Within the city, still greater accommodations have been reached. The residents sweep and shovel the sand, but rather than shunning it, they invite it into their houses. They soften their sleep with sand, spreading it thickly across the floors, then overlaying it with handwoven rugs, the most beautiful in the Sahara. Inviting in the sand keeps people from regretting the obvious, that the sand gets into everything anyway. They say you can complain about the grittiness of the bread, but might better just chew it. Chewing sandy bread is a good discipline, because it teaches forbearance. The people of El Oued pray in the sand, and wash ritually in it. Once a year, they shovel out the old grains, then turn around and shovel in the new They embrace their fate.
THERE WAS A time when the socialist regime built large hotels in the northern oases, and tried to promote the Algerian Sahara as a vacation spot for Europeans. For a few years in the late 1980s, it looked as if this might work. But even then there were problems: having thrown the Europeans out once, few Algerians wanted to serve them again, while within the puritanical Sahara people equated the hotels with sex and drink, and shunned them. Waiters and clerks had to be imported from Kabylie, a rugged area in the northern mountains, where Islam’s grip was less strong. Isolated from the communities around them, the hotels festered like sores in the desert. I knew Saharans who would not enter a lobby or restaurant even for a cup of coffee. Inevitably, hotel guests were made to feel unwelcome.
The less adventurous tourists in particular complained about the treatment. I remember a typically empty hotel in the western oasis of Timimoun, during the high heat of summer. Two French families had been stuck there for days because the town had run out of gasoline. We sat together after dinner, and talked about decay.
One of the men was a teacher in Paris. He had nervous eyebrows, and a thin face. He said, “There is the man in the office, and there is the assistant to hand him his pen, and there is another assistant to hand him his paper, and none of them works!”
I thought that in some ways such honest reaction though full of racial scorn was less corrosive than the excuse-making of more tolerant visitors. He had seen the desert squarely, though for the wrong reasons. I said, “You’re not enjoying your holiday.”
He got carried away. “Frankly, everyone hopes for military intervention.”
The other man at the table, a reporter for a newspaper in Normandy, said, “There are already so many of them in France. It will explode here, and then what? Of course we are worried. Aren’t you?”
I told him I was more interested than worried. But he was right, too—Algeria did explode, and then even France could not escape the parcel bombs, the identity checks, the police roundups.
Now the hotel in El Oued was falling into ruin. It was a dismal place with a dome and a watchtower, badly in need of fresh sand. It had neither power nor plumbing. To warm their hands one winter night, the clerks had made a little campfire of the tourist brochures. The fire had blackened the lobby’s tile floor and soiled the ceiling. I doubt whether the clerks felt guilty about this. They seemed surprised by the few guests still drifting through.
On the night I arrived there were two others. They were a Parisian couple, traveling by car. The woman had a boy’s haircut and intellectual mannerisms. She introduced herself as Brigitte, and addressed me in the familiar tu form. The man’s name was Alain. He looked tired, and older, and had a fleshy face beneath a gray beard.
Alain was a pied-noir, one of the colonials who after generations in North Africa had to flee to the motherland in 1963. Pied-noir means “black foot,” and refers to the black boots of the early French soldiers, and, later, to the bare and blackened soles of their impoverished descendants. The pieds-noirs were haughty in the way of colonial masters, but few ever found their fortune. Maybe because they were poor they lacked the political courage to invite Algerian independence. Finally Charles de Gaulle had the courage for them. When he pulled the French army out of Algeria he was understood by the pieds-noirs to have stolen their lives. They felt betrayed. Algerians understood the events better: after more than a century of unnatural advantage, the pieds-noirs were simply fated to lose.
The anger on both sides was so deep that in the end the pieds-noirs had to leave. It’s not surprising that even today so many remain full of hate. They lost their balance. When they return to Algeria on vacation, they do not judge the country squarely, but dwell on what it could have been, and dream bitterly of an Algeria without Algerians.
This may explain why, in El Oued, Alain and Brigitte looked glad to find me at the hotel. They insisted that I join them for dinner, where they shared a bottle of Beaujolais they had brought from Paris. Alain started by saying, “You’d never know that Algeria once produced some of the finest wines in the entire world.” Then he said, “It’s shocking how low a place can sink. I was here in El Oued before, and the streets were alive and well kept. Now look at them.”
I had, and I had found nothing unusual about them. They were poor, hot, and closed-off in the manner of many desert streets. They were more sandy than most, but probably always had been. But I don’t think Alain cared about El Oued anyway. After two weeks in the country, he just wanted to talk. What kept emerging was a memory of his youth.
“For three generations my family had a farm in the north, a small place, but very beautiful. There was a stream that flowed along one edge. My brother and I had a few cows to look after, milk cows you know, but otherwise we were free. We spent our summers wading and fishing. Sometimes we rode the tractor out into the fields with our father. He was a careful farmer, and a gentle man. He hired men from the village, and tried to treat them well. When the trouble started, the workers came and said they were our friends, and told us we had nothing to fear. But later when the trouble spread, the same men came to tell us we were no longer safe. Oh, they said they were loyal, but afterward there were attacks nearby—who knows by whom? And we were sent an anonymous threat. My mother was terrified. My brother and I could no longer go out alone on the farm. Father began to carry a rifle on the tractor.”
“How did it end?”
“We had to abandon the farm altogether and move in with our cousins in Algiers. Father found work as a butcher’s assistant. Finally of course we had to leave for France. I was fourteen, and it was the end of my childhood. After three generations our family had nothing to our name. And the farm?” He snorted. “Our loyal workers moved onto it, cut it up, wrecked it within a few years. They were greedy and stupid. By now you might expect their feelings to soften, but I know that still today the Algerians blame us.”
Brigitte spoke of El Oued. She said, “We went to the market this afternoon, and all we got were hostile stares.”
I was struck by the extent to which Brigitte had contracted Alain’s anger. She was a Parisian, and too young to remember an old Algerian war. But she had picked up the colonial habit of talking loudly about the Algerians as if they were not present or did not understand French. Similarly, she wore a short skirt and a sleeveless shirt, and through the thin fabric displayed her nipples in disregard of local sentiment. And now she sat drinking French wine. These were not acts of indifference, but of aggression. And Algerians understood the difference.
Alain said their trip had gone badly from the start. The couple had entered the country from Morocco. Seeing an Algerian birthplace on Alain’s passport, and recognizing him as a pied-noir, the Algerian border-control officer had snarled, “Why don’t you take your vacation in Israel?” It was for him like telling them to go to hell.
By some standards, Alain and Brigitte did just that. The lushness of the north brought forth too many angry memories. They fled south across the Atlas Mountains, and drove into the harshness and solitude of the Sahara, where they consoled themselves by collecting scorpions. Scorpions are little dragons—mindless, venomous, unlovable creatures, dreaded throughout history and by all peoples. Alain and Brigitte had not planned to wander the desert at night, tipping over rocks. But having fled the nor
th, collecting scorpions had given them something to do.
Now at the hotel after dinner, our conversation flagged. Alain placed a shoe box on the table, and Brigitte lifted the lid to let me peer inside. Two scorpions sat motionless at opposite ends, each on its eight legs, with its claws extended, and its stinging tail curled over its back. They were pale, baleful specimens, the color of sand, about five inches long. Brigitte had placed a rock in the box to make them feel at home. She gazed at them worriedly, then turned to me for answers. Were they thirsty? Did they have enough to eat? Had the car been too hot for them? Would Paris be too cold? I told her not to worry because honestly I did not care.
Respect is due, nonetheless. Scorpions are among the oldest creatures on earth, living fossils, largely unchanged from species that lived 350 million years ago. About then they emerged from the sea, developed legs and lungs, and eventually crept across every major landmass except Antarctica, into habitats from the equatorial forests to the savannas and the snow-covered mountains of the high latitudes. They thrive in the harshest habitat of all, the Sahara. This is because, beyond being adaptable, they are just plain tough. Scorpions don’t require plants. They eat spiders, worms, and insects, as well as the occasional snake, lizard, or rodent. When they emerge from their burrows their usual purpose is to hunt for food or a mate—and the females are prone to confuse the two. Most scorpions hunt by ambush. They have up to twelve eyes, and multiple motion-sensors. They wait by their burrows, and when prey passes by they move fast, and can snatch a fly out of midair with their claws. When they find bigger prey, they do not hesitate to strike with their tails. But they prefer to kill simply, by crushing with their claws. They are extraordinarily diligent about their eating: certain species can gain up to 30 percent of their body weight in a single meal. Scientists describe such feedings with some awe as “the conversion of prey biomass into scorpion biomass.” Afterward the scorpions look swollen.
They can survive a year between feedings. They conserve their bodily fluids so assiduously that some never drink, but absorb sufficient water from the flesh of their prey. It helps that their outer shells are impermeable, that their feces are dry, and that they release a crystalline form of urine. And scorpions don’t sweat. They regulate their body temperatures by stilting, by burrowing into the ground, and by hunting only at night. If for some reason they get caught out on a hot day, they can withstand baking, up to a point. Nonetheless, evolution has hardly prepared them for captivity in a shoe box. Alain jiggled the box to make them move, and they refused. He introduced a fork, and they backed into their corners and raised their tails defensively. Saharans say that a scorpion surrounded by a ring of fire will sting itself to death. But scorpions are immune to their own venom. And as a British zoologist has pointed out, suicide requires imagination, which scorpions lack.
I was relieved when Alain put down his fork. There are over fifteen hundred species of scorpions worldwide, of which only twenty-five are man-killers—but of those twenty-five, four are native to the Sahara, where they live in abundance. I thought it prudent not to provoke these two. Scorpion venoms are complex neurotoxins, among the most potent in nature. As measured by molecular weight, some are 100,000 times more toxic than cyanide. A bad sting can lead within hours to convulsions, followed by cardiac arrest or respiratory failure. Despite the availability of antivenoms, scorpions across the globe still kill more people than any other predator except snakes—over five thousand a year. Certain Algerian oases are infested with them. During the high summer season, you do not reach into the dark corners of your rooms, or dress without shaking out your clothes, or however long you live there ever feel quite at home.
This may explain why Alain and Brigitte had collected the scorpions—an instinctive affinity for the creatures who still terrified the natives. But there is also a more charitable explanation. Forget the past—as modern Parisians they may with distance simply have romanticized the desert. Think of the Germans who visit the American West by the thousands, yearning for a fabled frontier. The Sahara is visited by French people on equally wistful quests. Even those who are not pieds-noirs retain a sense of possession, however dated, and say things like “You are never alone in the desert,” which is wrong but sounds right. For the same people, scorpions may seem like souvenirs.
5
THE
PHYSICS
OF BLOWN
SAND
I STAYED ON in El Oued, and in the early hours walked south along a crumbling paved road under assault from the sand sea. The morning was bright and hot, and the dunes carved crisp lines against the sky. I passed a turbaned man on a donkey carrying empty gas cans into town. There was no other traffic. The minarets of El Oued disappeared behind me. The road led eventually to a village, or what was left of it. It was a village that had been mostly buried in drifting sand. The corners and roofs of stone structures still showed, but only three houses remained inhabitable, and from the evidence of digging around them, they, too, were threatened.
I drank at a well with a rope and bucket. There was no farming here. The only sign of industry was a freestanding stone oven, a baker’s oven, against which palm wood had been stacked. The wind blew sand, but otherwise nothing stirred. Two men sat in the shadow of a wall by a fire on which they had placed a blackened pot. They motioned me over and offered me tea in a dirty glass. The men were older than I, bearded and thin, and had no work. We spent a few hours together. They pointed to where the school lay buried, and to where most of the village stood beneath the sands. I asked them the details of its burial.
They said the sands are fickle. Dunes may drift for decades in one direction, or not drift at all, then suddenly turn and consume you. Consumption by the sand is like other forms of terminal illness: it starts so gently that at first you don’t worry. One day the grains begin to accumulate against your walls. You’ve seen the grains before, and naturally assume that a change in the wind will carry them away. But this time the wind does not change, and the illness persists. Over weeks or longer, the sand grows. You fight back with a shovel, and manage to keep your walls clear. Fighting back feels good and gives you something to do. But the grains never let up, and one morning while shoveling you realize that the dunes have moved closer. You enlist your sons and brothers. But eventually the land around your house swells with sand, and you begin standing on sand to shovel sand. Finally no amount of digging will clear your walls. The dunes tower above you, and send sand sheets cascading down their advancing slip faces. You have to gather your belongings and flee.
But your house is your heritage, and you would like somehow to preserve it. As the dunes bear down on it they will collapse the walls. The defense is again the Saharan acceptance of destiny: having lost the fight against the sand, you must now invite it in. Sleeping on the sand, covering your floors with it for all these years, helped prepare you mentally. But shoveling in the sand is not enough. Your last act is to break out the windows, take off the doors, and knock holes in the roof. You allow the wind to work for you. If it succeeds, and fills your house, the walls will stand. Then in a hundred years, when the wind requires it, the dunes will drift on and uncover the village. Your descendants will bless God and his Prophet. They will not care that you were thin and poor and had no work. They will remember you as a man at peace with his world. The desert takes away but also delivers.
I LEFT THE men to their contemplation, and climbed out over the dune that had engulfed their village. From its crest I discovered a valley two hundred feet below, where the desert floor was exposed and a stretch of blacktop emerged from the sand. The road was not on the map. It lay beyond the village and ran south toward the empty center of the Eastern Erg. I thought it might lead to an old settlement, perhaps one that had been uncovered by the wind, and I set off to follow it.
I should have been more careful. I was traveling too lightly, with neither a hat nor water nor any enduring sense of direction. The road kept turning, diving into sand, reemerging. Eventually it ran u
nder a mountainous dune and disappeared entirely. I climbed that dune, and a string of the highest ones beyond it, and knew even as I proceeded that I had gone too far. The dunes were like giant starfish, covered by ripples, linking curved tentacles to form lines. In all directions, the erg stretched to the horizons in a confusion of sand.
This was the landscape that inspired the British officer Ralph A. Bagnold, history’s closest observer of Saharan sands. Bagnold was an English gentleman of the old school. He fought in the trenches of Flanders during World War I, then earned an honors degree in engineering from Cambridge, and later reenlisted in the British Army for overseas assignment. While stationed in Egypt and India between 1929 and 1934, he led expeditions in modified Fords to explore the sand seas of Libya. These were big places in need of understanding. One erg alone was the size of all France.
Bagnold had a strong and inquiring mind. He marveled at the desert’s patterns, saw magic in the dunes, and wanted it all explained. To his surprise, he found that scientific knowledge was as yet merely descriptive: dune shapes had been catalogued, but little was understood about the processes involved in their formation. Bagnold set out to understand for himself. In 1935 he went back to England, retired from the army, hammered together a personal wind tunnel, and began a series of meticulous experiments with blown sand. He considered himself to be a dabbler, a tinkerer, an amateur scientist. But his research resulted in the publication, in 1941, of a small masterpiece of scientific exploration: The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes. It was a treatment so rigorous, and so pleasantly written, that it remains the standard today. Throughout it, Bagnold never lost his wonder. He wrote:
Here, instead of finding chaos and disorder, the observer never fails to be amazed at a simplicity of form, an exactitude of repetition and a geometric order unknown in nature on a scale larger than that of crystalline structure. In places vast accumulations of sand weighing millions of tons move inexorably, in regular formation, over the surface of the country, growing, retaining their shape, even breeding, in a manner which, by its grotesque imitation of life, is vaguely disturbing to the imaginative mind.
Sahara Unveiled Page 4
