Into the Seam of Time

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So here we are, at the end of our journey, in a place many have long believed was the end of the world. And beyond the end of the road lies only sand. Despite our travels, we have yet to find hide, hair, or even a firsthand rumor of that long-gone Scottish explorer. We came to discover Mungo Park and discovered Mali instead.

And now what? Just a shrug of the shoulders and a long flight home? Surrounded by the tantalizing Tuareg and feeling the Sahara underfoot and in every dry draft, can we not milk one more mystery out of this odyssey? Fortunately, we have our assigned tasks—our live dispatches, digital photos, satellite communications, and Surround Videos. While there is no city center here in Timbuktu to justify a Surround, what is it that surrounds Timbuktu? The Sahara.

With nothing between us and home but the desert, we call upon our beleaguered escort once again to make the unlikely a reality. "Alberto," we say, "how about a night in the desert?"

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Six hours later we find ourselves bouncing atop camels on a minicaravan headed north, bound for Fendaria, a Tuareg encampment 12 kilometers from town, on the threshold of the age-old caravan route. Muhammad Ali, a lean Tuareg wrapped in a green robe and taguelmoust, leads the train. Alberto slouches in his saddle, his blue turban draped around his head, covering his scraggly beard. Denise sits uncomfortably on her camel, hiding her hair in a tan Thai sarong. I have a baseball cap and shades on, and my ears are pink from sunburn. Beneath my Mungo Park shirt, I wear a necklace of stone beads from Dogon Country, and an Islamic gris-gris—a leather pouch containing a verse from the Koran.

At a small rise of sand, Muhammad calls our caravan to a halt. The camels kneel with groans of complaint to let us off. Our gear piles up on the ground—a backpack, a duffel with our sleeping bags, camera bags, and a satellite phone. The camels are unsaddled and their feet hobbled so they can't wander too far in the night. Huge black beetles feed on the camel dung and goat droppings underfoot. Tattered bands of goats drift across the land, their bleats and baahs resonating to the horizon.

Throughout our Malian travels, the houses of the locals have been as close to the ground as architecture allows. Each town echoes the color of the earth it settles on—the red dust of Bamako, the taupe mud of Kora, the tan sands of Djenné, the raw talus of Pays Dogon. Fendaria is a warm khaki. Oblong thatch walls a dozen feet by four are scattered amid the sands and scrub barely higher than a camel's hip. The roofs, made from UNICEF tarps, are supported by crooked sticks. Pelts hang from the acacia thorns, drying in the sun. Three children play in the dust, two girls and a boy. They are incredibly cute—bright, handsome children, playful and curious.

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The three of us wander between the shelters, taking pictures or watching. Small dark forms look over at us from fire rings near the shelters—women in deep-indigo robes, busy with the evening meal. Muhammad Ali gives a demonstration of the Tuareg way of warfare with two spears. "Throw only one spear at the enemy," he says. "If it misses, hold onto second spear and draw sword. Always have two weapons—like this!" He thrusts the spears into the air at an imaginary opponent.

The simple homes in the sand, the robed warrior fighting a specter, the dark forms huddled near the smoke, the near-naked children scuffling gracefully, the orange sun going down: the effect is psychedelic. I feel as if I'm in a nomad's camp a millennium past. The sensation lasts through the sunset and into the night, when a goat is slaughtered. As camels graze, silhouettes against the dusk sky, the day's heat evaporates.

Alberto breaks out the wine, and lacking our usual tin cups, we pass the bottle and share swigs. The stars come out, Orion on the eastern horizon, an extravagant Milky Way overhead. Soon the rice is served, which we eat with our fingers from the bowl. Then a haunch of goat appears, and Alberto and I help ourselves. By the time the second bottle is making the rounds, Denise and I must be too complimentary of the Tuareg and their lifestyle, too effusive with our longing to join them, for Alberto speaks up:

"The Tuareg have always charmed everybody, charmed them and fought them. We come here with our water and our wine, but when the water is gone and the wine is gone, there's only fucking sand."

It brings us up short. But it's a much-needed reprimand and reminder. Perhaps it makes us more keenly appreciative of the six women who appear in the night to clap and sing and play a one-string violin for us, while a boy dances beneath the starlight. For once, we don't take pictures, we don't shoot video, we don't record the songs. We sit on the sand and enjoy the soft melodies, the gentle rhythms, the falling stars.

Soon a pink glow swells on the horizon, and day quietly arrives. The Tuareg prepare small pots of strong green tea, saturated with sugar, to share with us and each other. When it's time to leave we still haven't shot our video, so while the camels are being rounded up from their far-flung feeding, we set up the tripod on our sandy rise.

Click to View Surround Video required

Surround Videos are not really videos but photography sequences shot with a camera mount that takes a 12- or 18-image series around the full 360-degree field of vision. The overlapping images are then stitched together with software to create the semblance of a full panorama. But it's only the semblance of a panorama because, as a friend of mine once put it, "Something funny happens with time at the seam."

Between the first shot and the 18th, a minute or two has passed. The two ends of the sequence are separated by a small but significant span of time. A lot can happen in a minute: camels move away, a campfire fades, the light shifts, the mood alters. If shooting a Surround is an attempt to explore the realities of a moment, it instead reduces that moment to yet another mystery, unknowable, strange.

We mount the camels and head back the way we came, across the desert, our own momentary exploration nearing an end. We leave the nomad's encampment behind and ride the seam back to Timbuktu.

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