The Maahes who crossed the desert. Tunka-Maa was a watcher from the Sahel, one of the small circles who had kept the old lion songs alive without ever hearing from the Nile, and the mantle chose him two years after Ismail-Nubi died. He is the first Maahes in the Roll who had never seen the river.
The mantle found him in the Sahel, but the Roll was not in it. So he made the journey that Salim-Aswan had mapped: across the oasis roads and north to the Nile, to learn the Roll in full from the last keepers of the Reckoning at Aswan, and then south again with it in his head and nothing else. He was the first Maahes to carry the Roll across the Sahara, and he did it on foot and by camel, speaking it aloud as he travelled so he would not lose a word.
At Wagadu, he taught the Roll to the watchers who had waited for it for a century. He founded the Sahel arm of the Pride, and he set up the practice of teaching every watcher at least a hundred names of the Roll, which is still the custom. He held the mantle for 60 years.
What he left behind: the Sahel arm, and the crossing itself.
