June 22, 2003

Jeffrey Tayler succumbed to the mystique of the Sahara long before he ever visited it. As a student of Arabic, he dreamed of shimmering dunes and inscrutable Bedouin, and of following the caravan route of the postwar British explorer and writer Wilfred Thesiger. But his first sight of the desert was less idyllic: he got lost and almost died of thirst. Nevertheless he returned, beguiled by accounts of the Draa Valley, an ancient trading path stretching hundreds of kilometres across the Moroccan Sahara to the Atlantic.

It had once been the “land of dissidence” where anarchy ruled, rebels fought French colonialists and, in the stories of Paul Bowles, ferocious locals mocked and mutilated European interlopers. Its sandstorms were vicious and its wells days apart. When Tayler set out to travel through it there were rumours of smugglers, guerrillas and forbidden military zones — and the nomadic Ruhhal, who were to be his guides through the desert, its oases and ancient casbahs.

Tayler wanted to find out whether the Ruhhal way of life was still liable, or merely a curious anachronism. His guides were a peculiar and fractious bunch. One spent his time telling riddles, reciting obscure statistics and attempting to convert him to Islam. Another was the son of a holy man, a boozy, chain-smoking taxi driver who insisted on calling people “dude” in a Californian accent.

This is a very unmacho traveller’s tale. Unlike writers who depict themselves as intrepid heroes, Tayler admits to being sad, scared and sick. He is disturbed by poverty and illiteracy, by the slum villages with their stinking heaps of rubbish, and queasy at faecal smells, rotting meat and swarming flies. He also becomes exasperated by his guides’ unhygienic ways, their ignorance and stubbornness, and their passivity in the face of fate.

But despite his own atheism and his distaste at his companion’s relentless evangelising, he comes to understand the appeal of religion to desert dwellers. “Nowhere for me had words Qur’anic or biblical taken on as much life as they had here in the Sahara, where, apart from the Word, there was nothing but rock, sky and sun.” As for the Rubbal, he feels they have an “innate dignity” a certain stoic purity. But Tayler has a reporter’s dark eye, and in the reader’s memory the deprivations he describes outlast the many beauties he encounters.

The Sahara covers 4.8m sq km, from Morocco in the north to Chad in the south, Mauritania in the west to Egypt in the east. In the popular Western consciousness it conjures images of heat and inhospitability, a “great nothing” paved with sand and almost bare of landmarks. Its power is brutal, eternal, unbending to human endeavour. “Beneath the sands lie many relics of the past, stone-age artefacts, forgotten armies, hunters who lost their way, murdered and plundered caravans, vanished explorers, dead camels... All these are buried and exposed and reburied in endless cycles write Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle in Sahara.

Villiers and Hirtle’s book covers the history, geography, geology and meteorology of the region in brain-strangling detail. It also attempts to nail some Western preconceptions as myth-muddled “outsider thinking”. Less than a quarter of Sahara territory is covered by sand, they explain, and more than four-fifths is rocky. Nor is it devoid of life, also being home to birds, lizards, rodents, foxes and antelope. Nor is it eternal: the desert has existed for about 3,000 years. Some 10,000 years ago it boasted forests, grasslands and rivers alive with fish.

Intoxicated by its history and fading cultures, Villiers and Hirtle despair of the modern Sahara, a territory degraded and polluted by the pursuit of oil — just as Thesiger did when he returned to the Sahara in the 1970s. For his part, Tayler explains how climate change and increasingly regular droughts have driven his beloved nomads out of the desert and into urban shacks, losing their tribal heritage and identity in the process.

He estimates that only two or three of each 100 Ruhhal who roamed the Draa valley a decade ago still tramp the nomadic paths. “Drought is killing the Draa and a way of life; its parching winds are eroding the casbahs, the most authentic architectural vestiges of north Africa’s long, glorious Islamic history.”

But while its human population shifts, the Sahara itself remains so vast and so fierce that it can never be fully conquered or exploited. “There are still immense tracts of Sahara unmarked by the modern, where the growl of the internal combustion engine is never heard, tracts that are tranquil and deadly, just as they always were,” write Villiers and Hirtle. It is this sheer wildness that ensures that the romance of the desert will continue to captivate its chroniclers. — Dawn/Guardian News Service

Valley of the Casbahs: A Journey Across the Moroccan Sahara
By Jeffrey Tayler
Little, Brown
ISBN 0316860786
352pp. £16.99

Sahara: The Life of the Great Desert
By Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle
HarperCollins
ISBN 0007148208
224pp. £16.99

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