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disappeared through the cla-lack of his compound gate. A dog barked in the distance and a mother shooed her children to bed. More stars came out, and the layered sounds of a village preparing for sleep quieted one by one until only the song of the crickets remained.
    Cleansed of its haze, the night sky shone clear, the stars brilliant. The new moon, its back to the sun, reflected no light to steal the show. Somewhere, not far from there, Rob sat under the same stars. I would not think of him. I would forget him.
    The fiery points of the Southern Cross, Scorpio, Ursa Major, Leo, and Virgo scattered across an infinite blackness and sparkled so close I reached up to pluck them.
    It would have been a night like this that Muhammad went on his Night Journey. Issa’s story had painted a picture so vivid, I imagined Muhammad flying through the velvet darkness on a horse with satin wings. Led by the Angel Gabriel dressed in a robe of starlight, Muhammad climbed a gossamer ladder of woven clouds. As there were layers of sound, air, and light, so Islam taught there were seven levels of heaven.
    Into the night, perhaps at the moon, Adam welcomed Muhammad to the first level of heaven and showed him a vision of hell. On toward the stars, Jesus and John the Baptist met him at the second level, Joseph the third, Enoch watched over the fourth level, Aaron and Moses, the fifth and sixth. Finally, past the stars and into a great void, Abraham welcomed him to the seventh level of heaven where he reached the throne of the Divine. There, Muhammad saw a sign of God, a flaming tree the size of a newborn galaxy.
    A comet tore a golden seam across the sky—the hem of Gabriel’s robe. How wondrous to go beyond oneself and see the Divine of one’s beliefs! What a journey that would be. Whether Muhammad had gone on his journey in a dream, a hallucination, or in his physical body did not matter to me. What mattered was that he had gone.
    Was I not also on a journey? The glorious afternoon and evening, the sandstorm, the rain, the cool, my visit with Laya and her children, Issa and his story, the stars—all had been a part of it.
    I lay back against the chair and looked up. Was this not a journey worth making? I did not have Rob, but I had the people of FDC, Laya and her children, and Issa to accompany me. I was not alone.

Chapter 4
    The Goddess Wagadu
    July/Ramadan
    An early morning in mid July, Hamidou drove Djelal, Don, Fati, Adiza, and me to Sambonaye. No one was talking, so I pressed my face into the moisture-fat wind that blew in through the window and squinted at the landscape. A carpet of green grew in the low-lying areas where runoff from the rains had pooled and awakened the grass. The second week of July marked the midway point of Nduungu , the three months of rainy season that determined if people would eat well, eat enough, or starve from now until the next rains.
    Since that first rain in May, I had determined to do my job, learn as much as possible, and enjoy the journey. It was better than going back to Idaho.
    So, I kept my days busy with work and tilling the garden of okra, millet, and beans I had planted in my courtyard. But I could not control my dreams. Every night in my sleep, I ran through empty streets, looking for Rob, but never finding him. Despair loves the middle of the night.
    Time trudged onward, not giving a damn whether I had a broken heart or not. June had come with short bursts of rain, hot days, and cool nights, boosting my resolve to stay the course. In early July, friendly intervals of rain transformed the land into a patchwork of green grasses and seasonal lakes.
    I breathed in the spice of wet earth and let the green soothe my eyes. This was what it had been like over two thousand years ago when the great Soninke Empire reached from Senegal across the continent to Sudan, before the white man, before Christianity or Islam, when the Goddess Wagadu reigned.
    Four times Wagadu stood there in all her