The Best American Travel Writing 2012 by Jason Wilson

followed him across a courtyard, passing a woman and three children who sat transfixed in front of a battered television blaring a Pakistani game show. We ducked through a bright green curtain into a tiny airless room piled with books and smelling of incense and human sweat. The marabout motioned us to sit on a carpet. Gathering his robes, he knelt across from us and produced a matchstick, which he promptly snapped into three pieces. He held them up so that I could see that they were indeed broken and then rolled up the pieces in the hem of his robe. With a practiced flourish worthy of any sleight-of-hand expert, he unfurled the garment and revealed the matchstick, now unbroken. His powers, he said, had healed it. My translator excitedly tapped my knee. “You see,” he said, “he is a very powerful marabout.” As if on cue, applause erupted from the game show in the courtyard.
    The marabout retrieved a palm-size book bound with intricately tooled leather. The withered pages had fallen out of the spine, and he gently turned the brittle leaves one by one until he found a chart filled with strange symbols. He explained that the book contained spells for everything from cures for blindness to charms guaranteed to spark romance. He looked up from the book. “Do you need a wife?” I said that I already had one. “Do you need another?”
    I asked if I could examine the book, but he refused to let me touch it. Over several years his uncle had tutored him in the book’s contents, gradually opening its secrets. It contained powers that, like forces of nature, had to be respected. He explained that his ancestors had brought the book with them when they fled Andalusia in the fifteenth century after the Spanish defeated the Moors. They had settled in Mauritania, and he had only recently moved from there with his family. “I heard the people of Timbuktu were not satisfied with the marabouts here,” he said. I asked who his best customers were. “Women,” he answered, grinning, “who want children.”
    He produced a small calculator, punched in some numbers, and quoted a price of more than a thousand dollars for the gris-gris. “With it you can walk across the entire desert and no one will harm you,” he promised.
The Green Beret’s Girlfriend
    The young woman appeared among the jacaranda trees of the garden café wearing tight jeans and a pink T-shirt. She smiled nervously, and I understood how the Green Beret had fallen for her. Aisha (not her real name) was twenty-three years old, petite, with a slender figure. She worked as a waitress. Her jet-black skin was unblemished except for delicate ritual scars near her temples, which drew attention to her large, catlike eyes.
    We met across from the Flame of Peace, a monument built from some three thousand guns burned and encased in concrete. It commemorates the 1996 accord that ended the rebellion waged by Tuareg and Arabs against the government, the last time outright war visited Timbuktu.
    Aisha pulled five tightly folded pieces of paper from her purse and laid them on the table next to a photograph of a Caucasian man with a toothy smile. He appeared to be in his thirties and was wearing a royal-blue Arab-style robe and an indigo turban. “That is David,” she said, lightly brushing a bit of sand from the photo.
    They had met in December 2006, when the U.S. had sent a Special Forces team to train Malian soldiers to fight AQIM. David had seen her walking down the street and remarked to his local interpreter how beautiful she was. The interpreter arranged an introduction, and soon the rugged American soldier and the Malian beauty were meeting for picnics on the sand dunes ringing the city and driving to the Niger River to watch the hippos gather in the shallows. Tears welled in Aisha’s eyes as she recounted these dates. She paused to wipe her face. “He only spoke a little French,” she said, laughing