The mayor and the commissar and the surgeon of police all gather around as we load up. They’re candid about the problems down here at the frontier. There is no oasis and no water for crops, so all their food must be brought in from Tamanrasset, 250 miles away.
The mayor unpicks a stick from his teeth and gestures at a row of new houses across the street.
‘The people are poor, but very conservative. We build new houses, with floors, and they still want to sleep on the sand.’
As Said puts it, they mistrust the ‘chair culture’. They remain nomads at heart, so everything expendable is dumped in the street for the goats to sift through.
‘And the women,’ the mayor shakes his head, ‘you don’t see them. Some of them never leave their houses.’
As the time comes for yet another goodbye, the mayor and his friends are warm and courteous, but I sense they are already switching off, preparing to return to the reality of their isolation. They know that almost anywhere else is better than here and yet it is their home. To survive it must require a particularly indomitable spirit.
The road to Tamanrasset follows one of the oldest trade routes across the Sahara, from Nigeria to Algeria, across the very heart of the desert. It is still a sand piste. There are signs of a hard-top being laid north of I-n-Guezzam, but it runs beside us, tantalisingly unfinished. The surface, by no means free of rocks and boulders, is generally firm, but there are softer patches where wheels cease to grip and the cars begin to swing.
This is a main road without garages or tow-trucks, so virtually everything that breaks down is left to the mercy of the sands. It was between I-n-Guezzam and Tamanrasset that Margaret Thatcher’s son went missing in the 1980s. He and his girlfriend were rescued after a long and expensive search. Not everyone was so lucky. A few miles off the main piste is an undulating area of fine sand and basalt boulders so strewn with old car bodies that it’s known as the Cemetery. Quite what happened to all these wrecks is difficult to tell. Some are twisted out of recognition, others seem just to have been abandoned, one door swung open, as if someone had decided to get out and walk. Anything that could be removed from them has been removed. The wind, a constant companion in the desert, catches at their metal skeletons, making them twitch and vibrate as if not quite dead. An old Deux Chevaux, painted all the colours of the rainbow and half filled with sand, adds a touch of colour to the wreckage, a reminder of the part deserts played in the hippie dream. There is no shelter here and not a cloud in the way of a sun which is sending temperatures beyond 38degC/100degF.
The wonder is that any of these cars got this far.
Seven hours after setting out, we arrive in the well-kept streets of Tamanrasset. The town feels as if it has just had a makeover. Kerb-stoned sidewalks, concrete arcades, lines of shade-giving trees, walls and buildings decorated in what seems to be a regulation shade of blood-brown. Even the razor wire has been painted in Tamanrasset.
Day Seventy-One
TAMANRASSET TO ASSEKREM
Around 10.30 the four rusty flagpoles on the forecourt of the Hotel Tahat recede into the distance as we take to Tamanrasset’s gloriously smooth and comfortable roads. Within a mile we throw an abrupt right onto a track so ferociously jagged that for a moment I fear we might have been hijacked.
It does not get much better. Every now and then we come to a stretch that is merely rutted earth, but these are few and far between. Generally, it is a bed of broken and solidified lava, over which the vehicle judders and shudders as if possessed. A puncture offers some brief respite, then the whole painful process begins again. But it is a price almost worth paying for magnificently dramatic scenery. We are in the Hoggar Mountains, which, with peaks rising to 10,000 feet, are amongst the highest in the Sahara. They’re formed by the hard cores of ancient volcanoes, eroded into a series of weird and wonderfully shaped towers, plugs and pinnacles.
Some have incised vertical surfaces, as if they’ve been clawed, others are so deeply scored that their sides look like organ pipes or massive petrified tree roots. On one the scarring runs in all directions like a starburst captured in stone. There are knobs, spires, needles, arcs and bluffs, rocks standing four square on plinths of rubble, resembling mediaeval castles. Tenacious tufts of grass cling to the defiles and gullies; otherwise, this is a land of rock and stone. The Touareg know it by the suitably Tolkien-ish name of Atakor.
Just as I’m constructing romantic notions of mythological lands, a squat white Mercedes jeep bounces down the track towards us. Not unbelievable in itself, but quite a shock when I see it has British number plates. It pulls up and out gets a bony, angular man of late middle age, with a flick of fair hair and a quick, elfin-like energy. With mutual exclamations of surprise we introduce ourselves. His name is Tom Sheppard, a well-known traveller with books to his name.
Like many twentieth-century Englishmen, from T. E. Lawrence to Wilfred Thesiger, he has a passion for desert, and particularly this part of the Algerian desert. He’s been coming here for forty years, following tracks marked on the old French maps.
‘The Hoggar’s very special.’
He likes the compactness of the area, and that there is, within 1000 square miles, such an extraordinary combination of mountain and dune.
‘Pristine dunes, quite untrodden by anyone at all.’
He hasn’t seen another human being for eight days, one of which was his sixty-eighth birthday. He describes it with almost military relish.
‘I had a really special meal on that one. Meat and two veg. Chilled grapefruit for goodness’ sake. Damp kitchen towel, wrapped around the tin, the dryness of the air makes evaporation and you get cooled grapefruit segments. What more could you ask for a birthday?’
Life has been made much safer for him since the advent of satellites.
‘God bless the Americans for putting them up there.’
He enthuses about something called EPRB, Electronic Precision Recording Beacon - basically a distress signal, which bounces off a satellite to centres all over the world. He’s had to use it in Libya recently.
‘And they were onto it, just like that, eleven minutes after starting transmission.’
I’d like to talk a lot more, but Tom politely turns down our offer of lunch. Though he exudes conviviality, his pleasure is in going solo, and as his dust-covered Mercedes, as compact and self-contained as its owner, crunches off down the track, I find myself distinctly envious of the man.
Having covered the next 50 miles in a painful four and a half hours, we catch sight of a tiny hut silhouetted on a ridge high above us, a refuge built by the ascetic French missionary Charles de Foucauld ninety years ago. After a few more agonisingly slow hairpins we pull up at the gates of a compound below the hut, where there is a hostel maintained by the town of Tamanrasset.
The accommodation is basic mountain stuff: an uncompromising stone-walled building, with two outside lavatories (quite far outside), three dormitories and a communal meeting room, with rugs and cushions, chairs, tables and an open fire. After our meal we sit in here with Arouj, the administrator, a heavily turbaned, moustachioed Touareg, probably a devastatingly handsome man in his youth, now a little fleshed out. Business doesn’t look good. There’s room here for 150, but apart from ourselves there are only four other visitors tonight. One is a young German biker, who set out to cross the Sahara with two friends, both of whom have had to return home after arguments with sand dunes. Arouj orders some mint tea for us all. He’s pleased to see us. Very few British ever come here, he says. Germans, yes, Italians (for the rock climbing) and Spanish.