Timbuktu, a mythic city born of mud and sand

After a meal one day at the only restaurant to speak of in Timbuktu, Canadian writer-travelers Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle strolled outside. A man with a donkey passed in one direction; two elderly women, one carrying a bucket on her head, went the other way.

"Otherwise," the authors write, "the street was deserted, somnolent in the afternoon sun, the houses gray and dun, the street gray sand, the sky gray with haze. It wouldn't have looked very different five or six hundred years ago, except it would have been busier, much busier ... "

The ancient city de Villiers and Hirtle describe in their new book is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site threatened by encroaching Saharan sand dunes. The fabled glories of this mysterious and mythical desert settlement have been fading since 1591, when Moroccans attacked, bringing the beginning of the end to at least five centuries of illustrious commerce, arts and learning.

Located about six miles from the Niger River in the West African country of Mali, Timbuktu was founded about A.D. 1100 by Tuareg nomads. But, like a port city in a sea of sand, its key location on trans-Saharan gold-, salt- and slave-trade routes prompted astonishing growth and, with it, the magical reputation that fails to fade in western imaginations.

De Villiers and Hirtle are no exception. During their research for their previous book, "Sahara: The Extraordinary History of the World's Largest Desert," they grew fascinated with Timbuktu. So the two sojourned there to begin work on a new book, de Villiers doing most of the travel into the hinterlands, while Hirtle consulted archives, libraries and technical journals. The result, written by both, juxtaposes primarily pre-colonial history with contemporary travelogue, and goes far toward illuminating these starkly contrasting worlds of boom and bust.

Then, as now, Timbuktu was made of mud, its streets of sand. Seen from the air, the city is barely distinguishable from the desert. Gone, if they ever existed, are canals to the Niger; gone, certainly, are surrounding forests, which warded off shifting sand.

Although the city has no sewers or sanitation, it still has its water, its amazing markets, its multiethnic makeup. It was never walled, never a capital city, yet it became a center of Islamic study and religion; its schools and libraries attracted scholars from Alexandria, Baghdad, Mecca and beyond.

Today, as the authors' interpreter and guide Halis jokes, a row of donkeys is the town taxi stand. Halis, a young Tuareg, owns a dozen camels yet has a pocket for a cellphone in robes of traditional design but probably made from Chinese rayon. De Villiers and Hirtle are sometimes privileged to see Timbuktu's complexity through his eyes. What they learn is revealing for Americans.

If, Halis says, he had 30 camels, he could earn a living in the desert where it's clean and people know their place. There would be no Saudi-trained "new imams," who side in political matters with al-Qaida and whose strict, humorless version of Islam so vividly contrasts with gentler, nonconfrontational ways of the past.

Timbuktu is poor in many senses, yet its people endure. "Poverty ... does not mean ignorance, or meanness of spirit," de Villiers and Hirtle observe. "Sometimes, indeed, heritage and a notion of a glorious past are what keeps the spirit going."