The hydrologist’s name was Sollah. In the morning he took me to see the irrigated farm, which he called a model. It sprawled across 800 unshaded acres in virgin desert—an American-style operation, privately owned, with a bright green tractor and a crew of Haratin workers. Circular irrigation systems stood over wheat stubble. There were greenhouses, and plots of tomatoes, peppers, pimentos, cucumbers, melons, and cantaloupes. There was plenty of mud. This was modern agriculture—energetic, productive, and perhaps wasteful. I told Sollah that it reminded me of the farming in California. He looked pleased, and asked why. I answered, “Cheap water.” This pleased him even more, because it was his water. He had directed the government crew that had drilled the first well.
We went to drink the results. Two pumps drove a heavy flow into a holding tank. The water was sweet and cool. Sollah and his crew had struck it with an Oklahoman rig at a depth of 450 feet. The well had run brown with sand and mud for two days, and afterward had turned clear. The project had taken a month to complete, which was average. There were several crews like Sollah’s in that part of the Sahara. Between them they were drilling forty-five wells a year. Every well had produced.
Most of the Sahara is too dry for drilling. If you do hit water, either there is too little, or it is too salty, or too expensive to pump out. Although it might sustain a few settlers, or people passing by, it is not worth the cost of getting to. But here in the northern third of the desert, large reserves of fresh water lie under the parched surface.
The shallowest reserves are the ones that for centuries have irrigated the oases. They are immediately susceptible to drought and overuse: the water table falls, crops fail, and the oases must be abandoned. But if rain falls, even far away, eventually the shallow reserves are replenished.
Of greater importance for the near future are the deep reserves, whose discovery was a by-product of the search for oil. The mere knowledge of their existence has had a profound effect on life in the Sahara. Known as confined aquifers, they are pools of fresh water trapped in permeable rock strata at depths of 300 to 6,000 feet. They hold as much water, according to one estimate, as the Amazon River discharges in two years. That is a lot of water. What’s better, much of it is under pressure. Once tapped, it rises to the surface and forms artesian wells. Geysers have shot hundreds of feet into the air. Wells have been capped to keep villages from flooding.
The new water works powerfully on the souls of Saharans. Muammar Qaddafi launched an agricultural revolution in Libya, and began building gigantic irrigation projects. He spoke of transforming the sands. If for no other reason, he was respected for this. Other Saharans have equally grandiose dreams: miles of tomatoes, famous potatoes, rice paddies, fish farms, horizons of grain—the United States of Moulay. If there is water in the desert, anything is possible. Sollah, by nature a quiet and rational man, was suffused with the glory of his mission. He spoke then not as a hydrologist, but as a Saharan. Even the taxi driver who took us out to the farm had an opinion. He believed that irrigation would eventually bring rain. Call it reverse desertification, the trickle-up theory.
But there is a problem. If you measure a desert by the amount of heat at the surface versus the amount that would be necessary to evaporate the annual rainfall, the excess evaporative power of the Sahara ranges from a factor of ten to infinity. Of course these so-called dryness ratios are high partly because there is so little rain—in places no rain at all. You might reasonably expect some level of man-made rainfall to fill the need. But even in the wettest parts of the Sahara the air is so dry that regardless of the heat, evaporation rates are the highest in the world—twice those of the Californian and Australian deserts. The average relative humidity is 30 percent, and it has been recorded as low as 2.5 percent. In the Sahara it is not only the ground but also the sky that is thirsty.
In any case, the deep aquifers are being recharged very slowly, if at all. They contain mostly fossil water, deposited long ago when the Sahara was not a desert. The water that Sollah and I were drinking was perhaps 5,000 years old. In western Egypt, well water may be five or ten times older. My comparison to California was only partly accurate, because so much of the irrigation water in the American desert comes from rivers and reservoirs—short-term, renewable surface supplies. Some waste is therefore affordable: you suffer drought, you change your laws, you wait, you drink again. But the deep water of the Sahara is different: you pump it here for keeps. Like oil, it is not renewable.
Another problem is that, despite the large reserves, only a fraction of the stored water can be extracted economically. There are many reasons for this, including lowering water tables, loss of artesian pressure, expense of drilling, expense of pumping, and increasing salinity. Thoughtful people caution that new wells should be drilled sparingly, and the water used wisely. They use terms like “practical sustained yield”—meaning you take out no more than is going in. They say an aquifer is like a bank account—if you must draw it down, the reason should be to build a return in the long run. They warn about unchecked exploitation, and talk about the end coming as soon as 2025.
But their advice passes unheeded. Saharans are as greedy as anyone. They dream of green. It is the color of Islam. In Algeria now, the revolutionaries have vowed to make a garden of the desert, though of course they never will.
14
THE
SAFARI
THE SAFARI ROLLED into In Salah after dawn, when the chill was off the air. It was a high-clearance truck, a tough three-ton Mercedes that had been modified for passengers by the addition of a narrow door at the front of the cargo box, and a row of small windows along each side. The windows were opaque with dirt. A ladder climbed the rear to an overhead luggage rack. Up front in the cab, the driver and his assistant sat smoking in self-important isolation, as sober and concentrated as pilots headed into a storm. The condition of the truck—its crumpled fenders, cracked windshields, and wired-on hood—hinted at the rigors ahead. Oil dripped from under the engine.
Twenty-five of us boarded, a full load. The air inside was stifling. We sat shoulder-to-shoulder on metal benches and looked each other over—the typical collection of tight-lipped and dusty men. The only woman was an unveiled Malian cradling a baby who, over the grueling trip to come, uttered hardly a whimper. The mother and child were accompanied by two men in filthy robes and chèches. I later learned that they came from somewhere near Timbuktu, had been working for years in Libya, and were struggling home. Other passengers were laborers and traders, black Africans returning south across the Sahara to the nations of Niger, Burkina Faso, and the Ivory Coast. Only the poor traveled this way. The driver’s assistant made a quick count, then locked us in from the outside.
There was no road now, only the scarred and rutted desert. The first bump threw us from our seats, and some of the passengers laughed. The next bump threw us hard against the ceiling, and the fun was over. One of the young men landed badly, taking a seat corner in the ribs; he shouted in anger and pain, but shouted in vain. The driver could not hear him, and would not have cared anyway. His driving was unflinching. Because from the back we could not see the ground ahead, we never knew when the next blow would fall. Crouching to protect ourselves from serious injury, we hung grimly to the seatbacks and endured the passage of time. Imagine being blindfolded, baked, and beaten.
Every few hours, when we stopped for a rest, the driver’s assistant would unlock the door. The woman and child would remain inside. Emerging into the brilliant sunlight, the men would spread into the desert, turn their backs to the truck, and kneel modestly to urinate. Sand and rock then extended with brutal clarity to the horizons. But the real Sahara was a tangle of Africans on the inside of a long-distance truck, the stink of their unwashed bodies, the poison of diesel exhaust.
The day passed in a haze of sweat and injury. The open side windows, high above eye level, let in clouds of dust. Once, as I floated above my seat, I spotted a Mercedes sedan laboriously picking its way south. The land climb
ed. In the afternoon we urinated on an upsloping desert of a mountain.
The roughness of the ride forced temporary friendship on the passengers. We first shared our hatred of the driver, then shared our bread. We stopped for the night in a gorge called Arāk, a funnel through which all Trans-Saharan traffic passed. Arāk had a roadhouse—a café and a few of the traditional straw huts known as zeribas. The establishment was run by a wizened Frenchman, emaciated and deeply tanned, who draped a scarf around his neck. He said he had lived in Algeria for thirty-five years, as a teacher, and later here in Arāk, and he didn’t give a damn about the first Algerian revolution or the second.
He took me for an adventurer and a fool. “You’d better get yourself a zeriba,” he said. “It’ll freeze tonight. These Africans, they can sleep anywhere. I’ve lived here long enough so I can too.” He squinted at me critically. “But you—you might not survive the night.”
Resisting the impulse to prove him wrong, I rented a zeriba. I paid him the equivalent of three dollars, six times the normal rate. He pocketed the money, and afterward left me alone. We did not speak again.
I borrowed a greasy blanket from his help, an Algerian hustler with a permanent smirk. “Keep an eye on your suitcase,” he said. “These niggers will steal everything.” He wanted me to change French francs with him, or sell him my razor, or my watch, or give him batteries—he was alert to any possibility. I said I had nothing for him. He lost interest and moved away.
One of the Malians warned me against eating the couscous. It had been cooked days before, he said. The café at Arāk was known throughout the desert to make people sick. The Malians shared their tea with me. I gave them the last of my food, two oranges, and ducked into the zeriba. Wrapped in the blanket, I lay in the dirt and listened to the wind rustling the walls.
The next morning, I saw the Trans-Saharan from a hillside. We had stopped for a brief rest. It was eight o’clock, rush hour on the desert highway. An empty basin stretched below, twenty miles from rim to rim, crisscrossed by tracks. Far in the distance, a cargo truck inched northward raising dust.
In the afternoon we came to a sudden halt. The engine revved. The assistant did not emerge to free us. We stood on our seats and peered outside. A tractor-trailer crossing an oued ahead had mired to the top of its wheels in mud. Rare autumn rains had fallen on the mountains; the oued looked dry, but was not. The truckers now were trying to dig out.
I thought we should stop to help them, or offer a ride, or check their water supply. But not a word was exchanged. Having surveyed the truckers’ misfortune, we chose another crossing point, and with brutal speed rocked and slithered through the mud. On solid ground again, we hesitated for just a moment before hurrying on to the south. The stranded truckers, who had put down their shovels to watch, seemed not to mind.
PART II
THE CENTER
IS A WAR
15
TAMANRASSET
IT IS THE desert of more so: drier, fiercer, and wilder, an emptiness of stony basins and barren volcanic peaks, of buttes, cinder cones, and confused black rock. The land is as mesmerizing as a night sky. The canyons give it depth; the nomads give it scale. You can gaze into it for hours absorbed by the drama of desolation and distance. The sense of Africa, of ancient roots and shared history, is inescapable. Then you turn around and find Tamanrasset.
Tamanrasset is not an oasis. It has no date groves, few trees, and little water. Perched nearly a mile high in the Hoggar Mountains, it is the Sahara unimagined. Forty-five thousand people live in these mud-bricked neighborhoods which spread along a dry riverbed. You can walk from one end of town to the other in fifteen minutes, and around the entire thing in an hour. Travel-weary trucks list through the streets. Women duck out of sight when strangers approach. Masked Tuaregs in twos and threes ride by slowly on their camels, or haughtily stride down the sidewalks. Soldiers linger in the stark cafés.
Few towns in the world are so remote: there is no telephone connection, no good road, and no decent postal service—only a municipal downlink for national television. Groundwater is in such short supply that new households are not allowed to hook up to the municipal system, and old households are severely rationed. The middle class lives on deliveries from private water trucks that scavenge supplies from distant wells. The poor live by the bucketful. Once there was a plan to pipe in water across the hundreds of miles from In Salah, but no one expects it to be completed now. Despite all this, Tamanrasset is growing fast.
Some growth is due to troubles in the Sahel, the parched savanna along the Sahara’s southern edge. The troubles are ecological and political: recurrent droughts have shoved traditional enemies against one another, and a widespread rebellion has broken out through much of the central Sahara, which pits Berber Tuareg separatists against the new black majorities of Niger and Mali, and has little to do with the Islamic revolution in the north.
Refugees from all sides of the conflict filter through the desert across the international borders, and camp loosely for miles around Tamanrasset. No one knows how many are out there. They live in scrap-shacks and discarded army tents, which quickly take on the color of the earth. Like illegal immigrants elsewhere, the men look for day-work, and the women take in laundry. The smallest children go naked and hungry. Dressed in rags, young boys slip into town to hawk cigarettes and to shoplift. There are no schools for them, and no doctors. The neglect is intentional. Tamanrasset’s police chief once said to me, “The drought is over. It’s time they left.” But on both subjects the refugees disagree.
The other reason for Tamanrasset’s growth is commerce—the old-fashioned chance to buy low and sell high and trade goods across the Sahara. Tamanrasset sits at the heart of the desert. Linked to the north by 1,200 miles of the Trans-Saharan, it dominates a web of unmarked trading routes stretching equally far into Mali, Niger, and Libya. Because the local currencies have little international value, and “hard currencies” are rare, the commerce works mostly by barter. Tamanrasset traders export Algerian food and livestock in exchange for hard-to-find durable goods—car parts, electronics, guns. The merchandise moves not by caravan, but by truck. It is a difficult business of bypassing import tariffs and greedy government officials. Serious risks are involved; the traders are threatened by army patrols, Tuareg rebels, bandits, breakdowns, and death by thirst. By the standards of international smuggling, their profits are small. Nonetheless, behind the plain mud walls of Tamanrasset’s compounds, they manage to support their families in some luxury. They make connections as far away as Lagos, Accra, and Dakar. War and famine swirl around it, but Tamanrasset endures. Saharans call it the new Timbuktu.
I HAD FLOWN there before, and thought I knew the place. But only now, arriving bruised and exhausted after weeks by ground from the north, did I understand the extent of its geographic isolation. The Safari pulled into town around sunset, and with a final rattle settled into silence. I nodded to the Malians, who slipped away toward the outlying refugee camps. Shouldering my suitcase, I headed through the camel market and into the center.
Tamanrasset’s oldest building, which dates from the First World War, is a small adobe fort with crenelated walls, like a set piece out of a Foreign Legion movie. It was built by Charles de Foucauld, a French aristocrat and army officer turned desert monk, who moved to Tamanrasset in 1905 to live among the hostile Tuaregs.
Foucauld was an early example of the modern visitor, a runaway who came to the desert for reasons that had more to do with himself, and with Europe, than with the people he intended to help. Tamanrasset then was a fragile encampment of fifteen straw zeribas clustered around a well in the mountains. Foucauld chose it because of its isolation and poverty. In his diary he wrote, “It does not seem possible that there could ever be any garrison, telegraph, or European here, and there will not be a mission for a long time. I chose this distant spot where I want the only model for my life to be the life of Jesus of Nazareth.”
Foucauld never saw the Sahara s
quarely. His desert was at first just a place far from France; his Tuaregs had value mainly as a dangerous people among whom he could express his Christian ideals. Much as he sought to live humbly among the natives, he was inescapably a European, with the full force of Europe behind him. His refusal to understand the power he wielded was not without consequence. It led ultimately to his murder, and to the French reprisals that followed. More important now, it predicted the confusions afflicting the desert today. Does it matter that Foucauld meant well?
He was a short, gaunt, heavily bearded man, uncompromising in his humility. For decades he had wandered the Sahara under the most punishing circumstances, walking in sandals when he could have ridden, denying himself food and wine, thinking about Christ when he might have been sleeping. Now he intended to show the Tuaregs the path to Catholicism, and to found a new and ascetic monastic order. At both efforts he was unsuccessful during his life. Though he compiled a four-volume dictionary of Tamachek, the Tuareg language, and collected two volumes of Tuareg poetry, he converted not a single man or woman. The Tuaregs learned to stay away from the wells of Tamanrasset to avoid his sermonizing. His appeals to other Catholics to join him in the desert went unanswered. His only unambiguous achievement was the martyrdom he yearned for. He wrote, “If I could be killed one day by the pagans, what a fine death! My very dear brother, what an honor and what a joy if God would only listen to my prayer.”
He got his wish during the First World War, which awoke the Frenchman in him. About the Sahara he now wrote, “Progress is possible only by means of a French, a truly French administration, which natives will be permitted to join not only when they have French citizenship and have received a French education, but when they think like Frenchmen!”
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