Pinatubo II
Page 25
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Next evening found them on a desert road east of Agadez, traversing the rocky crags of ancient worn mountains. On another Friday and another missed day off for Aahil, they were combining a tour of the southern Ayărs with a search for a magic air valley. Brad explained how daytime heat captured in a valley rises in the evening, like a thermal but spread out. The air of the whole valley ascends, lifting raptors and paragliders alike, magically. “Kind of like ridge lift too, any air going upward slows your descent. Magic air has a more mysterious source.”
The road trended upwards from sand bottom valleys, giving way to chattering stone on the passes. Vince hummed as he listened.
“We need the right kind of valley.” Brad pointed at the topography on visiscreen. Scouting for ideal terrain, he pointed out a couple promising spots they could ground checked as they passed. A wadi allowing a drive at least part way up would help and then a nice flat launch spot.
Conversation turned to the project—they lost only one balloon the night before, but Aahil tracked the location down today.
“Your guy got to it riding a motorbike.”
“True.” Aahil said.
“Can the scout truck get in there?” Brad asked. “Or we could rig up a small pull-trailer for a motorbike,” Brad said.
“Yes, good,” Aahil said. “We recover balloon to scout.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Vince said.
With little light left in the day, and Brad having marked two promising ridges on the map they decided to tour beyond the Ayărs. Next evening they could return and fly.
On a final descent the road passed through thinning rocks into the sand. As they left the mountains, the track lead them into a desolate nothingness, what Aahil called the true desert.
“I don’t see one blade of grass,” Vince said, glancing out the window.
Anywhere Aahil pointed Vince saw nothing. But he noticed a stir in their driver’s Tuareg blood, more even than at the Sultan’s palace. Places he knew, they could not. Where once the barren sand had been plains of green grass covered in grazing gazelles. That age was better remembered back in the Ayărs.
“What makes a true desert?” Brad asked.
For the Tuareg, the Sahara was not one desert, but the Tinarimen—‘the deserts’. The name rang with sweeping meaning when Vince looked across the expanse. The road they drove withered into the distance of the Ténéré, the truest desert of ‘the deserts’. The uninhabited emptiness, the place where there is nothing, nothing at all. Where the jinn, the spirits of the desert played tricks on your mind when alone, Aahil explained in all earnest. Yet truly, the Tuareg legend told where now they looked upon the purest of sand, there once lay not a mirage, but a water filled lake.
Vince called up an infogram tour—to supplement Aahil’s rich desert tribal history. The Taureg had migrated thousands of years ago from the north to the Sahel, after the green Sahara had waned, across true desert sands. They were pushed south by Arabs in the times of horses and chariots. The tour guide added how after the Taureg move the trail they followed became a later medieval trade route, to Bilma in today’s Niger.
Touring before the Taureg people lived on the land, the guide told of Green Sahara times. Ahead in the now Ténéré Desert, in those times first the Kiffian people lived with roaming elephants and giraffes, like the president’s Dabous Rock carving. Alligators and hippos swam in local waters, and the people had been of the fisher/hunter kind.
Aahil listened intently, as Vince revealed the history.
Later as the lake dried the Tenerians lived in the Aïr Mountains among olive, juniper, Aleppo pine forests, and rivers in valleys teemed with fish. The people ran pastoral cattle on plains of seed-bearing grasses. Still before Taureg, 8500 years ago to 6500 years ago, large mammals roamed the land as in African national parks of today. Aahil told them how the president did not mention the thousands of years that had passed, only that he wanted his people invigorated about this, the times of a Green Sahara. And, many people were listening.
On their return in the dark, as twinkling stars appeared, Vince let his mind drift as Brad traced out possible ascent routes on the terrain map.
“Feels square,” Vince said.
“Explain,” Brad said.
“You know, when you run the math of a statistical model. You run iterations until you have the error minimized. Same with the world. You can tell when you’ve done everything you can by how you feel. One feeling equation confirms another. You know, like fair and square.”
“That an angel message?”
“Yeah.” Vince grinned.
“Okay bud, tomorrow we return. We’re gonna find us some valley air out here,” Brad said. “Maybe we’ll call it angel air, instead of magic.”