To Timbuktu for a Haircut by Rick Antonson

Author:Rick Antonson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2012-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

René-August Caillié, the French explorer, has been called “one of the oddest figures in the history of travel.” He arrived in Timbuktu in 1828, disguised as an Arab, and became the first European to return safely home after that accomplishment.

The Tuareg Halis jests with the leather bucket at the alleged “well of Bouctou,” from where originated the world’s greatest travel name.

I politely shooed Zak away. I wished to be alone in my travel fantasy. The two keepers of the place, oblivious to my presence, talked in their sleep. The Ethnographic Museum encircled its namesake “Tin,” the Berber language’s grammatical kin to “well.” A recent construction, it showcased Tuareg and Songhai artifacts of music and costume. Standing over the well of the woman whose name became the byword for remote, I stared into the hole, its shallow depth blocked by mud. At the end of a rope swung a camelskin bucket that dropped from a wooden winch, itself secured by tree branch props. I looked within the well and sensed Bouctou contemplating her distorted navel.

Zak sloughed along a block away and waved to me. Bolstered by our logistical success in matching a street name with an explorer’s home, it made sense to Zak that we chance Barth’s Lane to find the house of the man who finally convinced skeptics that Timbuktu’s fame was founded on exaggerated claims.

Sweating and covered with a day’s dust, we stopped outside the home of Heinrich Barth, to the northeast east side of the Sidi Yahia Mosque. I breathed deeply. Barth’s stay in Timbuktu was the signature piece in his five-year crossing of the Sahara. If there was a hint that Timbuktu might have a tourism future, this house was it: we paid an entrance fee. Pictures on the walls had descriptions in English, French, and German. Barth’s maps and sketches were displayed. Framing was elusive, but some of the documents were protected behind glass, where the heat had melded them to the surface. A pamphlet on Barth’s exploits was for sale. Was the furniture his? Did he slouch in that corner, surrounded by curious and untrusting observers looking on in silence? Did the tall German feel the urge to hunch over, given the lowness of the ceiling, as I did? Was the air as tight in his lungs as it felt in mine?

Barth arrived in Timbuktu with a debilitating fever and recuperated as a guest in this house, close to Sheikh Al Bekây. He stayed here for the first month, during which the competing authority, the local chief, who challenged the sheikh for power over the Christian, made many attempts to expel Barth. Among other reasons, it was suspected that he was Laing’s son. The result of this competition between two conflicting and influential local rulers was that Barth was unable to move freely about the city. Sheikh Al Bekây eventually moved him to an encampment in the desert, from where Barth, on occasions, visited Timbuktu’s mosques and spent hours among the townspeople and visiting the “lively markets.

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