Free 1492: The Year Our World Began by Felipe Fernández-Armesto Page B

went twice to the Sahel—once as a boy, and later as an envoy of the ruler of Fez, where he spent part of his childhood and adolescence. He had to cross the Atlas Mountains, narrowly escaping robbers—on his first journey—by excusing himself in order to pee and then disappearing into a snowstorm. He must have seen the white peaks of the Sierra Nevada from his home in Granada, but after shivering nearly to death in the Atlas he hated snow for the rest of his life. He crossed a ravine over the Sebou River in a basket strung on pulleys. In retrospect, it made him sick with terror. He reached Taghaza, the flyblown mining town that produced the salt Sahelian palates craved. Here, where even the houses were hewn from blocks of salt, Leo joined a salt caravan, waiting three days while the gleaming slabs were roped to the camels.
    The object of the journey was to exchange salt for gold, literally ounce for ounce. You can live without gold, but not without salt. Salt not only flavors food but also preserves it. Dietary salt replaces the vital minerals the body loses in perspiration. Dwellers in the Niger Valley and in the forests to the south, where there were no salt mines and no access to sea salt, lacked a basic means of life. The Mediterranean world, meanwhile, had adequate supplies of salt but needed precious metals. From the northern shores of the Mediterranean, the source of the gold could be glimpsed only with difficulty across the glare of the Sahara. Even the Maghrebi merchants who handled the trade were unsure of the location of the mines, secreted deep in the West African interior, inthe region of Bure between the headwaters of the rivers Niger, Gambia, and Senegal, and, farther west, around the middle Volta.
    The gold came north along routes secret to the traders who handled it along the way. “Dumb trade” procured it, according to all the accounts Europeans had at their disposal, written perhaps from convention rather than conviction. Merchants supposedly left goods—sometimes textiles, always salt—exposed for collection at traditionally appointed places. They then withdrew, and returned to collect the gold that their silent, invisible customers left in exchange. Bizarre theories circulated. The gold grew like carrots. Ants brought it up in the form of nuggets. It was mined by naked men who lived in holes. It probably really came from mines in the region of Bure, around the upper Gambia and Senegal, and perhaps from the middle Volta.
    In the mid–fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta, the most-traveled pilgrim in the Islamic world, joined a southbound trading caravan at Sijilmassa, where the gold road began, and headed south in search of the place of origin of the trade. His motive, he claimed, was curiosity to see the Land of the Blacks. He left an unsurpassed description of the terrible journey across the desert, between “mountains of sand…. You see them in one place. Then you look again, and they have shifted to a new position.” Blind men, it was said, made the best guides, because in the desert visions were deceptive, and devils amused themselves by misleading journeyers.
    It took twenty-five days to reach Taghaza. The water here, though salty, was a precious commodity that the caravanners paid dearly for. The next stage of the journey usually involved ten days with no possibility of replenishing water supplies—unless perhaps occasionally by extracting it from the stomachs of dead animals. The last oasis lay nearly three hundred kilometers from the caravan’s destination, in a land “haunted by demons,” where “no road is visible,…only the drifting, wind-blown sand.” 2
    Despite the torments of the road, Ibn Battuta found the desert “luminous, radiant,” and inspiring—until his caravan reached an evenhotter region, near the frontier of the Sahel. Here they had to travel in the cool of the night, before at last, after a journey of two months, they reached Walata, where black customs officials