TOMBOUCTOU, Mali -- There were only four guests, all staying for a single night, during one recent week at the Relais Azalai, this town's one modern hotel, forcing disconsolate tourist guides to trudge through streets of deep sand in a vain search for clients.
Souvenir merchants, wearing turbans against the fierce sun and fine grit borne in the breeze, maintained a determined lookout at the hotel's gate, hoping to unload some of their finely engraved sabers.
The curator of the museum, with its 500-year-old manuscripts and other relics of a great but distant past, stays home these days, leaving it boarded shut.
Since the recent renewal of an age-old conflict between the majority black population who settled this ancient desert outpost in the Middle Ages and the nomads who have always ruled the dunes just beyond, most of this town has given up its dreams of a tourism boom.
In their place are the older routines of elaborate greetings and whispered snippets of news exchanged in spots of coveted shade over never-ending doses of sugary tea served in tiny cups.
"We still come to work every day, but it is only to purge the time," said Fanta Toure, a manager at the hotel in this town of 21,000 or so residents.
"Until next week's flight, this place will be completely empty, and until there is peace in the north there is nothing we can do about it."
Tombouctou is mythical both in its former wealth and its present desolation, but its existence has always stood on a few simple facts. If this city of crumbling mud brick edifices and narrow, winding alleyways has come to be synonymous with remoteness, its location -- on the edge of the Sahara at the northern bend of West Africa's greatest river, the Niger -- has always made it a strategic meeting place of two worlds.
They are the black south and a vast but mostly empty north that is home to nomadic, light-skinned Tuaregs and Moors.
Sweeping in from beyond the huge dunes that form the town's doorstep, Tuareg rebels have mounted hit-and-run attacks against Tombouctou and a score of other settlements on the desert's edge in recent months, sowing fear among sedentary populations throughout the region.
In reprisal, international human rights groups say, the mostly black armies of this country of 9 million and its eastern neighbor, Niger, have razed one Tuareg settlement after another, poisoned their wells, and forced thousands of nomads into exile throughout the region.
Five hundred years ago, raids like these by the Tuaregs brought down such wealthy kingdoms as Mali and Songhai, whose fabled capitals of mosques and great universities were here.
Today's hostilities are spreading ethnic hatred and economic destruction that threaten the stability of both Mali and Niger, two of the region's most vibrant but poorest democracies.
Faithful to its reputation as a place of mystery, seemingly placid Tombouctou, with its mixed population and mutual suspicions, surrenders few easy hints of the slow-motion conflict that has recently troubled nearly all of the outpost towns strung along the broad northern bend of the Niger.
"The Tuaregs who are fighting have nothing to do with us," said a Tuareg merchant who would give his name only as Mohamed. "Here in town, there is no trouble between us and the blacks."
After a visit to his one-room house, however, where he and his tribesmen display their silver and bronze metalwork for sale, Mohamed said in a whisper: "We want peace, but the blacks are trying to wipe us out."
For many blacks, and for Malian officials, the view could scarcely be more different.
"That they could dislike this government, or wish for more resources, can be understood," said Lt. Col. Abdoulaye Fane, governor of Tombouctou. "But when they attack riverboats and vehicles that are carrying tourists, and even some of their own kinsmen, we cannot comprehend."
Then Colonel Fane touched upon what is perhaps the deepest source of resentment among Mali's black majority: "What it seems these people really want is to return us to a state of slavery. That will never be acceptable."
For officials in the faraway capital, Bamako, the solution to Tombouctou's problems lie in economic development. "When you are in Tombouctou, you are near Niger, and hence Nigeria, you are near Mauritania and you are near Algeria," said Mahamadou Diagouraga, the government's commissioner for the north.
"The northern bend of the river is a zone of commerce par excellence, and with some economic assistance we could work miracles with farming and livestock, too. All we need is some peace and stability."
In the meantime, the eternal conflicts between the cultures of the river and the sand, between black and nomad, seem likely to persist.
Here and there, shadowy black civil defense groups have sprung up with names like Ghanda Koy, or Owners of the Land, which aim to fight the Tuaregs eye for eye, often without distinction between combatant and civilian.
"We don't need Ghanda Koy here because we are already prepared for the Tuaregs," said a Tombouctou youth who gave his name as Abdoulaye. "The day may soon come when you can't find any of those people in these parts."