Sahara (2002)

by Michael Palin

  But the plane that really matters is the Hercules. Without the Hercules, Atar would not have got its gleaming new airport and freshly laid tarmac, for inside its ample flanks are the 22 tonnes of editing equipment, which provide the television coverage on whose revenue the Rally’s survival depends.

  Wires and cables spill like entrails from its belly, connecting up satellite dishes and generators and even a makeshift studio, complete with potted plants, set up on the tarmac for live interviews with the drivers, which will be pumped out to the four corners of the world.

  Way beyond the bustling, hi-tech centre of this instant city, a suburban sprawl of less privileged competitors stretches to the far corners of the airstrip. At its shadeless limits, where the tarmac runs out and the rubble begins, a tent, a Union Jack and an old Range Rover, with a row of white socks drying on its bonnet, mark the headquarters of the only British interest left in the Rally. The tent is shared by Dave Hammond, a short and amiable motorbike rider, and his two mechanics. Dave is what’s known as a privateer, someone who has entered the race ‘for the romance of the event’, without the backing of any of the big teams. Not for him the Mitsubishi millions. His fuel tank bears the name of Webb’s Garages of Cirencester.

  And bears it proudly. Fifty-two bikes have already dropped out and Dave is lying twenty-first of the 115 still left. He’s optimistic. At this stage of the rally the pressure is on the big boys and they begin to make mistakes. Dave reckons that if he doesn’t do anything silly he’ll pick up places at the expense of those being forced to take risks.

  I ask him if he has any sense of where he is. He shakes his head and laughs.

  ‘I just know we’re going south, because it’s getting hotter and hotter.’

  The Dakar Rally, it seems, is really nothing to do with seeing the world. It’s about machines and drivers. Where you are is less important than how fast you got there and whether you still have a vehicle that can get you out. Someone tells me of a first-time American competitor, thrown off his bike five days ago in Morocco, who’d asked plaintively, ‘Is there much more sand out there?’

  Day Twenty-Five

  ATAR

  You have to be up at sparrow-fart to catch the Rally. The first riders on this time-trial stage, a loop starting and ending in Atar, have left the airport by eight o’clock, and it’s been a long and tricky drive to find a position along the course ahead of them. Once again, the first sign of activity is aerial. A muttering and thudding fills the valley and seconds later a silver helicopter streaks in over sand and stone tracks it has taken us an hour to negotiate. It circles gracefully, picks a spot and swoops to earth, disgorging a camera crew at the point where the piste is marked by a low but nasty run of bumps. A few locals have gathered to watch. They crouch on their haunches, arms resting on knees, looking more bemused than expectant. A donkey watches impassively from a nearby clump of tamarisk trees. A few yards further on, a group of village women are standing up against a flimsy fence, holding a sign on which is written ‘Go, Johnny Go!’, believed to be a reference to the presence of the veteran Gallic rocker Johnny Hallyday in one of the cars.

  More helicopters appear. Some land in a scatter of sand, others hover briefly before sweeping away in search of the next good vantage point. Then the first of the bikes comes into sight around the base of a sand dune, swaying and skidding past at speeds of around 60 miles per hour, sending up a fine plume of red sand as its rider, standing, arms and legs braced, works furiously at throttle and brake to get a grip on this treacherous surface.

  One of the bikes hits a submerged stone and careers off course, flinging its rider to the ground. He remounts and roars by. We check the number. Somehow it had to be. 126. Dave Hammond, Great Britain.

  Before the cars come through we move on to a better vantage point overlooking the village of Tougadh. Because it’s up in the hills, the buildings of Tougadh are sturdier than most I’ve seen in the Mauritanian Sahara, a mix of rectangular houses and circular huts, most of them resting on a skilfully cut dry-stone base and topped with mud and thatch. The village lies across a rising slope, with the head of the valley at one end and a thick grove of date palms at the other. There is no movement amongst the huts. A figure lies asleep outside one of the houses, head resting in the crook of an arm.

  Then comes a distant hum, like the sound of a swarm of bees. Moments later the sound changes from swarming bee to angry hornet and a thin line of dust can be seen snaking through the palms. Swinging wildly on the sandy track, the lead car bursts out of the trees and into the village. Compared with the motorbikes, whose riders could at least be seen grappling with their machines, it’s disappointingly anonymous. A red box driven by two Lego men. Compelled by Rally regulations to observe a speed limit whilst passing through a village, it croaks and barks through the gears with rather bad grace as it climbs between the houses and over the hill. A young man from the village clambers up, waving vigorously at us. For a moment I think this must be the first Mauritanian to show any excitement about the race, but it turns out he wants to sell us some of his dates.

  For the next two hours the sixty-five cars left in the race snarl by, hauling the message of McDonald’s and Microsoft, PlayStation and Gauloises through the sleepy, unappreciative village. After the cars come the trucks and an armada of support vehicles, until all that’s left is a Toyota Land Cruiser containing three journalists covering the rally. They seem in no great hurry and are opening up the daily ration kits issued to them by the organisers. David Park, from the New York Times, is impressed.

  ‘What have we got today? Pate de volaille. There’s sausage, cheese, two biscuits, one for the pate, one for the cheese. Petit Napoleon.’ He shakes his head in awe and admiration. ‘It’s so … French!’

  A line of village children stand watching Park and his friends as if they’ve come from Mars. They might as well have done. In almost every material respect they are different from the inhabitants of Tougadh. Well-fed, prosperous, highly mobile, technologically sophisticated, multinational. Everything this part of Africa is not. Park hands out most of the content of his ration bag to the children. His smile is broad, theirs are tentative. Then his Toyota fires into life, the palm thatch fence sways in the slipstream and the last of the Rally is gone, possibly until next year, probably for ever. A little way up the hill, a man still lies asleep with his head in the crook of an arm.

  All the competitors, apart from a few stragglers, are back at the airport by mid-afternoon. Minor injuries are nursed, positions checked. Stories and rumours spread through the camp. One car somersaulted over a dune, but when the co-driver managed to struggle back to lay a helmet on the dune as a warning sign the next car flew right over him. Alfie Cox, one of the top bikers, won the stage, despite riding the last 200 miles without water after a fall had severed his supply. Leading the six trucks left in the race is the Russian team, admired by one English journalist less for their driving than their spectacular devotion to the hard stuff.

  ‘Anything’ll do. They finished off the windscreen washer fluid last night.’

  And Dave Hammond is still in the race. Despite two falls, he completed the 250-mile course in just over four hours and has moved up to eighteenth place. He and his mechanics are cleaning the bike meticulously.

  After they’ve finished they’ll gather with other riders to watch video footage of their day’s performance.

  There’s a strong family feeling at work here. At heart, the Dakar Rally is about fraternity - bands of brothers united by common language, enthusiasms and ambitions. I admire their mad bravery, but we don’t have much in common. Mauritania excites me much more than motorsport.

  Day Twenty-Six

  ATAR TO CHINGUETTI

  It’s still dark when I wake at the Auberge. It takes a while to work out why the room appears to be shaking. Then the dull reverberation focusses into a familiar sound. The planes are leaving. The circus is moving on. The Dakar Rally is taking to the skies again.

  Sure enoug
h, as we pass out of Atar later in the morning, the airport is empty, the tarmac cleared. Soldiers are no longer in position. The corrugated metal sheets of a ‘Toilette Publique’ are being dismantled. A line of damaged bikes waits to be collected and flown home. A goat sniffs around the leftovers of the bivouac and somewhere out in the desert the strike force heads south. They’ll be in Dakar long before us, that’s for sure. But we’ll have seen a lot more.

  It’s a good day to be on the move. Skies bright and clear, mellow winter temperatures peaking at around 30degC/86degF. We’re climbing up between the sheer, brick-red walls of the Adrar Massif in scenery that could have come straight out of a John Ford Western. What’s more, we’re on that luxury of luxuries - a freshly tarmacked road, paid for and constructed by the Chinese in return for fishing concessions off Mauritania’s Atlantic coast.

  Having done its basic job of taking us through the pass and onto the escarpment, the tarmac ends abruptly. The road reverts to dirt track but soon the rubble gives way to softer, sandier terrain, and by the time we reach the outskirts of Chinguetti we are on the edge of a sand sea, classic date-box desert, for which the Arab word erg sounds awfully inadequate.

  The fine golden sand looks soft and seductive, but it is the most difficult and dangerous surface and dune-driving requires great skills. Despite clever use of the four-wheel drive, we have to make three attempts to climb one towering dune. My heart is in my mouth each time, for we seem so close to tumbling over and crashing down the slope.

  Once at the top I’m left gasping, not so much at the perilousness of the ascent, as by the revelation of the sand sea, stretching to the horizon. The sinuous outlines of the dunes, formed by the wind into hundreds of thousands of peaks and crests and troughs, is mesmerisingly beautiful. Though the sand is constantly in motion, being smoothed and reshaped by the wind, there is an illusion of complete stillness, the sculpted contours of the sandscape smooth as marble, not a grain out of place, everything in perfect equilibrium.

  John studies it more philosophically.

  ‘I suppose you could say it’s the ultimate wasteland,’ he observes. ‘The world’s surface reduced to fine dust.’

  He’s right of course.

  Day Twenty-Seven

  CHINGUETTI

  Looking over the battlements at Fort Saganne, our French Legion lookalike hotel, as another hot day gets underway, I can see below me a network of lanes and low stone and plaster houses that could have been there for months or years, it’s hard to tell. Their walls are uneven, often broken and collapsed into piles of rubble. A woman who has been peeing unselfconsciously in the sand goes back into her house. The front door is of corrugated metal, hanging from one hinge. Beyond is an area of wide sandy spaces with shops and long, low, concrete civic buildings. To one side stands the tall shell of the electricity generating station, its walls punctured by Polisario mortars twenty-three years ago and still unrepaired. But a half-mile or so beyond all that, stretched across a low hill and bordered by palm trees, old Chinguetti, with its assortment of towers and red-gold stone walls, stands out handsomely, like a mediaeval hill town.

  From the battlements of Fort Saganne, Chinguetti, seventh holiest city of Islam, looks a place of substance and civility.

  When we drive into the old town, across the bone-dry football pitch that occupies the flat plain between old and new Chinguetti, the reality is rather different. For a start, the taller and more spectacular of the two minarets turns out to be a water tower.

  Though the old mosque has been beautifully restored, the warren of streets around it is like a ghost town. Discarded sardine tins, batteries, padlocks, Pepsi cans and electric cables lie half-buried in the sand. Birds dart through the ruined houses, and occasionally a veiled figure will call out from a doorway, indicating that their house is not abandoned and pointing out the word ‘boutique‘ scrawled beside it on the wall and the small collection of local artefacts dimly visible inside. In other streets the stone walls are all that remains. Behind solid carved doorways, once prosperous houses lie open to the sky and the sand.

  The desert is taking over Chinguetti.

  There are surprises. I’m trudging up a side street when I hear the sound of voices chanting. It comes from the other side of a low wall, in which a green door stands ajar. I peer round it and find myself in a white-walled courtyard. A dozen children, all clutching wooden boards covered with Arabic writing, are sat in a row facing the wall, reciting texts in high sing-song voices. Standing above them, occasionally stooping to correct some misreading is a tall, elderly man, veiled in black and white, with hollow cheeks and a straggly grey beard, as long and pointed as his face. He is the imam of the mosque whose minaret, shaped like a Gothic church tower, we passed earlier. This is his house and also the medersa, the Koranic school, where the children learn the holy texts, and where some of the better students will be able, one day, to recite the entire Koran from memory. They don’t seem to be learning anything else.

  He shakes hands with Cassa but not with any of us, I notice, but when he answers our questions his fierce countenance cracks easily into a twinkling smile, revealing two prominent, immaculately white teeth.

  Beckoning us into the shade, he orders two of the senior boys, clearly his favourites, to offer round a wooden bowl of zrig, a thick mixture of goat milk, water, millet and sugar.

  In a voice thin and husky from a lifetime of summoning the faithful he tells us that the minaret is the second oldest in continuous use anywhere in the Muslim world. Until very recently, he says, he used to climb up and make the call to prayer from the top of the tower; now he’s not strong enough and has to rely on a microphone down below.

  Along a side street nearby, the word ‘Bibliotheque‘ is scrawled in white paint on the stone lintel of an otherwise inconspicuous doorway. Stepping inside, I find myself in a room, no more than 15 feet square, with bamboo mats on the floor and rough-plastered walls. An old man rises to greet me.

  Behind him, stacked on shelves, are bundles of papers wrapped in leather bindings or manila folders. They are books and documents of extraordinary beauty, many of them six or seven hundred years old. In some cases the pages have come loose from their bindings, but in all of them the quality of the work is exquisite. They have been in his family for centuries and he treats the texts like old friends, moving his finger from right to left, as the Chinese and Japanese do, across the delicate, spidery calligraphy.

  There is a commentary on the Koran, with notes around the margins, and a book of Islamic law, still clearly readable, detailing legal procedures - numbers of witnesses, rights of the accused - all dating back to the golden days when Chinguetti was one of the great centres of Islamic scholarship.

  ‘This land,’ he says, head inclined towards mine but eyes fixed somewhere in the distance, ‘was called Chinguetti before it was called Mauritania.’

  I ask him if there might be a price at which he’d part with a book like this, but he shakes his head. These are his life, and part of the life of his fathers and forefathers. He cannot let them down by selling them.

  In the main square of Old Chinguetti is a more organised collection of the city’s treasures. The Bibliotheque Al Halott can be found off the courtyard of a fine old house, behind ancient acacia wood doors. Beneath weathered black beams are bulky modern filing cabinets containing 1400 manuscripts. A father-and-son team looks after them, and so valuable are the works that they only allow visitors in one or two at a time. Their pride and joy - ‘le plus ancien ouvrage‘ - is a Koran, brought here from Mecca in AD 1000. They have a book on astronomy dating from the fourteenth century, clearly showing the planets of our solar system circling the sun, proving that Arab scholars knew something that the authorities in Europe refused to acknowledge for a further 200 years.

  Six o’clock. The best time of day. People are out in the streets again, shops are open, children, rolling old tyres, race after each other. The big heat is off, the setting sun turns the desert a rosy purple and the sou
nds of the city soften to a murmur.

  Walking in the new town, I find myself first watching, then participating in a game of dhaemon, as taught me by Mohammed Salim of the Polisario. An erect, bare-headed man, who clearly fancies himself as the local Grand Master, is taking on all comers and thrashing them. He barely raises his eyes from the sand as I’m sat down opposite him and given my quota of crottes de chameau, camel droppings. Then something goes wrong with his strategy. Soon I have at least a dozen friends and advisers ready to manage my every move, shouting, debating and arguing with increasing hysteria as they scent a rare victory in the air.

  Sure enough the sticks are uprooted with increasing regularity and the all-conquering camel turds are sweeping across the sand, until, with sharp cries of delight, the foreigner steals a victory.

  I seem to have had all Chinguetti on my side, for as I walk back to the hotel later I keep getting waves of acknowledgement, broad grins and cheery shouts of ‘Champion!’

  My stock with the owners of the Hotel Fort Saganne is already pretty high.

  ‘Vous etes le deuxieme star ici!’ they enthuse, ‘le premier star’ being Gerard Depardieu, who stayed and worked here whilst making what was by all accounts a very bad film called Fort Saganne in 1984. I only wish their facilities matched their view of my status. Though I am in Depardieu’s room, the generator provides light and electricity only fitfully, the bedside light is operated from a switch 20 feet away from the bed, the pillow is made from some form of granite and the painting and decoration seem to have been completed by someone with a serious grudge against society.

  It all becomes a bit clearer when they reveal that Depardieu didn’t stay in this room at all, but in a Winnebago parked outside. They even show me the spot.