The crescent moon and green and white verticals of the national flag flutter above the sub-prefect’s office in the main street of I-n-Guezzam. Construction is going on to turn this dirt strip into a dual carriageway, but work seems desultory. Two rake-thin guards, rifles slung over their shoulders, stand outside the office where our papers are being checked. As we wait, Said confides to me that I-n-Guezzam is considered the end of the earth, and a posting here is usually a penalty for past mistakes. I like Said. He is clearly proud of his country and impatient with it at the same time, like a father with a delinquent son.
He apologises that there are no hotels of sufficient quality in I-n-Guezzam. We have been invited instead to spend the night on the roof of the mayor’s house. This is a two-storey brick and plaster building with a small garden tucked away behind high walls. The downstairs rooms are full of people, mostly family I assume. The mayor, a tall slim Touareg, wears a yellow turban, matching gandoura (an Arab kaftan), leggings in cream and red check and a pair of thin scholarly glasses. Our presence is clearly something unprecedented in I-n-Guezzam and he is forever bringing people up to the roof to meet us. The commissar, a short stocky man in T-shirt and Umbro training pants, shakes hands all round, followed shortly by someone introduced to us as the Surgeon of Police. I think they’re all quite keen to hang around and party, but we cross-Saharan travellers are by now desperately in need of food and sleep.
Day Seventy
I-N-GUEZZAM TO TAMANRASSET
I should be used to the gripping chill of the desert nights by now, but I still find myself reaching for a sweater in the small hours. I find I’ve laid my sleeping bag beside a small drainage hole in the wall, through which a blast of gritty wind is blowing straight into my face. Stuff my towel into the hole, wrap my turban round my head and settle myself back to sleep. It doesn’t come easily. There is a constant subdued roar coming from somewhere, as if planes are warming up for take-off (I’m later told it’s the town generator). I can’t wait for the dawn.
It is a beauty. The sun rises as a pulsing red ball, glowing like a hot coal before softening into a peachy glow which fills the sky with benevolent promise. (I keep making a mental note to myself not to describe any more sunrises, but some are majestic and, jaded travellers though we are, we never ignore them. They raise the spirits like nothing else. Apart from a cold beer.)
The mayor and the commissar and the surgeon of police all gather around as we load up. They’re candid about the problems down here at the frontier. There is no oasis and no water for crops, so all their food must be brought in from Tamanrasset, 250 miles away.
The mayor unpicks a stick from his teeth and gestures at a row of new houses across the street.
‘The people are poor, but very conservative. We build new houses, with floors, and they still want to sleep on the sand.’
As Said puts it, they mistrust the ‘chair culture’. They remain nomads at heart, so everything expendable is dumped in the street for the goats to sift through.
‘And the women,’ the mayor shakes his head, ‘you don’t see them. Some of them never leave their houses.’
As the time comes for yet another goodbye, the mayor and his friends are warm and courteous, but I sense they are already switching off, preparing to return to the reality of their isolation. They know that almost anywhere else is better than here and yet it is their home. To survive it must require a particularly indomitable spirit.
The road to Tamanrasset follows one of the oldest trade routes across the Sahara, from Nigeria to Algeria, across the very heart of the desert. It is still a sand piste. There are signs of a hard-top being laid north of I-n-Guezzam, but it runs beside us, tantalisingly unfinished. The surface, by no means free of rocks and boulders, is generally firm, but there are softer patches where wheels cease to grip and the cars begin to swing.
This is a main road without garages or tow-trucks, so virtually everything that breaks down is left to the mercy of the sands. It was between I-n-Guezzam and Tamanrasset that Margaret Thatcher’s son went missing in the 1980s. He and his girlfriend were rescued after a long and expensive search. Not everyone was so lucky. A few miles off the main piste is an undulating area of fine sand and basalt boulders so strewn with old car bodies that it’s known as the Cemetery. Quite what happened to all these wrecks is difficult to tell. Some are twisted out of recognition, others seem just to have been abandoned, one door swung open, as if someone had decided to get out and walk. Anything that could be removed from them has been removed. The wind, a constant companion in the desert, catches at their metal skeletons, making them twitch and vibrate as if not quite dead. An old Deux Chevaux, painted all the colours of the rainbow and half filled with sand, adds a touch of colour to the wreckage, a reminder of the part deserts played in the hippie dream. There is no shelter here and not a cloud in the way of a sun which is sending temperatures beyond 38degC/100degF.
The wonder is that any of these cars got this far.
Seven hours after setting out, we arrive in the well-kept streets of Tamanrasset. The town feels as if it has just had a makeover. Kerb-stoned sidewalks, concrete arcades, lines of shade-giving trees, walls and buildings decorated in what seems to be a regulation shade of blood-brown. Even the razor wire has been painted in Tamanrasset.
Day Seventy-One
TAMANRASSET TO ASSEKREM
Around 10.30 the four rusty flagpoles on the forecourt of the Hotel Tahat recede into the distance as we take to Tamanrasset’s gloriously smooth and comfortable roads. Within a mile we throw an abrupt right onto a track so ferociously jagged that for a moment I fear we might have been hijacked.
It does not get much better. Every now and then we come to a stretch that is merely rutted earth, but these are few and far between. Generally, it is a bed of broken and solidified lava, over which the vehicle judders and shudders as if possessed. A puncture offers some brief respite, then the whole painful process begins again. But it is a price almost worth paying for magnificently dramatic scenery. We are in the Hoggar Mountains, which, with peaks rising to 10,000 feet, are amongst the highest in the Sahara. They’re formed by the hard cores of ancient volcanoes, eroded into a series of weird and wonderfully shaped towers, plugs and pinnacles.
Some have incised vertical surfaces, as if they’ve been clawed, others are so deeply scored that their sides look like organ pipes or massive petrified tree roots. On one the scarring runs in all directions like a starburst captured in stone. There are knobs, spires, needles, arcs and bluffs, rocks standing four square on plinths of rubble, resembling mediaeval castles. Tenacious tufts of grass cling to the defiles and gullies; otherwise, this is a land of rock and stone. The Touareg know it by the suitably Tolkien-ish name of Atakor.
Just as I’m constructing romantic notions of mythological lands, a squat white Mercedes jeep bounces down the track towards us. Not unbelievable in itself, but quite a shock when I see it has British number plates. It pulls up and out gets a bony, angular man of late middle age, with a flick of fair hair and a quick, elfin-like energy. With mutual exclamations of surprise we introduce ourselves. His name is Tom Sheppard, a well-known traveller with books to his name.
Like many twentieth-century Englishmen, from T. E. Lawrence to Wilfred Thesiger, he has a passion for desert, and particularly this part of the Algerian desert. He’s been coming here for forty years, following tracks marked on the old French maps.
‘The Hoggar’s very special.’
He likes the compactness of the area, and that there is, within 1000 square miles, such an extraordinary combination of mountain and dune.
‘Pristine dunes, quite untrodden by anyone at all.’
He hasn’t seen another human being for eight days, one of which was his sixty-eighth birthday. He describes it with almost military relish.
‘I had a really special meal on that one. Meat and two veg. Chilled grapefruit for goodness’ sake. Damp kitchen towel, wrapped around the tin, the dryness of the air makes evaporation
and you get cooled grapefruit segments. What more could you ask for a birthday?’
Life has been made much safer for him since the advent of satellites.
‘God bless the Americans for putting them up there.’
He enthuses about something called EPRB, Electronic Precision Recording Beacon - basically a distress signal, which bounces off a satellite to centres all over the world. He’s had to use it in Libya recently.
‘And they were onto it, just like that, eleven minutes after starting transmission.’
I’d like to talk a lot more, but Tom politely turns down our offer of lunch. Though he exudes conviviality, his pleasure is in going solo, and as his dust-covered Mercedes, as compact and self-contained as its owner, crunches off down the track, I find myself distinctly envious of the man.
Having covered the next 50 miles in a painful four and a half hours, we catch sight of a tiny hut silhouetted on a ridge high above us, a refuge built by the ascetic French missionary Charles de Foucauld ninety years ago. After a few more agonisingly slow hairpins we pull up at the gates of a compound below the hut, where there is a hostel maintained by the town of Tamanrasset.
The accommodation is basic mountain stuff: an uncompromising stone-walled building, with two outside lavatories (quite far outside), three dormitories and a communal meeting room, with rugs and cushions, chairs, tables and an open fire. After our meal we sit in here with Arouj, the administrator, a heavily turbaned, moustachioed Touareg, probably a devastatingly handsome man in his youth, now a little fleshed out. Business doesn’t look good. There’s room here for 150, but apart from ourselves there are only four other visitors tonight. One is a young German biker, who set out to cross the Sahara with two friends, both of whom have had to return home after arguments with sand dunes. Arouj orders some mint tea for us all. He’s pleased to see us. Very few British ever come here, he says. Germans, yes, Italians (for the rock climbing) and Spanish.
French?
He wobbles his hand. Some French.
I feel for him. The locals have put a lot into this place. There is an airstrip at Tamanrasset, and the Hoggar mountain area is a national park, protected by UNESCO. But as long as Algeria remains better known for its civil war, places like Assekrem will remain a well-kept secret.
I make my apologies and get off to bed. We’re to be up at five tomorrow to walk up to the refuge. Arouj hands me his card. It has his website marked.
Day Seventy-Two
ASSEKREM TO HASSI-MESSAOUD
An alarm sounds in our dormitory, followed by total silence. Then a rustling of sleeping bags, a muffled curse, a cough, a variety of yawns and silence again. We’ve all been very well behaved in the night. No raucous snoring, farting or too many trips to the toilet. I know, because I’ve been awake most of the time. I never sleep comfortably if there’s an unusually early start in the offing. My body knows it’s in for a shock and stays on red alert for most of the night. A torch is switched on, the first light of the morning.
Pull myself reluctantly from my sleeping bag, which has had more use in the Sahara than on all my previous journeys put together. I keep thinking I won’t need it any more, then up comes a night like this. Middle of the Sahara and cold as a Scottish winter.
Bleary, grunted greetings. Queue for the lavatory, faces washed with a splash of bottled water. Tea has been made by someone, God bless them. Then out onto the mountainside. The mass of bright stars, normally such a delight, seems to be almost hostile this morning, the cold already intensified by a wicked little wind. The top of the hill is a few hundred feet away, up a steep zigzag footpath. Nigel and Pete set the pace, weaving up it like mountain goats, despite carrying more than anyone else. Maybe Nigel, a well-established quinquagenarian like myself, felt an urge to prove himself after yesterday’s encounter with the boyish sixty-eight-year-old Tom Sheppard.
By the time we’ve reached the top of the path and the broad flat plateau on which Pere de Foucauld built his refuge, we’re above 9000 feet and gulping gratefully at the chilly air.
There is still three-quarters of an hour to go before sunrise, but the stars are fading slowly and a faint lemon-magenta glow is shading the eastern horizon. Up here the mountains are all below us. Only one summit, that of Tahat, away to the north, is superior, and that by a few hundred feet. Even before the sun comes up the view is breathtaking. The misty pre-dawn light compresses the spaces between the mountains, giving the appearance of a solid range to what we know to be a collection of eccentric individuals.
Said whispers in my ear.
‘This is third best sunrise in the world, after Fiji and Ceylon.’
He pauses a moment for me to take this in.
‘The purity of the air here is recorded by the meteorological station and sent back to the United States. To measure carbon and ozone in the atmosphere.’
(I’m not altogether sure about this purity of the air bit; it brings to mind something less reassuring that I recently read in Jeremy Keenan’s book Sahara Man. At In Ecker, less than 60 miles northwest of here, the French tested their first nuclear weapon. According to Keenan, there is anecdotal evidence of poisonous emissions and mysterious deaths immediately afterwards.)
A bitter north wind drives me to take shelter in the refuge. Above the doorway of this plain stone construction is a white marble panel. It reads ‘Charles de Foucauld, juillet-decembre 1911’. Inside, a narrow passage leads to a small chapel, where there is a picture of a lean Frenchman with a well-trimmed beard dressed in a white monk’s habit, and, above it, the emblem of a red heart with a cross rising from it.
Fifty-three years before he built this refuge de Foucauld was born in Strasbourg, a vicomte from a privileged and wealthy background. He joined the French army and was posted to Algeria, where he lived a playboy life, doing little but splash his money around on parties and mistresses. Then, suddenly and quite drastically turning his back on the easy life, he travelled North Africa disguised as a Jewish rabbi, joined a Trappist order at the age of thirty-one and, twelve years later, entered the priesthood. His work brought him to the Touareg of the Hoggar Mountains, amongst whom he gained considerable respect, not only learning their language but also producing the first French-Tamahaq dictionary.
He accepted, indeed revelled in, the isolation of the desert. There is a shelf beside the chapel on which a book of his writings lies open at the place where de Foucauld gives his own account of what has brought us here: ‘The beauty of the view defies description or even imagination … it is marvellous.’
There’s not much I can add to this as I watch the sun rise over the Hoggar Mountains, giving each peak form and colour and revealing the spectacular proportions of this strange and unforgettable landscape.
The Sahara’s fearsome reputation for ending people’s lives prematurely was enhanced by the murder of de Foucauld, who was shot and killed in Tamanrasset five years after building this refuge. The order he founded, the Little Brothers of Jesus, continues his work, supported by Algeria’s Muslim government. The current incumbent, Brother Edward, offers tea to ourselves and two other tourists who’ve struggled up to the sunrise. He tells us that Pere de Foucauld, far from being forgotten, is in the preparatory stages of canonisation and will very soon be made a saint.
He also asks if we wouldn’t mind taking down to Tamanrasset a Korean acolyte, who has just spent forty days and nights on his own up here. We pick him up later in the car park, an incessantly smiling, patient man, jauntily dressed in fishing hat, windcheater and jeans. It looks more like he’s spent four hours in Banana Republic than forty days in solitary.
We’re back in Tamanrasset by midday. Snatched rudely from the sublime to the ridiculous, we find ourselves struggling to negotiate forty-odd bags through an overcrowded airport with ‘Feelings’ playing over the Tannoy. Nor does the culture shock end there. We are soon aboard a 737 bound for Hassi-Messaoud. It has taken us four hours to drive the 40 miles from Assekrem; the next 700 miles of our journey will take less t
han ninety minutes.
As we take to the air I can’t take my eyes off the panorama of peaks spread out below me like tombstones, and even when the Hoggar Mountains slip away to the south, the desert landscape remains hypnotically beautiful. A series of round black circles, the traces of spent volcanoes, cover the surface like blisters, before giving way to a wide flat tableland eroded into a series of long twisting terraces. This in turn gives way to the glorious salmon pink of the Grand Erg Oriental, part of the sand sea that swirls across the centre of Algeria in long languid curves.
As we begin our descent the unbroken stretch of virgin sand becomes increasingly tarnished. Straight black lines cross the landscape below, connecting up a series of tiny installations, making the surface of the desert look more like a printed circuit board. The lower we get the more depressing it becomes. The sand sea is riddled with roads, pipelines, clusters of low huts surrounded by smeared black pits, at the centre of which, like the totems of some ancient religion, are towers spouting flame. This is Algeria’s Aladdin’s Cave. Within a 300-mile radius of the rapidly approaching oasis of Hassi-Messaoud are sufficient reserves of oil and gas to make this embattled country the third richest (after Libya and Tunisia) in the Sahara.
In an already security-obsessed country the oil and gas production facilities are fortresses in themselves. No vehicles are allowed up to the airport buildings, and we have to carry all our equipment 300 yards down the road, through a narrow checkpoint and across into a car park surrounded by a 10-foot-high razor-wired steel fence. Behind the bars of the car park are more white faces than I’ve seen on our entire journey. They stare out from minibuses and four-wheel drives, company coaches and private saloons, their gazes neutral and incurious as they wait to be driven away. These are not the faces of people glad to be here; they’re the faces of people who have to be here. They’re the oil men.
Sahara (2002) Page 23
