Field Notes from editing part II – book V

Mali, Road to Timbuktu

Somewhere between San and the desert, the road asks what you are carrying.

The morning air in San is silver and provisional. We leave early — Karim checking the route one last time, the sky outside still the colour of undecided weather. This is the Sahel’s particular rhythm: you are always crossing toward something, never quite arriving.

My body has its own itinerary. The golden liquid announces itself somewhere outside Mopti — slow, inevitable, soaking through cotton with the quiet indifference of magic that has long since stopped asking permission. Karim pulls off the road without comment. Retrieves the Kayar wraps from the back seat. Holds the cloth open while I change in the roadside air. Practical. Careful. Entirely without embarrassment. We have learned this language on the road, the two of us.

“You are radiant,” he murmurs. “You carry not just the future, but all the wildness of the worlds between us.”

“Yeah, you should give it a try. See if you’d still feel like a goddess, or just an oversized, slightly bruised piece of fruit.”

That night we tent in the scrubland. I drift — the way I do now, more crossing than sleeping — and find Asdar under a different sky altogether. Silver dunes. A low moon. His hands trembling slightly as they find the changed shape of me. He kneels. Some things belong only to the dark between worlds.

What Karim does not tell me until Timbuktu

He doesn’t sleep when I cross. He has learned to tell the difference between my rest and absence. He lies in the dark, watching the golden light seep faintly through the cotton, thinking about nothing in particular — until the first hyena announces itself at around two in the morning.

Not subtle. Nothing about a hyena is subtle.

What follows is less a chase and more a negotiation conducted at increasing speed across approximately two hundred metres of Malian scrubland.

In the dark. In his underwear.

Waving a cooking pot at an animal that outweighs him and finds the whole situation mildly entertaining. The hyenas are not fleeing. They are herding. There is a distinction, and Karim discovers it at the hundred-metre mark when he realises he is no longer sure which direction the tent is.

He comes back. Rezips the entrance. Lies down beside my quietly glowing body. Stares at the ceiling until dawn.

When it calls me back, I wake to birds and cool cotton and a cracked cooking pot I don’t remember leaving outside.

He hands me tea.

I drink it without asking.

An excerpt from The Memory Cartographer |Book V Part II The Agbara Chronicles by I.Ph. de Lange © 2026 I.Ph. de Lange All rights reserved. Published by CYcrds OÜ.