Is the Domani Council of Merchants REALLY dead? Or could it be that Rand just had the wrong people looking for them? Given how in ToM, Rand tells Cadsuane to go search one of the largest geographical features/regions in the known world – the Caralain Grass – for King Alsalam, and she finds him in a rather timely fashion, while the thousands of Aiel searching the rather smaller country for the Council were much less successful, I really have to question their abilities as searchers, and given the previous efforts of the Aiel to find a person, I think the methods they employ are the key to their lack of success so far.
The first Aiel search we see undertaken is their search for a safe place to stash the objects of the Power the Aes Sedai gave to them. That appears to have taken several centuries, but the world was breaking around them, so we’ll give them a pass (though it took foreign Aes Sedai to come find them and help in order for them to actually locate such a refuge). The next search was for the descendants of the Watersharers to pay back their debt from when they came to the Three Fold Land. This took them something like 2,000 years, despite the fact that they were next-door neighbors. The Watersharers lived right by the Dragonwall, and while that is a considerable stretch of real estate from north to south, they lived right by the place the Aiel crossed it! Did the step of back-tracking to the place where they crossed the Dragonwall and looking to see if short swarthy people still lived there never occur to them? It’s not like they needed to do a lot of research either! Every significant leader among them had experienced that event in the glass column ter’angreal, and should be able to personally recall what they looked like! Did it take them 2,500 years to pick out a suitable thank-you gift? Then there was the hunt for Laman the Tree-killer, which took three years for the world’s most accomplished sneaky killers who habitually scorn wetlanders as blind fools. You’d think finding a very public figure who lived in the largest building of the largest city in the country would have been easy enough for them to waltz a small party past all those stone-blind guards and whack him – you know, like a crippled, white-haired musician manages to do 20 years later, in the midst of a civil crisis when the guards would have been on high alert!

Most egregious, however, is the search pattern for their long-awaited Car’a’carn. As one of the few functioning intellects among the Aiel, Rhuarc took charge of that search near the very end, presumably because the Wise Ones had dreams informing them what a cluster-fu*k their people were conducting for the first year or so, and nagged him to go get the effort under control and with some vague suggestion of organization. Prior to Rhuarc taking charge, we saw the Aiel numerous times in the wetlands. Their purpose? To search for He Who Comes With the Dawn, whose coming will be announced by the fall of the Stone of Tear. When Perrin tells Gaul that he has gone to Tear, Gaul’s reaction is a total “Duh!” moment, suggesting this is general knowledge. So where do we see Aiel searching for the man who will appear in Tear? We see the first one well to the north of Kinslayer’s Dagger, Urien, a Red Shield of the Tardaard. Did he decide to approach Tear through the Shienaran fortifications and head south across the length of the continent? Or did he wander out of Jangai Pass and head in the opposite direction from Tear?
The next group of Aiel are a rather vivid cautionary tale of the dangers of inducting women into the military – when sent out on a critical recon mission to find the prophecied messianic figure, what do the very first Maidens ever encountered in the series do? Divert for a shopping trip! The Maidens who were theoretically sent to find HWCWtD were spotted in a stedding acquiring sung wood! This is like sending CIA & FBI & MI6 agents throughout the world to locate a critical religious figure, and the female agents all diligently start searching the world’s shopping malls. In the case of the bloodthirsty trio of Maidens from tGH, one might be tempted to offer the excuse that they picked a good place, because that is the first encounter between the Car’a’carn and his people, but they completely overlooked it! I wonder if they ever realized their error or if those three maidens died trying to raid a haute couture establishment in Tanchico and never got to learn how the search turned out. I can just imagine the aftermath of their encounter as those three Maidens leave Stedding Tsofu:

Rhian: Wow, that was close! We almost ended up shedding blood in the hold of the Treebrothers!
Maiden 2: Don’t they have their own actual names for those things…?
Rhian: As if we Aiel pay attention to anyone else’s terminology! Let’s get back to our mission, now that our girl-time shopping fun has been so rudely interrupted.
Maiden 2: We were supposed to find He Who Comes With the Dawn. Boy that’s a mouthful. Can’t we just call him the Car’a’carn?
Rhian: Not for another couple of books until RJ has to use the term more than three or four times per book and gets tired of typing all that. This is still the early 90s and I don’t think PC word processors can copy & paste yet. Now what do we know about this He Who Comes With the Dawn? He’s one of us right?
Maiden 2: Well, he is of our blood but raised among the wetlanders. That IS, after all, why the Wise Ones sent us to the wetlands to look.
Rhian: Well, of course! Knowing this fact, and there being warriors of every clan sent out on this mission, anyone who would follow a He Who Comes With the Dawn from the Three Fold Land would have to be really, really stupid! The kind of stupid that only a hammer to the head can cure. So we need to find someone in the wetlands, who is obviously one of our blood.
Maiden 2: He’d probably be acting like a wetlander, too. You know, wearing wetlander clothes, riding a horse, wasting water, maybe even [shudders] carrying a sword.
Maiden 3: I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
Rhian: Hmmm. An Aiel-looking fellow acting like a wetlander. Ring any bells?
Maiden 2: No, but since absolutely none of us ever travel into the wetlands, aside from the hunts for the Treekiller and HWCWtD, the opportunities for a wetlander to raise one of our blood would be exceedingly rare! How many wetlanders of Aiel blood could there be? I doubt there is more than one or two in the whole world, so if we see an Aiel-looking man acting like a wetlander, odds are, it’s probably the guy we traveled into the heart of our enemies’ nation to look for.
Rhian: Right, so we’d be looking for a tall, red-haired man, with light colored eyes and fair skin, made more noticeable by his shorter swarthy companions?
Maiden 2: Why does that description sound familiar?
Rhian: I am sure I'd notice if I saw an Aielman among the wetlanders! So this search should be easy as pie.
Maiden 3: So an obvious Aielman, dressed as a wetlander, riding a horse and carrying a sword...like that guy we saw back in the stedding, about twenty minutes ago?
Rhian: Why him? Just because he's obviously an Aielman, but a long-time inhabitant of the wetlands by his dress and speech, is no reason to take note of him when the whole reason we even left our homes was to find an Aielman born to one of our society but raised in the wetlands...shit.
Maiden 2: Crap in a hat! You mean we just committed a major gaffe by trying to pick a fight and shaming ourselves before the Ogier, and might very well have given He Who Comes With the Dawn a horrible first impression of Aiel?
Rhian: Let’s never, ever tell anyone about this, and go see if the Lost Ones can teach us sexy dancing.

Later, Perrin meets yet another Aiel, Gaul, in Altara. Much is made of how freaky the Aiel find rivers, and how disconcerted they are at having to cross large bodies of water, yet Gaul and his companion crossed the two largest known rivers in the wetlands to reach the small village in Altara where he was strung up in a cage! Not only that, he crossed those rivers knowing they were putting those same enormous rivers between themselves and the primary location connected to the man they were looking for! What was that thought process? That’s like looking for a man who is prophesied to burn the city of Atlanta, in Texas. Or like looking for a man prophesied to appear in Istanbul, in France. And this is GAUL! The man who “thinks too much” according to a Wise One, and whom another jokes will be sent to Rhuidean due to his un-Aiel intellect!

Given this apparent pattern of conducting searches for people, I would guess that the Aiel probably searched Tarabon, Saldaea and the Almoth plain assiduously for the missing Domani Councilors, and were just as surprised as could be about their lack of success. I’m surprised the guys who can channel and go off to kill the Dark One are smart enough to look in the Blight! I wonder now if the reason why in the beginning of their war with the Seanchan, the Aiel refrain from attacking the Tarasin Palace in Ebou Dar because their exploratory assaults into Murandy, Ghealdan and Cairhien failed to locate the place! Or maybe they thought it was a DIFFERENT large white palatial building on the Mol Hara square in Ebou Dar? How did Aviendha’s granddaughter & her boyfriend come up with those purloined war plans? Stumble into the room marked “military files” while looking assiduously for the commissariat?
Yay, Aiel. Score another win for Darwinism in Aviendha’s future vision.