We are in turn collected and driven to our accommodation in batiments durs, long low huts, like grey steel tents, put up by the French in the 1950s. A television is on in a small communal area just inside the door of the hut and a rugby match between Ireland and England is playing.
The crew, lured by beds and bathrooms, crash out in their rooms, and I’m the only one to witness England’s defeat and Eamonn O’Brien’s unconfined joy.
Day Seventy-Three
HASSI-MESSAOUD
I feel thoroughly disorientated. I saw with my own eyes last night that we were in the middle of the desert, but this morning I step out of our hut to find it surrounded by tall swaying trees. Green lawns and flower beds border the road to the communal dining block. Hassi-Messaoud means ‘the well of the man called Messaoud’, and I can’t imagine he would recognise his watering hole since the oil men got here. A network of electric pumps works round the clock to bring water up from hundreds of feet below the surface, enough to support 15,000 trees and 40,000 people. This tiny postage stamp of greenery, this blip in the wastes of the Sahara, has flocks of ducks and herds of goats, palm trees producing the very finest deglet noir dates, cows producing four barrels of milk a day, tennis courts, schools, swimming pools, fountains and a cinema.
This eerie similarity to a piece of provincial France is not accidental.
When oil was first discovered in the desert in the 1950s, Algeria was an integral part of France, not a colony, but a series of departements, as much a part of the mother country as Aveyron or Vaucluse. The French purred with pleasure at the news of this firstever discovery of oil on its territory and immediately put in the investment needed to retrieve it, creating, amongst other things, the man-made oasis of Hassi-Messaoud.
At almost the same time, however, the Algerian uprising began and by 1962 France was forced to grant full independence to its most obstinately defended African possession. The French dream of a Saharan equivalent of North Sea oil finally died in 1971, when the Algerian oil industry was nationalised, without a cent of compensation to the French government.
Nevertheless, French influence still clings to the place. The VIP dining room is called the Salle Bleue and is decorated with a nice touch of Gallic surrealism, featuring nets, fish tanks, underwater grottoes and other watery themes. At lunch, to which I’m entertained by the executives of Sonatrach, the Algerian state oil and gas company, French is spoken and there are many courses: salad, hardboiled eggs with caviar, carrots, lettuce and tomato, grilled swordfish, lamb chops, omelette, lemon tart with cream, fruit and coffee.
‘We eat well before Ramadan,’ jokes one of my hosts.
The only thing missing is a bottle of Beaujolais, but the ban on alcohol is, I’m assured, a general rule in all drilling areas, anywhere in the world.
The Algerian executives seem comfortably westernised. The head of the base refers to his countrymen as ‘Mediterranean people’ and dinner-table conversation revolves around such bourgeois topics as children’s education, keeping fit, summer holidays and life in Algiers, to which most of them return for three weeks’ leave, every four weeks. I ask them the reasons for the high level of security at Hassi-Messaoud, the massive fences, the armed guards, the watchtowers. Do terrorists strike this far south?
A few swift glances are exchanged around the table, a wordless debate as to how much I should be told. Oil workers were killed in 1992 but since then it’s been safe. The boss man leans back, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. Apart, that is, from ‘Glass Eye’.
Glass Eye? Some nasty infection carried by blowing sand?
No, Glass Eye is a bandit who steals vehicles and reads Islamic tracts to his captives.
Ah, this is beginning to sound familiar. Does he ride around at the head of a fleet of Land Cruisers full of armed men?
General nodding. That’s the man.
Also known as Louar, the One-Eyed One?
They seem awfully impressed with my information. I’m awfully impressed by Glass Eye’s range. We’re 800 miles from the border, where I first heard of him.
To be honest, they’re happier talking about hydrocarbons than one-eyed bandits. This doesn’t make for jolly banter, but it’s interesting to learn that the oil which has paid for Hassi-Messaoud, the Salle Bleue and this six-course dinner is no longer the biggest money-spinner for Algeria. They currently produce less than Britain’s North Sea fields. Natural gas reserves, I’m told, put her fourth in the world league after Russia, the USA and Canada.
Our hosts are determined that, before we move on, we should visit the gas production plant, 200 miles northwest. There is a plane that leaves every morning, at half past six.
Irresistible.
Day Seventy-Four
HASSI-R’MEL
One advantage of being up at five is to witness the industrialisation of the Sahara in its most dramatic form. Dozens of flares blaze away in the desert, creating the eerie illusion of a false sunrise. The rigs, hung with arc lights for round the clock production, are dotted about in the sand, buzzing with the might and menace of rockets at their launch pads. This, you feel, is the work of the gods.
Barely visible in the glare from the working lights are the dim, huddled Bedouin encampments outside the security fence, a reminder of what it must have been like here before oil was discovered, when the nomads and their families came to find water at Messaoud’s well. The only way they can get close to it now is to take on some menial work inside the base, but they’re removed from its green and pleasant avenues at the end of the day.
Hassi-R’Mel is cooler and fresher than Hassi-Messaoud, and its airport cleaner and less frenetic. We’re given a VIP welcome, which means tea and biscuits on arrival at the airport and a turnout of executives, including my host for the morning, the impressively titled Head of Quality and Quantity Control. His name is Salah Benyoub, an amiable and unassuming middle-aged man, dressed in striped shirt and wearing a baseball cap over a hairless scalp, which, he readily tells me, is the result of recent chemotherapy. He has worked here for thirty years and speaks good English, which, he says, is the lingua franca of the oil and gas business. It’s an international business too. Salah has been to Texas and vacationed in Vegas.
‘Did you lose any money?’
‘Of course. That’s what you’re meant to do isn’t it?’
Once tea and polite introductions are over, we’re driven over to the heart of the operation, the CNDG, the National Centre For Despatching Gas. This proves to be a huge and rambling complex of multicoloured pipes (yellow for natural gas, brown for liquid nitrogen, green for composite), looking more like some computer-generated model than the real thing. Gas from far below the surface comes up in molten form, is treated and eventually chilled to minus 170 degrees, at which temperature it is sent through one of two pipelines, either west to Spain, under the Strait of Gibraltar, or east to Italy, under the Mediterranean. When it reaches the other end of the pipeline it is warmed and expands to 600 times its volume. Every cubic foot that leaves Hassi-R’Mel turns into 600 cubic feet at the receiving terminal.
It’s all a bit much for me to take in, but I do like the thought that the yellow paint on the pipe at the back of my cooker matches the yellow paint of the 4-foot thick pipes rearing above my head in the middle of the Algerian desert.