Sahara Unveiled

by William Langewiesche

  AISSA KNEW ALL about history. Two nights out of Tamanrasset, he said, “There is a woman behind every war.”

  “Behind Vietnam?”

  “Madame Kennedy.”

  “And the Persian Gulf?”

  “Ah, I’m glad you ask.” He started with the birth of Mohammed, never got to the woman, and after a long discourse said, “There is much more, but I cannot tell you everything tonight. I will tell you more every night. By the time we return from the Tadart you will know enough to write a book.” So I had something to look forward to.

  It had been another rough day, and two more goats had died. In the afternoon we had come to the Tassili escarpment, a craggy mountain wall rising along the eastern horizon. But instead of turning toward Djanet, which now lay only a hundred miles away, we had nosed into a barren settlement of cinder-block shacks. Children ran up to us, and trotted the surviving goats off to water. Aissa told me the village was home to Abdullah, his black Tuareg driver. Abdullah’s wife and children had gone off, and his windowless one-room house was empty. We went inside, and sprawled on the dirt floor to the buzzing of flies.

  Abdullah kept flicking the light switch and giggling. “It’s not working,” he said in Arabic. I noticed that the light socket was empty. I doubted anyway whether it had been hooked up, or whether the village had a generator.

  Men masked by chèches stooped through the doorway, slipped off their sandals, and sat with us. Abdullah knew them by the folds of their chèches. I had to resort to the cruder technique of watching their feet: he with the splayed toes, or the decimated nails, or the mottled skin. The children came back with a jug of water and a bowl of carrot stew. We ate. Abdullah lay along the wall and began to snore. I asked Aissa the name of this place, and he answered nastily that it had none. The air was stale. I went outside into the afternoon sunlight, and walked through the settlement. The children followed silently, stopping when I stopped. I could not get them to smile. The settlement was treeless, relentless, dismal. It had an open well with a bucket and a hand-crank, and a vegetable patch where carrots grew. I found our goats perched on rubble in a ruined yard. I wanted to drive on for Djanet, but accepted my fate when the sun fell and darkness softly settled.

  We walked into the desert to cook dinner in the dunes. With wood scavenged earlier, we built a fire. Abdullah made the unleavened bread called tagela, by kneading water from a goatskin into flour, forming the dough into a circular loaf, burying it in sand by the fire, and shoving hot embers over the top to bake it. After about an hour he dug it up, and with a knife began the slow ritual of scraping and banging the sand from its crust. Baking and scraping tagela occupies many nights in the open Sahara; it marks the tedium of desert time. You simmer a sauce while waiting. When most of the sand has come off, you pull the tagela apart and shred its hot flesh into the pot. You rinse your fingers in goatskin water, then use them to eat from a communal bowl. If there is meat, someone throws fatty scraps one at time onto your little pile of food. You chew slowly through the gristle.

  Toward the end of our meal, an old nomad in a bulky chèche came out of the darkness to join us, and Aissa introduced him rather stupidly as a “master of the desert.” The man was tall and light-skinned, and had the erect bearing of a Tuareg noble. He wore a dagger. His hand, which I shook, was as cracked and hardened as a hoof. He spoke a little French, but used Tamachek to name a confusion of stars.

  In the morning we loaded the goats back into the trucks and drove across a sand sea called Admer. The dunes were 300 feet high. I noticed again Aissa’s aggression, and his skill in driving. He assaulted the slopes, jamming the truck at full throttle up each dune, counting on momentum to carry him across the crests, and gravity to pull him down the steep slip faces. Never did he get stuck. Abdullah worked more cautiously, relying on the four-wheel drive to crawl across the dunes, hesitating on the crests, sometimes bogging down.

  Finally we got to Djanet, a town at 3,600 feet built on terraces above a dry riverbed. Aissa had business there, which would take a few days. Afterward, he and Abdullah would together, for the price of one, drive me south into the Tadart. I took a room at the Djanet hotel and settled down to wait. Having endured one trip with Aissa, I guessed I would endure another.

  I should have made different arrangements. The Tassili plateau, rising to 7,000 feet just east of Djanet, is a greater repository for rock art than the Tadart, and less risky. It holds 400,000 Neolithic paintings and engravings in a national park the size of Yellowstone. The Tadart lies farther from Djanet, and offers less. But that is precisely why I wanted to go there—because the Tadart is the desert’s desert.

  And Djanet was a pleasant place to wait. Built of pale stone, the town scaled steep valley walls above a green palm grove. On one hill stood the ruins of a fort from which the Tuaregs had once driven a small French garrison. On another hill stood a whitewashed mansion with a satellite dish—an old presidential retreat, still maintained. There was an airport ten miles out of town. Along the shady main street, Tuaregs and Arabs mixed easily with immigrants from the south. At the market, long-distance Saharan trucks nestled under trees.

  Outside the small army base, soldiers relaxed between desert patrols. Their responsibilities included policing the remote borders with Libya and Niger. They drove groups of battered Land Rovers years past normal retirement. I saw Soviet-made helicopters flying in loose formation. At the shaded café I heard talk of a skirmish somewhere the week before. Smugglers, Tuareg separatists, Islamic revolutionaries—I knew enough not to ask. The storytelling did not worry me. I’ve heard lots of it. I thought Djanet swaggered like other border towns.

  WHEN WE LEFT Djanet, Abdullah drove, and Aissa sat beside him in the front of the pickup truck. I crouched on the jump seat in the truck’s extended cab. The hot desert air blew forward through the sliding rear window. In the back we carried supplies under tarpaulins—blankets, food, a shovel, a spare tire, jerricans of fuel and water.

  South of Djanet we followed the well-worn track to Libya through a desert of scattered acacias. We were stopped by an army patrol driving a Land Rover in the opposite direction. It was like a meeting of friends on a small-town street: no one bothered to get out. We handed our identity cards to the driver, who handed them across to the sergeant, who was surprised to find an American passport, and said something about Dallas, by which he meant the television show. I smiled. Abdullah acted obsequious. The sergeant asked Aissa where we were going, and why. Aissa answered that I was an important scholar interested in the rock art of the Tadart.

  Later, I asked him why he lied. He said, “Because the army thinks all reporters are spies.” But Aissa lied because he liked to.

  We spent the hottest midday hours in a canyon by a spring where Tuareg nomads had made camp. Their tents were dark and low-slung, made of animal skins and burlap. The nomads had camels and goats and an old Land Cruiser with a faded tourist agency emblem on the door. Clothes hung from the trees. When we arrived, the women ducked out of sight, pulling the youngest children after them. The men were tall and thin, and wore chèches of course. They strode up swinging their arms, and stood with their heads held back looking down their aristocratic noses. One wore wraparound sunglasses and a digital watch. They invited us to sit with them in the shade of a tarpaulin stretched between two acacias. We shared our fruit and bread. They built a fire for tea. Their talk was spare, and in Tamachek. I realized with a start that one of them was the old master of the desert from the village without a name. He gave no sign of recognition now. The younger men deferred to him. Children escaped from their tents and came over to watch the strangers. The goats bleated. The high sun passed. We left the camp and drove south and east, across rough ground, locked into four-wheel drive.

  The most surprising characteristic of the Sahara is the speed with which it changes. Here is the desert of just that one afternoon: pink and yellow dunes, blue craggy cliffs, black volcanic rubble, gravel plains, gray boulders half-buried in sand, an eroded gulch
, two dry rivers, a cone, a canyon, many badlands. The track we followed forked, faded, and disappeared.

  At night we made camp on a mesa. I asked to whom the land belonged. Abdullah looked at me blankly. Aissa said, “It belongs to no one. It belongs to the government. It belongs to God.” We contemplated this for a while. He said, “There is often no government, but God is everywhere.”

  Even then he was not honest. There are various reasons not to believe in God, but Aissa’s was the most selfish. At the age of thirty he was still his father’s pet, and far too spoiled to submit to any higher authority. As a Saharan he could not admit this, of course, but religion was external. He kept revealing himself unintentionally.

  I made a vicious sport of asking questions. Abdullah had the servant’s habit of answering in the affirmative. Aissa had the opposite habit.

  Were these sands made by water? No, by winds.

  Were they made by winds? No, by water.

  He could not help himself. If I wanted to stop, I suggested we go; if I wanted to go, I suggested we stop. And because Aissa was not stupid, he began to resent me for it.

  He was a terrible braggart, pathologically unable to admit weakness or failure. Even when he appeared to admit a fault, it was only to brag again. Two days from Djanet he said, “I am a very cruel person.”

  I heard the implied threat, but couldn’t tell if Aissa himself was aware of it. The night before he had pulled a .45 caliber pistol from his robe, and on a blanket by the fire, had cleaned it and checked the loading. Abdullah had giggled. The joke was on the army sergeant, who would have arrested us had he known. I asked Aissa how he planned to use the gun. He smiled and said, “To protect you from bandits.”

  When Aissa said he was cruel, he meant he was strong. He told me a story about family life back in Ouargla. “I have a little brother who is only six. One day a cat scratched him. It was a small scratch, but my little brother cried. Me, I took the cat and, like this, I snapped her neck. Then I took my brother and said, ‘Now you see little brother, do not cry.’ ”

  We came to the Tadart’s entrance—a searing canyon that cut and turned through a scorched plateau. It was noon. Leaving the truck on the canyon floor, we climbed searing rocks to a prehistoric painting of a four-headed woman, and beyond, to scenes of copulation and hunting. In the shade of an overhang we drank warm goat milk heavy with fat, and chewed a mix of crushed dates and bitter desert herbs. The canyon was yellow and brown and violently bright, and so infernally hot that the winds blew upward and sand dunes mounted the walls to escape.

  The rock art reminded Aissa of women. He said, “In 1992 in the United States, scientists discovered that exercise is bad for women. I could have told them that.”

  I laughed.

  He didn’t like that. He asked about the American women I knew.

  “They still exercise,” I said.

  Aissa hated them for it. He said, “Someday you will introduce me. I will ravage them. I will make them beg for my love.”

  I doubted it.

  THE SAHARA HAS not always been such a desert. Over the course of geological history, it has gone through wet spells that transformed it into woodland and savanna. Homo erectus first arrived during one of these spells, maybe 500,000 years ago, while following game north from the Niger River, or east from the Nile, or both. By 100,000 years ago, the center was inhabited by people living in small groups, hunting abundant game, scattering bones and stone tools widely about. The desert returned later as it had returned before, sometimes convincingly. The timing remains uncertain. Perhaps 50,000 years ago, a fishing village stood near present-day Djanet, on the lake that left the sands of Erg Admer.

  The haze begins to clear about 8000 B.C., at the height of the last great wet spell. Lake Chad, which is today mostly swamp, was an immense inland sea that reached to the Niger River and emptied into the Bight of Benin. At the core of the Sahara, the Hoggar Mountains were forested with oak, walnut, and elm, and the Tassili was forested with pine. To the south, the land descended into the rich grasslands of an African savanna. The Tadart teemed with wildlife. Rivers flowed through its canyons.

  A culture flowered. Artists began to paint and etch the rocks. The largest of their images stood fifteen feet high. The artists imagined gods with round heads, and drew a Sahara roamed by African mammals—giraffe, elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, zebra, buffalo, wart hog, and antelope. Catfish, perch, and turtles swam in the lakes. Crocodiles idled in the rivers. The people hunted on foot, with spears and bows and arrows. They made pottery, lived in villages, and buried their dead. They hoed the grassland and ground its grains. They did not farm.

  Around 5000 B.C., a new people of obscure origins arrived. They were long-bodied herders of cattle, possibly from the distant mountains of Ethiopia. They introduced the finest period in Saharan art, the Bovine, characterized by its graceful depictions of a pastoral life. It seems likely that they were the ancestors of today’s Fulani nomads, herders of the Sahel: the similarities extend beyond bone structures to include details of hair-weavings, clothes, and village construction. These herders had a long stay in the central Sahara. The period from 4000 B.C. to 2500 B.C., roughly contemporary to the Old Kingdom of Egypt, has been called the Golden Age of Saharan pastoralism.

  THE CATTLE HERDING was so successful that it spread south from the mountains. Speculation that the herdsmen invited the desert through overgrazing is unfair. Older and larger climatic forces were at work. Around 2000 B.C., the weather simply shifted. A dryness settled tentatively across the Saharan lowlands, and crept into the mountains, and slowly deepened. There were years then as now when the rains returned and the vegetation thickened. But the desert was on its way.

  You might expect people not to have noticed such gradual impoverishment. But these people lived surrounded by their art, the now-ancestral celebrations of a bountiful land: etchings scarred the rocks for hundreds of miles; paintings endured in the indelible burnt-orange of laterite and iron oxide. The old creations must have forced people to confront their loss. Did they fight each other, hunt witches, find new ways to pray? It made no difference anyway. The lakes and rivers shrank. The big wild animals drifted south. On a cliffside near Djanet, someone drew a weeping cow, which still looks like a declaration from the end of time.

  Around 1500 B.C., with the drying-out well under way, a race of light-skinned Berber warriors invaded from the north. They drove chariots pulled by galloping horses, and soon became the masters of the central Sahara. Eventually they gave up chariots for the horse and saddle. They made their own drawings celebrating strength and aggression—key attributes for success in the deepening desert. These warriors were ancestors of the Tuaregs.

  Not all of the original herders fled the desert. Those who remained became the Tuaregs’ serfs, the original Haratins. Over more than 3,000 years, they never freed themselves from their captivity. Black African captives mixed with them at the bottom of a rigid Tuareg hierarchy based on skin color. By the mid-nineteenth century, 90 percent of central Saharan society was made up of black serfs who were permanently excluded from a true Tuareg identity. This is the traditional society that today is too easily idealized. The concept of equality came from the outside—from Islam and later from Europe—but it never thrived here. The Tuareg aristocrats did not need to rule oppressively because their serfs refused to rebel.

  I saw it in the Tadart. Abdullah was a serf at heart. He had the sympathy of a prisoner for his guard, and seemed to like taking orders from a man like Aissa. He was a Tuareg, but a Tuareg in confusion. Days from Djanet, despite my objections Aissa ordered him to unwind his chèche for me. Abdullah did, and grinned about it. His face surprised me. He had long uncombed hair framing wide cheeks, flared nostrils, a sparse mustache, and buck teeth—the features not of a Berber or a Fulani, but strangely like those of an Australian aborigine. The episode unsettled me. Aissa watched with satisfaction. He wanted to demonstrate that Abdullah would do his bidding.

  THE CAMEL FIRST
came to the Tuaregs as a domesticated beast of burden. The short story of its journey starts in America with the Eocene rabbit-sized Protylopus, whose descendants crossed the Bering Strait and evolved into an early cold-climate camel, probably two-humped, that subsequently spread across Asia and into North Africa. This prehistoric camel was a shy and defenseless animal that lived in brushland, and relied for survival on its ability to roam far from the watering holes of its predators. Apparently this strategy was not good enough. In a Sahara also roamed by lions, wild dogs, and early human hunters, camels became extinct sometime before the first rock paintings. It seems likely that the species faced similar extinction throughout the Middle East. One branch may have retreated north into the cool isolation of Iran and central Asia, where it evolved into the two-humped, long-haired camel that lives there today. The more important branch seems to have retreated into corners of the Arabian Peninsula, where an intensifying desert protected it from its predators. Over time it developed into the short-haired, light-colored, one-humped animal capable of enduring extremes of heat and, to a lesser extent, of drought.

  Camels do not store water in their humps. They drink furiously, up to twenty-eight gallons in a ten-minute session, then distribute the water evenly throughout their bodies. Afterward, they use the water stingily. They have viscous urine and dry feces. They breathe through their noses, and keep their mouths shut. They do sweat, but only as a last resort, after first allowing their body temperatures to rise 10 degrees Fahrenheit. As they begin to dehydrate, the volume of their blood plasma does not at first diminish. They can survive a water loss of up to one-third of their body weight, then drink up and feel fine. Left alone, unhurried and unburdened, they can live two weeks between drinks.