Life in the Sahara

Baked meringue topping as far as the eye could see. It would have looked deliciously edible if my stomach was not suffering the explosive effects of an errant carrot. Not ideal in the middle of the Sahara desert, sure. But then not much about the world’s largest desert is ideal. The small number of creatures that have managed to call it home all have a gritty aura about them. The hardened black beetles that tattoo the virgin dunes with their footprints stop at your feet and look up at you as if to say “Hey! You’re a dick!”. The unlucky crows that have somehow landed here from the back of some old trading frigate seem to know that their brothers elsewhere on the planet just have it so much better. Tufts of grass like steel wool house hardy grey grasshoppers and the occasional gecko.  Small, unlikely pockets of life have sprung up all over the Sahara and – begrudgingly –  have adapted to these harsh and unforgiving conditions. The same certainly cannot be said of myself and Tough Guy. My headache, thirst and abdominal fireworks were not the signs of an organism that had mastered its environment.

And yet it had all started so peacefully. It was just going to be one – heck, maybe two – days in the ancient Islamic town of Chinguetti. I would stock my camera with images of this crumbling thirteenth century town, Tough Guy would have his annual fill of culture taking in the thousand-year-old manuscripts kept in the six local libraries and we would both have a bartering chip with extremists by stating that we had been to the seventh holiest city of Islam. Whether this would carry greater kudos than visiting the eighth holiest city, we were unsure. Or, for that matter, how exactly this religious rating system is done in the first place. Does Hanover Park, for example, bring up the rear at twelve-thousand-and-fourth? We attempted to extract these answers from the local scholar-cum-librarian. Unfortunately, all he could keep telling us was how quickly Mauritanian women put on weight after you marry them. And so it was from the rooftops of these locations of such millennia-old sage knowledge that the silver-caramel dunes of the surrounding Sahara called to us. “Dave and Tough Guy,” they seemed to say in a whispy hypnotic voice “Come to my bosom. I am unfathomably vast and enticing, edgy and a little dangerous. I span the breadth of a continent and etch over the borders of thirteen countries. I may house some Islamic extremists and induce chaos in most nations I touch, sure. But hey, c’est la vie? You know you want to…” And she was right. She cut to the core of me, that old rascal. For one thing was undeniable – that desert has a peculiar hypnotic pull.

So there we found ourselves. Not as much in her bosom as between her toes. Tricked. And yet, despite suffering all these ailments, that experience in the Sahara was nothing short of spectacular. The endless shapes cut by the dunes in the early morning light, the impossibility of the night skies above us, the view of an oasis after hours of nothingness, the penis-shaped footprints left by the camels. But above all else: the silence. No crickets, no mosquitoes, no cars, no dogs barking, no electrical hum of a completed circuit. Just a vacuum. At night it really feels like all life but your own has ceased to exist. But with the rising of the sun, the hardy creatures of the Sahara continue to eke out their existence. Some quite successfully – like the desert fox. Others less so – like Dave McAlpine. And most of the others somewhere in between – like the desert hare that sheepishly bolted behind the nearest dune as soon as it saw us. I fear the poor bugger must have eaten the same carrots as I did.

  

 

And now the coup de grace...