by Dennis James
The next morning, we get up early to see the sunrise from the top of Assekrem. It is another fantasy in red, the eastern faces of the brooding mesas and grotesque crags suddenly glowing like lanterns while their shadows stretch out and then draw back behind them, as if someone had opened a Gate of Hell and was now slowly pulling it shut.
The Artists, the Monk, the Queen, and the Chief
On the drive back to Tamanrasset, Barbara asks Sidi S about Neolithic pictographs that are supposed to be in the vicinity of our route. He smiles and says, “Tomorrow, tomorrow,” which has been his answer for the last two days. When I ask if he knows where they are, he gives a vague answer. It’s clear he doesn’t know anything about the drawings or doesn’t understand what we’re asking—or both. While Barbara fumes, I piece together an inquiry in French to Khan. His face lights up, “Oui, oui. Bien sûr.” Minutes later, the 4x4 is rocketing down a wadi, a dry riverbed.
In about half an hour, Khan pulls up, and there, ten meters away, are the drawings, mostly of animals and people, covering at least four square meters of standing red rock. They overlap and have differing degrees of verisimilitude to the creatures portrayed: obvious figures of humans, camels, snakes, and scorpions; and less obvious representations of horses and cattle. Most are stick figures, but some have carefully rendered features. Farther down the wadi are more pictographs clustered on high rising rocks on the sides of the dry streambed. There is no official signage, no explanatory material. We are alone with the doodles of our species from two to ten thousand years ago. Were these religious icons? Tribal signs? Journal entries? Or just something to do at the riverside while waiting for the wash to dry? The pictures are in the open, not in a cave. We acknowledge the artists’ wish that they be seen, collection by collection, like gallery hopping in Chelsea. Finally, an hour and many photos later, we leave the site to its mysterious purpose. What profundity do we take with us? Not much. Just more evidence of the uniquely human impulse to transcend our brief existence with art.
In Tamanrasset, we again stumble upon one of Charles de Foucauld’s former dwellings while browsing through shops for Tuareg silverwork. It is a small, windowless mud hut in a compound that also encloses a one-room school for Tuareg children, a chapel, and a shop. Members of de Foucauld’s order, a young French woman and a young Polish man, sell handmade Tuareg crafts to help support the school. They are proud of their work and spend thirty minutes telling us about de Foucauld and their mission. They’re nice, and we hope they don’t get shot like de Foucauld.
A short drive from Tamanrasset, just outside the oasis village of Abalessa, sit ruins and a small museum, which we visit the next day. Sidi S chats with the museum caretaker, ignoring the ruins. Khan, Barbara, and I nose around until we find a marker in French indicating that this was the residence, citadel, and tomb of Queen Tin Hinan. The tomb is empty. Sidi S, Khan, and the caretaker have no further information, and we learn nothing about the mysterious Queen. Once back in New York, we find out that she lived in the fourth century and was accorded great prestige as the matriarch of the Tuareg. It’s strange that three Algerians living in a region populated by the Tuareg could not, or perhaps would not, tell us anything about this historic figure.
We leave the Queen’s place to have lunch with a local family. Our host is the Tuareg chief of the village. He is a portly, stolid oligarch who barks orders to his sons and minions. He holds court under a large, leafy tree and serves us tea. We exhaust what few polite inquiries we have regarding his family, the village, and the weather, while he volunteers little and asks no questions in return. He has a substantial house into which we are not invited. The chief directs two of his sons, around eight and ten years old, to take Barbara and me on a tour of his property, which is several acres large, walled in, and planted with various productive crops and trees. Much of it is fodder for his herds of goats, but we also notice date palms, vegetables, and citrus trees. The boys are charming, quickly overcoming the language barrier by gesture and pantomime. They are delighted by Barbara’s photos. They show us the water supply and distribution system—a well with a motorized pump and a maze of shallow trenches among the crops.
Lunch is served in a replica of a Tuareg nomad shelter within the chief’s compound. The roof and walls are made of woven palm wood slats. The chief sleeps there every night on a palm wood pallet. After lunch, while Barbara takes pictures of the chief and his boys, I try the pallet and doze off, to everyone’s amusement. Things further loosen up when the chief’s wife brings out his youngest, a one-year-old son.
In the evening, we return to the Garden of Outoul hotel and retire early for our flight to Ghardia.
The M’zab
The old Air Algeria prop plane lands on the runway of the airport that services the M’zab Valley, in particular, the Mozambite cities of Ghardia, El Atteuf, Bou Nour, Melika, and Beni Isguen. The familiar figure of Sidi N in his trademark khaki bill cap and photographer’s vest appears; he’s as happy to see us as we are to see him. Word has already gotten back to him that the person assigned to us in the South as an English-speaking guide was neither, and he was worried. We assure him that Khan saved most of the day.
The Mozambites are a Berber people who practice an ultraorthodox version of Islam known as Ibadi. They were driven out of Northern Algeria by the Sunni Arab invasions and, beginning in the twelfth century AD, established five cities, each on a fortified hilltop above the M’zab Valley. They number 250,000, the largest concentration being 80,000 in Ghardia. They do not proselytize or use violence against nonbelievers. They are largely self-sufficient, having, over the centuries, devised unique methods of water supply and distribution. They are the shrewdest businessmen in Algeria, especially in the fields of retail sales and heavy construction, conducting business in locations throughout the country and abroad, and sending their profits home to the M’zab.
The cities are among the most graceful, architecturally, that we have ever seen, and that applies to both their old and new sections. The houses and streets are in perfect harmony with their environment. The buildings are whitewashed, with occasional pale-blue, soft-pink, or tan coloring, but are devoid of ornamentation. These dwellings have been designed to maximize comfort in the intense heat, with small windows, narrow outside lanes, and inner courtyards that provide shade. The principal mosque and fortress sits at the top of a hill with a square minaret beside it. From a distance, each town looks like a Cubist painting. The “new cities,” which are privately developed extensions of the old, are built on the same model, but with more amenities. The seven-hundred-year-old Mosque of Sheik Sidi Brahim in El Atteuff, now seldom used, is a small, pure-white one-story building with sensuously curved walls and ingeniously divided interior space. It was an inspiration for Le Corbusier’s design for several churches in France.
The community is prosperous. The cities are clean. Crime is minimal. No vagabonds are here.
Mosque of Sheik Sidi Brahim, El Atteuff
These are, however, cities of men. Young unmarried women, who are allowed to show their faces, pass us in the lanes. Then there are ghostly figures, shrouded in white and completely covered up with only one eye exposed, hugging the buildings as they hurry by. They are the married women. These one-eyed wraiths turn their faces away if the eye makes contact with a male eye from outside the family. And even these phantoms and their unmarried sisters disappear from the streets in the evening. Men seem to run everything. Marriages are arranged by men. Male elders govern the cities and resolve all disputes. Men control all the businesses.
Cultural or religious transgressions result in expulsion from the community, Sidi N tells us, shaking his head. He deplores these restrictions on women, but they seem to accept their situation—or at least show no obvious signs of rebellion. The population of M’zab is growing. There appears to be no mass exodus of women, and those who leave often come back. (Coincidentally, upon our return to the US, we see a new opera, Dark Sister, about the difficulty Mormon women have in walking away from their c
ommunity.)
Tourist access to the residential streets is restricted. A local guide must be engaged. Photographs of the residents are prohibited. Access to the mosques is denied, except, occasionally, to that of Sheik Sidi Brahim.
The Mozambites don’t need tourism. It is tolerated but not encouraged.
That is their right and, for them, it is probably a good policy. And who knows? Maybe behind those silent white walls, the women are running the show, telling the men, including the elders, what to do. But I don’t think so.
Timimoun, the Sea of Sand
We drive 630 kilometers across scrub desert, from Ghardia to Timimoun, an oasis town on the edge of the Grand Erg Occidental, also known as the Sea of Sand. About halfway, we stop at the mining town of El Golea. There, in the cemetery adjoining the small Catholic Church of St. Joseph, is the tomb of Charles de Foucauld, the ascetic monk. We seem to have become his followers. The grave is a simple concrete sarcophagus with his name and dates of birth and death, with no crosses or weeping angels. I’m sure he would have approved.
We find a small museum of natural history nearby. When we walk in to have a look, the young director is so excited he nearly has a stroke. He takes us through all the exhibits and, from memory, explains every dinosaur bone, arrowhead, lance point, cutting tool, grindstone, stew pot, and stuffed bird in the place. The museum is lovingly maintained and very interesting. Miners turn up a lot of old items and bring them to him. However, funding is scarce. We make his day, and, perhaps, his year.
We arrive at Timimoun in the early evening. It is a small, pretty town of eighteen thousand, sometimes called the Red Oasis because of the red clay used to make the stucco for its buildings. The Sudanese architecture of the city is particularly striking and uniform, consisting of deep-red walls with cream trim and crenellation. The main street, First of November Avenue, is a wide boulevard lined with shops, markets, cafés, hotels, and government buildings. It is a lively thoroughfare traversed by a wide variety of peoples—Arabs, Berbers, Sudanese, Nigeriens, Malinese, Mauretanians, a few Europeans, and two Americans. It is a treat just to sit in an outdoor café on the avenue, mentally translating a daily Liberté or El Watan newspaper, and watching this colorful parade.
Later, we stroll through the marketplace. The vendors are very friendly, and Barbara’s pictures of them elicit loud guffaws. Due to all our walking, the sole of one of her light hikers has separated. People direct us to a shoe repair facility in the market, where we find a young man with a small carpet, some tools, cans of polish, and a manual sewing machine. He fixes the boot in ten minutes and charges the equivalent of fifty cents. The repair lasts for the rest of the trip.
We stay in a villa on the edge of town, again the only tenants. The villa has a shaded café that overlooks part of the oasis-fed vegetable and fruit fields and provides a fine view of the sunset over the desert.
The next day, we go into the desert to visit a long-abandoned ksour, one of the tenth-century castles typically built on hilltops to guard the trade routes and provide shelter for the traders. Until early in the twentieth century, Timimoun was the largest slave-trading center in North Africa. From there, we gaze out at the endless encroaching dunes of the Grand Erg Occidental.
Our driver heads into the dunes with his 4x4 and shows off his hair-raising driving skills until he gets stuck at the crest of a dune. With all of us helping to dig and push, we get unstuck. I hope this tempers his enthusiasm for such stunts. Environmental damage aside, there should be some places where vehicles cannot go and that remain the exclusive realm of hiker and camel.
Adrar
In contrast to the historical Timimoun, Adrar is a modern industrial city built by the government during the past decade, where piping for the natural gas pipeline is manufactured. It is a neatly laid-out town of forty-five thousand with fairly attractive red and yellow residential developments, schools, and public buildings. There is an enormous palm tree–lined central square with a towering monument for the martyrs.
Sidi N takes us on a tour of an old, nearly vacant casbah and an abandoned Jewish quarter. “In the past ten years,” he says, “there have only been two tourists in Adrar. You. There is nothing here. Why did you put this place on your itinerary?”
In fact, this was the only destination included by the travel agency that we didn’t handpick. We figured they knew what they were doing. “Wrong,” says Sidi N. But we make the best of it, walking around the neighborhoods and just kicking back. The high point of the stay is dinner at an open-air grill, sitting on tree-trunk stools and watching the sweating chef carve up legs of lamb with a scimitar-sized knife that he flourishes theatrically. All the workers in the grill are from Mali. This triggers our curiosity about that country, which ultimately leads to our journey to Mali in 2012. We later find out from our travel agent that there are no daily flights from the Timmimoun area to Algiers and that the reason we were to stay overnight in Adrar was to wait for the next flight. Who knows? Perhaps we would not have gone to Mali had we not eaten at the grill in Adrar.
Algiers Redux and the Roman Ruins
Most of the day is spent in transit, but by late afternoon we are back in the Hotel Safir in Algiers. We have a corner room with windows on one side and French doors opening on a balcony that overlooks the harbor.
We unpack and relax for a while, then go for a walk before dinner. Many people are on the street downtown, strolling, window-shopping, hanging out. Suddenly, a young man comes from behind, grabs one of Barbara’s gold earrings, and runs off, dodging pedestrians on the sidewalk. Fortunately, the earring comes off easily and her ear isn’t injured, but she cries out, trips, and falls. I quickly determine that she’s okay but mistakenly think he had grabbed her purse, so I give chase, shouting “Stop, thief!” My plea in English is in the wrong language. No one stops the thief or even tries (I should have shouted in French, “Au voleur!”). He ducks down a dark side street and I lose him. I’m not sure what I would have done had I caught him.
Barbara is shaken up but otherwise all right. She blames herself for wearing gold earrings, and we learn a valuable lesson: we no longer travel with personal items that we can’t afford to lose.
Dinner with a half bottle of Coteaux de Mascara helps out. The incident is a sad blot on our Algerian experience, but it could have happened anywhere, including Brooklyn.
Cherchell and Tipasa are lovely seaside towns a couple of hours’ drive west of Algiers. Cherchell is a bustling Mediterranean fishing port that happens to be sitting on vast Phoenician, Roman, and Byzantine ruins 2,000 to 2,500 years old. The city was called Caesarea by Juba II in the first century AD, at the height of its glory. On the way, we pull off the highway and drive up a high hill to see a tomb that, allegedly, was the burial place of Numidian royalty beginning in 500 BC. It may or may not contain the remains of Juba II and Cleopatra Selene, Juba’s Queen and the daughter of Marc Antony and Cleopatra of Egypt. It seems that while his father, Juba I, spent his life and died fighting Roman domination of Algeria, Juba II served the Romans dutifully and well, administering Algeria to their great profit.
The tomb is a round pile of rock about thirty meters high and twice that in diameter. There is an entranceway, which is barred. According to Sidi N, there is nothing inside anyway, just one passageway that circles the perimeter and ends in an empty internment space. Because of its size and hilltop location, the tomb can be seen from many kilometers away. That’s unfortunate because it is not particularly attractive. Sic transit gloria mundi.
In Cherchell, there seems to be ambivalence among the citizenry about the antiquities in their midst. They maintain a museum containing some particularly fine Roman sculptures. On the other hand, several sites in the city, including a substantial amphitheater and bath complex, are fenced off and littered with trash. While we sit in a crowded café (all male clientele except for Barbara), Sidi N informs us that discoveries of antiquities in the city are considered a nuisance by some, hindering commercial development. At th
e city center, there is a spacious and well-tended town square where children play in a two-thousand-year-old fountain while their mothers sit on segments of fluted columns. Sunburned old men in worn black suits use Corinthian capitals as tables for their espresso. The Cherchellians utilize the antiquities without revering them.
Tipaza, on the other hand, is quiet and small. The ruins are outside the town and extensive, spilling down dramatically to the sea. While Tipaza also offers lovely beaches and turquoise waters for weekenders from Algiers, the antiquities are very important to the local community, more than just for their economic impact. They are taken seriously and well maintained.
This Roman outpost was home to twenty thousand people in the fourth century AD. It had the typical Roman city grid layout, with a paved decumanus (main street connecting with the Roman coastal road) and cardo maximus (main cross street). Lining these streets are nearly intact amphitheaters, fountains, temples, granaries, barracks, stables, baths, and villas of the illuminati. Common folk, small traders, craftspersons, farmers, and herders lived on the side streets. Plazas and gardens abound, in which ancient olive trees still stand, providing shade, fruit, and beauty. The columned forum, or marketplace, lines both sides of the cardo maximus, as do more sumptuous villas, all with a stupendous view of the sea. The offshore breeze tempers the heat. One could spend days roaming the woods and cliffs of this beautiful site, imagining the well-ordered, luxurious life lived here by the Roman inhabitants. At least until the Vandals arrived in AD 372.
The next day, Sidi N shows up with his eighteen-year-old grandson as an alternate driver, and we make the trip to Djémila, originally called Cuicul during the Roman and Byzantine occupation in the first six centuries AD. It lies in the Kabiye Mountains in Northeastern Algeria, a region that has regularly produced revolutionaries, including those who fought the French, Berber tribes demanding more autonomy, and Islamic militants seeking national power.