1South of the sea, south of the mountains, there is a desert so wide that a caravan is two months crossing it. On its far side a great river bends up out of the forest lands to touch the sand, and turns away again. At that bend stands a city of mud brick the colour of a lion. Its name is Timbuktu.
2Salt came down to it from the north, cut in slabs from the floor of the desert. Gold came up to it from the south. Where they met, there was a market. And in the days of this story, a hundred years after Rumi was carried to his grave, something else had begun to be bought and sold there, at a higher price than either.
3The king of that country, two generations before, had gone on pilgrimage to Mecca with so much gold that the price of it fell in Cairo and did not recover for ten years. He came home with a thing he valued more. He brought scholars, and camel-loads of books, and a poet from Granada who built him a great mosque of mud and timber. And around another mosque in the north of the city, the one called Sankore, teachers gathered, and students came to them from every land of the black peoples.
4Now hear of a boy named Bakari, who was a fisherman's son from the great river, and who could not read a word.
5He was thirteen. He had gone north with a salt caravan as a camel boy, because his father had too many sons. He had seen the sea, and thought little of it. Now he was coming home with another caravan, a thousand camels long, and his work was to tend four beasts that belonged to an old man.
6The old man was a teacher of Sankore, called al-Hajj Ahmad. He had been away three years. He had prayed at Mecca, and then he had gone to Cairo and to Fez, and in those cities he had spent everything he owned, and everything his students' families had sent with him, on books. They rode in eight chests on the four camels, wrapped in oiled leather against the sand: the law, and grammar, and the lives of the Prophet, and the stars, and reckoning, and the healing book of Ibn Sina in five parts.
7"What is in them?" Bakari asked on the first night.
8"Everyone I could not bring," said the old man. "A physician from Bukhara. A judge from Córdoba. A reckoner from Baghdad. They have been dead a long time, and they are coming to Timbuktu to teach. You are their camel boy. It is a great post."
9He scratched a shape in the sand by the fire. "That is alif. It is a man standing up. Tomorrow I will show you another."
10There was a third at their fire most nights. He was a merchant of the oasis of Tuat, a Jew, named Ishaq. He dealt in paper, which he bought from the Christians' ships at the coast, and in copper and glass beads, and he was taking six camel-loads south to trade for gold. He and the old teacher had fallen in together at the first well and had not stopped arguing since. They argued about the stars, and the law of Moses and the law of Muhammad, and the price of paper, each calling on the one God to witness that the other was a robber.
11Bakari had never seen two men enjoy each other so much.
12"Why do you sit with him?" he asked his master. "He is not of our faith."
13"He is of the faith of a physician named Moses, whose book on medicines I have in the third chest," said the old man. "And his people have carried their books through more deserts than I have. A man who knows what it is to carry a book is my cousin. Now, ba. It is a boat with one thing under it."
14They came to the salt mines of Taghaza, where the houses are built of slabs of salt and roofed with camel skin, and there is no tree. They loaded salt. Beyond that place lies the worst of the road: ten days without a well, then one well, then ten days more.
15On the sixth day out, the old teacher could not mount his camel. It was a fever of the chest. He rode tied on, and that night he could not eat.
16He knew. He had Ishaq and the boy sit close. "The books go to the imam of Sankore," he said. "All eight chests. They are not mine. They belong to the ones who will read them." He was quiet for a time, breathing. Then he said to Bakari, "How many letters have you?"
17"Nineteen."
18"There are nine more. Ishaq knows them. He reads our writing as well as his own, though he will tell you that his own is older." He smiled at the merchant. "Robber."
19"Thief," said Ishaq, and held his hand.
20He died before morning. They buried him in the sand, with his face toward Mecca. The Muslims of the caravan prayed over him. The Jew stood apart with his head covered and said the words of his own people for a friend. The caravan moved on at sunrise, for a caravan does not wait.
21On the tenth day they came to the well.
22The guide reached it first, and Bakari saw him stop, and get down, and stand still. When they came up they smelled it. A camel had fallen into the well some weeks before, from another caravan, and had died there. The water was black, and stank, and could not be drunk by man or beast.
23Ten days of sand lay behind them, and ten ahead. The water skins were a third full.
24The chief of the caravan was a hard and careful man of the veiled people of the desert. He sent a rider ahead on the fastest camel, with two skins of water, to reach the town at the desert's edge and send men back with water to meet them on the way. If the rider lived, they would be met in six or seven days. If he did not, no one would ever know what had become of them.
25Then he went down the line with a stick, striking off loads.
26"Water rides," he said. "The weak ride. Salt rides, for salt is the price of the water we will owe. All else stays here." He came to the four camels with the eight chests. He struck the first chest with his stick. "What is this?"
27"Books," said Bakari.
28"Whose?"
29"The old man's. He is dead."
30"Then they are no one's. Unload. I want these four beasts for water skins and for the sick." He was already moving on. Over his shoulder he said, "Break the chests up. They will do for the fire tonight. The paper also."
31Bakari stood in front of the lead camel. He was thirteen and the chief had a stick. He did not know what he was going to say until he had said it.
32"They are not no one's. They belong to the ones who will read them."
33The chief turned round. He was not angry. He was a man doing sums with lives. "Boy," he said, "I have four hundred people and a third of the water. I will not carry a dead man's paper while the living walk. Stand aside."
34It was a true answer. Bakari had no answer to it. He stood where he was, because his legs would not move him, and waited for the stick.
35"Take mine," said a voice.
36It was Ishaq. He had come up behind, leading his own string. Six camels, loaded with copper and beads and bales of white paper: three years of his trade, and his family's bread for three more.
37"You want four beasts," said Ishaq. "Here are six. Throw my loads in the sand and put your water skins and your sick on my camels. Leave the boy's four as they are."
38The chief looked at him narrowly. "Your goods for a dead Muslim's books? What are they to you?"
39Ishaq did not answer at once. He looked at the chests. "One of my fathers, long ago, came out of Spain with a book under his arm and nothing else," he said. "He left a house to bring it. I was told that story before I could walk. I thought it was a story about my people." He shrugged. "Copper I can buy again."
40The chief was not a sentimental man. But he could count, and six was more than four. He nodded once. The copper went into the sand, and the beads, and the paper, bale after bale, and by nightfall the wind was already covering them.
41The books rode.
42Those were bad days. A swallow of water at dawn, a swallow at dusk. Bakari walked, so that his camels would carry less. His tongue swelled. On the fourth day people began to see lakes that were not there. On the fifth, two of the sick died. At night Ishaq, who was no longer a merchant but only a thirsty man with nothing, sat by the boy and drew letters in the sand with a cracked finger.
43"Ta," he said. "Say it. What comes after?"
44"Why now?" said Bakari. He could hardly speak.
45"Because I promised. And because if we live, someone will have to read them."
46On the seventh night, Bakari saw a star too low on the southern sky. It was yellow. It moved. He watched it a long time, sure that it was another lake of the mind. Then there were three of them, and the sound of men calling.
47The rider had lived. The people of the town had come out four days into the desert, as their custom was, with camels and full skins, and had lit torches so as to be seen. Bakari drank until he was sick, and drank again. Then he walked back down the line in the dark to the lead camel, and put both hands flat on the first chest, to be sure.
48They came into Timbuktu twelve days later. The imam of Sankore came out himself to receive the chests. He was told how they had come: that their owner lay in the sand, that a camel boy had stood in front of a stick, and that a Jew of Tuat had thrown down his fortune so that they could ride.
49Then the imam looked at the boy. "Can you read?"
50"Twenty-eight letters," said Bakari. "I cannot yet make them into words."
51"Who taught you?"
52"A teacher of this mosque taught me nineteen. A merchant of Tuat taught me nine."
53"Then you have been to a better school than most," said the imam. "Come tomorrow."
54Bakari came the next day, and for forty years after. He learned to make the letters into words. He read what was in the eight chests, one after another. When his hand was good enough, he was set to copy them.
55For that was the rule at Sankore, and he kept it when he became a master himself: no book that came into the city left it, or was shut in a chest, until it had been copied. A student paid for his teaching by copying. In the market, a good book fetched more than its weight in salt and often more than gold, and families kept them as other families keep land.
56Bakari remembered a well with a dead camel in it. He had seen how near eight chests came to being a night's firewood. "One copy is a thing that can be lost in a single day," he taught. "Make two, and send one away from you."
57Ishaq came south again every other year while he lived, and after him his son. They brought paper, and they took away gold, and they took something else. Each time, Bakari gave them a copy of some book to carry north, to Tuat, to Fez, to anyone who had none. And he asked them what the old teacher had asked: who was there, in the countries beyond the sea? What did they know?
58The merchants told him. And they told others what they had seen in the south. Word of Timbuktu went up the desert roads to the coast, and over the water to an island where a map-maker of Ishaq's own people was drawing a great chart of the world for a Christian king. He had never crossed the sand. But he drew, in the middle of the desert, the king of the black peoples seated on a throne with a nugget of gold in his hand, and beside him a city by a river. Sailors looked at that map. They began to wonder whether there was a way to that gold by sea.
59Now see how far the lamp had come. From a shipwrecked girl of Egypt to a fisherman's son of the great river, it had passed through more hands than can be counted here.
60Not one of them knew all the others. Not one was of the same people as the one before. Each thought that he was keeping a small flame of his own.
61In the year that Bakari became a master at Sankore, far to the north, in a land of forests and cold rain where his name would never be heard, a merchant built a mill beside a river to beat rags into paper. It was the first in that country. The craft had been more than six hundred years on the road from China: through Samarkand, through Baghdad, through Cairo and Fez and the cities of Spain.
62The paper was ready. The nine signs were in the counting houses. The needle was on the ships. The books of the Greeks had come home to the west by way of Arabic, and young men were arguing over them in every town that had a school. And somewhere in the east there was a rumour, carried or not carried, of a page that could be taken apart.
63In a town on the river Rhine a child was about to be born. His people worked in metal for the mint. He would grow up among punches and moulds and molten tin.
64In Timbuktu, at the hour of the evening prayer, Bakari trimmed the lamp in the copying room and set a clean sheet in front of a boy who had come that week from the river.
65"That is alif," he said. "It is a man standing up."
66One fire, many hands. It was about to find a new kind of hand, one that did not tire, and could make a thousand books in the time it took Bakari to make one. Now hear what came after.