The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

IV.—Timbuctoo, Queen of the Sudan

The day of my departure from Jenne was occupied in receiving farewell visits from scores of friends, who first believed me a harmless lunatic as "the man with the questions," and then received me with affection. From Jenne to Timbuctoo we journeyed by boat for 311 miles in a labyrinth of meandering tributaries, creeks, and channels along the course of the Niger, and reached at last the Pool of Dai, whose waters appear under the walls of Timbuctoo itself; and then, a few miles further on, we arrived at Kabara, the landing-place and port of Timbuctoo.

Two things arrest attention on disembarking—the sand and the Touaregs. The sand, because you have no sooner set your foot on shore than you flounder about in it as if it were a mire; and it pursues you everywhere—in the country, in the streets, and in the houses. The Touaregs are impressed on you because, though you never see them, everything recalls them. The town is in ruins, but its wretchedness is overpowered by life and movement. The quays are astir with lively bustle, and encumbered with bales, jars, and sacks in the process of unloading. To travel from Kabara to Timbuctoo, only five miles distant, there is a daily convoy—medley of people, donkeys and camels, attended by twenty tirailleurs with rifles on their shoulders.

An immense and vivid sky, and an immense and brilliant stretch of land, with the grand outlines of a town uniting the two. A dark silhouette, large and long, an image of grandness in immensity—thus appeared the Queen of the Sudan. She is indeed the city of imagination, the Timbuctoo of legends. Her sandy approaches are strewn with bones and carcasses that have been disinterred by wild beasts, the remains of the camels and other animals that have fallen and died in the last stages of the journey.

The illusion of walls, produced by the distinctness with which the town stands out from the white sand, disappears, and three towers at regular intervals dominate the mass. The terraces of square houses are now distinguishable, renewing the first impression of grandeur in immensity. We enter the town, and behold! all the grandeur has suddenly disappeared, though the scene is equally impressive on account of its tragic character rather than its beauty. And this is the great Timbuctoo, the metropolis of the Sudan and the Sahara, with its boasted wealth and commerce! This is Timbuctoo the holy, the learned, that life of the Niger, of which it was written, "We shall one day correct the texts of our Greek and Latin classics by the manuscripts which are preserved there." These ruins, this rubbish, this wreck of a town, is this the secret of Timbuctoo the Mysterious? It is a city of deliquescence.

Jenne had the vein of Egyptian civilisation; the origin of Timbuctoo has to be sought in a different direction, for her past is connected with the Arabian civilisation of Northern Africa—the world of the Berbers and all those white people whom we have known under the name of Touaregs in the Sahara, Kabyles in Algeria, Moors in Morocco and Senegal, and Foulbes in their infiltrations into the Sudan, who had been crowded back into the interior by the invasions of Phœnician and Roman colonists. So also, when the Moors were driven out of Spain back to Morocco, to find their ancient patrimony in the hands of Arabs, they were forced to prolong their exodus into the south, and became nomads about the great lakes on the left bank of the Niger, in the neighbourhood of Oualata and Timbuctoo, carrying with them the name of Andalusians, which they bear to the present day.