Once the city of Timbuktu was more important in population, in commerce,
in learning than the London, the Paris or the Rome of the time. It was
the crossroads where African traffic, east and west, met African
traffic, north and south; Timbuktu dominated all. In its commercial
houses accumulated the wealth of Africa; in its universities and mosques
the wisdom of Greece, Rome, Byzantium and the Near East--at a time when
such learning was being destroyed in Dark Ages beset Europe.
Timbuktu's day lasted but two or three hundred years at most. By the
middle of the Twentieth Century it had deteriorated into what looked
nothing so much as a New Mexico ghost town, built largely of adobe. Its
palaces and markets has melted away to caricatures of their former
selves, its universities were a memory of yesteryear, its population
fallen off to a few thousands. Not until the Niger Projects, the dams
and irrigation projects, of the latter part of the Twentieth Century did
the city begin to regain a semblance of its old importance.
Homer Crawford's team had come down over the Tanezrouft route, Reggan,
Bidon Cinq and Tessalit; that of Isobel Cunningham, Jacob Armstrong and
Clifford Jackson, up from Timbuktu's Niger River port of Kabara. They
met in the former great market square, bordered on two sides by the one
time French Administration buildings.
Isobel reacted first. "Abe!" she yelled, pointing accusingly at him.
Abe Baker pretended to cringe, then reacted. "Isobel! Somebody _told_ me
you were over here!"
She ran over the heavy sand, which drifted through the streets, to the
hovercraft in which he had just pulled up. He popped out to meet her,
grinning widely.
"Why didn't you look me up?" she said accusingly, presenting a cheek to
be kissed.
"In Africa, man?" he laughed. "Kinda big, Africa. Like, I didn't know if
you were in the Sahara, or maybe down in Angola, or wherever."