The Caravan of White Gold by Michael Benanav

Author:Michael Benanav
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jaico Publishing House

CHAPTER 6

Before long, the caravan traveled through a pass between two burly, flat-topped buttes whose steep western walls were blanketed from top to bottom with sand. Their eastern sides were practically bare. This was Foum Alous, the gateway to the plains of Taoudenni; the Gates, I thought, of Hell. I remembered once seeing Rodin’s phantasmagoric sculpture of that name, in which he depicted people in relief (an ironic term, in this case) agonized by various forms of Underwordly torture. It was a deeply affecting work that captivated me so completely, it seemed to possess an aesthetic force akin to gravity, attracting my gaze like an apple to the earth and holding it there.

But here, approaching what I imagined would be the closest thing to Hell on earth I’d ever encounter, I grew uneasy. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to see human beings enduring the kind of suffering I expected to witness at the mines. Rodin’s work is so compelling in part because the viewer isn’t looking at real people condemned to the Inferno, but an artistic envisioning of an archetypal realm. Likewise, the idea that men live and work the way they do at the salt mines is fascinating (humanitarian sentiments aside), but preparing to meet that reality face to face was unsettling; it seemed more than a bit perverted that Taoudenni was marketed as a tourist attraction—albeit a rarely visited one—to which foreigners in four-by-fours occasionally came to gawk at less fortunate men. The only mitigating factor in my favor, I thought, was what I had endured to get there.

When we arrived at the mines, we dismounted and unloaded the camels on an open, empty plain that had all the appeal of a giant parking lot. I felt a brief pang of triumph at having made it across the desert, but was quickly overwhelmed by the intensity of my surroundings.

Despite all I had seen thus far, and all I had imagined, I was unprepared for the untempered desolation of Taoudenni. It is situated on utterly lifeless desert flats; not a single leaf, or even thorn, grows from the parched, crusty dirt, which was so sharp it bit into the soles of my bare feet. The sun pounded the earth like a sledge on an anvil. Mound after mound of mined rubble receded to the eastern horizon. I was overcome with foreboding. I felt intuitively that I didn’t belong there; that no one did. The severity of the Tanezrouft is easier to accept when it’s just a place for passing through. Only when confronted by the reality of people actually living and working there was I struck by its overwhelming meanness. I could see why, until 1991, this place was used as desert gulag for Malian political prisoners; the threat of it surely stifled more than a few dissident voices.

Walid, Baba, and I piled our bags together and covered them with our blankets, a meager shield from the midday sun. Then we walked north a couple of hundred yards

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