In the main square of Old Chinguetti is a more organised collection of the city’s treasures. The Bibliotheque Al Halott can be found off the courtyard of a fine old house, behind ancient acacia wood doors. Beneath weathered black beams are bulky modern filing cabinets containing 1400 manuscripts. A father-and-son team looks after them, and so valuable are the works that they only allow visitors in one or two at a time. Their pride and joy - ‘le plus ancien ouvrage‘ - is a Koran, brought here from Mecca in AD 1000. They have a book on astronomy dating from the fourteenth century, clearly showing the planets of our solar system circling the sun, proving that Arab scholars knew something that the authorities in Europe refused to acknowledge for a further 200 years.
Six o’clock. The best time of day. People are out in the streets again, shops are open, children, rolling old tyres, race after each other. The big heat is off, the setting sun turns the desert a rosy purple and the sounds of the city soften to a murmur.
Walking in the new town, I find myself first watching, then participating in a game of dhaemon, as taught me by Mohammed Salim of the Polisario. An erect, bare-headed man, who clearly fancies himself as the local Grand Master, is taking on all comers and thrashing them. He barely raises his eyes from the sand as I’m sat down opposite him and given my quota of crottes de chameau, camel droppings. Then something goes wrong with his strategy. Soon I have at least a dozen friends and advisers ready to manage my every move, shouting, debating and arguing with increasing hysteria as they scent a rare victory in the air.
Sure enough the sticks are uprooted with increasing regularity and the all-conquering camel turds are sweeping across the sand, until, with sharp cries of delight, the foreigner steals a victory.
I seem to have had all Chinguetti on my side, for as I walk back to the hotel later I keep getting waves of acknowledgement, broad grins and cheery shouts of ‘Champion!’
My stock with the owners of the Hotel Fort Saganne is already pretty high.
‘Vous etes le deuxieme star ici!’ they enthuse, ‘le premier star’ being Gerard Depardieu, who stayed and worked here whilst making what was by all accounts a very bad film called Fort Saganne in 1984. I only wish their facilities matched their view of my status. Though I am in Depardieu’s room, the generator provides light and electricity only fitfully, the bedside light is operated from a switch 20 feet away from the bed, the pillow is made from some form of granite and the painting and decoration seem to have been completed by someone with a serious grudge against society.
It all becomes a bit clearer when they reveal that Depardieu didn’t stay in this room at all, but in a Winnebago parked outside. They even show me the spot.
‘It was parked over there!’
My room was the one used in the film itself.
As Fort Saganne was all about the terrible privations endured by members of the French Foreign Legion, this explains a lot.
Day Twenty-Eight
CHINGUETTI TO NOUAKCHOTT
Around a quarter to seven the generator coughs into life, which means electricity and hot water will be available until half past nine, when they turn it off again. Up onto the battlements for a last reminder of the panorama of Chinguetti, this quintessential image of the desert. It requires a vivid imagination to evoke the glory days of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when Ibn Battuta came down here from Tangiers, when there were seventy-six libraries in the town and when the constant coming and going of camel trains between Morocco and the fabulous kingdom of Mali made Chinguetti one of the centres of the civilised world.
Now the desert is quiet. The trade has gone elsewhere, by ship around the coast, on overland trucks that can’t cope with the fine sand seas that enclose Chinguetti.
But, splendidly isolated as it may feel, Chinguetti is only 1200 miles from the coast of Europe, and if not trucks and boats, then aeroplanes may yet be its saviour. There is a growing curiosity about the desert, and as more tourists brave the Sahara south of Morocco this particular combination of landscape and history could well bring some money back to this historic city.
These tourist-board thoughts come to me as I wait at the small airstrip outside Chinguetti. I’m cadging a ride to Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital, aboard a Cessna, from which Nigel has been filming the desert sands.
We peel off the baking tarmac and into the air, spreading panic amongst the camels careering below us. Soon the ancient crust of the old Saharan plateau pushes through the desert sands, exposing fault lines that reveal shiny, fractured, black rock and reminding me more than anything of the world’s second largest desert, Antarctica.
After two hours in the air the colours begin to change. The charred blacks and browns of the escarpment give way to a green and white landscape as we slowly descend towards Nouakchott. The green is from stands of trees and fields of crops, a reminder of what irrigation can do in the fiercest of deserts, but it’s the white that predominates, a great spreading undercloth of limestone and salt, as if the desert had been bleached as it reached the sea.
Our plane banks and turns and as it begins its final approach to the Mauritanian capital I can just about make out the Atlantic Ocean, away to the west.
Below us, streets and cars and palaces and office blocks and other visions of a way of life I’d half forgotten race up towards the plane. After where we’ve been, the thought of descending into the midst of a million people seems a great anticlimax, and the more I look forward to the creature comforts of a big city hotel the more I feel that I’m betraying the desert.
Day Twenty Nine
NOUAKCHOTT
After one night at the Monotel Bar-El-Barka I realise that my appreciation of the simple life is a cracked and broken vessel. Maybe it’s a question of age, but the delight I have taken in switching the air-con on and off, flushing and re-flushing the lavatory, caressing the bedside light and reading the laundry list from start to finish, including the women’s section, suggests to me that I am not cut out for deprivation.
If twelve days of desert travel can reduce me to gibbering delight at the sight of one of the world’s shortest room-service menus, what is to become of me when we turn east again, back to the sands?
There is water outside my room that is just for swimming in. It’s surprisingly cold and refreshing. The only other occupants are two Mauritanian children, who seem amazed by the whiteness of my body, which, fresh from a long English winter, is very white indeed. They stare open-mouthed, as if seeing a ghost.
Thirteen years ago, whilst filming Around the World in 80 Days, I was stuck on a Yugoslav freighter moving agonisingly slowly across the Bay of Bengal. The tiny mess room was dominated by a map of the world. To help pass the time, my cameraman, Nigel Meakin, and I competed with each other to memorise every African country and, for extra points, the name of its capital. Mauritania was a tough one, but Nouakchott was a match winner. Nouakchott was the Holy Grail of obscurity.
Which is why I experienced more than the usual frisson of firsttimer’s excitement when I saw the name on the airport building, and why I immediately bought up all three postcards in the hotel shop. And why I’m rather ashamed to learn that this city we could never remember is the biggest in the Sahara.
I take some comfort from the fact that this is a recent development. Nouakchott, whose name, my guidebook tells me helpfully, may mean ‘Place of Wind’ or ‘Place of Floating Seashells’, was only created in the late 1950s, and even by 1980 had less than 150,000 inhabitants. Then came fourteen years of drought and an influx of refugees, which has pushed the population beyond the million mark.