Sahara Unveiled

by William Langewiesche

  The favorite program was a Mexican soap opera, dubbed in Arabic, about a rich family living on a distant Pacific coast. Malika said, “I like it because it carries me so far away.” I wasn’t sure how to read this. As a woman living in an Islamic world, she had a habit of talking in code.

  When the evening episode started, all conversation stopped. After the episode, Zora smiled wryly and said, “So you see how we pass our time. It’s not a real life when the television gives you your only escape.”

  I asked Malika if she thought of returning to the Sahara. She answered, “The Sahara is no place for a woman.”

  Zora said, “Here at least we have each other.”

  She meant, “Here at least Malika has me to protect her.”

  And she was right. Zora was smarter than Malika, and more sentimental, and always strong. She was the head of the household. Her husband was a gendarme, a member of the national police force, but a meek man by comparison. Once in my presence he suggested wistfully that she should retire from her job managing a neighborhood medical clinic. He thought she might play the more traditional Muslim wife. Zora snorted, and said to me, “You see? The religious crazies are getting to him!”

  Later she said, “He asked me to wear the veil. I told him I would leave Algeria first!” She would serve his dinners, and do his cleaning, but his opinion mattered to her only when it wasn’t irrelevant. Her job was important, and the family needed the money.

  Without intending to, they had taken sides in the struggle. The gendarme was a civil servant with no fight in him, and he was tired of the barracks life. He would gladly have retired, and lingered at the café by the neighborhood mosque; he would gladly have the new rulers. But Zora could never have stood for it. At work she was known as a disciplinarian; in the neighborhood she was known for her fierce rejection of the revolutionaries. She was a religious woman, and had twice made the pilgrimage to Mecca, but she could no longer stand to attend the local mosque, and now said her prayers at home. This was noticed. Zora’s idea that the family could keep to itself was an impractical fantasy. The civil war would not be so easy to escape.

  I don’t know how much she said in public. In private, she detested especially the coming of the veil. Blaming the synthetic fabrics, she talked about the pimpled faces of the women she saw at the medical clinic. She talked about hypocrisy, about women who strip off the veil away from home, and about the sinning that goes on under the holiest of clothes.

  “But people do change,” I said.

  Zora scoffed. “Before, these women were alive and full of talk and laughter. And now, it’s as if they are dying, or already dead. Suddenly they’re silent. They hide behind their veils and make a show of disapproving.”

  Night came, and with it came the rain again. Before the curfew the sisters loaded me into Zora’s old Fiat for the trip across town to the hotel. Malika sat in the back with her three youngest children. She spoke little in the presence of her sister. Zora drove awkwardly, with uncharacteristic caution. We nosed out of the alley by the house, then down a street where Islamic slogans had been scrawled on the buildings, then out around the mosque.

  Zora gestured angrily at the men standing in the doorways. “They can put on their holy airs, but they forget we have known them since they were babies! We remember! Are they going to tell me about Islam? A few years ago they were nothing but hoodlums and drinkers!”

  We came to a stop sign, by men talking in the downpour. “Look at them,” Zora snapped. “They will make a show out of staying on the street until the last minute before the curfew. They don’t even have the sense to get in out of the rain.”

  I was in a quiet mood. I wanted to be alone with Malika. Zora was too angry, and could not appreciate the rain. Earlier she had hustled the children into the car as if the drops might hurt them. Malika had lingered and turned her face toward the sky. Malika believed the Sahara is no place for a woman—but she had been taught by it nonetheless.

  The revolutionaries had been taught by it as well. At the start of the troubles, the army swept thousands of young men from these city streets, and shipped them to camps deep in the Sahara for punishment and persuasion. But the camps did not dampen the revolution. The Sahara teaches by taking away. The revolutionaries learned to do without. When they returned to Algiers they had grown beyond city life. The men standing by the stop sign in the storm did not look idle. Their conversation engaged them. I thought they had learned to love the rain. I saw the desert on them.

  2

  ABOUT

  PARADISE

  THE FRENCH CONQUERED the Sahara early in the twentieth century, then set about trying to understand it. Ethnologists spread through the desert recording its folkways, which they published in small books, which burrowed into the libraries where they sit today. I have read, for instance, that the prophet Mohammed had a donkey, and that one day he set out to ride him to a nearby oasis. Halfway there the donkey looked at the Prophet and, seeing a stick in his hand, asked, “Why do you carry the stick?”

  “It is to use when you refuse to walk,” answered the Prophet. “It is for beating hardheaded beasts like you.”

  “Throw away the stick,” said the donkey. “If I am not obedient, you can do with me what you like.”

  The Prophet pretended to throw away the stick, but hid it under his coat. Soon afterward the donkey refused to go on. The Prophet said, “But you promised to keep walking!”

  “Yes, I promised,” said the donkey. “But I’ve changed my mind. Do what you like. You have bare hands, and I have hooves.”

  Hearing this, the Prophet took the stick from his coat and struck the donkey a hundred blows until the donkey’s tongue hung out. Then he cursed the donkey, condemning him to another hundred blows every day of his life. And if some future master spared the donkey, because he obeyed and worked hard, he would receive those blows from the angels.

  These are the stories that Saharans may have told their children to explain the miserable lot of desert donkeys. More important, they are the stories that the French repeated.

  One ethnologist heard that God once took pity on the donkey, and that He pronounced, “Enough of this unhappiness! I have decided to allow the donkey into Paradise.”

  The donkey was delighted, and exclaimed, “At last, I’ll be able to rest!”

  When he came to the threshold of Paradise, the great gates opened for him. He stuck his head inside, and found there a green oasis of flowers and fruit trees, where the rivers flowed with milk, wine, and honey, and the women were amorous. But he also spotted groups of children playing in the streets.

  The donkey hastily backed out and said, “Can this be Paradise? The children who torture donkeys on earth are allowed here as well? Then I will not stay. Better to return to the suffering of life!”

  He left Paradise, but not before its brilliant light had bleached his muzzle. Ever since, donkeys have had white muzzles.

  The French taught that when a donkey is found without a white muzzle, a Saharan might say to a child, “Poor beast, he has not seen Paradise!”

  The French were sympathetic administrators. Their ethnologists helped to explain why Saharan children pelted donkeys with stones, as if French children did not.

  3

  ACROSS

  THE

  ATLAS

  I TOOK THE early bus for Biskra, an Algerian oasis on the eastern border with Tunisia. The bus was called Express because it required merely a day to cross the mountains. The passengers who boarded at the station in Algiers filled the seats and crowded the aisle, and waited with closed expressions for the bus to start, as if only through silence could they endure the trip. The bus pulled out of the station at dawn, listing and groaning, stinking of sick engine, hot oil, and dirt. I worried because Biskra lay 300 miles ahead, and I wanted to put the distance behind. The desert teaches patience, but patience is a hard quality to learn.

  We moved through Algiers in a drizzle. The outer city stretched for miles along the Medite
rranean in clusters of bleak concrete apartment towers that surrendered gradually to cultivated fields. Occasionally, ruins of French farmhouses stood at the end of palm-lined drives. The soil looked fertile but unloved. The morning passed. Traffic on the road dwindled. We came to muddy towns of oversized brick and unfinished construction, where rubbish littered the gullies and factories stood idle. Passengers climbed on and climbed down, and slowly the bus grew less crowded. We passed army checkpoints, and a convoy of unhappy soldiers stalled beside the road like bait for the revolution.

  In the deepest farmland, two university students flagged down the bus and sat beside me discussing a political text. They spoke in French because the text was in French, and loudly because they wanted me to overhear. The subject was the absorption of Muslim immigrants into Parisian schools. The students had adopted the book’s viewpoint, which was European and fearful, and they agreed now that head scarves on Muslim girls were unacceptable. They never acknowledged my presence, perhaps because it was enough to know that I was listening. They seemed to want to see themselves in my eyes, to distinguish themselves from the less thoughtful Algerians on the bus. It is probably not surprising that thirty years after national independence, some in the middle class still harbor those hopes. Even their opponents, the Islamic revolutionaries, require an audience of outsiders to define themselves.

  The students climbed down near a failing state farm. They fell silent, and waited glumly on the road’s muddy shoulder while the bus drove off, headed away from Paris.

  Ahead the Atlas Mountains formed a dark wall that rose into the mist and cloud. The road narrowed, wandered, then found a steep-walled valley, and climbed it. The bus could barely make the grades, and had to creep uphill bellowing in the lowest gear. The earth near the road was raw, eroded, and slick with rain. We passed through forests of stunted evergreens, and basins where alfalfa and vegetables grew. Men on donkeys watched as we labored by. In the afternoon the view widened and we rolled out across the high grassy plateaus that occupy the core of the Atlas, 3,000 feet above sea level. The landscape was punctuated by higher peaks and outcroppings, and by tabletop mountains like those of the American Southwest.

  Beyond the town of Bou Saâda, in continuing drizzle, the country grew slowly drier. We came to rows of planted pines, the heralded Green Barrier that stretches east to west across Algeria, and by which the Algerian army once tried to hold off the Sahara. The idea was to stop the sand, as if sand were contagious or a cancer, the cause of the land’s decline, and not its symptom. The Sahara frightens those within its reach. When windstorms lift its surface into the stratosphere, and the desert dust falls as far away as Europe and the Caribbean, people there feel dread. Algerians are no different. They worried they might be pushed into the sea—and many were indeed forced to emigrate. But it was overpopulation and incompetent farming, not advancing sands, that consumed their land. The army marched out to confront a myth, and ignored the real enemy at home.

  The Green Barrier has served a purpose nonetheless. The trees are like caged canaries in a mine. Their survival confirms that the coast is for the moment safe. The reason is that the Sahara is simply not advancing toward the north. If it were, it would swallow the trees effortlessly. The essence of any desert is its overwhelming power, and the Sahara is the most powerful of them all. It exists beyond the scale of human engineering. In simple words, it is created by global weather patterns that cause the atmosphere over all of North Africa to press toward the surface and to dry out. To stop such a desert from advancing you would need a barrier stronger than anything an army could build—say, a mountain range called the Atlas. And even that might not work. The Sahara swallows mountain ranges whole.

  The Atlas Mountains do act to change the weather, but in the reverse direction, by squeezing the maritime moisture from the Mediterranean winds. The last of that moisture fell now, as the bus climbed a thousand feet above the plateau and the rain turned to snow and mixed with clouds to sweep the barren hills.

  We stopped for Berber nomads herding goats across the road. The nomads looked cold. Their low-slung tents, pitched in the distance, offered scant shelter from the weather. The snow fell harder.

  Berbers are the ancient inhabitants of North Africa, and though few still live as nomads, they constitute its base population. They are copper-skinned, dark-haired, good-looking people, neither Arab nor Negro, whose origins remain largely unknown. Malika is one of them. Nineteenth-century French imperialists claimed the Berbers had descended from Celts, and now deserved to come home. Romantics claimed they had descended from the lost people of Atlantis. Berbers had their own myths. Current theories are more tentative: they propose that the Berbers descend from Eurasian horsemen who invaded Africa 4,000 years ago, or that they descend from still-earlier inhabitants. Anthropologists are certain only that North Africa has been inhabited for at least 200,000 years, and by successive populations. When the Romans built colonies on the North African coast, the land was occupied by the same people who occupy it today. The Romans dismissed them as “Berbers,” from barbarus, which in turn derived from the Greek for “foreign and uncivilized,” which indeed they were.

  In that sense the word “Berber” still expresses a common European attitude toward North Africans, though “Arab” is more commonly used. But the Arabs are if anything overcivilized. Inspired by Mohammed’s teachings, their armies came to North Africa from the Middle East in the seventh century A.D. and didn’t stay long. When the soldiers left, their followers remained behind as merchants and missionaries. They began to trade south into the Sahara. They interbred with the Berbers, and taught them a new philosophy and religion, and the language to understand it. Over the following centuries this potent combination spread into every corner of the wilderness, replacing the original Berber tradition. North Africa did not surrender to the Arabs, but was persuaded by them, and underwent a collective change of mind. The most determined holdouts were these tough mountain herders of the north and the even tougher Tuaregs of the central Sahara, a Berber people also originally from the north, who to this day have retained their Berber customs and language. But they, too, converted to Islam.

  The bus stopped in a village of cold stone. Women came from their houses to greet their returning husbands and sons. They trilled high-pitched ululations, the warbling cry that so spooked the French patrols during the war for independence. The men wore burnooses, brown woolen gowns with pointed hoods like the garments of medieval monks. Children scampered through the mud, excited by strangers and the scent of travel.

  The bus driver was a Berber too, but generations removed from the mountains. He was a sharp-faced man with styled hair. At one stop he caught my eye in the overhead mirror and grimaced, as if he wanted me to know that he had no patience for these peasants. I noticed that he spoke to them as little as possible. He wore black slacks, a silky white shirt, and thin-soled shoes more suitable for dancing than for driving. The farther we got from Algiers, the less he cared to look beyond the road. The bus was his oasis. Only once did he get off, to grab a coffee at a stone-shack café. Armed with cassettes of bad European rock, he seemed to dream of a faster life somewhere else. He must have hated the way the land on the southern edge of the Atlas had emptied.

  WE CAME TO the Sahara late in the afternoon, during the descent from the mountains, as if we had passed through a transparent wall. The rain suddenly stopped, the air warmed, and a strong sun dissolved the clouds. We crested a rise, and the Sahara appeared below—a brilliant and treeless plain stretching south in naked folds to the horizon. A trace of smoke marked some unseen oasis. The view was so wide you could imagine the curvature of the earth.

  The road led down into it, and the uniform plain became a rolling desert of yellow sand and ochre dirt, strewn with stone, and cut sharply by gullies. Spiny bushes had rooted along the gullies, and in the shelter of rocks. A camel grazed on thin and fragile grasses. The bus grew hot. I opened a window to let in the wind. The air smelled of baked soil, and t
asted of sand. In the distance a cluster of date palms survived untended. The sky was close, fierce, relentless. It pushed away even the memory of rain.

  BISKRA WAS A town of well-kept cement and adobe houses, French colonial arcades, and 20,000 people. It stood along a dry riverbed that snaked from the mountains before spreading into the desert and disappearing. Dry riverbeds are the most important feature of any desert, and they have many names. Within the United States alone, depending on the region, they are called washes, gulches, gullies, creeks, coulees, and arroyos. To see a desert clearly it helps to apply the local term. In the Sahara the term is oued, which is Arabic for “river.” Wadi is used farther east. Everywhere, it is understood that the rivers are dry.

  Nonetheless some oueds, like Biskra’s, store large amounts of water close below their surfaces. The underground water was how Biskra lived. In that sense Biskra was a typical Saharan oasis—not the waterhole of public imagination, but a settlement built around plentiful wells. What Biskrans themselves called the oasis was not the town proper, but the grove across the oued, a garden three miles wide where vegetables, fruit trees, and 150,000 date palms grew. The number of date palms was widely known because date palms in the Sahara count for a lot. The number of people was less important. Biskra was a regional capital not because of its population, but because it commanded a string of oases where altogether 1,500,000 palms grew. It also had several large date-processing factories.

  One of those factories exploded on the afternoon of my arrival. The explosion killed twenty workers, and burned, and made the national television news because it was an old-fashioned industrial disaster, and not an act of revolution. That evening around the central square, men lingered in small sidewalk cafés. Women did not linger, but walked close to walls, wearing veils and bulky robes. A few wore jeans, but even they hurried by in tight groups. The men watched them with an uneasy combination of lust and disdain. Biskra was a cosmopolitan place. When the sun went down, street lamps bathed the square in pools of orange light. I drank a slow bitter coffee, and to the surprise of the men beside me took it without sugar. They asked me about cowboys. I said that cowboys drink weaker coffee, which surprised and pleased them.