Timbuktu grew rich as a crossroads, the place where black Africa below the Sahara met Berber and Islamic traders from the north, and through them, indirectly, the markets of Europe. It became the capital of the Mali Empire and home to Mansa Musa, the emperor so wealthy that he is still ranked among the richest people who ever lived. That golden age left its mark in the famous manuscripts of Timbuktu, the libraries of Arabic scholarship that made the city a center of learning. Today Timbuktu is a poor town, and the contrast with its reputation can be jarring. But the fame is not a fiction. It is the long echo of real commerce, real scholarship, and real distance.

Timbuktu feels more Arabic than African, a city that has been half-swallowed by the desert it borders. Its streets are made of sand, every one of them but a single paved exception, and the dunes have piled so high over the years that you often have to step down into the houses, their doorways now sunk below the level of the road. The threat is not just poetic. In 1990, two years after Timbuktu became a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it was added to the list of sites in danger because the desert was burying it. Walking the old town takes only minutes, but every footfall is a small reminder that the Sahara is always advancing.

At the heart of the old town stand the three great earthen mosques of Djinguereber, Sidi Yahya, and Sankore, which together formed what became known as the University of Timbuktu. All three are within a short walk of one another, their mud walls bristling with the wooden beams used to replaster them each year. They close to visitors during prayers and have at times been off-limits to non-Muslims entirely. Nearby, the preserved houses of the first Western explorers to reach the city carry commemorative plaques: Alexander Gordon Laing, the first European to arrive, who was killed before he could leave, and René Caillié, the first to make it there and back alive. Most are private homes now, lived in rather than displayed.

Reaching Timbuktu has never been casual. You can drive in from Mopti in twelve to twenty-four hours, or take a hard 4x4 run across the desert from Gao. Better still, catch one of the river pinasses from Mopti, a three-day journey upstream where you camp on the shore at night and a cook prepares meals onboard. Air service exists but is thin: Sky Mali has flown a single Boeing 737 to Timbuktu from Bamako and Gao, twice weekly, with cancellations to be expected. The city sits a long way from comfort. Carry water everywhere, drink only what is bottled or boiled, and respect the heat, which is punishing all year. There is no river or lake in town to cool off in. To hire camels and a guide for the dunes, deal with the Tuareg directly rather than the so-called guides who crowd the streets, and remember the old traveler's trick that the wider Sahara is measured not in miles but in days, with the great salt caravans still running a journey of forty.