MID-DAY AT A MOROCCAN OASIS
At the end of the last track in the Sahara, the wind whistles a scary tune
Twenty kilometres south of Arfoud, the road unravels like the thoughts of a madman.
All that indicates what lies beyond the horizon are tire tracks radiating outward onto a featureless dead zone of sun-blackened slate embedded in a scorched and seemingly endless plain. Dust tornadoes, some a hundred metres high, inscribe signatures on the earth, but nothing else — no plant, no landmark, no building, no dune, no hint of past or future — interrupts the terrifying emptiness. And so, to impress upon ourselves the bleakness of this place, we three adventurers stop: Ali Bokbot, our Touareg guide; and ourselves, a pair of North American fools determined to reach the last oasis in what is known locally as Erg Chebbi and elsewhere as the Sahara Desert.
Our journey to this Allah-forsaken spot on the Morocco-Algeria border had begun five days earlier in the Mediterranean coastal city of Tangiers. We’d boarded the Marrakech Express and a half-day later found ourselves in the town fabled as the last stop south on the hippie highway to hashish-induced bliss. But Marrakech was only a waystation on a trip that would become increasingly surreal as we head eastward — day after day — toward the Sahara. On the first morning out, the route climbs switchbacks through terraced fields toward the Tizi-n-Tichka Pass. Around us rise the 3,500-metre summits of the High Atlas Mountains.
Donkeys — like preposterous mobile haystacks — lug their loads to nearby threshing grounds. There, amid flat-roofed, mudwalled houses, teams of tethered horses are driven in circles over the wheat so their hoofs can loosen the kernels from the chaff. The scene is medieval.
Descending onto the arid edge of the Western Sahara, the terrain levels out, the air grows opaque with wind-borne dust, and the heat be- comes palpable ... almost corrosive. The route is punctuated by desert towns whose appearance seems absurd in such a forlorn land. No traveller on the long journey between Marrakech and Arfoud fails to be lured down the narrow side road into the Dades Gorge, a phantasmagoria of eroded cliffs that enclose a dozen villages, riverside palmeries, and ghost towns. We linger one night at a small, candlelit hotel in the middle of the 25-kilometre-long canyon.
In the valley below, we can hear the muezzin calling the worshipful to prayer. The breeze smells of roses.
The hotel’s windows frame dozens of bulbous stone hoodoos, some 100 metres tall, whose forms loom over the valley’s inhabitants like harbingers of doom.
Whenever we pause, the women — palms dyed with henna, chins tattooed — draw their veils and turn away. In a world where most doors are decorated with an evil eye, a stranger with a camera is viewed with suspicion. Children, however, would pop up from nowhere, their voices wheedling: “Un stylo? Un bon-bon? Un dirham?” With no pens or candies or coins, we flee, heading further eastward, hoping to find in the Sahara’s emptiness a message more sublime.
When we finally approach the outskirts of Arfoud, the first renegade dunes of the Sahara are swirling skiffs of fine sand across the road. At times, hobbled camels appear in front of us, wandering the roadside unattended — like apparitions in a dream. The wind stops. The air screams of heat. Mirages dance on the horizon. I ask myself briefly whether Arfoud is the end of the journey into the Sahara ... or the stepping-off point for more frightening things beyond?
Arfoud is a soulless oasis village that marks the point where the River Ziz loses momentum and sinks forever beneath the allencompassing desert soil. It also marks the point where the intrepid or insane can fulfil some peculiar vision — inspired perhaps by Lawrence of Arabia — and head southwest to where the enormous and endless Saharan dunes start.
Knowing the road ends outside Arfoud and 3,000 km of untracked desert begins, we hire Bokbot to lead us into a world as familiar to him as it is strange to us. He’d grown up in the desert, working his father’s camel trains as they crossed North Africa. He still does this today. But now, if offered, he laughingly agrees that he’d take a Land Rover over 40 camels any day.
An hour’s drive south of Arfoud, the starkness of the landscape assumes almost metaphysical proportions. We are out beyond BorjSud our Michelin map tells us, near a blue dot called Dar-Beida where — in an emergency — a solitary well might yield potable water. In every direction, the land is absolutely flat; the sky is as pale as tears. Occasional stone cairns mark the route. The kilometres pass. The heat is going thermonuclear. “How hot is it?” I ask.
Bokbot considers this. “Not so hot. Forty-five degrees, maybe 47.” We two exchange wary glances. “It’s cooler since the rain,” Bokbot adds.
We look around. “When did it rain?”
“This spring. First time in six years. It’s been dry.”
“It’s been dry!” I laugh. There isn’t a single plant in sight. Venus should be so barren. We sit mesmerized — or maybe cauterized — as the desert slides by.
The dunes finally appear, nacreous and pink and fabulously unreal, looming larger as we rocket now across the hardpan like acolytes approaching the Holy of Holies. The dunes fill the horizon, some 200 metres high, undulating in ridges that assume exactly the curves and colour of naked hips, buttocks, and thighs. At a cluster of palms surrounding a well, we park. This oasis has one building, a café/ lodge where we can either escape the sun or hire a camel for a journey into the dunes. We hire a camel.
Soon, we are engulfed by the Sahara, ascending sandy ridges and descending into hollows, swaying precariously, side to side, on and on, up and down, swallowed alive by the dunes. Ahead of us, Ydir Ait Bahaddou, a handsome Berber tribesman, dressed in blue caftan and a blue turban, leads his camel into the emptiness. And when we’ve gone so far that we seem truly lost, when we’ve crested one of the highest dunes and there are only dunes in every direction, we halt. The moment is existential. So, we write our names in the sand. These words seem to be all that keep us from disappearing forever like the River Ziz — into the vastness and immolating heat of the desert. By the time we agree to turn back, the wind is already erasing our transient names — like God snuffing out a flickering candle flame.