on-writing-well

A Writer's Decisions 275
of mud buildings that looked long abandoned, as dead as Fort
Zinderneuf at the end of Beau Geste; surely nobody was alive
down there. The Sahara in its steady encroachment, which
has created the drought belt across central Africa known as
the Sahel, had long since pushed past Timbuktu and left it
marooned. I felt a tremor of fear; I didn't want to be put
down in such a forsaken place.
The reference to Beau Geste is an effort to tap into associations
that readers bring to the story. Much of what makes Timbuktu
legendary was put there by Hollywood. By invoking the
fate of Fort Zinderneuf—Brian Donlevy played a sadistic
French Foreign Legion commandant who propped the dead
bodies of his soldiers back into the niches of the fort—I'm
revealing my own fondness for the genre and striking a bond
with fellow movie buffs. What I'm after is resonance; it can do a
great deal of emotional work that writers can't achieve on their
own.
Two words—"tremor" and "forsaken"—took a while to find.
When I found "forsaken" in my Roget's Thesaurus I was quite
sure I had never used it before. I was glad to see it there among
the synonyms. As one of Jesus s last words (speaking of resonance),
it could hardly convey more loneliness and abandonment.
At the airport we were met by our local guide, a Tuareg
named Mohammed Ali. For a travel buff he was a consoling
sight—if anybody can be said to own this part of the Sahara, it
is the Tuareg, a race of proud Berbers who wouldn't submit to
the Arabs or the later French colonials who swept into North
Africa, withdrawing instead into the desert and making it
their preserve. Mohammed Ali, who was wearing the traditional
blue robe of Tuareg men, had a dark, intelligent face,
somewhat Arabic in the angularity of its features, and he
moved with an assurance that was obviously part of his char-