Free Hold the Enlightenment by Tim Cahill Page B

been a vast and fertile grassland. There were drawings of an elephant, an eland, an ostrich. Giraffes seemed to have been considered the most consequential of the animals depicted. There were two of them etched in ocher onto flat, black rock, set just above the sand as if in a gallery. The figures were five feet high and expertly rendered. Riding beside one of the giraffes was a man on horseback, reining his mount and preparing to throw a spear. There were already four spears in the giraffe.
    I had planned to study the rock art in the morning, along with my favorite among the Italians, Luigi Boschian. Gigi, as everyone called him, was the oldest in our group, sixty-seven, but nonetheless a strong walker who wanted no help clambering over the rocks and who seemed always to know where he was when we strolled through the desert together. Our bond was this: Gigi and I were interested in the same things—history, astronomy, archaeology, geology, anthropology—the difference between us being that he had taken the trouble to do an immense amount of reading in these areas.
    Our common language was Spanish, though neither of us spoke with precision, which was sometimes frustrating. I wondered, for instance, if the men on horseback depicted on the rocks could be the ancestors of the Tuareg people, who now populated the deserts of northern Mali, Niger, and southern Algeria. When I asked Gigi about it, he started at the beginning, as he tended to do. Present-day Tuaregs were the descendants of North African Berbers, who had invaded the central Sahara about 3,500 years ago. They were originally horsemen, but as the climate changed and the desert claimed the land, the horse gave way to the camel. And wasn’t it interesting that while the Berbers had used chariots, the use of the wheel was eventually abandoned? Camels were the better technology.
    In the course of his explanations, Gigi often got sidetracked, wandering off on some tangent or other and dithering there for half an hour at a crack. He wore desert khakis, neatly pressed, but ashirttail was always out or a pant leg stuck into a sock. His abundant white hair was properly combed in the morning, but by noon it had degenerated into a finger-in-the-light-socket situation I’d describe as a full Einstein. He was the quintessential absentminded professor, Italian style. In explanation mode, he held his hands in front of his chest, palms up and open, as if weighing a pair of melons. When our mutual incompetence in Spanish defeated us, he’d turn his palms over and drop them to his waist, as if patting two small children on the head. I thought of this as Gigi’s I-can-speak-no-more futility gesture.
    Now, with bandits presumably chasing us, we had to abandon the rock art.
    I gathered my gear, lurched down the sand slope, and began helping with the loads. Our caravan consisted of three four-wheel-drive, one-ton vehicles modified in this manner or that for hard overland desert driving. Lanterns were glowing, and our party of just over a dozen—three West Africans from the land below the Niger River, two local Tuaregs, a cacophony of Italians, myself, and photographer Chris Rainier—was moving fast, stashing the gear any old way because it was thought the bandits were now very close.
    We’d been half expecting the bastards.
No Guarantees
    Aguelhok was a small, wind-scoured town of narrow, sandy streets and adobe buildings, none of which would look out of place in Taos, New Mexico. We pulled our vehicles into a large walled courtyard that seemed to be a municipal gathering place, locked ourselves behind the metal gates, and milled around in the dark, unwilling to sleep.
    One of the Italians, Dario, said, “Bandits? Ha. They want us to stay here so we have to pay.” Dario, I’d guess, was in his early forties, a trim, athletic man I could see snapping out orders in a corporate boardroom.
    Muhammad, the Tuareg security consultant we’d hired and theman who’d told us about the