The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (44 page)

A typical sugar plantation salary: $20 a month. The girl says police came to expel the Afar diehards who refused to move. Shots were exchanged. Blood flowed on both sides.

How old is this story? It is one of the oldest stories in the world.

What are the individual names of the Sioux forced from the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory by gold miners? Who remembers this anymore? Who are the millions of people who surrender their livelihoods today—Irish farmers in the European Union, Mexican ranchers shunted aside by highways—for some abstract common cause? It is impossible to keep track. Humanity remakes the world in an accelerating cycle of change that strips away our stories as well as the topsoil. Our era's breathtaking changes flatten collective memory, blur precedence, sever lines of responsibility. (What disconcerts us about suburbia? Not just its sameness, but its absence of time. We crave a past in our landscapes.)

Dubti is a busy green frontier. Ethiopians are flocking there, bringing new hopes, tastes, ambitions, voices, a new future—a new history.

In Dishoto, another truck-stop town, I recharge my laptop at a police station. The officers are all outsiders, non-Afar, from the highlands, from the south. They are friendly, curious, generous. They ply Elema and me with tea. (It is dense with sugar.) Our conversation is interrupted by government ads. The policemen watch these nation-building commercials intently: music played over video loops of strip mining, roadbuilding, workers in medical labs. We thank them. We walk on.

Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist, once wrote that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

The Afar girl's name is Dahara. She is 15.

Near the Ethiopia-Djibouti Border

We camp on the flank of Fatuma mountain, a basalt sentinel overlooking the caravan trails that braid eastward to the old coastal sultanate of Tadjoura. The tiny Republic of Djibouti sprawls below: a scalded plain, hotter and drier than the Ethiopian desert, with dry lake beds of blinding white salt, scarps of gunmetal gray, and doubtless, huddled somewhere in the shade of a doom palm, more Afar nomads—herders cleaved from their Ethiopian brethren by a colonial border, speaking in halting French.

This is where I begin to say goodbye to the Afar camel men from Herto Bouri.

Elema, Yarri, and Aidahis declare themselves ready to push on. They wish to walk with me to the beaches of the Gulf of Aden. But this is impossible. Two of them have no passports, no documents, no scraps of paper attesting to their existence. (“This is all Afar land!” they say.) And besides, Elema is sick. He issues his camel-loading orders lying down, from under his
shire
, his sarong, which he drapes over his head like a sheet. In a few hours we will part ways in the ugly border town of Howle.

What is it like to walk through the world?

It is mornings like these: Opening your eyes to nothing but seamless sky for day after day; a pale, numinous void that for one fleeting instant, when you first awake, seems to suck you upward, out of your body, out of yourself. It is the clarity of hunger, a transparency that seems blown through by the wind, the way a hollow pipe is blown to make it whistle. (We trekked 18 miles yesterday on short rations, on a single bowl of noodles and a handful of biscuits each. My wedding ring, once tight, jiggles loosely along my finger.) It is learning to read landscape with your whole body, your skin, not merely your eyes—sensing camel fodder in a thorn scratch, the coming dust in the smell of the wind, and of course, precious water in the fold of the land: a limbic memory of great power. It is watching the eternity of Africa slip by at a walking pace, and coming to realize dimly that, even at 3 miles an hour, you are still moving too fast. It is the journey shared.

Mohamed Aidahis: a powerful ant-stomping gait. Kader Yarri: the marionette looseness of a skinny man's step. Mohamed Elema: the spring-loaded step of a square dancer. On our best days we four ramblers recognize our immense good luck. We ricochet down steep mountain trails, almost running, with the desert of Ethiopia shining at our feet. We bounce our voices off the walls of black-rock canyons in whooping contests. Then we catch each other's eye, three Afars and a man from the opposite longitude of the earth, and grin like children. The cameleers catch the spark, and sing.

What is it like to walk through the world?

It is like this. It is like serious play. I will miss these men.

Ardoukoba Lava Field, Djibouti

The dead appear on the forty-second day of the walk.

There are five, six, seven of them—women and men sprawled faceup, facedown, on the black lava plain as if dropped from the sky. Most are naked. They have stripped off their clothes in a final spasm of madness. Sandals, trousers, brassieres, cheap nylon backpacks—their belongings lie scattered, faded, washed-out, bleached by the sun to the pale gray of undersea things. The skin of the dead is parched a deep burned yellow. The little wild dogs that come in the night have taken their hands, taken their feet. They might have been Ethiopians. Or Somalis. A few, probably, were Eritreans. They were walking east. This is what unites them now in the mineral silences of the desert: they were making for the Gulf of Aden—for the open boats of the Yemenis who smuggle destitute Africans to peons' jobs in the Middle East. How many such migrants die in the Afar Triangle? Nobody knows. At least 100,000 attempt the crossing to the Arabian Peninsula each year, according to the UN. Police chase them. They become lost. Thirst kills them.

“A crime!” Houssain Mohamed Houssain shouts back at me. “A disgrace!”

Houssain is my guide in Djibouti. He is a decent man. He is angry and perhaps ashamed. He strides far ahead, shaking his walking stick at the stone-white sky. I lag behind. I wipe the sweat from my eye sockets and study the dead.

A demographer calculates that 93 percent of all the human beings who ever existed on Earth—more than 100 billion people—have vanished before us. Most of humanity is gone. The bulk of our heartaches and triumphs lie behind us. We abandon them daily in the wasteland of the past. Rightly so. Because even though I have told you that I am walking to remember, this isn't completely true. As we reenact the discovery of the earth over and over again, to keep going—to endure, to not sit down—we must embark also on journeys of forgetting. Houssain appears to know this. He never looks back.

One day later we reach the Gulf of Aden.

A beach of gray cobbles. Waves of hammered silver. We shake hands. We laugh. Houssain opens a sack of hoarded dates. It is a celebration. We stand on the rim of Africa. The sea is walking—it falls endlessly forward into Africa and then rolls forever back, pulling away to the east . . . toward Yemen and the Tihamah coast, toward the lupine valleys of the Himalaya, toward ice, toward sunrise, toward the hearts of unknown people. I am happy. I write this down in my journal: I am happy.

Brave, foolish, desperate travelers. You almost made it. You fell 3 miles from the coast.

II. The Wells of Memory

There are thousands of wells in the old Hejaz. We walk to them. Sometimes their water is sweet. More often it is salt. It matters little. These wells, which pock the long-disused caravan trails of Arabia, are monuments to human survival. Each concentrates a fine distillation of the landscape. And the same applies to the people who drink from them. In the Hejaz—the fabled realm of a vanished kingdom of the Hashemites, who once ruled the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia—there are bustling wells and lonesome wells. There are wells whose waters convey the chemistry of sadness or joy. Each represents a cosmos in a bucket. We take our bearings off them.

Wadi Wasit is a well of forgetting.

We reach it on a fiery day in August. We are halfway through a more than 700-mile foot journey, perhaps the first made in generations, from Jeddah to Jordan. We rest in the dendrites of gray shade thrown by the well's two thorn trees. Here we meet the running man.

He arrives in a pickup truck. Portly, mustachioed, a Bedouin camel herder, he is friendly, curious, talkative, jittery. He mistakes us for treasure seekers. (Why else walk through the scorching desert?) He has come to sell artifacts.

“Look at this!” he says. He displays a tin ring. The iron scabbard of a sword. A well-rubbed coin.

How old are these things?

The running man doesn't know.
“Kadim jidn,”
he says: Very old. He shrugs.

The Hejaz—a crossroads where Arabia, Africa, and Asia meet, and long tied by trade to Europe—is one of the most storied corners of the ancient world. It has seen millennia of wanderers. Stone Age people hunted and fished their way north out of Africa through vanished savannas. People from some of humankind's first civilizations—Assyrians, Egyptians, and Nabataeans—roamed through here, trading slaves for incense and gold. Romans invaded the Hejaz. (Thousands of the legionaries died of disease and thirst.) Islam was born here, in the dark volcanic hills of Mecca and Medina. Pilgrims from Morocco or Constantinople probably drank from the well in Wadi Wasit. Lawrence of Arabia may have gulped its water, too. Nobody knows.
Kadim jidn
.

“Take it!” the running man says. He shoves his orphan finds at us. “Take it for free!” But we decline to buy his curiosities.

Packing our two camels to leave, we spot him once again. He is running now—sprinting around the well. He has removed his white robe. And he is running through the desert in his underwear, circling the well under the ruthless sun. He runs with abandon. Ali al Harbi, my translator, takes a photograph. Awad Omran, our camel handler, guffaws. But I cannot laugh. He is not mad, the running man. Or drugged. Or playing some joke. He is lost, I think. As we all are when we abandon history. We don't know where to go. There is an abundance of pasts in the Hejaz. But I have never been to a place more memoryless.

A small, bottomless well in the Hejaz: a white porcelain cup.

It holds dark, rich coffee. It sits atop a polished wooden table inside an elegant mansion in the port of Jeddah. Three articulate Hejazi women refill the cup endlessly. They take turns talking, wishing to correct misperceptions about Saudi Arabia: that the kingdom is a homogenized society, a culture flattened by its famously austere brand of Islam, a nation rendered dull by escapist consumerism and by petrodollars. No.

Saudi Arabia, they say, is a rich human mosaic. It enfolds many distinctive regions and cultures: a Shiite east, a Yemeni south, a Levantine north, and a tribal Bedouin stronghold in the center—the puritanical redoubt of the Najdis, home of the ruling dynasty, the House of Saud. The women insist, moreover, that no region in Saudi Arabia remains more independent, more proud, than the realm that has guarded the holy cities of Mecca and Medina since the tenth century—the vanished kingdom of the Hejaz. Fully independent by the end of World War I, the Hejaz was annexed by the Al Saud dynasty only in 1925. It remains a place of contradictions, of complexity, of tensions between religion and geography. On the one hand: a sacred landscape, its holy cities long forbidden to nonbelievers. On the other: the most cosmopolitan and liberal corner of Saudi Arabia, a melting pot, an entrepôt and nexus of migration, brightly checkered with influences from Asia, Africa, the Levant, and a hundred other places—the California of Saudi Arabia.

Laila Abduljawad, a cultural preservationist: “The Hejaz has attracted pilgrims from every corner of the Islamic world. How could this not rub off? Our main dish is Bukhari rice from Central Asia! Our folk textiles are Indian! Our accents are Egyptian! We are more open to the world than the people from the center.”

Salma Alireza, a traditional embroiderer: “The traditional dress for women in the Hejaz was not the abaya”—the severe black robe imposed by the ruling Najdis. “Women here used to wear bright red and blue dresses in public. That was traditional. But life changed in the 1960s. The oil money poured in. We modernized too fast. We lost so much in fifty years!”

Rabya Alfadl, a young marketing consultant: “Is the Hejaz still different? Take a look around.”

And it's true. The women sit at the table unveiled. They wear casual Western clothing: blouses and trousers. (Such a meeting would be difficult to arrange in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, where gender segregation and tribal ways remain so strict that a man will not utter his mother's name in public.) The house where we chat is sleekly designed, chic, minimalist, global in decor. And outside, in Jeddah's streets, there are art galleries, cafés, promenades, museums—the cultural hub of Saudi Arabia.

“A sense of cultural identity has persisted in the Hejaz for a thousand years. It developed its own music, its cuisine, its own folktales,” Abduljawad tells me. She turns her cup in her hands. “We are taking our first baby steps to rescue a small part of this.”

These women are daughters of a feminine city. Arab folk tradition holds that the biblical Eve was buried in Jeddah, now a modern, sprawling, industrial port. Eve's tomb—200 yards long, shaped like a reclining figure—was crowned by an “ancient and lofty dome,” according to the Moorish traveler Ibn Jubayr. It is gone, marked today by a barren concrete cemetery. Wahhabi clerics, who abhor shrines as idolatrous, likely razed it nearly a century ago. But again, no one can remember.

More than 300 miles north of Jeddah, near a dry well called Al Amarah, we stop walking. We look up from our tired feet. A car approaches across a plain of glistening salt. It is a Toyota HiLux, the iron camel of the modern Bedouin.

This is an event. Traversing western Saudi Arabia on foot today is lonelier than it was one or two generations ago when the black tents of Bedouin were still pegged to the brittle hide of the desert. The famous nomads of the Hejaz—the Balawi, the Harb, the Juhayna—have resettled in towns, in suburbs, in offices, in army barracks. Modern Saudi Arabia is heavily urbanized (matching the United States in this respect).