The hotel was a state-run place whose only guests were the foreign technicians residing there. They formed a small group—British, French, and one American—sent by their respective governments, and paid hardship salaries to brave the revolution and bring their ideas to the desert. Out of necessity they stuck together. I met them in the hotel restaurant, which played Michael Jackson tunes and had a menu made up entirely of unavailable choices.
After dinner we retired to the bar, which for religious reasons no longer served alcohol. The British especially seemed angry about the deprivation. They were experts in irrigation pumps and mixed drinks—cynical men who, having indulged in the remnant privilege of the white man, could no longer stand the natives, nor stand to return home. The sole American was different because he seemed in his heart never even to have left home. He came from Tuscumbia, Alabama, on the Tennessee River, and called himself Chuck. Chuck was sixty-five. He had a lean, lined, battered face, a glass eye, and a visored cap emblazoned with an American football. The cap read: Show Pride—Alabama—Roll with the Tide. I was the first American he had seen in nearly a year. He said, “I’m loving this,” and plied me with soft drinks.
The British wanted to talk about the missing alcohol. They described something they called iced tea, a mix of white liquors that would have knocked them senseless.
I changed the subject to Algeria.
They groaned. One said, “What takes forty-eight hours in Morocco and Tunisia takes eighteen months in Algeria.”
I answered, “Or maybe things just look better across the fence.”
Chuck said, “What does it matter? It’s all a desert out here anyway.”
He meant the world away from home, including Britain.
He wanted news of American football. The University of Alabama was his special interest. He was disappointed that I had not kept track.
He invited me to his room, where he lived with Guy Lombardo cassettes, Robert Ludlum novels, a water purifier, and a hot plate. He showed me his cartons of candy bars, instant mashed potatoes, beans and franks, and macaroni. The room smelled of canned deodorizer, which he sprayed daily to mask the stench of the toilet. He told me he felt like a prisoner. He meant that he lived in isolation and felt lonely.
Chuck was a chicken man. He had come to Biskra on behalf of the United States to build a demonstration farm intended to teach Saharans how to raise production-line chickens. But Chuck himself was not convinced. “This is our tax dollars,” he complained. “Yours and mine. It’s a goddamned giveaway.”
He was angry because he was partly to blame. We sat in his room in two chairs by an open window, and talked late into the night. He asked about my work in the Sahara, and I said something empty about events there, as if there were any. He saw through this, and asked where I had been over the years, and why I traveled. I said I traveled out of curiosity about the horizons. Chuck was not that kind of man. He said he hated the damned horizon. He traveled too, and had most of his adult life, but only because he was known in some corner of the Department of Agriculture for his willingness to endure. He wanted to tell me about it.
“They’re sitting in some damned office over there, and some damned somebody says ‘Chickens,’ and somebody says, ‘Send Chuck—he’ll take the job.’ ”
And Chuck would.
He said, “I didn’t think much about it at first. Korea, Vietnam in the early days, Pakistan. After a while I didn’t know what else I’d do. The money was good, for chickens. Vietnam again, Egypt, a bunch of others. Algeria? I wish I’d told somebody even just once to go to hell.”
Here in Biskra he kept threatening to quit, which is not the same.
“It wouldn’t be so bad if these people wanted chickens, but they don’t. They never do.”
To show for his life he had some money in the bank.
He peered at me with his good eye, unaware that his glass eye had slewed. “You a married man?”
I said, “Yes,” but I don’t think he heard me.
He said, “I’ve been single twenty years. I swear my next wife’s gonna be deaf and dumb and own a bar.” It was a stock joke, a verbal twitch, and he did not smile. The years had reduced his family to a widowed sister on an Alabama farm. He placated himself with thoughts of retirement. “Florida for the bad months, Alabama for the fishing.”
In the morning I accompanied him to the post office, where he checked his box, which was empty. He complained that it took over a month to get a letter from his sister. I sympathized. He gave me Algerian postal Par Avion labels to paste on my own letters.
He didn’t want to let me go.
We exchanged addresses, and I left him standing at the center of town, a little man in plaid pants, flip-down sunglasses, and sneakers.
4
CITY
IN
THE
DUNES
BEYOND BISKRA, THE Sahara starts in earnest. This is the Great North, the desert as people imagine it—a scorching flatland of pale soil, a palm grove like a shimmering green line floating in the distance, an ocean of dunes. You can close your eyes to see it.
But the north is also a desert of surprises. The first is the oil that required the new nation beyond to pay attention. The second is the ample subterranean water that allowed small towns to become large ones. The third, which grew from the wealth and water, is the web of paved roads that makes driving the north almost easy. The roads are narrow, and sometimes interrupted by drifting sand, but they are maintained and easy to follow.
Away from the roads this is still a big desert: flat, scorching, and difficult to navigate. Distances between neighboring oases are a hundred miles or more. Drivers who set off cross-country and miscalculate their directions by a few degrees may miss their destinations by miles, then drive in frightened circles until they can drive no more. Satellite navigation would be useful, but drivers can barely afford to keep recapped tires on their cars. So it is better to stick to the pavement, where help is usually near. The roads are frequented by refrigerated trucks, army convoys, private cars, and swarms of yellow taxis. Those taxis are the desert’s fourth surprise. When you close your eyes and think of the Sahara, you don’t naturally picture a fleet of smoky Peugeot station wagons in need of repairs. They operate under license, shuttling between neighboring oases, and, unlike the bush taxis of sub-Saharan Africa, they rarely carry more than the legal maximum of seven people, plus luggage. But they also rarely depart without a full load. So you go to the station, find the right Peugeot, check its tires, negotiate a price, and wait. You don’t ask about the departure time because the driver has no idea, but will always answer “soon.”
The wait may last an hour or several days. Open-ended waiting is good training for the deeper Sahara, a place with no roads or taxis, where even at its best, the transportation is uncertain. But waiting anywhere is unpleasant work. In the north, you try to find shade within sight of the taxi. There are no reservations. A taxi that is one person short may suddenly be three people too full, and if you don’t fight for your place, you lose it. Then you start again. I have been stranded for days in some oases, unlucky, and unable to grab a cab. But in Biskra I escaped that fate.
The driver I found was an aging man with a tasseled ski cap and gold-rimmed teeth. He did not speak much, but asked to fasten our seatbelts as we approached the roadblock on the edge of town. We were as usual six passengers. The police checked our belts, then had us undo them and step out of the taxi for an identity check. Two veiled women were allowed to remain in the car. The driver handed over his permits wordlessly. The police found no subversives, and let us go.
A mile later, we discovered that Biskra’s only gas station had run dry. We would have to wait until a tank truck arrived to replenish it. No one asked how long this would take. Out of modesty, the women again stayed in the taxi, looking straight ahead. The men climbed out and crouched in the dirt beside the road.
A clean-shaven young man told me his name was Leuilli. The women were his mother
and sister. It was Friday, the Islamic Sabbath, and he was escorting them south to visit his uncle. I asked him if the women weren’t suffering from the heat inside the car. He looked surprised and said no. But the temperature outside had climbed to 100 degrees.
Leuilli spoke difficult French and a little English. Dates had rotted his teeth. He told me he was a student: twice he had failed the baccalaureate, but he would try again as soon as he found time to study. He wanted to talk about the United States.
Eventually the tank truck came, and replenished the station, and the taxi gassed up, and we set off for El Oued, a city in the dunes, 150 miles across the desert. Leuilli insisted on sitting beside me. I insisted on a place by an open window.
The Sahara undulated under pale blue sky. The ground was made of dirt and gravel, and was tan and barren, but not bare. It supported patches of grass and small bushes. We passed a ruined mosque alone in a stand of palms, and a camel wandering un-tethered. An oued filled with refracted sunlight shimmered like a lake. The road followed it, descending, and stretched across the Chott Melrhir, a salt flat below the level of the sea. Seeking relief from the heat, I leaned into the hot breeze pouring through the open window.
The human animal is the most adaptable of all species, and the most successful in the desert, but it cannot stand to be overheated. The body requires about ten days to get used to the extremes of the desert climate, makes small adjustments, which allow it to dissipate heat more easily, but it never learns to conserve water. Of course some people can just naturally stand the heat better than others. Because human cooling works by sweat, it works best on people with a lot of skin in proportion to their weight—people who are short and skinny. But there is no such physical type as a desert rat. Saharans are born small, but also tall and fat. Visitors are as comfortable after ten days as after ten generations. During the summer when the afternoon air sears your lungs, Saharans feel the pain as well, and complain frequently about the weather.
Beliefs make their suffering worse. Women in the Sahara would feel cooler in light, full clothing, but they dress in heavy robes to hide even the hint of their sexuality. The most pious of them willingly wear bunched ski socks around their ankles, and heavy woolen gloves to hide the shape of their hands. The desert is full of such self-imposed tortures. I have been told in the Sahara to avoid drinking water to avoid sweating. I have been told that hot liquids cool better than warm ones, and that warm ones cool better than cold ones, and that cold ones will overheat you. Now, in this taxi without air-conditioning, I was asked by the other passengers to roll up my window because I was letting in the hot wind. Leuilli agreed. Afterward we all suffered together.
Our driver put on a tape of the Koran, a lovely, melodic reading of the holy book. “If you’re bad, you’ll go to Hell,” Leuilli said. He meant a place of drought and fire. “But if you’re good, you’ll go to Paradise.” He meant a place where only donkeys suffer.
We stopped at a lone adobe house, the color of the earth. A boy emerged and offered sweet tea in shot glasses. I bought a round for everyone. Leuilli was pleased, and took tea to his mother and sister. They drank behind their veils, still looking ahead. The men walked into the desert and washed ritually with dust before kneeling toward the east to say their afternoon prayers.
Later we came to the sand. It started in sheets and streaks and pockets on the gravel, floated and swirled across the road, and built into yellow dunes on the horizon. Desert sand is made of eroded and weathered rock, mostly quartz particles, pushed and rounded by the wind. It crept into the taxi and settled on the floorboards. The driver switched off the cassette player, and wrapped a strip of cotton around his mouth and nose. No one spoke. The dunes marked the shore of the Eastern Erg, a sand sea covering 120,000 square miles, an area slightly larger than the state of Arizona. The erg is 70 percent sand. It contains hidden salt flats, and here and there, the gravely surface of the desert floor. At its core lies an area of 90 percent sand that itself is the size of New York state, and has a population of zero. Other sand seas are larger.
The Eastern Erg is an erg because the basin in which it lies has been trapping sand for over a million years. The sand comes from ancient river and lake beds, and more recently from the weathering of rock at the foot of the Atlas Mountains near Biskra, where over the past 2,000 years the winds have excavated the desert floor by as much as thirteen feet. The wind gathers the grains from the desert floor, then soars, skids, and bounces them across flat land until they come to a basin. Inside the basin the winds slow and swerve, tangle with the dunes, and drop their load.
M. Mainguet, a French geographer, writes that the Eastern Erg still has a “positive sand budget.” He means that the erg has a wealth of grains, and keeps getting richer. The sand continues to accumulate by six million tons every year. If all the grains in the Eastern Erg were evenly leveled, they would lie eighty-five feet thick. But they do not. As the sand begets sand, it forms into dunes, which grow nearly 400 feet above the basin floor, repeat every mile, and shift about. Most sand seas are uninhabitable. El Oued, our destination, is one of the few places where people have chosen to make a stand. It was settled about six billion sand tons, or a thousand years ago, and named for the water that still seeps close below the surface. It is justifiably famous for its survival.
Sand spilled onto the road, and the pavement grew worse. Leuilli thought we were driving too fast; he worried that we would blow a tire. The driver carried no spare, because no one does. Tires are scarce and expensive, about six hundred dollars apiece at the official exchange rate. Leuilli asked me about the situation in the United States. When I admitted that tires are plentiful and less expensive, he asked me the price of jeans. I answered, relatively low. Leuilli sighed. “You know, I dream about America.”
When the old Peugeot began to stutter, the driver acted as if he hadn’t noticed. The passengers exchanged glances and said nothing. Then the car lost power entirely, and coasted to a stop. The driver went forward to fiddle under the hood. This time, optimistically, we stayed inside.
Leuilli asked again about the United States. “Is the living cheap there?”
“No cheaper than in Algeria.”
“Is there unemployment.”
“Not like here. But many people are poor.”
Leuilli refused to believe it. He smiled. “In America life is easy.”
Another passenger interrupted crossly, “You speak nonsense.” He was an older man in a suit and fez, holding a briefcase on his lap. He said, “You must not compare Algeria with America or Europe. They are rich and powerful countries. Our histories are different.”
Leuilli looked rebuked.
The gentleman formally introduced himself. His name was Mr. Miloudi, and he was traveling to El Oued on business. He asked me if I had been to Ouargla, the oasis where he lived. I said I had. Ouargla had been the home of Malika and Ameur Belouard in the years before the accident. It is an unattractive oil and government town of 100,000 people. But Mr. Miloudi didn’t see it that way. He spoke proudly about Ouargla’s wide boulevards and modern buildings. “All that was built since we threw the French out.”
Mr. Miloudi had fought in the war of independence. He was the rare Saharan who seemed truly not to care about the West. Now he wandered off to urinate in the desert. Leulli was unrepentant, and took the chance to talk about American military power: the Persian Gulf War, the earlier bombing of Tripoli—these attacks on his brethren had only strengthened his belief in the unfailing magic of the United States. You could no more dissuade him of it than you could dissuade a conspiracist, and knowing this, I did not try. The driver got the engine started. We limped on.
The dunes loomed larger, bore down on the pavement, and pushed their sandy tongues across the road. Road signs warned of SABLE!, French for Sand!, as if otherwise a driver might not notice. The sand streamed in jets from the crests of the dunes like snow streaming from alpine peaks. It eddied downslope and out over the road at knee level. It swirled and slip
ped across the pavement. It wore the paint off the warning signs.
We came to a yellow bulldozer belching diesel smoke, a machine engaged in endless battle. The operator was a man about my age, with a black beard. He paused placidly while we stopped to consider a way across a patch of sand, and he and I exchanged curious glances. His features were hawklike. His eyes were deep and calm. I admired his resignation and his ability to labor on, just as from a distance I sometimes regret my own ambitions. Still, I won’t pretend that I envied him his life. I would tear myself inside with frustration. So much of who we are is where we have been.
Closer to El Oued we came to a group of farmers with shovels, flinging sand. Farmers in an erg fling sand in order to survive. They plant clusters of date palms in the depressions between dunes, then spend their lives defending them. Only from the depressions can the palms tap into the underground water; but the palms then interrupt the wind and bury themselves in sand. Untended, the depressions would not stay depressed for long.
But the farmers are more clever than they seem. They fight back by ambush, ringing their gardens with thatched fences, which do not stop the sand directly, but intercept the winds. Sand builds against the fences, grain by grain, and engulfs them. Artificial dunes are born. They rise as the farmers build new fences on the graves of the old. After years, the dunes tower in tight circles above the palms, providing shelter to the trees. To the casual observer, the effect is of holes dug by hand, but the real work is done by the wind. Farmers from El Oued have learned how to grow the sand.
Sahara Unveiled Page 3