Sahara Unveiled

by William Langewiesche

  Protected from predation by the Arabian desert, the wild camel was relatively docile. Around 2000 B.C., Arabian nomads began to tame it for its milk and meat. Later they got the idea of riding it, and better yet, of using it to carry their cargoes. Domestication of the camel eventually spawned changes of the most dramatic kind. It shifted power from the cities to the desert, brought wealth and prominence to the nomad, and because of the desert mobility the camel provided, it helped give rise to Islam.

  In fact the Arabian camel was so successful that in time it supplanted horses and ox-drawn wagons through most of the Middle East and North Africa. Across a wide swath of the earth, it replaced the wheel. In his pioneering exploration of this subject, The Camel and the Wheel (Harvard Press, 1975), Columbia historian Richard W. Bulliet explained why. He wrote that a camel can carry nearly as much as a wagon, but breaks down less often. A wagon is pulled by two oxen and requires a driver. Worse yet, a wagon rolls on wheels, which require roads, which must be built and then maintained. Pack camels walk in strings, on paths or open ground. They climb mountains, cross sand dunes, progress thirty miles a day, eat sparingly, drink deeply, don’t fear the dark, respond to whippings, and live long lives. They can’t offer riders the speed and impact of a battle horse, but then battle horses can’t stand the hard desert. And camels do gallop.

  Bulliet is a camel proponent, but also always fair. He explains why the camel never flourished beyond its natural range, and he makes the point that even within Arabia its advantages became apparent only slowly. The problem was the hump, which is made of fat and cannot bear a load. For over a thousand years, the saddles went on behind the hump, because the first camels did not have enough space in front. But the rear was weak and wobbly. The solution, engineered in north Arabia several centuries before Christ, was a new kind of saddle that straddled the camel’s hump with a frame of inverted V’s. By moving forward off the rear end, it provided the rider with a high, comfortable ride, and a stable perch from which to swing a sword and thrust a spear. More important, by distributing the weight, the new saddle allowed the camel to carry heavier packs. This was the saddle that defeated the wheel.

  The wheel was already in decline. On the fringes of the Roman Empire the roads were not being well maintained. And since chariots had been surpassed in war by mounted horsemen, the wheel had lost its luster. Nonetheless, only in the land of the camel did the wheel actually disappear. With few exceptions, the Middle East and North Africa became wheel-less societies. The banishment was so complete that in some of the Saharan oases even the memory of the wheel was lost.

  When the new camel technology arrived in the Saharan highlands, around the time of Christ, the Tuaregs seized on it first for its military uses. In the extreme desert climate, fierce horsemen could become even fiercer camelmen. The match was so good that the Tuaregs soon became the world’s greatest camelmen. For riding and making war, they bred the ultimate camel, the mehari, a tall, thin animal with a back so long they could put their riding saddles before the hump. This placed the warriors low, within the upper reach of an opposing horseman, but improved the camel’s handling.

  The Tuaregs still love their camels. When they ride them they nestle their bare feet against the camel’s neck, and direct them with gentle pressures. They speak tenderly to them and brag about owning those that are fast and white and beautiful. They are camel romantics. But even they must suspect that the camel is obsolete. Again the rocks tell the desert’s story; interspersed among the ancient drawings are newer ones, of trucks and automobiles. The Tuaregs now forge their swords from the good steel springs of Toyotas. They idealize the past, but fight in four-wheel drive. The chariot has returned with a vengeance.

  IN THE TADART we worked through an uncharted desert of sculpted buttes and blowing sand. We climbed to rock paintings, hid in caves from the noon sun, slept under the bright stars. Aissa navigated purposefully. When we came across tire tracks he got out to study them, and called them old, an army patrol’s. They put him in a good humor. He said he would take me to a real Sahara where even nomads do not go. I accepted. It lay in hidden valleys choked by dunes too soft and steep for Abdullah’s driving. With bare hands we dug the truck through. By evening we drove into a gray, rock-strewn moonscape. At the head of a canyon, under black walls, we stopped to make camp. Aissa and Abdullah abandoned me there.

  It happened this way: we unloaded blankets and some food, a jerrican of water and a jerrican of fuel. Aissa said they would search for more wood, and they drove away. Night came. After an hour I walked to a promontory, and looked out into the darkness of the lower canyon, and saw no headlights. After three hours I realized something had gone wrong.

  I thought the truck might have broken down or had a flat. How far would they have driven in search of wood? They had food and water of their own, and would probably wait for daylight before making repairs. I wrapped myself in a blanket, and lay thinking late into the night.

  The Sahara’s silence engulfed me. The sky slid slowly by. I dozed until a wind drove sand into my face, returning me to the desert. I felt strong and clear-minded. Carefully, I thought through the previous days—the fragmented conversations, the changing moods, the boasts and veiled threats. The truck was too new to have broken down. I remembered one of Aissa’s stories, a lesson he had taught his young brother.

  “Who am I?” Aissa asked him.

  “Aissa,” his brother answered.

  “No. Who am I?”

  “I don’t know,” his brother said.

  “That’s true, little brother. And you cannot know.”

  But I knew. Enough almost to pity him. Aissa was an unlucky fellow, not stupid, but addled and greedy. He was a killer. I think he had wanted to be my friend.

  I knew now why he had agreed to drive me here, and why he had driven away. What better reason for wandering the Sahara than the pursuit of art and history? Aissa had confused me by accepting payment, and I had served him perfectly. For what he had to do now, I would have been an embarrassment. Because I might serve him again, I figured he intended to return. But this was a dangerous business, and with every hour my chances diminished. By dawn I was angry.

  The sun drove me onto the canyon wall, into the shade of overhanging rock. From my perch I spent the morning looking beyond the lower canyon into the endless desert of sand and stone. Nothing moved. Under other circumstances the isolation might have seemed interesting, but it did not seem that way to me now. After all the warnings this desert had given me, after all I had written, I had allowed it to trap me. Worse still, I had gone out of my way to get here. The Sahara is not a natural destination, and it never will be. A writer writes about it, as a reader reads about it, to satisfy his curiosity about an unseen part of the world. Imagine abandoning life for no better reason. If the Sahara killed me, I would die stupidly. By afternoon, I had to face that possibility, and it surprised me.

  About such strandings, Salah Addoun had at various times said to me:

  “When you break down, you have to be calm, because the desert is calm.”

  “Tourists panic and drive aimlessly. They are afraid of the lion before the lion.”

  “When you are lost, you should sit. Wait. One hour, two hours, a full day. Sit. You will find your orientation.”

  He was right. By pushing other thoughts aside, I found I could patch together the route we had taken from Djanet. I thought in theory I could reverse it through the maze of the Tadart. So technically, maybe I was not lost.

  The problem as always was drought. I had nearly thirty gallons of water, but could not expect to walk out carrying even half of that. Fifteen gallons weigh 120 pounds. From reading Edward Adolph, author of the classic Physiology of Man in the Desert (1947), I knew that any water I could shoulder would more than compensate for the additional sweat it demanded. Nonetheless, a person is not a camel. Walking by day, carrying as much as a strong man can carry, I might make 30 miles before collapsing. Walking by night I would triple that distance onl
y to lose my way. Djanet lay more than 200 miles away, and the Tuaregs’ springs almost as far. Fight as I might, the desert would overwhelm me. I could almost smile about it. I thought again of Addoun. “For every man there are two times that are inescapable—the time of birth and the time of death.” If by tomorrow Aissa had not returned, I might get around to calculating mine.

  The alternative to walking was, of course, to stay put and hope for rescue. In the shade of this overhang, with afternoon air temperatures rising to 110 degrees, I might make the water last several weeks, and after it ran out, survive perhaps another two days. But I knew already the horror of such passivity, the helpless anticipation of death by thirst. Saharans have the comfort of God, but even they may lack the courage to endure the suffering.

  A friend of Addoun’s died during one of my earlier trips to Tamanrasset. He was a young trader working alone, without the money yet to afford a reliable vehicle. I remember a thin, shy man with a face like a boy’s. He drove the desert as far as Niger and Mali in an old Peugeot sedan. The car broke down often—he was used to fixing it. But the last time, only a hundred miles from Tamanrasset, the engine seized. His friends in Tamanrasset later wondered how long he had lasted. They believed in the end he drank gasoline. That much was normal. His body was discovered by passing truckers. The corpse was unusual because it was burned.

  The next evening I had met with Addoun and others, and had suggested that their friend had preferred self-immolation to the final stages of thirst. The Saharans disagreed. Their friend was a religious man, and would never have killed himself. Suicide is immoral not because of the sanctity of life, but because it appears to preempt fate and God himself. They insisted instead that he had made an innocent mistake. Crazed by thirst, with gasoline on his breath, he had lit a cigarette. The fire had burned him from the inside. And that was his fate.

  I must have looked skeptical. Addoun said, “He was alone in the desert. He had no water. In the end he understood his destiny. Why would he kill himself? He had no more worries.”

  Nonetheless, I decided in the Tadart to burn my fuel before I finished the water. I had matches in my pocket. The fuel was diesel, which is presumably less thirst-quenching than gasoline. I would burn it off slowly, starting in the morning, by soaking it into sand and feeding a small fire. The fire would smudge the sky. I did not imagine that I would be found. If Aissa had left an itinerary in Djanet, he had left a false one. Nor was anyone likely to happen by. I was stranded, not by chance, in the Sahara’s most uninviting corner.

  In the afternoon, I drank deeply. The water was hot. I swirled it in a cup, and admired its beauty. By evening I had decided on my course. I would wait in this canyon, burning the fuel, drinking the excess water, eating enough to stay strong. I would fashion a backpack, and experiment with water loads. I would write long good-byes to my wife and to my children. And when the only water remaining was the amount I could carry, I would set off to the northwest, hoping not for Djanet, but for nomads, or an army patrol, or a spring, or a well. My chances were small, but I would walk at night and keep walking until I died. I am not a patient man. The certainty that I would leave this canyon elated me. Addoun once said to me, “As you believe in life, you must also believe in death.” I agreed, for once like a Saharan. But the mood did not last; late into the night I remembered the tears of my children.

  THEN AISSA AND Abdullah returned. I heard the growl of an engine, and saw the headlights approaching. Too angry to feel relieved, I melted into the blackness of the canyon and watched. They parked by the campsite, made a fire, ate, and slept. At dawn I went to them. They lay by the ashes, with blankets over their legs. A tarpaulin held in place by deadwood covered the truck’s cargo bed. The situation remained dangerous. I let my anger show through.

  “You found your firewood,” I said.

  “We got lost,” Aissa answered.

  I shook my head. “Where have you been?”

  “Oh, you know, out there somewhere.” He smirked and waved his hand toward the desert.

  Abdullah giggled.

  Furiously, I told Aissa to stand. An emotion like hatred flitted across his face. We walked away from Abdullah. Controlling my anger, I said, “No more lies, Aissa.”

  “You’re right. A man does not abandon his friends.” He apologized insincerely.

  “I want you to tell me how far into Libya we’ve come.”

  He smiled and never gave me an answer.

  I have gone over the maps since, and still I don’t know.

  My ignorance reminded Aissa of his power. He said, “Are you sure you’re not a spy? I should warn Abdullah.”

  I told him not to threaten me.

  Abdullah fueled the truck and loaded it. We dug across the dunes, and in the afternoon headed northwest toward Djanet by a new route. We drove for days. We lingered over a few rock paintings, because even ignoring them would have brought too much into the open between us. Aissa still needed my help. If we encountered an army patrol, I would again serve as his excuse. This went unsaid. We kept a sharp eye out. The mood kept getting tenser.

  Nights, beside the cooking fires, Aissa bragged about smuggling black Africans into Libya, and spoke about a newer business in automatic weapons. He spoke about the Tuareg rebellion, and the Islamic revolution. He said my government would be interested in such information. I answered that my government did not care, but I could no more shed my nationality than a man can escape his skin.

  Abdullah giggled stupidly, but he had changed, and seemed less the serf. Aissa kept coming back to spies. He said, “You can lie among vipers, and they will not strike you unless you move in your sleep.” I detested him.

  One day we joined a track that led across gravel plains to a lonely well. The well had a stone and cement casing, a bucket with a rope, and no lid. The water lay about fifty feet down, dimly reflecting the brightness of the sky. No drowned bird marred its surface. Abdullah dropped the bucket, let it fill, and harvested a crop that was clear and cool. We drank, replenished the jerricans and goatskin waterbags, and poured bucketfuls over our heads. We drank again. We drove on.

  The last afternoon, in a waterless valley speckled with thorn trees, we came upon goats, and then again upon the Tuareg nomads. They had moved their camp and were expecting us. The women slipped away. I recognized the old master of the desert, and some of the children. Abdullah had changed into his finest robes, and was in a proud and happy humor. Aissa tried to distract me with chatter about the Sahara, but ran out of things to say. At such close quarters there was no way to keep the transaction from me. From behind the seat in the extended cab, Abdullah unloaded boxes of ammunition. Then he went to the back, threw the firewood to the ground, peeled back the tarpaulins, and handed down the cargo—a dozen Kalashnikov assault rifles.

  I don’t know why there were so few rifles. The rebel Tuaregs say they are fighting to make an independent nation of the central Sahara—an idea so obviously impractical that a dozen rifles may actually be the measure of it. But the rifles may also have been a sample of a larger order to come. Either way, I saw that the acquisition was important to the Tuaregs. And Aissa saw that I saw.

  I had served my purpose. We drove toward Djanet, only twenty miles to the north. We did not speak. The atmosphere in the pickup was deadly. Abdullah had sobered. Aissa seemed lost in thought. I sat forward on the backseat, and watched his hands, alert for any move toward his pistol. I calculated my chances of breaking his neck, which were small. But we came to the paved road between Djanet and its airport, and drove smoothly into town.

  I took a room at the hotel, and in the morning bought a ride with livestock traders hauling goats to Tamanrasset. I recognized one of the goats as an animal that Aissa had brought to Djanet. The traders smiled about this, and we agreed that it is in the nature of business. We had a pleasant two-day trip across the Hoggar Mountains. We listened to tapes of the Koran. We stopped often to water the goats, all of whom survived.

  In Tamanrasset I stayed wit
h Salah Addoun, and never mentioned Aissa. We dined again with the merchant Moulay Lakhdar Abderhadim, who asked about the trip he had arranged. What did I think of the Tadart?

  I answered that it was beautiful.

  Abderhadim beamed, and offered to find a similar ride for my continuing trip south along the Trans-Saharan to Niger.

  I thanked him and said that I had already made arrangements to travel by more public transport—two large trucks exporting dates to Agadez.

  Addoun named the drivers.

  Abderhadim looked satisfied. He predicted that the ride would be safe because of all the travelers who would accompany such a convoy. Trips to the south were unfortunately no longer frequent. He asked me if I knew of the Tuareg trouble, because he forgot that we had mentioned it before.

  18

  YAZID’S

  DESERT

  THE CHIEF JUDGE of Tamanrasset was a young and soft-spoken moralist who was widely feared. His name was Moulay Yazid. He shaved closely, and dressed in slacks and pressed shirts. Citizens cringed before him. They fawned over him. A lesser Saharan would have savored the power, and profited by it. But not Yazid, who resisted all temptation. He had read widely, and had traveled, and had learned to understand himself in a world larger than his surroundings. He was strong not because of his power but despite it.

  He may have been the most educated man in Tamanrasset. He spoke Arabic, French, English, Spanish, and a bit of Tamachek. He woke up early every morning, and worked hard all day. He did not go home at midday, and did not take naps, and rarely relaxed. We became friends, and spent late nights talking about the larger world. In a desert confused by conspiracist simplicities about the functioning of power, he recognized the limits to it. When he said, “There has never been a bad American president,” he meant that the worst ones had been checked by the Constitution. He mentioned ruefully that the same had not been true for the nations of the Sahara.