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T H I S+W E E K > Lost in the Sahara
Dunescapes
Letter from Amsterdam
D E P A R T M E N T S The Surreal Gourmet
Mondo Weirdo
Readers' Tips and Tales
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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LA S T+W E E K Tuesday, Sept. 9, 1997
Bali low
A full list of all
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lost in
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at midnight, from the hamada to the east, a groan arose, a wail, a wind as heavy and cloying as hot breath. I turned my face away. Aziz slumbered on. An hour later, sand was caking on my face no matter what position I assumed. A flashlight-blur of yellow approached from the dune. "You must come to the tent now," said Ali. "Sharqi." (Sharqi, or "sirocco," derives from the Arabic sharq, or "east," and denotes "a wind from the east.") The tent flaps whipped and lashed, sand poured in as through a sieve and whirled in eddies around us. Though Ali and Aziz, and another boy, wrapped in black shawls, snored dead to the world, I couldn't sleep with my face covered by my shirt; it suffocated me. I waited and waited for dawn and what I assumed would be the cessation of the wind. Eventually I dozed off. I awoke at dawn to a dirge of winds, rising and falling and quavering, a cyclonic rhapsody on the sands. I roused Aziz. "We have to go now," I said. He sprang forth bleary-eyed from his shawl and grabbed his bundle. I clamored to the top of a dune. The sun, the vicious taskmaster of the sharqi, drove sand at us in ferocious blasts across the hamada that stretched tablelike to the horizon. The wind varied, giving the illusion of abating at times. Gusts broke my balance; blasts of dust would turn the sky and earth into a single whirling gaseous mass. The power of the storm was alarming; I had seen nothing like it before. We pulled away from the tent at 5:30 in the morning as if into a choppy sea with whitecaps of sand. We bounced, we jolted, the Peugeot rattled and clanked on the cracked earth. Again and again we slowed as Aziz lost the piste to the blowing sand. At a meter-high ledge, we ground to a halt. "Don't you know the way?" I asked. We were not on the piste of the night before. We backed up and snaked along the edge to a trough. I stopped. If this was a piste, it led to a sand patch. Sweat dripped off my brow; the car was turning into an oven with the windows rolled up against the dust. "Go on!" he said. We shot over the sand onto more hamada, but the wind blasted up a curtain of dust. I slowed; the wheels cut into sand and spun and spun. Aziz jumped out. "No problem. I'll get Ali and he will drag us free." He took off at a trot, but the wind manhandled him and he stumbled. I sat vexed at my own shortsightedness; despite all I had read on desert travel, I had entered the Sahara with neither water nor spare fuel, and worst of all, in a car fit for little more than a Saturday jaunt to the mall. I got out and tried to dig myself free; as a result of my exertions, the Peugeot ended up sunk to its axles. I sweated streaks through my shirt and coughed up a gob of sand. Inside the car it was fiendishly hot; outside, the wind harried. I crouched in the doorway and took out Aziz's ID card: How ill-conceived, how urban had been my precautions! A thief?! What was a thief alongside the fury of the greatest desert on earth? An hour later Aziz came running with a shawl-wrapped waif of a boy, Lahcen, in his mid-teens, but wiry, with black, brown and gray teeth. He and Aziz piled sand around my front wheels and told me to accelerate. I did, and we shot free. We pulled off heading west, away from the sun, with Lahcen in the passenger seat. I followed his left-handed chopping gestures that indicated "Left ... left ... straight on, slow, left." An hour passed with us trundling this way and that. The hamada burned with sand blowing from the east, the direction of the main road. The corrugations of the piste faded in and out; we stalled heading west. For a moment we were blinded by a burnt ocher maelstrom aflame with the sun behind it. "Stop here!" said Lahcen. He scrambled out. Ahead the brown ghosts of three camels faded in and out with the undulating sheets of sand. Lahcen whistled to them. He seemed not to hear me when I asked him what he was doing. He jumped back in. "Those are our camels. They will show us the way ... to our tent." "Then you don't know the way?" Aziz whacked Lahcen on the head. "You don't even know the way!" he shouted. "But when will they go home? It's not like they go running at mealtimes, is it?" I asked. "By God, I don't know. But they will go home, sooner or later." We moved on again, this time in search of a dry riverbed Lahcen said was "just over there." The sun crept higher; wind tore off the hamada in a bellowing rage. We lost visibility to the sands; we regained it, lost and regained it. We rambled ahead, ever bearing left with Lahcen's chopping gestures. I considered the possibilities: If we overshot M'hamid, nothing would stop us from rolling onward into Saharan barrens extending over 1,000 miles to Timbuktu. But we would never reach Timbuktu; our fuel would run out, and without water, death from thirst would arrive within three days. I fought back these thoughts -- they led only to a debilitating fear -- and focused on the piste. "Are we north of M'hamid, or west?" I asked Lahcen, to determine what our chances were of overshooting it. "By God, our tent should be over there," he said. Black and silvery tents resolved themselves into scrub brush as we approached, dashing hopes over and over again. Mirages. The piste itself was either imagined or not; corrugations appeared and disappeared; we were tacking crosswise against the blowing wastes. Left, left, said Lahcen's hand. "Stop!" said Lahcen. He opened the door and staggered out. I got out too, and found I had to hunch low or be blown over. "The camels are over there!" Lahcen shouted. We proceeded, bouncing over stony hamada. But there were no camels over there, and Lahcen's hand returned to chopping the air. I felt panic rising within me, coming out of my gut and passing over my heart. My eyes stung with sweat. "Maybe we should just wait this out," I wondered aloud. "How long can it last?" "It could clear this afternoon. Or not ." "But how long does the sharqi usually last?" "Maybe three days, maybe seven. God alone knows." We had been driving for over four hours; I glanced at the gas tank arrow, which hovered at less than a quarter. We had used up more than a quarter tank. Hamada. Sand. We swerved. Sand. Hamada. Lahcen's hand cut the air. We were circling. I thought to object when, during a blind spell, we slammed into something; I heard a sharp report, steel against stone. Lahcen asked me to stop. He and Aziz conspired over a baked plate of sand behind the car. I felt panic alternate with despair at the thought of the hours we had spent circling. I didn't show it; there was no one to turn to, no point in a confession. I got out and knelt with them. "The piste ahead leads to M'hamid," shouted Lahcen above the gale, pointing south. As I passed around the front of the car, I noticed a wet spot on the sand. I bent down; drops of water, dispersed by the wind, were dripping out from behind the bumper. Our last jolt had punctured the radiator. I sat back in my seat, speechless with the discovery. We waited, the horizon having abandoned us to another all-enveloping maelstrom. Sand suffocated us as water would were we 50 fathoms beneath the surface of the sea; it blew in through the ventilators, it entered our lungs as we breathed. I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror; there was my face, tawny with grit and streaked where sweat had poured off my brow and temples. It occurred to me then that death as a metaphysical abstraction -- a phenomenon of nothingness, of nonexistence, of peace, even -- suddenly seemed quite divorced from the bowel-churning ordeal of dying -- in our case, dying of thirst, dying roasted by the sun. With the wind and sun and grit between the teeth, there was no way to collect my thoughts and saunter into metaphysics. And I had two people with me; a sense of responsibility as the driver, not to mention elder, prevailed. I turned back to our predicament. Staying with the car is the key to survival in desert mishaps. How many times had I read that years ago in preparation for a trans-Saharan run across Algeria that never took place? Attempting to walk out means certain death. I rummaged through memories of Wilfred Thesiger's "Arabian Sands," his account of travels with Arab tribes in Arabia: Bedouins drank the blood of their camels through a straw straight from the jugular; they ate camel vomit; they shampooed in camel urine. My creaking Peugeot could offer none of these less-than-epicurean survival treats. I rubbed my eyes and found gummy balls of sand on my fists. By 11 the sun was infusing the maelstrom with a gaseous steely glare; the piste, either real or imagined, faded and reappeared as we slowly jounced and creaked our way over the hamada toward M'hamid. Or not. But a wash of sand appeared and interrupted the piste. "Don't dunes surround M'hamid?" I thought aloud. I had been to M'hamid the year before and seen them! I felt suddenly breathless with the realization that this piste -- our last hope -- would become impassable by the sheer geography of the region. Lahcen stared ahead. I stopped. "Will we make it?" His head dropped. "In this car, by God I don't know." "We have only two choices; either we find the tents now or we wait it out." I thought of the water from the radiator leaking into the thirsty earth. His head remained bowed. Lahcen got out and kneeled, studying the baked earth under his toes. The effect of the ferocious gales of heat was akin to that of a blast furnace; I fingered the cracked skin on my lips. Lahcen climbed back in and motioned left with his hand. Left again, I thought. We started up. More circling. Baked hamada spread under a roiled oncoming wall of dust. A flash of white-brown from a gust of sand blinded us. When it dropped we saw a dune. Left, chopped Lahcen's hand. A rage bubbled within me; we were entering the dunes! Left again, he said. Another left, and it appeared we had run into a dead-end of dunes. I laughed out of despair. "Go on!" said Lahcen. "Go on!" His voice broke. We reached the end of the dune and turned left. A knee-high piece of scrap metal, a buoy-like marker, suddenly stood out black in the white blustering blaze. The curtain of sand flickered to reveal the tent, battered by the sharqi. Ali stepped out as we drove up, his shawl a flailing horizontal mane behind him. He opened my door. "God be praised. You should not have set out on this sharqi. God saved you. Come, have tea." Lahcen and Aziz kept their heads low. They thought they had failed me, I supposed, though they might have been more worried about the thrashing Ali would give them if I complained or blamed them. I said nothing, seated with my tea amid the eddies of whirling dust in the tent. I thought about diving headfirst into the cold blue water of a hotel swimming pool; I foretasted the ecstasy of guzzling an entire bottle of Evian; I realized how much a luxury water could be and how ingenious one had to be to survive where it was a rarity, as in the Sahara. Ali's sinew and calm hospitality suddenly commanded new respect from me.
Later, I learned this was one of the worst sharqis in years; winds hit
90 miles an hour and bore temperatures of over 125 degrees. That afternoon, it briefly abated. After I
poured water in my depleted radiator, Ali suggested we make for the main
road. The sharqi started up again midway, but with his sure guidance it
didn't matter. At the whitewashed arrow we bumped and rattled our way to
the tarmac, a black runway to salvation.
Jeffrey Tayler is a writer who lives in Moscow. His work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the Moscow Times and Worldview magazine. ________- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Have you had any desert adventures -- or misadventures? Share your sandy stories in Table Talk. Are you interested in seeing Morocco -- under slightly less adventurous circumstances? Check out the options in Wanderlust Marketplace. ________- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
SHIFTING SANDS | A portfolio of images ________- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - For a look at the sensual side of the desert, savor Pamela Roberson's extraordinary portfolio of dunescapes. |
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