French?
He wobbles his hand. Some French.
I feel for him. The locals have put a lot into this place. There is an airstrip at Tamanrasset, and the Hoggar mountain area is a national park, protected by UNESCO. But as long as Algeria remains better known for its civil war, places like Assekrem will remain a well-kept secret.
I make my apologies and get off to bed. We’re to be up at five tomorrow to walk up to the refuge. Arouj hands me his card. It has his website marked.
Day Seventy-Two
ASSEKREM TO HASSI-MESSAOUD
An alarm sounds in our dormitory, followed by total silence. Then a rustling of sleeping bags, a muffled curse, a cough, a variety of yawns and silence again. We’ve all been very well behaved in the night. No raucous snoring, farting or too many trips to the toilet. I know, because I’ve been awake most of the time. I never sleep comfortably if there’s an unusually early start in the offing. My body knows it’s in for a shock and stays on red alert for most of the night. A torch is switched on, the first light of the morning.
Pull myself reluctantly from my sleeping bag, which has had more use in the Sahara than on all my previous journeys put together. I keep thinking I won’t need it any more, then up comes a night like this. Middle of the Sahara and cold as a Scottish winter.
Bleary, grunted greetings. Queue for the lavatory, faces washed with a splash of bottled water. Tea has been made by someone, God bless them. Then out onto the mountainside. The mass of bright stars, normally such a delight, seems to be almost hostile this morning, the cold already intensified by a wicked little wind. The top of the hill is a few hundred feet away, up a steep zigzag footpath. Nigel and Pete set the pace, weaving up it like mountain goats, despite carrying more than anyone else. Maybe Nigel, a well-established quinquagenarian like myself, felt an urge to prove himself after yesterday’s encounter with the boyish sixty-eight-year-old Tom Sheppard.
By the time we’ve reached the top of the path and the broad flat plateau on which Pere de Foucauld built his refuge, we’re above 9000 feet and gulping gratefully at the chilly air.
There is still three-quarters of an hour to go before sunrise, but the stars are fading slowly and a faint lemon-magenta glow is shading the eastern horizon. Up here the mountains are all below us. Only one summit, that of Tahat, away to the north, is superior, and that by a few hundred feet. Even before the sun comes up the view is breathtaking. The misty pre-dawn light compresses the spaces between the mountains, giving the appearance of a solid range to what we know to be a collection of eccentric individuals.
Said whispers in my ear.
‘This is third best sunrise in the world, after Fiji and Ceylon.’
He pauses a moment for me to take this in.
‘The purity of the air here is recorded by the meteorological station and sent back to the United States. To measure carbon and ozone in the atmosphere.’
(I’m not altogether sure about this purity of the air bit; it brings to mind something less reassuring that I recently read in Jeremy Keenan’s book Sahara Man. At In Ecker, less than 60 miles northwest of here, the French tested their first nuclear weapon. According to Keenan, there is anecdotal evidence of poisonous emissions and mysterious deaths immediately afterwards.)
A bitter north wind drives me to take shelter in the refuge. Above the doorway of this plain stone construction is a white marble panel. It reads ‘Charles de Foucauld, juillet-decembre 1911’. Inside, a narrow passage leads to a small chapel, where there is a picture of a lean Frenchman with a well-trimmed beard dressed in a white monk’s habit, and, above it, the emblem of a red heart with a cross rising from it.
Fifty-three years before he built this refuge de Foucauld was born in Strasbourg, a vicomte from a privileged and wealthy background. He joined the French army and was posted to Algeria, where he lived a playboy life, doing little but splash his money around on parties and mistresses. Then, suddenly and quite drastically turning his back on the easy life, he travelled North Africa disguised as a Jewish rabbi, joined a Trappist order at the age of thirty-one and, twelve years later, entered the priesthood. His work brought him to the Touareg of the Hoggar Mountains, amongst whom he gained considerable respect, not only learning their language but also producing the first French-Tamahaq dictionary.
He accepted, indeed revelled in, the isolation of the desert. There is a shelf beside the chapel on which a book of his writings lies open at the place where de Foucauld gives his own account of what has brought us here: ‘The beauty of the view defies description or even imagination … it is marvellous.’
There’s not much I can add to this as I watch the sun rise over the Hoggar Mountains, giving each peak form and colour and revealing the spectacular proportions of this strange and unforgettable landscape.
The Sahara’s fearsome reputation for ending people’s lives prematurely was enhanced by the murder of de Foucauld, who was shot and killed in Tamanrasset five years after building this refuge. The order he founded, the Little Brothers of Jesus, continues his work, supported by Algeria’s Muslim government. The current incumbent, Brother Edward, offers tea to ourselves and two other tourists who’ve struggled up to the sunrise. He tells us that Pere de Foucauld, far from being forgotten, is in the preparatory stages of canonisation and will very soon be made a saint.
He also asks if we wouldn’t mind taking down to Tamanrasset a Korean acolyte, who has just spent forty days and nights on his own up here. We pick him up later in the car park, an incessantly smiling, patient man, jauntily dressed in fishing hat, windcheater and jeans. It looks more like he’s spent four hours in Banana Republic than forty days in solitary.
We’re back in Tamanrasset by midday. Snatched rudely from the sublime to the ridiculous, we find ourselves struggling to negotiate forty-odd bags through an overcrowded airport with ‘Feelings’ playing over the Tannoy. Nor does the culture shock end there. We are soon aboard a 737 bound for Hassi-Messaoud. It has taken us four hours to drive the 40 miles from Assekrem; the next 700 miles of our journey will take less than ninety minutes.
As we take to the air I can’t take my eyes off the panorama of peaks spread out below me like tombstones, and even when the Hoggar Mountains slip away to the south, the desert landscape remains hypnotically beautiful. A series of round black circles, the traces of spent volcanoes, cover the surface like blisters, before giving way to a wide flat tableland eroded into a series of long twisting terraces. This in turn gives way to the glorious salmon pink of the Grand Erg Oriental, part of the sand sea that swirls across the centre of Algeria in long languid curves.
As we begin our descent the unbroken stretch of virgin sand becomes increasingly tarnished. Straight black lines cross the landscape below, connecting up a series of tiny installations, making the surface of the desert look more like a printed circuit board. The lower we get the more depressing it becomes. The sand sea is riddled with roads, pipelines, clusters of low huts surrounded by smeared black pits, at the centre of which, like the totems of some ancient religion, are towers spouting flame. This is Algeria’s Aladdin’s Cave. Within a 300-mile radius of the rapidly approaching oasis of Hassi-Messaoud are sufficient reserves of oil and gas to make this embattled country the third richest (after Libya and Tunisia) in the Sahara.
In an already security-obsessed country the oil and gas production facilities are fortresses in themselves. No vehicles are allowed up to the airport buildings, and we have to carry all our equipment 300 yards down the road, through a narrow checkpoint and across into a car park surrounded by a 10-foot-high razor-wired steel fence. Behind the bars of the car park are more white faces than I’ve seen on our entire journey. They stare out from minibuses and four-wheel drives, company coaches and private saloons, their gazes neutral and incurious as they wait to be driven away. These are not the faces of people glad to be here; they’re the faces of people who have to be here. They’re the oil men.