and drifted off to sleep to the rocking and jerking.
I WOKE UP AT SIX in the morning. The night had seemed endless. The car’s passengers had been agitated for hours. We stopped every twenty minutes, and so many vendors got on and yelled and banged on the windows it sounded like ocean waves of voices crashing on the beach. Papa-si rearranged his boxes throughout the night, each time climbing up to the shelf above the hallway by boosting himself up on my bed. But as the hours passed the next day I settled into the rhythm of the clacking rails and gave myself to the heat and dirt. The sky was pure blue, the countryside desiccated brown and yellow knee-high grass dotted with leafless baobab trees, with sharp, high, flat escarpments in the distance—a hot, baked world that felt like Lucifer’s anvil. The Senegalese pot trader made thick, syrupy sweet tea, a ritual of boiling and pouring and boiling and pouring in two different teapots, over the stove teetering on the floor of the room, a fur fetish strapped tightly to his bicep. We passed village compounds of conical mud huts with peaked thatch roofs fenced with upright sticks, and paused at small brick station houses that must have been a hundred years old.
At a place called Keyes, statistically the hottest location in Africa, with an average temperature in April—now—of 108 degrees, a man jumped on the train and stole a bag of charcoal; there were shouts, and a policeman emerged from the train and chased him down, returning with the five-foot-long sack on his head.
By the afternoon it felt searing, leaning out of the windows—attached to which were signs admonishing DO NOT LEAN OUT OF THE WINDOW in French, English, German, and Spanish—it felt like bending over a barbecue. “Mon ami!” Papa-si would yell, every time he looked at me, giving me a thumbs-up. In the morning and afternoon and evening, men prayed on rugs in the hallways. When we rounded bends I could see hundreds of boys and men on the train’s roof. I wanted to go up to talk to them, but a guard on the train stopped me. Before every station they would stream off into the bush at the edge of villages; at Coulombo there were so many, soldiers and police streamed after them. They caught an unlucky few. I watched as one policeman held a man by the collar and kneed him repeatedly in the back, marching him into the heat.
As the sun dropped, I discovered two men selling cold beers out of a cooler in the next car. I bought a round and settled on the floor of the vestibule, my feet dangling out of the train. Moussa was long and lean, wearing jeans and sandals, and he was returning to Dakar with crates and crates of mangoes that filled the bathroom—a journey he’d been making twice a week for five years. Which meant that he practically lived on the train, spending at least four days a week rumbling through the heat and dust. There was no moon in the black sky, and we clanked along at ten miles an hour, the Southern Cross just out of the open door, on the horizon. A man slept curled on a plastic sack next to us; we were squeezed together, our legs touching. It was hellish and filthy. But Moussa was happy; he rifled through a burlap sack and brought out a one-burner propane stove and two green chipped enamel teapots, and the Malian tea ritual began. Boil and pour. Boil and pour, always from two feet in the air—even on the jolting train he didn’t spill a drop. “The first is bitter, like life,” he said, pouring the tea through a strainer. “The second is easy, like friendship. And the third—ahh, the third is sweet, like love.” He made tea, two cups at a time, poured into shot glasses on a silver tray, for all of us crowded in the heat and dirt of the rattling vestibule. Free of charge, of course.
By legend, at least, this was one of the worst trains in Africa, maybe the world. It was definitely hot, crowded, and broken. But it was also beginning to feel surprisingly pleasant; the heat, dried mud,
I WOKE UP AT SIX in the morning. The night had seemed endless. The car’s passengers had been agitated for hours. We stopped every twenty minutes, and so many vendors got on and yelled and banged on the windows it sounded like ocean waves of voices crashing on the beach. Papa-si rearranged his boxes throughout the night, each time climbing up to the shelf above the hallway by boosting himself up on my bed. But as the hours passed the next day I settled into the rhythm of the clacking rails and gave myself to the heat and dirt. The sky was pure blue, the countryside desiccated brown and yellow knee-high grass dotted with leafless baobab trees, with sharp, high, flat escarpments in the distance—a hot, baked world that felt like Lucifer’s anvil. The Senegalese pot trader made thick, syrupy sweet tea, a ritual of boiling and pouring and boiling and pouring in two different teapots, over the stove teetering on the floor of the room, a fur fetish strapped tightly to his bicep. We passed village compounds of conical mud huts with peaked thatch roofs fenced with upright sticks, and paused at small brick station houses that must have been a hundred years old.
At a place called Keyes, statistically the hottest location in Africa, with an average temperature in April—now—of 108 degrees, a man jumped on the train and stole a bag of charcoal; there were shouts, and a policeman emerged from the train and chased him down, returning with the five-foot-long sack on his head.
By the afternoon it felt searing, leaning out of the windows—attached to which were signs admonishing DO NOT LEAN OUT OF THE WINDOW in French, English, German, and Spanish—it felt like bending over a barbecue. “Mon ami!” Papa-si would yell, every time he looked at me, giving me a thumbs-up. In the morning and afternoon and evening, men prayed on rugs in the hallways. When we rounded bends I could see hundreds of boys and men on the train’s roof. I wanted to go up to talk to them, but a guard on the train stopped me. Before every station they would stream off into the bush at the edge of villages; at Coulombo there were so many, soldiers and police streamed after them. They caught an unlucky few. I watched as one policeman held a man by the collar and kneed him repeatedly in the back, marching him into the heat.
As the sun dropped, I discovered two men selling cold beers out of a cooler in the next car. I bought a round and settled on the floor of the vestibule, my feet dangling out of the train. Moussa was long and lean, wearing jeans and sandals, and he was returning to Dakar with crates and crates of mangoes that filled the bathroom—a journey he’d been making twice a week for five years. Which meant that he practically lived on the train, spending at least four days a week rumbling through the heat and dust. There was no moon in the black sky, and we clanked along at ten miles an hour, the Southern Cross just out of the open door, on the horizon. A man slept curled on a plastic sack next to us; we were squeezed together, our legs touching. It was hellish and filthy. But Moussa was happy; he rifled through a burlap sack and brought out a one-burner propane stove and two green chipped enamel teapots, and the Malian tea ritual began. Boil and pour. Boil and pour, always from two feet in the air—even on the jolting train he didn’t spill a drop. “The first is bitter, like life,” he said, pouring the tea through a strainer. “The second is easy, like friendship. And the third—ahh, the third is sweet, like love.” He made tea, two cups at a time, poured into shot glasses on a silver tray, for all of us crowded in the heat and dirt of the rattling vestibule. Free of charge, of course.
By legend, at least, this was one of the worst trains in Africa, maybe the world. It was definitely hot, crowded, and broken. But it was also beginning to feel surprisingly pleasant; the heat, dried mud,
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