As if reflecting the change of direction the landscape changes too. A long escarpment wall has risen up from nowhere and dominates the eastern horizon until the light goes down and it blends into the general darkness. Our convoy rattles on, twisting and turning until the track tackles the escarpment head-on. For the first time since crossing the Atlas Mountains we are climbing, steadily, if not spectacularly, following the thin dusty plume of the vehicle ahead.
We level out on a plateau of splintered rocks. It’s a bare, dispiriting place.
Night falls, and with it comes that vague anxiousness I’ve felt many times since we left Morocco. A feeling that we could go on like this for days and nothing would ever change.
I wake from a bumpy back-seat slumber to find we’ve stopped. Ahead of us figures in veils flit away from our headlights into a large, crisply flapping tent. Cassa has got out and is striding off into a grove of trees. We disembark. Stretch legs, yawn, drink some water. It’s nine o’clock by my watch when Cassa returns with furrowed brow and motions us into the vehicles.
Apparently, a friend of his, who was to put us all up tonight in his ‘Typical Nomadic Tent’, has disappeared into the desert, as nomads do, and not come back.
So, off we go again. Back into the night.
Half an hour later, dots of light flicker in the distance. They prove to belong to a small encampment outside the little town of Azougui, which bears unlikely signs of tourist facilities. As we turn into the compound our headlights pick out a painted board, the name of an auberge and the reassuring words beneath it, ‘Pres de la Ville. Loin du Son Stress‘.
It’s not where we were meant to be, but no-one’s complaining.
Day Twenty-Four
AZOUGUI TO ATAR
Pass the night in a thatched hut, shared with Basil, with barely room to stand up straight. Woken in the small hours by the sounds of a ferocious cat fight. The ensuing trip to the loo is quite tricky. The door of the hut is tiny. I crawl out like a bee leaving a hive, to be rewarded with a massive and magnificent night sky. In the absence of moonlight the definition and abundance of the heavens is overwhelming, and I find myself praising my Maker for giving me such a weak bladder.
The morning reveals a number of similar straw huts, shaped like igloos and set around a large tent, over 30 feet square, and two whitewashed stone buildings with gabled roofs which look incongruously like Welsh chapels. Looking beyond the camp, I see a much less inimical landscape than the rest of the western Sahara. Palm trees and long grass fill in the empty spaces between the acacia trees and dry-stone walls border the tracks that lead up to the quiet, laid-back little town. Over a breakfast of fresh-baked bread and bananas, Cassa tells me that Azougui was once a trading post on the edge of the desert, where gold and salt and slaves changed hands. It was from here that a particularly aggressive dynasty of Berber peoples known as the Almoravids set out on a quest for more land, which led them north, to found Marrakesh, before moving across the Strait of Gibraltar and into Europe.
Cassa, a youngish man, elegant and rather aristocratic, runs tours into this part of Mauritania, and I would not dream of questioning the validity of anything he says were it not for his playful but confusing habit of hopping from intense seriousness to hooting laughter in the same breath.
On our way south and east we pass through a remarkable landscape, where the constant, unblinking process of disintegration and decay that characterises the Sahara takes rich and varied forms, from spectacular, Rio Grande-like mesas to soft sand dunes, crumbling escarpments and moon-like rubble-strewn plains. In the midst of this austere beauty is the small town of Atar, neither austere nor beautiful. But today and tomorrow Atar will be in a world spotlight. The Paris-Dakar Rally is coming to town.
The Paris-Dakar arouses mixed emotions. For the organisers, it is the most gruelling event on the motorsport calendar, pitching man and machine against one of the harshest environments on the planet. For opponents, like the French Green party, it is ‘colonialism that needs to be eradicated’, costing sums ‘equal to the annual health budget of some of the countries the race crosses’.
In 1999 it was held up by bandits whilst crossing Mauritania. In 2000 threats from Algerian fundamentalists forced the contestants into an air-lifted leapfrog over the country, and last year the driver of a back-up vehicle lost a leg after hitting a land mine near the Moroccan wall.
But the Paris-Dakar, now commonly known as The Dakar, as Paris is no longer its obligatory starting point, has, since its inception in 1978, survived wars and rumours of wars, fatalities and serious accidents, to grow and flourish, carried on by its own obstinate momentum and man’s insatiable urge to do things the hard way.
Somewhat ironically for a town surrounded by desert, Atar suffered from catastrophic floods in the 1980s and all buildings of character seemed to have been washed away and replaced with nondescript concrete and breeze-block. One exception to the overall dusty brown of the narrow streets are the Total gas stations, which are a riot of liberally applied red and white paint. Total, it turns out, are the sponsors of the Dakar Rally.
We find accommodation, albeit modest, at the Auberge El Medina, on a corner where four sandy streets meet. An unattended donkey trots past as we push open the heavy metal doors into a courtyard bordered with pink oleander and yellow hibiscus. Mats are laid out for communal eating and two large tents stand at one end of the yard. Privacy is not a characteristic of desert life. The idea of a room of your own is alien to a country whose traditions are nomadic and gregarious, but the proprietors of the Auberge El Medina have judiciously spread their cultural options. On the other three sides of the courtyard are five rooms with locks on the doors. However, each room has at least six beds in it.
Walking outside after we’d settled in, I had expected to see a town gripped by Rally fever, with banners, bunting and bars open all day. There are, of course, no bars in the non-alcoholic Islamic Republic of Mauritania, and the lack of bunting and banners is explained later in the afternoon when the Rally finally hits town.
It comes, not along the road, but down from the sky. A series of distant rumbles heralds a steady flow of cargo planes, amongst them a Hercules and three or four high-winged Russian Antonovs, descending to the south of the town. They bring in the Rally, keeping it as exclusive as any travelling circus, a self-sufficient unit effectively isolated from any reliance on, or interaction with, the local people.
Atar airport is in very good condition. The Rally organisers have seen to that. It stands on the outskirts of town, an immaculate collection of domed and arcaded buildings standing out from the surrounding half-built houses and empty walled compounds like a Christmas present on a rubbish tip. A small city has sprung up on the tarmac, huddled around a dozen planes and half a dozen helicopters, all of which, apart from an elderly cream Dakota belonging to the Mauritanian air force, are only here for the Rally.
One Antonov freighter is fitted out as a hospital, another as a catering store. Still others belong to the big works teams, whose riders bivouac in matching tents pitched in the protective shade of the wings. Striped marquees have been erected for the administration and the press, lap-tops cover trestle tables, mobiles are constantly in use (though it’s impossible to get a mobile signal anywhere else in Mauritania), fridges full of cold drinks hum away in the desert sun.
But the plane that really matters is the Hercules. Without the Hercules, Atar would not have got its gleaming new airport and freshly laid tarmac, for inside its ample flanks are the 22 tonnes of editing equipment, which provide the television coverage on whose revenue the Rally’s survival depends.