The white monk of Timbuctoo

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Author/Creator Seabrook, William Buehler Date 1934 Resource type Books Language English Subject Coverage (spatial) Middle Niger, Mali, Timbucktu Source Smithsonian Institution Libraries, DT553 .T6S4X Rights By kind permission of Bill Seabrook and Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. (Larousse Group). Description A biographical account of Pere Yakouba (Auguste Dupuis), a French priest who visited Timbucktu early in his life. He left the priesthood and built a new life in Timbucktu. 29 illustrations. Format extent 312 pages (length/size)

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http://www.aluka.org Smithsonian Institution <7 Cibraries Alexander Wetmore 19,4 6 Sixth Secret, 1955 a- x, ýrwý

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO by the same author ADVENTURES IN ARABIA Published also in England and in Dutch, French, Hungarian, Swedish, and Arabic. THE MAGIC ISLAND Published also in England and in Czech, French, German, .Italian, Spanish, and Swedish. JUNGLE WAYS Published also in England and in Danish, French, German, Italian, and Swedish. AIR ADVENTURE Published also in England and in French.

/A// A YAKOUBA TODAY

The White Monk of Timbuctoo BY WILLIAM SEABROOK Illustrated HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY NEW YORK L\ LIRRE

COPYRIGHT, 1934, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. Second printing, October, 1934 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA BY QUINN & 3ODEN COMPANY, INC., RAHWAY, N. 3. Designed by Robert osephy

PREFACE I TRIED to persuade, coax, bribe, buy, bully him into doing it himself. He has the ability. He could have written an autobiography that would have curiously combined the respectively scandalous and saintly qualities of that roistering, rodgering hellion Benvenuto Cellini and the Blessed Saint Francis of Assisi-with a touch of Marco Polo added. But when a man is indifferent to fame and money and suffers no itch to exteriorize his ego, most arguments fall flat. It may be cynically pointed out, with more than a grain of truth, that the reason why Pere Dupuis-Yakouba is so beautifully indifferent to such gewgaws, material and immaterial, is that he is already amply supplied with them. He is the leading citizen of a fabled city' in which he has lived richly and usefully for many years, beloved and honored. He has no rating in Bradstreet's or on the stock exchange, and his name is totally unknown to bankers in New York, Cincinnati, Atlanta, or San Francisco, but he lives abundantly in a rambling mud palace, surrounded by family, servants, slaves, handmaidens; with more money than he needs to feed his tribe, buy the best champagne, absinthe, and cocktail ingredients, books in fifteen ancient and modern languages, the finest pipe tobacco-and plenty always left over to give to the poor. As I See Appendix, p. 221.

PREFACE for fame, there is no man, white or black, in that vast territory which is French West Africa, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Equator, from Dakar to Lake Tchad, who is more famous in his curious way than PWre Yakouba. White governors, air ministers and generals, black potentates and Moslem princes, all know and visit him. The Christian priests also still visit him and call him "brother," but speak of him, alas, with a mixture of sadness and affectionate regret. For the legendary White Monk of Timbuctoo is a renegade monk and a renegade priest in the technical sense that he unfrocked himself lo these many years. And the consequent legend of Pere Yakouba (though unknown to the English-speaking world) is already so widely current in France and Europe, has been written so often and in so many guises, that it is high time for somebody to undertake to write his true life, since he will never do it himself. Some of these already written, mostly journalistic, legends are grand, and all of them, even the worst, have generally a thread of twisted truth in them. Yakouba has been used to make a page or chapter in nearly all the African books written by distinguished Frenchmen in recent years. Pierre Mille of the Academie Frangaise, Paul Morand, Albert Londres, Charles Louis Royer, Blaise Cendrars, Francis Bceuf, and a dozen other writers less well known in America have all, at one time or another, spent an hour, or a day, or a week on his roof terrace. Some years ago, I did identically the same thing. Visiting Timbuctoo for a short week, I found Yakouba the most vi

PREFACE interesting phenomenon of the once Mysterious City,' spent most of the week drinking absinthe with him, and later wrote a chapter adding to the superficial Yakouba legend. It was no better or worse than the other chapters written by my similarly itinerant predecessors. But I found that Yakouba had left a deeper, more lasting impression on my mind and emotions. I felt that he was perhaps the only white man I had ever known who, triply handicapped for the adventure by being civilized, educated, and an intellectual, had found freedom and some happiness-and that he had done it in defiance of the laws of convention only, rather than in defiance or violation of any basic rules of fundamental morality. He seemed to me fundamentally a good man, a free man, and nearly a happy man. I do not believe I have ever known another educated white intellectual who was good and free and happy. My father was a good man, but he was never free or happy- I myself am a free man in the limited sense that I am ready at all times to defy ordinary conventions at any price, including-if need be-that of my reputation or my money or my life, rather than forego what I call my freedom-but I am neither good nor happy. So Yakouba preyed on my mind long after Timbuctoo. I admired and envied him, and in a way loved him. I admired and envied him without in any way wishing to take the precise road he had taken toward a solution of the good life. I certainly do not want to live in Timbuctoo or marry a black woman or beget thirty children- nor does it occur to me to suggest that others do so as a solu2 See Appendix, p. 224.

PREFACE tion of a good life for them. It wasn't his black wife and his slaves and his mud palace that I envied and admired; it was the goodness and freedom that I felt in him. I began to feel also (as time passed) that Yakouba's life might have some possible significance with relation to human life in general-his "life" written down by himself in a book, as the word is used in libraries. I felt that, apart from the elements of adventure which should assure its interest as entertainment, it might have a further meaning. I knew that he could write, because I had read some of the things he had been writing for years, principally to amuse himself, partly in scribbled notes, partly on an old cylinder-alphabet typewriter, some of it casually published, all scattered pellmell in his study. So I sent him long letters urging him to do it. Then I bombarded him with cablegrams from Paris, proposing that I should write a long preface to it if that would help any, and guaranteeing that it would be published not only in French but in several other languages, informing him that certain publishers were even prepared to offer him substantial advances. The upshot of it was that he said yes tentatively, and one day I revisited Timbuctoo. He was docile as a lamb at first, but in the end there was no persuading him. Neither money, prospects of outside fame, nor pleas of friendship could budge him. In the final end, principally for friendship's sake, he agreed to give me his whole- hearted collusion in a modified plan. We had plenty of time to do it. He helped me viii

PREFACE ransack his studio, his library, his metal trunks, confiding to me all his scattered notes, which we discussed and augmented, his typed, unpublished pages, sketches, ancient photographs-everything that might help me to write his life, since he refused to write his autobiography. So I have undertaken it. W- B. S. Bandol, 1933

ILLUSTRATIONS YAKOUBA TODAY frontispiece HIS LATE EMINENCE CARDINAL LAVIGERIE 20 THE LATE MONSEIGNEUR HACqUARD 20 FOLLOWING THE MASSACRE OF THE FIRST PERE BLANC MISSION TO TIMBUCTOO, THE FATHERS WENT ARMED IN THE DESERT 21 YAKOUBA S ORDINATION IN THE AFRICAN PRESBYTERY 36. THE FIRST MONKS IN TIMBUCTOO 37 ATUAREGCHIEFANDTWOSLAVES 68 TIMBUCTOO CURIOSITIES IN 1905 69 ALTAR TO OUR LADY OF TIMBUCTOO BUILT BY PERE YAKOUBA IN 1895 84 TIMBUCTOO TODAY: AIRPLANE VIEW 85 PERE DUPUIS-YAKOUBA WHEN HE WAS APPOINTED SUPERIOR OF THE MISSION AT TIMBUCTOO 100 TIMBUCTOO S SUPERIOR BESTOWS A CASUAL BENEDICTION 101 A COCKTAIL PARTY AROUND 1900 116 YAKOUBA'S STREET 117 A CORNER OF YAKOUBA S HOUSE TODAY 117 YAKOUBA FIRST MARRIED SALAMA BY THE MOSLEM RITES, AND LONG AFTERWARD BY THIS CIVIL CONTRACT 132 RAOUL, A PET GRANDSON 133

ILLUSTRATIONS DIARA, YAKOUBA'S FAVORITE DAUGHTER 133 SALAMA AFTER THESE MANY YEARS 148 YAKOUBA ON A HUNTING TRIP 149 YAKOUBA WITH HIS MEDERSA 149 YAKOUBA, NO LONGER PRIEST9 NOW DIRECTOR OF NATIVE UNIVERSITY 190 YAKOUBA SEATED ON THE ROOF OF THE NATIVE UNIVERSITY 191 YAKOUBA AS COMMANDANT OF GOUNDAM 196 A PART OF THE YAKOUBA TRIBE TODAY 197 LALLA, PET AND PEST OF TIMBUCTOO'S AIRPORT 212 "cLE BEAU CRAPULE" 212 MAMADOU MACHINE, THE TAILOR, WITH HIS WIFE 213 DOORWAY OF RENE CAILLIi'S HOUSE 213

PART ONE

A

I y ES, YAKOUBA, but you can't remember that. That's not it. That's not the way. You are not remember_ ing anything when you sit there and say I was born, I was baptized. -I can too! Didn't Moses tell how he was born-and even how he died and was buried? But, damn it, you're not Moses even if you did marry a big black African negress the same as he did. You promised me you would try to remember what you first remember, and you promised Salama the same thing after she scolded us yesterday, and you slept all night on it, and now you sit here on the roof and tell me you were born. -Merde on you and Salama! It's her fault anyway. She made me say yes when you started plaguing me with those telegrams. I knew I was a fool to say yes. But you were a bigger fool to come flying here. I wish you hadn't come. I wish you would please go away, fly away, now. No, I'll just sit around while you remember that when you were three hours old you wet your diaper and then I'll tell you that I know damn well you did but that you don't remember it and Salama will hear us quarreling and come up and take the bottle away from us and give us both hell again-

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Something of the sort happened presently when she came up, except that she gave Yakouba more hell than she did me. She helped me. We kept at it. During the next day or two we made his life miserable. He went and sulked in the Mosque of Sidi Yahya and hid another time in old Ben Labas' palace, but she always sent slaves to find him and bring him back. He called her a sow and me a Yankee journalist, but in the end we made him talk and we made him remember what he first remembers instead of the statistical pap about being born of pious parents on a farm near Chaiteau-Thierry in November, 1865, and christened Auguste and studying for the priesthoodHe remembers his father's clumsy hands whittling and gluing a sort of box. It had a peaked roof, a window, and a door with a knob, so he thought it was going to be a little house, but it was only a wooden clock-case. He must have been about three and a half years old, and it turns out they weren't on a farm at all. They were in a crowded workmen's slum in the center of Paristhe narrow Rue du Cloitre-Saint-Meri jammed in diagonally between the Rue de Rivoli and the Archiveswhere Eugene Dupuis, his father, had camped his family on an artisan brother-in-law and pottered at the workbench as a pretense of earning their keep. He doesn't remember his mother and father very well at this period. His father was a man who talked loudly and smelt of a strange smell which turned out to be absinthe, and his mother was a worried woman who kept saying that they ought to go back to Gland. For he had

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO been born on a farm all right; they were farm people, real peasants belonging to the land, and it was a mistake for them to be in Paris, which may account for Yakouba's cantankerous insistence on remembering a bucolic infancy, but he never saw Gland or any other countryside, except through the unregistering film of a suckling baby's eyes, until he was more than ten years old. He doesn't remember very much about the household where his father glued clocks, except that nobody liked it, and his mother kept saying all the time that they ought to go back to the farm. But they didn't. They made another mistake instead. They were in another place now which he begins to remember much more clearly, in the same quartier but in the Rue des Billettes, with big bright windows almost on a level with the pavement, "almost in the street," he says, where his father now stood in an apron behind a high zinc counter pouring things to drink out of colored bottles, in a room with tables and chairs and a nice smell and people, some bareheaded and some with hats on, and sawdust on the floor and his mother, who sat on a high stool behind a corner of the zinc counter and took in money. So that when he really begins to remember things distinctly, his father was keeping a bar in a crowded workingmen's district in Paris. He had the barroom, the sidewalk, and the whole street to play in, and he liked it fine, although pretty soon he was almost run over and killed by a brewery wagon. This was his first adventure, and the steaming belly of the off horse still seems so monstrous to him that when he is persuaded to talk about the episode at all he likes to see in it a prophetic or symbolic

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO significance which will be too metaphysical, I imagine, to hold water with the psychoanalysts. At any rate he was about five; his mother had given him a slab of bread and butter, and he had eaten it on the sidewalk, and then had started on an aimless diagonal across the cobblestones when there was a clatter, roar, cursing, shouting, all seemingly over his head, and he was under the belly of a percheron reared backward on its haunches, sliding on him with sparks flying from its hooves. He was pushed down rather than knocked down, terrified rather than hurt, and scrambled out from under. Having read and pondered William Blake, he now likes to brag and mystify people by saying that the only thing he is afraid of or ever will be afraid of is horses, and that horses "or any other animals in harness" are more dangerous than free wild beasts in jungles. But it doesn't make much sense unless you understand that Yakouba is a blageur as well as a dialectician and that by "animals in harness" he doesn't mean mammalian quadrupeds hitched to wagons. He is preaching from the text, "The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction." It is the declaration of faith of a man who has all his life been on the side of the tigers, which is perhaps a way of being on the side of the angels. Rightly or wrongly, a goodly company have thought so, including even a few great saints of the Church. Be that as it may, as a cub of wrath he seems to have put on a pretty good show at about this same age of five, in the back-room of his father's saloon, when he tried to kill the policeman. This was in 1870 while the Prussians were advancing toward Paris. His father had been mobi6

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO lized in the Garde Nationale and went every day with his musket to drill on the ramparts, while his mother ran the bistro. One day the cop on the beat brought in a sergeant who was checking the house-to-house clean-up on civilian firearms. As they were on duty, she took glasses and a bottle of something to the table in the back-room where they sat down for a moment's gossip. Little Auguste was there. "No," she had told them as she was filling the glasses, "we never owned a pistol, and the musket, of course, is enrolled with Eugene." Now they were talking of other things. The familiar policeman interrupted with a twist of his head toward the child: "But, Madame, it is my duty to warn you that I believe you are concealing something. This time you must reply carefully. Are you willing to make oath that there are no guns in this house!" "Bon dieu!" she said, "I had forgotten." From a closet she brought a little wooden gun with the paint peeling off and handed it over. "This is serious," said the gendarme ponderously. "We must take it away and report it," while the sergeant listened amused. Then the future Father Superior of the Augustinian White Monks of Timbuctoo went into action. The offensive seems to have included an attempted escalade, as well as kicking, clawing, and trying to bite, for the grownups long afterward chuckling would always say: "Why, he tried to climb him like a cat climbs a tree !" And if the gendarme himself was present, he would always interrupt at this point:

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO "Yes, he had to be pulled loose from me like you pull a cat loose from a branch." Of course, Yakouba remembers these later tellings and retellings by the grown- ups better than the episode itself. What he remembers direct is his grief and rage, and that he tried to kill the man who took his gun. He always adds, with a twinkle in his old blue eyes, that they gave it back to him. His childhood, during this period when his mother was trying to run a saloon with his father drinking up the profits, must have been, for a child such as he was, glorious. Imagine an old-fashioned family bistro behind the Rue de Rivoli with sawdust, cats, neighbors, cheese, olives, madeleines, sweet blackish brandied cherries in a big glass jar, his own mamma enthroned behind the bright zinc bar, his father a soldier who marched in red pantaloons with the bugles of the Garde Nationale and took him on his knee when he came home to clink tumblers and sometimes roar political songs with his cronies of the crowded quartier in the evenings"I was born of pious parents on a little farm." Oh, what a lie the truth so often proves to be! Come on, Yakouba, now we're getting somewhere. What do you think you looked like in those happy days when your papa was drinking himself to death in Paris, and you were too young to share your mamma's worries? He remembers that he wore black smocks like his father, and leather shoes with wooden soles. He seems to have been a stocky, smallish kid, blue-eyed but with hair that was darkish rather than blond; out-doors in the 8

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO street a great deal of the time for a child of five, despite the episode of the brewery wagon. Just across the street diagonally, there was, and still is, an old Carmelite church and cloister which had been converted to a somewhat queer use for the Paris of that day, or this. Yakouba remembers it vividly but without tenderness, back over the long vista of more than half a century, and describes it in a way which, I fear, will seem to you neither kindly nor Christian: "Our corner was infested," he says, "by some hatchetfaced old maids masquerading as nuns or nurses in blue starched uniforms and ugly poke bonnets, who went in and out of the place across the street and had a socalled charity school behind it where they dished out a hell-broth concocted by the Germans and the Devilwhich was called 'Lutheranism,' though it wasn't musical." But he has his tongue in his cheek. He frequently rants without malice, and you soon learn as he tirades against them that these "emaciated witches masquerading as Sisters of Charity" were simply the deaconesses of the French Protestant Lutheran Settlement House who conducted, and whose successors still conduct, what is probably an excellent free primary school in the back-buildings giving on the old cloisters. His mother presently sent him across the street to school there, soon after his sixth birthday, and I think the plain truth of it is that Yakouba is still sore about it because at that age he didn't want to go to school at all. Of course, it's true too that his parents, being what they were, regarded Protestants as heretics and that the THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO only reason they sent him there, instead of to a Christian parochial free school in another quartier, was that it saved omnibus fare. Peasants up north may be as devoutly Catholic as we are down among the olive trees, but if you've ever been much in rural northern France you know that they would send a child to school to the Devil if it saved two cents a day and they were sure the Devil could teach him to read and write. I cannot conceive, however, that such sectarian matters could have had the slightest importance for a healthy child at six. So that when the old theologian tells of the early perils his soul underwent at the hands of these "schismatic hags," you know he is pulling your leg. Well, he went to school to the deaconesses, time passed, Louis-Napoleon lost Alsace-Lorraine, Eugene Dupuis drank himself to death on absinthe like a good patriot, and one rainy morning in February, 1875, when little Auguste was about ten years old, his mother heaved a sigh which must have been more of relief than sadness, and took her child back to the farm.

II HE WAs polite to the cows, the rooster, the pig, the manure pile, to his grandpa and grandma who still went to the fields every day, and to some vague young cousins from a neighboring farm. But he was a town kid, a city boy, a petit Parisien who didn't fit in. And it was apparent even at the age of ten that he resembled his father in at least one respect-he had no taste for agriculture. He didn't like the horse. He wandered along the banks of the Marne, moped with his nose in a book, bungled the chores, and was generally useless. But he had a superb appetite. They are hard in the north, and practical. They were practical one night around the kitchen fire after he had been sent to bed. Next morning they hitched the horse to the cart instead of to the plow and brought back the curl. They had no money to spare but they were dignified peasants who owned their own land and had a certain amount of peasant influence. As for little Auguste himself, they didn't ask him, they told him. He took to Latin in the parish school like a duck to water; by late spring he was marching at the head of the choir boys wearing a surplice trimmed with Malines lace, carrying the tall-staffed golden crucifix, and that same 11

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO autumn they packed his little trunk, kissed him on both cheeks, and sent him up to the Petit Seminaire at Soissons to begin his preparatory studies for the priesthood. "I was there for eight years," he says, "getting Latin, Greek, and Hebrew." Eight years seems a long time for what was merely a prep school, but when he says "getting" it doesn't mean just studying and passing examinations. It means got. This would account for the fact that both notes and personal recollections touching this period-likewise the six subsequent long years at the Grand Seminaire-are meager and colorless. Though not neglecting theology and doubtless unconscious of his highly special trend, he was deeply absorbed in laying the solid foundations on which would later be built his equally solid if somewhat scandalous career as the greatest philologist and linguist in Africa's modern colonial history. At any rate, these fourteen years are blank in Yakouba's memoirs. A child disappears, forever, through the seminary doors at Soissons-and from them emerges, one day in the summer of 1889, a full-fledged young rural parish priest, black robe, shovel hat, hobnailed shoes, complete even to the beard, who presently arrives in the village of Marle-en-Thierache and announces that he is the new vicar, the Reverend Auguste Dupuis. The women took to him at once, the men eyed him critically but on the whole favorably, as they might have inspected a new colt or a new school-teacher, reserving judgment. His darkish, copper-flecked beard was bushy, his eyes had a wide-awake level gleam, he was of medium height. "Costeau," which you can translate "husky," or

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO "robust," if you dislike slang, was what they said of him. He wasn't a bookworm. He was a yearling bull who had been shut up in a pen learning Latin, Greek, and HebrewHe said mass on Sunday mornings, played belotte, bowled, and drank beer with his parishioners. Still these gnarled, hardbitten menfolk of the village, behind his back, withheld their judgment. But not for long. What the French call an "incident" occurred very soon. The women, as usual when priests are transferred, were tidying up the presbytre and the Reverend Auguste Dupuis was quartered for a few days at the inn which was, as always in such villages, a sort of boarding house for the few local widowers and bachelors who didn't work on farms. But it also harbored rural transients, and returning to his room one afternoon, he found a hulking teamster with muddy boots sprawled asleep across his bed in broad daylight. Yakouba explained afterward to his chief of diocese, a somewhat astonished bishop, that the man on being awakened had spoken of the clergy, even of the Church itself, in terms that were not respectful. At any rate (Let lions roar, Lord!), the incident was that Yakouba had thrown him bodily out of the window, which made considerable commotion apart from the broken glass, for it was a second-story window overlooking the market place. The French people, high and low, have always loved a fighting priest. The grave- faced bishop inflicted disciplinary meditations upon the virtues of humility, and shook hands warmly with Yakouba in the presence of a parish bursting with pride.

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Thus quickly he became an integral part of the village, an integral part of its legend, almost as if he had been born there, almost as if he were retaking root in his own soil. Indeed these really were his own people, peasants of the valley of the Marne, so close to his own peasant birthplace that his mother and cousins soon came to visit him, bringing cakes and wine and woolen socks. This was the career his mother had chosen for him, this was the map of it. He would later become curl, travel third class four times a year as far as Soissons, go to Paris once or twice, to Chateau-Thierry to help bury his mother when her time came, and be buried himself in turn in the valley where he had been born. This was the pattern of it, chosen by his mother, and it seemed that she had chosen wisely. If any one suspected otherwise, it was not she, nor Monsieur the Cure of Ch~teau-Thierry, nor Monseigneur the Bishop at Soissons, nor the congregation at Marie. Yakouba now often wonders when he himself first began to suspect. And here we reach a difficult issue which will recur frequently in his later tangled life, and which perhaps never comes entirely clear. I have been afraid of getting bogged in it from the time I first decided to write out his life story. Even with his help, I am afraid of getting bogged. For it isn't clear to him either. And to simplify a thing that is not simple, is simply to falsify. Already, for instance, it can be shown convincingly -indeed it seems to be categorically implied in the little I have already written-that Yakouba had no inclination or calling to be a priest at all; that he was forced by his family, then cajoled by gilt-lace fripperies plus

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO a free chance to learn Latin, then caught by the obligation of having accepted free board and tuition at the expense of the diocese for eight long years. All this did happen exactly as I have set it down. Yet a contrary thing is equally true. A child of ten may be lamentably misguided by believing that "mother knows best," may mortgage his little soul for the cheap pleasure of carrying a gilded stick at the head of a parade-but it is none the less true that at some later period, during those eight years in the seminary, Yakouba became by his own intelligent volition a true believer in the essential doctrines of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, became with equal sincerity and joy a servant of the Lord. If there be any underlying tragedy or sadness in his outwardly superbly free, frequently wild, yet rich and useful life since he abandohed the robe, it lies in the fact that he still loves the Church and has always loved it. He loves it, I am sure, more than he ever loved his earthly mother. His heart is there. As for his brain, Yakouba, while tending like his great patron Saint Augustine toward a pantheistic mysticism too liberal and, at the same time, too abstruse to interest any but the most highly trained technical theologians, has never been in schism or intellectual disaccord with any issue of fundamental faith or doctrine-not even when he tore off his monk's robes and went to bed with Salama. He went to bed with her as a good Catholic and a good Christian. The celibacy of the clergy has never been anything more than a matter of church discipline pure and simple, never doctrinal, and his regretful voluntary demission of the priesthood involved no apostasy.

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO What I am trying to say, perhaps too obliquely, is that Yakouba was not really forced into the priesthood against his will and did not quit the priesthood through dislike of the sacred calling, no matter how strongly the superficial exterior facts seem to indicate it. But enough for a while of these doctrinal riddles. They merely bring us to another series of exterior facts which soon began happening back there in the valley and which point toward the even simpler and more obvious reason why Yakouba went astray. Mother Church? Mother Goose! That wise old woman's equivocal explanation of similar phenomena will become more and more apropos as we go on, and while I insist that it doesn't contain the whole truth concerning Yakouba, it may nevertheless be basic: Peter Wright Will never go right, And this is the reason why; He follows his nose Wherever he goes, And it points all awry! It can scarcely be denied that Yakouba's tendency to follow his own anatomical projection has determined to some extent his eccentric life-curve and orbit. But Yakouba was then (and still is for that matter in his old age) a bull rather than a lecher. He tells me, and I believe him, that not even in those early days when he was a robust, hot-blooded priest and virgin at the age of twenty-four, was he ever plagued by erotic visions like Saint Anthony. He was simply aware, as a young

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO male animal is, of the proximity of the healthy, sometimes pretty, females of the village. Looking back on this period when he was a virgin man, yet completely aware as all country youths must be of the physiological mechanics of the sexual act, he says that he could scarcely say that he exactly "lusted after" women. No, it wasn't that way at all, he says, with a beautiful naivet6 which may be confusing to any but the pure in heart. It was simply that he "wanted to go to bed with one," and that to do it seemed to him "natural and proper," so that it seemed to him "unnatural and not proper" that his garb and calling forbade it. If there was a mistake somewhere, he felt, it was the Church's mistake, not his. He seems to have been clean-minded, natural-minded. When he looked at a woman and wanted her, he wanted her with his penis, not with his brain. His first actual experience came about in a way so natural, so normal, so ordinary that it must be told in the same way, without embellishment or spurious Boccaccio flavor: He was sent occasionally by the diocese to help in other neighboring parishes, and stopped once for nearly a week with an abb6 whose sister kept house for him. She tidied Yakouba's room every day, and if he happened to be in it, lingered to talk with him. She was a handsome and wholesome young woman, he says, not pert or beautiful. On the second or third day, when her brother the abbe was absent, she remained in the room with Yakouba. Thereafter, she came every night, and one morning, oversleeping, they were awakened by the abbe. He was a kindly man, past middle age, full of 17

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Christian tolerance, not prone to scandal, and was willing himself to hear Yakouba's confession, but was technically doubtful about the propriety of himself prescribing penance and granting absolution. So that Yakouba, as soon as he conveniently could after his return to Marle, went up by train to Soissons and had himself confessed again by one of the diocesan overseers, who duly passed the matter on to the bishop. It wasn't quite so simple as in the case when Yakouba had thrown a man out of his own bed. I imagine that the bishop began to foresee that he would eventually have trouble handling this new young priest. But when Yakouba himself offered the bishop an opportunity to get rid of him by sending him as a missionary to China, or Africa, or the moon, the bishop merely transferred him instead to another local parish, still in the same diocese. This bishop, being a northern Frenchman himself, was Scotchly loath to relinquish so soon to the heathen a priest whose stomach had been filled with food and head crammed with Latin at the expense of the diocese for more than eight years. So that Yakouba, for a while in 189o, served as vicar in a little place called Morgny. Concerning this extremely brief interval, he writes, "Je remplis de mon mieux les devoirs de ma charge; je m'y employai de tout mon cacur," and of course he did, God bless him, but as for the rest of it, the basic rest, of which he neglects to write, the bishop might as well have chased a benevolent young tomcat from one backyard into another. There was never any open scandal, but when next the i8

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO then young Reverend Auguste Dupuis (still in the year 189o, and scarcely twelve months out of the seminary) confided to the bishop that he felt deeply in his heart that the Lord was definitely calling him to help save heathen souls in far-off lands-the farther off the better -the bishop readily agreed that such indeed must be the will of God and promptly signed the necessary papers.

II "1p"["HE CARDINAL was being wheeled out under the palm trees in a pushcart-no, it was a baby-car"Triage because it had four wheels- because his gout hurt him, and when we saw him I ran and knelt in front of it, and first he gave me his benediction and then he hit me so hard I saw stars, on the head with his fist, a regular rabbit-punch, my head was bent over and I couldn't see it coming, and it landed just above the base of " For Jesus Christ's sweet sake, Yakouba! It's even worse than telling how you were born on a farm. Don't you know I'm trying to do the best I can? I'm trying to write a book about you, not a comic strip. I wish I'd stuck to niggers. Suppose I put it in the book, suppose I put it in your biography which you're too lazy to write yourself, that His Eminence the late Cardinal Lavigerie, Archbishop of Carthage and Primate of all Africa, rode in a baby carriage and socked you in the head with his fist? "Well, that's the way it happened. You can put it in or leave it out as you please."

ZC02 0 I-00 -z 11 1

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO All right, if you swear it happened that way I'll put it in, but you'll have to tell me how it happened that way. It was soon after he had gone to Algeria, still in 189o, to begin his novitiate in the Mother-House of the famous Augustinian missionary order of the Pares Blancs, the "White Monks" or "White Fathers," which, though founded less than a quarter of a century before by this same Cardinal Lavigerie, had already illumined the Dark Continent with a formidable galaxy of explorers, saints, and martyrs. So that it must have caused a considerable buzz and flurry among the hundred or so young fledgling friars, who had turned schoolboy again to learn Arabic and Kabyle in the classrooms and palm groves of the Maison Carrie near Algiers, when it became known that their great founder and hero himself had come down from Paris after a surfeit of banquets with dukes, duchesses, and dignitaries- instead of taking the cure at Vichy or Aix-les-Bains-in hope that the African sunshine might help his gout. As for the "baby-carriage," it was constructed that way instead of like an ordinary invalid's wheel-chair in order that the archiepiscopal foot might remain horizontal. When the youngest and most recently enrolled of the novices ran and knelt in its path, the cardinal, pleased by the impetuosity of the gesture, not only laid his fatherly hand upon Yakouba's head in gentle benedic1 See Appendix, p. 228.

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO tion, but letting it rest there affectionately invited the other novices to draw near, and began a little discourse. Presently he warmed to it. These were still the great, heroic days; some of these overgrown peasant boys, awkward provincial priestlings, would help change the map of Africa, others would die by the spears of the Tuaregs. The Sahara sands would more than once again be watered by the blood of martyrs, and Timbuctoo the Mysterious was still a mystery. As for the cardinal, he was already an old man, gouty and occasionally absent-minded, but still full of fire. As his words heated and came to their climax, he lifted his gentle hand from the kneeling Yakouba's still bowed head and brought down his fist with a concluding thump as upon an oaken pulpit lectern. This somewhat extraordinary coup de poing, though surely inadvertent, was revealing. For Cardinal Lavigerie was a great tyrant who made martyrs willingly, a consecrated madman with genius and a vast apostolic vision, whose followers- including Yakouba from that moment on-adored him as Napoleon's grenadiers adored the Little Corporal. I am sure that if Lavigerie had been still alive when Yakouba, after becoming Superior of Timbuctoo, was offered the bishopric of the Soudan, my friend's life story would have been wholly different. For between him and his redoubtable chief, from that meeting in the palm grove, there grew-in addition to the hero-worship shared by all the novices-another sort of bond, a curious kinship between men totally different save perhaps in one respect-between this aristocratic, rich-born ecclesiastic notorious for his almost Spanish love of luxury, pomp, rich foods, and vintage burgundies, 22

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO gilded beds, purple and fine linen, this despotic, jeweled cardinal and this peasant- born, coarse-robed monk who would become almost equally notorious by making his bed on the earthen floor of a mud-hut with a negress. The bond, I think, is that they were both men, and both churchmen-in the great medieval tradition. The one is dead, the other now a graybeard, but the bond still holds. When Yakouba was in the vein and would really get going on Lavigerie, with his pipe and a fresh bottle of Pernod up there on the roof under the desert stars, after Salama and all Timbuctoo had gone to sleep, there was magic in it that may not be put on paper. Starlight and absinthe were in it, but there was more. The bull became a bearded Scheherazade and the Cardinal of the Sahara lived again as Haroun-al-Raschid still lives on Baghdad's roof-tops. Blanched caravans came marching out of the dead past in the night silence, and a dreaming camel groaned over beyond the mosque of Sankore'. Long-since rusted Tuareg spears were bright again with blood, and a jackal yapped down by the lagoon behind the colonel's vegetable garden. These tales were many and might make a different sort of book, but it is not the life of Cardinal Lavigerie that I am writing.2 The one tale which ties up later with Yakouba's own life, and which he told me slow-voiced, with a certain awe, letting his pipe go out, will suffice, I think, to show what manner of man was this cardinal. It concerns, or rather is connected with, the fate of the first mission which he had sent toward Timbuctoo, not many years before Yakouba was to go there. It was his lifelong 2See Appendix, p. 232.

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO obsession to plant the Cross in the legendary capital of the black Moslem empire. It was his dream to offer the Mysterious City in fief to Our Lady. He had even chosen the name for the first altar to be raised there. It was to be called "Our Lady of Timbuctoo." Here is the story: In the autumn of 1875, three priests from the Maison Carrie set out by Cardinal Lavigerie's command to try to reach Timbuctoo by the desert route, through the heart of the Sahara. Their names were Paulmier, Boeirlin, and Menoret. They were young in years, but veterans at the game. They went by Arab camel train, themselves garbed as Arabs, eating only Arab food with their hands, sleeping in their white burnouses, speaking Arabic amolig themselves. Lavigerie knew, and they knew, that he was sending them to almost certain death, but there was just a chance that thus disguised they might win through. The real departure was from Metlili, the last mission post at the extreme southern limit of Algeria, already on the edge of the Grand Erg. Here they chose their final camels, men, and guide for the great traverse; made up their little caravan. The local Chamba chief, neither friendly nor unfriendly, tried to dissuade the priests from going, and to dissuade any of his own men from agreeing to accompany them. He said: "I don't want your blood to fall back in my face, or that anyone should accuse me of encouraging you to go or even letting you go. Therefore, here, in the presence of witnesses, I beg you not to go." Having washed his hands of it, he did nothing to pre-

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO vent them. For guide, they had chosen a small, youngish Arab with the nondescript, almost anonymous name of Hadj, the John Doe of the local oasis, but who had twice made the great traverse and had been in the Hoggar. To lead white men to Timbuctoo alive, however, was a different matter. His father followed him to the mission house and said in the presence of the priest: "I am an old man and going to die soon, but if you take this job I will learn of your death before I am dead, and a father should die before his son. For the sake of decency you must wait until I have died before you go down there and get yourself murdered." The little Arab John Doe listened gravely and followed his father back to the paternal tent in the oasis, but when the appointed day dawned at Metlili with mass being said in the open air, the caravan of camels ready, the last kyrie sung, John Doe was obscurely present in the fringe of the crowd, and when the caravan disappeared over the horizon he was leading them. Setting this down now in written words as Yakouba told it to me in spoken words, trying somewhat to follow Yakouba's way of telling it, I am beginning to wonder by what actual words, or how, this little anonymous lay figure came to life there on the roof as Yakouba talked and sucked his pipe. It seemed to mean something to Yakouba, though I cannot understand what. But it did. He didn't make me see the three priests as they went over the horizon. He made me see the little guide. On the edge of the Hoggar in the heart of the Sahara, near the oasis of In Salah, where there is now a military

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO airdrome and a very swanky officers' club, they were massacred by Tuaregs. Airplanes, wireless, not even caterpillars had yet been invented. The news traveled slowly. Three months afterward, on a Holy Thursday, Cardinal Lavigerie was riding in a carriage with a Spanish prelate on the fashionable esplanade at Biarritz, when his valet came running after them with a telegram from Marseilles. It is recorded that Lavigerie's face turned pale, then flushed with joy; that he exclaimed in an exultant voice: "Te Deum Laudamus!" and then added characteristically, "but I don't believe it." Some weeks later, having learned with certainty that they were all definitely massacred, he knelt in gratitude, despite his gout, at the feet of the Queen of Martyrs and wrote to a friend in Paris: "They are really dead. What a joy for us and for them !" This isn't all of the story but I think it begins to become clear why the surviving Peres Blancs of that heroic epoch-even Yakouba, who has been known to make sly jokes about the Holy Ghost-still speak of Lavigerie as one who was something. It is less clear to me why that little lay figure of the Arab guide came alive there so strongly on the roof, for his little posthumous moment in parenthesis; Yakouba had never seen the man when he was really alive nor had the man been of any real significance, yet he was alive there on the roof again as when he set out leading the caravan from Metlili-so alive that his death made 26

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Yakouba and me sorry that he was dead when Yakouba told how he was dead. All the bodies had been found. They had cut off the heads of the three glorious martyrs and had mutilated them. The little guide still had his head on his body which was pierced through by many spears. A jackal was yapping again down there by the lagoon. They are harmless enough little beasts, timid animals, if they do feed upon the dead. Like biographers. Lucky that Yakouba was still alive. It would have been an awful mess for Salama and me to straighten out his notes. This wasn't going to be exactly a biography, though maybe he would be dead before the book got finished. Well, the priests from Mopti would come up to say Mass, and there would be a 'Christian cross out there beyond the Mosque of Sidi Yahya over his Christian tomb, but Salama would see that the covering stones were arranged in the Moslem way so that the jackals couldn't dig him out of the sand, and writers who came to Timbuctoo would go out to look at it instead of sitting here with him on the roof, pouring out a last drop of Pernod and hearing him talk beneath the stars. I loved the old man. We both drank too much absinthe. Our women worried about it. We might both be dead before the book got finished. It would be a pity. He was knocking the ashes from his pipe again. The dew had begun to fall. It was time to go to bed. But he hadn't concluded his story of the great French cardinal which had been interrupted for a moment by the almost apologetic ghost of the little native guide. We went into 27

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO the library and lighted some candles. I suppose he had all the books which had ever been written on Lavigerie. He got down the big two-volume life by Monseigneur Baunard, the Abbe Marin's Vie, travaux, voyages, the collected letters compiled by Monsignor de Rodez, and we bent our heads over them as he found the pages, the sentences. In a more or less formal letter to Monsignor de Rodez, acquainting him with the final details of the massacre, Cardinal Lavigerie wrote: "What have I ever done, Dear Lord, to merit so much kindness from God? Our order has now received its supreme consecration, and we are filled with joy. I have never heard a more impressive Te Deum than was sung here for them." In a more intimate letter to an exalted fellow prelate, he wrote: "They all want to go to be martyrs now. They are filled with beautiful zeal. But they must wait their turn. I am an old owl who knows that Rome was not built in a day." He found time also to write out, by his own hand, to the three mothers of the three murdered priests three identical little notes of condolence which I think may fill you too with a certain awe of this Cardinal Lavigerie, as it did me as I followed Yakouba's finger tracing the words there: "God used you to give them birth and God used me to send them as martyrs to heaven. You have learned the happy certainty. Your hearts must have trembled with holy joy."

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO "Whe-e-e-w," I said in a low, slow whistle as Yakouba gave me an affectionate pat on the shoulder and warned me not to wake up Salama getting out, "-that was a man." "Yes," whispered Yakouba, warning me again not to make any noise, and not to stumble over old Meteb who slept across the door-sill, "that was a man." I went to sleep that night in a jumbled time-sequence. I was there now, long years after those events, in Timbuctoo with old Yakouba-the old P re Blanc-yet no Pre Blanc had ever yet reached Timbuctoo. The first three had been murdered on the way, and Yakouba was going to be sent next, but not yet. He was only twentyfour years old, back in the Maison Carrie where the wise old owl in a baby-carriage had hit him with his fist. He would be sending him soon.

IV AKOUBA still wanted to be sent to Timbuctoobut he wanted to get there. He had no predilection for martyrdom. He had plenty of fighting courage, but being passively stuck full of spears and having his head cut off was simply not in his line. Salama will tell you he makes a fuss if he cuts his finger. So that when His Eminence the "Wise Old Owl" promised to keep him in mind, but said they must wait until there was at least a good gambling chance of "arriving"-he was not too much irked by the delay. He settled down willingly at the Mother-House in Algeria to perfect his Arabic, Bambara, and Kabyle, and was only a little annoyed when they shifted him back to Europe to teach for a while in the big Augustinian seminary at Malines. It was a way of salvaging, out of Yakouba's head, lest it should happen to fall later in the sand down yonder, a reasonable return for some of the money which the Church had spent in cramming it full of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and heathen languages. If he got into any trouble with Belgian women, there is no record of it. They say surprisingly that he made a marvelous teacher, though he says it was a bore; "-- but I didn't bother much about it one way or the other," he THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO adds, "for I knew I wouldn't stay there long. I knew I was for Africa and that Africa was for me." This was in the early nineties when the Colonial Office and the Quai D'Orsay were having similar wish-fulfillment premonitions, particularly with reference to the vast, rich, fertile "buckle" of the Niger. Timbuctoo Was both the door and the key- Nearly always in the history of empire, these dreams run parallel. Likewise their fulfillment. The Pere Marquettes and Joliets are usually contemporaneous with Cortez and Pizarro. So that while our priest was dreaming of Timbuctoo as he taught tuba, tubae, tubam in a drab seminary classroom, a real bugle blew one morning down there in Senegal, and Colonel Bonnier's flotilla,' led by a remounted gunboat, was steaming up the river, while a column commanded by an obscure major of engineers named Joffre 2 was marching overland to effect a junction at Khabara and take Timbuctoo. Yakouba tossed his grammar aside, packed his little tin trunk, and telegraphed the Maison Carrie. (Here for a moment, the history becomes tangled, that is, the history of the Augustinian White Fathers, and Yakouba's private story with it. They become snarled because the great Lavigerie, who should have directed and stage-managed everything, had meanwhile died. His place as director-general of the order was being provisionally filled by a Monseigneur Toulotte who conceived the somewhat extraordinary idea of going to Timbuctoo himself! This was presently overruled from Rome, and 1 See Appendix, p. 237. 2 See Appendix, p. 239.

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Lavigerie's original idea of sending a small, picked band of Arab-garbed, Arab- speaking, tough-fibered young adventurer-monks revived. Things hadn't gone smoothly at Timbuctoo. All France was shocked to learn that Colonel Bonnier, after reaching Timbuctoo which was without walls or fortifications, had been massacred in a surprise attack. Joffre had arrived later with his land column to avenge the deaths and build some mud-forts, but the city was not yet a safe objective for archiepiscopal junkets, and Monseigneur Toulotte was eventually content to let others go in his stead.) Yakouba, whose faults I hope nowhere to -gloss, had lost his patience and temper during the earlier uncertainty- He protested that rather than continue teaching he would "turn Trappist and dig potatoes and learn the pig's language." When offered the alternative of joining a mission to Palestine he replied viciously that "the only Jew he had ever loved was Jesus." ' Luckily for him an order came, before he could be disciplined locally for insubordination, designating him officially as a member of the mission to Timbuctoo and instructing him to report immediately to Pare Hacquard at Marseilles. Instead of crossing the Sahara by caravan, they were going down to the West Coast and up the river in canoes. There were four of them, hand-picked for the job, young but not too young, "filled with a beautiful zeal," but filled also with the spirit of high adventure, boon companions in the Lord, white-robed, black-bearded, 8 See Appendix, p. 240.

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO keen, already sniffing Africa as they strolled down the Cannebikre toward the Old Port. They were: The Reverend Father Eveillard, a somewhat older bull of a monk; the younger Reverend Fathers Ficheux and Dupuis-Yakouba; the Reverend Father Hacquard, their leader, already "an African old-timer" in his early thirties, who later became bishop and was drowned swimming by moonlight in the Niger. He led them now to an Arab restaurant on the Quai, over on the left by the fishmarkets, but bethinking them that they would get their fill of mutton-grease and couscous later, and tempted by adjacent scarlet, kaleidoscopic mounds of eels, cooked crawfish, Roman mullet, they shifted next door and ordered a noble bouillabaisse, with a jug of Algerian white wine. They were getting acquainted and thought well of themselves. They liked each other. They were all in excellent humor. So, Sa Grandeur, His High-and- Mightiness (meaning Monseigneur Toulotte) had wanted to go to Timbuctoo himself! "But the Blessed Virgin had been a good mamma to us on the day of Her assumption." Yakouba remembers as well as anything that "Last Bouillabaisse" on the Old Port at Marseilles-"it was reeking with saffron"-and what they said to each other. So they were going to be the ones! Not Monseigneur Toulotteand not the English missionaries either who had been trying to beat the French to Timbuctoo "ever since they sent a man in 1795 who never got there but wrote a book about it." * Hacquard told how he had "breakfasted in * A manifestly unfair reference to Mungo Park. 33

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Paris with Papa Polignac and damned all the English roundly." They discussed the relative risks of the caravan .and river routes. Once in Timbuctoo protected by a mudfort and a cannon, they'd be safe enough, but Tuaregs still raided along the Niger. "Well, if that happened," said they, "r-vive la joie quand meme." They quoted in Latin the doctrine on special dispensation for martyrs.. It would always be a quick way of going straight to heaven without a long stop-off in purgatory "where it appeared the wine was sour and the weather abominable." When they had finished their pipes and their little black coffees with rum, they went round the corner to the offices of the Fraissinet Line in the Rue Beauvau, and then to have a look at the S.S. Tayg~te, the "bon vieux sabot" on which they had been booked for Senegal. The best had been reserved for the four reverends. The Order sent its servants out freely to have their throats cut, if so it chanced, but always made a point of doing well by them. In addition to offering prayers to the Sacre Coeur and Saint Christophe, it "had not forgotten to do the needful," as Yakouba says, "at the shrine of La Sainte Bureaucratie" (Sanctified Red Tape). They had a spacious outside cabin on the top deck with four bunks, "big as a forecastle," so that they could "say Mass as many times a day as they liked without disturbing the other passengers"-every comfort, "and at half price too!" To cap even this already climactic joy for any Frenchman, His Holiness, Pope Leo XIII, "The Fox of God," had sent in person a telegram saying "Duc in altum," which means "Go to it!" in plain colloquial English.

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO "Vive la joie!" repeated the Reverend Father Hacquard fervently, and "Vive la joie!" echoed his reverend companions as they took a last stroll along the Cannebiere before going aboard to sleep. They sailed next day for Senegal, out past the Chateau d'If, on a bright Christmas morning. This was in 1894, only forty years ago, only yesterday in a way of speaking, though Yakouba's beard is now snow-white and a great deal of water has flowed over the crocodiles of the NigerShe was a battered old West Coast freighter carrying a motley of traders, prospectors, spahis, tirailleurs, petty functionaries; a Sister of Charity for the hospital at St. Louis and a couple of whores for a cabaret in the Gabun; Greek and Syrian peddlers going back to Dahomey or the Congo. At Oran they picked up a handful of legionnaires with a sergeant, and the party was "complet." Yakouba had time on the boat to scribble some notes which give fragmentary glimpses-like cut shots from a newsreel--of life aboard the Tayg~te, likewise of himself and his companions. There was, he needlessly assures us, "no snobbism or formality, even in the dining saloon. Our excellent waiter wiped his nose with his napkin and kept a cigarette behind his ear. We all smoked our pipes at table with the coffee." The sheep on the main deck "were at first penned apart," but later "roamed freely and mingled with the other passengers." The crew had an accordion, and "we were all amused last night when some of the lgionnaires chose dancing partners among the sheep, pulled them up on their hind legs, and made them waltz, bleating." 35

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO The food and wine were "abundant." The captain "never came to the dining room, except to attend Mass which we celebrated there on Sundays," to which apparently everybody came for devotion or diversion, including the two ladies bound for Gabun and the Sister of Charity. When they wanted to say Mass on other days than Sunday, they had to do it in their own cabin and were requested by the purser "not to sing too loudly." There was a young Corsican who won everybody's amused admiration because he thought he was going to Lake Tchad. He had nothing but his knife and some fish-hooks. "Sempre avanti," jots Yakouba, "as if to go see his grandmother! II se moque de tout." The four monks, headed for Timbuctoo with not much heavier luggage, were also accepted as fellow-adventurers, yet treated with all the respect due their special calling. They were better understood, perhaps, by these dissorted traveling companions than they will be-unless I am careful-by some of my more sedentary AngloSaxon Christian readers. It is pretty evident that Yakouba-and his three fellow-monks, since he found them congenial-were far from "pious" in the purselipped puritanical sense. What is perhaps less evident, if one is accustomed to associate piety with cant and crepe, is that these robust, joyful fellows were- like David who cut off the tail of King Saul's shirt and danced jigs before the Ark of the Covenant-none the less sincere, true servants of the Lord. So I shall risk passing along to you, from Yakouba's notes, the high-j inks they cut in Las Palmas when the Taygete touched the Canaries for an afternoon: 36

6ý7 PETRUS LA4BERTUS, Trruu s. caucis iSz 111ERLJSALP.A 8. It. F. PRESBYTkl( CAPOINALIS 600SSEX4 DRI UT ÅKYSTOUCAB N6015 GRATIA ARCKIEPISVJPVS HECHUN~% PRIMAS BFLGIf. Di~ Nubis åt CAmUto, R~*do Åä~ c« in D~ ~m ät weitså multu, -~rjos amtriua eL ~ihua ~kuos ad verbwn Dci przkhc~, ck mku~= -pundt" sw~atam admialgu"dm litýnter ^talmuc ut cleptLLbiýag. cam c~ quo verhi divini Pr=Puem et C..f,-mom &«ot virtudbu omt.m é~ t«ttruo" fide 44 ~ 10~ åttihet, i- ~äC JeMte iastrudas et kowaq repertus fteric4 idcirmo Di~ n~ ~hum U pmýliaml 11«ýutiaTa tfibi concoömu, åfulue, ad 8.-amtutum pecaitentäm dT tu MP~Kug, ila Ut CIrM fidelittio ýmfesåoneo andire ~jue u~ter ahmIvere, a ~Was Xobio n"CML16, P..1c et ml~. 3100i81vto. twwn m m~ cujusvis VCI mlio~ a 8~ Sede, ant b X66 hppröhatm,ý nomfemkums excipere tibi non limtý då ~ er ~ ~ ya ant mam. .i kgitiem ý.^ ctaffln" MODMUii ~ tant. ~ ug vero ut jum~ fflasäm B-toruffi lkenzia in ~mik ~41,4 V<ýbum Tkä ýon pmö"g( non --- &åkom qum lm, &crog,~ cs & hic ýiggtotu' pa &atuta 8y~ Ot åp«åtim per ituk w~ MfäftIta Sunt. ~ate Iwrpeuclas åt ~fter h~ tibl w~ns ut, Ium a Paroobo rö~ wt in ur~ n~tabb tium nwam non e~ &"~ta omrihundis Mifolni.trab" iis etiam impet4i pomig lienm~ Apos~ j~ f~lgm pme~ a &~eto \IV Costil. ]>id Xuksý de die 5 Aprilix 1747, r~ tibus, qum Adma. 11e, Danduc Decano et" m quo comm~ intm '4uIfta~ oluhem öporv~ =quo ta Dat= m~ = WI, Vkarh gen sigillquo madro, ncenom, secreum öh~ phö, Tc be Åfändota Eord åt å- Dömai CArdindlig Arcisippk'sropL YAKOUBA S ORDINATION IN THE AFRICAN PRESBYTERY UNDER RIS FAMILY NAME, AUGUSTE DUPUIS

I o k' Iwo- THE FIRST MONKS IN TIMBUCTOO left to right, PEkRES FICHEUX, EVEILLARD, HACOUARD, YAKOUBA

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO By collusion, as they all piled off the boat, the Foreign Legion sergeant posed as a "missionary," shepherding the four bearded, Arab-robed, Arab-speaking strangers through the crowds on the Quai, whispering to the inquisitive Spaniards who stared at their rosaries, that they were "native converts" from the Atlas. The citizenry of Las Palmas, marveling to see a group of their Moroccan enemies turned Christian, cheered "Los Moros!" wildly, wanted to form a procession to the cathedral, presented them with a municipal escort and fine carriage to see the sights. The native converts each made a gracious discourse in choice Arabic thanking the Grover Whalen of the Canary capital. On the final leg, beating down the West Coast to Cape Verde, Yakouba merely scribbles: "We passed the time gayly and piously, awaiting Dakar where our tribulations would commence."

AKOUBA and his companions, landing at Dakar, were among the first Peres Blancs ever seen on the West Coast. Their sphere was North Africa and the Sahara, where their native desert garb was practical and inconspicuous. At Timbuctoo, which is a desert city, curiously sand-situated on the extreme lower edge of the Sahara, with the great, green Niger flowing almost beneath the shadow of its mosques, they would be back in their own bailiwick-but piloted meanwhile through the streets of Dakar, the busiest, and ugliest, city of the whole West Coast, they were like cowboys or red Indians on Fifth Avenue. Dakar already had priests and missionaries aplenty, but they dressed like sober priests, not like sheikhs or dervishes, so that it caused considerable staring and gossip among both natives and French when these rough, white-cowled Arabs wearing crucifixes were seen taken to the episcopal palace and lodged in its guest chambers. Monseigneur Barthet, the bishop, was well aware of this, and when Pbre Hacquard told him, over the liqueurs at luncheon, of the episode at Las Palmas, he was perhaps more annoyed than amused. "I am going to show Dakar," said he grimly, "that

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO you are just as French and just as Catholic as Monsieur le Cure." On Sunday morning, by the bishop's orders, the four "marabouts" celebrated High Mass before an astonished populace in the cathedral, after which Pare Hacquard mounted the pulpit and preached a long, eloquent sermon. It was good propaganda, and good publicity-good theater, if you like, on the bishop's part-so good that the Reverend Father Guerin, superior at Port SaintLouis, jealous and impatient after awaiting them three days, wrote not too amiably: "There is no need for you to remain longer in Dakar; everything is ready for your reception here where your presence is necessary to arrange for your departure which should take place (doit s'effectuer) on the fifteenth." So they went to Saint-Louis where Father Gu&in, whose bark was worse than his bite once they had preached for him too, treated them "with simplicity, solicitude, and affection," and saw that they got off only two days behind schedule. He saw them aboard the little iron side-wheeler, Briere de l'Isle, on the morning of January 17th, and soon they were "steaming like tourists up the Senegal River past negro villages, crocodiles, hippos, monkeys, birds of every color." One of the first people they spied aboard was the young Corsican with his knife and fish-hooks. He now had a little hand-satchel containing a clean shirt, extra socks, and a hunk of salami. He was still going to Lake Tchad. "Every time we stopped he had a couple of handlines over the stern baited with chicken guts from the galley." Thus occupied, he disappears forever from Yakouba's

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO notes and recollections, consequently from this tale. The son of a gun! I hope he got to Tchad, or the Mountains of the Moon, if he wanted to go there. As for the tub they were now on, it couldn't take any of them very far. It plied only as far as Podor which they reached next afternoon, an administration post with a sick white agent and black telegraph operator, a few mud houses, and "an abandoned white cemetery where the village dogs make water on the rotting crosses-La France chrftienne sur les bords du Senegal." Here they transferred to a chaland. They were going to pole up toward the headwaters of the Senegal and safari overland to the Niger. (The chaland deserves a parenthesis. In the West African river scene, it is indigenous as the crocodile, yet an invention of the white man. It is a flat iron barge, twenty feet long, or longer, as wide as possible; a sort of houseboat, or rather a floating camp, since the cooking is done over an actual campfire at bow or stern, each party bringing its own pots and pans, cots, blanket rolls. You settle down and camp on it-for a long time. It has no reasonable or regularly dependable mode of propulsion. You hire negroes to tow it, like the Volga boatmen, where the banks permit, pole it when it can't be towed, put up a crude sail and go to sleep if there's a wind, let the current take you and go to sleep if you're lucky enough to be going downstream. Always demand a hitch if anything propelled by gas or steam--even the private yacht of the governor-general-happens to pass your way. Its normal speed varies from two miles to no miles per hour. Villages along the bank sell you, or give you,

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO chicken, milk, fruit, eggs, a goat, a sheep. You fish, swim, shoot crocodiles, tease the hippos while jungle and bush slide lazily by, or fail to slide by, sleep all afternoon, see the river by moonlight and the waterbirds pink in the dawn. I'm not trying to sell you one. You can't even rent one. You have to borrow them, from the administration, which has no other earthly use for them. Some people like them, even in these latter days of airplanes and speed lorries. Paul Morand (that time when he filched Albert Londres' canned peaches, or didn't), Madame Herriot, Prince Sixte de Bourbon, Andre Gide, junketing French politicians with their wives or mistresses, have all had a go at it.) Apparently the experience was about the same in Yakouba's day: "Moussa, the cook-boy, makes coffee at dawn. Poling, we fish. When they tow us, we go ashore and hunt; lunch aboard and siesta; soon after sunset we tie up to the bank, at first near some village, but soon as far away from villages as possible. Night life in the ports is too demoralizing for our sailors." The reed-and-mud villages along the bank are deceptively sleepy and dead in the daytime, but "at night they all have their tom-tom under a big tree, with a raised platform for the singers and drum-beaters." Each village has its "orchestre municipal," and there are "troupes ambulantes," barnstorming companies, traveling circuses, which move up and down the river. "Many a rural prefecture in France has less nocturnal entertainment." But oh, how these priests-on-a-picnic longed to hear a lion roar! As usual, though they found many tracks, they never heard one. Yakouba never saw a lion until he had

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO lived in Timbuctoo for more than a year-and then it nearly bit him. But there were crocodiles galore, by the hundreds. "We tried a fricassee of the tail of a youngish one. Without being exquisite, it was very eatable." Next day, nearing another river post, they saw "recent graves of dead French soldiers." It had been less of a picnic for them. The post turns out to be Kaeaedi, a mud fort with a telegraph office, where they lunch with le Capitaine Saussois and hear the latest news from Paris. Casimir-Perier has been kicked out and F6lix Faure elected president. "Ah, when will our mercurial France learn a little stability'?" scribbles Yakouba solemnly, and I am astonished. What does he know, or care, about political stability? Not at any rate in F6lix Faure's time, my friend. The notorious Madame Steinheil will presently become his mistress and go on trial for murdering her husband. But by that time you will have become a turbaned ca'd of Timbuctoo and laugh instead of scribbling "Ah, when." On January 3oth "the wind changed and we put up a sail." Demba, their black "captain," was "a wily sailor," and as the wind held they made excellent progress. But he proved too wily- Opposite a village called Hamadi "the mast mysteriously snapped," and they had to tie up the night for repairs. The mystery was quickly solved. One of the black "captain's" favorite wives lived at Hamadi. At Matam, the last outpost of Senegal near the Soudan frontier, "where the dead French are buried in a common grave surmounted by a pyramid of stone," the adminis-

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO trator was down with danghi fever. He would be having a grave all to himself, soon. At Bakel, the first post in the Soudan, the administrator, the only white there, was also running a high temperature, but dragged himself from his cot to show them two marvels, a vegetable garden and a native school-teacher, the latter a relic from a now abandoned mission. "All the way from Saint-Louis to Kayes," he told them, "you can die now without finding a single priest." A few days later when they had the sail up again, a white man ran following along the bank and pleaded to be taken aboard saying he was sick and hungry. After he had been fed and had looked about the well-provisioned scow with its big piles of cases and luggage in the hold, he said: "I am Monsieur Tel, the famous explorer. I have crossed the Sahara eight times. It was I who cut off the arm of the famous Tuareg chief at Douiret. In a saber duel. I was the first white man to reach Timbuctoo, where I had to kill a great many other Tuaregs. I see that you are Pare Blancs. My cousin was charcutier to the nephew of Cardinal Lavigerie. So I will go along with you, wherever you are going, and protect you." "Yes ?" they replied. 'Vell, we come from Marseilles too." When they dropped him at the next village with a few tins of food, a few francs, and a little tobacco, he called after them, "You are making a mistake. All the whites here are

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO fripons or fumistes, the one or the other-including the administrators !" After recounting this incident, Yakouba writes, "Our voyage, thanks to the divine protection, was never boring, and on the 12th of February we arrived at Kayes." This was the first real town they had seen since they quit the coast. It had a considerable white population, hospitals, mission, a chapel, a big native market, a lieutenant-governor in residence-which meant officialdom and red tape. They soon were caught in it. The health commissioner wanted to quarantine them. It seems they had passed through a cholera epidemic without knowing it. With their archiepiscopal credentials, which had no bearing whatever on the matter, they were given a clean bill of health with apologies and invited to say Mass. At the mission, they met the first, last, and only Tuareg convert in the history of Christianity. He had been picked up a babe-in-arms by the soldiers and kept as a curiosity, like a cub, after they had killed papa and mamma bear in the fighting around Khabara. He was now in the "school for hostages" run by the sisters. At Kayes began a short piece of railroad, the first in West Africa, which was eventually to connect the Soudan with the seacoast. It had only been laid as far as Bafoulab6, some 14o kilometers, but was already being run, experimentally. They were given an entire coach, to which they transferred their baggage. "Experimentally" turned out to be a mild word for it. "The Sacred Heart of Jesus, which had up to now protected us, evidently wished to try us somewhat." Before they had thumped and grated ten kilometers, a coach derailed, and

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO they were held up for two days. A little further on, they passed a recent wreck where two coaches in splinters lay at the foot of an embankment. Toward dark next day, they rolled into Bafoulab6, the railroad head, "a camp in a field," where they slept in the coach and next morning set about trying to get porters. They needed a hundred. It seems a good many, but twenty is a normal average for one traveler. They were four, and were carrying more than the normal baggage, a ton or more of supplies and equipment to establish a hospital, dispensary, school, etc. On February 23rd, the safari got under way, heading cross-country southeastward for the Niger. Of course "safari," like "boy," is a borrowed word in this territoryThe Soudan is not jungle. It is bush country. The porters went frequently two by two, or as they pleased, while the four priests ambled along on stunted horses. It was the dry season. They slept without tents, "a la belle itoile." One day they met a northern Arab gentleman traveling in state, garbed like themselves but more richly, his horse caparisoned in bright-colored leather trappings, his porters and armed attendants numbering two hundred. He was as surprised as they were. After the ceremonial greetings came the ceremonial questions, full of curiosity on both sides. He let them begin. "Who art thou?" "A Moorish sherif." "Whence comest thou?" "From Toukoto where I have established a great house of merchandise."

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO "Whither goest thou?" "To my home in Medine." It was now the turn of the Arab gentleman. (It may be well to explain that in Arabic the word for God is always Allah, whatever be the speaker's faith, and that marabout means any sort of man of God-priest, prophet, dervish, as you wish-a mutually tactful alibi for amiable gentlemen momentarily not disposed to be killing or converting each other.) 'Who are you others, and whence come you!." "A family of marabouts. We come, like yourself, from the north." 'Whither go you?" "To the blacks of the Great River, carrying the word of God, to teach truth and justice to those who ignore such matters." "Go with God, and may God protect you, 0 marabouts of my country." "Go you likewise with God, and may he bring all your business to its desired fruition." Next morning Yakouba's horse went lame, and he had to walk. He skirted, hunting, and killed "a big ugly bird which not even the porters would eat." Later, one of the porters began acting queerly and brandished a long iron knife. He had a persecution mania and believed thal the administrator back at Bafoulab6 was following him to kill him. They took the knife away 'from him and calmed him. Reaching Kobaboulounda, they were met by a white man who happened to be bald-headed like the administrator of the other town. "Our madman crept behind him and felled him with an iron bar. Our other 46

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO porters caught him and would have beaten him with whips, but we had him douched with water and tied solidly to a tree for the night." At Boulouli, which they reached on February 28th, they found a queer community, "like a family of cats and dogs in harmony," a negro Moslem village whose chief was "marabout, muezzin, and imam combined," and whose right- hand man was a black priest who imagined himself Catholic. "He had a rosary, and the chief had a string of Mohammedan prayer-beads. They sat counting them together and were friends." These had been mud villages lost in the bush, but reaching Kita on March 3rd they found a considerable French population and were held up for a time. "The head of the mission there insisted that we must make social calls with him upon all the white inhabitants, who then returned the calls. Quelle barbe! But since we preach Christian charity, we must sometimes practice it." During these several wasted days, the safari became disorganized. One of their headmen was in jail, and forty of their porters had decamped. "God assisted us visibly," says Yakouba, who is getting sore. "They were caught and brought back, but the French hereabouts are as bad as the English, who take baths, I am told, and wear dinner coats in the jungle." They left Kita the morning of March 14th, long before dawn. "It was 2 A.M., black, no moon. We had torches of dried grass tied to bamboo poles. Sometimes we set fire to the bush, the thorns crackle and make showers of sparks, the cones explode and we are ringed

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO with fire like that heathen woman who disobeyed her papa I suppose he means Brunhilde, though I can't imagine where he ever saw an opera. Perhaps he may have read about her in the V61sunga Saga. I neglected to go over these "notes de voyage" with him very thoroughly because I was completely absorbed in the main action of his story which takes place almost entirely in Timbuctoo. But his next note says, "I was tired of walking and climbed back on my own horse," so I suppose that's what he means. "We sleep, pray, shoot wild pigeons, picnic, hold clinics in villages through which we pass." In one of these villages they made a "convert," a boy named Noumou, who attached himself to the safari for no known reason, began making the sign of the cross like a monkey, and called them all "papa." He was a puzzle. "We ought to baptize him, but we mustn't give him too good a Christian name, for he may disgrace it afterward." They were all now in good health, good morale, had picked up some ancient artillery horses-'" pauvres betes!"-and were making fifteen to twenty kilometers a day. At Tombaguina they meet two sergeants bringing some chained prisoners from a Somonos village, including the chief and a witch-doctor, who had sacrificed a virgin to drive away the whites. The whole village had apparently participated in the ceremonial. The girl's parents were chained in the line, not as witnesses but principals. "We talked, in Bambara, with the young 48

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO witch-doctor who had wielded the knife. He was fatalistic, without regrets, and not at all repentant." Yet at Dio, a fortified Bambara village, they were invited inside the walls, given dolo, which is millet beer, and fresh bread. "Volhi for your fitichiste Moslem fanaticism," reflects Yakouba, "or any other fanaticism. Some are fanatical and some are not." They forded the Baoul6, "the red river with a bad name," without losing a man or animal, and held a fete for Saint Joseph on the opposite bank. Two griots (black troubadours) mysteriously appeared, attracted by the singing, and serenaded them in turn. They were now in the basin of the Niger, "a fair land." The porters all shouted "A'kagni! A'kagni!" Bambara is a splendid language with only two thousand words, no grammar, no syntax, and completely in accord with Socrates that the good and beautiful are one. At Kati they met F6lix Dubois, the Figaro reporter who was later to become celebrated as the author of the first readable book in any Christian language on Timbuctoo and its environs. "Partly out of Christian brotherhood, but largely out of curiosity," says Yakouba, "we invited him to supper." They found him brilliant and charming. "Best of all, he was modest, a quality praiseworthy in itself, but particularly admirable in a journalist." Going down from Kati to Bamako, which has now become the French metropolis of the Soudan-a gay miniature Paris on the Niger-they followed a stream with rocks and waterfalls. The path was strewn with springs which flowed gently down to green meadows, and

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO soon they saw below them the mighty river in a vast, cultivated plain. "We thanked the Divine Providence for having conducted us to the land of our dreams. But none of us was yet ready to sing Nunc dimittis. We had yet to reach Timbuctoo. Omnia impendam et superimpendar ipse pro animabus." Thus they entered the future city of Bamako-"Bambako" in Bambara, the "Place of Hippopotami." Capitaine Didier had ridden out to welcome them. He was commandant of the post. He insisted on taking them home with him. "The word of a commandant is law in these regions. We were delighted to obey him. We needed a day or two of rest." They had paid and dismissed all their porters, expecting to take boat here at Bamako. But the chalands were at Toulimandjo two days distant, so they hired a hundred makeshift men and continued overland. The new porters smashed a case of rice and were beaten by the kountegue'-their own headman. But they were cheerful and docile if awkward, the beaten men laughed with the others, and the kountegue's whip seldom cracked. "They are of a much better disposition than camels," remarks Yakouba, "'--from here on we paid with cowrie shells instead of coined money." % Reaching Toulimandjo they "admired an enormous crocodile which ate a woman yesterday and was captured alive, and transferred to the boats." Barge life on the Niger was a repetition of the Senegal except that poles only were used, and they made consid1 See Appendix, p. 242.

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO erably more speed, carried by the current. This needs explaining. The Niger rises in the jungles of Guinea, flows "up," in a geographical-direction sense, to Timbuctoo, bending there to form the immense "buckle," and flows "down" through Dahomey and Nigeria to the Atlantic. On the first day they slid by Koulikoro, the extreme point hitherto reached by missionaries. From now on they will be the first priests who have ever passed this way. At Yamina where they tie up for the night, native fishermen present them with a "capitaine," a giant catfish with a head as big as a man's and from whose tail delicious steaks are cut. They are kept awake most of the night by the din of a secret society ceremonial, "beating tom-toms, chanting and howling, blaring wind instruments of which we cannot guess the form or name." This is real now, this is "something," as Yakouba said of the old cardinal. Whenever they tie up now for the night, there is no certainty whether the natives will present them with a "magnificent catfish" or with a shower of spears. On Easter day, however, they sighted a uniformed spahi galloping along the bank, his cloak flying, sent out by Lieutenant Gosselin to welcome them to the spahi camp at Segou. "Notre Seigneur, Saint Joseph, and Notre Dame d'Afrique have visibly watched over and guarded us." At Segou, they left Pare Eveillard and Pre Ficheux to found a mission. Hacquard and Yakouba pushed on toward Timbuctoo.

VI T WAs no longer a picnic on iron barges. The pirogues (long, narrow, native scows made of wood and bull's-hide) "were badly sewn together leaked like baskets." They embarked in three, one for Hacquard, Yakouba, and Mahmadou their cook, one for their needful provisions, and one for nine armed tirailleurs, black mercenaries in French uniform who fought like demons when need be and understood only two commands, "P'enez la garde," and "F- dedans!" Everything now between fortified posts was enemy country- No more tying up for the night, no barbecues, no strolling in the bush. They kept out in the wide stream with their poles and let the current take them, day and night. Thus they arrived without incident at Sansanding in the kingdom of Mademba. The captain in charge of the garrison took them to call on the king. He was heart and soul for the French who had given him three cases of brandy and the Legion of Honor. Yakouba found his majesty "tr~s sympathique." I imagine it was mutual. Mademba was of the dynasty of Emperor Jones (exPullman car porter) and King Christophe (ex-garfon de cafi); he had once been a telegraph operator at Fort

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Valerian. He promised to send the two young princes royal up to Yakouba to learn to read and write. But it was mostly slow, hard going. At Mopti a fortnight later they had a queer and rather poignant adventure which seems perhaps stranger to me than it will to some others, because Mopti has changed enormously in the intervening years. Timbuctoo is still, thank God, more or less as Yakouba found it, but Mopti is now a busy river city with great warehouses, wholesale rice and hide concerns, clubs, bars, hotel, garages, handsomely housed missions including an American Protestant one. When I last stopped there, they were planning to build an ice factory. The Mopti which Hacquard and Yakouba reached was a mud garrison in a mud village with a detachment of black soldiers. The only white man was a young sergeant of marines down with bilious fever. "He lay on a straw mat, delirious, vomiting and pissing blood. Humanity prevented us from going on, though there seemed little we could do but clean him, console him, and put his soul in order." Hacquard injected a gram of chlorohydrate of quinine and gave him a dieretic containing a little chloroform. "He was out of his head, poor child. Whatever he could reach, our burnouses, our hands, our feet even, were good to cover with kisses and tears." He was so beyond ordinary aid, this little soldier, says Yakouba (and this time I assure you he isn't being funny), "that we prayed directly to the Archangel Michael."

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO They kept vigil beside him, taking turns, for sixty hours, when the diarrhea and vomiting slacked, his urine cleared a little, and the fever began to fall. They knelt with their arms around him, all three thanked the Archangel in Shining Armor, and the two priests, after leaving instructions and medicine, pushed on toward Timbuctoo. A miracle in Mopti? Don't ask me, and don't ask Yakouba. If you must ask somebody, ask Dr. Alexis Carrel, head of the Rockefeller Institute. He may tell you something that'll surprise you. When anybody presses Yakouba too hard on the subject of miracles he is likely to read you the page in which Saint Augustine heard God's Voice in his mother's backyard and obeyed the Voice, but reflected that the actual sound-waves which beat upon his eardrums might have come from a noisy family next door. At Gourao where the Niger widens to make Lake Debo, they found Bonnier's flotilla, now commanded by the lieutenant de vaisseau Hourst. There was High Mass and a reception aboard the "flagship" followed by presentation to another proudly pro-French black majesty, this time Aguibou, King of Macina. They had aced him with another bit of ribbon and a handshake. But from here on, now actually at last approaching Timbuctoo, they were in definitely hostile territory. In those days you couldn't pin a ribbon on a Tuareg and kiss him, even if you were a Frenchman-though, believe it or not, they've done it since in the Hoggar. It would have been a bore to come all this way and then be mas-

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO sacred, so Hourst gave them a whole additional platoon of tirailleurs with a white Alsatian sergeant. They were now arriving. They had been a long time on. the route. April had ended. It was early May forty years ago, in 1895. It was the extreme end of the dry season. The flotilla would be immovable for weeks. The water was still dropping "except in our leaky pirogues where the level rose continually," and even in those flat, bilging barges they couldn't quite pole through the last grass and mud to the high-and-dry wharf at Khabara, which is to Timbuctoo what Piraeus is to Athens. They found footing at dawn and walked the last three miles or so. From the roof of the fort, they had their first sight of the Mysterious City, a gray, luminous mass, on a slight rise at the rim of the flat horizon, hardly a dozen kilometers distant. Between them lay the ugly so-called "forest of Khabara," wavy sand-dunes smudged with thorn-tree thickets, fit for robberies and murders, dotted with the graves of many travelers who had seen but never entered Timbuctoo. Nor had this yet become a tale to be remembered. It was a current fact to be dealt with. It was late afternoon before the escort could be organized-a company of tirailleurs and a detachment of spahis with torches in case night caught them. They arrived at twilight and were shown through labyrinthine sand-streets between solidly massed flatroofed houses, like children's building blocks, like Egyptian mausoleums, to an empty one which had been swept clean for them. It was completely empty. Its floors and 55

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO walls were clay. It was too late for receptions or affairs. They lighted their own candles, set out their own camp gear, ate dinner prepared by their own cook, and went to sleep in their own beds-in Timbuctoo.* * You will have to do the same thing if you go to Timbuctoo today, unless, of course, you visit friends there. It is a real city, I assure you, but it has no hotels or restaurants. You can't rent a bed or buy a dinner.

VI y AKOUBA seems to have been filled with a spontaneous, almost childish delight in Timbuctoo from the morning when he awoke in the strange house and walked out into the strange city. White comers, then and now, react differently to its photographic aspect. Some will tell you that it is a vast, dirty, and forbidding flat agglomeration of houses built like tombs; others will see mystery and beauty in it, the mystery and beauty of ancient Egypt rebuilt in clay and sand. Yakouba's mind is not photographic nor are his comments pictorially descriptive. I imagine, from the old actual photographs, that it must have been about the same as it is now, except more tumbledown, decayed, disordered. He doesn't say. He simply seems to have fallen in love with it on sight and to have had a perhaps wholly irrational premonition that it was his city, his place. Something queer, something definite, though however vague to himself, must have then really happened inside him. It is queer how soon he seems to have lost all interest in France, Europe, Paris, the valley of the. Marne, the home of his childhood; nor did he ever develop the slightest curiosity about other places in Africa or any wish to explore them except as they had a bearing on this

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO place. Yakouba had achieved alive-intensely young and alive-the end of his seeking, his wandering, which most of us can hope to find only in the grave, or beyond it. He had come home to Timbuctoo. Please do not think that I am piling it on too thick, or that I am piling it on at all for cheap dramatics. It was thick. His life ever since has proven it. The captains, explorers, other missionary monks, administrators, commandants, white merchants of that day, are all gone, dead, or scattered, forgotten there and forgetting, while he alone remains, through nearly half a century and still today, this strangest city's strange first citizen. I will pile it on thick because it is thick: Salama became the mother of his legitimate children, the wife of his body, the fat old queen of his prolific native household-wife of his body, wife of his heart and loins. But can any woman, white or black, ever be the wife of a man's soul? I am not sure how Salama comes into this part of Yakouba, if at all. I do not believe that the fascination of one or many black women is the key to this twist of Yakouba's soul. He has loved two mistresses his whole life long I think, Timbuctoo and the Church. Herein lies the secret tragedy of his defiant yet useful life-but neither he nor I will admit that there is any secret tragedy for many a long chapter yet. When Yakouba unbarred the iron-studded door, drew aside the bull's-hide flap, and strolled out for the first time that morning, brimming with curiosity, he found an equally curious crowd of black people, mostly robed, who were perhaps surprised that this strange white marabout

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO could give them greeting in their various polyglots, Bambara, Arab, even Songhoi; ask directions, chat familiarly. He learned that the borrowed house in which he had slept was only a stone's throw from the garrison, the mud fort beyond the native market, and went to meet and thank the commandant whose name-what does it matter?--was Captain Imbert. For the two Peres Blancs, though beholden to the military and on excellent terms with them, hadn't come to consort with the white conquerors, though the conquerors were, for once in colonial history, welcome here. Their coming had rid the rich black burghers, artisans, merchants of more than a century of Tuareg rapacious robbery and misrule. Hacquard and Yakouba, however, had nothing to do with that. They were not army chaplains. They were missionaries. They had come to establish relations of a different sort with the natives, and had made it known. Yakouba returned to the house and there, familiar with native etiquette, they awaited callers. First came the black chief of the city (mayor, if you like), voluminously swathed in robes of fine white wool, followed by a retinue and a drum which he left outside. The first exchanges were formal, pompous on the mayor's part, but in a few minutes he was on the floor with his skirts pulled up, and Yakouba was rubbing zinc ointment in an old scrape on his shin. The imam of the Grand Mosque entered with polite salaams, followed by the cadi (president of the board of aldermen, if you like), that Sidi Ben Labas who was to become our friend's best friend in after years. Other notables, scholars arrived, and last of all came the Mokaddem of the Senussi, a

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO powerful and sometimes sinister Mohammedan secret society, vaguely like the Christian Knights Templars, fomenters of jihads and holy wars.' He seemed to have come in polite curiosity, to measure them. They were willing. They engaged battle, as technical experts, using classic Arabic, in dialectic commentary on the Holy Books, comparing texts and doctrine. Hacquard read, from his New Testament in Arabic, Christ's Sermon on the Mount, knowing that if the Mokaddem demurred thus-and-thus, he could catch him with such-and-such hadiths of his own Prophet. But the Mokaddem was not being caught in that trap. He agreed that it was 1oo per cent sound doctrine- adding that it was, of course, pure Islamism, archi-pure, "as pure as the Koran itself," and tried in his turn to trip the white marabouts. Yakouba still twinkles, remembering it. They couldn't trip each other. The nearest they got was a dogfall, and then they tried genealogy. After a few indecisive rounds with the progeny of Jacob, they struck a snag in the genealogy of Jesus which the Moslems trace, on the maternal side, to a Mary, sister of Moses. The Mokaddem, after much scratching of his beard, agreed that on a point of this sort the Bible probably had it straighter, and borrowed Hacquard's Testament to have the correct genealogy copied out. Thus developed between them and the Mokaddem, as Yakouba puts it, "toleration coupled with an extreme curiosity which later ripened into a warm but always mistrustful friendship." * 1 See Appendix, p. 243. * In 1917 Yakouba, as chief agent of native affairs for the French government, took part in a punitive expedition against the Senussi. 6o

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO All native Timbuctoo soon heard that its notables were hobnobbing with the new white marabouts, and when next they walked abroad they were saluted on every side with obsequious bows and honorific titles by the populace -hailed as Tolbe by the Peuls, Alfa by the Songhoi, Mori by the Bambaras, Sherif by the Arabs. But the common people were soon to learn that the younger of these two white notables was unlike any notable of any color they had ever known before. Universal brotherhood, equality with all mankind, is as rare among Africans and Arabs as it is among Christians. Usually, just as among us Christians, it is a thing to be talked about rather than practiced by any but saints, poets, cranks. So that when Timbuctoo saw the younger of the strangers, who had been honored by the white captains and their own black notables, now hobnobbing on equally familiar terms in the bazaar, market, streets with the ragtag and bobtail, loafers, laborers, peddlers, sweetmeat sellers, women, slaves, they didn't quite know what to make of it and tapped their foreheads just as we would do if we saw the silk-hatted rector of Trinity Church or Nicholas Murray Butler eating peanuts and playing checkers with a bootblack on a bench in Washington Square. The color of his skin wasn't in it for much. In this ancient seat of black culture and black empire, they hadn't yet learned to be ashamed of being black. The same action on the part of one of their own notables would have puzzled them perhaps even moreI'll say for the blacks and Timbuctoo, however, that I think this insanity of Yakouba's was given a better break there than we have generally given the Walt Whit61

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO mans, John Reeds, Gene Debses in our white capitals. Yakouba wasn't so easy to handle, not much easier for the blacks to handle when he became one of them than he had been for his own Church. They had to give him a break more than once. Well, they gave him a break more than once, and they are not sorry. It will be ten years yet before this thing flamed completely in him to change his destiny, and before I enter upon the story, his real story not yet begun, it may be well to sketch in here a little of its stage setting, the Timbuctoo he found in 1895, and Timbuctoo as it is now, singularly unchanged. I want to show, if I can, that Yakouba's intuitive, spontaneous preference was based on something more pragmatic than mere fantasy-that it was not wholly mystical. One reason why I am trying to write this book at all is that I have a feeling that if I can write it truthfully, the life of Timbuctoo, as well as Yakouba's personal life, may conceivably have some significance, some bearing on life in general. We have made in these recent years, for the time-being at least, a pretty sad mess of our own civilization, peace, security, way of living; and the different way of living in Timbuctoo is so very different (without necessarily being better or worse) that it may shed a little light on the unsolved problem of living a good life. How to go about describing the contrast. Perhaps by negatives, since by negatives Timbuctoo offers the strangest contrast of any city this side of dreams to the positive aspects we know of our own cities, New York, London, Paris, Birmingham, Detroit, or Cincinnati. First of all, Timbuctoo has no machinery, no machines, 62

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO no mills, factories, electricity, or steam. All the handicrafts flourish, and the artisan, pressed neither for time nor money, can make his living calmly. There are rich and poor people (Yakouba is a rich man today by local standards), but there are no millionaires or hungry people. What perhaps strikes the stranger more personally is that there are no cafes, hotels, bars, restaurants, garages, brothels, churches, movie theaters; not one commercial advertising sign or billboard; no residence or even bungalow of European style, no pane of glass, no telephone, no newspaper; no public conveyance or vehicle of any sort; only one automobile privately owned-and publicly frowned on-brought rattling God knows how from Gao in 1931 by a worthless cousin of one of Yakouba's black sons-in-law. He drives it when he can beg, buy, or steal gas from the military airfield. Thus Timbuctoo-despite the airfield-is the one world-famed, legendary city of the past which has not been mechanized by the white man. Baghdad, Kabul, Bokhara, Cairo, Samarkand have electric signs, taxis, ice factories, hotel orchestras, loud speakers, Diesel engines, Greta Garbo, so that Timbuctoo is almost as queer an anachronism in 1934 as Old Man Yakouba himself. I think they go rather well together. I'm not implying by this that it would be well, or better, for you or me or the streetcar conductor. Let's say it is better for Yakouba, and let it go at that. Native life there, though the natives are black, is medieval Arab, that is to say, not much different from what it was in the time of Moses and the patriarchs or

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO in the later time of the great caliphs. If you think it may be dull, or dead, or boring, you have only to read the Arabian Nights or the Bible. The walls and houses may look like tombs, as casual travelers say, but what goes on inside them is another matter. Yakouba's house, in the native palace class, is now one of the finest. You can say that it offers no luxuries but every essential comfort, if by luxuries you mean electric ice box, buttons to push and chains to pull, a limousine at the door, and department stores down the street. Or you can twist it paradoxically and say that you have no comforts but every luxury-if you fancy the idea of reclining on divans, owning slaves, ordering a whole sheep roasted in your kitchen, lying on your roof terrace under the stars, listening to the music of a lute plucked with an eagle's quill, quarreling with your concubines or calmly talking with learned doctors of philosophy, with never a thought of going to the office or factory next morning through a traffic jam or in a crowded subway. At any rate, it suited Yakouba, and I go so far as to suggest that though his spontaneous embracing of it seems almost pathological, he was not entirely the victim of a mystical delusion. But his sudden, come-home-asit-were, gay, free, Harpo-Marxlike yet saintlike love of these new black brothers and sisters and their way of living must have surprised them-and may have even surprised him, since there is no evidence that he had ever been stirred by any such love-of-life or love-of-all-mankind emotions back in France. It certainly surprised his superior, Father Hacquard, who suggested that while Our Lord was privileged when he walked on earth to 64

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO show a marked preference for the company of harlots, fishermen, publicans, and sinners, Yakouba, for a mere young priest, was carrying things a bit too far. Of course, Hacquard was right and Yakouba repentant, and besides we are getting too far ahead of the story. Yakouba was not yet a revolutionary. He was still a priest in the temple, and since there wasn't any temple yet in Timbuctoo he set to work with a will to help build one and be a priest in it. VIII HIEN the two first white priests set about building their chapel, dispensary, and clinic in May, 1895, all black Timbuctoo was more or less similarly busy. The city was having its first building boom since 1770 when the Tuaregs took it from the Sultan of Morocco. Here was one of the few cases in the history of white conquest in which the permanent arrival of machine guns and missionaries benefited the native proprietors and freeholders. The Tuareg masters had never occupied or administered the city. They had simply preyed upon it, its caravans, its black Moslem merchants and citizens. In the years immediately prior to the coming of the French, raids and pillage were so frequent that the rich Timbuctooans disguised themselves and lived in straw huts, secreting their wealth, while the Tuaregs stabled their horses in the abandoned palaces. The massive mud walls of these buildings had the exterior aspect which they retain today, but the terraces and interiors were in wrack and ruin. Now things were safer, Fort Bonnier loomed protecting, and the city was patrolled night and day by tirailleurs and spahis. It needed to be. The Tuaregs were just

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO over the dunes. "If a white man wandered five hundred yards beyond the sentinels," writes Yakouba, "he would be found with his throat slit; if a black ventured out he would be grabbed and sold but the veiled hyenas no longer dared to enter the town. The citizens spit in the faces of the heads drying on pickets in the bazaar, called down the blessings of Allah on our heads, went working, buying, selling, dancing about their business." All this was extremely recent. Yakouba's new friend Sidi Ben Labas had only moved back into his palace a few weeks before and still had masons working there. The worthy cadi was already beginning to reap rich rewards both from the French and his own people for the wise r6le he had played when issues were in doubt. He had gambled on the French, and the French had won. A dervish had told him of a dream, he had said, in which he saw whites coming up the river with purifying fire, after which the lion and sheep lived peacefully together in Timbuctoo. Nobody believed a dervish had told him anything, but everybody was more than sick of the Tuaregs, and he had been able to persuade the whole city, even the Mokaddem of the Senussi, to connive with the French and welcome them as saviors rather than conquerors. He died only a year ago. I saw him last in 1930. He was a fat old man, very black and over six feet tall, turbaned and swathed in robes of fine white linen, his breast covered with French decorations- the Legion of Honor, Academic Palms, Mrite Agricole, and whatnot. The two old men were cronies and visited each other nearly every day to gossip about the old days when Ben Labas was

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO mending his palace and lent the new priests his contractor to build their mission houses. The trader whose house they already occupied was not returning, so they used it as a nucleus for the proposed new structures. It had an oblong dependence suitable for a temporary chapel, so instead of starting to build a church immediately, they began building the dispensary and clinic alongside. They were compelled to use slave labor, whether they liked it or not. No local contractor would work without slaves, and they soon found that if they undertook to supervise the work themselves they would be forced to employ slaves anyway, so they turned it over to the cadi's contractor, a Songhoi named Abou Zent. He brought six freemen masons, with wooden trowels, and forty slaves, male and female, who transported clay in wicker baskets, water in calabashes. There is, properly speaking, no sawn lumber, no cut stone, no brick. The walls are built of sun-dried clay cubes plastered over with soft clay; the flat roof terraces of the same material reenforced with reeds, straw matting, hewn beams. Abou Zent directed it with a pencil stub, a little book in which he kept tallies, and a bull's- hide whip. The priests were sincerely distressed to see Christian houses-of-mercy built by beaten slaves-for slavery then was real in Timbuctoo, not like the slavery of today in which the slave is simply a family servant with a job for life and more privileges and safeguards for old age than the average hired domestic in Christian lands. Every day, Yakouba says, as they watched the walls of the mission rise, a native town crier passed, accom-

44 I 1 K A TUAREG CHIEF AND TWO SLAVES BEFORE THE CARAVANSERAI IN TIMBUCTOO

44ct oZ E ol cj4

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO panied by a uniformed spahi from the garrison, proclaiming in Songhoi and Arabic: "Hear it with your ears! All proprietors of slaves and all contractors who employ slaves belonging to others are still authorized to discourage evasion and enforce obedience by all the usual methods, including whips and irons. Hear it and heed it!" * "But the whip had this advantage," admits Yakouba practically, "that our pharmacy and clinic went up as fast as Pharaoh's pyramids--even faster, being smaller." It was well they did, for it was now late in May and the tornadoes would be coming soon. When they "opened for business" about June 1st, it was "like the opening of the street fair in Neuilly." All native Timbuctoo, high and low, sick and well, came crowding there, from dawn to night, out of curiosity. The place was well equipped. They had about everything you would find in the early nineties in a country drugstore, and both the two priests had a sound smattering of medicine. They had a case of instruments too, and were prepared "to set a broken leg, or even cut one off in an emergency." "The city was suddenly stricken with an epidemic of mysterious ailments," writes Yakouba. 'We worked from dawn to eleven A.M. and from four until dark, but the hardest work of all was to distinguish between the really ailing and the rascals who wanted to taste our nostrums * They couldn't do anything about it. In a letter to Paris Father Hacquard wrote, "The commandant (military governor) is doing his best and has a good heart, but slavery is so basic a part of the social-economic fabric here that it would upset everything, he tells me, to condemn and break up the old system before we have worked out something to take its place."

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO or wear our bandages out of vanity, curiosity, or sometimes simply because they were free." Just as they were beginning to get their local practice running smoothly, they were upset again. The first big caravan from the north with twenty thousand camels, so strong that the Tuaregs hadn't dared attack them seriously, arrived from Marrakesh. These trans-Saharan caravans always arrive at their destination with a good many sick and wounded who need quick attention, and curiosity again added to the disorder at the new clinic, for many of the merchants, guards, and cameleers were Moroccans from the Atlas who had never seen a Christian. So that not only the sick and wounded but also the caravan chiefs "came by the dozens to visit and sit by the hour." Ben Labas, the Moslem cadi, and the Senussi Mokaddem, whose secret-society oath was "Dinh Dinh Mohamet!" (Kill in the name of the Prophet!), came and obligingly poured tea to help out the poor swamped Christian missionaries. On the second day, helping them further, Ben Labas dug up a volunteer clinic assistant in the person of a retired local merchant originally from Fez who possessed some real Arabic science, including medicine and a considerable knowledge of medical botany. He helped in the treatments willingly, at the same time imparting his knowledge in exchange for theirs. "Indeed, we found the quality of his mind," Yakouba says, "more purely scientific than that of most Christian scientists," and goes on to recount an episode which you may or may not agree proves the point. He asked their European advice in the outside case of

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO a woman who had been suffering from a dysentery which he hadn't been able to check and who had lost so much blood in the last few days that he feared for her life. They gave him a special bismuth preparation, the best for desperate cases, and he went away to try it. Two days later he returned enthusiastic, "Praise be to God, the remedy is excellent! The dysentery slacked after two doses and was completely arrested by the third dose." "She is out of danger, then?" "Oh, no. She died yesterday, but that is of no importance. The medicine did its work marvelously. She was too weak to recover, but that is only because we gave it to her too late." This man, who was really an excellent doctor, eventually turned over all his practice to them, "dumped it" on them is the way Yakouba puts it, and gave an equally scientific reason for that too: "You do it for God's love, and God will be sure to reward you. I do it for money, and many of my patients never pay me and never will. It is better for you to do it, since you are sure to be paid." The caravan went away. Other caravans came and went. So did a couple of tornadoes. Timbuctoo remained, the free clinic flourished. "When the inhabitants found we were really here for them," Yakouba underscores, "they were for us." An additional reason, I think, for the immediate prestige of the clinic was that Timbuctoo is a naturally healthy place and that the common ailments, fever, intestinal disorders, etc., are generally of a sort which respond readily to remedies. Syphilis is rare there,

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO tuberculosis unknown; cholera, tsetse, yellow fever seldom if ever touch the region. It is a splendid climate somewhat like our lower Arizona. White women live there without losing their freshness, and white children thrive. The Timbuctooans couldn't understand at first why a poor man, laborer, or slave had the same standing in the clinic as a rich man or notable, but since all were welcome and all treatment and drugs were free, everybody ended by approving it. One day they heard their native concierge call to some humble, timid ones: "Come on, don't be afraid! All are equal here as in the eyes of God. If the Sultan himself came, he'd have to sit in the sand and wait his turn." This was pretty nearly true. The real aristocrats, if they were ailing, came just the same, sat awaiting their turns, laughed at it, and liked it. The common people were more puzzled and less at ease, but liked it too. "Only certain pompous black bourgeois, neither high nor low, like Monsieur Rikiki, found it lacking in decorum." Of course they were often imposed on-but not in every case successfully. A big blind negro of the people, about thirty, blind from birth, had himself brought to them saying that he was "Fakih, the Jurisconsul" and that he would unquestionably be cured by them. Since they weren't just then in the miracle business, they could do nothing for his eyes, and apart from the blindness he was in superb health. So they dismissed him. But next day he was back, swearing that they had already made him "see a little," describing the physiognomy and appearance of Pere Hacquard as proof. He added that

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO merely being again in Hacquard's holy presence was causing him to begin to see dim images now. If they let him remain, he said, he'd be sure to have the eyes of an eagle in a few weeks. He could bring his own sleeping mat, he assured them, and "only ate meat once a day." They made him sit down and flashed lighted matches, zigzagging, in front of his eyes. He was blind as a bat. Caught lying he said, "Now we can talk as honest men." What he proposed was to fake a miracle which, he explained, would be mutually advantageous, increasing the honor of the Peres Blancs, while supplying himself with food, lodging, and "an agreeable occupation." Thus they began to learn the seamy side of native life, native tricks, and to have their own occasional little triumphs. They had made one real enemy among the notables, an old taleb named Abdallah, a marabout who, though not directly connected with any of the mosques had a considerable following, particularly among the ignorant. He sold hijabds (charms) to cure sickness and, when the free clinic began to cut into his profits, began to preach against the Peres Blanes, pointing out that they were, after all, infidels and that good Moslems could not go to them for treatment. When hearers demurred that the white marabouts, though infidel, were effecting cures where his own amulets had failed, he argued adroitly that even if they were cured of their sickness they would die eventually anyway, and that when they did die they would go to Gehenna. This was hard to answer, and his propaganda hampered the missionaries. What to do about it? What they actually did will delight Dashiell Hammett and the Jesuits. They framed him. In the butchers'

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO market there was a ragged brat no better or worse off than hundreds of others, but quicker-witted, nicknamed "Petit Pierre" by the soldiers, who gave him pennies. The Pares Blancs discovered that this waif had once been a bondservant in Abdallah's household and had been turned out to shift for himself, which he did very well with pennies from the soldiers and meat-scraps every killing day from the butchers. Hacquard and Yakouba went to see him. "Oh, you poor little boy! Left to starve in the streets! Come along with us and we'll give you a clean shirt and a nice mat to sleep on and all you want to eat. Has your cruel master abandoned you?" "Well, he didn't exactly abandon me," replied Petit Pierre. "He beat me and threw me out." "For what, you poor child?" "He caught me stealing." "Better forget about that. Just remember that he threw you out." The native law on the treatment of bondservants is rigid. They are in a different category from slaves. They must be nourished properly, housed, cared for in sickness by their masters. Yakouba went to see his friend Ben Sidi Labas who was, among other things, chief judge of the civil and criminal courts. Next day the court crier, accompanied by a drummer, proclaimed in the streets: "Be it known to all that the marabout Abdallah who poses as a holy person, reads the Koran piously, and counts his beads in public is a liar, hypocrite, and scoundrel. The Koran law prescribes that all bondservants are as members of the family, yet he has treated a child as 74

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO you wouldn't treat an animal; which poor child, abandoned to die, has been saved by white Unbelievers who have shown themselves truer servants of God in this instance than the Faithful. The marabout Abdallah is condemned, therefore, to lose his bondservant and to pay a fine of three francs." The two missionaries-the future right reverend Bishop of the Soudan as well as our tangled friend Yakouba-were beginning to have a grand good time in Timbuctoo. Pare Hacquard writes to his sister: "We are doing such a rushing business that we have extended into the street like La Belle Jardiniere in Paris. I sit outside the doorway on my throne, an empty crate covered with leopard-skins, and we have an outside counter made with empty boxes nailed together, fitted with shelves for drugs and bandages. Straw mats are laid on the sand, and the whole street is blocked by patients. It makes no difference, for people pass this way only on foot. I depend less on Bambara now- I have learned to massacre the Songhoi language more freely, and even to speak a little Tuareg. You ought to see our 'barnyard' behind the kitchen: chickens, guineas, two ducks, pigeons, and a turkey! By the way, we've caught another little Tuareg, or rather the spahis caught him and the commandant gave him to us. We keep him in the house and he's charming. He has already learned to make the sign of the cross, says a little prayer to the Virgin, 'Merci, papa' to me, and eats like an ogre." * * These letters are preserved in the Vie, trauvaux, voyages, by the Abb6 Marin, published by Berget-Levrault, Nancy, i9o5. 75

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO About this same time Pere Hacquard writes with an equally joyous enthusiasm of a wholly different sort to a fellow-ecclesiastic back home: "Our chapel is nearly finished. The good God and his dear mamma are pretty badly housed, almost as badly as they were in the stable at Bethlehem, but when they want it bigger they will do something about it. They know that our time, our work, our lives are completely at their disposal, to serve their greater glory." The walls of that first chapel have long since crumbled. I wish I could have seen it. I see only the photograph of the altar (there was already an itinerant Belgian photographer who had come up from Bamako) which Yakouba has preserved through the years. The chapel was a bare, rectangular mud chamber, he tells me, some ten feet wide and not more than twenty feet deep, opening on the inner courtyard in which the crowds could gather. The altar was in an alcove in the center of the rear wall, facing outward, flanked by tamarisk beams, with a canopy fastened to wooden pegs driven in the clay. It was an empty drug-crate, nailed to picket legs, draped with white cotton and covered with mats of colored grass. There were candles, flowers, a painted plaster Virgin, gilt-crowned, no bigger than a dollIt must have been rather pitiful, and rather beautiful, a mud house and a plaster toy filled with majesty and splendor. The Queen of Heaven was enthroned as Queen of the Sahara. Our Lady of Timbuctoo! And Yakouba was her cavalier. The French are like that. They made her a countess once-of a little town in Gascony. 76

Ix A EMBARRASSED unofficial delegation of mustached French bachelors from the fort called on Father Superior Hacquard late in June (the native families, far from complaining, had felt themselves highly honored) to speak with him privately on the subject of Father Yakouba. Not that they were prudes, you understand. On the contrary! In fact, that was just it. There was Lita, for instance, the Peul girl, you know, whose father makes those doughnuts dipped in honey. Well, she had agreed to come and keep house for Lieutenant Aubade, and now she wouldn't, and you know why. What did he do to them anyway? Put a sign of the cross on them, or something? There was Moussa too-the one nicknamed Elizabeth, you know-and, while he might have done it inadvertently, he had also practically stolen one of Captain Doussol's mistresses. Please understand. A priest was a man, bien entendu, as much so as a soldier. They didn't mean to be unreasonable, but would the superior please ask this young Pere Yakouba to be a little reasonable himself. Yakouba was duly scolded, confessed, penanced, absolved, and repentant, but it wasn't very easy for a young

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO priest of his peculiar temperament and vitality to be reasonable in Timbuctoo. Its women are as free and warm and expert as ever were the women of ancient Alexandria or Montmartre in Mimi's time. It is a great port, a camel port as Alexandria was a seaport, sacred to Aphrodite, but with this difference that the priestesses here are of no special class. Though predominantly Moslem, veils and harems are practically unknown, and its women generally are just as free as among the great Moslem desert tribes of Arabia the Blest. They sleep for pleasure with whom they please-and apparently this young white marabout had pleased them inordinately. Yakouba seems to have restrained himself as much as he could (that is, until he finally boiled over entirely) out of consideration for Father Hacquard and public opinion among the whites. But he got no help from his own honest conscience. He was always honestly opposed to the disciplinary rule of the Roman Catholic Church imposing celibacy and chastity upon its clergy. He knew that some of the greatest men in the Church's history, cardinals and popes among them, had been neither chaste nor celibate, and has been contending all his life that in this matter, which does not touch in any way on fundamental doctrine, the system of the Greek Orthodox and Russian branches of the Church is preferable. He believed, furthermore, that women were a natural necessity in the household for sewing on buttons, darning socks, superintending the kitchen, and that quite apart from the question of celibacy, and even though the Roman system might be tolerable in Europe where priests' households were frequently run by mothers, sis78

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO ters, womenfolk of their own families, it was a bad system for the colonies. So his honest conscience gave him no support at all, and discretion seems to be about as far as he ever went toward trying to reform this weakness, flaw, whatever you may choose to call it, in his make-up. His consorting with native women, though frankly sexual, was a part too, I think, of the almost mystical quirk in his character which drew him toward the blacks. It was associated, I sincerely believe, with his exuberant nonsexual but all- embracing love of this newfound black humanity to which he seemed nearer kin than to his own white humankind in France. At this epoch, June-July, 1895, he had not yet met or even seen Salama. Salama, like the confectioner's daughter, Lita, was of the Peuls, that mysterious race, sometimes ivory, sometimes black, supposed to have the migratory blood of ancient Egypt in its veins and credited with producing some of the most beautiful women in the medieval black Moslem empire. She herself was never beautiful, not even before she began to bear Yakouba's many children, but in her youth she must have been magnificent, a superb bronze Venus of heroic size. Yakouba refused to lend me the only photograph he has of her at that period. It was the only thing he wouldn't trust me with. We couldn't have it photostated in Timbuctoo, and he said our plane might burn in the air or fall recrossing the Mediterranean. She was of a prosperous Timbuctoo-Khabara family, not of the notables, possessing considerable property including houses in Timbuctoo, but she was not in the city when the mission

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO arrived, or for some time thereafter. That summer, she was down at Khabara where her father had a house and fisheries which were beginning to operate again more freely under French protection, and the summer following she spent in Gao. How many women Yakouba had before he met and married Salama, he himself doesn't even approximately know, but he assures me that the legend is exaggerated. Others still living there say not. As for his immersion deep into the intimacies and secrets of native life while still a priest, I do not believe it could be exaggerated. He went deeper, I think, than any other educated white man before or since. He was initiated into their Free Masons' society, having learned incidentally to wield a trowel with any of them, before the last dab of clay had dried on the dispensary, and was soon a member of several other secret guilds, similar to the craftsmen's guilds of Europe in the Middle Ages, with signs, passwords, and meeting-places. He began likewise making the first pen-and-ink sketches 1 of implements, tools, products, of all the arts, crafts, and industries uniquely Timbuctooan, including the extraordinary weapons and jewelry made by the armorers, goldsmiths, and silversmiths in classic designs which are supposed to have survived here only, from the time of Askia the Great. He was already in a peculiar, almost equivocal position, particularly for a robed priest. He was a difficult man for Hacquard to handle, and proved equally difficult later when the secular administration took him over. But both Hacquard then, and the military government later, 1 See Appendix, p. 244.

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO realized his highly special value, made allowance for his eccentricities. The mission was doing amazingly well, and the superior had written to the mother-house in Algeria asking that lay brethren be sent out to help them in the dispensary. They soon had to lease three neighboring houses, one for a sort of hospital, a second as a temporary asylum for such Bellahs, black captives of the Tuaregs, as had succeeded in escaping or been brought in by raiding parties, and a third for a small, not yet official primary school which Yakouba taught in Arabic. These Bellahs at first, particularly those brought in by the troops, were inclined to be wild and suspicious, imagining that they had simply exchanged one kind of slavery for another which might be worse. "Three adult Bellahs were brought in one day, two men, a young woman, and an old woman seamed like a boot. They tried to escape from us. It was not that they could conceive any other life than slavery; they were like wild animals, afraid of strangers. But now, tame to us, they are happy as can be; the men work in the garden, the old woman pounds rice, the young one helps cook, looks after Petit Pierre and the other brats. They think they are still slaves but like this better than being slaves to the Tuaregs. They caress our hands and say they are in heaven." Another Bellah, able-bodied, who "turned impudent after he found there was nothing to fear and ate with the appetite of a hippopotamus," said when they suggested that he go out to a reed-hut of his own and get a job as a porter:

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO "Me! Not if you cut off my head! I don't budge from here." They found him odd jobs on the premises and later he said: "You might just tell the soldiers that the next time they go raiding I'd be much obliged if they'd catch my wife and bring her here for me." The Bellahs were another group that had been handled so long with "whips and irons" that it wasn't easy to keep them in order by kindness. A similar problem developed with Noumou, the little Bambara who had attached himself to them down the river and refused to be left behind. About the tenth time Pare Hacquard caught him stealing-it happened to be a box of matches-and remonstrated with him almost in tears-"the scapegrace monkey was touched by our distress." "But, papa, how can I not steal since you do not whip me when I'm caught?" "From the mouths of babes come words of Solomon," put in the cook whose matches had been filched. "Well, if we must, we must," sighed Pre Hacquard, turning to Yakouba. "Take him in the courtyard and give him a switching." "Not I, Reverend Father Superior. This is a family matter rather than ecclesiastical. He belongs to you. If you want him beaten, you'll have to beat him yourself." Some weeks later Pere Hacquard wrote to his sister in France: "The child was right. It did wonders. After three whippings he has stopped stealing, yet remains as bright as ever. I think we can safely baptize him soon." 82

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO They subsequently baptized him Ishmael, and he became the first altar-boy of the mission, assisting with the Mass and swinging the incense pot. He is still alive, I'm told, and still a "convert," working now as a chauffeur for a mission down in the Volta. I seem to have been dodging this matter of native converts for the past three chapters. I wish I could dodge it altogether, but I suppose I cannot, since it is, theoretically at least, the principal object of any Christian mission, whether Catholic or Protestant. The reason I would like to evade it is that after having lived a number of years in various colonies I don't know exactly what I think about it, either in Timbuctoo or in general, and that what I do think of it will please nobody. I am not even sure that in the whole history of the world one adult Chinese, one adult black savage, or one adult Moslem of any color, being a real believer in his own gods or devils, has ever been converted to ours. I suspect, on the other hand, that if you catch any child young enough it will become not merely a superficial adherent of whatever religion it happens to be taught, but, if it has a natural disposition toward devoutness, a sincere, devout believer in that religion. I agree with what any pragmatic colonial will tell you, that the mass of adult so-called converts have allowed themselves to be baptized solely for a bowl of rice, or a shirt, or a free education, or sometimes, childishly, just to please the whites who have become their masters, but I do not entirely agree with the dictum of most colonials, especially those who have to employ native labor, that "all native Christian converts are crapule au fond." I would never employ native 83

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Christian labor myself because the percentage of relative honesty and decency is heavily on the side of those who stick to their own superstitions, their own faiths, but against this I remember with deep affection old Adham Zir who tended the date-groves of the American Protestant mission near Deir-er-Zhor on the banks of the Euphrates. I remember his grizzled beard and his kindly, keen, honest eyes. The missionary household loved him, and he loved them. One evening, discussing matters touching the resurrection bccause he had taken me to see some tombs, he said: "Of course no man has ever risen from the dead, and there can be no God but God, but the religion of Jesus is not evil and these people have been kind to me for many years. Iwould laydown mylife for Mr. and Mrs. H- , so why not say the harmless words which please them on Sundays?" The mission in Timbuctoo made plenty of converts. They baptized children, slaves, even Tuaregs when they were caught young enough, and as many adults as they chose from among the patients who were treated in the clinic-barring, of course, the notables. The chapel and courtyard were as crowded for Mass on Sundays as the clinic on week-days for treatments. Yet I do not think it would ever have occurred to either Hacquard or Yakouba to try to convert their best friend, Ben Sidi Labas, Moslem of the Moslems, and by far the most intelligent and honorable black man in the region. Make what you will of it. Many veteran missionaries will tell you in confidence that they don't know what to make of it after devoting all their lives to it. 84

K' -~ I ALTAR TO OUR LADY OF TIMBUCTO0 BUILT BY PERE YAKOUBA IN 1895

C i hj -Z, .

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Concerning the usefulness and permanent value, however, of the dispensary-clinic and subsequent schools which they founded-likewise of their scholastic contributions in a wider field than pedagogy-there can be no dispute. Of the two men, both able linguists, Yakouba was the specialist in classic Arabic, and through the aid of his friend the cadi gained access to the few priceless manuscripts which had survived the disintegration of the university of Sankore, preserved in secret by the local descendants of individual professors, historians, theologians. Among them was a partial copy of the Tark el Soudan,' written in the sixteenth century by Abderrahman the Timbuctooan, and of which orientalists ever since the time of Louis XV had been trying to find copies in Tripoli, Algeria, and Morocco. It is the history of the black empire of which Timbuctoo was the metropolis in the days of its glory. Dr. Barth, the German, had found and translated extracts, and Felix Dubois had recently located but not yet translated a more or less complete copy at Djenne. The Arabic fragments located with the help of Ben Labas were the first Yakbuba had seen in any language. They also dug up fragments of Leon the African who had visited Timbuctoo in the fourteenth century and wrote, "The Timbuctooans are gay and frequently dance all night." In the interval of Yakouba's absorption in these manuscripts an incident occurred which sheds a certain light, I think, on the subsequent phenomenon of his highly prosperous survival after taking the defiant plunge which usually spells oblivion for whites in Africa. Since Ya2See Appendix, p. 244.

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO kouba was specializing in Arabic and Bambara, Hacquard had decided, as a fair division of linguistic labors, to specialize in Songhoi, the language of the old empire, still spoken by a considerable proportion of the people, just as the language of the troubadours is still current among peasants in Provence. He planned to learn it thoroughly, to write a grammar and lexicon. The only free time was at night, so he employed a native professor who came after dinner to give him lessons in his bedroom. Yakouba slept in a neighboring room but assured them that the lessons wouldn't disturb him. One morning after a considerable lapse of time, Hacquard was in the mission courtyard giving orders to some Songhoi masons concerning a new structure. They shook their heads and questioned each other. They couldn't understand. Yakouba, standing in the doorway, impulsively interrupted with a stream of words which the masons understood immedi. ately- and then turned red with embarrassment. But his superior was not resentful. "It's plain you learn faster than I do," he said, "but there's no need any longer to eavesdrop." With which he turned over all his notesand the professor-to Yakouba. After Hacquard had become a bishop and won many academic honors by his own scholastic achievements, he said of Yakouba, who was then Superior of Timbuctoo and already being considered for promotion, that he was far more than a learned scholar-that he had "a gift for it amounting to genius." This fact, that Yakouba became an outstanding linguist in a territory where the French rule tribes and races speaking more than thirty distinct languages, many of 86

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO which he was the first white to learn at all, helps to explain, in my opinion, why Yakouba, after tearing off his robes like the monk in the comical-obscene limerick and wildly "going native," didn't go-to-hell-in-a-hamperbasket as such whites generally do-not merely in Conrad novels and the movies, but pretty damned nearly always in real life. There's an obvious moral here for all and sundry who contemplate fleeing from our own harassed subway-civilization to live with pineapples and concubines in Timbuctoo or the South Sea Isles. The moral is so obvious that it's not worth mentioning, but it might be a wise precaution, in addition to feeling that you have a potential genius for it, to do something equivalent to picking up a thorough knowledge of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic here at home before you buy your ticket on the freighter. This book of mine and Yakouba's is not propaganda for the tramp lines. The average white man who has gone native is one of the saddest spectacles under the tropical sun. I wouldn't have admitted it ten years ago, either in print or to myself. I almost remained in Arabia in 1925. But I am glad I didn't. I am not Yakouba. Yakouba has survived it. He has beaten the game. But it wasn't easy even for him, as you'll presently be seeing.

X O NE DAY late in August, Captain Meyer, then commandant of the fort, sent two army rifles with sixty rounds of cartridges to Hacquard and Yakouba, with instructions to hang them on the wall beside their beds. The Tuaregs were closing in again and making trouble. All whites, civilian as well as military, were to go continually armed and sleep within reach of their rifles until further notice. In September the Tuaregs were gathering in force in the Goundam region just west of Timbuctoo, where they had started raiding villages. When they pillaged Douekire, killed a couple of white traders, and carried off a hundred or more slaves, Captain Meyer decided to send a column out against them. It was composed of Senegalese tirailleurs with a goodly sprinkling of white sergeants and corporals, led by Captain Florentin. The garrison had no chaplain, and Yakouba went along, ostensibly to shrive the dead, but in reality because he had already picked up more of the local dialects than any of the Senegalese interpreters and was safer than any of the black local ones. He stood high with the officers, though he had stolen some of their prettiest native girls-or perhaps because of it-and when Lita appeared to see him off 88

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO with a basket of her father's honey-cakes, they made him share them. The adventure of the column was typical and can be told 'Very briefly. Its chief interest as a part of Yakouba's story is that it took him for the first time to Goundam, the town on Lake Faguibine, of which he himself would later be made commandant, with a uniform, gold braid, sword, epaulets and tassels, which he still considers one of the most comic episodes of his career in Africa. The present expedition, however, was not comic. The Tuaregs, though in considerably greater numerical force, refused elusively to give battle, then regathered and attacked the camp just before dawn, using the strange tactics which have become almost classic in the South Sahara. The Tuaregs, on horseback, armed with iron lances and great bull's-hide shields, galloped through the camp as through fire, but under the neck of each horse clung a Bellah slave, armed and muscled like a gladiator, who dropped off as his knight galloped through, and wrought what dagger massacre he could until he was himself cut down. It was in a similar surprise attack that Colonel Bonnier had been massacred, but in the present case there was no surprise, and many of the Tuaregs were shot from their saddles, including a chief named Ghane whose head was subsequently carried back in triumph and added to the galaxy already stuck on pickets in the market-place.* The column had some twenty killed and wounded, including several whites, but the Tuaregs got the worst of * In i93o I saw a pair of ears nailed to the wall outside the door of Colonel Fourri's office. This is not revengeful savagery on the part of the French, but intelligent, good policy. 89

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO it, and were becoming more and more afraid of the French rifles, so much so that when a second column was sent out to bring in dead or alive a chief named N'gouna in the El Masara region, he decamped in such haste that he left his tent behind, in which they found rugs, utensils, several Korans, magical formulas, a Traiti de tactique evidently taken off the body of a white officer, five bottles of green chartreuse, and seven live chickens kept, they supposed, for divination by the entrails rather than for food. They found also a large empty cowhide bag, tanned soft and pliable but strong, with a heavy silver lock attached to the thongs which drew the neck shut. Nobody was able to guess its use, so when they returned they gave it to the mission as a curiosity. When the little baptized Tuareg cubs-the mission now had three-saw it brought in, they all began howling bloody murder and tried to run away. They were too scared at first to explain intelligibly, but one of them kept yowling, "Don't put me in it! Don't put me in it !" so the solution was easy to guess. Grown calmer, they told that they were put in such sacks for punishmentas white mothers will sometimes shut a child up in the closet. But as even this seemed insufficient to explain their terror at the mere sight of the sack, Yakouba kept questioning them further, until one of them said, "Big people sometimes scream and die in it." They got the full explanation later from a Bellah. It is rather ingenious. Putting bad children in such sacks for an hour or so is not their principal use. They are used to punish or torture grown-ups whom the Tuaregs do not wish to muti9o

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO late, particularly recalcitrant girls and women. They are stuffed in the sack with their knees doubled under their chin, their heads bent, their bodies drawn tight in a ball, and with a small hole left somewhere for the air to come in so they can't stifle. "Three or four days and nights of it," the Bellah said, would "completely tame the most rebellious." In the daytime the sack was left in the sun, at night it was rolled and left on a pile of sharp stones or camp-gear such as tent-pegs, mallets, tools; if they moved from one camp to another, it was simply put on a camel with other baggage. Sometimes, he explained, the sack was first soaked with water so that after the supple leather "had been drawn as tight as possible, it would shrink in drying and become still tighter." Weak ones sometimes died, he said, but not often. Usually "they were not spoiled." It was amusing, though, he said, to hear them, after the first day, begging and pleading to have a spear stuck through them. Another amusing thing, he said, was that if they wanted to keep a girl that way a long time, they would fasten her in a tight ball with her head outside the sack so they could give her food and water. The garrison and mission began to learn, from this time on, a good deal which had been hitherto unknown about the habits and customs of the Tuaregs.1 The military, beginning a systematic clean-up to make the approaches to Timbuctoo safe both from the north and from the river, were able to examine captured camps at leisure, learned much from the liberated Bellah slaves, and occasionally made adult Tuareg captives. Later they caught 1 See Appendix, p. 26o.

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO a Tuareg marabout with whom Hacquard, Yakouba, and the imam of Sankore had long conversations. The Korans, chickens, and magical formulas found in N'gouna's tent were a pretty good key to their religion, a debased form of Mohammedanism mixed with fetichism and witchcraft. The striking similarity of their shields, lances, and two- handled swords to those of the Crusaders, coupled with the fact that the shields actually had big crosses designed on them, and that the men were hawk-nosed, frequently blue-eyed, had given rise to the legend that they were by race and religion the scattered offshoot of a band of Christian knights who had disappeared into the desert and consorted with native women in the time of Saint Louis and Richard Coeur de Lion. But this spectacular, theatrical theory which has inspired many shelves of fiction, and even misled ethnologists of a past generation, was already being abandoned when Yakouba poked his curious nose in it and decided, with a couple of sniffs, it was nonsense. He found their religion a jumble of illiterate Islamic mixed with pre-Islamic desert paganism, with never a trace of Christian influence or tradition. He found their chivalry zero, not merely in the treatment of women but likewise in battle. They were expert in ambush and massacre, but reluctant to stand and fight. One thing he did find, however, was that they have a feudal, hereditary nobility, with whom the French have finally come to terms in parts of the South Saharan territory.* To the Tuareg marabouts, all other marabouts, even Christian white ones, were fellow * When Marjorie Worthington, American novelist, was in Gao in 1931, she met, with Lieutenant Auban of the Meharists, a number of Tuareg princes serving as officers in the French camel corps. 92

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO witch-doctors, so that Yakouba got along with them famously and learned a great deal from them, though he never came to like the Tuaregs. In the late autumn of 1895, new complications began to develop at the mission. If Yakouba had found his journey's end, his heart's desire in Timbuctoo, it was not the same with his superior. Pere Hacquard was proud of what they had accomplished there, dated all his letters "Sainte-Marie de Tombouctou" and looked forward to the day (destined never to dawn) when the city would have a cathedral, but in the meantime it had not become a special place to him as it was a special place to Yakouba. In that sense it was simply "a mission like another," and before he had been there six months Pere Hacquard was already restless to go further and found more of them. He had written confidentially in September to his friend, the nun of Saint Charles, that he was "thinking of pulling up stakes and going elsewhere," had also written to Segou telling Pere Eveillard to hold himself in readiness for a transfer, and had urged the Maison Carre in Algeria to hurry along a couple of lay brothers. Around Christmas he was offered an ideal opportunity to push further into unknown territory. Naval Commandant Hourst, then in command of the flotilla of the Niger, and later to become famous for these explorations * was planning a governmental hydrographic expedition down the Niger toward Dahomey and the Atlantic. The Niger's course after it made its immense bend, its "buckle" on which Timbuctoo was set like a jewel, * The best account is Hourst's own Ricit de voyage, published by PlonNourritt, Paris, i898.

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO had not yet even been accurately mapped, and no white boats had ever mounted or descended that thousand miles of mighty stream. Hourst was now planning to try it with three armed chalands and a commission from the Geographic Society to sound, measure, and chart the river-and invited Pere Hacquard to come along. Yakouba scribbles in his notes, "So the Reverend Father has decided to go farther into Darkest Africa, but he doesn't quite know what to do about me. I'm sure I mustn't be superior unless it can't be helped. We both hope Eveillard will arrive before he leaves." The expedition was delayed until late in January, and Pere Eveillard arrived in ample time to take over the executive direction of the mission as a whole, so that Yakouba, who was already running the school and the pharmacy, still had some leisure to devote to what Anatole France once called "the reasonable occupations of a philosopher"-the further cultivation of ancient manuscripts and doughnut- makers' daughters. He went to Khabara on a donkey to see the expedition off, to go aboard the chalands, to marvel at the revolving cannon and at Pere Hacquard's de luxe installment on the "flagship," where he had "chapel, office, dining room, and bedroom all consisting of one room eight feet square," photographed them with an already old-fashioned stereoscopic camera, joined in shouting "A la garde de Dieu et en avant toujours," and ambled cheerfully back to Timbuctoo, on his donkey, without envy, wondering how he'd get along with Eveillard, never suspecting that Eveillard would soon be down with fever and he himself superior whether he wanted to be or not.

XI LONG about Easter, in 1896, Pere Eveillard, frazzled out by fever, was shipped down to the coast, Pere Yakouba became Superior of Timbuctoo, a couple of lay brethren arrived from the Mother-House in Algeria to help him, a long-delayed message came up the river from Hourst and Hacquard saying they had reached Dahomey, the Tuaregs grew scarcer in the neighborhood so that people began to venture unarmed in the forest and lagoons, new merchants and traders came in, Yakouba discovered to his chagrin that he could be, when forced to it, a thoroughly capable Father Superior but that it made him tired, so one morning he left the two lay brethren with the bag to hold, picked up a gang of ragamuffin black boys, and posted a notice over the door of the chapel that he'd gone fishing. "Bon Dieu, that too!" said the bachelor gossips when they heard it at the garrison, "he'll be after us next, the sacre bouc!" But this time they were wrong. Yakouba has plenty to answer for without that. He is one orientalist who never developed even a dilettante interest in homosexuality, though most of his mature life has been passed in a region where its practice is so commonplace among THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO both Arab and negro Moslems that it is considered neither eccentric nor immoral. But boys held no attraction for Yakouba in this special sense. He had simply picked up his gang and gone off to play hooky with them. They borrowed a pirogue at Khabara, hired a couple of laptots to pole it, chucked in their fishing tackle with a sack of bread, salt, peanut oil, shotgun, and a box of matches, and slid off into the lagoons. Before they caught any fish, Yakouba broke the wings of an armored duck with buckshot, and his screeching mob was in the water after it--careless of crocodiles-racing and splashing. The armored duck of the upper Niger is an edible ornithological monster almost as big as a bustard. It sheds ordinary shot like rain, and one of its legs makes a meal for a family. The naked gang, swimming, shouting, battled with it, drowned it, and towed it back. In the evening they barbecued it on a grassy bank, stuffed their bellies, and were devoured in turn by mosquitoes. Next day they pushed further into the big river, tossed bread to the hippos who nearly upset the boat in their amphibian scrambles, caught a lot of fish, and killed an ape. This is on the edge of the baboon country, and the local simians, instead of resembling hand-organ jockos or bewildered human babies, are ugly beasts which make an excellent stew. A wandering stranger, attracted by the smoke, or smell, appeared to share the meal and gratefully ate all he could, but when he afterward saw the hide and head, poked his fingers down his throat and vomited it all up, apologizing at the waste of the good 96

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO food, explaining that flesh of the ape was taboo to his clan.* They started homeward late by moonlight, a little nervous. It was better to lie low at night, but the mosquitoes had bothered them too much the first night. Sure enough, as they were poling through the neck of the shallow pond of Menkoulagongou, some Tuaregs stopped them. But it ended in nothing worse than a surly, disgusted palaver. They'd have liked well enough to take Yakouba's gun and could have made a little profit on the boys, but if a white man had his throat cut now so close to Timbuctoo the whole squadron would be out, and they knew from experience that the reprisals would be bloody and general. The presence of the white marabout was unfortunate. Yakouba who sat in the stern of the boat, with the shotgun cocked and laid across his knees, gave them two empty brass shells and a little tobacco and commended their restraint. When they poled up somewhat sheepishly to the wharf of Khabara after midnight- they were supposed to have returned before sundown the previous evening-there was a spahi corporal's guard with a farm lantern, the moon having sunk, fussing with a piroguIe. What were they doing launching a boat at that time of night, asked Yakouba. They were going out to look for the white marabout. "Oh, it is thou," they observed when the light flickered on his beard. "Well, we'd better see you safely back to the fort. The other white marabouts are with the commandant." * These clan taboos have no relation, either hygienic or religious, to intrinsic edibility. Some family clans may not touch, for instance, respectively, beef, mutton, fish. Others may not touch rice. 97

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO During the year which followed, Yakouba initiated the two fr~res thoroughly in their clinical duties which did not, he explained, include running to the commandant every time he stayed out all night, taught them as much as he could of the local dialects, broke in another pere who had been sent to help them. Though he was an original sort of father superior who evidenced an increasing fondness for females, fishing, and playing hooky-once even joining a camel corps sortie and tagging along with it as far as Araouan-he seems to have administered the mission admirably well. It was during this interlude, 1896-1897, that he added the hitherto neglected art of tippling to the already impressive list of his accomplishments in the humanities. It was Frere Jacques-one of the new lay brethren but no relative, I suppose, of him who sounded the matine-who conceived the bright idea that a liqueur of sorts might be distilled from the fruit of the jujube tree which grew in profusion, and suggested that with the father superior's permission he would try to contrive the apparatus. With part of an old zinc powder-cannister donated by a friend in the artillery, a length of copper tubing, native jars, and soldering tools borrowed from a Songhoi blacksmith, he devised a worm and alembic, set it up in a corner of the courtyard, made some mash, built a roaring fire under it, and sat down at a respectful distance. After a couple of explosions and further tinkering, it yielded, according to the father superior's diary of events at the mission, "the first drops of a pale, golden liqueur which resembled fine old Armagnac and tasted like rusty nails." The inventor, however, was persistent. Yakouba re98

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO counts on the same page of the diary that several days later as he was teaching the catechism to a class in Arabic, Frere Jacques burst in from the courtyard calling: "Ca pisse encore, mon pere, et cette-fois-ci je crois que fa-y-est." He had cleaned the alembic thoroughly, and this time they rolled the cooled drops on their tongues appraisingly, smacked their lips, rubbed it on the palms of their hands to test the aroma, and agreed that it was "pas si mal que fa!-" The "jujube distillery" became at once a permanent adjunct of the mission. Nor were they deluding themselves about the product's excellence. After they had presented a bottle of it to the commandant and to one or two people of the tiny European colony, it leaped locally to fame. Selling it for money would have required a lot of red tape from the Mother-House in Algeria, so at first they gave it away, but the commandant soon proposed something more interesting. Let them value it, he said, at two bottles of ordinary Pernod, champagne, or other European aperitif, even good burgundy if they chose, and as chalands were arriving regularly now with stuff of that sort in bulk, the mission would soon have a well-stocked and varied cellar. Thus Sainte-Marie of Timbuctoo gained new prestige and profit, and thus her most Christian father superior soon became, as the good Hebrews say, "a drinker." He is still a drinker and has been for these forty years, a white man, in the tropics. It takes considerably less than forty years to rot the livers of most white men who become drinkers in the tropicsa detail which has no point except as further indication of Yakouba's special equipment for becoming the special

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO person he became. He had the tripes, guts, and constitution of a bull as well as a bull's pizzle. If he hadn't he'd have been dead long ago, whether in a bishop's robes or a beachcomber's rags. While all was going merrily in Timbuctoo that year, Hourst and Hacquard, risking their bones in dangerous rapids where most boats smashed, their hides in poisonarrow jungles through which no whites had thus far passed, reached the Atlantic, long-haired, emaciated, looking like scarecrows, were picked up at Porto Novo by a Spanish freighter and carried home to France where they were feted and beribboned by government, church, learned academies, and scientific societies-incidentally adding to the fast-growing fame of the Peres Blancs and putting Hacquard in line for an early bishopric. In the spring of 1898, Sa grandeur (that is to say, His Lordship) the new bishop of Philippeville and Rusicada, Vicar Apostolic of the Soudan and Sahara, dropped off one day at Khabara to see how things were going with a couple of old acquaintances of his, Sainte-Marie of Timbuctoo, and Father Dupuis-Yakouba of the same address. A letter which he afterward wrote in confidence to a fellow prelate (published after his death in the Matin bibliography), sheds an intimate light on what had happened to Yakouba and the city during the short intervening years: "I left the mission here with a trembling heart, poor Timbuctoo, but all is well. The personnel of the garrison has changed: Colonel Klobb is now commandant of 100 f PERE DUPUIS-YAKOUB.A WHEN HE WAS APPOINTED SUPERIOR OF THE MISSION AT TIMBUCTOO

TIMBUCTOO'S SUPERIOR BESTOWS A CASUAL BENEDICTION. PERE YAKOUBA CIRCA 1900

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO the region, with Captain Cristofari as adjoint; our local commandant is Captain Robbe, formerly 'satrap' of Goundam, with Lieutenants Cauvin and Vidal as adjoints. These gentlemen assure me unanimously that the mission has been doing marvels, and I find that they are all enchanted admirers of Ptre Dupuis-Yakouba, though they tell me quite frankly that he is rapidly becoming koyraedje (turning completely native)." Monseigneur Hacquard was now forced to consort and consult with the colonels, lunch with the governors and rulers, but he gave an intimate tea afterward-as he says with affectionate humor-"for Yakouba, the cadi, and the rest of the native notables," including Koyra-Boro, Milad, Hammadi, and Bo-Mahaman. Mohammed-benel-Mibrikate was absent, occupied toward Gao with some of his merchant-caravans. Traffic was safer now, and his commerce was again wide- flung. Old-timers all, and not too embarrassed by their host's new grandeur (Ben Sidi who had put on all his ribbons whispered audibly to Yakouba, wondering why Hacquard had removed the gold miter he had worn at the High Mass), they discussed local affairs, gossiped about recent changes. Everybody with trash to sell or an ax to grind, they agreed, grocerymen, Greeks, Jews, traders, was piling in, now that things were safe. And of course the worst of it was that they fancied themselves the pioneers of Timbuctoo. "It's always that way in a new territory," said Monseigneur. "Soon they'll be telling you how to run things." "Let them tell us," said Yakouba; "they will all pass and we will remain." 101

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Thus it was. Yakouba remained, year after year, turning more and more koyraedje, fond as ever of pretty negresses and jujube gin, but commended and undisturbed in his post as superior of the prosperous and growing mission, until, in the autumn of 19oo, his happy and useful existence was rudely interrupted. He wouldn't talk with me much about it, but the incident is pretty well covered in his written notes. He tells it in the notes with a circumstantial simplicity which is perhaps all the more revealing for being casual: "It was on the 17th of October, a Wednesday, I believe, that I returned from an oasis. It was on the Sunday following as I was having a late breakfast around ten o'clock-having celebrated Mass at nine-when there appeared in the courtyard the face of a P~re Blanc who was not of the region and whom I had never seen before. His face was not sympathetic. I was the one who was surprised. I asked what I could do for him. Nothing, he said. He had merely come to replace me as superior and director of the mission. He coldly handed me the order which had been signed by Monseigneur Hacquard down in Segou. "With it was a second order which showed me that at any rate I was not being disgraced as the newcomer had meant me to suppose. I was instructed to proceed immediately to Dahomey with authority to take over and reorganize the mission at Fada N'Gourma." Just the same, Yakouba was being punished, and he knew it. He was being exiled from the Timbuctoo he loved. He was hurt and resentful. If the bishop had been anybody but. his old comrade-in-arms, he would prob102

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO ably have kicked out of harness then instead of later. But Hacquard, he felt, was still his friend, and he suspected that it might be better to see further into this before flying off the handle. Subsequent developments seem to prove that Yakouba was right concerning his bishop's feelings. But it is not entirelr clear. Of Hacquard's sincere admiration and affection for Yakouba so long as they were both more or less equal in responsibility, there is ample evidence, but in what light the Vicar Apostolic, which means chief ecclesiastical executive of an immense territory, was forced to consider him, is not so easy to answer. The evidence is puzzling for the probable reason that Yakouba himself was a puzzle to Hacquard. He unquestionably exiled Yakouba from Timbuctoo as a punishmentwhether for rodgering too many women, going on too many wild-goose chases in the oases and lagoons, drinking too much jujube juice, or turning too completely native, does not matter. But he may at the same time have chosen him for strong positive reasons as the best man he could send down to Dahomey on a difficult, important job. The mission at Fada N'Gourma, chief city of northern Dahomey, was in a thorough mess. Everything had gone wrong there. Its superior had gotten himself involved in quarrels and squabbles with the commandant and all the local white officials, and on top of thataccording to the reports which had reached Dakar and Segou-was cordially distrusted and disliked by the native notables. Here was a difficult job in double-barreled diplomacy, in which the eccentric pet of French garrisons and native populace might shine. So that Monseigneur 103

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Hacquard's motives were probably not only mixed, but quite possibly included a desire, while kicking his old comrade in the pants, to kick him into line for subsequent advancement and reward. Poor Yakouba, however (hurt and unhappy), knew nothing of this as he packed sulkily next day, turned over the keys of the dispensary to his unsympathetic successor, said good-by to nobody, not even Ben Sidi Labas, and set out "for the snake country." "That was all I'd ever heard of it," he says, "and I sincerely hoped one would bite me the first day I got there." How Yakouba journeyed through the kingdom of the Mossi, met the fat black emperor with his harem of musical androgynes, was initiated into the order of the "Lion of Macina," arrived finally in Dahomey to take over a mission which was in such rotten shape that its superior actually fled; how he conquered the Dahomeyan dialects and damsels within a month and reorganized the mission within a year on such successful lines that rumors of it reached all the way to Rome, does not seem to me, intrinsically, to be a part of this story. Yakouba's real story is Timbuctoo. His life is Timbuctoo. I have eighteen pages of his own notes covering this Dahomeyan adventure, which h6 revised and tapped out for me on the ancient cylindrical contraption which he calls a typewriter, and other documents bearing on it from the Hacquard bibliography and the archives of the Maison Carree, but I don't know what to do with them. They might almost make a separate different sort of book about a different 104

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO sort of Yakouba who organized and evangelized upper Dahomey-but in that sort of book he would later have to become bishop, and the book would be written by a professor of one of the church colleges instead of by me. So, since he didn't become bishop, and since I'm the one who's writing this other sort of book, we'd better skip Dahomey and get along with it. Another good reason for skipping and speeding at this point is that events themselves were skipping and speeding for our own Yakouba-the never-to- become-a-bishop one-who would never have gone to Dahomey at all if he could have helped it, and who now, after a year or so down there, was headed back where he belonged, planning to stop by Segou and tell Monseigneur all about it before returning to Timbuctoo, as he had been promised he should if he behaved himself down yonder. His life was rapidly approaching its crisis, its parting of the ways, as he traversed the plains of the Soudan on horseback with a dozen or so porters and servants, nearing Segou and the river: At Dedougou on the Black Volta, a spahi from Bamako gave him the first news that Monseigneur Hacquard had been drowned in the Niger, swimming by moonlight, on a Holy Thursday.* * Yakouba tells me that he had in his hands a little silver-chased shotgun which Hacquard had sent him as a birthday present all the way to Dahomey, and that when he looked down at it he began crying like a baby. 105

THE, W1l1TE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Reaching Koutiala, where there was an outlying Pre Blanc mission, two lay brethren, and presently one of the pares, addressed him, Yakouba, as "Monseigneur." When he was mystified, then outraged, they said, "But the news is quite definite, and we supposed, of course, that you had heard it." The pare added, "We meant no disrespect to his late lordship. You will have to get used to being called monseigneur, since everybody in the region knows it, including the military and the natives." He soon found that this was true. In Segou itself, then at Mopti, all along the river, he was congratulated with decorous restraint, the other monseigneur having so recently died, was treated obsequiously by some and cordially addressed by all with his premature new title. "It was distinctly pleasant," says the old man reminiscing candidly in these long after-years, now that the poignancy of his friend's death and his own subsequent troubles have been toned by time. "I was warmed by the flattery, and observed that the administrators and commandants, inviting me to luncheon, included little sausages from France among the hors d'uvres and asked my opinion of the wine-but my head was in too much of a turmoil to be completely turned, nor did I get as much fun out of the fawning of certain worthy people as I might, for at bottom I didn't want to be a bishop and knew quite well, furthermore, that I was not fitted to be one. I have sometimes suffered doubts as to whether I should ever have become a priest, but as for becoming a prelate, io6

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO I had no doubts whatever. So I knew, if the wise governors did not, that it was not precisely a wise idea. Meanwhile there had been no official order concerning Monseigneur Hacquard's successor, and on the contrary there was a perfectly good order reappointing me to my old post as Superior of Timbuctoo, so I returned there quietly and in not too great distress." A good deal of this is written in his diary. The last time we were going over it together, he said: "Of course, it was nonsense. To tell you the truth, I never lost any sleep over it at the time." "Why'?" "Because," he replied, pointing his middle finger solemnly at himself and shaking his head in negation, "the Holy Ghost is a bird which always knows where to build its nest." Meanwhile, however, it was taken for granted in Timbuctoo that its popular and eccentric leading citizen would soon be Bishop of the Sahara, and if there had been a Rotary Club there, white or black, Yakouba would surely have been given a banquet. As it was, he was congratulated by the officers of the garrison, the black notables, the lay brethren of his own mission, and the new Pere Blanc who had been acting as superior in his absence. But there was a nigger in the woodpile-a nigger with a white robe and a white face, in plain fact, in the mission itself. Monseigneur Hacquard, however he may have felt, had been absolutely loyal to Yakouba. All that the Maison Carrie and Rome knew about Yakouba was that he had made a success of the Timbuctoo mission, had been 107

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO picked for an even tougher job in Dahomey which he had done superbly well, and was logically in line for promotion. But now, by jealousy, in secret, from Yakouba's own priestly household, "the true story" was sped back to the. Mother- House. The "truth of it," the Maison Carrie learned, was that Yakouba had to be sent away from Timbuctoo because he had been debauching the native women, sprawling around drunk on jujube juice, and even taking little boys into the lagoons. That business about Dahomey? A credit to him? But you don't understand at all! Monseigneur Hacquard had to send him down there to get rid of him! It was an earful. It was also a problem, for the governors, of course, were familiar with the other side of the picture. They knew that Yakouba stood head and shoulders above any other scholar, linguist, expert on native life and customs in the region, and had proven his worth as an executive by setting things to rights in Dahomey. He was the best timber available for the bishopric. But against it now stood this. They puzzled a while, and being intelligent, fairminded, concerned not merely with justice to an individual but first of all, as was right, with the good of the great order, ended by asking Yakouba to come back to Algiers and talk things over. In plain red tape, the order, which arrived many weeks later at Sainte-Marie de Tombouctou, appointed a new superior pro tern. and recalled Pare Yakouba to the Maison Carrie. Yakouba remembers that day as the hardest of his life. It was, of course, his life's turning-point. He consulted io8

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO nobody, shut himself in his bedroom, refused luncheon, spent the whole day thinking. The p~re who would now be superior and the two lay brethren heard him pacing on the earthen floor. Toward sunset he came out. He had stripped himself of his crucifix and robe. He was wearing cowhide sandals, an old native shirt, a rag wound round his head in native fashion. He carried nothing in his hands, no sack, no bundle. "Adieu," he said to his gaping confreres and walked out of the mission. He slept that night in one of the reed shelters empty for itinerant laborers of the humblest sort, and was seen next morning wading in the lagoon, still barehanded, catching crawfish for his breakfast. 109

PART TWO

I ~HAT WAS it you thought, Yakouba, when you thought all day about it? What made you walk out that day? What made you decide to quit the Church? -I thought until my head hurt. If I try now to think everything I thought then, it'll start hurting again. Besides, I've told you. But Yakouba -I tell you I thought I'd quit, and quit! Haven't you ever thought you'd quit something and quit? I wish to heaven you'd quit now! Yes, I once threw my typewriter against the wall and smashed it some and knocked down a lot of plaster, but there wasn't any wet nurse like Salama to come along and take care of me afterwards, so I had to go back to it. And now it's brought me to this. You know I feel sorry for. her sometimes. I bet she sometimes wishes -So she told me this morning. But now let me see. So he stuffed his pipe, and shouted down to old Meteb the majordomo not to let anybody come up on the roof, and poured us another shot of Pernod, and leaned over 113

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO and tapped my cheek as he always did after we had quarreled, and began to try to tell me what he had thought that day when he had thought all day and walked away at sunset. "You see, Hacquard was dead," he began, "like Lavigerie, and I didn't know what to do." Trying to explain to me why he didn't know what to do, he told me first a lot of the obvious hard stuff, the politics stuff, the commonsense stuff, the chessboard stuff: He could go back to the Maison Carrie, force a showdown, confess publicly his guilt which was of the flesh and involved no mortal consequences by the Church's spiritual dogma, promise to go and sin no more, and probably go with the rank of a monseigneur. But go where'? Go where they sent him, bien entendu, and it was by no means certain, since all this had occurred, that they'd send him back to the Soudan. A monseigneur professor in a seminary in Belgium, par example? Or bishop of Bethlehem or Chateau-Thierry. They were equally far away from Timbuctoo. Go back to Algiers then, agree mutually to forget all about the advancement, and persuade them to let him return to his own region here as the simple missionary- monk he now was? There was nothing to that, though it might have been a good solution. The more he thought of itthinking what he'd do himself if he were one of the ecclesiastical governors-the more he was sure that if he went back to Algeria, which was the same as going back to France, whatever they did, they'd never send him back to Timbuctoo. Well, then, what about accepting that, and becoming 114

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO a monseigneur somewhere else'? It would be nice news for the jealous ones who had tried to hurt him, nice news too for the peasant family he'd almost forgotten on the banks of the Marne. There would be many agreeable things about it. And even though his two great protectors were now dead, he believed he could go up there and do it. What was to stop him? Maybe that was a solution. Well, there was one thing which perhaps ought to stop him, and that was his own honest conviction that he was not cut out, not fitted, to be a monseigneur. But maybe he was wrong on that, he argued speciously with himself; maybe, since they had planned to make him one, they knew more about that than he did. He was trying now to reconstruct for me, perhaps for himself too, thinking loosely aloud, the gambits, the mechanical pros and cons, of the game he played all day long with himself not five hundred yards from where we were sitting, thirty years before, with his destiny as the stake. Suddenly he asked for the matches, interrupted himself, knocked out his pipe and reloaded it, spat over the terrace impatiently, and said: "Look here, what's the use of all this reasoning at this late date? A man always does what he wants to do. Or, at least, he always ought to do what he wants to do. If you can't be true to yourself, you can't be true to anything. I have wondered sometimes if the failure to do it isn't the mysterious sin against the Holy Ghost which damns the soul forever. So listen to me, young man, and hear it, for all the rest I have been telling you and all 115

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO the arguments I racked my brains with that livelong day are twaddle: "I quit the Church because I didn't want to leave Timbuctoo and didn't want to give up women." He stopped and puffed furiously at his pipe, as if that was the end of it. But I knew he hadn't finished. Whenever he got himself stirred up that way it usually uncovered something deeper, something turned up with the plow, something which sometimes surprised him as much as it did me. I kept quiet, and presently he said quietly: "A city, or a woman. They are not a price for a man's soul, and I am not sure that I sold mine for them. They are not even a price for a career, and I am not even sure that it was for them I gave up honors. There was something in myself that had to do only with myself. The real choice I had to make, inside myself, was whether I would be a man or be a bishop. I don't know whether you understand me, or whether I can explain it. There was nothing dishonorable about becoming a bishop, nothing which would violate my manhood in becoming one. " He stopped this time definitely, leaving me to understand if I could. I think I understand somewhat, and I think others will understand somewhat too. The choice, as Yakouba made it, is not always easy, perhaps not always best, certainly not always profitable. To be a man or a churchman. To be a man or a rich man. To be a man or a governor. To be a man or a poet. A man or a great composer, virtuoso, or surgeon. A man or a corner groceryman for that matter. A man or a best seller. A man or a copyrighted name on a brand of soap, a book, or an d~t P-0 El4 1: jý

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO office. It is not easy to be both. It is not very easy to choose. It is not very easy to think about. Well, Yakouba chose to be a man, and now that he's told you all he can about his reasons for the choice, let's go back to the lagoon where he was catching crawfish with his bare hands for his breakfast, and have a look at him. I suspect, on top of everything else, that he had been unnecessarily theatrical about it. After all, there were some books and the silver-chased shotgun, not to mention fishing lines which would have immediately come in handy, and which were his intimate personal property; and he knew perfectly well, of course, that he could have slept in comfort and had a good breakfast and welcome in the commandant's house, or, if he was bent on severing all relations with whites as well as with the Church, an even better bed and breakfast in Ben Sidi Labas's palace. But no, they found him next morning as proud and naked as Diogenes, knee-deep in the water, grubbing under stones for shellfish, with no earthly possessions save the rags that lay on the bank. He was certainly starting again as a man, stripped down to a man's essentials, but he was being a bad boy about it, ham-acting more than a little, and cantankerous in the bargain. Pretty soon, imagining at first that the reverend father superior and future bishop- elect was simply full of jujube juice again, sergeants, then Lieutenants Cauvin and Vidal, finally the commandant, not to mention his friends among the native notables and the shocked, embarrassed brethren he had left at the mission, tried to coax him out 117

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO of the water and make him drink a cup of strong black coffee. He told them all to go to hell, but finally consented to have a talk with Ben Sidi Labas, after which, still bare-handed, carrying neither sack nor bundle, still with nothing but a ragged old native shirt to cover his nakedness, he wandered off again among the lagoons, apparently heading vaguely in the direction of Khabara. Ben Sidi Labas explained to the worried commandant and to others concerned that Yakouba, on top of the pride which made him quarrelsomely unwilling to accept food or shelter now that he had deliberately cut himself off from all means by which he might repay hospitality, was also suffering from a crack-brained idea (which, by the way, is a common mania with intellectuals) that he must now make a living with his hands. He had decided to become a fisherman, Ben Sidi Labas said, and suggested that the best thing to do was to let him alone until he became more reasonable. The idea was not as crazy as it sounded. Khabara was a fishing center. There were hundreds of pirogues, tons of dried fish moving continually in native commerce, and Yakouba was more than welcome aboard the boats of any of the native fishermen, who gladly let him help them with the work, share their food and houses until something definite was arranged. The proprietors talked with him willingly, and he made plans to go into the business. It was thus, in the house of one of the proprietors, that he first met Salama who was of the proprietor's family. She knew all about him, though he at that time knew 118

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO nothing about her. Salama wouldn't fit at all if this were fiction. In the first place she was no jungle cutie with skypointing breasts and flowers wreathed round her middle, and in the second place there are those who say that she knew exactly what she was doing when she married Yakouba. Yakouba was now approaching forty. He was no longer a "young man," and he wouldn't be an "old man" for many a long year to come. He was a man, tout court. And Salama was a woman. Be that as it may, she was not and had never been a cutie. She was no Josephine Baker either. Except that she was younger, I should say that she was a woman more in the category of, for instance, Marie Dressler among the whites, or of the late superb lamented A'Lelia Walker of Harlem. She was a magnificently strong, clean, healthy, full-grown negress with character and brains. I think it is probably true that she knew just what she was doing when she took charge of Yakouba, and I don't. think there is much doubt that the way it really happened was that Salama took charge of him. She promised to help him get properly started in the fishery business, sat in on the conferences, began to make herself indispensable to him at Khabara, though she had probably already made up her mind that he was not to go into the fishing business at all. She was a very handsome woman, though not in any sense a beauty. Yakouba slept with. Salama in her house on the first night and begot Diara. 119

11 ALAMA had been, for some time, "married" to a young white commandant at Gao, now fortunately returned to France, and had two extremely handsome young mulatto daughters. Evil tongues in the heads of people who remembered the Old Testament story of Lot's daughters in the cave wagged to the tune that when Yakouba married Salama he was marrying a harem, but this was only thirty years ago in Timbuctoo, not five thousand years back yonder in Sodom and Gomorrah, so of course there could have been no truth in that. What can be safely said without evil tongue, or evil pen, is that Yakouba, by this Moslem marriage which was afterward Christianly legalized with stamped papers and the commandant as principal witness, acquired three competent and personable females to look after his welfare and his household, of which Salama, I suspect, was from the first not only queen but boss. Before a week had passed she had moved the household, and Yakouba along with it, back into the center of Timbuctoo, to another of her houses, and they still say it was she, the black woman, who persuaded him to give up the idea of becoming a Niger fisherman and go and 120

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO talk sense with the white colonel over yonder. Do what your mamma, says, now! Do what your mamma says, Yakouba. Put on your best suit and go and see the nice gentleman, and be polite to him, and don't forget to say please, and he'll be sure to give you something nice. Mother always knows best. Coquine de bon dieu de bon dieu de bon dieu!!t Poor, defiant, brave Yakouba! Out of the frying pan into the stewpot? Was that going to be the way of it? Name of a black female pig! His mother had been his mother, and then the Church had been his mother, and now this black African sow he had never set eyes on until she had lain down with him for her sow's work, she was wanting to be his mother too. He had never been particularly obedient to any of his mothers. He had always tugged at the apron-strings, had always been self-willed and eccentric. And now for the first time, at nearly forty, complete freedom had been almost within his grasp. If Salama was going to be the way she was already starting to be, why didn't he tell her to go to hell and walk out on her? He was mad enough to do it. Why didn't he? They had such a row that the neighbors thought he was trying to beat her. But he didn't walk out. He swore at her a lot-and stayed. I don't get it, the why of it, either from his notes, or from the tirades they still have-both grown old-when he disobeys her now. It may not be Salama and Yakouba at all. It may be one of those discouraging things it's best not to believe. It may be that the strongest and most freedom-wishing boy, even when his beard turns gray, still needs a mother if only to defy and disobey her. 121

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Yakouba defied Salama for a little while, then agreed that it might not be a bad idea, and went to see the colonel. Worse than that, Salama had promised them that he'd eventually come. They were prepared for him. The trap was set and baited. They told him he could have more or less anything he wanted in the civilian end of it, but suggested that since the red tape might take a long time, they create a job for him as "special interpreter," with a salary that could be paid out of the military cashbox. , Salama had certainly known what she was doing when she took in the poor renegade who had only one ragged shirt and might have become a beachcomber. He was now a fonctionnaire, and she could buy him as many shirts as she thought he needed. Being a negress, she wasn't content until she eventually got him a uniform with a lot of gold braid, a sword, and a plumed hat and took him to be photographed in them, but this came a long time later, and he didn't keep them very long. I think Yakouba was already thoroughly scared, and that this accounts for the first thing he wanted to buy, which was not a shirt. He wanted to buy a house. He didn't want to live in Salama's house. He wanted Salama to live in his house, as if that could stop her from bossing it. So the weird bride and groom went house-hunting in Timbuctoo, as less weird brides and grooms go househunting in less remote cities after a premature honeymoon usually spent in some outlying waterside resort like Khabara. This whole central, revolutionary episode in Yakou122

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO ba's midlife can be made to lend itself readily to presentation as a magnificent and successful, if eccentric, gesture toward personal liberty, freedom. It has been handled in that way in magazine and special newspaper articles by Jean Kessel, Albert Londres, Charles Louis Royer, William Seabrook, Paul Morand, a bright correspondent of the Tageblatt whose name I have forgotten, and practically all the continental writers and journalists who have visited West Africa in this generation. It is always sure-fire time-copy for the bright boys in Paris and Berlin. Most of the pieces are pretty good, believe it or not, and some of them are quite convincing. Incidentally, I quite convinced myself while writing it to convince the Ladies' Home Journal and I had it in mind, I think, to write in the same convincing way when I started to write this. But look at the damned thing now. On Monday Yakouba was a monk. On Tuesday he was a free man, naked in the creek, catching crawfish. On Wednesday he had a pregnant wife, a civil service job, and went looking for a house like Monsieur Rikiki. Merde, Yakouba. What kind of story is this that I'm trying to write about you this time? You can see for yourself what's happening to it. Next thing you know, I'll be making people sorry for you. -Well, that would be all right. I'm always glad for a little sympathy. I've been told that your American women are tres sympathique. I won't mind if they feel sorry 123

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO for me. I might have married one of them if I'd gone as missionary to the cowboys instead of To hell with that, Yakouba, you're too old now. But what kind of a story is the story of your life, anyway? -How should I know, my friend? I'm the one who has lived it. I suppose the best thing to do at this point is just to tag along house-hunting with him, whether it makes a convincing pattern or not, and see what kind of a house he bought, and what seems to have happened to him next. But I hope, at least, that you are beginning to understand that I told the truth when I said that Yakouba wasn't easy to handle. I'm ready to swear to that, along with bishops, governors, military administrators, and Salama. The house isn't so very easy either. Several French colonial friends, who have "seen the animal at liberty on the roof," have teased me for calling Yakouba's house a "palace." Maybe I slid too naively into local idiomevery native notable's habitation is termed a palace in the Soudan, just as such private residences used to be termed "hdtels" in Paris and "palazzi" in Florence-but if I don't call it a palace, I don't know exactly what to call it. It would be ridiculous to call it a chateau, or a villa, or a mansion, and "house" simply doesn't seem to fit. You might as well call the old Spanish fort in Florida a house. Walls three feet thick, a courtyard full of donkeys and slaves, oil and water jars so big a man could hide inside an empty one like Ali Baba, a terrace on which 124

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO you could play tennis or give a barbecue, inner chambers to which no ray of light has ever penetrated- Of course, it is merely built of mud, of unbaked clay. But even so, I can't see that house is the word for it. If palace seems too pretentious in English, let's call it a mud palace. Mud palace seems just about right, but let's go along with them and have a look at it before we call it anything. Yakouba, swathed in fine white native robes and turbaned like the cadi, with embroidered red Morocco slippers, Salama with heavy silver bracelets on her arms and gold ones on her ankles, carrying an umbrella, followed by slaves and her two handsome daughters, turned left beyond the postoffice, past Mamadou the Tailor's house, thence into an exclusive native quarter not far from the bazaar. They were already a procession. In a few years they would be a tribe. The first place they looked at was the one they bought, the one in which they still live. It belonged to a relative of Salama. The price was fair. It suited Yakouba, and he may even have imagined he was choosing it. It had a characteristic Timbuctoo facade, massive, leaning slightly backward like a fort or tomb on the banks of the Nile, three stories high including the parapet around the terraced roof. Its doorway, flush with the street, was heavy wood studded with copper nails, and inside the wooden door was a leather curtain. You stepped direct from the glaring sand, across the threshold, into a cool, shadowy vestibule floored with hard clay. Outside, there were no sidewalks, no passing carts or carriages. Your street was sand of the desert, sacred to donkeys, dogs, pedestrians, 125

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO except on the rare occasions when a thousand loaded camels padded groaning beneath your window. The vestibule, widening into a reception hall with chambers giving off it and a steep earthen staircase on its left, narrowed again and led through to the interior courtyard in which were stalls, immense water jars, sheds, rooms for slavea, and the kitchen, with charcoal braziers and a sunken hearth with a spit on which a whole sheep could be turned. There was no oven, for the ovens are community property, on central street-corners in each quarter of the city. There were no fountains, flowers, or grassplots. The Timbuctoo courtyard is essentially a workplace. The Timbuctoo roof terrace, with its divans, rugs, taborets, is the pleasure and leisure place. The downstairs rooms, some large, some small, high-ceilinged, cool, bare, with Arab texts and decorations scratched on their plaster walls, would presently be hung by Salama with rugs and tapestries, garnished with ostrich eggs, bright leather cushions, hammered brass, daggers, bubble pipes, junk from the bazaar. She would transform the 'lareem," her own room and those of her daughters, into a very close imitation of a David Belasco-Greenwich Village oriental dive. Don't blame Salama for it. African negroes only do such things where they have been subjected for centuries to Arab influence. She was a Moslem negress and considered ostrich eggs in leather lace the height of elegance and luxury. The magnificent terrace, with heaven for its dome and the great Sahara for its back-drop curtain, not even Queen Victoria could have spoiled. It now has, in addition to divans and taborets, some striped deck chairs and 126

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO iron lawn furniture from Paris 'which suit it admirably. And the big upper main room, from which you walk out directly onto the terrace, was chosen immediately by Yakouba for his own. After all, it was going to be his house, wasn't it? It is now lined with books and piperacks, fitted with comfortable furniture, part European and part native, but with no gewgaws, the sort of librarystudy you might find in the Paris or New York home of a scholar who has lived in the colonies. Its rent was about a dollar a month. Its purchase price -nearly $2oo-was consequently high, but the land itself was the principal value, centrally located, so Yakouba signed a piece of paper and bought it outright on credit. He has lived in it ever since, begotten all his legitimate children in it, played on its floor with his grandchildren, enlarged it, entertained cabinet ministers and generals, princes and princesses both French and negro in it, gotten drunk in it, and danced on its roof with his gray beard waving. He will die in it when his appointed time comes. So now that you know more or less what it is like, you can call it a house or a hut or a palace or anything you choose. His first caller, Ben Sidi Labas, approved of it, but then Ben Sidi Labas approved of Salama too. She was not of his social caste, not of the cultured aristocrats, not of the notables, but he seemed to think she was just the woman for his friend Yakouba. 127

II I-F SALAMA was queen, boss, mother of Yakouba's household-and of Yakouba too in the opinion of most folks who know them-he had nevertheless gained in marrying her one specific sort of virile freedom which she never dreamed of trying to curtail. An honest Roman Catholic priest, in theory, can have no woman, while an honest priest of the Russian or Greek Orthodox Catholic Church can of course have one. So also can Protestant ecclesiastics. An honest American or Englishman, in theory, can have only one woman at a time. If he takes, or even wants, a second woman or a plurality, his one woman, with public opinion in her favor, complains, protests, frequently hales him into court where penalties involving his purse-trash and good name are severely inflicted; occasionally she shoots him in the stomach with a little pearl-handled automatic. An honest Frenchman or Italian, in theory, can honorably have two women simultaneously, to wit, his wife and his entitled mistress. But if he acquires a third woman or a harem, his wife and mistress both protest as bitterly as any Anglo- Saxon monogamistic wife, often join in trying to ruin him, with public opinion again in 128

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO their favor; and occasionally the wife, or it may just as likely be the mistress, puts arsenic in his coffee. Not so in Moslem Timbuctoo. The native citizenry, both male and female, would regard such attitude on the part of any decent wife as fantastic, deplorable to the point of insanity- The Koran law is explicit. It provides that a "just man" may have as many wives, or concubines, as he "is able properly to care for." Its application, in all places where the moral-social fabric remains Islamic, is usually founded on pragmatic economic sanction. The poor man generally has one wife. The well-todo man generally has three, or several. The rich man may have a hundred, whether he be priest or layman. There is, of course, no Moslem rule or slightest prejudice concerning race or color, since to them the Old Testament is as sacred as the Koran. It is equally a divine revelation. The superiority of the Koran, they hold, lies solely in the fact that it is a later revelation, more up-todate as it were. The Old Testament is, in a sense, the Father-Book. From it they derive not only their sanction for polygamy but many other rules of life. "The Song of Solomon," beautifully translated into Arabic, is one of their favorite erotic sacred poems-'"I am black but comely, 0 ye daughters of Jerusalem"-and one of their pet sacred stories is the tale of the trick God played on Miriam when she tried to make trouble in the family because her brother Moses had married a negress. They enjoy the rich oriental humor of it. It occurred, if you recall, when Miriam "spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman he had married." The anger of the 129

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Lord was kindled, "and Miriam became leprous, white as snow." * You can imagine the sumptuous belly laughter it must have afforded the black wife. And when sister Miriam humbly apologized, begging to have a little color restored to her own cheeks, the sequel has it that God gave her another dig before relenting. "If her father had but spat in her face, should she not be ashamed for at least seven days'?" asked the Lord, and answering his own rhetorical question, he ordered them to shut her up for seven days to be ashamed of herself, after which he turned her back to her natural color. Salama was a Moslem negress, proud and sure of her position. Yakouba has never actually married other wives, perhaps because he was "conditioned" to that extent, as the John Watson crew might say, by his French origin; or perhaps because he could have as many women as he wanted without marrying them, but certainly Salama would never have thought of preventing it, and has never interfered with his chasing-and catching-honeyed doughnut-makers' daughters. Salama and Yakouba quarrel sometimes like cats and dogs, but they never quarrel about that. So let's not quarrel about it either. I mean us, you and me, the reader and writer of this. I'm not trying to make out a case in favor of polygamy or miscegenation. And I haven't the remotest idea what might be a * From the King James version of the Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments: translated out of the original tongues; and with the former translations diligently compared and revised, by His Majesty's special command. Appointed to be read in churches. The parts here quoted are from Numbers i2: I; 12: 9; 12: 10; i: 14. 130

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO satisfactory solution of the sex problem in Europe and America. I am simply trying to tell you how it was, and is, with Yakouba and Salama in Timbuctoo. I don't want you to do anything about it. I'll be very much pleased if you simply find it interesting, as a phenomenon. There is definitely, however, less sex jealousy among Moslem women than among Christian women. It would be absurd to say that jealousy does not exist among them, but, generally speaking, a Mohammedan wife, particularly when she is superior and intelligent as was Salama, or to put it differently, when she is sure of herself, would never think of being jealous merely because her husband held sexual intercourse with another woman -or for that matter, with a boy. She might be violently jealous about a red shawl, a white camel, or an amber necklace, but that would be a horse of quite another color. What Salama was always jealous about-jealous as any New England housewife- was the cleanliness of her earthen floors, the quality and quantity of her spotless linen, the excellent abundance, and economy of her table. Yakouba, who has to ask Salama now for five francs when he wants to buy a new tin of European pipe tobacco, tells me that she took complete charge of the family economics from the first day. When he drew his first month's salary, in advance, he turned it over to her in a lump. Their first family dinner in the new mud palace was a banquet. Salama, followed by slaves with wicker baskets, did the marketing herself. Her majordomo, Meteb (now 131

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO grown old), carried a pink-dyed leather purse containing French coins and a purple kidskin sack containing a peck or two of cowrie shells. The franc has turned so many whirligigs since then that it may be better to explain the cowrie shells in terms of American money. One hundred cowrie shells-a small handful- equaled about a cent in the exchange of those days; oo cowrie shells-a big generous double fistful-came therefore to about a nickel. But since in those days you could buy a chicken for a penny, a small sheep for a dime, the native currency was less unwieldy than it sounds. Timbuctoo is, of course, a region rich in foodstuffs. It is rich in horned cattle of all sorts, poultry, fish, game, rice and millet, fruits and honey, grease and fats. The butter is liquid but excellent, tasting somewhat like fine Roquefort cheese, only stronger. The bread is of whole wheat, or other whole grain. It comes out of the ovens fresh, hot, deliciously crusted in loaves the size and shape of a Scotchman's tam-o'-shanter twice a day, at dawn and sunset. There is usually a little sand mixed in with the flour. Salama enjoyed her marketing, shouted and stormed and commanded in the new kitchen, and that night Yakouba sat down, at the head of the table, to what may have been the best dinner he had thus far ever eaten in his life. Ben Sidi Labas and Mohammed-ben-el-Mibrikate, who were among the guests, remember it likewise with pleasure after these many years. It began with dwarf watermelons and tender young cucumbers peeled and eaten like apples, followed by cold 132

W;-~~~~~-c4.-kp- lt ~ ~4i'i'4'4 ø%e& £ t u ~ . ~:ML~ 44x crý -i~L ~ 4a~ n~ n&tU*~Le.,L YAKOUBA FIRST MARRIED SALAMA BY THE MOSLEM RITES,, AND LONG AFTERWARD BY THIS CIVIL CONTRACT

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO capitaine, which is a sort of channel catfish, served with ginger and spices. The main dish was a foutou, a locally famous West African dish which merits to be adopted by the Ritz. Cut the stewed white meat of chicken or young kid in chunks about the size of dominoes or checkers. Superimpose upon a base of rice or millet. Make a hot sauce of fresh palm oil thickened with pounded roast peanuts, seasoned with salt, black pepper, and cut-up fresh red paprika pods, but do not serve the sauce separately. Pour it generously over the dish before it is brought to table. Salama made it with chicken, but kid or baby lamb is almost as satisfactory. She used chicken because she was following it with a mutton couscous. Yakouba seems to remember that there was also a course of meat-balls (into which "she might have put anything," he informed me petulantly when I asked for the recipe), and that the feast concluded with cakes and sweetmeats, furme, alfinta, alkatyi, etc. I asked him why Salama hadn't bought any doughnuts dipped in honey, and he said well, she hadn't, and that I could go to hell, which may somewhat offset the compliments I was paying her a while ago for never being a jealous female. But he brightened up and added that the colonel had sent a bottle of Burgundy, most of which he drank himself, the other guests preferring dolo, millet beer. Two details of this dinner may interest you, if you happen not to be among the many who have visited the region and seen similar repasts: 133

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO The men sat around a table with knives, forks, and spoons.* The black boss-queen and her young mulatto princesses hovered round the kitchen, helped with the service, and sat down to the leavings when the lords of creation went up on the terrace to smoke. Salama was a boss with a sense of decorum. She won't let Yakouba eat with her even now except on rare occasions when he's sick or something. She always makes him eat first. A banquet like that must have involved considerable expense, possibly as much as a half a dollar, not per person of course. Total expense. But fifty cents is a lot of money to spend in native Timbuctoo in one day. It was lucky that Yakouba had a job. It became a strange sort of job, because Yakouba was a strange sort of fellow. He was supposed to be special interpreter which amounted to being chief interpreter, but the very first time they tried it, it didn't exactly work out that way. All ordinary civil cases and disputes among the natives were handled, and still are, by the cadi. The military government occupies itself only with matters which are criminal or political, that is to say, tangled and for the most part crooked, just as in London or New York. The first case in which Yakouba acted as interpreter involved some gangster activities down Khabara way, the theft of loaded pirogues, a feud among fisher* The well-to-do black burghers of Timbuctoo, unlike the black people of the forest and unlike their Arab neighbors of the Sahara, have been eating from tables, using tableware frequently of gold or silver, sleeping on beds or couches, sitting in chairs, for fully five hundred years. They were already doing it before Columbus discovered America, before Mohammed was born. Timbuctoo was the metropolis of the Songhoi negro empire before the Arabs came. 134

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO men. It was heard before Captain Cristofari. Complainants and witnesses were examined, Yakouba translating clearly, faithfully, limiting himself to his duties as the rules required, and presently Captain Cristofari was prepared to give decision. Yakouba seemed to be suffering acutely, and the captain asked him what was the matter. "Well, the matter is," replied Yakouba, "that it wasn't that way at all. You see, so and so and so and so, as a Khabara man who works for Salama's uncle told me last night, and Yazin the goldsmith knows so and so, and Medli's daughter down by the mosque heard so and so from Ali the beef butcher so it couldn't have been that way." "Diable!" said Captain Cristofari, who was a Corsican and in a bad humor anyway because he had been recently forced to poison a pet panther he had tamed like a cat, "I can't call yott as a witness. You're the interpreter. Why couldn't you stay in your role'? I'll have to have the witnesses taken out and beaten now, and then one of them will complain to Dakar. No, I won't do that. Since you know so much, you might as well find out all about it. I'll adjourn court and reserve decision. When you've got it straight, come back and let me know." The case established a sort of precedent in the new uses of Yakouba-which soon became manifold and forced him to watch his step with great care, since he had one foot in the French fort and one in the heart of the native quarter. He has seemed to be able to handle it for all these years without ever betraying either faction, but it got him in some tight places, particularly at the first. On the whole, however, the people, the black notables 135

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO and the white rulers, congratulated him on his wisdom and honesty, continued to confide to him their secrets and troubles. As for the Peres Blancs of the mission-the lay brethren and the new father superior who had succeeded Yakouba-they were not saying anything. Old inhabitants, including the French merchants who have been there longest, tell me that the mission began to lose influence, go down, almost from the time Yakouba walked out of it. Of course, Monseigneur Hacquard's death, as well as the violent new anticlerical party which came into power and affected all branches of the French government including colonial administrations, may have accounted for the disintegration of the mission much more than the defection of one individual priest. But whatever the cause-alas for the drowned bishop's cathedral dream !-few people can remember today where the chapel stood. Its mud walls are dry dust. The mission is no more. The mission died. The monk who had shaken off its robes went marching and carousing on. 136

Iv IT wAs about this time that Salama-and Timbuctoo-nearly lost our friend Yakouba. At least, that's what they say, though I have my doubts. It is clear enough that the lion intended to bite him, but whether it would have eaten him afterward is problematical. Yakouba had been there for ten long years, and had never seen a lion. Timbuctoo is lion country. In fact, it is a lion's paradise-domestic flocks, cattle on a thousand flats, herds of gazelle, giraffe, and antelope, water in abundance, and a nice, clean bush to hunt in, with plenty of visibility. A lion is no good in the jungle. He can't pounce from trees like a panther, and you only have to look at his dumb, noble nose to know that it couldn't tell a salt mackerel from a rabbit. He can only tell it's a cow when he sees it. So he likes to hunt in the open bush or at water holes. Another reason why he adores the Timbuctoo region is that there are no Englishmen in it. But this doesn't mean you can walk out any morning and snap him with your kodak. The present postmistress has been there some six or seven years and is still waiting to see her first one, before she files her application to be transferred to the village in Normandy where her aunt lives. 137

THE WRITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO So there was nothing especially unusual about Yakouba's not seeing one, except that he seems to have had a passion to see one ever since he heard them roaring at night on the Senegal River, and was beginning to get sore about it. So when he began to mope around the house (I seem quite content to call it a house after begging your kind permission to call it a palace), Salama who was feeling good, with her belly proudly swollen by Yakouba's doings on that first night in Khabara, gave him permission to go and see a lion, but insisted that he shoot it. She insisted too that he arrange to go with Talbaut, a black-bearded fellow who had some sense and a pack of hunting dogs, and sent Meteb along to look after them. They also took a trader named Casanove, but left the dogs behind. With donkeys, a handful of negroes, spears, guns, umbrellas, provisions and Pernod to last them for several days, they crossed the Niger on barges and went down across the Soudan bush toward Lake Haribongo. They blazed away at everything except camels and other semi-domestic animals which might belong to somebody, and by the end of the second day they had bagged three bustards, a giraffe, some baboons, a hyena, a rabbit, and a big horse- antelope. On the third day they seem to have remembered, or perhaps Yakouba reminded them, that they had come to look for lions. They separated, hunting for lions, and Yakouba and Meteb were the first to return to camp, late in the afternoon. They had left some of the negroes to guard the camp which looked like a meat-market or a 138

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO massacred zoo. Yakouba, who was tired and sleepy, had a swig of Pernod and took a nap. The negroes napped likewise. When he awoke a little before sundown, and went around the tent to pour himself another drink, Meteb suddenly shouted, "Look out!" Yakouba jumped the wrong way and stumbled against an annoyed elderly lion which snarled and snapped at his leg. Lions, unlike the tiger and panther, seldom seek human society or meat that has been already killed, unless they are too old or decrepit to hunt for themselves. This one was quite large, but mangy, and apparently suffering from rheumatism or gout. At any rate, it was illtempered and rather slow on its feet. It snarled some more and moved sideways and was preparing to try again to bite Yakouba when Meteb said the Songhoi equivalent of "Shoo !" and lambasted it a good one across the backside with his spear-shaft. The snarl changed to a disgruntled yowl, and it loped disgustedly away. The excited negroes congratulated Meteb and commended his wisdom. If he had stuck the point of his spear into the lion, they explained to Yakouba, the lion might have really lost its temper and killed them all.* Talbaut and Casanove wanted to hear all about it when they got back to camp and saw the impressive footprints. Then: "But what about you, name of a pipe! Why didn't you shoot it ." * I thought the old man was spoofing me when he added this explanation, but Daniel Streeter, who specializes in debunking tall tales about the king of beasts, says it makes good sense. 139

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO "How could I shoot it? The gun was over there on the ground. I didn't have a gun in my hand. I had the Pemod in one hand, and a glass in the other. Maybe you could & shoot a lion with a bottle of Pemod! I confess it didn't occur to me." They gave the horse-antelope to the nearest village. The only thing they took back was the giraffe's skin which they gave to Salama. It was handsome but the flies had been in it and it soon began to stink, after the tanning, so she threw it out. Nobody cared. Yakouba had seen a lion at last, and everybody was pleased about that. They are still pleased about it. It was one of the first stories I heard about Yakouba, in Daviot's grocery store, the first time I went to Timbuctoo. 140

T HE MOST interesting thing that ever happens normally in Timbuctoo is the arrival of one of the great salt caravans from the mines in mid-Sahara. They come only twice a year, once in December and again in May. You keep watching for days from the rooftops. When the shouting begins, you strain your eyes and can at first see nothing. Gradually, far out in the desert, you distinguish faint, blurring movement on the horizon. An endless procession of microscopic camels is slowly materializing out there, out of nothing, as if it had come from nowhere. The silence of the caravan's actual arrival in the city is more impressive than the shouting was. The crowds stare silently. The men of the desert, walking wearily beside their tired camels, are silent too. They are haggard, strained, covered with gray sand-dust. Each camel has two, sometimes three, slabs of salt, the size and shape of tombstones, slung across its hump. They pass a tower at the city's northern edge on which the markers stand counting tallies. Nobody says much of anything. There is no sound of marching. The padded feet of the camels, the bare feet of the men, make no sound in the sand. As Leland Hall wrote after seeing it, "did a man turn his 141

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO back on the caravan, he lost it altogether, while it streamed on not fifty feet behind him." Then they split into groups, break ranks, unload, camp here, there and everywhere, go to the lagoons to water the camels, turn them loose to graze on thorn in the forest of Khabara. Timbuctoo and all its suburbs are overrun with camels and Arabs for a week. The cameleers sit or strut in the bazaars and tell tall tales. The caravan chiefs talk desert politics with the colonel at the fort, gossip past midnight on Yakouba's roof. One early autumn, after several years of such sights and gossip, Yakouba had a sudden notion he'd like to go and see where all the salt and camels came from. Salama told him it was a crazy notion and that he couldn't go, but Colonel Klobb, though he encouraged Salama to keep Yakouba from having too many crazy notions, took Yakouba's side in that particular disagreement, and Yakouba went. The colonel had a reason. No French column had penetrated the Djouf, the sinister, legendary central "desert of thirst" in which the vast Arab-owned, slave- worked salt mines of Taoudeni were located, and it would be an excellent thing to have a report on them. Furthermore, the French had not yet occupied Araouan, which was only ten days northward, directly on the route to Taoudeni, and Araouan was important as the converging point of all the great caravan routes from the north. The colonel had for some time been thinking of sending an expedition to Araouan and now decided to send Yakouba along with it. Whether they pushed on to Taoudeni, or returned first to 142

THE WHITE MONK OF TIM3UCTOO Timbuctoo and made a second expedition, would depend on circumstances. But before they got away, there was another domestic quarrel, this time at the fort. Salama had nothing to do with it, or Yakouba either. He merely heard about it on the night before the departure, dining with the officers at Fort Hugueny where he was to sleep and leave with the column at dawn. "Where was Captain Chardon!" everybody wanted to know when they sat down at table. He was sulking, it was whispered, because he hadn't been picked to lead the expedition. It was to be led by Lieutenant Pepoint of the spahis, and Captain Chardon was giving a dinner of his own over in his house near the rifle range, damning the colonel and disparaging the lieutenant. The bugle blew at dawn. The three white men, Yakouba, Pepoint, and a young under-officer named De la Lotte, rode fine Arab horses, followed by a hundred black spahi riflemen on camels, with extra camels carrying food and water for the horses-everything swanky, military, and impressive. "But before we had gone far," says Yakouba, "I began to suspect, in my humble civilian way, that perhaps Captain Chardon was right." It seems, to begin with, that Lieutenant Pepoint began explaining to Yakouba as they rode along that the desert was a place where people frequently suffered from thirst, and said that the thing to do was never to drink between meals. It dawned only gradually on Yakouba that Pepoint was not talking about water. It seemed that a case of absinthe and some champagne had been included 143

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO among the supplies. This surprised Yakouba who had brought along several bottles of his own as a precaution, but he was not necessarily displeased by it, yet. P~point explained that he had also brought along two cases of clear, filtered water which his own houseboy had bottled for them, to be used with the Pernod. In the late afternoon, all going happily, following the main caravan trail, they arrived at the well of Teneg el Haye, where they would camp and spend the night. As the spahis began tethering their watered camels, drinking from the same brackish well, and lighting their campfires to make couscous, the white masters were pouring out three generous doses of Pernod and adding the crystal-clear filtered water prepared by the lieutenant's houseboy. They clinked their glasses, took generous, thirsty gulps, stared at each other with bulging cheeks, and simultaneously spat it out in the sand. It tasted, says Yakouba, "like the vilest gargle a doctor could invent. A little alum is commonly used to purify water, but this tasted as if the boy had spilled the whole box in it. 'We poured out three new doses of Pernod and mixed it with water from the well which tasted only of goat. The tang which it gave the alcohol was startling but not repugnant. A piece of camel dung about the size of an olive floating in Pepoint's glass created the impression of a cocktail. Darkness was falling, and by the light of a photophore * we mixed some more." * A contrivance originating in French rural districts before electricity, and still used in Timbuctoo today. An ordinary candle is pushed down 144

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO I suppose they finally ate some of the spahis' couscous and slept, though Yakouba's notes don't mention it. The ellipse indicates that they must at least have slept, for he continues: "We awoke at dawn spitting cotton." They drank a lot of strong, unsweetened tea and continued northward. Of course they carried water in skins, but it was soon hot and stinking and when they reached the next well toward evening, the well of Ourouzil which has an overflow and pool, he says: "We were down on our hands and knees among the horses and camels." It has always been difficult for even the best of the French to get it through their heads that the Sahara is not a backyard in Passy. It is occasionally ridiculous, and occasionally heroic. It may perhaps explain why they are its greatest explorers. On the third day at dawn, they set out for the wells of Inalay, the furthest point which the camel corps had reached the year before in its reprisal raids against the Berbers. Late in the morning, they descried two men on camels crossing the trail a mile or two ahead, hurrying suspiciously toward the west. They sent spahis on horseback to catch and question them. They were Kounta fleeing from a d'Idnan rezzou (raid for loot and livestock). "Our spahis would have loved a battle. Lieutenant P~point would have loved it too. With a big raiding party in the neighborhood, there was a chance of it. into a tall, hollow candlestick and automatically fed slowly upward by a coiled spring, the flame being enclosed in a glass globe. A cyclone can't blow it out. 145

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Alerte! Scouts flung out fanshape, signals agreed on, rifles inspected, allons, enfants de la patrie!" They went forward all day without sight or trace of the rezzou. Reaching Inalay, they found a Berbouchi nomad encamped near the well. He was glad to see the soldiers. He had likewise been forewarned, but instead of trying to escape with his small drove of camels he had simply scattered them-they were nowhere in sight- and now blandly proposed that the military column turn camel-cowboys and help him round them up. He seemed to know his onions, and not to be treacherous. A man of the desert who contemplates treachery is seldom impudent, and this man was slightly so in a good-natured way. Where he got his information was a mystery, but he told them that the rezzou, led by Moussa ag Yend, had learned of the presence of the spahi column in the region and had turned eastward. "We were going into territory which he knew better than we did and needed all the help and information we could get from him. While our men were rounding up his camels, the military interpreter and I went to work on him. "He was willing enough, but we were hampered by our 'commandant,' Lieutenant Pepoint, who was determined to know how many kilometers it was to Bou Djebeha. Bou Djebeha was reported to be more than a well. It was said to be an oasis with a village. And our sacre P~point insisted on our making the Berbouchi tell us how many kilometers it was to Bou Djebeha. "Kilometers! I might as well have asked the nomad 146

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO if he slept well on railroad trains. But Pepoint insisted that we ask it just that way, "'Kem kilometres min hon ila Bou Djebeha?' "The brave Berbouchi was completely mystified. Ask my grandmother at Gland how many Pa &oat there are in a load of turnips? "'Ma naraf!' It was two wells; it was four cheeseballs and a handful of dates; it was a skinful of water because the first well might be dry; it was three and a half days with camels not in a hurry; it was two days if you pushed on horseback; but how many kilometers it was he hadn't the remotest notion. "At this point, however, the Berbouchi had an idea of his own. And it was perhaps fortunate, from then on, that our lieutenant was unfamiliar with the Berber dialects. If we could explain to him, the Berbouchi suggested, what a kilometer was, he might then be able to estimate how many kilometers it was to Bou Djebeha. Was it something, for instance, that you ate, or drank, or was it perhaps a litter? Or was it a sort of song which we chanted? "I looked solemnly at the military interpreter and saw that the military interpreter was looking solemnly at Lieutenant Pepoint, but less solemnly at me out of the corner of his eye. "All right, I thought. Maybe it was the idea of riding in a litter that put it into my head. I explained carefully to the Berbouchi that a kilometer was a suppository (all Arabs know what that is) which our commandant used for an affliction which made riding painful. 147

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO "The Berbouchi grinned and said with obscene joy, 'D'yent agi ha ta ha'ka n'yenne.' "'What's he saying? What does he say?' demanded Pepoint. "'He says,' lied the military interpreter, 'that it will take us about three and a half days, but that he knows nothing about kilometers.' "'Well, tell him he's an imbecile,' said Pepoint sharply. " 'Our commandant requests us to inform you that your grandmother had no nose,' I said very solemnly to the Berbouchi in his dialect. 'We were now beginning to understand each other admirably, and he riposted instantly, " 'In that case, I will make an ideal guide for him. Tell him that I will conduct the column personally to Bou Djebeha, and we can all keep tally on the kilometers as he inserts them you-know-where.'" If this was a fair example of Yakouba's methods as chief interpreter to the military lords of Timbuctoo, one begins to wonder how he has held his job these twenty years. But perhaps a closer analysis of it, on the contrary, will explain why, for the twisted dialogue had accomplished its paradoxical purpose. They had permitted, nay invited, the cynical nomad to join in their derision, but had won him over to the service of the commandant who was the unsuspecting butt of their jokes. "The Berbouchi ended by guiding us all the way to Araouan," Yakouba says, "apparently for his own amusement. He talked for the whole five hundred miles of noth148 .t.t tip: 'Ni vi 4. Jr ~6

I tl . t Above: YAKOUBA ON A HUNTING TRIP. Belo : YAKOUBA WITH HIS MEDERSA ' ~ii7 I' 4t IY

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO ing but the commandant's anal orifice, and our laughter was sometimes embarrassing to explain. He was the most obscene fellow I have ever met." That he was faithful as well as competent was proven before they left the camp where they had found him. When he volunteered late in the afternoon as guide, they decided to push on by moonlight, but discovered that the hobbles of many of their own camels had been cut and that the beasts had wandered. In less than a half hour the Berbouchi discovered that the trick had been done by three cameleers they had hired back in Timbuctoo, adherents of the chief who controlled the Bou Djebeha region, and who had been instructed to prevent the column, if possible, from pushing further into the territory. The old chief had too much sense to fight a well-armed column, and knew that a palaver would do no good, but had adopted a policy of hampering and obstructing the French as much as possible. Approaching Bou Djebeha toward the end of the third day, they had a queer experience, queer that is, for the Sahara. Yakouba assures me that they ran into a thick fog. It wasn't a sandstorm, he says, or anything like a sandstorm. There was no wind blowing. It was a heavy, damp, yellowish mist, he says, a "regular London fog such as you read about in the police romances." I have never seen a fog in the heart of the Sahara, or in any other desert for that matter, and Yakouba is sometimes a liar. But he seldom lies except for a purpose, usually humorous, and this fog leads to nothing. So I suppose they must have run into it. I asked him if it mightn't have been the Pernod, but he swears that both he and 149 THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Pepoint, who remained the best of friends in French, had been "drinking most abstemiously" since they left Teneg el Haye. At any rate, he says, they plodded for an hour or so through a fog so thick they couldn't, see the camelmounted spahis fifty feet behind them, and finally the Berbouchi insisted the whole column halt. They must be very close, he told them, to Bou Djebeha, and if they missed it they might go on to Marrakesh where "it was true he had an uncle, but it would take a couple of months to get there and he feared the commandant didn't have a sufficient supply of kilometers." Presently they heard voices coming out of the fog from the left. They shouted and were answered from Bou Djebeha. It proved to be an oasis village with twenty wells, date groves, and a kasbah, which is a sort of fortified storehouse, corresponding in use to the "blockhouse" of early American settlers. The people were friendly or indifferent, but said the caid was "on a journey," and as it was doubtful if not actually hostile territory, Pepoint, with Yakouba and the white marechel de logis, established headquarters in the kasbah, with the spahis camped around it. Their animals were in need of rest, and they spent an unpleasant three days there. Yakouba remembers the water principally. It was full of magnesium, he says, so that soap wouldn't lather and you couldn't wash in it, "but on the contrary it was too efficaceous internally. The Berbouchi asked us the riddle of why the men of Bou Djebeha never wore pants and we all knew the answer. It was because they had to take them down so often." To counteract the diarrhea, they drank fresh warm 15o

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO camel's milk. Yakouba didn't like it, but says, "I confess that drinking the fresh milk of a cow has always filled me likewise with a certain repugnance." Okay, Yakouba. Leave it for calves and babies. One of your own begetting will soon be nursing at Salama's majestic nipples, but milk is no proper drink for bearded bulls. "Trinquez!" The ultimate oracle for the Abbey of Thelema wasn't written on a milk bottle, if I remember the other monk correctly. They were three days more on the road--or three nights rather-of bare, flat, sandy, moonlit nothingness. Approaching the Araouan oasis in the dawn, they descried on the dunes, still three miles away, a vast crowd of people, and since the distance was too great to be sure whether they were armed or not, friendly or unfriendly, they stopped and sent scouts forward with a bugler. "Our sacr6 commandant, Lieutenant Pepoint, had instructed him to sound a warning blast if there was trouble! If, for instance, they cut his throat, he was then to blow his bugle. We waited for a half hour. The scouts and bugler, welcomed by the sightseers, had gone on into the city. The crowd began waving to us. The Berbouchi said it was all right. Pepoint swore a little, and rode nobly at the head of his column, saluting the crowds who cheered him. "We were received marvelously. If the chiefs who lived by raiding down yonder didn't like us because we spoiled their sport, it was just the opposite here. Araouan had prospered since our columns cleared the route and made Timbuctoo a safe market. Beneficent self-interest! Strongest pillar of friendship! Surest guarantee of gen151

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO erous hospitality! The notables and cadi did us honor, offered us their houses, provided abundant food for us, for our horses and camels. We would have a good report to make to Colonel Klobb. We were sincerely welcome. There might still be dissidence in territory along the route, but the French tricolor was welcome in Araouan." A Gargantuan incident grew directly out of this wholeheartedness. There was food in abundance, but a famine of fuel for the moment in Araouan. Its principal combustible was camel dung, dried and stored, from the great passing caravans which always halted there. It was now November, toward the end of the long summerautumn interval between caravans, and even the notables were subsisting on raw and cold fare until the December salt caravan assembled. It was the grown son of the old cadi-he later became mayor of Araouan in turn when his father died-who made the large gesture. He tore the massive nail- studded door from his own house, forced his astonished slaves to chop it into firewood, and presented it to the Frenchmen so that they could have a hot dinner. Such a gesture would be merely theatrical near a forest or lumber-yard, but here it was in the authentic grand manner. The wood to replace it, if it ever were replaced, must come by camel from the Volta or the Atlas Mountains, some thousand miles away. Meanwhile Yakouba had been recognized as "the white marabout of Timbuctoo" by caravan merchants who had visited the free clinic down yonder, and after dinner a delegation of local marabouts came to visit him, smoke, offer sweetmeats containing hashish, while they 152

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO discussed abstruse metaphysical problems, seated in a circle on mats in the sand. Islamic pundits possess an endless gamut, as our schoolmen did in the Middle Ages, of fantastic puzzlers, some of which are more startling than the riddle of how many angels can dance on the point of a needle. One of their favorites is whether or not that great warrior, the Archangel Michael, has balls at all, and if so, to what heavenly use he puts them. The problematical navels of Adam and Eve are dismissed as less interesting, being useless in any case, but there is a whole series of speculations as to whether or not angelic beings eat and drink, and if so what; and, if yes, what may be the nature of their urine and excrement. Is it angelic, celestially perfumed, or does it stink? Yakouba tells me that he and the marabouts of Araouan considered this problem exhaustively by induction, beginning with that of camels, fish, the higher and lower animals, birds, new-born babies, beautiful ladies, vampires, devils and holy saints, agreeing that that of carnivorous cats and Beelzebub was unquestionably the sharpest, affecting the nostrils as a shrill whistle affects the ear, and concluding almost unanimously that that of the angels was like water-lilies, nenuphars. cc Slightly faded lilies," proposed Yakouba, but the local pedants were not immediately willing to concede it. After some discussion, they said: "Well, slightly faded, if you insist, but only very slightly-and not decayed at all." Said the old man to me, chuckling over how he had 153

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO forced them, with abstruse arguments backed by holy writ, to concede the amendment: "If you are really fool enough to write this nonsense for Christian readers, I hope you'll have the grace to protect us by pointing out that alimentary and gastronomic problems of the hereafter have been the legitimate concern of all religious thinkers and writers. The nectar and ambrosia of Mount Olympus, the flagons of mead and roasted oxen in Valhalla, the milk and honey of our own dear heaven. Tons of books have been written about it, and if what the books say is true, tons of dung must have fallen in the Elysian fields. And as for Saint Michael's couilles, if any, they present, of course, a proper interest for serious theologians. Such things are a bit out of fashion today, but the great Fathers of the Church were deeply concerned with them. It was the pious Giovannuiccio of Cyprus, if I am not mistaken, who spent many years pondering on whether or not the hymen of the Blessed Virgin Mary remained intact during the delivery of our Lord and Savior, or whether " "All right, all right, Yakouba, I don't know whether I'll be fool enough to write it down or not, but if I do, I think we'd better cut it short right here, and get along to something safer." He was in an excellent humor, for once. He enjoyed reminiscing about this trip to Araouan. He liked the door particularly, and recollecting again the roaring dinner- fire they had made with it, he bethought him of another detail. "The final question posed by the marabouts," said he, "was in a different category. It was simply, how do 154

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO matches light? But it wasn't so simple to answer because the Arabs have lost their once famous knowledge of physical science and chemistry. If I spoke in terms of sulphur and ignition, I risked losing face, as P~point had lost face with the Berbouchi when he insisted on talking in terms of kilometers. I was hard put to it. I am not sure whether my answer occurred to me spontaneously, or whether I had heard it somewhere, but it sufficed, and I was applauded gravely. These men, you understand, were learned in a sense. They could recite the Koran forward and backward, but they still believed in magic and hijabs. I explained that the hard, red head of the match was a stone prison. The fire was imprisoned in it. I make a hole in the wall of the prison by scratching it against something hard, and the fire escapes. They nodded their heads. Solomon had imprisoned djinns in stone jars in the same way. When the jars were broken, or opened, the djinns escaped, frequently with fire and a lot of smoke. They patted me on the shoulder, offered me another piece of hashish candy, asked me for more tobacco, and since it was now growing late, proposed to provide me with a choice of concubines." They remained in Araouan for several days. Yakouba details a number of plausible reasons in his notes to explain why they did not push on to the salt mines in the north, but I think the plain truth is that, protective of his own hide like all good adventurers, he felt it would be safer to wait until later and go into that dangerous territory with a leader who was less of a wild goose than Pepoint. In any event, since pushing further had been left to their own discretion, they agreed to go home. 155

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO "I think the notables were relieved by our departure," says Yakouba. "We were out of firewood again, and they were looking askance at their doors, afraid they might soon be forced by hospitality to follow the example of their future cadi." Returning toward Timbuctoo, Yakouba slept on his camel and "dreamed of red roofs, green shutters, a little garden of flowers and a bench in the garden with a priest sitting on it." My friend is as full of prejudices as anybody, and has little patience with Doctor Freud. He prefers Daniel. But I badgered him into talking about his little dream. He agreed that it was probably a village parish garden back yonder in the valley of the Marne, and that the cure was the cure' who might have been Yakouba if Yakouba had never left the peaceful valley to go wandering over seas and mountains and deserts. But what he wouldn't agree to was any implication of the wish-fulfillment idea. He insisted that when he woke up on a camel in the middle of the Sahara, he was "in a better place." I believe he was telling the truth, but I would like to venture a fumbling guess that if wish-fulfillment must be implied in such a dream by the new psychology, his subconscious regret was atavistic rather than personal. Yakouba's forebears had been, since the time of Charles Martel, that is, for nearly a thousand years, peasants in that valley of red roofs, green shutters, little gardens. And just now he was not only in the Sahara which would surely have surprised his ancestors, as it actually had surprised his living relatives, but about to be lost in it, which they would even more certainly have disapproved. 156

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO For on the third day, their friend the Berbouchi dozed on his camel too, and it was only toward sundown, when the oasis of Bou Djebeha (which should have been quite close at hand) mysteriously failed to appear over the horizon, that they discovered they had been following a sleeping guide for many hours. In every direction it was just blank, flat sand-desert, without trail, scrub, or thorn- bush. The sun had sunk, and night was falling. "Ask the imbecile where we are," shouted Lieutenant Pepoint. "Tell him I'll put him in prison tell him it's a prison offense to sleep while guiding a military column but make him tell us where we are." The military interpreter looked sorrowfully at Yakouba, and Yakouba said to the Berbouchi: "The commandant has mentioned your grandmother's nose again and requires that you tell him where we are." This time the Berbouchi was bad-tempered, knowing himself to be at fault, and replied angrily, "It is an ill fate to be guided by a sleeping guide, but a worse fate to be commanded by a fool. Please tell the commandant that if he were not a fool he could see for himself that we are nowhere." "He says," interpreted Yakouba, "that it would be prudent to camp here and await the dawn." So they camped in the center of nowhere and gave all the water to the horses. A man can go three days and nights, or four if need be, black-tongued and swollenmouthed, but a horse in the desert must drink or die. When sunrise came, the Berbouchi, who had been sniffing all night, studying the stars, sifting and examining 157

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO the sand, confessed that he was still lost. They were in an unpleasant if not dangerous predicament. Of course, if they continued south, by sun and stars, they could reach the Niger in seven days, but if during the interval they came to no well or oasis, they would never reach the Niger. Everything depended now on the Arabs, on the native desert men. In such cases a man who has been zero in the caravan, less than nothing, may emerge as savior. It happened in this case. The Berbouchi found in the convoy of burden-camels an old cameleer named Mabou who had lived most of his life in the oasis of Bou Djebeha. The old man would not be hurried. He tested the wind, wandered a mile away from camp, sat down, lay down for a time, came back with his head bent, walking in circles, and said, pointing north of west, "Bou Djebeha is there, not far distant, but just how many hours I cannot say." In an hour the kasbah was visible; in two hours they were drinking their fill at the wells, watering the beasts, filling the goatskins, now safe on the main caravan route seven days north of Timbuctoo. Such men cannot tell you exactly how they do it. I have questioned them in similar cases and have heard them questioned by equally curious native sheikhs who generally reward such a man with gifts which will keep him in comfort for life. There is no superstition or magic connected with it, nor do they claim clairvoyant powers. Nor have they any secret method to conceal. They will try to tell you. What they tell you is always equivalent to what the honest European or American means when 158

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO he tells you that he has had a profound "hunch" about something. Sheikh Mitkal Pasha el Fayez, hereditary overlord of the Beni Sakhr in the north Arabian desert, whose grandfather entertained Lady Esther Stanhope, whose father quarreled with Doughty, who himself helped Colonel Lawrence dynamite the railroad south of Damascus, and who knows the desert as a Cabot or Lowell knows Back Bay-the kind of knowledge you must begin to acquire at least a hundred years before you were born-shook his head tolerantly when I suggested (when we were lost for a little while in 1924 going toward the Nefud) that odor or even fainter impalpable qualities of the atmosphere might account for it. "My father was of the opinion," he said, "that it is like the domestic cat or carrier pigeon, except that some men, usually not very intelligent, possess it, while others do not." I suppose all of this should have been in parenthesis, or perhaps not dragged in at all, except that Yakouba was interested in it too, and being still a good Catholic, knelt and gave thanks for them all and vowed for his own part a dozen candles to the shrine of Our Lady in the little mud mission where he would never say Mass again. During the week that followed, they kept to the caravan trail and nothing happened except that, with sure wells at every camp, he and Pepoint drank up the rest of the Pernod and repatched their somewhat strained friendship. Late on the sixth afternoon, however (if you have never made a long caravan journey yourself, you may 159

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO imagine that fate or luck made this jaunt unusual, but I assure you that no real camel transit in a real desert is ever monotonous), they got lost again. They were expecting to camp at the well of El Adjou, less than twenty-five miles north of Timbuctoo-they were practically home and completely safe with the whole Niger rolling less than a day's ride distant, and should already be entering the zone of thorn-scrub pasture-when the Berbouchi came galumphing back on his annoyed camel to say that he didn't like the looks of things. He had come this way to Timbuctoo a hundred times, he said, and it didn't look like this. The commandant and Yakouba weren't seriously worried, but the former, like the Berbouchi's camel, was distinctly annoyed. It wouldn't bring him any compliments if he led the column into a lagoon or swamp when they were already almost within sight of the fort. This time, it was mysterious. The spahis and cameleers chattered and wondered. The Berbouchi slid down from his camel and again sifted some handfuls of sand. "Ho!" It was dumb and simple. The scrub and pasture had been burned over, he said. It was all right. In less than half an hour the tree by the well poked above the horizon, and by dark they had a score of little campfires lighted, using the last of their tea, sugar, and tobacco. They were home again, relaxed and glad of it. Indeed, they had news of Timbuctoo that same night. Shepherds attracted by the campfires came and told them that, only two days before, a rezzou for slaves and cattle, penetrating all the way to the river disguised as merchants and then running with their booty, had been 16o

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO crossed by Captain Chardon and a camel corps squadron, five raiders killed, the slaves recaptured, and the cattle saved. When they rode into the city next afternoon, welcomed back by Colonel Klobb, Salama's majordomo Meteb, who said she couldn't come out herself because she was about to have the baby; Ben Sidi Labas and other notables seeking the latest news from Araouan; the honey doughnut-maker's daughter and a chorus of various other female friends of Yakouba, Pepoint, and the spahis, they learned that the disguised raiders had pushed their effrontery to the point of entering Timbuctoo openly and trafficking in the bazaar. Some of the slaves recaptured from the rezzou had been identified by local merchants who had sold them. The only other news was that Salama was in labor with her first baby by Yakouba. Yes, there was one more item for the personal column of the Timbuctoo "Home News-Star-Gazette" which hadn't yet begun publication, and probably never will: The Berbouchi, who had disposed of his beasts at a good profit in Araouan, rented a house in the street where Yakouba lived, set himself up as a merchant of camels. He is now almost a "notable." In 1929, when I wanted to visit a Tuareg camp north of the city, it was he who supplied me with camels; and it was he, one night on the roof with us, who told me some details of this ancient excursion party which Yakouba had either forgotten or intentionally left out. 161

VI IS is the chapter of Diara. She must have a whole chapter to herself though it be a short one. In this ..,chapter she will be born and receive gifts. She will be the first-born of the progeny of Yakouba and Salama. Presently Salama will be bearing Youssoufou, Paul, Asher, Marcelle, Adah, Seir, Charles, Bashemath, Henri, Louis, Nabaroth, Gertrude, Bilhah, Issachar. Some of them will be jealous of Diara, for they will receive only paragraphs and fewer gifts. Salama was in labor when Yakouba returned from Araouan, and the gifts had already begun to arrive at the house, but he was not permitted to see them. He was sent up on the roof where he sulked and smoked his pipe. The French doctor from the fort had offered his services, but Salama would have none of him. She was shut up with old Noumou, the Toucouleur midwife. Toward three in the morning, Yakouba heard a faint miauling "like a kitten," and after a while Meteb and Noumou brought him his baby, naked on a leather cushion which had been covered with a napkin. It was a little girl, plump, pink, mulatto, with curly, not crinkly, hair, kicking its legs, and still miauling lustily. It was a splendid baby. It was a bad argument against 162

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO miscegenation, but the dice had been loaded in its favor. Salama and Yakouba, apart from their diverse pigmentation, might have won first prize at a German eugenic congress. Of the fact that the child was a mulatto, I cannot imagine that Yakouba, then or ever, gave a hoot. In case Mr. Lothrop Stoddard or readers in Atlanta object on principle to its being a mulatto, I would beg them to remember tolerantly that Yakouba was a Frenchman, and that very few French people give a hoot. I am sure that some readers who may object to its being a mulatto feel in their hearts that the French, like Italians or Greeks, are not quite white either. So I hope it will be all right. As for myself, I hold no brief for mixed marriage. If you want to argue about it, or get mad about it, get mad at Mr. H. G. Wells (blond, mustached, Anglo-Saxon, Nordic Britisher), who wrote and said the other day he was convinced that the most wicked, evil thing in the world today was racial prejudice, color prejudice. But please don't get out of patience with me because Yakouba's baby was mulatto. I have an intense dislike for all Armenians. I shouldn't have dragged myself into this at all. This chapter was to belong to the baby. It was the first new-born baby Yakouba had ever seen, of any color. Meteb tells me he chuckled, poked it with his finger, said it looked like a monkey, and asked if they always came as wrinkled and small as that. Thus the former P~re Blanc of the Augustinian Order of the Missionary Monks of Our Lady of Algiers of Africa became a pere, tout court. 163

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO The baby was taken back to Salama's breast, and Yakouba went downstairs to look at the presents. The officers of the garrison had sent a silver mug. Ben Sidi Labas had sent a panther skin and a live guepard. Madame the wife of the commandant had sent a spoon with an image of the Eiffel Tower on its handle. The bachelors' mess had sent a doll bought from a Syrian merchant; Yazin the goldsmith, a necklace of semiprecious stones from the Tomb of the Kings at Gao; Mohammed-ben-el- Mibrikate, ostrich plumes; Salama's uncle at Khabara, a basket of fresh fish. The Berbouchi came with a chapter of the Koran sewn in a greasy amulet, fit gift for the daughter of a marabout, and told Yakouba that the camel-men were saying that Colonel Klobb was thinking of sending another expedition to the salt mines soon. Salama's health was perfect. In another fortnight, Yakouba had begotten Youssoufou and was on his way to Taodeni in mid-Sahara. 164

VII UR LEGENDARY .(though now to us familiar) "White Monk of Timbuctoo," who is himself the living protagonist of many myths in the Niger region, exploded one of the Sahara's most persistent myths when he went to Taodeni. The outside world, Arab, negro, and European alike, had believed for centuries that Taodeni was built of salt, that the walls of the city, the walls of all its houses, were built of rock-crystal salt. It was a fine myth, plausible, yet worthy of Sinbad the Sailor; possessing a certain Kubla-Khanish quality if you thought of it in terms of sunset or moonlight; a certain Alice-in-Wonderlandish quality if you thought of it in terms of seasoning your salad by rubbing it against the dining room wall-so that Yakouba was disappointed when he discovered that the pleasing legend was "not precisely true." He left Timbuctoo early in December with an entire squadron of the real camel corps commanded by Captain Laverdure, competent leader and veteran Saharan, serious. They were to bring back the big azala, the winter caravan which, it was reported, would have more than ten thousand salt camels, joined probably by some thou165

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO sands of others with richer merchandise and dates from Morocco. The salt camels, belonging to many tribes and merchants scattered in the oases of the southern desert, were to assemble at Bou Djebeha, a few days north of Timbuctoo. It was a great gathering of the tribes, and when the empty caravan streamed out for the long traverse guarded by the camel corps and many goumiers, native mercenaries armed with rifles, Yakouba says it was "like Xenophon's army ten miles long," which, of course, is merely a manner of speaking. It may have been nearly one mile long. His notes of the actual journey are brief and colorless, perhaps because he had been over part of the route before, perhaps because his friend the Berbouchi hadn't come along to share the fun, perhaps because he never became pals with Captain Laverdure. I myself have never traveled in the company of a great caravan, and am not very good at describing things I haven't got the feel of at first-hand. But such a caravan is something, and it seems a pity to just write that "after three weeks," or whatever it was, "they arrived in Taodeni." So since the old man hasn't done it and I can't do it, I want to quote a compact paragraph of Leland Hall's, which I think does it extremely well: "One is blistered by the sun and parched, and there is not water for baths; but the nights are cold and mysterious and grand. When they come tO a halt at the end of the day, all along the line a thousand tiny fires are lit, each of only a few twigs. Water must boil for the tea, 166

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO the sweetened tea on which almost solely the Arab may live and work for days among the vast sands. Swiftly night falls over the camp. The fires gleam like fine points of light and for a little while there is the tinkle of discreet music here and there. Then, as by the wave of a wand, the fires are extinguished, and in the great starlit space around, the men, wrapped in their blankets against the bitter cold, lie down and sleep, motionless on the sands. Only the grunt of the camels breaks the silence. But the guard is on watch. For, ancient as the memories of the route itself are the stories of fierce pillagers who lie in wait along it." * This is really all I can do to fill the gap. I don't know what, if anything, special happened on the journey. After three weeks, or whatever it was, they arrived at Taodeni. They approached the flat city, which was walled like a feudal stronghold, over salines that were "deader than dead sand," no oasis, no scrub, no pasture, no animals. People could live there at all only because there was a big, deep well inside the walls and a fine oasis, Telig, twenty miles eastward, with date groves, fountains, splendid pastures, from which food, supplies, and extra water were easily transported. The whole caravan and camel corps went on to Telig. The shrunken camels which had had no water at all for nearly a week would rest, graze, and drink their fill. The men likewise. Laverdure and Yakouba didn't bother to go. Stuff could be sent back to them. They had come * From Timbuctoo, by Leland Hall, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1927. 167

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO to see Taodeni. So they stayed there. And Yakouba's notes pick up again. The city was entirely walled, compact, flat, rectangular, and had one gate. The houses were packed together like city blocks, like children's building blocks, cubes, walls touching, streets so narrow that a pack-donkey sometimes got stuck in them. They seemed to be inhabited mostly by women and children. The men were all at the mines. The buildings were gray, of a hard substance which might have been salt. Yakouba broke off a piece of crumbling wall and tasted it. It tasted like salt all right. "C'est pas de la merde, Madame, c'est du chocolat." We have a classic quote for it in English too. "It looks like s-t, it smells like s-- t, it tastes like s-t, it must be s-t." But it wasn't salt. It was sun-baked clay, salty as brine, but clay.* Always take your myths with a grain of salt, says Yakouba. Life was hard in Taodeni, but the caid and his family were rich. They had a handsome "summer place" in the oasis and a palace somewhere up in Morocco. He provided everything that was needful for the captain and Yakouba. Next day they visited the mines. This was some thirty years ago, and the mines were a mile or more west of the city. Today they are a couple of miles to the southeast. The city hasn't shifted. The miners follow the vein, and work toward the rising sun. The vein is triple, three veins of rock-mineral salt, * You can get clay, or bakeable building earth, by digging down a few feet anywhere in the Sahara. Our oceans of water are three or four miles deep, but the ocean of sand is seldom more than ten or twelve feet deep. 168

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO which run like gigantic crystal serpents about fifteen feet beneath the surface of the desert,' the three of them superimposed in the Taodeni region, separated by thin strata of red, greasy clay. They are owned ancestrally (nobody asks why) by the caid, just as lords and barons owned whatever lands were valuable in Europe when peasants were serfs. Each miner has a concession of about fifteen-by-fifteen feet lateral surface, that is, a surface the size of the floor of an average-sized room. A space of twenty feet or more separates each concession. The miner begins then by digging an isolated square hole of his own down about fifteen feet through the desert's floor, until he reaches, cleans, and sweeps the crystal floor which is the top of the first vein. He now discards his pick and shovel. With hammer, drill, and a lever, he cuts and pries out a block about four feet long, two feet wide, and the depth of the vein itself, usually about two feet, under which occurs the first thin stratum of clay. This block, shaped like a small coffin, too thick and heavy for transportation, he splits laterally along the vein, as slate is split, into two blocks shaped and sized like old-fashioned tombstones, transportable, each weighing eighty to a hundred pounds. Of course he breaks a lot of it, particularly getting out the first blocks. The broken rock-salt is sacked and sent south, along with the bars, to Timbuctoo from which it is distributed by merchants and peddlers throughout all West Central Africa. My Guer6 cannibal friends salted their food with it, as do tribes on the Congo and Cavally who have never heard of the Sahara. 1 See Appendix, p. 265. 169

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Underneath the third vein are pockets of salt water. Until he has finished with his concession, the miner may have trouble with this. But when he has exhausted his concession, before he is granted another, he must dig on until he taps a water pocket which will completely inundate the truncated vein. "So that the poor fellow must be in a quandary," says Yakouba, "praying for water as Saint Augustine prayed for chastity, 'Please, 0 Lordbut not yet.'" In fifty years, say some, in a hundred years say others, the inundated vein reforms, so that the little grandsons of caids yet unborn may sit in the shade and drink tea while unborn miners dig out the salt for them and inundate it all over again, so that in still another hundred years or so, world without end, Amen. Reds, communists, and wobblies, please note. You really ought to send a walking delegate to Taodeni. I was thinking of Upton Sinclair who was experimenting with spiritism the last time I saw him, and wondering whether he had ever heard from Sacco and Vanzetti, and if so if they had told him whether, when the switch was thrown, it was physically painful or so sudden that they felt no pain, and had forgotten all about the myth which Yakouba had visited Taodeni to investigate. It would have been a pity if I had forgotten it entirely, for he found the real explanation at the mines, and the rational explanation of a myth is often more interesting than the myth itself. The explanation was that the workmen in the mines didn't go home to lunch. They ate their lunches at the mines and took a nap. The salt splits thin like slate, and 170 THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO to protect themselves from the sun they had all, from time immemorial, built themselves little huts, little houses of salt-crystal slate, so that there was asortof "city" built of salt, though I gather from Yakouba that it looked more like a camp, more like a petrified version of "All quiet along the Potomac" or "Tenting on the old camp grounds." Yakouba says that's the way it was. So if anybody ever asks you whether the houses or Taodeni are built of salt, you can say yes or no, or even "yes and no," if you are that sort of awful person. Before the caravan got loaded and started back, it was Christmas, Reveillon de Noel. The captain and Yakouba went over to spend it in the oasis. It was not a gay Christmas for Yakouba. His Christmas dinner, eaten alone, consisted of a handful of hard dates, rice, and water. Captain Laverdure had potted meats, conserves, wine. It is not clear whether he simply forgot to invite Yakouba to his own table or to send him a bottle of wine, or whether he was selfish with the scanty supply that remained. It was not gay for Yakouba. It made him sad. He consoled himself, he says, by thinking of the camels which would be at least six or seven days without water or pasture going back toward Araouan. His notes on the return journey tell nothing of interest, show no enthusiasm. Perhaps he was sad all the way. He says it was one of the "late years for the midwinter caravan," that it was "nearly the first of February when we reached home." I discover now in writing it that what interests me most about this Taodeni journey is something Yakouba slides over without either concealment or emphasis. I 171

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO mean his relations with Captain Laverdure and his subsequent attitude, these long years after, toward Captain Laverdure. I will not say that he loves him, but he admires and respects him. He has nothing but derisive, humorous contempt for Pepoint who shared all the wine and Pernod with him, but remembers Laverdure as "an admirable officer." Apparently he was-a precise and competent officer who treated Yakouba not as a companion or "character," but as a paid interpreter of the garrison, which at this period was exactly what Yakouba was. Yakouba was sad, but completely without resentment then or subsequently. To forgive one's enemies, even love one's enemies, since enemy implies a sort of equality and the forgiveness implies a sort of magnanimity, is easier and less subtly admirable, I believe, than to hold a good opinion of a superior man who has slighted you. There are things one may learn from Yakouba without necessarily being impelled to "go to Timbuctoo," as we kids used to say in Abilene, Kansas, when we meant the fantastic limit. 172

VIII IT wAs along around 1907 or eight, with Diara weaned, Youssoufou born, and another brat begotten, that Yakouba was appointed adjoint principal d'affaires indigenes, and nearly followed Monseigneur Hacquard to a watery grave in the Niger. This job, patterned after the pet guepard, which seems to be half dog and half pussycat, weirdly combined the functions of Chief of the Intelligence Department and Comptroller of Taxes.' Yakouba had an office now, where he was seldom to be found, and occasionally made long official voyages. One of these took him way down the river, a thousand kilometers or so, to Niamey near the Dahomeyan border. The trip seems to have been jinxed from the start. It was one of those excursions which show the worst French side of the French in its worst p6ssible light, which I assure you is worse than you or any other decent American or Englishman can possibly imagine unless you know the French intimately and love them. There are six dry, vicious pages of it in the old man's diary. He doesn't spell out the names of his companions. There were three Frenchmen in the chaland, the little 1 See Appendix, p. 265. 173

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO houseboat, which was cramped quarters. They didn't like each other. Neither of the three liked either of the other two. Commandant L- didn't like Doctor P- or Yakouba; Doctor P- didn't like the commandant or Yakouba, and Yakouba was almost wishing he was still a Pere Blanc, or even a village priest back home. He writes with pained restraint: "The navigation offered nothing particular until we came to the rapids of Labezenga. We entered the rapids on the morning of August 17th, at nine o'clock, two men at the rudder and ten with poles. We struck a rock, the rudder was smashed, the boat whirled out of control but not wrecked. We were shot into calm water ass-backward." The phrase is not precisely nautical. The old man is not a sailor. He can't swim very well either. The calm water was swarming with crocodiles and as they careened across its glassy surface they smashed side-on against a "tate de chien," which I take in this case to mean a slightly submerged rock, and "Paf! a hole ten centimeters wide in our ribs. We floated, sinking. The crocodiles came hopefully. We tried to stop the hole with each other's bedding; the laptots beat at the crocodiles with their poles. We made them stop and bail. An eddy drifted us sinking slower into water where they could touch bottom. They poled and we sank in the shallows. The other two chalands with our baggage and provisions had meanwhile come safely through the rapids, and rescued US.', They camped. These were the last rapids. Their chaland could be mended. From then on it would be easy. 174

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO But the commandant, who was maybe brave enough under shot and shell, had been scared. He was a coward about crocodiles and drowning. He announced that they would continue on foot. They quarreled about it. He was the commandant. "There was nothing attractive about plodding two hundred kilometers through marshes and bush. We did' not say anything to each other." In mid-afternoon the commandant got tired and they stopped. Porters had followed them with camp-cots and food. Pretty soon the three chalands appeared and tied up. Mosquitoes bit them. Yakouba and Doctor Pwanted to sleep aboard the chaland. The commandant made nasty remarks about their softness and said they would all sleep ashore. Toward midnight there was a deluge of tropical rain. By the flashes of lightning they saw the commandant gather up his soaked bedding and sneak aboard the chaland. Yakouba and the doctor waited a little while and sneaked aboard too without making any noise. When the commandant awoke, they were way out in midstream, making good time toward Niamey. He was in a poisonous rage. The laptots insisted they had misunderstood his orders. He, of course, blamed Yakouba and the doctor. When he ordered them to make immediately for the shore, they pointed out, which was true, that the river was bordered with swamps. The doctor mentioned various sorts of deadly snakes which live in swamps and remembered that he had forgotten to bring his serums, which was a lie, but I gather that by this time their 175

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO relations had become so mutually unpleasant that the doctor would have failed to find his hypodermic if the commandant had been bitten by a king cobra. The commandant may have suspected as much. Anyway, they continued in the chaland. They were not bitterly silent. They had been bitterly silent the day before, which is about the limit of Latin endurance. They now quarreled loquaciously with nasty politeness. When they reached Niamey, it was rain, rain, rain. It was the nasty tail-end of the rainy season. It rained, steamed, was humid and nasty in Niamey during the whole week it took them to do their administrative and fiscal business. There was already in 19o8 a small French colony in Niamey, a few officers, administrators, merchants, who had a cercle, a club. Yakouba and Doctor P- , separately, made friends with the two different, mutually unfriendly gossip- cliques of the club, and with the malarial rains for excuse drank Pernod from morning to night. The commandant, who came to the club but didn't drink, ordered them at seven o'clock one evening to get all their baggage at once and come aboard the chaland, to leave next morning at dawn. "It was nearly dark, and raining buckets," Yakouba writes. Before they left the club, porters came looking for the commandant to tell him that the goatpath leading down to the waterfront was a torrent, that men had fallen and lost several cases of baggage, that embarkment in the rain and darkness was impossible. Unfortunately a local captain with whom Yakouba had struck up a drinking friendship said the porters were 176 THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO right, and advised the commandant to agree and wait until morning. "So that's it !" sneered the commandant at them both; "just a little plot you cooked up, a coup monti so you can sit here and drink all night. Eh bien, I am still in command of this expedition. I have given my orders, and they will be carried out." By eleven o'clock Yakouba and Doctor P - were aboard with their personal baggage. The commandant had not yet come aboard. At this point the pettiness descends to such a puerile level and is so patly French, that I think I'd better quote straight from Yakouba's own notes in French. Otherwise, since these are, after all, important officials, officer, doctor, government administrator, I doubt-unless you have lived, and become a part of, French provincial life yourself-whether I could make you believe it: Presque aussitdt, nous entendons sur la berge la voix du Commandant. Le docteur ferme immidiatement les portes de notre cabine qui itait la premiere et j'Jteigne la lumiere. Le commandant remarqua le fait et, comme il ne voulait pas rentrer chez lui en demandant permission de passer chgz nous, it fut oblige de faire comme un babouin sur le plat-bord le tour du chaland. De plus, voyant la porte de communication ferme'e, nous lTentendimes s'e'crier, "Ah, its l'ont bouclie! eh bien! Elle restera bouchie! So that it was anticlimactic, almost expected, when it was discovered next day that the doctor, who had been charged to see to it that a quantity of fresh bread was put aboard, had deliberately forgotten it, willing to go with177

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO out bread himself since by doing so he could deprive and annoy the others. That all three of them arrived eventually back in Timbuctoo without murder is probably due to the fact that they abandoned the chaland near Gao and returned on horseback. This voyage, in addition to accomplishing its fiscal and administrative purposes, had two repercussions in Timbuctoo. One was the founding of a short-lived cercle, a club bar like that of Niamey. The other was that Yakouba returned so disgusted with his new job that he took a month's vacation and went fishing again, down Khabara way, with Nioumouni the Holy Howedj a. This Nioumouni was of course the Nioumouni, the one who was raised from the dead, you know. For yearslong before Yakouba ceased to be father superior of the mission-the two of them had been boon companions, to the scandal of both Monseigneur Hacquard and Ben Sidi Labas. Nioumouni was the one man, white or black, in all West Africa, who could drink more than Yakouba. And the miracle by which he was resurrected from the dead was not precisely catholic. He was the middle-aged chief of a fishing clan, the Korongoy. He had been mystically inclined all his life, a real "marabout-cognac," Yakouba tells me, a "musulman-alcoor" from early youth, though the miracle and sainthood came rather late in his career, in the following manner: One day his nephew Hamma Tilakassou, fishing with a net in the Niger near the wharf at Koryome, fished out a large bottle of mysterious origin, tightly corked, sealed, 178

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO and containing a pale golden liquid. He took the bottle to Nioumouni who opened it, tasted it, found it to be excellent brandy albeit with a rather special flavor, drank it all giving fervent thanks to Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate, and fell into a deep sleep. Three days later, as he still slept profoundly, was indeed in a coma, the alarmed clan carted him to the then clinic of the Peres Blancs who, on crudely analyzing the residue in the bottle, discovered it to be heavily camphorated. Nioumouni continued to sleep, or remain in a coma, for seven days and nights, when he awoke, blinked his eyes, and expressed surprise to find himself back on earth. He explained that he had been dead. "What was it like, Nioumouni ?" "It was better than here." "How better?" "The same, but better. Pleasant rivers, fountains, terraced gardens, fruit, shade, perfumed boys, green silk tents and music, high-breasted girls with large eyes, drink of every taste, of every color-and horses. "What, Nioumouni? Horses in paradise? The Koran does not mention them." "Well, I can't help that. I was there, and there were horses." The horses had as much to do with the spreading of the tale as had the miracle and contributed more, perhaps, to Nioumouni's fame. That same summer it was told in Morocco, in the Sufi schools and Dervish monasteries of Tripoli, in cafrs at Marrakesh, that a fishing marabout of Timbuctoo had come back from the dead, 179

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO and that there were horses in paradise. The slight matter of the authenticity of the resurrection itself was completely neglected in the polemic controversies which arose over the horses. Thus Nioumouni became a legend in his own lifetime, as our White Monk of Timbuctoo had become a legend, and this, in addition to their mutual fondness for drink, linked the legendary white man and the legendary black man by a sort of bond that annoyed Salama and the colonel. Every time they went fishing together, something deplorable or astounding was pretty likely to occur, and on this particular occasion the episode nearly attained the proportions of another miracle. Nioumouni had gin, and Yakouba had Pernod. They had fishing tackle likewise, and betook themselves to a quiet abandoned village called Day on the banks of the Niger only a couple of miles beyond Khabara, where Nioumouni had a camp. Mixing absinthe with gin, instead of with the customary banal water and sugar, clouds the green liquid to the same agreeable opalescent white and has the double advantage of being more potent and pleasing. While Yakouba was taking a nap, Nioumouni recalled something he had forgotten to do in Khabara, leaped on his horse, and galloped back to attend to it-only a matter of a few minutes. He'd be back before his friend awakened. Arriving at a gallop in Khabara, looking for his house, he couldn't find it, nor could he recognize anything else familiar in the town where he had been born. "Why, this is not Khabara at all! I thought I came 18o

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTO0 just now to Khabara, but I must have forgotten to start. I must still be at Day!" He galloped back over the route and, as the fumes of gin and absinthe cleared a little, recognized Day when he arrived there. But this recognition did not help matters. On the contrary"Wellah, by God !" he cried, "I am still at Day. These places are bewitched. They shift about faster than my horse can gallop, but we will see!" Refusing to heed Yakouba he began to gallop like mad back and forth between Khabara and Day, trying to catch up with one or the other, as they shifted, until he finally fell off his horse dead drunk in Khabara and was put to bed by his wives. Yakouba remained in Khabara, nursed his friend through the hangover, and went over to the lakes with him where they remained for a fortnight. I have asserted that Nioumouni was an abler drinker than Yakouba, but the intervening years have told another story. Nioumouni presently died drunk. His name still blossoms in the dust, and he will be remembered in Timbuctoo as long as Kit Marlowe is remembered in London, as long as any city holds its illustrious drunkards in affectionate recollection, but he died drunk, he is dead. May you be with Mohammed in paradise, Nioumouni, and may there be horses. May you gallop in clouds of glory, Nioumouni, drunk with the glory of God forever. It will be a long time yet before your old friend joins you. He may enter eventually by the same gate you did, but not for many a long year. He'd better be getting back right now to Timbuctoo where the biggest and most important work of his career awaits. 181

Ix T HE NATIVE notables and populace of Timbuctoo became violently stirred up about it long before the white French government took the slightest interest in the matter. Indeed, several years passed before the governor of all the Soudan down in Bamako, and the Minister of Colonies up in Paris, poked their fingers in the pie, though Yakouba was in it up to his neck from the beginning. (He gets so much mixed up in it, more and more as the years pass, that I hardly know what to do about his private life, about Salama and the babies. She is more or less pregnant all the time throughout these busy passing years, and Yakouba is always being congratulated, or about to be congratulated, on becoming a father again, and I had promised to give each new baby a paragraph, but I am inclined to go back on my word. This is not the story of the tribe. It is the story of the old man. I didn't bother to tell you, for instance, a couple of chapters back, that Khadijah, the eldest and least handsome of the stepdaughters, had married Moulay Ali, the wool merchant over at Gao, and that Yakouba was already a stepgrandfather. It would have interrupted something else, and I didn't think you'd care. The other one, the 182

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO handsomest-I've forgotten her name myself-is married to a school-teacher down in the Volta, another daughter, whose name I've also forgotten, to a Belgian engineer in Australia. As time passes Diara, who has scarcely yet been weaned, will be suckling an authentic Yakouba grandchild of her own, and Youssoufou will die, and Paul will be the next to marry-you see, there's no end to it. Such genealogies and ramifications are a bore even when the begetter is Abraham and the book is the Bible. So from here on, unless some of the progeny force themselves into-the narrative, we'll leave them out. We'll take the increasing tribe for granted and get on with the patriarch himself.) It all began when an inoffensive black Mohammedan professor, canvassing on commission, came up from Djenne to persuade the black notables and merchants of Timbuctoo to send their sons down there to college. To the colonel and the white administration of Timbuctoo, this was normal, harmless, even praiseworthy, since Djenne had an excellent institution of Arabic learning, properly supervised by the white administration down yonder, while Timbuctoo had none. The Timbuctooans, however, screamed, tore their hair, threatened to ride the professor out of town on a rail, or lynch him. A Timbuctooan send his son to school at Djenne! Why, they'd see their sons dead first, or slaves. Send their sons to learn the Koran in Djenne! They'd send their sons all right! But not with books. They'd send them down to wreck the place! The well-poised cadi of Timbuctoo, our old friend Ben Sidi Labas, was as wild as anybody. Lucky, he thought 183

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO to himself, that Yakouba was now close to the ear of the colonel. Yakouba would understand, and they'd cook up something together to put a stop to this insulting nonsense. Yakouba at the moment was even closer to the colonel's ear than Ben Sidi could have guessed. When the cadi puffed up to the roof-terrace that evening, he found the colonel already there-and for the same reason, though from a different angle. He suspected that Timbuctoo had gone crazy, or that it was a political plot. The arrival of the cadi was opportune. "Ben Sidi can explain it to you, mon colonel, much better than I was trying to do." It was really easy enough to explain. It was a Shakesperean case of finding quarrel in a straw when honor's at the stake, plus civic pride and mob psychology. Timbuctoo had been the seat for centuries of one of the greatest Arabic universities of the Moslem world. Scholars came there not merely from Djenne, but from Mecca, Baghdad, and Samarkand. In the fifteenth century a proverb said, "Salt comes from the north, gold from the south, but the word of God and the treasures of wisdom are only to be found in Timbuctoo." As Fdix Dubois aptly says, "The Queen of the Sahara would have been adorned with an imperfect diadem if the crowning glory of art had been wanting." The University of Sankor"' had been the city's greatest pride in the days of her magnificence-and that pride, alas, was the only thing which had survived from the great university. The fact that the priceless manuscripts were now scattered, 1 See Appendix, p. 269. 184

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO the walls and professors dust, made the present population all the more touchy about it. It had been so long the established, natural thing, Ben Sidi Labas patiently explained to the colonel, for the rich merchants and notables of Djenne to send their sons to Timbuctoo to acquire wisdom, that a proposal to reverse the process was outrageous, unnatural, contrary to precedent and tradition, a grievous, deliberate insult. The colonel remarked mildly that Djenne was said to have a quite good college whereas Timbuctoo actually had none, but the cadi insisted that this was entirely beside the point, an assertion which makes one wonder whether there is any basic difference, after all, between negro and white psychology. At any rate the colonel and the cadi failed to reach an understanding which made no difference for the moment, since the canvassing professor had packed his bags and fled. It may, however, have been this conference on the roof that gave Yakouba, whose psychology by this time could scarcely be termed exclusively black or white, the germ of an idea. He claims no credit for the germ of the new idea which simmered slowly and eventually sprang, full-panoplied like Minerva, from the brain of His Excellency Monsieur Clozel, Governor of the Soudan. By that time, the government had to do something about it, one way or another. Djenne, after the episode of the black professor, had sent the administrative French supervisor of its college, a Professor Vernochet, scouting for pupils, and the Frenchman had also been scorned,

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO ignored, insulted. But the Timbuctoo region, like Westchester County and Long Island, is a rich hunting ground for rich sons of papa, so the leading notables and civic boosters down at Djenne persuaded the administration there to persuade the governor down in Bamako to send Monsieur Mariana, the inspector-general of colonial schools, to make peace. Around i91o he came to Timbuctoo, called a mass meeting of its leading native citizens, and made a tactful, able speech. He was heard politely, but nothing came of it. The people of Timbuctoo were as sore as ever. For some years, ever since the first quarrel, Yakouba had been suggesting the obvious solution, the founding of a college in Timbuctoo, and suggested it again to Monsieur Mariana, but he still claims no credit and asked me to be sure not to claim any for him, believing that the idea was developed independently, part of a wider and more general colonial plan, in Bamako and Paris. Before the year 191 o had ended, the signed and sealed proclamation arrived, and there was great rejoicing. It was inscribed: "The Governor of the Colonies, Lieutenant-Governor of the High Senegal and Niger, greetings, to the Commandant of the Region of Timbuctoo." It authorized and provided funds for the immediate establishment of a medersa, that is, an Arabic university or institution of higher learning, including Islamic theology and Koranic law, appointed a faculty headed by the imam, a board of trustees headed by Ben Sidi Labas, and a president who was no other than a Monsieur 186

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Auguste Dupuis, whom we know by a shorter and more familiar name. Hurrah for Timbuctoo! Hurrah for Yakouba! To hell with Djenne! The pride of the native populace in their pet white marabout was unbounded and almost pathetic. He was one of them. He had become one of their own notables, married to a black wife, living in a mud house. And now the governor down in Bamako was doing as Yakouba told him! There was no doubt about that-in their minds. That the establishment of a medersa here was merely a part of a much wider plan pondered in the colonial home office at Paris was outside their ken and of no importance. Yakouba had said that the glory of Timbuctoo, the now almost legendary ancient university, must be restored to spite Djenne, and now it was proclaimed and sealed, and Yakouba, of course, was the head of it. Which proved he had started it. Work began immediately, and before buildings could be built or rented, or classrooms arranged, rich sons of papa, sons of chiefs from the oases, sons of merchants from Gao and other cities on the river, and two sons of kings from the Volta arrived to sit at the feet of the scribes and teachers. Discounting civic pride, negro psychology, misinterpretation of the governor's motives, it was a splendid thing for Timbuctoo, the first thing of the sort that had happened in centuries, and a fine thing for Yakouba who, even though he didn't want to be a bishop, could hardly have been content to be an interpreter and tax comptroller all his life. 187

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO This was a job worthy of him. Backed by the enthusiasm of the natives, which of course soon evaporated, and the codperation of the administration, which it continued to give and still gives him today, he put his shoulder to the wheel. i80

T HUS THE modern provincial peasant son of a Paris saloon-keeper became the turbaned head of a faculty and student body which might have existed in Baghdad or Cairo during the caliphate. Max Reinhardt or Balieff might have hired the whole outfit, or P T Barnum had he been still alive. Yakouba's majestic, now grizzling beard was the center of it, jovial-Jehova-Jove- like, frescoed-patriarch-like, Abraham-Isaac-and-Jacob-Jacoub-Yacoub-Yakouba- like, slapstick-stage-prop-detetive-theatrical-beard-like, but not false. It has never come off. And to deny that it has helped his fantastic career, helped spread his even more fantastic legend, would be ridiculous. The region is almost as proud of the beard as it is of Yakouba. Hence the hyphenated-noun-adjectives above. They are legitimate. They are a part of any true picture of Yakouba. Round the beard turning white was the black Arab faculty, learned marabouts all, robed, staffed, sandaled, in snowy, voluminous turbans, except for Doctor Mohammed Ali, the dean, who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca and consequently wore a green one. Others of the cast: 189

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Theology: "Monsieur" Benhamoudi, graduate of the University of Algiers. Koranic Law: El Hadj Eliman Es-Soyouti. Tamachekh and Mathematics: Sidi Ahmed Baber. Belles Lettres and the Humanities: Ibn Bazourt. History and Geography: Abdul Seddiq. Scribe: Malik Boukoum, post-graduate of the College of Sadiki. Overseer: Moninian Tarsore. Monitor: Goya Khadar the Eunuch. The only other beard was a heavy, black chin-beard, worn with sideburns and clean-shaven mouth, belonging to the professor of Tamachekh, causing him to resemble Brigham Young or a baboon. The chorus, or student body, consisted of several scores of rich sons of papa, shaven-headed, white-robed, rang,ing in ages from fourteen to twenty, mostly black, occasionally Berber, with one freckled albino who looked like a leopard and is now a witch-doctor. Christianity and the Koran left him equally cold. He was born a poumana and fulfilled his fate. This medersa was, and is, thoroughly serious, I assure you. It was picturesque, but not comic. What they taught, they taught. If it penetrated too slowly through the craniums of the rich sons of papa, it was driven into their ba ksides with the aid of a paddle wielded by Goya th" Eunuch. The physical sciences, astronomy, chemistry, etc., in which the Arabic universities once surpassed Europe, have been dead for centuries. Today they teach the Koran, the Five Books of Moses, the Hadiths of Mohammed, Islamic history, law, elementary mathe19o

'K' * I," lb. 1, 1' 3 Mi YAKOUBA, NO LONGER PRIEST, NOW DIRECTOR OF NATIVE UNIVERSITY, WITH BLACK PROFESSORS

. --. ....11 HERE HE IS AS PRESIDENT OF THE NATIVE UNIVERSITY, SEATED ON ITS ROOF

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO matics, Arabic poetry, belles lettres; and this was pie for Yakouba. It was up his alley. The old man doesn't know, or care, anything about electric lights, phonographs, bacteriology. But he is steeped in theology, history, literature, both Christian and Arabic. Proselyting, propagandizing, sectarian wrangling were left out of it by mutual agreement and by special command of the governor's charter. Yakouba remained a good Christian, his faculty and pupils remained good Moslems--except for the boy who was born demoniacand got along all the better for it. As a matter of fact, the medersa of Timbuctoo, though subsidized with Christian money and controlled by the colonial government, was pretty nearly honest, as such things go. Of course, not quite honest. Otherwise there'd have been no sense in founding it. But the son of a Moslem sheikh, a Moslem prince, even an imam or servant of the mosque could acquire learning and prestige without the sacrifice of his decent integrity and pride, which is rarely true of colleges founded by Christian nations for the natives of heathen lands. The fly in this amber was a less noxious insect. The trick, the double aim, candidly set down likewise in the charter was: First: The imparting of a higher education to a select group of Moslem youth, in Arabic, in accord with the classical Arabic tradition, i.e. including the Koran and Koranic lawSecond: The selection of a small, hand-picked, elite group of the best students who would also be taught French, given what smattering was possible of European 191

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO education, and to whom it would be confidentially explained-up to a certain point- what the French government was trying to do in Africa. In other words, Yakouba was running a legitimate and honest Arabic school for such as chose to stop at that; also an incubator to hatch out a superior quality of native interpreters, office employees, functionaries, oasis caids, and jungle kinglets, who would help make the desert and jungle a safe and profitable investment for the Banque de France and Monsieur Rikiki. I hope you have no objection. Ben Sidi Labas had none, and I am not trying to paint Yakouba as a saint or Tolstoi either. He has never been a champion, leader, or protector of the exploited and down-trodden black man. He became one of them himself, but he had no Messianic feeling of humbling himself or lifting them up when he did it. He thinks they are quite all right. He thinks the French government is all right too. My old friend is not noble. In fact he is always suspicious and impatient of people who are noble. He is, on the whole, pragmatic. I wonder sometimes whethery he might not have made a better bishop than he thought. He certainly ran the medersa high-handedly, and well. The ablest member of the faculty was Doctor Mohammed Ali. His Koranic learning was sound, likewise his knowledge of the Arabic and Persian classic poets, in addition to which he was a fantastically resourceful dialectician. Yet when this worthy dean began to secrete a daily bottle of cheap French brandy behind his lectern, and developed a passion for it almost equal to his love of 192

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Hafiz, Yakouba waited only a little while, and threw him out. "But you yourself drink vastly," protested the astonished professor. "And that is all the more reason," whispered Yakouba confidentially as one intelligent man to another, "why I cannot afford to have drunkards on my faculty." But when Mohammed Ali turned nasty about it, refusing to accept his dismissal gracefully, or confidentially, making scandalous countercharges against Yakouba, the old man thundered: "You are condemned by your own Koranic law and doctrine-not by me, your humble and sinful director. The Pope may drink barrels of burgundy, but when you let one drop pass your lips you are doomed to damnation. Alcohol is a Christian vice for which there is Christian forgiveness. You are a devout and learned priest of Islam. Before you ever teach again in this medersa, you must either abandon the bottle or let me baptize you !" This was, of course, below the belt, but Mohammed Ali, no sorry antagonist, had been hitting below the belt too, and the roles were catch-as-catch-can. "You'd better go," said Mohammed Ali's friends of the mosque, even those few who, like the Mokaddem of the Senussi, would have been pleased to catch the Christian marabout up a tree. Mohammed Ali went. He was replaced, more or less automatically, for a short time by Monsieur Benhamoudi, and then Yakouba pulled another fast one. He sent scouts and spies down to the rival school at Djenne. Timbuctoo pride and prejudice to the contrary, Djenne was a first-class institution. The scouts 193

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO and spies attended lectures, looked things over, and seduced the head of its faculty, Professor Ali Chaouch, who was the brains of that school, the best native pedagogist in the valley of the Niger. They brought him back in triumph, on a slightly higher salary, and the old man made him dean of the medersa. You have met Yakouba the bad little boy, Yakouba the young village priest, Yakouba the monk, Yakouba the missionary-explorer, Yakouba the father superior, Yakouba the beachcomber in a ragged shirt-tail catching crawfish for his breakfast. Permit me now to introduce my friend Yakouba the Rotarian, leading citizen and civic booster of Timbuctoo. And, fellow, were they proud of him!? They had their slogans just as we used to have 'em down in Atlanta when I was a Rotarian myself boosting for the "Empire City of the South." Hurrah for Timbuctoo! Hurrah for Yakouba! To hell with Djenne! Half the richest students of Djenne, sons of papa, sons of chiefs, sons of black merchant princes, kinglets, followed their favorite professor to Timbuctoo, and papa came to visit them, bringing trade and influence. They say that Yakouba, He ain't got no style; -He's style all the while, All the while. I wrote a long while ago about the almost mystic quality of Yakouba's love for Timbuctoo and its black people, suggesting that there was something Blakelike in it, something like Blake's vision of ugly London, golden-pillared, 194

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO shining in the New Jerusalem's holy light. And indeed I think there always has been. I am sure that not my eyes or yours can ever see what Yakouba's eyes see when he looks out over the mud roofs of his dream city. But this new side which came out after the founding of the medersa is true too. Yakouba has now become a guepard, a camelopard, a monster, a mystical Rotarian. He is becoming almost a case for the psychiatrists. For instance-the years had been rolling, and it was now the autumn of 19i4-can you imagine a Frenchman, a peasant at that, by heredity rooted in the valley of the Marne, who, no matter how many thousands of miles away he happened to be personally, heard of the German invasion calmly, if not indifferently? "Tant pis, les vaches, on les aura," he remarked philosophically, and thereafter he was only concerned with the war when it threatened to reduce the subsidy for his medersa. Did you never want to go home, Yakouba? Not even when it was over? Did you never want to see the place where you were born, as it were, or as it was after the battle of Ch teau-Thierty ? -Home? Where do you think you are? Whose roof do you think this is you're sitting on'? Whose Pernod do you think you've got your nose in? I'm home. I wish you would go home, and stop asking me questions. Yes? Well, why weren't you fair about it in your notes then? The reason I asked you now was that Dubos was 195

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO saying yesterday you'd been back to Europe three times. What about it? Were you? Why didn't you put anything about it in your diary? Were you ashamed of going back? Weren't they nice to you? -I put what I pleased in my diary. The mistake was when Salama let you know I had written a diary at all. For God's sake, yes. I went back to Europe three times, once to show it to Diara in 1913 when she was seven years old, once in 1921 with two of the other children, and I was foolish enough to go a third time just recently, in 1929, to show it to little Henri. They weren't much impressed. Neither was I. We like it better here. At least I did until you We had the rest of the Pernod and, still snorting his impatience with me and Europe, he told me belligerently of a final abortive episode which had happened "just day before yesterday," in the winter of 1930, or was it 1931. At any rate, it is worth interrupting the chronology to tell. Well-meaning friends in the administration had offered him a trip to Paris to see the Colonial Exposition. He hadn't the courage to refuse them. He packed his trunk, went down to Bamako on the Mage, one of the two little side-wheelers which now ply, thence by train to Dakar, and saw his trunk aboard the steamer for Marseilles which was to sail on the morrow. He went back to the hotel, slept badly, awoke wondering how he could have been such a fool, went down to the wharf, and announced that he wasn't going. 196

44 YAKOUBA AS COMMANDANT OF GOUNDAM. YOU CAN LAUGH. HE THOUGHT IT WAS FUNNY

/A'~ ~7 A !~ t A A, 4 ILL A PART OF THE YAKOUBA TRIBE TODAY, WITH SALAMA IN A PARTICULARLY VILE HUMOR

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO "But it's too late. Your trunk can't be taken off the steamer now, your passage is booked, we're sailing in an hour. Come on, Papa Yakouba, we'll make you comfortable, you'll sit next to the captain, the whole boat will be yours, you'll have a fine time." The old man-by 193o he had become the snowybearded patriarch with keen but bewildered blue eyes whom I know and love and sometimes feel sorry forwas almost in tears, according to the officials who tried to wheedle him aboard, but he proved bravely that he was still Yakouba. On that same day-there was no train for nearly a week-he started for Bamako on the kola truck of a native merchant and was back on his roof within the fortnight. The trunk has never come back. He doesn't give a damn. 197

XI THE WORLD WAR ended, never threatening Timbuctoo. The years and the Niger rolled on. Salama, now past thirty-five, in the prime of life, was still bearing Yakouba's babies with healthy regularity, and had also become a grandmother. Yakouba was now getting on toward sixty, in the ripe, seasoned prime of his male, bull's life. He still held his three governmental jobs, long past the time when most French colonial functionaries retire to put on carpet slippers, play cards and dominoes, tell tales of mighty and mysterious Africa, cultivate their tiny vegetable gardens. The colonels and commandants had rolled on with the years and the Niger. Old Man River bore them down to the sea and bore others up to replace them. Klobb, Cristofari, stern Laverdure, le sacre Pepoint were gone forever. Yakouba was already the oldest white functionary, the oldest white citizen of Timbuctoo. The new ones of the post-war period, some of them fresh from Paris, found him a phinom~ne, a numero, but still respected and admired him. This had already begun to change subtly when I first visited the city in the late twenties, but in the early twenties he was at the height of his active prestige and usefulness. 198

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO The continued success of the medersa brought him static prestige, honor and emolument, but the old man himself was not yet static. There was still adventure in him, and further service. The garrison continued to borrow him from the university, and when promise developed of a quite respectable little private war against an invading band of Tripolitan Senussi who imagined they were starting a jihad and were already besieging Agades, nothing would do but that Papa Yakouba go along to help teach them a lesson. The garrison sent a big column, with machine guns and a dismounted field piece strapped on the backs of camels, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Berger, with Yakouba as intelligence officer. The expedition went far afield, was gone for fully eight months, wandering part of the time like the lost tribes of Israel among the dunes of Jadal way over beyond Gao, in the eastern desert, and ending at last in a harmless fiasco. The prejudiced native notables, loyal Rotarians, will tell you the reason it flivvered was that Yakouba went down with fever at Gao, but you needn't believe it. I certainly don't believe it. I soon learned that anything Ben Sidi Labas tells you about Yakouba, or anything Yakouba tells you about Ben Sidi Labas, is to be taken with a bar of salt. They are modest enough about themselves, but if you believe either one about the other, they were the Conscript Fathers, the original founders, the Romulus and Remus of the place. The Tarik el-Soudan and Encyclopaedia Britannica attribute the founding of the city 199

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO to an old Tuareg woman with a big navel, but if you ever hear Yakouba and Ben Sidi in a really reminiscent mood you'll end by thinking they invented Timbuctoo like Edison invented the phonograph. What you may accept as gospel truth however, without even a grain of salt, is the tale told by the blacks and whites alike of how Yakouba was cured of his fever. It is one of the anecdotes still current in the valley of the Niger, a part of the authentic Yakouba legend. Dining with the post mddecin-chef-the garrison doctor at Gao-Yakouba developed a temperature. The doctor called a hospital orderly, whispered some instructions, and said: "You will find a nurse in your room after dinner with the necessary medicaments for your treatment." Retiring to his room, Yakouba found a young and handsome Baoul' wench, with no medicine, no thermometer, no hospital gear, no anything, in fact. The doctor says that the young nurse said next morning that Yakouba was the most "interesting" patient she had ever treated, and people who now repeat the anecdote add that it cured him instanter. But the truth is that while he kept the little nurse and repeated the treatments from time to time, he lay sick in Gao for a month or more, else he'd have been off to rejoin his column. Old Man River bore him back again to Timbuctoo where he convalesced on his roof, swallowing quinine pellets, sipping Pernod. 200

XII F TIM BUCTOO is the most special city in the South Sahara, Goundam is by far the loveliest. Hidden fifty miles westward among the mountains, at the lower end of a beautiful, palm-shored lake, protected from access by the ponds and marshes of the Niger buckle, no motor car has ever reached it, and no railroad ever will. Of strategic value to the Tuaregs, more easily approachable from the desert, it was the scene of the bloodiest battles in the French conquest of the region back in the early nineties, when the soldiers and missionary monks first came. Here, close by, had occurred the famous Bonnier massacre, the marshes had run red with the mingled blood of Tuaregs and tirailleurs, French graves dot the slope, and a great mud fort still looks down on the lake. By 192o, this was already ancient history. The region was now at peace. It remained military territory-still does because it lies on the fringe of the great desert-but the fort now contained only the French commandant with his household, and a handful of troopers who led an easy, lazy life. The commandant, a Monsieur de Loppinot keenly interested in archeology, decided one day that it was time 201

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO to go back to Paris, to renew his personal contacts with the museums, publishers, etc. The post at Goundam was an easy, lazy sinecure, yet at the same time quite important. The Tuaregs, the Kel Antassar, would never rise again with their two- handed swords and iron spears, but they might, and if they did Goundam would still be a key to the territory. The fort was always connected with Timbuctoo by telegraph. And there were the taxes to be looked after. Goundam was rich in rice and cattle. Goundam, in fact, was a plum, a post mingling ease and responsibility with all the delights of residence in an African Aix-les-Bains. So that when Monsieur de Loppinot decided to go back to the boulevards, and the regional white masters of the Timbuctoo district wished to do something nice to requite Yakouba (without losing him) for his many years of super-Rotarian civic service, they offered him the post of commandant at Goundam. The old man accepted with surprising alacrity. He says now that he needed a long vacation from the medersa, but it is probable that the pleasant memories of a botanical excursion he had made to the lake and mountains back in 1899, while still a priest, had more to do with it. A decade at least prior to the time of which I am now writing, a Monsieur Chevalier, curator of botany of the Muse de Paris, had come to the region searching rare plants and had invited the then father superior of the mission of Our Lady of Timbuctoo to go with him picking posies. The Musee de Paris being a national institution, the scientist-and incidentally Yakouba-had been, as the 202

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO French say so charmingly, "facilitated." * They had folding tents, donkeys, pack- mules, porters, servants, pite de foie gras, and champagne, a Captain Huguet of the artillery for guide. They traveled like a couple of bally British tourists. It was the old man's only voyage de luxe, and he wrote some lyrical, brief notes about it, which surprised me when I came to them. They are sometimes faintly humorous, but never derisive. He coos and purrs. Luxury corrodes his character. He is a tame provincial priest for a change, flattered to be the guest of Monsieur the scientist from Paris. "We traversed the gardens of Timbuctoo and the forest of mimosas to emerge on the plains of Tassakant, where we set up our tents by moonlight in the village. "Continuing next day before dawn we fell in a swamp, awaiting the sunrise; skirting ponds and fording lagoons, we heard the children singing as they wielded their hoes in the rice fields. "Camping beneath two great trees at El Masara, we bathed pleasantly in the fresh waters of the marigot. Here in the twilight our artilleryman lifted his rifle to shoot the lion of the marigot which came close to stare at us with golden eyes, but was dissuaded by the porters who said: "'If you kill him, we cannot eat him, and if you hurt him he will devour us.' "Next day we saw the graves at Takoubao where Colo* I have been "facilitated" myself a couple of times in the African colonies, thanks to Paul Morand's kindness and his ex-officio connection with the diplomatic service. It means that you have ice and airplanes, lunch with the governor, and borrow his chauffeur. It makes you feel like a prize Christmas package in transit, or the Prince of Wales. 203

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO nel Bonnier and his men were massacred, and stopped for lunch at Djindjin, a lieu-dit which exists only as a name on military maps." Rather nice, isn't it? But in an old-fashioned way which smells of a cultivated French priest quelconque with pen in hand and a taste for Lamartine. It isn't the real Yakouba. I told you a long time ago that the old man could have written this book himself, but I am beginning to be glad he didn't. He might have written it all in that vein, with pen in hand, and he is richer than his writings. He goes on now in the same Jean Jacques romantic vein to describe their arrival in Goundam, the "pleasant city on a hillside, sloping to the lake, with mountains reflected in the water and its placid surface dotted with sailboats and green islands." I think I shall spare you the rest of the literal quotation. I think he probably wrote it for the curator, to go in the museum pamphlet. He leaves out entirely that when the cavalcade arrived in the Goundam bazaar, he, still in his monk's garb, was the one who was hailed and welcomed. What native of Goundam had never, at least once, visited Timbuctoo? And how many had been brought as patients to the mission dispensary? There was a reception in the market-place. He had brought his medicine chest and set up an open air clinique immediately. The cavalcade left the white marabout there among his natives, as Captain Huguet and Monsieur Chevalier wound their way up to the fort. Next day they botanized over toward Fatakara where the flat, shallow lake-bed, dry at this season, was an im204

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO mense prairie of herbs and flowers. Yakouba's notes on this are likewise phony, false Yakouba. He isn't imitating Lamartine now. He is imitating the chamber of commerce. He points out that "with modern European agricultural methods and proper transportation facilities, the Goundam lake region could be transformed into a rice district yielding millions of francs, as rich or richer than any in Indo- China." Yeah, Yakouba? With the Trans-Saharan Railway terminus next door to your house in Timbuctoo. I hope you die first! You know you'd rather be dead than see it happen. Sell your soul on paper for a pdt de foie gras sandwich. Grin, you bastard, hiding behind the great sand dunes, you know the Devil can't collect. You know the railroad can never come to Timbuctoo. You know that it would be a sort of sacrilege. Your next notes prove it. The hills and mountains shout it by their names, names like the names of places invented by Rimbaud-names that smell of crazy dreams. "Following the borders of Lake Tele, we distinguished on our right the mountains of Bankore, Takounde-bongo, Tombay, and Farach; northward loomed the peak of Immemella; the massif of Bankor masked the plains of Takakimp." Among such magic mountains, rising behind flaming deserts, anything-except railroads-can happen, as for instance: "We found Mohammed El-Mouloud Loudagh, nicknamed "Alouf," chief of the Kel Antassar, now raising his own rice, millet, vegetables, on the land of his brother 205

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO N'gouna, that other bloody bandit whose head erstwhile adorned a picket in the public square." Here they culled many a rare plant and flower, the rarest by an even rarer piece of luck. Monsieur Chevalier's horse was also a botanist, but Monsieur Chevalier was not a chevalier. When the horse wandered off the path to do its own herborizing, he was carried along perforce, and finally dismounting to drag it back by the bridle, found himself in an herbage that he had sought hitherto in vain. "From which Captain Huguet concluded," says Yakouba whose conversation is generally freer than his notes, "that the horse was a better botanist than its master." They came finally to Ras el Ma where the lake spread out in all its splendor into the open desert, affording a distant view of the Bankor slopes with their ancient ruins. Ras el Ma had a fine sand beach as well as a fine view, so they all went swimming. Here they found a whole column of tirailleurs, white-officered. Ras el Ma is the furthest-flung sentinel post of the Niger basin against the Moorish bandits of the far-off Rio del Oro, the Allouch, Boradda, and Mechdouf, who even today (1934) still come raiding, superbly equipped, from their strongholds by the waves of the Atlantic down into the rich Soudan. They are the only big- league bandits, robber barons left anywhere today on the face of the globe, and afford, here and in the Atlas, the chief military "diversions" that still occur in an otherwise peaceful, conquered Africa. In fields irrigated from the lake at Ras el Ma, Yakouba found a queer population tilling the fields, blacks 206

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO of various mixed races. "We are slaves," they said, "of the Mechdouf. We are cultivating their grain." The place was occupied by the French in force. No Mechdouf dared show his nose there. But the slaves, being what they were, worked on. Next day one of the servants was bitten by a little snake, "no longer than a foot- rule, no thicker than a pencil." His comrades gashed the puncture and rubbed into it a hijab remedy, ashes from the burned guts of a freshly killed black sheep. The whites were told of it too late to be of any help. The man died, vomiting, at midnight. This was the only distressing incident in the prolonged delightful outing. The moon was now full and the weather superb. They returned to Goundam by night marches, riding through mimosa groves, acacias, euphorbes, and myrrh trees. They were lavishly entertained by Monsieur de Loppinot, commandant of Goundam, and returned happily to Timbuctoo. So that now, ten years after, when they offered Yakouba himself the post of commandant at Goundam, these happy memories of his first visit to that region seduced him for a while from Timbuctoo. He took over the post in 192o and held it for two years. His diary for those two years is practically blank. Apparently Salama never came to live there, though she and the increasing tribe made frequent visits. Now, the military-civil commandant of an isolated post like Goundam is a sort of king, boss, a privileged master of blacks and whites alike. But it proved all wrong for Yakouba. I do not think nostalgia for his beloved Timbuctoo, home207 THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO sickness for his abundant Salama and abundant family were the whole cause of its proving all wrong for him. I am sure that Yakouba was not cut out to be a commandant. I suspect that he was not cut out to be anything except Yakouba. Whatever the cause, he writes nothing and tells little of the two years during which he was a commandant. He sometimes speaks comically about it, but only, I think, to protect himself. I think he was unhappy in Goundam. There does exist in his notes a long, serious, and rather dull account of how, while in the Goundam region, he helped a French archeologist explore and dig among the ruins of Bokar and Kama, where they found extensive fortifications on the mountain slope, attributed by Arab legend to the old empire-interesting, perhaps, if you are archeologically inclined. Yakouba, quite evidently, was not, though this expedition, like the former botanical excursion, was "facilitated." How beautiful, when shod in governmental patent leather, are the feet of them that walk upon the mountain gathering stones and posies, but Yakouba's feet soon took him back by his own preference to Timbuctoo the flat, where he could wiggle his bare toes on his own mud roof, not caring whether his feet were beautiful or not. 208

XIII HE YEARS and the Niger rolled on as Yakouba's beard grew snowy white, whereas his wife Salama remained as black as ever despite the fact that she had become head of the bakers' guild and trafficked heavily in flour.* In the winter of 1928, the Niger rolled me up toward Timbuctoo for the first time, and I arrived in the Mysterious City one dark Christmas night on a donkey. My principal reason for arriving there at all was to see, and if possible talk with, the legendary renegade white monk who seemed to me, from European hearsay, to be the city's one remaining mystery. I soon discovered that some scores of other bright journalists and travel writers, not to mention tourists, had been there ahead of me with the same bright idea.' Gossips told me the first morning at Daviot's grocery store that the old man was more than fed up with it. They said he had turned almost viciously cynical about it and had put up a sign on his house. The sign did not read, "NO ADMITTANCE." It read, I thought, almost tragically. There were only three public * She had also gone into the real estate business in z925, building, buying, selling local property. 1 See Appendix, p. -70. 209

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO signs in Timbuctoo at this period, and they were all grouped close together. Leaving the grocery store which had no sign but a flag, in the French square near the fort, walking into the native city, you first saw a board over the door of a mud house on the right which read in French and Arabic, "MAMADOU MACHINE, THE TAILOR." Turning left in a winding lane a little further, there was a bronze plaque on the door of another mud house, which read, "RENE CAILLIE', 1828." A little further in the same lane, reaching a larger terraced mud house, a board was nailed to the door, on which the old man had scrawled: cOUI, C'EST ICI. ENTRIE 2 FRANCS. 50 CENTIMES DE SUPPLEMENT POUR VOIR LA BETE EN LIBERTEi SUR LA TERRASSE. I did not knock. I went back to the grocery store. Toward ten o'clock they pointed him out to me as he was going into the postoffice. A little later he came into the grocery store. He was wearing an old beret, a pair of Arab trousers, a khaki shirt, heavy rawhide sandals with a thong that separated the great toes from the small. I am ashamed of some of the things I said about him in my first African book, but I still remember him best as I saw him then for the first time: "A robust, red-cheeked old man, stocky and powerful, with twinkling blue eyes and a great white beard, a not too benevolent patriarchal bull disguised as Santa Claus." Next day he took me to his roof, and on all the succeeding days and nights in Timbuctoo, I returned there. We drank enormously, and he told me many of the things which are now set down for the first time in these 210

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO pages. I believed that he would some day co6rdinate and publish them himself. We continued to drink outrageously. I neglected the letters which should have been presented immediately to other less eccentric French officials in higher office, while he neglected the medersa. Salama, and eventually my own wife Katie, had their hands full. They made me go away. Katie took me away. She was right. I was glad and sorry to leave Yakouba. I had no premonition that I should ever see him again. The years and the Niger rolled on. I was in France, and friends coming back from the colonies told me that Yakouba would never write his book. It was then that I began to bombard and annoy him with cablegrams. In the winter of 1931, as a result of our correspondence, I went back to Timbuctoo to see Yakouba. I was astonished to see that he had been growing older in that comparatively brief intervening time. He had been an old man when I first met him, but it was none the less strange to me that he had grown still older. When it became known and began to be gossiped buzzingly in the local French colony that I had come there for the memoirs, the life of old Yakouba, to be published not only in Paris, "mais a New York mme," I was even more astonished to hear the various opinions that the new white masters and merchants now held of their oldest white citizen. They were still proud of the old man, in a sense, but with a pride now tinged, here with indifference, here with snickering humor, here with familiar contempt. 211

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO I might add that there was an added tinge of petty jealousy when it was discovered that (while I too had been gossiped about disapprovingly by the serious bourgeois colonials) I had brought valid contracts for the old man and a substantial certified cashier's check on the Bank of Dakar, made out to Auguste Dupuis Yakouba. The colonel now governing the region, a gentleman who seemed to be one of the unmelting wax military effigies of the Musie Grevin, to whom I was forced to apply for a piece of red tape, received me coldly and seemed to think that I was being very foolish. In fact he said so. "A life of Yakouba? The memoirs of Yakouba? But why Yakouba?" I suggested, lamely enough, apologetically, that well, after all Yakouba had been longer in Timbuctoo than anybody else, and the colonel said yes but, adding a number of additional yes buts, ending with, but it was none of his business, and called in the adjoint civil of Timbuctoo, a gentleman named Jean Dubos, to give me the piece of red tape. Of the several score European residents, official and otherwise, Dubos was the one and only white Timbuctooan who approved me wholeheartedly and helped me heroically. He loved the old man, knew him well, went often to his roof, admired him wholeheartedly, and consequently helped me wholeheartedly This may seem to you a strange and inconsistent situation, after my telling you throughout most of the length of an entire book that Yakouba was the leading, beloved and honored first citizen of Timbuctoo. But I wonder if, whatever city or town you live in, you do not know at 212

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THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO least one old, eccentric leading citizen, who did marvels for your town in his time, and who is still honored, but with an honor tinged here with indifference, here with impatience, here with a snickering humor which is tolerantly almost contemptuous. I was a great deal more resentful of this, I think, than was the old man himself. If I now paint him in the slightest degree pitiful for such petty reasons as these, I will be mispainting him. He was still Yakouba. The bull could still bellow, and roar. And after all, if he was an old story to his fellow colonials, he still received more flattery than was good for him. This was one of the human reasons why higher-up local administrative functionaries were impatient. When distinguished visitors came up from the coast, or down from Paris, whether it was a famous homme de lettres of the Academie Franaise, a hardboiled colonel of the Foreign Legion, or the new air minister, they were always likely to be more interested in the old man in shabby shirt and rawhide sandals than in the spick-and-span gold-braided functionaries whose official life and raiment were equally impeccable. I had sensed something of this, more subtly, on my first visit. The then commandant, a Colonel Fourr6, a suave, intelligent Parisian whose mother still lived in an old mansion in the Rue de Vaugirard near the Senate and Medici Fountain, a man who, with a family tradition like that of Andre Gide, was too superior to be himself tinged with bourgeois pettiness, admired Yakouba and was fond of him, yet felt that he was a queer old type who had turned queerly native. Well, so he was. And if Fourre 213

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO could never have thought of inviting Yakouba to an intimate luncheon, Yakouba, I imagine, could never have thought of being invited. Totally different in tradition and temperament, they liked and admired each other, not intimately. Of course, in the Rikiki element, the Babbitt element, the bourgeois element of the local colony, both civil and military, mostly from provincial towns back home, particularly with those who had brought out their wives, there were many who felt, and would tell you feelingly, that Yakouba was a scandal and disgrace. Not that he was married to a black woman, mind you. Maurice de la Fosse, one of the greatest governors, if not the greatest, in the modern history of the A.O.F., had married a Baoule woman, and many of the most correct administrative bachelors were living with black women. It was Yakouba himself, they told you, who was the scandal. You understand. He had once been a priest, you know. And the way he drank, the way he went about in old khaki shirts, the types of natives he chose for companions-like that fisherman who had drunk himself to death down at Khabara. Yakouba would go the same way one of these days, you would see. And what made it worse was the way people from Paris, just passing through, of course, and who couldn't know all these things, flattered the old man and kowtowed to him. They didn't have to live with him year in and year out! If they did! Well! Not that they hadn't tried to be nice to him either, when they first came out themselves. There was Madame P-, for instance, who had given a dinner for him, and who had invited her friends especially to meet him, and 214

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO he had come and eaten and drunk more than anybody else, but had'hardly said a word the whole evening, and do you know, he hadn't the decency even to pay his dinner call, to make his visite de digestion. And the time he was invited by Madame B- , he didn't come at all. He sent word that he had a previous engagement, and they found out afterward that it was with some of Salama's relatives from Gao. And now that American journalist was up there on the roof with him again, drinking-do you know how many bottles of Pernod the clerk says they ordered yesterday from the grocery store ?-and well, somebody really ought to tell him. And well, somebody did tell me. Dubos told me. He had got it from his beautiful young wife who occasionally furnished material for gossip herself-the way she danced with Koupery, you know, when they had those parties out at the air field- and who adored Papa Yakouba. As for the air force, they had their own angle on Yakouba. He and his white beard and his fat black wife and his abundant tribe were a grand joke to them. But they thought the old man was just as grand as the joke was. They were always inviting him to go up with them, even though it was against the regulations, but he said such things were only for Elijah, that he preferred to wait until he died. As for native Timbuctoo, the real Timbuctoo, the black notables and populace who were mourning the dead Ben Sidi Labas and who would one day mourn Yakouba with the same ancient rites, it goes without saying, that they 215~

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO still not only loved him but worshiped him. Among negroes, just as in the days of ancient Israel, great men and gods are permitted, nay expected, to be eccentric. They have never thought Yakouba funny. And as for Yakouba's former colleagues, the Pares Blancs, the Catholic Missionaries of West Africa, they have held him through all these years and vicissitudes in deep, loving affection. He is a wandering sheep, to be sure, but a sheep of the true fold Thus diversified are the local views on Timbuctoo's queer leading citizen today. If you know Yakouba, you know how little they concern him. He and Salama are rich, as riches go in Timbuctoo; they are deeply fond of each other, loving and protective in their declining years. He watches the fruit of his labors in the medersa, the fruit of his loins in his children and grandchildren. The sun is setting. He is indeed now the Pe're, Father, Patriarchthe Old Man. He has lived his life in Timbuctoo. In the fullness of his time, he will die and be buried there. I shall never see him alive again. Never any more forever will we lift our glasses to the stars and hear the voice of Salama scolding from below, telling us that it is time to go to bed. The years and the Niger will still roll on. 2 See Appendix, p. 278. 216

XIV So WHAT? I do not know what. But I know that having told the story of Yakouba's life I have not told all of it. There is more to a man than a penis and brain, more than a body, more than pride or freedom. A city or a woman, no matter how beloved, be they Troy Town or Timbuctoo, fair Helen or the dark Salama, can never touch the soul of a man or satisfy his soul's secret longings. My old friend has solved in his individual way most of the mechanistic problems by which individual lives are frequently tangled, sometimes wrecked. He has worked out the harmonious adjustment of his sexual, economic, intellectual, social life. He has loved his fellow man and has never done intentional harm to any. He has found, built, made for himself a palace, freedom, wife, wealth, honors, slaves and concubines, a rich and useful life crowned with achievement; has gained every prize the wide world offers to the intelligent, strong-willed man, honorable but defiant of convention. The one thing that he has not gained is the thing that perhaps the world can never give, though one go in search 217

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO of it as far as Timbuctoo. He has not gained happiness, or his soul's peace. "In the end it is not well." There are sometimes tears in his old eyes, and he seeks consolation too often in absinthe. He wishes he had never quit the Church. 218

APPENDIX

NOTES ON PART ONE ON PREFACE 1. TIMBUCTOO'S FOUNDING AND FABLED GLORY. According to Abderrahman Sadi, the most reliable Soudanese historian, Timbuctoo was founded circa 1 100 A.D. by nomad Tuareg tribes who established a permanent summer camp on the north bank of the Niger buckle, returning year after year for pasturage. The straw huts became more or less permanent, and leaving a part of their camp gear there in the winter, they left an old female Bellah slave to take care of it. Her name or nickname was Tomboutou, which means "old woman with a big navel." The historian says the old woman's picturesque name as well as the ideal location helped make the camp known and that important caravans began to stop there. The old janitress died but her name lived on, and the camp of "Tomboutou" gradually attained such importance that merchants from Gao and Djenne built houses and established commercial branches there. Thus Tomboutou, or Timbuctoo, became a town, and pretty soon they built a mosque. It began to grow like Wichita, Kansas, in the pioneer days, like the cities that grew up on the old Chisholm and Santa Fe trails. Schools fol, lowed, and by 13oo Timbuctoo was such a prosperous, brilliant little city that kings and rich politicians, not only the Songhoi who had conquered the country from 221

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO the east, but also the Malinke and Mossi, two local powers in conflict with the Songhoi conquerors, began doing the sorts of things that are historically characteristic, whether the history concern whites or negroes, Christians or Mohammedans: They presented Timbuctoo from time to time with new minarets and rich adornments for its mosque, built summer palaces and other public edifices; they also took it from each other every fifty years or so, in bloody little wars. The still nomad Tuaregs who had been the original founders of the camp, taking advantage of these periodic disorders, came raiding and robbing when they could. In 1496, the Songhoi, dominant now in the vast, rich region of which Timbuctoo was the Sahara caravan gate, decided to clean up the mess. One of the kings, Sunni Ali, occupied Timbuctoo with strong, permanent garrisons, and from that time on, for more than a century, Timbuctoo, as the metropolis of the Songhai Empire, entered upon her period of true though legendary glory as Timbuctoo the Great, the fabled Queen of the Soudan. All this was happening, however, around the time of the discovery of America, when the eyes of all Europe were turning westward and long before any white man had any knowledge whatever concerning the interior of Africa or what went on in its still mythical central regions. Nearly two more centuries passed before the specific fables, legends, likewise the amber, gold, and spices of Timbuctoo, began to seep, through Morocco and Arabia, into Europe. In 15oo, for instance, Europe had never heard of the 222

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Songhoi people or the Songhoi Empire which had been growing and spreading in Africa since the tenth century. The history of their conquest and glory is now known to all historians, but their origin remains legendary. They are ascribed variously to Yemen, Egypt and Abyssinia. Their god is supposed to have been a fish with a golden ring in its nose. The Songhoi, or Songhois, today is a black negro, and ethnologists guess generally that he was always black. My friend Yakouba is not so sure of it. He thinks the Songhoi may have become black by a thousand years of intermarriage. Be that as it may, the Songhoi were black men when they first bobbed up dominantly in the Arabic-written histories of Africa. They became Moslem, and established the greatest negro empire that has ever existed on earth. They had three dynasties, thirty kings, their centuries of glory. They had never heard of Alexander the Great, but it makes a nice alliteration that they had their Askia the Great. It was toward the middle of his reign, around the year 1500, that Timbuctoo reached the apogee of its fame in the Arab-speaking world. Its University of Sankore was at its height, and learned strangers flocked there from Morocco, Tunis, Egypt, and Arabia. It was these traveling scholars, inevitably, who carried the first fabulous tales through Moorish channels into Europe. By the middle of the sixteenth century Timbuctoo was a magic name which excited not only curiosity but cupidity in the European courts, particularly in France and England. No European eye had yet beheld Timbuctoo, but Mediterranean merchants, including some white ones, had seen its great camel caravans which ar223

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO rived in the north loaded with gold, ivory, hides, musk, ostrich plumes. A proverb was born in the Atlas Mountains: "As tar cures the gall of a camel, so poverty finds its unfailing remedy in the Soudan." And in 1545, before Paris or London could do anything about it, the Sultan of Morocco began sending down official missions from Marrakesh, putting out his cat's claws. His armies followed. The Moors quickly conquered and destroyed the great negro empire. The glory departed from Timbuctoo before any white eye had ever beheld it. Under the Moorish government for plunder, things went from bad to worse in the Soudan. By the seventeenth century the scattered local Moorish governors, separated from Morocco by the wide Sahara, were beginning to defy their home government, set themselves up as petty pashas, warring among themselves. Around 18oo, the Tuareg bandits retook Timbuctoo. Thenceforth, until the white man finally came, they preyed upon the cities, the land, and the black people. So that when the French came, they had to fight the Tuaregs but were welcomed as deliverers by the Timbuctooans, who are only now slowly beginning to regain a little of their longlost prosperity. 2. FIRST WHITE EXPLORERS AND THE FINAL CONgUEST. The first white man who ever saw Timbuctoo was a French sailor named Paul Imbert. He was taken there in 1591 against his will, and died there in captivity without revealing anything about the place, so that, in a sense, he scarcely counts as an explorer. He had been ship224

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO wrecked on the coast of Morocco, captured by Arabs, and sold as a slave to a Portuguese renegade in the service of the Sultan, who took him as a slave to Timbuctoo. Messages reached France telling of his plight, but nothing could be done about it. In 1669, Louis XIV and his minister Colbert planned to send explorers in from the West Coast, but nothing came of it. In 1795 the English sent Mungo Park who failed to reach Timbuctoo but explored part of the Niger, wrote a good book about it, and left his legend among the natives. Yakouba tells me that the grandfathers of old men still living told of him as Bonciba-Tigui, "the man with the big beard." Around 1825, the English sent Major Laing. He reached Timbuctoo in August, 1828, and was murdered outside the city soon after his arrival, so that he too died without contributing anything toward the solution of the mystery that still shrouded the legendary city. The story of Major Laing's murder, as told by the Timbuctooans today, has, of course, been preserved only by word of mouth, and is not necessarily trustworthy. It differs from the accepted British story that he was massacred as a Christian by fanatical Moslems. The local tale, byno means a credit to the Timbuctooans whose descendants tell it, is that he aroused the dislike, or cupidity, of a group of black merchants who paid to have him murdered as he was riding in the desert. The first white man who reached Timbuctoo and returned to tell-and write-about it, was young Ren6 Caillie, a poor French boy, imbued with a love of exploration and adventure, to whom the word Timbuctoo 225

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO was magic in a sense not likely to be understood by sensible people, such as foreign ministers or imperialistic politicians; still less by his mother who kept a rural village bakery at Mauze in the Vendee, for he had begun to talk of "going to Timbuctoo" when he was twelve years old, and the whole village, including his own humble family, had naturally thought he was crazy. He was perhaps a little crazy. It was the year 1811 when he was twelve years old, and the most fantastic tales and pictures were still current in Europe concerning the mysterious, inaccessible city hidden in the heart of Africa, filled with palaces and delights. Timbuctoo was in this respect like the extinguished star whose light keeps coming to the astronomer's telescope for hundreds of years after the star itself is dead. Its riches and glory had long since departed, but Europe did not yet know it. The tales and pictures completely turned the little boy's head. The village nicknamed him "Robinson" and made cruel fun of him and his dream. His mother apprenticed him to a shoemaker, and died. At sixteen, having never been outside his native rural commune, he left it on foot, with about ten dollars in his pocket and an extra pair of hobnailed shoes hung round his neck. The extra shoes were because he was going to Timbuctoo, and without knowing exactly where it was- nobody then knew exactly where it was-he knew it was a long way. It was, in fact, longer for him than any modem map or geographer could have told him, since it took him via Guadeloupe, back to France-as cabin-boy, officer's domestic, bootblack-back once to his native village where he arrived with less money than he had at the outset, once fruitlessly to the 226

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO African West Coast, several times from Bordeaux to America as the servant of a wine-merchant, and eventually, in 1824, to Dakar in Senegal when he was twentyfive years old. He had by this time completely worn out the extra shoes and didn't have a sou in his pocket. But he was in Africa. He lived for a year, ragged and half the time starving, with Arab tribes, learning their language and bits of the Koran, and thus equipped, passing himself as an Islamic convert on a pilgrimage to Mecca via Egypt, disappeared into the Niger region, and after years of wandering, eventually reached the fabled, golden city of his dreams-to find it a dilapidated collection of mud houses and reed huts. He remained in Timbuctoo only fourteen days, then joined a caravan going north, to inform Europe of his melancholy discovery. Arriving eventually in Tangier, he looked up the French consul who was an intelligent man able to see the tremendous political importance of the fact that a Frenchman had penetrated to Timbuctoo, even though the fabled city was in wrack and ruin. So the peasant boy, still poor and ragged, was carried across to Toulon in state on a warship, and met by representatives of the Geographic Society, the Institute, and the Academie des Sciences, and presented with a prize of 500 francs, nearly a hundred dollars! The marvelous news was communicated to the ministry, and it was published in the official Moniteur that a "Monsieur Auguste Caillie" had discovered Timbuctoo. They didn't even know the poor boy's name. And within a few weeks the British newspapers were publishing articles doubting that, whatever the unknown Frenchman's name might be, he 227

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO had ever reached Timbuctoo at all. This so enraged the French that they immediately gave Caillie a prize of many thousand francs, made him a chevalier of the Legion of Honor under his right name, and awarded him a golden medal worth several thousand more. But doubts continued to be cast upon his achievement, a generous pension was later suppressed, and in 1838, not yet thirtynine years of age, he died in poverty, in ruined health, his honesty still doubted. He traveled a hard road before and after reaching Timbuctoo, but the road led at last to the stars. He was completely vindicated after his death and has his secure little place among the minor immortals. In 1853 the British government sent the German, Dr. Barth, into Africa as a British agent, and reaching Timbuctoo he was able to corroborate Caillie's disillusioning story, together with complete corroboration of the fact that the Frenchman had been the first white man to enter Timbuctoo and return alive. Nearly another lifetime elapsed, however, before the French, gradually dominating the Sahara and the West Coast, decided it was worth their while to undertake the permanent conquest of the upper Niger. In 1892 they sent the Bonnier flotilla and the Joffre column, followed by the White Fathers and our friend the missionary-monk Yakouba, who became Timbuctoo's first permanent white citizen as Cailli6 had been its first articulate white discoverer. CHAPTER III 1. THE PARES BLANCS. The missionary order known generally as the "Peres Blancs" (as the Franciscans were 228

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO once generally known as "White Friars" in England) was founded in 1868 as the Order of Our Lady of Africa of Algiers, by the first Archbishop of Algiers. Its institution had no trace of miracle or divine intervention. Its purpose from the inception was to convert the Arabs and black tribes of Central Africa, though its first great task was that of caring for the native orphaned victims of the famine of 1867. After the immediate purpose had been fulfilled, and after the delay caused by the FrancoPrussian War, the larger plan began to take shape. In 1874 the first mission outposts were established in the Sahara and in Kabylie. Such posts were constantly in peril, and the Cardinal Archbishop Lavigerie, founder and active head of the order, did not mince matters about the likelihood of frequent martyrdoms. Hadn't North Africa been bathed in the blood of martyrs, from Hippo Regius to Alexandria? And couldn't they, in Algiers, almost look upon the spot where the immaculate Cyprian had received the crown, the blood-stained palms? The Pares Blancs, in their turn, asked for martyrdom -and in their turn got it. In 1876 and 1881, two caravans, intended for the Soudan missions, were massacred by their guides under especially cruel circumstances. The guides had themselves been rescued, by the White Fathers, from bloodthirsty enemies. But other caravans won through, and today Africa has been parceled out into almost a score of Vicariates and Prefectures Apostolic. The southward advance of the White Fathers was disputed, not only by the natives, but by missionaries of the more nasal Christian sects. This has given rise, more than 229

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO once, to those absurdities that are always peculiar to missionary. work. For example, Africa is not only a victim to the "sphere of influence" idea politically; it is its victim in religion, as well. More than once there have been attempts to bring official pressure to bear on certain missionary bodies. When, for instance, the sectarian British East-Africa Company began to administer territories which the Peres Blancs had already exploited, there was a distinct odor of sulphur in the air. Usually, such conflicts do not lead to political "notes," or ultimatums, but they can lead to tension. It must be remembered that missionaries are empire builders, and the Peres Blancs, an almost exclusively French order, are especially suspect. Their work has been magnificent, not only in the Sahara and Niger regions, but in the region of the great lakes, i.e. Victoria and Albert Nyanza, Tanganyika, etc., and the mere data of their results are spectacular. They have Christianized, it seems, about four per cent of the entire non-European (in origin) population of the continent. In 1930, more than 6oo,ooo persons of both sexes and all ages had been baptized, and there were from 2oo,000 to 300,000 catechumens. The statement that the Pares Blancs constitute an almost exclusively French order should be qualified at this point. Certainly, it is effectively French through and through, for the indigenous black priesthood that the missionaries have brought into being are French in thought, if Catholic in spirit. This vast territory, of which the Pares Blancs are the most effectual ghostly administrators, is under the control of Vicars Apostolic, frequently titular bishops, and Prefects Apostolic. Dignitaries of this sort, inferior to 230

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO de fa4cto bishops only in the most insignificant trifles, are the stop-gaps of an ecclesiastical province in a state of inception or transition. Actually, they are quite as effective as bishops, and have the great advantage (this is true of the Prefect rather than the Vicar Apostolic, though the latter is allowed a loophole) of being able to omit the visit ad limina, i.e. to the Holy See, which is periodically demanded of bishops. This allows them to devote all their time to their charges. Most of the Vicars and Prefects have been drawn from the ranks of the Peres Blancs. The White Fathers are not a regular order, not technically monks, strictly speaking. They constitute, in fact, an anomalous group, quasi-secular, quasi- regular. That is, they are a society of secular priests and coadjutor brothers, as well as novices, living in community. However, there are only two rules that are utterly binding: i. Every member must devote his life to the conversion of Africa; 2. every member must live in community, and no house can contain less than three members. Here we have a perfect example of a pragmatic rather than a spiritual rule. The White Fathers constitute a specific, limited tool, and the community obligation is a needed check. Otherwise, the White Fathers are as free as any other secular priests. They have no vow of poverty, though they can expend money within the order only at the discretion of the father superior. In comparison with the complicated regulae of many orders, the White Fathers enjoy a degree of freedom that savors of real faith in erring humanity on the founder's part. An examination of their work shows that it is of the 231

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO sort that endures. Remembering the wholesale baptisms of the Mexican Indians in the days of Cortez, it is possible to be skeptical about the 605,486 baptized converts of the Pares Blancs. However, these conscientious workers require four years' preparation for baptism. If a black, of whatever degree of civilization, doesn't "revert" during those four years, he is ready. The White Fathers are good psychologists. The garb of the White Fathers is an adaptation of the ordinary costume of the desert Arab-white, voluminous robes-actually, therefore, by happy coincidence, identical with a cassock, mantle, and, sometimes, cowl. They wear a cross and rosary around their necks, in imitation of the native marabout and his sacred chaplet. All this is legitimate, clever, and very graceful-a refined example of protective coloring. In the severe black habit of the Jesuits, the Pres Blancs would have looked strange against the African background, but they melt into the picture as they are. 2. CARDINAL LAVIGERIE. Charles Martial Allemand Lavigerie was born at Huire, near Bayonne, which means in the Pyrenees near the Spanish border, on the 13th of October, 1825. His family, on both sides, was cultured, prominent, had produced numerous governmental functionaries. He was a strange and special child, just as he was destined to become a strange and special man. His authorized biographer, Monseigneur Baunard, rector of the Catholic faculty at Lille, and one of the ablest Catholic writers in France, has not glossed the facts. He presents them, on the contrary, with picturesuqe force 232

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO and vigor, in the two-volume life published by the Librairie Ch. Poussielgue, Paris, 1896. He tells us that from early childhood Lavigerie was a tyrannical egoist on the side of the angels: "I! avait son temperament personnel, autoritaire, absolu, dominateur, imperieux jusqu'au despotisme." At the age of ten he began catching and "baptizing" by force all the little Jews of his own age in the streets of Bayonne. "S'ils refusent, il les contraint, les empoigne, les pousse vers la rivi~re, ou la fontaine, et les asperge de force et copieusement, leur jetant ensuite quelques sous pour les empecher de crier." He proved to be a brilliant and aggressive student, went through Larresorre and Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet, finishing at Saint-Sulpice, and in 1854, though only twentyfiine years old, was appointed to the associate's chair of ecclesiastical history at the Sorbonne. Two years later he began to direct the work of l'Ecole d'Orient, and his effective career began. Everything and everybody had to give way before him. He was continually seeking, demanding, and receiving honors, power, decorations, advancement, money, all of which with his whole heart and soul he devoted to the service of the Lord. A man of violent Teddy-Rooseveltian muscular and mental strength, he lived like a prince of the Renaissance, with luxury and prestige, purple and fine linen, rich foods and generous wines, but all for the greater glory of God, tireless and unsparing of himself as he was of others. His first important achievement was securing relief for the victims of the Druses in Syria, and France gave him the Legion of Honor for this activity. French auditor 233

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO to the Roman rota in 1861, he was appointed, two years later, to the See of Nancy. Here he threw himself into organization with great energy, and his four years were marked by reforms that made Nancy famous as a tyrannically but perfectly run diocese. His heart, however, was in the East, and the Holy See recognized this when, on the 27th of November, 1867, he was raised to the newly established archbishopric of Algiers, partly owing to the overtures of Marshal MacMahon, whom he had met at Nancy. Lavigerie landed on African soil in May, 1868. The policy of his predecessors in the See (until 1867 merely a bishopric) had been a good-natured laissez faire, behind which was evident the strong arm of France, intent on placating the Arabs. Though Mohammedanism was the state religion in Algiers, Lavigerie at once began to proselytize. He was sharply reminded that his duty was to his own flock, i.e. the French colonists, alone, but he ignored the warning. Naturally, he was backed by the Holy See, and Louis-Napoleon soon learned that Lavigerie was intractable, especially when he refused the eminently desirable See of Lyons. Henceforth, with few exceptions, he was left to deal with the natives as he saw fit. The great dream of Lavigerie's heart was the conversion of Africa, no less. That he was of an oversanguine temperament cannot be doubted by even the most casual student of this great prelate's life, but on the other hand, he affords instances of hesitation that are almost impossible to square with the driving force that propelled his actions. In 1868 he founded the Peres Blancs, the White Fathers, and, an allied order, the White Sisters, as bodies 234

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO ancillary to his great purpose. The Algerian famine had prepared the way. Schools were established, hospitals were opened, and even agricultural stations were developed for the famine victims. At this point, Lavigerie was so enthusiastic about conversion that he wished to resign his executive position, and devote his life to proselytizing. Pius IX refused Lavigerie, whose talents as an organizer were phenomenal, but appointed him, instead, official delegate to the Sahara and the Soudan. The Franco-Prussian War put an end to government help, and henceforth Lavigerie had to carry his work forward With voluntary contributions. In 1874 he began to work southward, sending missions to East Africa and the Congo. Meanwhile, the work of conversion in Northern Africa had been brilliantly successful. Though his mind was directed primarily to efforts for conversion, Lavigerie found time to handle the routine work of his vast diocese with unfailing ability and astuteness. He established the See of Constantine in 1871, and his organizing labors in Tunis were not merely those of a conscientious pastor, they also showed traces of the activity that today is within the province of a public relations counsel. Truly his words, uttered shortly after landing in Africa: "I shall not seek one day's rest," were no idle ones. He worked for the Roman Catholic Church, and paradoxically enough, he worked just as hard for an anti-clerical France, so hard, indeed, that Gambetta, certainly not the easiest man to win over, pontificated thus: "L'Anticlgricalisme n'est pas un article d'exportation." Therefore, the Cardinal and his Pares Blancs were excepted from the stringent laws against religious orders. 235

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO On the 27th of March, 1882, Lavigerie was made a cardinal. Ten years were before him, during which he had the joy of seeing the work of the White Fathers and White Sisters crowned with success. Aligned with his work of conversion were his efforts to secure the freedom of the slaves throughout Africa, and the later years of his life were marked primarily by his struggles for the blacks. He had been the first to respond to Leo XIII's Encyclical against slavery, and he was the moving spirit behind the Brussels Conference and the Congres de Paris (189o). Furthermore, he traveled throughout Europe in the cause of liberation, and this arduous activity at his age shattered his health. Lavigerie was eminently happy in his relations both with Church and State. In 187o he supported papal infallibility, and he was always distinctly persona grata at the Vatican. In 1884 the See of Carthage was revived, and a year later Lavigerie was raised to the archbishopric that St. Cyprian had once dignified. He was now Primate of Africa, and it is no exaggeration to say that in 1892, when Lavigerie died, Africa was the property of three men: Rhodes in the Cape, Cromer at Cairo, and Lavigerie at Algiers. All empire builders! It should be noted, in this connection, that one of the Cardinal's last efforts was to reconcile the French Republic with the Roman Catholic Church by inviting the officers of the Mediterranean squadron to lunch in Algiers, while a band of his Pares Blancs played the "Marseillaise." This was tantamount to renouncing his monarchist sympathies to which, hitherto, he had clung. Naturally, he was violently criticized for this action, but the papers of Cardinal Rampolla 236

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO amply prove that the idea originated in the astute brain of Leo XIII. In this case, perhaps for the one time in his tyrannical but magnificently useful life, Lavigerie was merely carrying out somebody else's orders. This toast d'Alger, as the Cardinal's republican demonstration was called, was his last important public act. His health failed rapidly, and he died at Algiers in November, 1892. He was a great churchman, and a great man. CHAPTER IV 1. TIMBUCTOO CAPTURED AND BONNIER MASSACRED. The city was "captured" on the morning of January ioth, 1894, without the firing of a shot and under slightly comic circumstances which have been garbled or ignored in most of the French-colonial histories. As late as 1929, Jean-Bernard, who should have known better, revived a controversy in Excelsior as to whether Timbuctoo had actually been first "occupied" by Joffre or by Bonnier. As a matter of fact, it was first occupied by neither, but by an amusing lieutenant of marines named Le Boiteux who disobeyed orders and was punished for it. Le Boiteux's name is given a line in the encyclopaedias which are generally more accurate than history-books, but I owe the details to Yakouba's friend, the Cadi Ben Sidi Labas, who was an eye-witness. I naturally cannot swear to them, but I believe them to be true because other native notables still living tell more or less the same story. Colonel Bonnier had brought his flotilla "up" the river to Khabara without incident, and one of the smaller boats, poling into the lagoons, got even closer to Timbuctoo, in fact within sight of it. Conferences followed 237

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO between the French and the black burghers who were generally glad to see the French arrive but feared to present them with the "keys of the city," as it were, for fear the Tuaregs would come in and massacre everybody. Before a definite agreement was reached, Le Boiteux strolled up into the town, established himself comfortably on the terrace of a house, laid a revolver on the mud railing, propped up his feet on the same railing, lighted a cigarette, and doubtless said to himself, "So this is Timbuctoo." Thus was the city first occupied by an armed French force. The natives did not molest Le Boiteux, but when he returned to the flotilla he caught hell from Bonnier. (An immaterial local variant of the anecdote as told in Timbuctoo today is that the "revolver" was a small, portable revolving cannon. I hadn't heard it when I last talked with Ben Sidi Labas, who might naturally have called the one or the other a revolver.) Late the same day Bonnier entered the city with the 2nd and 5th companies of tirailleurs, and after establishing them there, started westward with a part of his force to look for the column he had sent overland with Joffre and which should have already arrived. On January 15th, Bonnier encamped near Tacoulec, over toward Goundam, and that night he with his white officers and most of the Senegalese troopers were massacred by the Tuaregs in a surprise attack. Unsubstantiated military gossip current now after nearly fifty years has it that Colonel Bonnier and his officers were engaged in a card game when the sentinels reported that Tuaregs were skulking in the neighborhood; that the French had 238 THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO no more fear of skulking Tuaregs than skulking hyenas, and that the card game was still going on when the mounted Tuaregs rushed the camp with their lances and dagger-armed Bellah slaves. 2. THE ARRIVAL OF JOFFRE'S COLUMN. It was nearly a month later, February 12th, that the obscure young officer of the engineering corps, then known as Major Jouffre (his family name was originally Gouffre, of Spanish origin), arrived with his overland column to avenge the death of Bonnier, of Ensign Aube who had been murdered in the forest of Khabara, to build forts in Timbuctoo, and to make it safe against the Tuaregs. One of the first melancholy tasks was to find and identify the bodies of Colonel Bonnier, the eleven European officers, the two white noncoms and the sixty-four native troopers who had been massacred. It is perhaps significant that the future Commander-inChief of the French Army, phlegmatic but extremely competent and conscientious, had made the march from Senegal and now proceeded to clean the region up, killing many Tuaregs, with a loss of only two native troopers who died of illness, and only one seriously wounded man who subsequently recovered. His own book, the only one, so far as I can find out, that he has ever written, My March on Timbuctoo, published in English translation in 1915, by Chatto and Windus, with a preface by the Abbe Dimnet, tells how he did it. It is a soldier's conscientious report, equally without merit or demerit as a literary production. 239

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO 3. How YAKOUBA GOT HIS "JEWISH" NAME. While Yakouba had become a brilliant Arabic scholar by hard study at the Maison Carrie, his superior, Pare Hacquard, had lived in Algeria since boyhood and was practically bilingual. When they arrived in Timbuctoo, they were still teasing each other and squabbling in a friendly way over the fine shadings of the language. Yakouba already had the deeper book knowledge, but Hacquard spoke Arabic "like an Arab." It was one of these squabbles which led indirectly to the younger Pare Auguste Dupuis having the name of Yakouba "wished on him" against his will. He tells the story in his diary-at his own expense: A few days after we arrived in Timbuctoo, a deputation of native notables headed by the Cadi Daounakoy, came to make us a visit. Hacquard saw them coming and said to me: "Go and entertain them while I change my gandoura (robe). The one I'm wearing needs to be sent to the wash." I met them with salaams and when we were all seated on the mats, I engaged them in polite conversation, "El youm ras el ham," said I politely, and they all looked at each other in astonishment, while I heard Hacquard shouting with laughter from his bedroom. He hurried in still laughing, and after greeting the notables said to me, in Arabic, so that they too could appreciate the joke: "I imagine you thought you were wishing 240

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO them a happy New Year." (So I had, for it was the first day of their Moslem year.) "Well," he continued, "you got an aspirate consonant wrong which completely changed the meaning of your whole sentence. What you really told them was that it was time to eat meat. You should have said: 'El youm ras el l am.j- )J He then engaged the notables in conversation, and presently one of them said: "What's the name of your young comrade there who doesn't know the difference between a month and a mutton?" The missionaries all chose, or were given, native names. Father Hacquard's monk's name was Abdallah which means Servant of God, and mine hadn't yet been decided. It was my turn now to be astonished, for Father Hacquard replied, without a second's hesitation, "His name is Yacoub." "So, Yacoub, Yacouba," said the notables, looking me over. When the notables had gone, I said to Hacquard: "Jacob was a great patriarch, and the Jews are a great people, but after all I am a plain blue-eyed French peasant from the Marne. After all, you might have chosen me a name slightly less Hebraic. "Que veux-tu, mon cher, it just popped into my head like that, without thinking." 241

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO So thus I became Yacoub which is generally a very Jewish name in Arabic. The "C" became phonetically a "K," and the terminal "A" was added by the Timbuctooans themselves in conformity with their colloquial usage. Thus the old man writes it in his diary, but he seldom if ever writes the whole truth about anything, which is one of the reasons I am glad I undertook this biography in his lifetime. One night on the roof, he told me that Hacquard afterward admitted he had chosen the name deliberately to pay Yakouba back for the thing he had said about the Jews when they tried to send him to Palestine. CHAPTER V 1. COWRIE SHELLS. Next to minted coinage, this shell is probably the most widely used form of money in the world. Hence its scientific name, cypraea moneta. It is a small yellow and white marine gastropod. It is still current in remote districts of West Africa, ranging from the Sahara to the Gulf of Benin, taking in the whole basin of the Niger; including also the upper Congo-Lualaba area. Its economic sphere centers especially in the Timbuctoo region, the district of the middle Niger and the country around Lake Tchad. It is also used in Southern Arabia and in other limited Asiatic areas. Sometimes the shells are strung on a string, sometimes kept loose in a leather sack, often carried in wicker baskets. Transactions of all kinds, from simple village marketing to buying and selling on a larger scale (when the shells are measured instead of counted) are accomplished through this 242

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO medium. In terms of European currency, its value is variable according to the remoteness of the districts. In the mountains east of Bandiagara in 1928, the rate of exchange was about 250 cowrie shells for 1 French franc, or roughly about 6o shells for 1 cent American. The exchange, however, is less ridiculous, less cumbersome than it sounds, for native prices are amazingly low in comparison to ours, a cent being in some districts a high price to pay for a chicken. CHAPTER VII 1. THE SENUSSI. The Islamic religious fraternity of the Senussi, or Senussites, was founded in Algeria in 1791 by Sidi Mohammed ben Ali ben es Senussi whose lineage is traced back to Fatima, the daughter of Mohammed. He is known to history as the Sheikh es Senussi. The order which he founded, unlike most of the dervish sects, was distinctly political rather than mystical. In religion, they were fundamentalists like the Wahabites, or like the Hardshell Baptists among Christians, but let it go at that, and concerned themselves actually with Islamic politics and economics. Their founder had studied theology in Fez, Mecca, Tripoli and Cairo, and seems to have been a reformer. The White Monastery which was the mother-house of the order, in the mountains near Derna, long stood for dignity, piety, honest labor. But when the French gradually began to conquer and absorb Moslem territory, the Senussi endeavored to revive the jihad, or holy war. The Senussi el Mahdi was still fighting them in 19oo. In Egypt, they soon came to terms 243

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO with the British, and in West Africa they have also become gradually "tranquillized." CHAPTER IX 1. YAKOUBA'S DRAWINGS. Some of these drawings, which the old man still amuses himself by making from time to time, have appeared in an official colonial office scientific brochure entitled "Industries et Principales Professions des Habitants de la Region of Tombouctou, par DupuisYAKOU BA, Agent Principal des Affaires Indigenes en Afrique Occidentale Franqaise, avec nombreuses illustrations," published by Emile Larose, Paris, 1921. Others appeared in the "Vie, Travaux, Voyages de Mgr. Hacquard," by the Abb6 Marin, published by Berger-Levrault & Cie., Paris and Nancy, 1905. Still others are reproduced for the first time. See pages 245-258. 2. THE TARIK EL SUDAN. It was long supposed to have been written by a certain Ahmed Baba of whom as little is known as of Homer. But Dubois found internal evidence which seems to prove conclusively that the real author was that Abderrahman ben Abdallah ben Amran ben Amar Sadi el Timbucti who is mentioned in the text itself as having been born at Timbuctoo, "the object of his affections," of one of those families in which "science and piety were transmitted as a patrimony." As for the Tarik itself, of which complete copies now exist in the British Museum and the Bibliotheque Nationale, the author's own preface describes its purpose and contents in a style that could scarcely be improved by the best writer of jacket blurbs in the best New York publishing houses today. I pass it on to them herewith as 244 tL SAA A AA tA AA TI-WH- ]i:L....J i PLAN OF HOUSE Top: Faqade; all apparent windows and doors, except the two central ones, are blind. Bottom: Ground plan, showing vestibule, stairways, chambers, and central open court. 245 fh

34 COMMUNITY BAKERY These public ovens are set on street-corners in all native quarters of Timbuctoo and anyone may use them. They are built of clay, quite large, are heated by filling them with dry camel dung or firewood, which is withdrawn after the oven is heated. The spiked projections from the interior of the dome are to provide larger surface area to hold the heat. Figure 1 shows the exterior; 2, the interior; 3, swab to clean out the ashes; 4, flat shovel to insert and withdraw the loaves; 5, tray for dough; 6, whole-wheat loaves which are about the shape and size of American pies. 246 rT. ARTISANS' TOOLS Top group: Tools of blacksmith, who is also jeweler; the weird-looking thing is the bellows. Bottom, left: Carpenter's brace and bit, and adze. Bottom, right: Mason's crowbar, trowel, and hoe. 247 I JI 0 50 ZZ 2

A - TUAREG ARMS Spears, ram's-horn staff, sword, shield and dagger. 248 JEWELRY Top line: Earrings, very large; stones in center model are red and white amber. Second line: Pendants. Third line: Finger rings. Bottom: Anklet and bracelets. 249 im

I4/oA /{o14j- &1?01 dyc 54 MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS Fiddle, lute, drums, flute, and harp or lyre. 250

SHOEMAKER'S TOOLS Except for the awl and the scissors, the author is unfamiliar with the English names for the implements. 251 6

'~4 FOOTWEAR Top: Men's slippers in multi-colored leather, sometimes embroidered, and cowhide sandal. Bottom: Womens slippers, shoes, sandal, clog, boot. 252 mgiakkk-m

LEATHER WORK Mostly in soft sheepskin, brilliantly dyed in primary reds, yellows, blues. Figure 1, wallet; 2 and 3, cushions; 4, tobacco pouch. 253

CARPENTRY Figure 1, window frame; aperture "A" is open, without glass; 2, wooden door- lock, interior view; 3, linen chest; 4, tent peg. 254

ARTICLES OF CLOTHING Top row: Men's shirts. Second row: Leather skirt of Bellah female slaves, back and front view, usually dyed in brilliant colors. Third row: Men's pants, or drawers. Bottom: Men's cloaks or mantles. 255

0 4 bi I 4 256

FISHING GEAR Tridents, spears, nets, hook-and-line, triangular crocodile hook; reduced profile of one-man fishing boat made of hides sewn on wooden frame. 257 .r- - to aa 5 ) b C BARBER SHOP AND BEAUTY PARLOR STYLES a: Children's head-shaving styles; these originally had a tribal or clan significance, like Scotch plaids, but are now worn indiscriminately. b: Coiffures for married women. c: Coiffure of Peuhl maiden. 258 1(

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO a model-particularly the first sentence in which the book is praised most highly, yet with pious modesty: "Praise be to God whom the weight of a pearl upon the earth does not escape. May prayer and salvation be the master of the first and last. We know that our ancestors took pleasure in mentioning the companions of the prophets and saints, and the sheikhs and eminent kings of their country, with their lives, their edifices, and the great events of their reigns. They have told us all that they have seen, or heard, of the times extending behind US. "As for the present time, no one is to be found to take an interest in these things or follow the path traced by their ancestors. Witnessing the decline of this science [history], so precious on account of the instruction it offers to mankind, I have implored the assistance of God in writing down all that I have read, seen, or heard concerning the kings of the Sudan and the Songhoi people, and in relating their history, and the events connected with their expeditions of war. I shall speak of Timbuctoo and its foundation, of the princes who have wielded the power of that city, I shall mention the learned and pious men who dwelt therein, and I shall continue the history to the close of the dominion of the sultans of Morocco."(From the English version of the Dubois translation.) 259

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO CHAPTER X 1. TUAREGS. Yakouba, who has lived longer in Tuareg territory than any other living white man, does not like the Tuaregs. This may be, of course, because he has become a 1o per cent Timbuctoo Rotarian. All good Timbuctooans hate the Tuaregs. In any event Yakouba, who has read all of Fenimore Cooper and several biographies of Buffalo Bill, insists that the Tuareg has all the bad qualities of the noble redskin minus the nobility. The French, officially, now make use of them to help police the desert, but this has in no wise changed the private opinions of Yakouba, Ben Sidi Labas, and the Timbuctooans who call them "Thieves, Hyenas, the Abandoned of God." To justify his convictions, or his prejudice, Yakouba loves to quote F6lix Dubois of the Figaro, whose Tombouctou, la ville mystieuse is, in his opinion, the only decent book that has yet been written on the city of his adoption: "Theft is their natural industry, a branch of their education, in fact, and to augment the meagerness of their herds, they prey on everybody. Unarmed travelers and merchants are their favorite victims, but when these fail, they rob and murder each other, so that the tribes are without loyalty to one another, divided among themselves by bitter hatreds. "They adopted a vague form of Islamism which they reduced to a belief in talismans. Since no morality, Mohammedan or otherwise, found foothold among them, they soon became characterized by the worst vices, only 260

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO retaining the one quality of physical endurance. Thieves and murderers when in sufficient numbers, they are the most obsequious of beggars when convinced of their weakness, and are, in either case, absolutely faithless. A Sudanese proverb says, 'The word of a Tuareg, like water fallen on the sand, is never to be found again.' They have nobles, serfs, and slaves among them, but nobility, none; if you wish to find any quality other than vanity and pride, you must look for it among their negro slaves. Neither age nor womanhood inspires them with either pity or respect. Bloodthirsty and cruel as they are, they do not even possess that limited courage which forms the redeeming characteristic of the condottieri. Their valor is displayed at night during the sleep of their victims or adversaries. Ruse is their principal weapon, even though they never show themselves without a spear in their hand, a sword at their side, and a poignard attached to the left arm. Murder and massacre are their specialties. In battle they are as cowardly as jackals. And as a people, they are the most useless and nefarious on earth. " Which seems to leave little to be added, if that's the way you feel about Tuaregs. The doddering old black burghers, who still talk of conditions before the French came, will treat you on the slightest encouragement, however, to entertaining variations on the theme, embroidered frequently with a certain oriental eloquence: "Behold still in our markets those hideous veiled ones in black, their breasts covered with red and yellow amulets. They now pretend falsely to a little modesty, 261

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO because they are cowards, but before the French arrived, they walked insolently in our streets, pushing us with their iron spears. Every year we paid them tribute in gold or kind, corn, salt, garments, and turbans. Their chiefs with their retinues were well lodged when they came here. The caravans bound for this town paid them toll in the desert, and they exacted toll from the river also, from the fleets going to Khabara. This did not suffice them; these were the least of our evils. From one end of the year to the other they treated us as captives of war, as slaves. They were constantly arriving in groups and dispersing through the town. All doors were closed as soon as they appeared, but they beat upon the doors, and thou -canst still see the traces of the heavy blows from their lances everywhere. We were forced to open to them, and without paying the least attention to the master of the house or his family, they would install themselves in the best rooms, taking all the couches and cushions, insolently demanding food and drink, and insisting upon having sugar, honey, and meat. On departing to rejoin their camp the only acknowledgment they made was to steal something from the house and spit upon their host. "If they lighted upon some man too poor to satisfy their exactions, they vented their ill-humor by destroying his belongings, and any attempt at resistance was met by their raised spear. If they arrived at midnight, accommodation must be found and a repast prepared for them. "They took possession of anything that pleased them in the markets. All the shops and sellers of stuffs and 262

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO garments had people posted about the town to give notice of their appearance, and everyone barricaded their doors. They robbed the passers-by in the streets. If they met a man wearing a beautifully embroidered robe or a new garment, or even only a clean one, they instantly despoiled him of it. They snatched the golden ornaments, coral necklaces, and adornments of glass beads from the women, and plundered children and slaves in the same manner. "The schools were formally held in front of the houses of the masters, and our children played in the streets as in other parts of the Soudan. But the Tuaregs used to seize them and carry them off, and only restored them to us on the payment of heavy ransoms. If a man whom they suspected of being rich had hidden all his valuables, they would leave some small thing behind on quitting his house, and then would return in numbers, crying out that they had been robbed, and the man would be forced to pay an indemnity. They have not changed today. They have always been cowards and are held back by their fear of the soldiers." Of course, this is not entirely true, nor is it even true that they are always "held back by their fear of the soldiers" today. When I wanted to visit a camp of Tuaregs in 1928, the then commandant of Timbuctoo refused to let me go without an armed platoon of tirailleurs as escort and insisted, because there had been some recent trouble, that I go no further, in any event, than one day's journey. In 1930 a big band of dissident Tuaregs raided to within twenty-five kilometers of Timbuctoo, taking everything before them, and fought, at the 263 THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO wells approaching the city, a meharist column led by Lieutenant Bara who was wounded. Lieutenant Bara was riding a blooded mare belonging to Koupery who had succeeded Daviot as manager of the chain-store grocery. Six days before this fight, the chief of the same Tuareg band had been buying supplies in Koupery's store, calling on the commandant at the fort, striding about the streets with his Bellah slaves. The raiders had been at that moment within 8o kilometers of Timbuctoo, but nobody yet knew it. And after they had made another war camp within only about thirty kilometers of the city, they still sent slaves in to buy supplies. When Yakouba and Koupery were telling me of this episode, the old man quoted a proverb worthy of Solomon. "The truth," he said, "is always easy to conceal in a public market." As for the real truth about the Tuaregs, apart from Timbuctoo prejudice, I suspect that it may be summed up in that other intelligent if not heroic military epigram that "he who fights and runs away will live to fight another day." 264

NOTES ON PART TWO CHAPTER VII 1. THE SALT VEINS IN THE SAHARA. The triple vein at Taodeni is probably a part of the great subterranean rock-salt vein which runs westward under the desert toward the Rio del Oro, and on which the horrible legendary, yet factual, slave mines of the western Dj ouf are located. According to all natives, the most awful fate, worse than death or torture, that can befall any man, or woman, is to become a salt-mine slave in the Djouf. There are hair-raising unconfirmed stories of white European slaves. These mines, in an almost impenetrable territory, far to the west of Taodeni, make one of the few nightmare horror mysteries still left in Africa. In 193o the Matin sent a caterpillar tractor expedition in, which brought back fantastic corroboration of some of the appalling stories. CHAPTER VIII 1. HIGH OFFICIAL PRAISE AND RECOGNITION. Appended is a transcript of the extraordinary report made by Lieutenant-Governor Clozel in 1895 on the services eclatants already rendered to the colonial government by Monsieur Auguste Victor Dupuis. As an official document, it is unique because, as Clozel sets forth in the document itself, it dealt with "an abso265

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO lutely unique character who had created for himself an absolutely unique situation in the Timbuctoo region. There is not a native in the whole Niger Valley or in the depths of the Sahara who does not love and venerate the name of Yakouba under which he has acquired this astonishing influence." The governor goes on to laud his scholarly and scientific achievements to the skies, demanding that he be decorated, attributing to him the success of the Araouan and Taodeni expeditions, even dilating on his bravery and belle energie under fire, though so far as I know from his notes and intimate conversations the old man has never been under fire in his life. He seems to have had everybody white and black (except Salama) completely hypnotized: RAPPORT SPECIAL du Gouverneur CLOZEL, Lieutenant-Gouverneur du Haut-tnegal et Niger a l'appui dune proposition speciale en faveur de M. l'Interprkte hors cadres DUPUIS (Auguste, Victor) pour le grade d'Adjoint Principal des Aflaires Indig~nes: Depuis r895, M lInterprete DUPUIS habite Tombouctou et, durant ces r3 annees de sejour ininterrompu dont il n'y a pas d'autre exemple dans toute l'Afrique Occidentale Franfaise, il s'est consacre sans rehtche at l'itude des langues indigenes, a celle des mceurs et des coutumes des sidentaires et des nomades. L'arabe, le songhai, le dialecte Tamatchek, le bambara, le peul lui sont aussi familiers que le Franfais; mais il ne se contente pas de les etudier comme Iangues parlhes, i veut 266

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO faire ouvre plus utile et plus durable et il publie successivement un essai de grammaire songhoi en collaboralion avec M. Hacquard et une méthode de songhoi suivie d'une chrestomathie avec double vocabulaire. Le point de vue scientifique n'est pas non plus négligé dans ses études et la publication de ses observations relevées dans le courant des années 1897, 1898-i899 lui vaut une médaille d'argent du bureau Météorologique de Paris. Mais ce n'est pas tant par son érudition que par sa connaissance extraordinaire des hommes et des choses du pays que M. DUPUIS s'est créé dans la région de Tombouctou une situation absolument unique. Il n'est pas un sédentaire du Nord de la Boucle du Niger qui ne vénère le nom de YAKOUBA sous lequel il est populaire jusqu'au fond du désert par delà Oualata et Taodénit. Et cette influence étonnante qu'il a acquise sur les indigènes avec lesquels il vit de leur vie depuis treize ans, M. DUPUIS n'a cessé de la mettre au service de la France avec une abnégation et un dévouement sans égals. Tous les commandants de Région sans exception qui, depuis le début de notre occupation, se sont succédés à Tombouctou, ont contracté vis à vis de lui une véritable dette de reconnaissance, car il fut pour tous surtout dans les moments difficiles, l'auxiliaire précieux dont le conseil sûr fait éviter de ces fautes politiques qui peuvent avoir les plus graves conséquences. Aussi les apréciations données sur M. DUPUIS par tous les Officiers qui ont commandé Tombouctou sont-elles un tissu d'éloges souvent émus, dictés par la plus sincère gratitude. Depuis qu'il est entré en 1904 dans l'Administration, il n'est pas non 267

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO a plus une colonne; une reconnaissance qui soit sortie de Tombouctou sans que le Commandant des opératiohs n'ait à ses côtés M. DUPUIS. Si nous avons, sans coup férir, visité Taodénit, s'il y a quelques mois nous sommes arrivés pacifiquement aux portes de Oualata, c'est beaucoup à lui que nous le devons. Dernièrement encore le succès de la colonne du Commandant LAVERDURE dans le Gourma était un peu son ouvre et là M. DUPUIS savait aussi montrer sous le feu la plus belle énergie et le plus calme sangfroid. Des services aussi éclatants ne sauraient rester sans récompense. C'est pourquoi j'ai l'honneur de vous proposer, Monsieur le Gouverneur Général, de vouloir bien l'admettre dans le cadre des Affaires Indigènes avec le grade d'Adjoint Principal afin de lui réserver, dans l'intérêt même de l'Etat un avenir en rapport avec les services distingués qu'il peut rendre pendant encore de nombreuses années. Je sais que la mesure que j'ai l'honneur de solliciter présente un caractère inusité, mais le cas de M. DUPUIS est un cas absolument unique comme il est un homme absolument unique et son cas ne saurait, à mes yeux, constituer un précédent. Pas plus que moi vous n'ignorez qu'il est venu en Afrique comme Missionnaire Catholique, qu'il s'est dégagé de tous liens confessionnels pour se consacrer uniquement au service de la France, au Soudan. Les représentants de l'idée laïque, les serviteurs du pays et du Gouvernement qu'il s'est librement donnés, que nous 268

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO sommes, que nous devons tre, doivent a l'ex-Pe're DUPUIS une assistance speciale, une aide efcace pour con qu'rir le rang social auquel ses services et ses mdrites lui donnent tous les droits. J'estime que devant un homme exceptionnel comme lui, la regle peut et doit flechir d'une fafon exceptionnelle et c'est pourquoi je mets respectueusement ma plus vive insistance a vous demander de vouloir bien agreer favorablement la proposition que je fais en sa faveur. signe : CLOZEL Dakar, zS dicembre 19o8 CHAPTER IX 1. THE UNIVERSITY OF SANKORi. This university, which was a great one and contributed more than gold and ostrich plumes to the fame of ancient Timbuctoo, was never a great university in the material sense that Princeton, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge are. That is, it never had lawns, campus, dormitories, groups of handsome and expensive buildings. So far as one can understand, some hundred or more of the most learned men of the black Islamic world came and settled there, each with his own library, his own manuscripts, to compare, to learn from each other, and to teach. There was never even a great public library under one roof, like the one burned at Alexandria or the marble one on Fifth Avenue. But available to all worthy scholars was the greatest collection of Arabic classic manuscripts (some of the professors owned only one, some a dozen or more) that existed anywhere in the sixteenth century. Leon the African said, 269

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO "Books sell very well there. You can make a greater profit out of them than from any other merchandise." Timbuctoo has never had marble, stone, or wood. The professors lived in their own mud houses, taught, in the open air, groups seated on mats in the sand, or on the roof terraces. The students never passed freshman examinations, or paid regular fees, or lived in fraternity houses or dormitories. Yet they had a great university. The white Islamic world had other centers of learning, Baghdad, Cairo, Samarkand, but Timbuctoo was the cultural center of the black Islamic empire. People who object to giving the negro any credit for cultural greatness, past, present, or future, may find here a paradox which can be used two-edgedly in argument. The manuscripts and teaching were all in Arabic. There existed no ancient written negro language. But the faces of the faculty and students of Sankore, which contributed to Timbuctoo its greatest glory, were black. CHAPTER XlII 1. THE YAKOUBA LEGEND IN EUROPE. Nearly all the colonial-minded journalists of France, at one time or another, have had a crack at P~re Yakouba and contributed to his legend. Likewise, various novelists, travelwriters, moral commentators, etc., using him both as an individual and a type, since the native mistress, concubine, or wife-black, brown, or yellow-has been a favorite controversial figure in French colonial literature and life since Pierre Loti made her famous. One of the most interesting, recent angles was taken by Pierre 270

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO Mille of the Academie Franjaise, himself a Catholic liberal-conservative, in the Nouvelles Litteraires in 1928, who argued that the custom was practically understandLE DICCIVILISE OU lavittoire des X 6 .pouses" able and defensible in the case of missionary priests! He said, in part: "There was a Pere Blanc who for thirty years-and he is still living-had been universally estimated and venerated by the natives. He became so identified with the lives of the blacks and Arabs, spoke so many of their 271

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO dialects, penetrated so deeply into their customs that he became our most precious auxiliary in native politics. If our troops were able to occupy the Oualata district almost without firing a shot, it was in a large measure due to him. On another occasion, when the Timbuctoo region was warned in time of an impending Tuareg attack, again it was thanks to him. "Well, one fine morning this Father Yakouba tossed his frock into the nettle-patch and reappeared garbed a la negre, announcing that he was going to work as a stevedore at Khabara. The governor-general soon forcibly lifted him out of that, gave him government jobs, and made him a political agent. In 1902 when I visited Timbuctoo, Yakouba was still superior of the mission. Though I have never been violently clerical, I was so deeply impressed that when I returned to France I assumed the r6le of pious mendicant to raise additional funds for the mission. The money was all pledged when news came that Yakouba had abandoned the mission, turned native, was living with a native woman and several concubines who had already presented him with a handsome assortment of variously pigmented babies. "Now permit me to declare an opinion which may seem to you scandalous or shocking: if any class of white men in the colonies is excusable for living with native women, it is in my opinion precisely these missionaries! The rules of their order give them almost no opportunity for periodic returns to France; the same rules require wisely that they live and dress in the native manner, learn the native languages, turn practically native in all things except that they are supposed to retain the celibate 272

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO white skins and perform their sacerdotal duties as priests. There have been cases of sublime self-abnegation. But the medal has a reverse side. It seems to me entirely natural for some of them to go the whole way. Furthermore, among the primitives, celibacy, continence, male chastity, is not regarded as a virtue but as a form of insanity," etc., etc. Yakouba, of course, always cantankerous, instead of being pleased at this defense, wrote an open letter to Pierre Mille, published likewise in the Nouvelles Litteraires, joshing him good-naturedly about the mule he had ridden in Timbuctoo and the eyeglasses which had fallen off his nose while riding it, but protesting violently against the implication that Salama was a "concubine" and howling the truth to high heaven-entirely true, by the way-that his legitimate children were legitimate, and lying good-humoredly in his turn by asserting that he had never had any concubines at all, though in his own memoirs he tells many an instance of having consorted with other native women than Salama. He also takes a good-natured swipe at his novelist friend Charles Louis Royer and the brilliantly sensational Albert Londres, who had also tasted the absinthe on his roof in Timbuctoo, heard his yarns, and to some extent distorted them. The letter is worth recording for the additional reason that he states clearly in it his position as a good Christian and a good Catholic with reference to the faith and doctrines of the Church. Here it is: 273

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO le 30 décembre 1928. Monsieur Pierre Mille, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, Paris. Cher Monsieur, On vient de me communiquer votre article de samedi dernier dans les Nouvelles Littéraires où, profitant de celui d'Albert Londres, et peutêtre aussi d'un passage de la Maîtresse noire, de L. Royer, vous vous servez de mon exemple pour expliquer certain côté de la vie des Européens aux colonies. Permettez-moi de vous signaler deux erreurs qui, sur la foi des autres, se sont glissées sous votre plume: D'abord, je n'ai jamais "gagné ma vie en surveillant le déchargement des chalands sur le Niger." Ce n'est pas déshonorant d'ailleurs, mais c'est tout de même inexact. Ce qui a pu vous porter à le croire, c'est évidemment le passage de l'article d'Albert Londres où il me fait vivre avec les noirs à Koroyomé. C'est une erreur que je lui ai d'ailleurs fait remarquer. Le gouverneur Ponty me nomma interprète et quatre ans plus tard, sur les instances du gouverneur Clozel, adjoint principal dans l'Administration. Voilà les faits! Mais ceci n'est qu'une erreur de détail. Ce qui est plus grave, c'est l'accusation que vous mettez dans la bouche du lieutenant de vaisseau Le B-. ccIl n'y a rien de fait! Yacouba 274

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO a abandonné sa robe, il est entré dans l'Administration-et l'on a découvert que, depuis plusieurs années, il vivait avec une. femme indigène et deux ou trois concubines qui lui ont donné une gentille petite famille de métis." Je n'ai pris mon épouse que lorsque j'étais en service auprès du colonel commandant la région de Tombouctou. De plus, je n'ai jamais eu de concubines et à plus forte raison d'enfants d'elles. Je ne suis pas musulman, lisez dans A. Londres la traduction de l'acte de naturalisation que m'ont octroyé les indigènes. "Il participera à tous nos droits comme à toutes nos obligations. Toutefois, il conservera sa religion, comme nous la nôtre." Non, je n'ai jamais pensé à abjurer la religion chrétienne catholique-je souligne ce dernier mot.-Si la discipline actuelle de l'Eglise catholique interdit le mariage au clergé latin, elle le permet, par contre, aux prêtres catholiques grecs. Il n'ya donc là, dans ma conduite, rien qui choque la doctrine. Mais j'en viens à ce qui est encore plus grave et ce qui a justement fort peiné, hier, mes trois enfants-qui sont avec moi, ici, en congé-c'est l'accusation de concubinage. Ils savent bien que c'est faux et qu'ils sont tous les enfants de Salama, mon épouse légitime et unique. Vous devez le comprendre. J'estime donc qu'il y aurait lieu à une rec275

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO tification publique ritablissant les faits dans toute leur exactitude, et je compte que vous le ferez en toute loyauti. Croyez bien, cher Monsieur Mille, au bon souvenir que j'ai gardi de la journde que vous avez passee avec nous a Tombouctou, ou" votre mulet vous djposa sur le sol a la porte du FortBonnier et oz' vous aviez perdu votre binocle. Yacouba. The great Pierre Mille and Yakouba have remained friends, as did Albert Londres and Yakouba up to the time of Londres' death two years ago in shipwreck off the coast of Abyssinia. The old man was really delighted with the amusing picture Londres had presented of him in Terre d'ibne, a chapter which was wholly "sympathetic," if not strictly accurate in historical detail. Londres was accurate enough in giving the simplest method of finding Yakouba if you want to look him up yourself one of these days when you happen to be in Timbuctoo, and in telling what you will find if you do: "Having no knowledge of Timbuctoo or of the native languages, I wandered at random into the native city and said Yakouba! to the first native child I saw. "The infant promptly took me by the hand and led me to the house." As he was knocking at the door a strange European appeared from around a corner. "He wore a long, magnificent white beard, a boubou, and wide Arab trousers. In one hand was a cane, in the other an old pipe and a 276

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO tobacco pouch. His naked feet were in cowhide sandals. He grinned at me. "We went into his house. When we were in the dark cave he said, 'This is my wife, Salama.' 'Bonjour, madame,' said I. We traversed two courtyards, in the second of which a young negress was pounding millet. 'One of my wife's captives,' said Yakouba, and led me up an earthen stairway to his library in which there was a corner furnished a l'Europienne, with tables, chairs, bottles with familiar labels awaiting the early hour of their sacrifice. Another young female slave, naked and beautiful, traversed the room and disappeared. 'You see that I have adapted myself to the simple and innocent native customs,' said Yakouba, 'but the bottles are European, so we can have an aperitif. You had better take some tobacco from my pouch. I don't know where the tin is.' " "'Every laptot and boatman between here and Mopti charged me to greet you for them, Monsieur Yakouba; in the vast region your name is known everywhere,' said I politely, but I soon discovered that fame didn't weigh too heavily on his shoulders," etc., etc. Londres recounts two Yakouba anecdotes which the old man never told me, and which do not appear in his notes. One concerns General Gouraud, later Military Governor of Syria, whom Yakouba knew in the days when he himself was a priest and Gouraud an unknown shavetail lieutenant attached to the Timbuctoo garrison. Gouraud, it seems, went Tuareg hunting on his own in the forest of Khabara, bagged a few, but came back slightly wounded. The telegraph line was already work277

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO ing and when a dispatch came from Paris, Yakouba opened a bottle of Pernod to fRte what they supposed would be Gouraud's promotion to a captain's stripes. Instead, Gouraud was given twenty days' arrest. The other concerns his first visit to the family back in Gland near Chateau- Thierry, with Diara and one of her little brothers, when his own peasant brother exclaimed in astonishment: "But your children are black !" "Name of a camel! what color did you expect them to be? They were born in Timbuctoo! And they are going back to Timbuctoo, where we can be all the colors of the rainbow if we like." 2. CATHOLIC OPINION ON YAKOUBA. If you, kind reader, as a Christian, or Catholic, have been shocked at times by the strange life which I have tried honestly to present in these pages, I beg you to ponder the following letter, written personally and officially by Monseigneur Sauvant, present Vicar Apostolic of the Sudan: VICARIAT APOSTOLIQUE DU SOUDAN z2 janvier 1929. Monsieur Dupuis-Yakouba, Tombouctou. Mon tr~s cher confrere, car, en ddpit de tout et par dela toutes les vicissitudes de la vie, je vous ai toujours considr et aime comme tel et je sais que tous mes autres con frres du Soudan partagent avec moi les memes sentiments a votre egard. Si jamais, a' mon retour au Soudan, je vais jusqu'a Tombouctou, vous accepterez, 278

THE WHITE MONK OF TIMBUCTOO n'est-ce pas, que je vous fasse une visite? Soyez tranquille et sans arrie're-pensee, le ne vous importunerai pas ni ne cherclerai a faire rassaut en quoi que ce soit de ce qui vous est personnel, et nous nous quitterons meilleurs amis qu'au dibut de l'entrevue. Ma benidiction? Vous la demandez? Je vous la donne grande, large, immens'ment fraternelle et je vous embrasse comme jamais fr~re n 'embrassa son frbre. Votre vieux et extre7nement affectionne fr~re en J 'sus et Marie. Fernand SA UVANT, vicaire apostolique du Soudan. TRANSLATION: My dear confrkre, for, in spite of and beyond all the vicissitudes of life, I have always considered and loved you as such, and I know that all my other confreres of the Sudan join with me in thus feeling toward you. If ever, on my return from the Sudan, I come to Timbuctoo, you will permit me, will you not, to make you a visit? Have no worry or suspicion, I shall not importune you, or make any assault whatsoever upon any of those things which are personal to you, and we will quit each other warmer friends than ever. My benediction? You ask me for it? I give it to you, grand and wide, immensely fraternal, and I embrace you as never a brother has embraced his brother. Your old and extremely affecionate brother in Christ and Mary, (signed) Fernand SAUVANT, Apostolic Vicar of the Sudan. 279