HAVE YOU MET-

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22343, 5 March 1938, Page 21

HAVE YOU MET-

Rene Caillie, who went to Timbucfpo? At the southern edge of the vast Sahara stands Timbuctoo. Occupied by the French in 1894, it has been an enigma for centuries, a city into which no white man had ever entered and come out alive. When Rene Caillie came into the world in 1799 Timbuctoo was unknown. Born in * Poitou village, he early dreamed of the mysterious town, and one day walked out of Mauze bound for the end of civilisation. It was years before he could make anything like a beginning. He had to learn Eastern languages. He had to get to know the ways of the Moors. From Saint Louis he went on to join a tribe of Moors, and afterwards, dressed as an Arab, he spent a year with a desert tribe, plodding over burning sand and sharp flints. Then he linked up with a caravan, pretending to be an Egyptian on the way home. In face of constant danger, sometimes desperately ill for months, he kept on. Everyone was suspicious of him. Enemies were all about him. Disease was rampant, food scarce, the heat terrible, the glare blinding, the desert cruel, but Rene Caillie had set out for Timbuctoo, and to Timbuctoo he went. A boat finally carried him into the town of his dreams, which he reached at midnight on April 29, 1828. All he did was to stay there a fortnight, and then begin the more terrible journey home. It meant crossing the Sahara. He went with a huge caravan of 400 men, with women and children, and 1400 camels. They co.uld find no water. They were overtaken by a sandstorm. There was death and disease. Caillie was ill again. He crept into Fez after a nightmare journey. He was arrested, but escaped. He went on to Rabat and was left lying in the streets, dogs howling round. At Tangier he broke into the French Consul's house, and would have been carried off to prison had he not begun speaking in perfect French—this brown and yellow shadow of a man whom everyone thought mad. It was the end of his amazing journey of 3600 miles on foot. It had cost him 538 days of sufferirfg and torture, but he goes down to history as the first white man to enter and leave Timbuctoo. He died in 1839.