Our last tale from M. Shayne Bell, “Mrs. Lincoln’s China” (July 1994), was a finalist for the 1995 Hugo award. His beautiful new story evokes the African continent of H. Rider Haggard and other nineteenth-century authors. A continent that was so mysterious and romantic to the European explorer that he would not be surprised to find…
“What do you make of this book, Kevin?” François Brissot asked me one evening in the National Archives of Niger. He handed me a book bound in black leather, dusted clean. I opened it slowly, in the middle, but it still crackled. The pages were brittle and crumbling around the edges. It was evidently a journal, written in black ink, the last half of the book’s pages blank. I tried to read some of the words in the dim light. We hadn’t yet turned on the one light bulb Brissot allows us after dark—the electricity costs the archives too much, and he has to conserve. Though I sat by a window, the sun had nearly set and the light was almost gone. It was difficult to read.
“It’s in English,” I said finally, having made out a few words.
Brissot laughed and walked off. Of course the book was in English. Brissot hands me everything written in English. I go there to help him recatalog the holdings of his archives, as he thinks of them, left in chaos after the Nigerian withdrawal from Niamey at the end of the Water War. “I am too old to find patience for your English,” Brissot had once told me. He reads English, but slowly. Since English is my first language, I can quickly tell what a document is, who had written it and why, and mark it for future filing. I never expected to make it through the archive’s English-language holdings that summer. Brissot does not expect to finish sorting out the mess the Nigerians had left him in what remains of his life.
I set the journal on the table in front of me and carefully opened the cover. The first page was blank, but the second was signed
There is a table and chairs by the encyclopedias, under the one light bulb. I turned it on and sat there to read. The journal was evidently not the first Adams had kept, since the narrative begins
Abdullah and I breakfasted on figs and goat’s milk cheese and took leave of our host before sunrise, but the gatekeeper again would not let us leave the city as we had been promised. I stood at the gate with the few belongings left me—principally these journals and my compass—packed in bags tied on the donkey the Sultan had sent us, the faithful Abdullah at my side, he as anxious to depart Agadez after our two-month detainment as I.
I argued with the gatekeeper, using the little Tamasheq I can now muster, since that is what he spoke to us. I demanded to see his orders, but of course he produced none and began to threaten and curse me. Abdullah also spoke with the man, but to no avail. He would not open the gates; he insisted he had orders against it; so I turned the donkey, led it behind me, and slowly walked with Abdullah back to the house that had been our prison these past two months.
Our host, Jubal Ibn Faleiha, stood in the street outside the gate to his courtyard, talking with great happiness and animation to two other Mussulmen all dressed in similar white cotton robes, but when he saw me approaching him again the happiness left his face, though he greeted me and said: “Six times have I blessed you in the name of Allah, Robert Adams, and watched you leave my home to start your journey back to the land of the Christians, and six times have I watched you return to me. Allah be praised.”
It occurred to me to ask him not to pray over us the next time we were told we could leave Agadez, to ask him to let my prayers be the only ones offered, but I remembered that Abdullah always prayed to the same Allah as Ibn Faleiha, so I said nothing since in any case prayers of thanks to Allah were certain to be offered upon the slightest hope of word that we could leave.
At noon we learned the reason for our stillborn departure. The Sultan sent a messenger who asked for me, and when I was called into the courtyard he bowed many times and told me the Sultan requested my presence at dinner that night. I told the messenger I would do as the Sultan wished and attend his dinner. After the messenger left, I begged water to wash in from a serving girl of Ibn Faleiha. She pretended not to be able to understand what I wanted, though for the past two months I had spoken with her in Arabic, asking her for water and food.
I went through the house asking each person I met for water and finally, back in the courtyard, I met Ibn Faleiha himself and asked him for water. He appeared surprised and put upon by my request, though it must have been he who had ordered his servants not to attend to my needs. I felt uncomfortable confronting him as I was forced to do, knowing that our relations had become strained, but the Sultan had ordered me to stay in his home—a punishment, Abdullah told me, for Ibn Faleiha having advised the Sultan privately against one of his marriages, a marriage the Sultan had been determined to consummate, and which he had, despite his subject’s well-meaning, if ill-conceived, advice. History teaches us again and again how unwise it is to stand between one’s sovereign and a woman.
I tried once more to speak with Ibn Faleiha about the cost of my stay and told him that if we were in my own land I would have had the means to pay him for his hospitality, but that I had been robbed, held against my will, and ordered into his home. Indeed, if regular commerce existed between England and this land I would have sent him payment, but that was impossible. I again offered to perform whatever service he might ask of me in his house, but he appeared shamed by my words and, remembering his duties as host, ordered that I be given water, which I was shortly, in a tiny jug, with which I made do.
After washing, I dressed in my worn trousers, shirt, and jacket and in the early evening walked to the Sultan’s palace and was admitted and taken to a room in which the Sultan sat with three bearded advisors, one of whom handed me paper, pen, and ink and asked me to draw a map of the streets of London, not forgetting to mark the principal buildings, the palaces, the walls and fortifications, where they might stand. I began my task by drawing in the parks, which landmarks I use to orient myself in London, but the advisors stopped me to ask the purpose of the parks. They would not believe that they exist for beauty’s sake, to rest human eyes from the sight of stone, glass, and metal. They determined amongst themselves that the parks were maintained against a time of siege when the forests in them could be cut down for wood. I told them there was no wall around London, that the city is too vast for a wall, but they would not believe that any city could be greater in size or fortification than their own Agadez nor that the royal English capital would be unwalled. I, not wanting to insult them or try their patience, did not tell them that Agadez, with or without its wall, could fit comfortably inside the limits of Hyde Park.
For two hours they questioned me on the particulars of London, such as the location of the King’s Palace and the size of it, which again they would not believe, often asking me the same or similar questions a second or third time, as if to check the truth of my reports, to discover whether I varied in my telling. It began to seem as if they were gathering information from me with which to prepare an invasion of England, and despite my situation the entire exercise amused me greatly. I held back nothing and told the Sultan stories of the great buildings of London, of the ships docking there from around the world, and of the vast seas over which those ships had traveled. My stories amused the Sultan in turn, and he laughed many times, though his advisors regarded me gravely. When they were satisfied with my stories, or tired of them, one of the advisors carefully rolled up my map of London and tied it with leather straps. They all looked at me as if I had given them great and secret knowledge. I laughed inside myself to think that in their hearts they might hope one day to sack London, which suddenly, I realized, was the reason for their keeping me in Agadez: they feared the intimate knowledge of
The hour being late, and all of us quite hungry, the Sultan clapped his hands and servants immediately brought in food and drink. The dinner was unremarkable: mujadara, a roast goat, water, coffee. But the food encouraged the Sultan in his native good humor and in his, I had often hoped, sincere friendliness toward me. He asked me to talk of the Thames or of Paris, but I, continuing with my new plan, talked only of the streets in London that bordered the Thames, and of the bridges over it, not of the course of the river itself below or above London. The Sultan laughed at my descriptions of London’s crowded streets and of the noise of the wagons at night, though he thought the making of such noise when men should be sleeping uncivilized. “But perhaps you Christians do not sleep at night?” he asked. “Or rather, you do not let your women sleep?” I told him that Christian women do not let their men sleep, and the Sultan laughed.
But suddenly he stopped laughing. He leaned toward me and whispered that he would show me his wives. This sudden intimacy and confidence surprised me. I thought it prudent to encourage him and told him how honored I would be. I imagined the Sultan meant to introduce me to his wives, that he would call them into the room, but instead he led me down a long, narrow corridor to a low door, and beyond the door a black room. The Sultan promptly entered that room and I followed, knocking my knee against a bench, which I sat on, and I saw before me a row of three peepholes. The Sultan was looking through one of them. It shocked me to realize that he wanted me to observe his wives while they slept, but when I looked through the peephole I saw to my further surprise that the women in the room beyond us were not sleeping, but rather bathing in a small, tiled pool.
There were three of them, none particularly lovely, though at that late hour, with their long day ended and apparently unaware of our presence, even the most plain among them displayed a weary, comely peace. I wondered which had aroused Ibn Faleiha’s opposition.
They splashed about their pool, and their soft laughter and the sight of them bathing by candlelight aroused me, though I was careful to hide my feelings. I did not know what reaction the Sultan expected from me. To appear too interested in his bathing wives was an obvious danger: these women were above temptation if I valued my life.
The Sultan seemed impatient. He leaned over to me. “One of my wives is very special,” he whispered, “a kind of woman you will have never seen in your Christian England.”
“Which one?” I whispered back, thinking that even the working women of my country compared favorably with any of these, but the Sultan did not refer to one of the women in the pool.
“She sits in the doorway on the far side of the room, waiting her turn at the water,” he said.
I looked again through the peephole and indeed saw a woman crouched in the shadows of the doorway, still fully clothed in her veil and robes.
“Watch her,” the Sultan said.
I wondered why the woman the Sultan regarded with such esteem waited to bathe until all had others finished, but I could think of no reason except, perhaps, disease. The Sultan grew more and more impatient with the time his three other wives took in the pool. I began to think that he would presently shout through the peephole for them to be gone, but he said nothing, and presently they left. We watched them wrap themselves in robes and leave the room. Each of them, when she passed the woman kneeling in the doorway, would not approach her, but attempted to pass her by with as much distance between them as possible. No one spoke to her.
When the last of the three had hurried past, the woman in the doorway stood and approached a bench situated on the far side of the pool, which she faced, keeping her back to us, and she began to disrobe. I started to feel our voyeurism perverted, but I dared not question the Sultan’s scruples, feeling that I could not risk his apparent trust in me, arguably worth a great deal toward the eventual salvation of my life, and of Abdullah’s. So I joined the Sultan in watching.
First off came a jeweled bracelet, then the veil, revealing—to my astonishment—fair skin and long braids of blond hair, which she untied and shook out and which fell halfway between her shoulders and her waist, her back being exceptionally long. The blond hair particularly surprised me, mine being the only blond hair I had supposed to exist in all the regions of Africa I had visited. I wondered about the woman before me, and her origins, as she untied her robes and let them fall about her feet. What I saw then will remain forever etched in my memory. A raised ridge of bone ran down her back where the spine would be. She turned and stepped into the pool, holding her arms out from her to balance her steps, and where her breasts should have been were two more arms, tiny, folded together. When her chest touched the water the second set of arms opened to swirl the water before her. Her mouth emitted a soft clacking sound, and she sighed as leathery wings lifted up behind her, wings originally hidden in folds of flesh along the bony spine. I saw then that her lips were stiff, that the chin remained strangely immobile while she made the clacking sounds.
I looked away, horrified, and saw that the Sultan was watching me. “Is she not fine?” he whispered.
I could say nothing in reply.
“Look at her,” he whispered. “Certainly your kings in England do not have wives like her.”
I looked back through the peephole and saw that the “woman,” if indeed that is what she were, was preening her wings with a long tongue distended from her immobile mouth, a tongue that reminded me at once of the proboscis of butterflies.
“You are correct, Sultan,” I whispered. “In England there are no women like her.”
We were quiet for a time, watching. I felt certain it was the Sultan’s marriage to this creature that Ibn Faleiha had opposed. “Where is she from?” I asked.
The Sultan drew away from me at once, and I realized I had asked something amiss.
“Come,” he said. “I must keep my little secrets, too.”
He motioned me out of the room and softly closed the door behind us. I was glad to be spared another sight of his special wife.
“You have said little to me, Robert Adams, except to request more information about my lands.”
I understood then my error. “Curiosity brought me to Africa, that and the desire to learn more about the world we live in,” I told him.
“To what end are you, a Christian, curious about this part of the world?”
I thought for a moment before replying. “For two reasons,” I said. “First, to establish commerce, if possible and if it seem profitable, between my country and yours. The second reason is entirely personal: to see, with my own eyes, wonders.”
He turned and conducted me quickly down the corridor to the room where we had dined and pondered maps of my far-off homeland. “You have seen a wonder tonight,” he told me. We took leave of one another, and two of the Sultan’s armed soldiers escorted me to the street, where I was left to walk alone to the house of Ibn Faleiha.
I had indeed seen a wonder, I realized, though I did not understand what I had seen. Was this winged creature some sort of person no one in Europe had yet encountered—except, perhaps, in mythology? I thought of centaurs, griffins, the chimera. Had such creatures once existed in Mediterranean regions, withdrawing to some hidden African country, now allied with the Mussulmen? Was our mythology based, after all, on truth? This wife of the Sultan’s was not, however, a creature familiar in our mythology, unless the descriptions of one of them had become corrupted in Europe after centuries without contact.
Whatever the case, the Sultan of Agadez evidently regarded the creature as sentient, since he had married her. I determined to learn more about her and her kind before leaving: indeed, I soon realized that such knowledge might be crucial to the safety of my own land, perhaps even to all of Europe. The Sultan’s evident plans for sacking London were perhaps not the joke I had at first thought! Allied with an army of winged soldiers—the fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons of creatures like she the Sultan had shown me—the sacking of even the king of England’s own palace might not be farfetched. I cursed myself for the imprudence I had shown not only in talking openly and truthfully about the capital city of my nation, but also in drawing a map of it. I would mark it falsely in the future, were the leather straps that tied it ever loosened and that map laid in front of me again.
Such were my thoughts as I walked the dark streets to Ibn Faleiha’s. After I lay in bed, I could not stop thinking and find rest. I imagined winged armies descending on London from out of Africa, carrying fire and stones to hurl down upon our homes, businesses, and ships, firing deadly arrows from so high up that our finest marksmen could not strike them in return, kidnapping our wives, sisters, and mothers through the windows of their very bedrooms and flying off with them to fates we could only ponder with horror.
I woke sick to my stomach, a common event for me in Africa, though I had been spared all illness so far in Agadez. I could only attribute this illness to my gloomy thoughts of the previous night; the realization of my evident imprisonment and, perhaps, mortal danger; and the shock of seeing a living creature out of mythology. Abdullah cursed the Saharan dews to which I must have been exposed during my late night walk from the Sultan’s palace to Ibn Faleiha’s, but I had felt no dew. The night had seemed hot and dry to me.
I found myself unable to keep down food or water, though I made repeated attempts knowing, as I did, that I soon needed health and strength if Abdullah and I were to escape from Agadez, escape now being, I believed, our only hope.
Because of my illness, I put off Ibn Faleiha’s lessons in written and spoken Arabic that we had been prepared to resume. He had never ceased being fascinated that a Christian should want to learn to write and perfect the speaking of the language of the Mussulmen. I decided, however, to mention the Sultan’s wife in order to learn what Ibn Faleiha knew of her and her people.
“You have seen her?” he asked, his voice angry at once.
“The Sultan showed her to me,” I said.
“He captured her during one of his forays against brigands. The imams would have put her to death at once, but the Sultan not only forbade it, he married her, planning to ally this land with her inhuman kind, though nothing has come of that, Allah be praised.”
But if such an alliance were achieved, the military advantages seemed obvious. Ibn Faleiha claimed to know nothing of her origins, and he would speak of her no more.
In the afternoon, a messenger again arrived from the Sultan, and I was again summoned to the Sultan’s dinner. I sent word that I was ill, but the messenger soon returned saying that I must attend the dinner, ill or well, so I went. As before, the Sultan and his three advisors met me with paper, pen, and ink and once again requested that I draw them a map of London. “Where is last night’s map?” I asked. “I will add detail to it.”
“Draw us a new map of the same places,” the Sultan commanded, and I had no choice but to draw something. Their open mistrust alarmed me. Clearly they were asking me to duplicate last night’s map so that they might compare my two efforts. I could only imagine the consequences to me if they discovered major discrepancies. “Be certain to draw the course of the river you spoke of last night,” the Sultan continued.
I picked up the pen, sick at heart. My choices then seemed simple and few: betray my country or incur the swift wrath of the Sultan of Agadez. Betray England I could never do, so I determined to attempt to draw the Sultan’s attention away from London. I quickly sketched in the parks and major streets, as I had done the previous night, then Buckingham Palace, “the king’s winter residence,” I said, as if to myself.
“Where is the summer?” an advisor immediately asked.
“In the mountains of Wales,” I lied. “Our winters being exceptionally short, the king moves his capital during spring, summer, and fall to—” There I paused briefly to invent the name of a nonexistent city, “to Utopia,” I said, the title of Sir Thomas More’s book being the only name for an imaginary capital that occurred to me.
“Tell us of this Utopia,” the Sultan said.
And I did. When I drew the map of it, I memorized its details, since I fully expected to be asked to duplicate everything, including the two great rivers that join in the heart of my fictitious city, the massive government buildings, the palaces, the parks, and, since my audience would not believe that any king ruled from an unwalled city, its great wall and fortifications.
The Sultan and his advisors seemed extremely pleased with my stories and maps. When they judged that I had drawn enough for one night, an advisor carefully rolled the maps and tied them with leather straps. Then, as before, the Sultan clapped his hands, and servants brought food: kouskous, this time; another roasted goat and—a great surprise—wine. The various aromas nauseated me, though I had enjoyed these same foods, if not the heretofore unavailable wine, on many different occasions throughout my travels in Africa. I ate small portions slowly, though no one seemed to notice or care, the wine commanding most of the Sultan’s and his advisors’ attention. I knew of the Mussulman’s supposed prohibitions on drinking alcoholic beverages, but every man there drank freely and made no excuses for the wine. I certainly did not think it prudent to question their disregard of their faith’s scruples.
The hour was late, but we drank and ate, then drank more. The Sultan and his advisors became aroused and jovial. “We shall have music and dancing!” the Sultan said. He clapped his hands, spoke to the eunuch who approached, and presently a flutist and drummer seated themselves in an alcove and began playing an exotic, rhythmic music. The eunuch hurried a veiled woman to the arched doorway. She stood there reluctantly and attempted to turn to leave, but the eunuch would not let her. He spoke to her in low tones. I heard none of the words, but he seemed to urge her to an apparently unpleasant duty.
“Dance!” the Sultan roared. His shout startled everyone. The musicians stopped playing briefly and all of us—the woman in the doorway, the eunuch, the three advisors and I—stared at the Sultan.
“She must dance!” he shouted.
The eunuch said something to the woman, who at once straightened her back, lifted her head, and for a moment stood tall and proud. Slowly, she began to dance.
She moved gracefully down the steps, then onto the tiled floor before our table, her hands and body keeping time with the music. Once before us, she began to twirl. Her robes and veil lifted as she turned—and I saw the fair skin of her hands, a flash of blond hair.
I knew then who—or what—danced for the Sultan of Agadez and his guests: the woman from a lost mythology. I felt as if a jug of icy water had been poured over my head. I sobered at once and, shivering, sat up straight to watch the twirling dervish before me.
It was then that she noticed me, and she was curious. She danced close to me when she let her veil fall, and she danced close to me as she loosened the ties of her robes. I studied her face and, though it was not a type of face I had ever imagined existing on this world, I could still read the emotions that played there: unhappiness, sorrow, shame. I did not want to see her forced to dance naked. Even if her people were to become the enemies of mine, I did not want to see her shamed like that. I thought, in vain for a time, of a way to prevent her complete disrobing, but nothing occurred to me better than what I presently did: I began to cough, though my false cough soon turned to a real, and as the real continued I shortly could not stop myself from vomiting.
At once the dancing stopped, the music stopped, everyone stood but me. Without a word, the Sultan left the room. The eunuch rushed forward with rags. I took one of his rags and knelt to help him clean the floor.
“No!” he said, too loudly. “You are the Sultan’s guest.” He tried to take the rag from my hands, but I would not let him. I was responsible for the mess, and I was determined to help him clean it, though it comforted me somehow to find that at least this man still thought of me as a guest here. One by one the advisors left, and when they were gone, the musicians left. Other servants came at once to clear the table. The Sultan’s wife stood not far off, watching the eunuch and me, retying her robes. I had stopped her dance, but I had not planned to make such a mess. She crossed to the table, took pen and paper before the servants could clear it away, and wrote on the paper, which she handed to me.
It disturbed me to find my actions misconstrued in this manner. I crossed to the table and quickly wrote in Arabic on the same paper,
His words seemed to surprise her—it was as if she were not accustomed to the clothes she wore, though she hurried to comply. Soon the veil covered her head and hid her face in shadow. She crossed to the table and wrote. Her jeweled bracelet tapped the table while her hand moved. I saw that this bracelet was really four separate copper bands, a large yellow stone on the bottom, nearest her hand, then a tiny brilliant blue jewel on the second, small red jewels on the third and fourth. She handed me the paper.
“From a land called England,” I said. “It is far from here, and very different from this place. Where are you from?” I asked in return, glad that the Sultan were not present so that I might ask the question and read her answer.
She looked at the eunuch, who looked back at her but said nothing, then she motioned for me to follow her across the room to doors that opened onto a balcony. We stood at the rail, where she studied the night sky for a time. Innumerable stars blazed there. A breeze off the desert cooled the night air, and I became mindful of the dews that constantly worry Abdullah. I was about to say that for my health I needed to return inside, when she pointed northeast to something forty degrees above the horizon—above the Aïr mountains. I pointed at the mountains, but she pushed up my arm till my finger pointed at stars.
That was how she answered my question. I stood, wondering, as she turned and walked back into the room. I shortly followed, but she was gone. Only the eunuch remained in the now almost dark room, clearing away the last of the dishes. Most candles had been extinguished. “I do not understand,” I told him.
“Neither do I,” he said. He held the paper we had written on to the flame of a candle. When the fire had nearly reached his fingers, he dropped what remained of the paper onto a plate. Soon nothing was left of our communication but ashes and memory. He blew out the candle and left with the dishes. Soldiers came to escort me to the street, and again I was left to walk alone to the house of Ibn Faleiha in the dark night, cool now in a desert breeze. I buttoned my jacket to the neck to ward off dews, though once in my own room I opened the window, which also faced northeast, to look at stars for a time. The moon had not yet risen, but the night was bright with starlight. What had Suleiyá, for such appeared to be her name, tried to tell me? Were she and her people not something from a lost mythology, as I had imagined, but descended here from some star or moon?
Forty degrees above the horizon in Africa there are many, many stars at which to point.
I woke with a fever and other worse symptoms I refrain from chronicling. Two of Ibn Faleiha’s serving girls were also similarly ill, and Ibn Faleiha himself complained of a severe headache. Ibn Faleiha told me that many in the city were ill.
After a failed attempt at breakfast, I wrote an apology to the Sultan and sent Abdullah to deliver it. Though he waited at the palace till after midday for a reply, none came. Abdullah seemed troubled after his return, and I asked him the reason.
“I heard men talking at the mosque of thee, O my master,” he said.
“What did these men say?” I asked.
“That the illness in the city is thy doing, that thou hast cursed Agadez with some Christian ailment.”
“A curse that afflicts the man who says it seems strange and ineffective.”
“Indeed,” Abdullah said. “But that is not all. A mahdi has arisen here. He preaches in the mosque against thee, against the Sultan’s worldly ways, and against one of the Sultan’s wives.”
“What does he say?”
“That thou and this wife of the Sultan’s are infidels and have polluted Agadez. Tragedy will befall the city unless the Sultan repents and cleanses it.”
“What does this mahdi say of the Sultan’s wife?” I asked.
“That she is a devil whom he has tamed for evil, that one look of her brings a curse, and two hard looks stop the heart.”
“That is nonsense,” I said. “I have met the woman to whom they must refer. She looks different from other women, but her glance does not kill.”
“I only report what men say,” he said.
I stood and crossed to the window. “I would leave here at once, if the Sultan allowed it.”
“And I would follow thee, for thou, though a Christian, have been good to me.”
“Thank you, Abdullah,” I said. After a time I asked him if he thought we were in danger.
“I may not be,” was all he said.
Ibn Faleiha rushed into the courtyard shortly after midday with news of carnage on the desert. A caravan of pilgrims returning from the Hajj had been overcome by brigands a day’s ride from the city. Everything of value had been stolen, and those not lying dead on the sands were gone—kidnapped to be sold into slavery in Egypt or the Sudan. The Sultan had sent a troop to track down the brigands and rescue the enslaved.
Shortly we heard wailing in the streets, from the relatives or friends of those killed or kidnapped, I was certain. I looked out my window and saw bodies carried into the city on the backs of camels, donkeys, and horses. Those who mourned their dead followed them. When Ibn Faleiha and Abdullah returned from afternoon prayer, both looked deeply concerned.
“The mahdi blames this trouble on you,” Ibn Faleiha said.
“And on the Sultan’s infidel wife,” Abdullah said.
“Both are accused,” Ibn Faleiha said, in a quiet but angry voice. He stared at me for a moment, then moved to the window to look out on the street traffic. I wondered if he were prepared to believe the mahdi’s lies against me. Abdullah continued to recite them and to tell me how the illness had spread. Even part of the desert troop had had to return to Agadez because they were so ill. Whether Ibn Faleiha believed me responsible for such things mattered little since others believed them. My presence in Ibn Faleiha’s home put him and his household in danger.
“You have offered to work here in return for my hospitality,” Ibn Faleiha said, turning away from the window. “I ask you now to work, Robert Adams. Help me devise ways to bar the doors and windows of this house.”
Which thing we did. By night, all of us sat quiet at dinner—Abdullah, Ibn Faleiha, his aged wife, even their servants, and myself—behind barred doors and windows, though we knew that if the city rose against us, we would not survive.
“Abdullah and I must escape from Agadez,” I told Ibn Faleiha, after the servants had cleared the table and only he, Abdullah, and I remained in the room. “My life is forfeit if I stay, as is perhaps Abdullah’s since he guided me here. My presence, moreover, puts you and your house in danger. But Abdullah and I need help. We need horses.”
I thought perhaps he might equip us for escape so he might at last be rid of us and the danger of our presence.
“You do not understand,” Ibn Faleiha said. “All our lives are forfeit in Agadez. The mahdi preaches that contagion spreads from
I understood then how the Sultan had used me to ruin Ibn Faleiha and exact revenge for privately delivered, if unasked for, advice. Perhaps the Sultan had not seen the coming of a mahdi and his preachings against me, but he must have known how being forced to harbor an infidel Christian, as they thought of me, for as long as I had been under this roof, would damage Ibn Faleiha’s reputation and make his business, his dealings, even his word, suspect.
A servant placed a bowl of hot water on the table. Ibn Faleiha stood to wash his hands, preparing to retire for the night. “You have brought hardship to my house,” Ibn Faleiha said to me, “but it was not your intent; moreover, you have treated me and the customs of this house honestly and with respect. My observations of you over these months prevent me from accepting the mahdi’s preachings against you, or my eyes are blind and my heart incapable of judging truly. If Allah is cursing this city, and blame for it to be assigned, the Sultan should bear it, he who brought an unholy woman into this city to marry and cavort with, not you who traveled here to learn and establish commerce; therefore, I tell you this: my son, who lives in Bilma, leads a caravan that should arrive here within days. My wife and I and all in this household will escape with him out of this sultanate to Bilma. You and your servant may come with us, to save your lives, but you must leave Bilma quickly and be gone from us forever.”
Abdullah fell at once to his knees, thanking Ibn Faleiha profusely, then he turned in the direction of Mecca to offer prayers of thanks. I stood and bowed to Ibn Faleiha, thanked him and held out my hand. I had to explain our custom of shaking hands, but after I did, Ibn Faleiha shook hands with me. I trusted him then. I did not believe he would have shaken my hand had he believed me responsible for the disease spreading through Agadez.
Abdullah and I will sleep as if saved.
In the late afternoon, the Sultan sent a messenger to inquire after my health, which was greatly improved. I had eaten that morning and kept down the food and water. My fever had broken and, though weak, I could walk. I sent the messenger away with that report. Shortly he returned to bid me to the Sultan’s palace for dinner, which invitation I accepted. The eunuch met me at the doors when I arrived, and he escorted me down a different hallway to a room I had never seen, where he closed the door. “You must help us,” he said.
The veiled figure of a woman rose from a chair near the window. She held out a piece of paper to me. I took it and read her words.
“The mahdi will have her killed before he is through, and you, too,” the eunuch said. “I have seen this sort of thing happen before, as it did some years past when a different mahdi urged the Hausa driven from this city, and many Hausa killed or enslaved.”
“Where are your people?” I asked Suleiyá.
She took the paper, dipped a pen in the ink bottle on the table, and wrote:
“How many?” I asked.
That’s all! I thought. Clearly she and her people posed a minimal threat to England and Europe. I now had answer to that question, though immediately it occurred to me that her people might be nomadic, flying in small groups from aerie to aerie, and that the total of all such beings might number far more than nineteen. “How can so few protect us?” I asked.
“This is the word for boat, ship, or craft,” he said, and he handed back the paper.
“Is there a river beyond the mountains?” I asked, wondering whether the Nile, perhaps, had its source in the Aïr. If that were the case, and if we sailed down it to Cairo, I could arrange passage home—and forever be remembered as he who had discovered the Nile’s source, he who had solved that great mystery and lived to profit from it—but Suleiyá shook her head.
“There is no river,” the eunuch said. “She has ever described whatever brought her here with this word. No one understands but she.”
Suleiyá took the paper and wrote:
While I read those words she sat disconsolately in the chair. I considered my options: escape to Bilma with Ibn Faleiha and the company of an entire caravan, which offered considerable protection, or escort Suleiyá to her eighteen people and their “ship” in the mountains to unravel there a great mystery. I chose the mystery.
Briefly I explained Ibn Faleiha’s plan for our escape. The eunuch and I arranged to be in daily contact through Abdullah so that I could apprise them of the time of our departure. The eunuch and Suleiyá would find a way for her to leave the Sultan’s palace and come to Ibn Faleiha’s when I sent word.
I had little time to wonder at that. “Now you must hurry to the Sultan!” the eunuch said. “He will question your delay.”
But the Sultan seemed not to have noticed the few minutes I had spent with his wife and the eunuch. I drew for them a second map of my Utopia, adding many imaginary details.
We again ate at a late hour. This time, however, I did not become ill. As I prepared to take my leave, the Sultan looked long at me. “You have entertained me well,” he said. “I did not think a Christian capable of that.”
I wondered at those words as I walked home alone. They seemed odd to me, and I considered their implications. Suddenly I heard movement in the shadows against the building ahead, then low voices. A group of some ten men dressed in black robes stood waiting there, probably for me. I was unarmed and outnumbered. With a shout, I turned and ran back toward the palace and the assistance, I hoped, of its guards. But I found the doors barred. Though I knocked repeatedly, no one came for some time.
My assailants fell upon me and, despite my best efforts to fight, beat me with clubs till I thought I would surely die. I was knocked to the ground, where I held my head in my hands to try to protect it. The blow from one club broke the fingers of my left hand, but just as that happened, the doors opened and the guard rushed forth. My assailants scattered and ran away down dark streets, some pursued for a time by the guards. I was dragged inside, where the eunuch dressed my wounds. “You are lucky to be alive,” he said.
I wondered how long I would continue to be lucky. I remembered the Sultan’s strange words—portentous, they now seemed. The lack of guards outside the palace and their slow response meant that perhaps they had hoped I would be killed—the mahdi appeased, the Christian dead, the Sultan spared an order, somehow painful to him, for my execution.
I could walk. The guard escorted me to Ibn Faleiha’s, where Abdullah and others fussed over me till a late hour.
After a week I have healed enough to attend again to this journal. I wrote the entry for 27 May today, as if I had written it that night.
Two of my ribs are apparently broken, besides my fingers. Most of my body is still bruised and sore. But I am alive, healing, and, as the eunuch said, lucky. The mahdi has praised my attackers in sermons all this week.
Abdullah is just returned from the caravansary where today the son of Ibn Faleiha will finish conducting his business and depart Agadez, taking with him his mother and the servants of Ibn Faleiha, none of whom should evidently be missed for a time. By night, he will return for Ibn Faleiha and my party. The eunuch is to escort Suleiyá to meet us then, and we will all climb over the wall by cover of darkness and make our escape—the eunuch intending to accompany Ibn Faleiha to Bilma, as he fears he will be implicated in Suleiyá’s disappearance.
Abdullah tells me that the horses he and I will ride are fine animals, tan Arabians. “You must return these horses to my son,” Ibn Faleiha told me. “They are worth a great deal.” I do not doubt his words, and I promised to return the horses, God willing, after I had delivered Suleiyá to her people. I hope to be able to hold reins during the wild ride we will surely have to the Aïr mountains.
Ibn Faleiha is furious with me for having promised to help a Sultan’s wife escape certain death—“This Moon girl!” he called her. “This unholy creature whose presence in Agadez I opposed. You will be pursued. I can only think that, with this rash deed, you will draw the Sultan’s army after you and deliver us. For that, perhaps, I should thank you, and for that reason alone will I allow you to assist her.”
Abdullah refuses to go to Bilma and insists on accompanying me on this mad journey. I can only imagine what he will think when he sees Suleiyá’s face and, perhaps, wings.
I am sending these journals with Ibn Faleiha, since in our saddle bags is room for only food and water. Abdullah, Suleiyá, and I must travel lightly. My plan is to reach Bilma eventually, take up this journal, and write in it an account of all that befalls us in the coming days and of the wonders I might see.
The sun has just set. From my window, by the last dim light of day, I see the eunuch and a veiled woman approach this house. Abdullah and I risk much to protect this woman who is not human, and to solve her mystery.
Our plan is afoot. Soon all of us will have set off into a desert filled with brigands, pursued by a Sultan and his armies. Abdullah has spent much of the day in prayer.
I go now to join him.
The rest of the journal is blank. I found François Brissot sitting on the floor in the stacks, sorting papers from a cardboard box into neat piles. “Where did this come from?” I asked.
“From the archives of the mosque at Bilma,” he said. “When the government closed that city, the mosque’s records ended up here, just in time for the Nigerians to scatter them.”
“Have you read it?”
“Over the last six days, slowly, of course, and with my French/English dictionary nearby. I’d never done more than glance at the records from Bilma before now, and was surprised to find anything in English among them.”
“Were other journals or papers with it?”
“Only this, so far.” Brissot motioned vaguely at the boxes of papers and the stacks of books he had spent six months simply picking up from the floor. “Who knows what we will discover as we keep sorting and cataloging,” he said.
It was late. While Brissot locked up for the night, I reread Adams’s May 24 entry with its description of Suleiyá’s bracelets, thinking that I had seen something like them in Niamey, but I could not remember where. Brissot and I live in the same general direction, so we walked together for a time. I stopped Brissot on a street comer and pointed up at the night sky northeast of us. Niamey lies almost directly southwest of Agadez. You can’t see the Aïr mountains from there, but you can of course see the stars of that quadrant of sky.
“What would we find in the Aïr if we went looking?” I asked.
“God knows,” he said.
In my room that night, I opened my window to look at the stars. The breeze off the Sahara was hot and dry, as always. I thought of Robert Adams and his brave plan which had evidently not worked. He had never arrived in Bilma to take up writing again in his journal. But what had happened to him, Abdullah, and the “Moon girl”? Did the Sultan recapture them? Were they attacked by brigands? Had Suleiyá’s people left her—and what was she, after all? I had little hope that we would ever learn the answer to these questions. Some two hundred years later, how could we solve the mystery Robert Adams disappeared with?
I walked to the National Museum to study its displays of jewelry from the Sultanates, thinking that maybe here I had seen bracelets like the ones Adams described. But the oldest items on display from the Sultanate of Agadez were gold and silver necklaces dating from the 1850s. I asked the curator whether the displays were rotated, thinking that maybe other pieces were in storage now, not on display, but she assured me the museum’s holdings from the 1800s were small enough to be kept on permanent display. They rotated nothing out of the cases. I described the bracelets Suleiyá had worn, but the curator said they did not represent any Sahelian design she was aware of, past or present.
I left the museum disappointed. I told myself it was unrealistic to hope to find Suleiyá’s bracelets, or something like them, but even so I felt more and more certain that I had seen something like them in Niamey. I just could not remember where.
I’d become acquainted with a woman named Mariam Yacoub and her three sons, Abdullah, Nasir, and Idrees, who import fruit from Gabon. Mariam had promised me mangoes on Saturday, so on Saturday morning, early, I walked to her stall. I wanted to buy the mangoes first, before they sold out, then wander through the jewelers’ stalls searching for something that looked like the bracelets Adams had described.
The mangoes had come. They were set out in wooden crates stamped with the bright red ink of the Ministre d’Agricole du Gabon and the many black and red inks stamped officiously on the crates at all the borders they had crossed on their way to us. Mariam stood and held ripe mangoes for me to see as I walked toward her, but what made me stare were the bracelets she wore: two narrow, copper bands, one with a large, yellow stone, the other with a small red jewel. She had surely worn them before. It was here that I had seen bracelets like those Adams had described.
“Where did you get those bracelets?” I asked her in French.
“I thought you were coming for mangoes,” she said.
“I am!” I said. I explained about Robert Adams’s journal and its description of the bracelets a Sultan’s wife had worn, telling her that he had described four copper bands, not just two, one of them with a blue jewel.
Mariam stared at me, then called her youngest son. “Idrees,” she said. “Idrees!” She walked off, looking, evidently, for Idrees.
“Monsieur,” Abdullah, her oldest son, said from behind his fruit stand. “The mangoes.”
I purchased six, and Abdullah packed them carefully in the cloth bag I’d brought to the market. Mariam returned then, Idrees at her side. “Please come with me,” she said. “I have something to show you.”
We walked through the market to the jewelers’ stalls and stopped at one, where Mariam embraced another woman. “My sister Ghadda,” she said, introducing us—and, behind Ghadda, among her displays of jewelry, were three sets of bracelets that matched Robert Adams’s description of Suleiyá’s. I smiled and bowed to Ghadda.
“Show my American friend the bracelets on your wrist,” Mariam said.
Ghadda hesitated, then held out her left wrist. On it were two copper bands, one with a small red jewel, the other with a tiny blue one.
“Ghadda’s two and my two are the originals,” Mariam told me. “Our mother gave them to us. These others are copies.”
“Do you wish to buy a set?” Ghadda asked me. “They are beautiful, though simple. The jewels are rubies and a sapphire.” She handed me a set. “The yellow stone is from Eritrea.”
“Kevin tells me he has read about these bracelets, that the wife of a sultan once wore them,” Mariam said.
The copies had Arabic writing around the base of the yellow stone. “Is there any writing on the originals?” I asked.
“On this one, yes,” Mariam said. She took off the bracelet with the yellow stone and handed it to me. Faintly, around the base of the stone, I made out Arabic letters. That disappointed me. I’d hoped, if there were any script at all, for it to be unintelligible.
“It is a verse from the Koran,” Mariam said. “My grandmother had it engraved there, ‘This eases the afflicted heart,’ from the story of the death of Ibrahim, the prophet’s little son, and how caring for a grave does not benefit the dead but comforts the living. It is also what Ghadda engraves on the copies she makes.”
I looked at her. “This bracelet had no writing before then?”
“Grandmother told me when I was a little girl that there had been writing on it, but that no one could read it. She had it replaced with this verse.”
I compared the originals with the copy. The copy appeared to be exact, and beautiful, as Ghadda claimed. I bargained with Ghadda for the copy, but not very hard, and ended up paying too much for it. “How did the originals come into your family?” I asked Mariam, while Ghadda made change.
“They were a gift to our great-great-great-grandfather, who came from Morocco to this land.”
“And who gave them to him?”
“No one ever told us the wife of a sultan,” Ghadda said, handing me a few coins.
“Did your ancestor come here guiding an English explorer?” I asked.
“Surely he was French,” Mariam said.
Of course they were from Bilma.
Brissot discounted the bracelets as coincidence. “Some old North African fashion,” he claimed, but I wonder. I’ve asked Brissot to watch for anything else from the Bilma archives, hoping that perhaps some written account of Abdullah’s has survived, but as I continue to volunteer in the chaos of the archives, surrounded by piles of trampled and torn books and papers and manuscripts, many burned for heat while the Nigerians camped here, I have little hope. If such a manuscript ever existed, and if it somehow survived the occupation, it may be years before Brissot and his staff find it.
But I feel convinced that Abdullah, at least, survived the “mad journey.” Mariam and Ghadda knew little else about their ancestor, the guide from Morocco. But they promised to ask their mother, who is crippled with arthritis and spends her days in a tent in the camps that ring Niamey, whether she knows anything else.
“You must come with me to my mother, Kevin,” Mariam said. “She claims to have been waiting for someone to ask about our ancestor.”
Ghadda stood there, with Mariam’s three sons, and after they had closed their stall, we all walked to the camps and the tent of their mother and grandmother, Hanna Abdullah. She reached up her hands to me and pulled me down beside her onto a worn carpet.
“You are a Christian?” she asked.
I nodded, a Christian by birth, at least.
“I thought it would be a Christian who would come asking about my great, great-grandfather. A mahdi would have cut out his tongue for blasphemy if he had kept telling his story, so he stopped telling it generally, but he told his children, saying that someday someone would ask, and that then they could tell it. They told their children, who told my mother and uncle, and I have told my children, since death seems near for me and no one had come asking for the story before you.”
“You surprised us, that day in the market,” Mariam said. “We counseled with mother before we decided to let you hear the story.”
Hanna told me her story, then. What she recounted matches, in general detail, Robert Adams’s narrative, down to the description of Suleiyá, except that she believed Robert had been French and Suleiyá an angel. Allah, she believed, had sent Robert to Agadez to bring out Ibn Faleiha’s household before the plague of 1819, and to settle Abdullah in this land, where he eventually married Ibn Faleiha’s youngest daughter.
“The angel took the Frenchman,” Hanna said. “She gave Abdullah her bracelets as a benediction, and he stood on a mountain ledge to watch her take the Frenchman into the sky. It was for saying that—that an angel had taken a Christian to heaven—that the mahdi would have cut out his tongue. But all of us, Abdullah and Ibn Faleiha’s descendants, see Allah’s hand in this. What do you make of it? Why have you come asking?”
How could I tell her? I was simply curious, while this story had become part of her faith. I had wondered, of course, whether here we might find evidence for something almost too good to hope for, something almost like Hanna’s angel. I suppose the story can mean many things. I thanked Hanna for telling it to me, and told her that Allah must have wanted her family to do a special work in this land, if he had brought Abdullah here and saved Ibn Faleiha’s household, even if to do all that had meant calling someone not of their faith to help bring it to pass. Hanna smiled at me then.
“Others will probably want to talk with you about this,” I told her, thinking of François Brissot, thinking, too, of possible tests someone might someday want to run on the bracelets.
Brissot scoffed at all of this and would not pursue it. He
So I have written this account, appended a transcript of Robert Adams’s journal to it, made a recording of Hanna recounting her story, and keep the copy of Suleiyá’s bracelet with all of that. I will tell this story to whomever I can, if I think he or she able to do something with it—run the tests, scour the Aïr, interview Hanna and her descendants in depth. If I find no one, I will hand this account to my nephew, and ask him to do with it what I have done. Maybe someday, someone will ask one of us about it, or we will ask the right questions.
I often look at stars now. I stand at night in the hot, Saharan breezes to look at them. Forty degrees above the horizon in Africa, there are many, many stars.