In Timbuktu, Even the Camels Idle : Africa: The great caravans are history and the town’s cultural prominence a memory. But it’s still an exotic place to say you’ve been to.

In the loose sand that is the street outside Tarif’s Bar, there are more hoof prints of camels and donkeys than tire tracks. The reason: There are more beasts of burden than motor vehicles here.

As for the camels, they are worth pondering. They once brought the great trading caravans across the Sahara Desert from North Africa. Their strong backs kept this once-prosperous center of learning and commerce well supplied with luxuries from around the world.

But today the camels are hobbled. They lie, idly, on the dunes with blank faces and yellow teeth.

Timbuktu is not well supplied at all. Nor prosperous.

Inside Tarif’s Bar, there are only three liquor bottles left on the glass shelf--two of Johnnie Walker Scotch, one of Campari. And they are empty.

The reggae music of Bob Marley howls on a scratchy loudspeaker; Christmas lights blink over the door, although that holiday is months away or months past. Inside this tavern, the faces are long and tired.

It is a bad time of year in this distant brown-on-brown, mud-and-sand outpost--a mystical place for many, a locale to inflame childhood imaginations, although few can explain exactly why, especially those who come here from afar.

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The principal attraction of modern Timbuktu, insofar as anyone seems able to guess, is the hard-won right to open conversations henceforth with, “When I was in Timbuktu. . . .”

But the subject was supplies. Of which there are few in Timbuktu. Only five miles away is a lifeline: the mighty--well, the big, brown and sluggish--Niger River, one of the most important in West Africa. But it has not rained enough yet to lift the river off its oozy mud bottom in this inland delta passage, so the three supply boats are all tied fast a few hundred miles upriver.

It has rained, however, too much to drive a vehicle here. It seems the first downpour dissolves the dirt-and-sand rut that lets cars and trucks reach the city. “Right now the route is washed out and everybody is waiting for the boats to start,” says Diawuye Guindo, Timbuktu director of UNICEF, the U.N. Children’s Fund.

So, Timbuktu is left with only its airport and its two Air Mali (known locally as Air Maybe) long-haul flights per week from Bamako, the capital, and Mopti--hardly the way for a city of 20,000 (down from 100,000 about 500 years ago) to keep up its reputation.

Ah, 500 years ago, now those were the days. Back then, the history books tell us, Timbuktu was a trade center. Salt from the Sahara came south toward West Africa. Gold made the trip back north. Ivory went north, cloth came south. Back and forth.

Here, the road linked the Arab world and black Africa. For a time, this was the center of learning in all the region, with 180 Koranic schools. The still-standing Sankore Mosque was said to be the most important center of Muslim scholarship in the black Islamic world.

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Guidebooks tell of the first report from Timbuktu to the outside world, two years after Columbus sailed to the New World. Timbuktu then was part of the powerful Songhai empire, and one could admire its civil service, its judicial system, the “great store” of doctors and learned men “that are bountifully maintained at the king’s expense,” according to the report.

That also was the heyday of the famed Tuareg nomads. Feared across the Sahara, they preyed on camel caravans. They still are known as the blue warriors of the desert, on account of the rich indigo dye of their turbans and robes that stains the skin.

Today, the Tuaregs are slowing down as nomads. There are no caravans to tax. Some Tuaregs wander from water pump to water pump in the desert with their strings of camels. Others have pitched their lumpish skin tents more or less permanently on empty, windblown, mud-puddled lots here and in the surrounding dunes, where they try to farm carrots in composted sand.

After waging a low-level war against the Malian government, including lobbing an occasional mortar into town and scurrying off into the desert, the Tuaregs this year signed a new peace pact and have not raided Timbuktu since April. Now, it is hoped, they will settle down to their everyday worries--such as how to avoid the strangulation of poverty--like other Malians.

UNICEF runs many water stations in the region, 11 gallons for a penny. Solar power nourishes the pumps that nourish the camels. There is the usual lineup of other relief agencies to be found in places where there is little money and great need.

The people of Timbuktu have become welfare dependent.

“One thing that’s different here is that people cannot travel the way other people do. Because of changes in the rains and silt in the channels, it’s becoming more and more difficult for boats to get up the river. Each year, they come later and later. And Timbuktu suffers for lack of a permanent road,” says Moulaye Sidi Haidara, the district representative to the national Parliament.

“It needs a lot of assistance,” he says, earnestly. “It’s quite necessary that your big country give us some money for a road.”

Haidara’s attitude is normal. Outsiders are regarded with the same eagerness as a thatch of palms might be upon yonder dune--a sudden, unexpected promise of relief from the blaze of sun and sweep of sand. In other words, outsiders are sure to have money.

“It’s deep in our tradition,” laughs Mali’s President Alpha Oumar Konare. He is speaking, in Bamako, of Mali’s, shall we say, aggressive hawkers, demanding beggars, plentiful pettifoggers and the others whose pockets yearn for the tinkle of loose change.

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Perhaps the last thing to die from the age of great trading caravans is the spirit of the traders. They are on hard times now. There are no tourists in town today. There were two last week. There are 65 hotel rooms, but only four are booked, none by foreigners.

Timbuktu’s contact with the larger world consists of two radio-relay telephone lines out of the city and two radio stations that broadcast during the day in a cacophony of languages.

So enough. What is good in Timbuktu?

The doors, for one thing. Practically any structure of substance, any burgher who wants to be taken seriously, has a proper door made of carefully joined wood boards and decorated with stenciled designs in layered sheets of nickel. These doors have been a feature here for three centuries. And for 35 years, without ever setting foot outside here, master M. al Lasane has carried on the craft, tailoring his doors to fit the city’s frames and allowing credit installments. “We get about four good months’ work a year,” he says.

And the rest of the time? Well, Babacar Toure, proprietor of the Hotel Bouctou, says that is the very best thing about Timbuktu: It’s as far from the rat race as one is likely to get.

“What do we do?” Toure says. “We like to talk. We like to listen. We’re good at that. Have a seat.”