You wake before dawn to the sound of camels complaining. It is November — the cool season — and the year is 1910. Your uncle, the madugu (caravan master), pulls your indigo veil across your face against the sand. Around you, hundreds of camels are being loaded in the dark, each one taking four or five gleaming white slabs, cut from the earth like enormous frozen windows. Each slab weighs thirty kilograms. Each one is worth more, mile by mile, the farther south you carry it.
This is the azalai: the salt caravan that has crossed this desert for centuries. In its greatest days, ten thousand camels moved together — a living train stretching past the horizon. There are no road signs. There are no roads. Your uncle steers by dunes he has memorized and by stars he reads like a map. If he is wrong by a few degrees, you will miss the well, and the desert does not forgive that.
Play with the sky above — drag the sun through the day, wait for the stars, watch the caravan make camp. Then take your first journey down the salt road.
Drag the day slider and travel from the salt pits of Taoudenni to the docks of Timbuktu. Watch your water. The desert is watching it too.
Every slab of Taoudenni salt is cut to roughly the same size: about 110 cm tall, 45 cm wide, a hand-span thick — and 30 kilograms heavy. A camel can carry four or five. Your camel, Tazidert, has opinions. Find her limit.
At the mine, salt is nearly worthless — it's just the ground. But every kilometer south adds value, because south of the desert people and cattle need salt and have none. Old records say a slab could roughly double in value between Timbuktu and Djenné alone; a 90-kg camel load there could fetch around 450 grams of gold. Click each stop on the salt's journey.
Click a stop to begin the salt's journey south.
Relative values are a stylized estimate for teaching — real prices swung with drought, war, and season. The pattern (value multiplying as salt travels from mine to forest) is the historical truth.
Seven questions stand between you and your place in the caravan. Answer honestly — the desert always finds out.