A Caravan of Gold

In the year 724 of the Hijra, which the Christians far to the north called 1324, the Mansa of Mali decided to go to Mecca, and the whole world, it seemed to Elias, decided to go with him.

For a year the capital at Niani had been filling up. Men came in from every province of the empire, from the gold fields of Bambuk and Bure in the south-west, from the trading towns of the river, from Timbuktu and Gao in the east, with their households, their servants, their animals and their baggage. Camels arrived by the hundred from the desert edge, groaning and spitting and complaining in long lines down the red roads. The markets ran out of cloth, then leather, then rope. The smiths worked through the night. The town spilled out past its walls into a sprawl of tents and pens and cooking fires that went on as far as Elias could see from the top of the granary, and further.

Everyone had a number for the caravan, and every number was different. Eight thousand people. Twelve thousand. Sixty thousand, said the man who sold kola nuts at the north gate, who had never counted anything higher than his own debts. Camels beyond counting. And gold. Everyone agreed about the gold. More gold than anyone had ever carried anywhere, gold enough to make a road to Mecca, gold enough to buy Egypt, packed in leather sacks and loaded on camels and guarded by men with spears.

Elias had seen the Mansa himself only once, from a distance, at the great feast at the end of Ramadan, when he had sat beneath a silk canopy on a raised platform, under the shade of a parasol topped with a golden bird, with his commanders and his scholars and his griots ranged around him, and the whole of Niani had bowed and thrown dust on their heads, as was the custom. Elias had thrown dust with everyone else, and looked up through it, and seen a man of middle years in a robe of red and white, very still, listening to the griot recite the history of his ancestors. He had not looked like a man who owned more gold than anyone in the world. He had looked like a man who was thinking about something very far away.

Mecca, people said. He had been thinking about Mecca for years. About the obligation of every Muslim who could make the journey to make it once in a lifetime. About the holy places, and the scholars of Cairo and Medina, and the books. People said he wanted books more than anything. People said a great many things.

Elias had seen the gold, though.

That was the strange thing. Elias had been born in a village of round mud houses on a tributary of the river, the child of a family that grew millet and kept goats and had never in its history owned more gold than a single earring. And now Elias had stood in the Mansa's own storerooms, among the sacks.

It had happened because of a goat.