Around the World in 50 Years

by Albert Podell

  With a roar and a rush, the five of us ran toward the pool, yelling loudly. The frightened camels dashed out, all except for an ugly albino veteran I had to slap hard on the rump. For half an hour, Steve and I bathed in the pool and stood under the gushing pipe, letting the water soak into every dehydrated pore of our bodies, while Willy took our photo, the same photo featured in The New York Times four months later—surely the first (and perhaps the last?) the Times printed of a full-frontal naked man—when we were reported lost in a deadly cholera epidemic in Afghanistan.

  The pool was heaven until the camels regrouped and, led by the albino avenger, aggressively returned to reassert their rights. It was our turn to retreat. Besides, the border was about to open, and we were eager to get across.

  Once through, we followed the dirt track toward the east and, as the sun came hotter into the sky, we began to feel the effects of dehydration. Our eyes burned and our lips cracked. We found no wells in this part of the desert, not a tree anywhere, not even a boulder to give shade.

  Suddenly, as we peaked a slight rise, we saw a glorious sight in the distance: a rare desert lake! We gunned the engines, turned off the track, and raced the vehicles toward the water’s edge. We soon left the soft sand of the desert and reached the hard-crusted surface that marked the periphery of the lake. But the water itself, that refreshing, beckoning water, was still distant, still farther than we’d thought. The faster we drove, the faster the water receded toward the horizon … until we gradually came to realize we’d been fooled. It was a mirage, a fata morgana, a classic deception of those shimmering sands, but a deception of such magnitude and perfection that we were all stunned.

  The ground was packed sand and salt deposits interlaced with a network of the tiniest fissures, clearly a dried lake bed. The map confirmed it: Chott el Djerid, the largest salt pan in the Sahara, half as wide as Tunisia itself, half as long as Lake Erie, 70 feet below sea level, occupying an area as large as Connecticut, absolutely waterless and barren at this time of year. We forgot our thirst just thinking of this marvel, and chuckling over how we, supposedly old desert hands by then, had been so deceived.

  We opted to rely on our compass and continue across the roadless lake bed a while, as it was a relief not having to dodge rocks and potholes and soft sand, and a thrill to be driving where, as far as we could tell, no vehicle had ever rolled before, leaving white tracks on the virgin soil. (Twelve years later I saw this odd place again, in a movie theater, but there it was called planet Tatooine, and plodding across its crusty sands were Luke Skywalker, C-3PO, R2-D2, and a holographic Princess Leia.)

  After we crossed into Libya, we resumed our run on the old asphalt coastal road to the still-standing ruins of the third-century Roman city of Sabratha, where all was as silent as the desert night, lifeless as the desert day, and sea wind and weather were threatening to reduce to limestone dust what had once been part of the glory of Rome. I walked in wonder through the temples of Liber Pater, Isis, and Serapis, past a Christian basilica dating from the time of Emperor Justinian, and on the mosaic floors of the baths overlooking the sea.

  At the start of a sandstorm, Steve scouts for a route across Tunisia’s 160-mile long Chott el Djerid, the largest salt pan in the Sahara. It can be crossed by boat in winter, but completely dries up in the summer, when the temperature reaches 120 degrees. Driving is dangerous because the salt crust is not firm.

  I couldn’t help thinking that this was once a bustling city in a mighty empire, a thriving city in a civilization that ruled most of the then-known world for over 400 years, a civilization that brought engineers and aqueducts and teachers and libraries to the most distant corners of the darkness, an empire relatively more powerful in its time than my own country in its, an empire whose enemies were just heathens on horseback and nomads on camels, yet an empire of which only these ruins remained.

  Our host in Libya was Mohammed Soussi, the owner of a fledgling Toyota operation headquartered in Benghazi, and we came to know him well during our week in his company, while his men serviced our vehicles and repaired the camper undercarriage. On our last night, he hosted a farewell dinner for us, and after his other guests had gone, we sat on a terrace overlooking the city and talked. When the conversation turned to religion, he gave me an insight into his, declaiming:

  “Islam gives meaning to my whole life. I could not live without it. It tells me everything I need to know and every way how to act. It is the greatest religion, the only true religion. Your religions are a fairy tale with miracles and sons of God and Trinities. With Islam there is only one God and He is all powerful. Mohammed is the one true prophet of God, and His writings are the only way that the divine will can be learned. The Koran is the final revelation. We need look no further and we need accept no other. The Koran tells us all we need to know about how to conduct our lives and how to submit to the will of God.

  “I never worry. I never drink alcohol. I do not covet young girls, or boys, and I will make my marriage with the help of my father. I never think of suicide and I never think of taking drugs. I am not, like so many in the West, troubled by doubts and fears and neuroses. I know that Allah watches over everything we do, and that if we do everything as He has caused to be written in the Koran, we shall have our reward. I am serene and at peace with myself and the world. I am delighted with the sunrise, because it is the work of God, and with the sunset, because that is also His doing. And when I say my prayers and praise Him, I am sure that He hears them. Does yours?”

  Because of the time spent mending the camper-trailer, we could make only a short stop at Leptis Magna, much as I’d have preferred to stay a week. Far more extensive and glorious than Sabratha, Leptis had been a showplace of the Roman Empire, birthplace of the powerful Emperor Septimius Severus, a handsome city of colonnaded avenues, amphitheaters, meeting halls, fountains, baths, basilicas, forums, libraries, arches, and some 40 major buildings. Unlike Sabratha, which had been built from local limestone, Leptis was fashioned from splendid multicolored marble brought from Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor, and its noble stone still stood gleaming as it had before the birth of Christ.

  After leaving Leptis, we saw nothing for miles save the tiniest villages and the dullest desert. The road we followed was La Strada Imperiale, built in the 1930s by the Italian fascists. It still bore the scars of WW II, when it had been chewed up by tanks, blasted by dive bombers, blown apart by land mines, and cratered by artillery shells. The holes were strategically spaced and impossible to avoid. Whoever first suggested that “if nothing goes right, go left,” never tried to negotiate this road.

  The road’s condition gave rise to some local humor:

  Q. What do you do when you come to a pothole?

  A. Honk, in case somebody is in it.

  The roadside was strewn with the carcasses of giant truck tires that had been torn to shreds by the potholes and the desert heat. Many of the demolished tires were three feet in diameter and laced with metal mesh, so dense that two of us couldn’t lift one, yet the road had shattered them. The only thing in the road’s favor was that it was straight, arrowing across the desert, often running 30 to 40 miles without a turn or bend.

  The desert sapped our energy and desiccated our bodies. Then the ghibli began, the dread Saharan wind that is the scourge of Libya. We’d been warned about the ghibli, but the reality went beyond description and further than imagination. It was a blow of pure heat like the discharge of a blast furnace. Inside the cars, which had no AC, the thermometers zoomed over 120 degrees. Whether we drove fast or slow, there was no getting away from the desert blowtorch. It blistered our eyes, cracked the insides of our noses, and parched our throats. Our temperatures soared, our pulses raced up to 130 beats a minute. Any exertion was exhausting: It was an effort to breathe, a struggle to move, a torment to drive. We were being baked alive, but could not escape the searing wind until it died of its own accord two hours later.

  The ghibli is so much the bane of Libya that it’s mainly t
o blame for the desert that covers 98 percent of it. Irrigation and fertilizers can make the sands bloom, but they can’t beat the ghibli. Flourishing fields have been wiped out in a day, farmers ruined in hours. Only the hardiest olive trees and date palms survive. Because of the ghibli, Libya couldn’t be considered a developing nation: “She’s as developed as she’s ever going to be,” one old-timer opined, “as long as she has the ghibli. Once that wind hits, there’s nothing left to develop.”

  Half the Libyans were still nomads, and we saw more of them as we left the desert floor and slowly climbed toward the hills of the Jabal Al Akhdar, where scrawny goats, sheep, and camels hungrily chewed tufts of grass and stubble into something digestible. The sun beat down without mercy, and there was no shade, not a bush or a tree anywhere. I felt sorry for the animals, and for the people who had never sheltered under a tree, lain in a flower-filled meadow, or basked in a cool brook. I thought of my parents’ courageous migrations from their shtetls that had enabled me to be born in the most prosperous of lands, while these less fortunate people had been born in the most wretched. What if we, like them, had been born never to know a full belly, a day without fear of illness and uncertainty, a carefree love, a rewarding life? I had believed that people could be masters of their fates, that with ambition and perseverance they could rise and achieve, but I realized then that it was not true for all, and that for many—indeed, perhaps for most of humanity’s billions—there were no grand opportunities, no high hopes, no worry-free days, no comforts but an early grave.

  I soon felt sorry for us. We suffered another major breakdown of the camper-trailer (which we belatedly realized was unsuited for these rough roads), and labored all day to remove the axle. By nightfall our food and water were gone, except for the box of matzos, which I insisted we had an obligation to save for our photo op at the pyramids. We’d been traveling light on rations because of the exorbitant prices in Benghazi, planning to stock up in Egypt, and we’d drunk our water cans dry in a couple of hours from our exertions. Only one car passed all day. They had no water to spare.

  We were preparing to settle down for a parched and hungry night when a military 4 × 4 pulled up beside us, and out jumped a trim Libyan army lieutenant who offered us his canteen. No genie leaping out of a lamp could have materialized at a better time.

  The lieutenant, who told us to call him Ihab, was an instructor at a remote camp near the Egyptian border, about 50 miles east, where he taught guerrilla warfare, counterinsurgency tactics, demolition, traps, and sabotage to a company of commandos. He’d been to Benghazi on leave to visit his wife and was returning to his camp when he saw us.

  I asked if he had any food. He thought for a moment, then pointed south. “We will get food from the nomads. They are passing through here on their way to summer pasture in the hills. I visited their encampment a few days ago.”

  “But aren’t the nomads dangerous?” Woodrow asked. “Don’t they beat up strangers and rob them?”

  “Only the nomads with the five-sided tents. Even I stay away from them. But these are different. There will be no trouble if I am with you.”

  “You mean they’re afraid of the army?” I asked.

  “Not at all. We have no control over them. When we got our independence, the king promised the nomads they could come and go as they pleased, and we let them keep all their guns. They have no passports. They cross the borders as they wish. Our country is trying to persuade them to settle down and become farmers, but it will take years. It is difficult to build a nation when half its people are never in the same place from one month to the next. But they are too proud to be told what to do. It was their great-great-ancestors who destroyed the towns along the coast after the Romans left, and it was their sheep and camels, a thousand years ago, that pastured on the farms and ate all the grasses and pulled down the forests and caused this desert.

  “Our legends tell us that once a man could walk all the way from Tripoli to Tangier in the shade of trees and gardens. But these nomads destroyed them all. They want to stay with their old ways. Every year more of them die. When there is no rain and no grass, you see everywhere the bones of their baby sheep and goats. The herds get smaller every year. Many of the families have only enough left to keep alive.”

  “Then how will they be able to help us?” Manu asked.

  “The Bedouins here do well. They are near Cyrene and the hills, where there is always some rain and grass. Their goats and sheep survive.”

  “Then why don’t more Bedouins come here?”

  “It is forbidden. It would be war. Each tribe grazes where it has grazed for a thousand years. Each tribe has a boundary. If they find another tribe on their grazing land, they kill them.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a very charitable attitude,” Woodrow remarked.

  “The Bedouins are not known for their charity.”

  “Then what makes you think they’ll give us food?” Steve asked.

  “You will give them a present, of course. Some clothing is always good, or jewelry. Also bring your rifles: We must show the nomads you are armed so they won’t come back and rob you when you sleep.”

  “The only extra clothes we have are shoes, and we don’t have rifles, just bows and arrows,” I explained.

  “That will do. The nomads wear shoes. And they will respect you as warriors if you bring bows and arrows, for their fathers used them before the British gave them guns in the war.”

  Steve and I left the others to guard the trailer. We drove four miles due south into the desert before Ihab stopped us: “We will walk the rest of the way,” he said, “so that we don’t disturb their animals.”

  I saw black tents outlined against the blackness of the desert night. What seemed like open space between the tents was crisscrossed with guy ropes, and by the time we’d stumbled our way through them, the whole camp was aware of our presence. Sheep and goats shied away, chickens and children scurried in front of us, and tethered camels snorted beside the large hide tents. The night air was fragrant with the scent of tea and baking bread.

  Ihab led the way to the sharif’s tent, at whose threshold we laid our bows to show we came in peace, and bowed to the smiling old man who bade us enter. We left our shoes outside, except for the pair we brought to barter. After a round of Arabic courtesies and formalities, the lieutenant explained the purpose of our visit, pointing to our gift. The sharif pointed to our bows on the threshold, whereupon they went into a long palaver before seeming to reach an agreement.

  I inspected the surprisingly comfortable tent. It was about 40 feet in diameter and 15 feet high, with an earthen floor covered by thick carpets atop straw mats. The peak, which had wide holes at the seams, where air and light could enter, wasn’t rainproof, but in a land where it sometimes doesn’t rain for a year, that was not a major concern. As we’d entered, someone had drawn a curtain across the rear sections of the tent, which were the women’s quarters and the kitchen. When strangers arrive, the women are hidden so as not to see or be seen.

  The most remarkable aspect of the tent was its treasures: Stacked against half the length of the wall to a height of three feet were dozens of neatly folded carpets, each exquisitely woven, each worth a fortune. The chief proudly spread them before us. I saw something protruding from one of the rugs that looked like a rifle butt. The chief caught my gaze and pulled out an ancient Italian rifle wrapped in rags. He pointed up to the center post, which was crisscrossed with cords from which hung other rifles. I detected the front sight of a rifle peeking out from under the chief’s cushion. Four or five chests stood beside the stacked rugs, each a sturdy trunk studded with decorative nail heads. I could only imagine what was in them.

  The sharif opened a smaller chest to pull out a box, inside of which I glimpsed a sparkle and shine and heard the clinking of coins. From the box he withdrew four small glasses with ornate rims. One of his wives entered from behind the curtain, bringing an old British army canteen filled with steaming water. She only par
tly hid her face from us, too curious to hide completely. She was close to 16, dressed in a scarlet skirt and white blouse, with gold bracelets on her slim wrists and ankles. She was full of life and energy, and I found her very attractive except for some bluish tattoo marks on her chin and between her eyes. It was hard to hide my admiration from her husband—and my envy of him. I found something overwhelmingly compelling about this old man and his nomadic life. This was the other side of that existential coin, a life with no bonds and no borders, no bosses and no time clocks, no meetings and no conference calls. It was moving with the sun, blowing with the wind, making passionate love in a great airy tent on a cooling desert beneath a canopy of brilliant stars.

  The chief performed an elaborate ritual of pouring the tea back and forth from several feet above the glass with obvious love for his labors. When he finally considered the brew suitable for serving, it was as sweet as honey, thick as liqueur, and hot as fire. He drank his without cooling it, and Ihab bid us to do the same. It scorched the lips, melted the teeth, and warmed the soul. The chief pressed another glass on us, then another. Refusal was not an option.

  When the tea was finished, the chief clapped his hands. Two of his other wives came from behind the curtain, laden with food, which they placed at our feet: a big porcelain pitcher of thick goat’s milk, a pile of flat brown bread, and a metal bowl holding several dozen small eggs.

  “That’s a good haul for a pair of shoes,” I told the lieutenant when we were clear of the camp. “You’re a great bargainer.”

  After a minute of silence, Ihab confessed: “I’m afraid I had to promise him more than the shoes…”