The Sahara Read online

  Title Page

  THE SAHARA

  A Cultural History

  by

  Eamonn Gearon

  Publisher Information

  First published in 2011 by

  Signal Books Limited

  36 Minster Road

  Oxford OX4 1LY

  www.signalbooks.co.uk

  Digital edition converted and distributed in 2011 by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  © Eamonn Gearon, 2011

  The right of Eamonn Gearon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. The whole of this work, including all text and illustrations, is protected by copyright. No parts of this work may be loaded, stored, manipulated, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information, storage and retrieval system without prior written permission from the publisher, on behalf of the copyright owner.

  Cover Design: Devdan Sen

  Cover Images: Roberto Caucino/istockphoto; Wikipedia Commons; Scoop/istockphoto Illustrations: All illustrations Wikipedia Commons, except: siemens.com p.151; tinariwen.com p.240; Michelle Brehm p.242.

  Please note page numbers refer to the print edition of this title.

  Dedication

  For my late father, upon whose knee I first learnt about the Sahara;

  My mother, for not telling me how much she worried when I first entered the Sahara;

  And to Osama, Ibn Kelb and Baby, my camels, who made it possible for me to explore the Sahara, thereby exchanging dreams for memories.

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  My own relationship with the Sahara stretches back over two decades, and my love of the place grows every year. While I have lived, worked and walked in the Great Desert, I have been lucky to learn many lessons from its inhabitants that I would never have found in any library. Foremost among this knowledge was that gained from the Bedouin, which has allowed me to pursue solo, camel-powered expeditions.

  Cecil Beaton put the case neatly in a 1942 diary entry, when he wrote from the Egyptian Sahara, “I see that human existence in the desert has not the proportion of the surroundings.” It is hard to imagine a place more replete with history, myths and legends. The Sahara is justly a land of superlatives: the world’s largest hot desert, with the highest recorded temperatures on earth; it is driest, wildest, most dangerous in its immensity, most beguiling.

  It is also one of the most starkly beautiful places on earth and has long captured the imagination of those who have come into contact with it, from the earliest inhabitants to contemporary tourists. From its prehistory, countless generations have been moved to record their impressions of the Sahara. Thankfully, many committed their thoughts to stone, paper, canvas and film, allowing us to share in these experiences.

  The plethora of accounts written by those who spent time in the Sahara means that tough choices have been made in selecting who and what to include and exclude. This is no encyclopaedia but it is at least hoped that it will be of service in guiding readers through the literal and imaginary landscapes of the Sahara, its history, cultures and a portion of the creative work it has inspired.

  Those who have passed through the Sahara have been as diverse as the landscapes found there. Innocent traveller, prospector and trader, solo adventurer and conquering soldier, writer, poet and painter, ethnologist, biologist, legionnaire or hermit, each account has its place, enjoying some share of that common thread of the story of the desert that inspired them. Whatever reason one might have for being in the Great Desert, the experience leaves no one untouched. The Sahara does not allow a neutral response; its mystery breathes life into even the stoniest of hearts that confronts the desert’s vastness, terrible beauty and immeasurable silence.

  Thanks are due to numerous people: writing a book is not as solitary a pursuit as some might imagine: To Oscar Blend, whose keen eyes and red pen made the manuscript make sense; Dr. William Sheward, for material support and wise counsel whenever I visit London; to Eileen Clauson, for similar generosity freely given in New Hampshire; Will and Lucy Beharrell, and the peace of Ramsden; Tom and Candace Powers; Phyllis Nemhauser and all the staff of the Baker-Berry and Sherman Libraries at Dartmouth College, and likewise the staff of the Howe Library, Hanover, NH; my agent, Graham Greene; Michael Dwyer and James Ferguson for the initial commission and subsequent encouragement. Finally, my greatest thanks go to my wife, Laura, whose patience, insight, advice, and unstinting backing made this book possible.

  Introduction - A Quick Tour of The Sahara

  Before exploring the Sahara’s human history, we will be well served by a quick tour of its geographical present. The great desert covers portions of eleven North African nations: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Mali, Mauritania and the Western Sahara. Depending on the results of a January 2011 referendum, which is giving the southern Sudanese the opportunity to vote for independence from the north, this figure may become twelve.

  Perhaps the commonest view of the Sahara, as nothing but a sandy place, is neatly summed up by the nineteenth-century Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, Richard Whately, who is responsible, some would say guilty, of the following speculation: “Why can a man never starve in the Great Desert? Because he can eat the sand which is there.” Not content with one groan-inducing pun, Whately went on to ask, “But what brought the sandwiches there? Why, Noah sent Ham, and his descendants mustered and bred.”

  However much sand the Sahara may contain, it must not be thought of as a monolithic entity, a single mass covered in its entirety by sand dunes. The Sahara has numerous distinct geographies but its name is somewhat misleading. It is Arabic and made up of three consonants, saad, ha and ra, and short and long a-sound vowels. It means simply desert, so to talk of the “Sahara desert” is something of a tautology.

  Most Arabic words are drawn from three-letter roots, like the Sahara’s saad, ha, and ra. From these roots families of words branch out and, once mastered, are a great help to both native and foreign learners of Arabic. For example, the Arabic letters equivalent to k, t, and b come together in various forms to make the words book, office (the place of books), library (the house of books) and the verb to write (to create a book). Likewise, the s-h-r root, as well as giving us desert or “desolate place”, also gives us a barren region, a waste-land, a shade of dusty red, and verbs for “to wither” and “to inflict sunstroke”.

  In the same way that the s-h-r family of letters has numerous members, so the Sahara is many deserts in one, not one desert. These deserts, some named by their inhabitants, some by invaders and by other foreign visitors, each have a distinct identity while at the same time being identifiably a part of the Great Desert by their situation in the top third of the African continent. A native of southern Algeria lives in a desert that he or she knows as the Ahaggar, or Hoggar, while neighbours to the north live in the Tassili n’Ajjer, which translates from the local Tamazight language as Plateau of the Rivers. The local population of northern Chad know home as the Tibesti after the mountain range, while inhabitants of one of the oases west of the Nile may refer to their homeland as al-sahara al-gharb, the desert of the west. In Arabic, Sahara as a proper noun seems to have been used first in the ninth century by the Egyptian historian Ibn Abd-al-Hakam (d. 871), when he referred to a distinct piece of desert to the west of the Fezzan and not just as a general description of a desolate place.

  Ignoring the varieties of deserts, it is the multi-coloured waves of sand tha
t capture the popular imagination when thinking about the Sahara. Beloved alike of poets and photographers, the dunes are loathed by the foot traveller, for whom they represent an obstruction that must be crossed with great care. These striking, textured, surreal fields of whipped sand have for millennia formed a notable obstacle to free movement between various parts of the Sahara. But for all their terrible majesty, the dunes only make up about fifteen per cent of the total mass of the Sahara. That is not to say they are paltry affairs.

  Saharan scales and distances are vast: anything making up “only” fifteen per cent of the desert’s surface will still take up a lot of space. If the area covered by the Sahara’s sand dunes was laid over a map of Europe it would cover virtually the whole of France, Germany and Spain: nearly 600,000 square miles. The Great Sand Sea alone, the world’s largest unbroken area of dunes, which stretches from northern Egypt and eastern Libya to Sudan, covers an area larger than Ireland and Wales combined.

  The Saharan landmass covers a remarkable three-and-a-half million square miles - roughly the same size of the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii. But just as remarkable is how little human life is to be found in it; an estimated population of two-and-a-half million gives it a density of less than one and a half people per square mile. While sailing down the Nile, Rudyard Kipling considered the size of the desert, writing in Letters of Travel:

  Going up the Nile is like running the gauntlet before Eternity. Till one has seen it, one does not realise the amazing thinness of that little damp trickle of life that steals along undefeated through the jaws of established death. A rifle-shot would cover the widest limits of cultivation, a bowshot would reach the narrower. Once beyond them a man may carry his next drink with him till he reaches Cape Blanco on the west (where he may signal for one from a passing Union Castle boat) or the Karachi Club on the east. Say four thousand dry miles to the left hand and three thousand to the right.

  It is not a place in which to get lost. Whether marooned in a sea of sand or abandoned on an almost featureless plain the size of France, one’s options are limited and the likelihood of imminent death is high. An individual stranded without water in the Saharan summer cannot hope to survive for more than two or three days. The descent from thirst to madness is swift. If death comes only after a period of intense agony at least when it does come it is a merciful release. The immense, almost inhuman scale of the desert, combined with its limited water and its often alien faces, some of which might as well belong to other planets, all present an environment that many think would be best avoided at any cost.

  Added to this are the extreme temperatures. The difference between the mean temperature of the hottest and coldest month can be as high as 45°F (25°C), with maximum temperatures of ll2°F ( 44°C) often not impossible. Being so arid, the desert is devoid of water’s latent heat capacity to keep things warm after the sun sets, making the nights extremely chilly. With such fluctuations in temperature, surface rocks are heated and chilled in quick succession, leading to significant erosion. Cliffs are scored, the sand turned into an instrument of abrasion by the wind. In many places such wind erosion has planed the flat rocks of the hammada as smooth as ice. Elsewhere, the sand-laced wind has scored the vertical faces of the cliffs with curious imitations of glacial striation.

  Sometimes it is easier, and more comfortable, to explore the Sahara from afar. The first satellite pictures taken of the desert, by NASA in 1981, provided clear evidence of something that anyone who lives or has travelled in the Sahara already knew. The desert was not always as dry as it is today. NASA’s photographs showed large and numerous dry riverbeds and wadis that provided clear evidence of a once extensive system of surface water.

  Fresh, cold-water oasis

  Even nowadays many of the wadis continue to function as they are meant to, periodically filling with water funnelled along the channels after the infrequent rainfall that comes to parts of the desert, albeit often less than annually. Finding the path of least resistance, the rushing water cuts its way through the softest beds of normally parched rock.

  Today, the only permanent rivers in the greater Saharan region are on its edges, with the Nile and the Niger marking portions of the desert’s border along some of their course. Neither of these great rivers draws water from the desert itself but both rather rely on rainfall from wet highland areas in lands far beyond the Sahara’s borders. As the alleged traveller and writer Sir John Mandeville writes in his curious mid-fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman French travelogue, “Egypt is a long country, but it is straight (i.e. strait), that is to say narrow, for they may not enlarge it toward the desert for default of water.” Whether or not (although probably not) Sir John ever existed, let alone travelled to the ends of the earth as he claimed, the compiler of his Travels was more or less correct in this description of Egypt as a land hemmed in by the Sahara.

  A far more reliable source of water are the oases, which appear in depressions where water is able to break through-for instance where there exists some break or fissure in the earth’s surface that allows the water to intrude on the land. While both the quantity and quality of the water found in the oases vary greatly, the fact that many of the larger oases have been continually inhabited for millennia gives a good indication of just how immense are the underground aquifers that supply them. The water in some of the aquifers below the Sahara was left behind at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, which lasted from approximately 1.8 million to 12,000 BCE, rightly earning this priceless prehistoric resource the name fossil water. Yet although the centuries-old presence of certain oases demonstrates the enormous capacity of these aquifers, it by no means guarantees that some of them will not lose their water at some point. Indeed, there are many examples of oases becoming extinct, and when the water supply disappears so too must the residents of those oases. Quite simply, without these oases, human habitation in the Sahara would be impossible.

  Often thought of as underground lakes, the aquifers that lie beneath the Sahara instead of being recognizable, uniform bodies of water can more accurately be thought of as subterranean regions of saturated stone. It is the exertion of pressure on these wet underground rocks that feeds water up to the surface, like squeezing a sponge, in an unbroken flow. The Sahara is blessed with a number of such aquifers, of which two giant examples are especially noteworthy. The first is the Bas Saharan Basin, an artesian aquifer system that ranges not only under the majority of the Algerian and Tunisian Sahara but also stretches as far as Morocco and Libya, encompassing the entire Grand Erg Oriental region. The second great aquifer is the Nubian Sandstone System, which is located in the Sahara’s eastern and north-eastern quarters and is reckoned to cover in excess of770,000 square miles in the area of north-western Sudan, north-eastern Chad, south-western Libya and most of Egypt. Best estimates suggest that the Nubian Sandstone System contains somewhere in the region of36,000 cubic miles of groundwater. This single gigantic water system is responsible for supplying the majority of the water needs for all of the countries it lies beneath, with the exception of Egypt, which, as it has done since antiquity, relies on the Nile for most of its water needs.

  At the other end of the spectrum, the Sahara contains some of the world’s least-visited massifs and mountain ranges, which are among the most isolated places on earth. One reason for the lack of visitors is that these high places tend to have sprung up in the Sahara’s more central, and subsequently less accessible, districts. This is a pity for anyone who enjoys wildernesses because these peaks are among the most rugged and remote locations the world can offer. In northern Nigeria, the Air Mountains reach higher than 6,000 feet, and the Ahaggar Mountains in Algeria rise above 9,000 feet. To reach the Sahara’s highest peaks, however, one has to travel to the Tibesti Mountains in the emptiest corner of northern Chad. Here, among the lunar peaks, is the Sahara’s highest point, Emi Koussi, a forty mile-wide volcanic cone that reaches a height of 11,302 feet, rising a mile and a
half above the otherwise flat sandstone plateau that it dominates.

  The Ahaggar Mountains from Assekrem

  By far the largest proportion of the Sahara’s makeup is dun-coloured rock and stone in various forms, thousands of miles of gravel-strewn plains that can initially seem devoid of life or interest, especially for those who travel over these landscapes at speed. As Sven Lindquist once wrote: “In Sweden, when trying to imagine the desert, I thought of sandy beaches which never reach the water. But it is fairly rare to see beaches in the desert, which is more like an endless schoolyard.” These stony regions make up approximately seventy per cent of the Sahara, and consist of everything from plains of coarse gravel to plateaus of stripped rock and wadis.

  Water’s presence does not necessarily mean that life there is sustainable. In the northernmost part of the Sahara, southern Tunisia is home to the Chott el-Djerid, the desert’s largest saltpan or, for the sake of technical accuracy, endorheic basin. The Chott el-Djerid is a highly saline marsh lake that covers more than 2,500 square miles, and which glistens a brilliant, crystalline white. A startling sight, saltpans are found in different parts of the world, but especially in hot deserts. Lacking an outflow, either on the surface or underground through permeable rock, any rain that falls into these basins is permanently trapped there, apart from that which escapes through evaporation thus forming the Fata Morgana or superior mirages of mountain ranges and fairy castles as seemingly real as the rocks beneath one’s feet. In high summer, it is also possible to traverse the salt lake on foot or, exercising due caution, in lighter vehicles, thanks to the presence of a semi-hard crust that forms during the period of blistering weather.