Sahara Unveiled
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ACCLAIM FOR
William Langewiesche’s
Sahara Unveiled
“Whether dealing with the geography and history of the region, observing its psychological impact on the natives and outsiders, describing the beauty of its swirling sand patterns or discoursing on the characteristics of the scorpion … Langewiesche writes with style and flair.… This is travel writing with a human face.”
—Parade magazine
“Langewiesche … exploits the harshness, forlornness, and political hopelessness of the vast desert to fashion an entertaining and edifying tale.”
—The New York Times
“A reader’s dream.… With spare lyrical cadences and cool sensuality, Langewiesche summons up the landscape itself.… Sahara Unveiled has a masterful dry chill to it, a power that stays coiled and ready to spring and a prose that fits its subject as cleanly as skin to the bone.”
—Seattle Times
“Like Charles Doughty, Freya Stark, T. E. Lawrence, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wilfred Thesiger, and many others … Langewiesche finds places of his own amid the vast mysteries of the desert.… His travels are filled with intense characters and scenes so vivid you can feel the grit between your teeth.”
—The Advocate Literary Supplement
BOOKS BY
William Langewiesche
Cutting for Sign
Sahara Unveiled
William Langewiesche
Sahara Unveiled
William Langewiesche is the author of Cutting for Sign and a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly. For many years a commercial pilot, he now lives in Davis, California.
FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, JULY 1997
Copyright © 1996 by William Langewiesche
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in hardcover by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1996.
Portions of Sahara Unveiled have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Chapman & Hall: Excerpts from The Physics of Blown Sand & Desert Dunes by R. A. Bagnold (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1942).
Reprinted by permission of Chapman & Hall.
Editions Jean-Claude Lattes: Excerpts translated by William Langewiesche from Touareg, La Tragedie by Mano Dayak. Copyright © 1992 by Editions Jean-Claude Lattes. Reprinted by permission of Editions Jean-Claude Lattes.
Illustration credits: Photographs on this page and this page,
copyright © E. D. McKee/ U.S. Geological Survey; photograph on this page, copyright © Eric Lessing/ Art Resource, N.Y.
Map © 1995 by Vikki Leib.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows: Langewiesche, William.
Sahara unveiled : a journey across the desert / William Langewiesche. p. cm.
1. Sahara—Description of travel.
2. Langewiesche, William—Journeys—Sahara. I. Title.
DT333.L26 1996
916.604′329—dc20
95-48864
eISBN: 978-0-307-78066-9
Author photograph courtesy of William Langewiesche
Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Dan Frank, Cullen Murphy, Chuck Verrill, and Bill Whitworth for their years of support. Thanks also to Gail Boyer Hayes for her enduring faith and her intelligence. Finally thanks to the Saharans themselves, among whom I count close friends. I have judged them frankly. I know they will understand.
To Minouche
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Map
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Dedication
PART I: THE NORTH IS A DESERT
1. Before the Desert
2. About Paradise
3. Across the Atlas
4. City in the Dunes
5. The Physics of Blown Sand
6. A Lesson about Love
7. The King of Ouargla
8. Sleeping with Women
9. Ameur Was a Modern Man
10. Malika’s Desert
11. Prisoners of the Oasis
12. The Mechanics of Escape
13. The Inferno
14. The Safari
PART II: THE CENTER IS A WAR
15. Tamanrasset
16. A Tuareg Story
17. Lessons in History
18. Yazid’s Desert
19. A Door in the Desert
20. A Political Parable
21. A Tuareg Tragedy
22. South to the Sahel
PART III: THE EDGE IS A DESERT TOO
23. Niamey
24. A City Built of Mud
25. The Desert Nation
26. The River
27. Truth and Falsehood
28. Skipping Timbuktu
29. The Desert Is Downtown
PART I
THE NORTH
IS A DESERT
1
BEFORE
THE
DESERT
DO NOT REGRET the passing of the camel and the caravan. The Sahara has changed, but it remains a desert without compromise, the world in its extreme. There is no place as dry and hot and hostile. There are few places as huge and as wild. You will not diminish it by admitting that its inhabitants can drive, and that they are neither wiser nor purer nor stronger than you. It is fairer to judge them squarely as modern people and your equals. They were born by chance in a hard land, at a hard time in its history. You will do them no justice by pretending otherwise. Do not worry that their world, or yours, has grown too small. Despite its roads, its trucks, its televisions, the Sahara remains unsubdued.
In its scale and complexity, it is a difficult place to know. Consider just the external dimensions—a desert the size of the United States, filling the northern third of Africa, extending south nearly to the edge of the tropical forests. Only a fifth of this vastness is the sand of popular imagination, formed into the great dune seas called ergs in Arabic; the rest is rock and gravel plain, and high rugged mountain. On that much we can agree. But beyond such crude description, geographers begin to quarrel over the most basic measures. For instance, if “desert” is defined by dryness, should the threshold be six inches of yearly rain, or twice that? Should “desert” be defined by variability of rainfall? By rates of evaporation? By hours of sunshine? Or should we choose a biological standard and define the Sahara as a place where only certain plants and animals can survive? If the questions seem endless, it is because the desert defies such delimitations. You cannot even assume you will know it when you see it. My own impression is that the Sahara is indeed advancing south into Africa, despite the evidence from satellite surveys that perhaps it is not. The satellites measure temperature, soil, and vegetation. But my measure is mostly human. It starts far to the north, in Algiers, a port city on North Africa’s green coastal plain, which at first glance is not the Sahara at all.
Algiers was once the loveliest city of the French colonial empire. As the capital of an independent Algeria now, it still sparkles across hills above a blue Mediterranean bay. It has a whitewashed center with boulevards lined by stuccoed French-style apartment buildings, and a gentle climate nurtured by maritime breezes. The Sahara proper lies a day south by bus, across a farmed coastal plain, and out beyond the snowy
Atlas Mountains. Visitors mention the desert’s pull, the fabled attraction of that imagined horizon. They say the Sahara has the presence of an unseen ocean. That is true. But you can also find the desert closer, in the poverty and crowding of Algiers.
Algeria won its independence bitterly in 1962, after war, and then as a new nation found itself pressed against the Mediterranean by its vast hinterland. Ninety percent of the country lay out there beyond the mountains. Cynics who claim that the fight for independence came down to a fight for the desert’s oil are misreading history. The Algerians fought a classic guerrilla war for their families and towns and cultural ideals. Perhaps a million people died. Afterward the army ran the country, and spent the income from oil and natural gas on a long and troubled experiment with socialism that in the end left the people with little of the desert but the desert itself. It was as if the Sahara had refused to be reduced to oil. If the desert appeared on the map as a national treasure, it existed in reality as a forbidding land that denied Algeria’s fast-growing population the room to expand. Algiers became a city of two million in a colonial shell built for a fifth as many—one of a string of such towns in which nearly all Algerians now crowd the coast.
By the early 1990s, the economy had collapsed and the crowds had begun to quarrel violently. A long-awaited Islamic revolution that broke out in the north was sparked by bread riots. The military dictatorship answered in the only way it knew, by fighting back. The fight continues today. Deep in the Sahara, the oases remain relatively calm; they are conservative and religious places where the local Islamic radicals have little real opposition. But in the crowded north, with its close ties to Europe, the cities are infested not only with revolutionaries but with soldiers, spies, and other agents of the established order. People are dying by the tens of thousands. You cannot blame the Sahara alone for the troubles. But you should also not see the desert simply as some faraway place of little rain. There are many forms of thirst.
I STAYED NEAR the center of Algiers, beside the National Assembly building, in a hotel I knew from earlier visits, and had come to appreciate for its high colonial ceilings and the glowering of its guests. They were government men and party hacks, heavy smokers who stayed up late in the lobby and talked in low voices, acting worried and conspiratorial. They draped sports jackets over their shoulders, leaving the sleeves to dangle. They cast ominous looks in my direction. I found them strangely reassuring—proof that the old Algeria still endured, teetering as always on the edge of the political abyss.
Thunderstorms battered the city. My hotel room, which overlooked the street from the third floor, had a dripping ceiling, a door that would not lock, and French windows that kept blowing open, letting in the wind. A nightly curfew had been imposed. I kept the light off and watched in darkness as an army patrol moved cautiously up the street through torrential rain. Lightning flashed. An armored vehicle stood in an intersection near the casbah. The casbah is the oldest part of the town. It climbs a hillside above the harbor in a maze of streets too narrow to drive. During the colonial years it was the Algerian ghetto. Now all Algiers is the Algerian ghetto. Gunshots puncture the nights. The city teaches you to sleep away from the windows.
I lay on the bed and listened to the storm with satisfaction, expecting within days to cross the mountains to the place where rain so rarely falls. I had been to the Sahara before, but for short stays, and by air. There I had found a land unknown, as masked by the dreams built upon it as by drought and distance—and yet a land where the interplay between Europe and its former colonies lay exposed in the crisp sunlight. That interplay came as a surprise. It seemed to act through a set of mirrors by which Europe unwittingly found itself in its images of the desert, while the desert people in turn defined themselves not as they actually were, but as they were reflected in Europe. I saw in this another reflection, larger even than Africa, a metaphor for desert all over the world.
This time I would linger, and travel by ground. The Sahara is the earth stripped of its gentleness, a place that consumes the careless and the unlucky. But all you need to navigate it is a suitcase, a bit of cash, an occasional bus ticket, the intention to move on. Such simplicity appeals to me. Wars and borders allowing, I expected now to cross the Sahara in an arc from the Mediterranean south to the African savanna, and west to the Atlantic. The route would take me through the desert’s hyper-arid core—a place with plateaus nearly sterilized by drought, where bacteria cannot survive, and where cadavers, partially mummified, decompose slowly like sun-dried dates. The Sahara has horizons so bare that drivers mistake stones for diesel trucks, and so lonely that migrating birds land beside people just for the company. The certainty of such sparseness can be a lesson. I lay in Algiers in a hotel in a storm, thinking there is no better sound than the splash of rain. The desert teaches by taking away.
ALGIERS LOOKED CLEAN in the morning. The sun reflected brilliantly through the canyons of whitewashed buildings. Laundry hung from all the windows, turning the city’s insides out, betraying its density and the youth of its population. Most Algerians are children, and they wear children’s clothes. Families of ten now crowd into apartments built for two.
In the morning, when the curfew ended, the young men spill into the streets, then stand around all day. Factories have closed, offices have closed, and the men cannot find work. Economists could count them in the streets, and find that unemployment has overwhelmed the city. Whether the unemployment runs at 40 or 50 or 60 percent hardly matters. A paralysis has set in. Islamic radicals want to make a big change. Some are truly religious, and some only pretend to be. Some think of Islam as an expedient jobs program that moves the female half of the population out of the way.
When the killing began, the radicals shaved off their beards and discarded their traditional robes. Now they look like the modern city boys they have always been. I walked sidewalks thick with them. They were slim and well groomed, and could afford to drink espressos at the stand-up coffee counters. This is the face of the new revolution, dressed in counterfeit clothes, with proud labels—but largely unemployed. The only money to be made is on the black market, which is the key to this revolution. A young Algerian can, for instance, smuggle Peugeot carburetors into the country from France, sell them illegally at a fivefold markup, and buy a gun. With just a few such transactions he can also support his family. In fact, it is the efficiency of the black market that allows unhappy men the time to drift through the streets and think of change. There are so many of them in Algiers that beneath the sound of traffic you can hear their footsteps.
Algiers lives under this siege. As I walked by the main post office, a car backfired, and a policeman stumbled in panic, fumbling a pistol from his white leather holster.
The car may simply have needed a new carburetor. There were men in the street who could have provided one. But you could hardly blame the policeman for overreacting. A bomb had recently exploded nearby. And other policemen kept getting assassinated—along with journalists, professors, and military men. Anyone representing the state or the intellectual establishment was at risk. Soldiers stood guard on the corners, watching the crowds intently, cradling submachine guns, fingers on the triggers.
Foreigners, too, were at risk. Some had been attacked and had their throats cut. I was not worried, since I did not intend to stay long, and I have learned to walk purposefully on hostile streets, to keep moving, and never to ask directions. Moreover today, for once, I knew the way.
By afternoon I had walked to Hussein-Dey, a run-down residential district where Malika Belouard now lived in a two-bedroom house with her four children, her older sister, her sister’s husband, and her ancient Berber mother.
I had met Malika in the Sahara. At thirty-four, she was a gentle woman, with a soft build, brown skin, full lips, and wiry black hair which she tied back from her face. Her husband, Ameur, had been my friend, too. He had taught me the first rule of the oases, that only fools and foreigners stand in line. But then he had hit his head in
a driving accident, and had lost his mind forever. His mother had taken him home.
With no means of support, Malika had left the Sahara and crowded with her children into this tiny house up an alley in Hussein-Dey. She needed to find a job, but there were no jobs. Then the Islamic revolution broke out, and the house in Hussein-Dey became her fortress. It faced the alley with a heavy metal gate and a concrete wall topped by barbed wire. The family lived like prisoners. I arrived on time, but they had been waiting for me for hours.
Malika looked rested. Her sister, who was twenty years older and childless, required me to admire Malika’s beauty, which I naturally did anyway. Malika knew. There was little pretending between us. I asked about Malika’s husband, Ameur, and she said there would be no point in visiting him.
In French she said, “He can speak, but if you tell him the sky is red, he will answer, ‘Yes, the sky is red.’ ” She was both sad and angry. “He did this to himself, you remember.”
She had her own concerns now—the ferocious worries of a single mother bringing up four children in a dangerous neighborhood. Her oldest boy, Ali, had turned fourteen. She put her hand on his head, and as Ali looked at me, she said, “He is a bad student, interested only in basketball. He is getting too familiar with the streets. But what should I do? I can’t keep him inside forever.”
That opposition between the street and household was on their minds. Malika’s older sister, whose name was Zora, had witnessed rapes and killings in the last Algerian war, and she could not bear the thought that such savagery could occur twice in a lifetime. “We keep to ourselves,” Zora said firmly, as if by insistence she might protect the family.
Their cherished living room was small and heavily furnished. It had two overstuffed chairs, a sofa, and velvet drapes. A brother who had died for Algeria’s independence gazed steadily from a photograph hung in black on the wall. Beside him stood the television, whose screen was red and green and alive.