For most of the day the Trans-Saharan resembled a road—a rough but drivable strip of black pavement stretching into the distance across gravelly plains. On level ground, the bus gathered speed, but hills threatened to defeat it. I write “hills,” and remember hummocks; they were in fact mere ripples on the surface of a vast and level desert. But for our feeble engine they rose like mountains.
The steepest climb was a contest so difficult that the driver leaned forward sympathetically over his wheel. Blue smoke rose through the floorboards. The conductor scowled, daring the passengers to notice. We crept over the crest and began to accelerate down the far side. Somehow, the engine had endured. Now speed threatened to shake the bus apart. The passengers remained impassive. Windows popped open. The breeze purged the smoke.
In an oasis called El Golea more passengers boarded, and crowded the aisles. Among them was a veiled woman accompanied by children. The conductor shouldered his way into the back, and with obvious satisfaction ordered two men to give up their places. Then he shoved his way back to the front, and went outside to slam the popped windows.
The sun set, and the night turned sharply cold. The bus was unheated. I huddled on my broken seat above the engine, absorbing the warmth and fumes, listening to the driver grind the gears. A crescent moon rose among the stars. Dunes forced the bus to slow to a crawl. Once we braked so hard for a herd of camels that the luggage on the overhead racks slid forward in a cloud of dust. The conductor glowered. The driver lit a cigarette.
We came then to the first roadblock—a line of stones beyond which the pavement had disintegrated into rubble. The driver shifted down and swung over the shoulder, out into the open desert. But for the rest of the night we seldom touched pavement. Stopping, considering, backing, we traveled out in the sand and rock flanking the road, at times quite far from it. The windows popped open again. The air swirled with dirt. Breathing was difficult, sleep impossible.
I passed the hours watching the driver work. He had wrapped his face in a chèche, and was like a new man out here, guiding his unwieldy beast with concentration and skill. He was superb. He was proud. He was temperamental. When one of the passengers leaned forward and questioned the route he had taken, he braked to a stop, opened the door, and switched off the headlights. He wanted the moon to illuminate the horizons.
The driver said nothing.
The passenger hesitated.
The conductor looked triumphant. He said, “You can walk if you prefer.” He would have stranded the man with pleasure.
The passenger retreated into his seat. We set off again. The moon set.
We came to the end of the line, In Salah, in the bitter blackness before dawn. I went into the ruined cinder-block station, where groups of men stood in the gloom. Melancholic Arabic music drifted through the air. A baby cried quietly. From far away came an early call to prayer. Huddled forms slept in blankets against the wall: it was so cold that a bucket of drinking water had iced over. I crouched with robed strangers around a paper fire. The smoke floated against the ceiling. I spread my hands to the feeble flames. Beyond In Salah the land rises into the Sahara’s wild and mountainous center. No one knew when the Safari, the passenger truck for Tamanrasset, would leave. The schedule called for one trip a week, God willing. I waited at the station because others waited.
13
THE
INFERNO
I ONCE WENT to the Sahara during the high heat of summer to write about water in a provincial capital named Adrar, which lies west of In Salah, and is a place known even here for the severity of its climate. In Adrar, out of some 4,100 hours of possible annual daylight an average of 3,978 hours are filled with direct sun. This is steep-angle sunlight, powerful stuff. In the winter, when the air temperatures drop to freezing at night and rise to 90 degrees by noon, soil temperatures fluctuate so brutally that rocks split apart. In the summer, the Sahara is the hottest place on earth. The world record is held by El Azizia, Libya, where on September 13, 1922, the air temperature was measured at 136 degrees. Death Valley claims a close second, with 134 degrees in 1910. More recently, in 1994, the temperature in Death Valley hit 131 degrees, and the New York Times wrote: “An observer reported that even in the shade he could not hold out his open hand against a strong wind because the burning sensation was too painful.” In Adrar this would not have made the paper. Death Valley is just one little heat trap. The Sahara is a heat trap on the scale of a continent; its air will burn your hands from one ocean to another, across plains too large even to imagine.
I could have gone to Adrar in the spring, or waited until fall, but I chose July for its intensity. My only compromise was to fly. I sat in the cockpit behind the pilots. The airplane was a stodgy turboprop, a forty-passenger Fokker droning at 18,000 feet on a roundabout three-day run from Algiers to the oases. It was midday, and the Sahara stretched in naked folds to the horizon, brilliant, and utterly still. The land was blanketed by a haze of dust, suspended not by winds but by heat. The Trans-Saharan had appeared as a fading scar. Below us, a canyon had cut through the downslope of the central highlands. Now we passed across featureless plains along the northern edge of the vast and terrible Tanezrouft, where for hundreds of miles nothing lives.
The captain, who was not a desert man, had pasty skin and the look of an experienced pilot: bored, dissatisfied, underexercised. He flew with sloppy control motions, as if he could barely endure the job. For him the Sahara was a tough assignment. He said he suffered at night in the oasis hotels. “There is nothing out here,” he complained. “You let a sheet of paper fall, and it takes forever to hit the ground. It’s the heat.”
He tried to be polite. He asked me where I had been and where I was going, and why. He seemed worried that I had a one-way ticket only, and would have to find my way out on the ground. He called Adrar hell.
THE HEAT AT the airport was brutal and disorienting. Somehow I caught a ride into town and checked into the hotel on the main square. The square was barren concrete. The hotel room was unbearably hot. I went down to the lobby, sat under a ceiling fan, and like the rest of Adrar, waited for night. It was so hot that even that did not help. After dark, people came onto the streets more out of necessity than relief.
I had the phone number of a local man who had volunteered to show me around. He was a young merchant named Moulay Miloud. Moulay is a title of respect, indicating descent from the Prophet. The family, if it can be called that, has been extraordinarily prolific. I have heard the Sahara called, only half-jokingly, The United States of Moulay.
This particular Moulay, Miloud, was stuck in Adrar for the summer because, as it was explained to me, he was still too poor to escape. However, he had wealthy cousins in Tamanrasset, whom I had met and knew to be generous men; I thought they might have given Moulay Miloud an air conditioner. I dialed his number in hope.
The man who answered said his name was Ali, and that I had the wrong number. He would not let me hang up. He said he had heard of a Moulay Miloud, and would help me to find him. He wanted to meet me immediately at the hotel. I felt too hot to refuse. He asked how he would recognize me. I told him without getting into details that it wouldn’t be hard.
Minutes later, Ali pulled up to the hotel in a decrepit four-wheel drive Lada. He was a middle-aged man with a brisk manner. He loaded me into the car, clattered through the dark streets of Adrar, and within a few stops found Moulay Miloud’s apartment, in a sprawl of ground-level duplexes. A neighbor told us that he had gone into the desert, to an outlying village, to visit a brother who had returned from Mecca. He would be back in the morning. Ali insisted that I leave a message on the door. He was the rare Saharan who left nothing to chance.
Ali invited me home, to the oldest part of town, for late-night coffee. We sat on rugs under a bare bulb in a high-ceilinged room. The room’s walls were painted in two tones, in green and white. Ali’s young son brought in an electric fan, but the air that it stirred was stale and hot, and sweat streamed down our faces. We dran
k the coffee strong and sweet, and sat mostly in silence. It occurred to me only toward the end that Ali expected nothing from me.
At dawn a haze of dust and heat veiled the central square. Moulay Miloud sent word that he would meet me there at noon. He turned out to be a thin, fastidious bachelor, in a pressed white robe and sandals. We went to his apartment to talk. He did not have an air conditioner, but had a fan and an evaporative cooler that lowered the temperature in his apartment to, say, 100 degrees Fahrenheit. We sat on the floor of his living room, and waited out the midday hours, drinking brown water from a plastic jug.
The water was brown because Miloud had mixed in cade oil, which smelled of pine sap and tasted of clay. The cade is an evergreen bush that grows far to the north in the Atlas Mountains. Saharan nomads value its oil, which they use to seal the insides of their goatskin waterbags. Miloud did not have a goatskin, but he came from a long line of desert travelers, and cade oil was his heritage. He bought the oil at the market in small bottles and added it to his water for flavor and good health. He was pleased that I liked it. But I would have drunk anything, because in the morning I had gone for a walk.
During the walk the air was still, the sky nearly white. There was no shade. The streets were deserted. The heat had sharp edges that cut at my skin, eyes, and lungs. An hour was all I could endure. I felt threatened, weakened, overwhelmed. I retreated to the hotel lobby and sat very still, questioning my judgment for having come to Adrar.
Now Miloud said, “It’s raining less. And every year it’s hotter. Nomads can no longer survive in this climate.”
I believed him.
The living room, like Miloud, was immaculate and small. It was furnished Saharan style, with mattresses, pillows, and colorful rugs. Black-and-white enlargements of nomads hung on the stucco walls, and a guitar stood in one corner. The Cosby Show played soundlessly on television. Miloud put on a cassette of screechy Saharan music. In the hallway by a portrait of Bob Marley was a postcard of three naked women. They were grotesquely fat. I did not understand why Miloud had put them there, if this was humor or hatred or both.
Maybe it was cabin fever. Miloud said, “In the summer even the mind shuts down. You get tired of television, music, and books. There is no stimulation. There is little to say. You are too much indoors.”
LATE ONE AFTERNOON, with the air temperature settling below 128 degrees, Miloud and I drove a borrowed Renault to an outlying oasis, south along the ancient caravan route that leads eventually to distant Gao and Timbuktu. The road left Adrar across a rolling plain of sand and dirt, past neglected palm groves. The western horizon was lined by the dunes of the Erg Chech, an uninhabited sand sea extending 600 miles into Mali and Mauritania.
Miloud was thinking closer to home. He said, “In the winter all this is green.”
Translation: In the winter a bit of moisture may sneak in from the Mediterranean, and if some of it falls from the sky, a few translucent grasses may sprout. But the average annual rainfall in Adrar is less than an inch.
Still, there is water underground. Adrar’s two dozen oases sit at the receiving end of the largest dry watercourse in the Sahara, an ancient riverbed called the Messaoud. It is a long, shallow depression where water still collects close to the surface. The water lies on gradients, sloping with the land. To tap into it, the people of Adrar centuries ago borrowed a technique from ancient Persia: they built their palm groves and villages at the low points, then dug their wells uphill.
Known locally as foggaras, these upward-sloping tunnels are self-filling aqueducts, designed not only to find water but to deliver it in a constant and effortless flow. They extend for miles into the higher terrain, and are marked by regularly spaced excavation mounds like the diggings of giant moles. Although they are marvels of ingenuity, most are slipping into disrepair. One reason is the danger and difficulty of maintaining them: they clog up and cave in, and require constant shoring, and ever since the abolition of slavery—in the nineteenth century, under the French—there has been no ready supply of volunteers to do the work.
Our destination appeared as a green line against the dusty sky. The line became a palm grove and a medieval fortified village of about a thousand people. In searing heat, we walked through the streets—a warren of baked mud, and dark, built-over passages just wide enough for a loaded camel to pass. The inhabitants were Haratin blacks, the descendants of the slaves who had once maintained the foggaras. A band of dusty children followed us out into the desert to examine a decaying tunnel. They were surprised by my interest in it, as if the collective memories of digging were still too fresh to allow any Haratin to appreciate the engineering.
The Haratins had their own slaves now, electric pumps housed in cheap concrete shacks, requiring little companionship. The electric pumps drew water stupidly, vertically, from drilled wells. The modern world had arrived, and no one but a visitor could complain.
Still, the system of distribution was the traditional one. We followed the ditches that carried the water back through the village. Upstream the water was drawn for drinking; downstream it was used for washing and sewage. There was no treatment plant, and no need for one. The water that finally flowed into the palm grove was rich in nutrients. It was also precious. Water rights in the oases are inherited, bought, and sold, and are more valuable than the land itself. Within this grove, the water was divided and metered through finger-width gateways into an intricate branching of channels. In the end it spread into individual plots, separated by dikes and protected against wind and sand by adobe walls. There the date palms grew.
Date palms are well adapted to the Sahara. They thrive on sun and heat, and will produce fruit in water that is ten times as salty as that which humans can tolerate. Though they require copious irrigation for the first few years, they sink deep roots into the groundwater and become self-supporting. They become, in a sense, their own foggaras. They also shade the irrigated vegetable crops, mostly of corn and tomatoes.
The grove was small by Algerian standards—about a half-square mile of junglelike vegetation. Miloud and I strolled through it on dirt paths between the plots. The shade was dense, as was the heat. Dead fronds draped from the trees and littered the ground. Miloud pointed to them and said that when he was young the farmers would have been ashamed. Yellow butterflies flitted about. Ants carried oversized trophies. A turbaned man hacked at the earth. A ditch gurgled with polluted water. I stopped to list the other sounds: the distant music of Arab horns, a dove cooing, a donkey braying, a cricket, birds trilling, children laughing, the thunk of a woodchopper, a sharper hammering, a rooster, flies buzzing, a chanted prayer.
THERE IS A limit to the insulating qualities of adobe construction, a temperature extreme beyond which the walls go critical and begin to magnify the heat. Airborne dust makes things worse because it traps the heat radiated by the soil, and does not allow it to escape on summer nights. I have studied this: the walls do not cool down at night; at dawn the inside surfaces are hot to the touch; the next day they are hotter still. The houses become solar ovens. Concrete is worse—it gets hotter than adobe in sunlight, and no less hot after dark. In the big concrete buildings built with the help of the Soviets you can burn bare feet on upper floors.
During the peak months of summer, people move outdoors. In the morning and late afternoon they sit in the shade cast by the walls. At midday they hide as best they can, under an awning or a tree. Strangers flock to the hotels, where the lobbies have fans and high ceilings. Secret police flock there too, for the same reasons, and to investigate the strangers. Everyone waits. At night, while hotel guests lie trapped in their rooms, the Saharans eat and sleep in the gardens.
Miloud and I went to dinner in Adrar at the house of Nouari, a bookish construction engineer. He had also invited a tall, shy hydrologist who the next day was to guide me through an irrigated “experimental farm” north of town. The four of us sat on carpets in the sand behind the house. It was a sweltering night, with the temperature still over
100 degrees. The stars were blackened by dust. The meal was lit by kerosene lanterns on a barrel. Nouari’s wife and mother cooked for us, but did not appear. I made no mention of them. Nouari poured water from a pitcher, and we washed our hands.
We started the meal with warm milk and dates. Nouari said, “The Prophet recommended dates.”
Miloud added, “Milk and dates make a complete meal. They are all a person needs to eat.”
Nonetheless we also had tripe, couscous, and melon. Afterward we drank tea brewed by Nouari on a butane burner. The discussion returned to dates.
Saharans eat dates directly off the branch; they dry them and eat them; they bake, boil, and fry them and eat them. They are date gourmets and can distinguish hundreds of varieties by taste, texture, and color. They know date facts: that a thousand dates grow in a single cluster, that half the weight of a dried date is sugar, and that dates are rich in minerals and vitamins. Nouari listed them, taking care that I note every one: “Vitamins A, B, C, D, E.”
He described the yearly pollination performed by the farmers. He recited the line from the Koran that is read while this is done. “In the name of God, mild and merciful.” And he wrote it down for me:
The hydrologist added, “Dates help against cancer. Research is being done in the United States at a big university.”
Miloud observed that the tree itself is a wonderful resource. With help from the others, he went through its uses. They are too many to list here, but they can be summarized as follows: things that can be made from palm wood and fronds.
The hydrologist finished by saying, “The Prophet loved the tree too.” It is not surprising that the neglect of the groves in the Sahara has added to sympathy for the Islamic revolution.
Sahara Unveiled Page 10
