The Queen of the Silent Kingdom.
I entered the Silent Kingdom six years ago.
Praise be to Allah, whom the weight of a pearl upon the earth does not escape. May prayer and salvation be with the master of the first and last, our Lord Mahommed. Of a verity have I been blessed with blessings abundant, and enveloped by the cloak of his protection.
We had left the shore of Lake Tsâd after pillaging a great caravan from the north, and were moving westward across the stern, sterile desert in the direction of Gao, or Kou-kou, as it is popularly known among us, where we could dispose of our stolen merchandise. For months we had travelled across that immensity of sands where the very birds lose themselves, our camels often stumbling upon some skull, tibia, or even an entire skeleton, the remains of bygone generations of travellers who had perished on those lonely wastes. The sun blazed fiercely in the flaming sky, the skin cracked, the lips were parched. All the water we had was warm and impure, and even that was insufficient to quench our thirst. A scaly viper occasionally crossed our route, and at long intervals the swift flight of an antelope was seen. For days, months, nothing had rejoiced our eyes save the deceitful vision of the mirage, and one evening I decided upon a three days’ halt for rest.
On the previous day our eyes had been gladdened by the sight of a small well, where we filled our water-skins, therefore we were enabled to take our case; although being in an entirely unfamiliar country, the watchfulness of our sentries was never for a single instant relinquished. We were travelling with the sun only as our guide, therefore knew not into what territory we had entered, save that it was as barren and inhospitable a region as it had ever been our lot to encounter,—a shadowless land of solitude, abandonment, and misery.
In our raid upon the caravan near Lake Tsâd a bundle of papers had come into our possession, and these had been handed to me; but travelling constantly, I had not had time or inclination to examine them. That night, however, alone in my tent, I untied them and spread them out. Most of them, including a kind of diary, were written in the language of the Roumis, and as some bore the image of the Liberty of the Franks, I concluded that they must have belonged to some French officer in the northern region of the Desert, who had probably perished in an attempt to penetrate south.
One paper, however, the last I took up, was written in my own tongue, and I read it eagerly. It was an official letter, dated from Paris, urging its recipient to secure, if possible, during his explorations, the Fatassi of Koti, as the French Government were extremely anxious to obtain possession of it, and by that letter offered to pay any sheikh or tribesman almost any sum in exchange for it.
I put the letter down, smiled, and resumed my pipe. The hapless explorer, whoever he was, had probably died, and certainly his hopes would never be realised, for the Fatassi of the learned Koti was the phantom book of the Soudan. There was not a clansman in the whole of the Great Desert who did not know all about that priceless volume, yet no one had ever seen it. It had been lost to the world for ages.
Mohaman Koti, or Koutou, the great marabout, lived in Timbuktu in the year 850 of the Hegira, and was the most esteemed and even tyrannical councillor of our ancestor, its powerful king. His authority is said to have originated in the following manner. The king one day distributed some dried dates to his court, and Koti, who had recently arrived, was overlooked. Shortly afterwards the learned councillor assembled a number of people and dispensed fresh dates among them. This miracle—for we have no dates in that region of the far south—having reached the king’s ears, he discerned that upon Koti was set the divine seal, and from that moment gave him all his confidence. A few years later, according to Tarik è Sudan, Koti edited a history of the Kingdoms of Ganata, Songhoi, and Timbuktu, the only history written of those once all-powerful centres of civilisation, and in addition he dealt with the concerns of many peoples and many men. Families, since grown rich and powerful, and the chiefs of various countries, were shown to be with very humble origins, sometimes being the offspring of slaves. But while the book was being written, news was conveyed to the King of Timbuktu that the Songhois had revolted, and had combined with the great nation of Mossi to attack and capture his capital; therefore, in order to save his great store of treasure, he at once had it made up into single camel-loads, taken out of the city, and secreted in various distant spots on the confines of his empire. It was necessary, of course, to keep a strict and minute description of each spot where the wealth of the capital was concealed, in order that it might be recovered after the war; therefore Koti was ordered to inscribe in his book instructions how to unearth the great store of gold and gems, the spoils of war during four centuries. This, according to a legend completely borne out by our Tarik, he did, and the precious manuscript was given into the king’s own keeping. Ere one moon, however, the learned historian died suddenly at Tindirma, where a little white mosquelike house marks his grave till this day. The war was fought, proving, alas! disastrous to the king, who was compelled to fly, but, strangely enough the Tarik maintains silence regarding his subsequent adventures, or of what became of the precious Fatassi. Legend has it that the king was treacherously poisoned by a slave, as rulers were apt to be in those turbulent days; but by whatever means the once-powerful monarch met with his death, the fact remains that the priceless volume and guide to the enormous treasure of ancient Timbuktu was lost to all. For more than four centuries the recovery of the Fatassi has been the dream of poor and rich alike. The scholar coveted it because it would shed so much light upon the obscure past of these vast regions; the camel-driver, the merchant, and the prince alike desired to possess it for the information it was known to contain regarding the long-lost wealth.
