The Unknown Sahara Laszlo Almasy. Translation by Andras Zboray
The eastern Sahara’s Libyan Desert (covering Egypt, Libya, Sudan), was one of the last corners of the desert to be explored and still remains wild and barely visited. In the late 1920 and early 30s – the Hungarian Almasy (a contemporary of Bagnold and Clayton and fictionalised as the ‘English Patient’) criss-crossed this region in then newfangled motorcars which enabled systematic exploration of this hyper-arid quarter.
The book tells the stories of his many feats in the region: the first drive to Kufra from the west, the clarification of the Zarzura legend, the discovery of countless rock art sites including the famous Cave of the Swimmers, were some of his achievements.
Almasy’s energy and courage is inspiring. To be bombing around the most desolate corner of the Sahara in tinny Fords (2WD of course), dropping fuel and water here and there is quite a feat. You’ll also pick up some interesting Sahara lore that is not found elsewhere, in English at least. The book could use a sketch map to point out his wanderings. Even with three maps on the go I found it hard to work out where he was – especially around the Gilf.
That said, ‘Unknown Sahara’ is a desert classic finally available in English. Like Bagnold’s Libyan Sands (reviewed elsewhere), it reveals the very earliest days of Saharan motoring. Highly recommended.
DESERT EXPLORER – A BIOGRAPHY OF COLONEL P.A. CLAYTON Patrick Clayton (son), Zerzura Press
P.A. Clayton was one of the key figures in opening up the Libyan Desert in the early thirties. The book is a biography of the father by a son, who lived the first ten years of his life in Egypt, accompanying his father on several of his surveying expeditions deep into the desert, and the documented milestones in the explorer’s life are intermingled with details based on the author’s personal memories. It’s a pity, that the most significant of Clayton’s expeditions, those seeking the mythical Zarzura oasis in 1932 and 1933 are only described by quoting already published sources, revealing no new information. The son’s view is understandably biased, sometimes resulting in deviance from facts known from other sources, but never disturbingly so. Overall, the book is an excellent combination of already published information and personal experience, supplemented by previously unpublished photographs.
CONQUEST OF THE SAHARA Douglas Porch (2005 edition by Farrar Straus Giroux)
An intriguing and readable account of France’s attempts to colonise the Sahara during the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Full of historical detail, it vividly describes the vainglorious expeditions, large and small, which staggered across the desert, often poorly led and suffering greatly for personal prestige and their country’s honour. The extraordinary shambles of the doomed Flatters expeditions has to be read to be believed. This description refers to the original 1986 edition.
CALL OF THE DESERT Philippe Bourseiller, 2004 (28 x 36cm, 444pp)
Call of the Desert is a stonker. At around 4kg it is heavy enough to stun a full-grown horse and is packed with glossy, full-page portraits, close-ups and wide-angle vistas from the Atlantic to the Nile. All the mainstream Saharan shots all here in one book: the culture and landscapes of the Moors, some lovely Moroccan kasbahs, the Niger delta as well as Ounianga and the Ennedi and Meroe in Sudan – though not, noticeably the rich imagery of the Gilf and Uweinat – so falling short of being the absolutely ultimate Saharan picture book.
And the writing isn’t bad either. Rather than let the author do the talking which often results in flowery eulogies attempting to parallel the images, they’ve shipped in some experts who – being French (the longest-established source of Saharan scholarship) or Saharan – know better than most what they’re talking about. So you get surprisingly good accounts of the geology, pastoral society and one of the best accounts of human occupation, from the 7 million year old proto-human bones found in Chad (predating those of the Rift Valley) right up to the historic period.
It has to be said, the shop copy at Stanfords London (£30) had split its spine – the book may be too heavy for its binding – even the box it was posted to me in had split open. Amazon.co.uk pictured a different cover on its website but what you get is the book as left. They are going there from just £18 (presumably from the US where it is $31 new) which makes this the best Sahara picture book bargain since Civilisation in the Sands went for a fiver.
Also available: CALL OF THE DESERT – THE SAHARA (2005, 75pp). Extracted from the above collection (as many travel photographers do), this is a sort of school text book on the Sahara covering various themes and places like Ghadames, sand, nomads and camels, salt, ruins and even the Chad war with drawings and maps and of course great pictures.
The Libyan Tuareg author, Ibrahim Al-Koni, tells the tale of Asouf, a solitary goatherd who is the guardian of Wadi Mathendous. The similarly reclusive mouflon (barbary sheep or waddan, right) feature heavily and symbolically. His father died trying to hunt a mouflon, and Asouf once escaped from the Italian occupiers by changing into a mouflon and heading for the hills. One day aggressive modern hunters (one of them telling named Cain) come to Wadi Mat’, and insist he leads them to any remaining mouflon in the Messak. One presumes there is some kind of allegory being played out here. Cain is a voracious meat-eater. Asouf is a veggie. One is the incomer ravaging the desert, the other lives very humbly, at one with the environment. Nice though it is to read something in English by an indigenous writer of the Sahara, and even a Tuareg, the themes were not that subtly evoked and I spent more time picturing the well-known Fezzanese settings than acquiring any deeper meaning other than: nomads – good; modern man – bad. But don’t take my word for it – readers with better tuned sensitivities may get the message.
As a young boy Sven is captivated by a rare Swedish travelogue describing the well diggers of Touggourt in Algeria. Later on he becomes influenced by the writings of André Gide and other literary types who also spent time in North Africa. And so it seems a rather lame deal is struck with his publisher: go to North Africa, retrace the travels of some of these writers and cook up a polemical Sahara travelogue on the way.
As a selective literary colonial history of North Africa the book is OK. After skimming over St Exupery (which proves the author does not get the desert) he finds himself to Smara in the midst of the Polisario war while following Michel Vieuchange who arrived after much hardship and increasing self-delusion in 1930, disguised as a woman. The quest for Smara matched Timbuktu or Mecca at that time and Vieuchange spent just three hours there before dying on the way back to Europe. Lindqvist seems no more impressed with the place after a less strenuous journey, tellingly quoting Vieuchange “Decisions are made in Paris. They are carried out in the Sahara” Perhaps this was his conclusion on the Desert Divers project?
The Western Sahara may not be the most inspiring destination and to the author it’s as ugly and wretched as the romantic motives of the nineteenth-century intellectuals he catalogues. To underline their vanity he details the mind-boggling cruelty and atrocities committed by the French across northern Algeria which occurred right under the noses of the wandering writers like Gide. The curious fantasist Pierre Loti is ticked off and a couple of chapters of this short book seem to paraphrase Andre Gide’s The Immoralist. Why? Probably because the author liked him and the subject matter. We also get a graveside visit followed by the received text on the self-destructive life of Isabelle Eberhardt. Adopting local male dress and having turned native and Moslem with a fanatical compulsion, she at least gets off lightly in the author’s critique, being aware and rightly hostile to the vicious colonial enterprise around her.
But as a wilderness the Sahara really never gets a look in. His travels in Algeria get no further south than El Golea (another dump, in his opinion). Worse still, some chapters are separated by interminable short dream or magical realist sequences – surely the naffest literary device of all – while important questions like “How many muscles are there in a life?” are pondered over with thankful brevity. Meanwhile the autobiographer in him can’t resist recounting a lame childhood anecdote about how he was once lowered into a well to retrieve a ball. He didn’t nearly drown but he could have done and it was dead scary.
As a description of the Sahara this book barely bothers to scrape the surface. As a selective study of Saharan writers it’s lightweight and self-indulgent.
I wanted to be Saint-Ex, the flyer who does not abandon a friend in distress in the desert. I became Vieuchange, the desert wanderer who lies his way into continuing his journey, because he ‘had wanted it in Paris’.
At a time when LP can afford to produce loss-making guides to destinations few other publishers would touch, along with the new LP Afghanistan comes Algeria, the first English-language guide to that country for decades, if not ever (LP’s long out of print North Africa Shoestring from the 1980s covered Algeria but was always a bit lame).
It’s a slim book and the guide section is only about 100 pages but the Sahara fills about half of that and there’s plenty more on the practicalities of desert travel in the front and back sections. I’m not expert, but in the populated north the little-visited riches from the Roman era match those of Tunisia and Libya and get a good account. This will probably be the most genuinely useful section of this book that will help open up that area (security issues in the northeast notwithstanding).
As is fashionable, 4x4s get a jab on p.71 for creating too much dust which kills coral and so on, but you wonder how much dust Saharan tourists as passengers or drivers actually contribute compared to travelling or working locals? It’s a bit like the current debate on flying and is probably based on Andrew Goudie’s dust-raking ‘Toyotarization’ article that hit the broadsheets a couple of years ago. The LP has a point though, travelling at a slower pace is much more rewarding as long as you strike upon a good area. So it would have been nice to see more than a couple of paragraphs on the practicalities of choosing and undertaking a trek with camel support. That’s what an LP-er will be after down south which is divided mainly between Tam and Djanet. They don’t say much about travelling on the ground between the two which, following any number of routes, would the ultimate A to B tour of the south (as opposed to a loop).
Oddly, the fairly obscure Tassili d’Immidir gets a mention, but the more accessible and better known Tefedest does not. Maybe the author flew into In Salah and had to dig up a hinterland counterpart to Tam’s Hoggar and Djanet’s Tassili N’Ajjer. The problem is the three towns/regions don’t seem to hook up into a homogenous entity known as the Algerian Sahara. The book proposes what you can see out of each town rather than linking the three, perhaps because that’s the form with fly-in tours; the main way most will experience southern Algeria under the current restrictions.
Independent travellers will be frustrated or put off by these restrictions; fly-in Saharan tourists get what they’re given (in Algeria, as good as it gets) so the book won’t get much of a practical work out. Braver individuals can try and hire a driver/guide – it’s a good idea in the less-safe Roman north I reckon. This is where the guide pays off and for the background information alone, it’s worth buying to learn more about Algeria the country as opposed to the Algerian Sahara.
Al Qaida de Maghreb Islamique; Contrabande au nom de l’Islam Mohamed Mokeddem (Casbah, 2010)
I picked this up in Algiers airport for 1200D (€12), having seen it mentioned on the forum. It’s in French and I surprised myself with how much I understood; perhaps have being familiar with the subject helped. But I dare say I missed many of the books nuances so what follows is a bit vague.
It kicks off with an account of the origins of the notorious and now dead Abou Zeid, real name Mohamed Ghader (pictured on the cover), as an impoverished member of the Arabic Ghader clan living near Deb Deb, close to the Libyan border. Here he sets himself up as a successful smuggler of low value goods from Libya while getting married and divorced a few times. He’s painted as a rather withdrawn and even sociopathic figure who gets caught, goes to prison, gets radicalised and proceeds to rise up the ranks as the GSPC relocate to north Mali around the turn of the millennium. The book them jumps around chronologically, referring to recent kidnappings of the Spanish and Austrians (all listed here) as well as brief profiles of hostage negotiators and intermediaries like the influential Ould Limam Chafi from Burkina and Malian Tuareg warlords Iyaf Ag Ghali and the late Ibrahim Bahanga (the former of who is on the march again in 2012). It covers the establishment of the GSPC’s rearward base in northern Mali and gives an account of the 2003 event when 32 tourists were grabbed in the Tassili N’Ajjer in southeast Algeria.
There’s a little new information here and an odd lack of place names and other details such the enigmatic escape route to Mali and, a few months later, the subsequent flight of the gang to Chad with the ransom money where they were caught by Tubu rebels after a lethal exchange with the Chadian army. Court testimonies of a few captured kidnappers follow. Then it seems accounts of later abductions are repeated, seemingly lifted from the Ennahar website which the author ran. The origins of AQIM’s links with Al Qaida are also detailed.
Overall it comes across as a bit of a hastily completed book – not helped by the fact that a chunk of pages in my copy (with the original ‘dollar bills’ cover) are misplaced. I can’t say I learned that much new of interest, apart from the origins of Mohamed Ghader. A bit more research and detail in that vein may have been made a better read.
In a line: must have been a great adventure so should have been a better story…
An interest in pre-Islamic tombs of the Sahara lead me to Secrets of South Sahara (£15 on ebay), Mark Milburn’s account of a solo expedition ostensibly to the western Aïr mountains near Arlit in 1976-7 to study these monuments. I figured it would make a more digestible introduction to the subject than the many dry or technical academic studies easily found on the web which anyway tend to be localised and/or specialised.
I was familiar with the name and am sure I once read another book of his, but Secrets… seems to be the only one available. Mark Milburn was also mentioned in the Sahara Handbook (1980) as an explorer and scholar of Saharan pre-history, through in this book he never describes himself as a professional archeologist or academic, and comes across as merely a curious and well-read enthusiast. That may be incorrect or have changed since, as even today Milburn contributes many papers to publications in Spanish, German and French on the subject, including the now defunct Sahara Journal as recently as 2011. In fact you get the feeling he may have helped found SJ and even helped fund research in the Sahara. It’s hard to be sure about any of this as there’s little about [Dr] Mark Milburn on the web. He is perhaps a man of means.
As an account of desert travel just prior to the Golden Era when things got easier for a decade or so, the book itself was rather unsatisfying and inconsistent in pace. To be fair to the author, you get the feeling it was poorly edited by the American publishers who may have had little understanding of the subject or knowledge of the area. And there is no map! – always short-sighted with a book like this, so I’ve made a rough estimation on the left, based on his account. As you can see, he covered a fair amount of ground in Algeria and Niger.
The book starts with an overdetailed account of his descent from Germany to Spain to collect his desert gear stashed there. At times it reads like a diary and you’re left thinking, who cares what you had for breakfast or what letters you’ve received and from whom, let’s get on to the south Sahara. Already, an intense dissatisfaction with his vehicle is evident, as well as the people who service it, parts availability and so on – and it recurs right up to the very last paragraphs. It’s so bad he cannot even bear to utter the identity of his despised diesel, but from the photos it’s clearly a leaky-roofed 88” Land Rover. This scorn is perhaps more understandable when he admits that a previous expedition was curtailed when a gear lever snapped off at the base (a not-unknown flaw on Series IIIs). His was towed back (afaict), but you get the feeling that temperamentally Milburn and Land Rover should never have walked down the aisle. Anyway the mid-1970s were the ‘Leyland years’ – the subterranean nadir of British automobile manufacture when shoddily assembled ‘Monday-morning vehicles’ were made three days a week. The other two days they were on strike.
This preamble drags on into protracted to-ing and fro-ing across the Morocco-Algerian border before he finally gets allowed in, followed by much grumbling about Algerian inefficiencies and inconsistencies. The county was then in the midst of its paranoid, Soviet-backed episode which I too recall from my early travels there, a time when even photographing telegraph poles (a hobby of mine at the time) risked arrest. The Western Sahara war between Morocco and Algeria was just kicking off in late 1976 too, and there was some doubt that the Algerian border would be open at all, or that there was access to the Grand Sud.
One of 3 huge antennae tombs between Routes F4 and F7 in SW Morocco
On his travels he meets other tourists exploring the Sahara, and near In Salah teams up with a driver with similar interests. They set off east along the piste towards Amguid village to check out old tombs. The gnarly stage beyond Tin Habedra well was one of a few episodes where the author managed to evoke his majestic surroundings – elsewhere the grandeur passes un-noted. Once in Amguid, the two set about searching for tombs and paintings; MM himself treks up the escarpment for a better look over the many crescent tombs he finds below but here, as later, he admits difficulty in getting a good photo of an entire structure when alongside it at ground level. It’s something I’ve found myself; they look so much more impressive on Google Earth or from a drone (left).
From Amguid they nip down in the rain towards In Ecker where they encounter stragglers on the second Abidjan-Nice rally (precursor to the Paris-Dakar). Then a diversion west takes them out past Silet for more tomb and rock-art spotting around the twin peaks of Tioueine.
There are more shopping difficulties, intransigent clerks and tedious permit apps on the lean streets of Tam (also my impression in ’82), then it’s off to Niger. On the piste down to In Guezzam I was surprised to read of the mass of crescent tombs the keen-eyed Milburn was finding, seeing as this was a well travelled route and I’d never heard of such reports from others. Perhaps most are too focused on getting to the other side. Google sat didn’t uncover much either, apart from a collection 140km northwest of In Guezzam as well as a few more a few kilometres northwest of the border post.
In Arlit there’s more admin to unravel before stocking up and setting out with Bazo, a Targui guide, to explore a region to the northwest of town. You suspect this may be a place Henri Lhote (of Tassili frescoes fame – often cited in SoSS) had reported on in the same year, and which may have been a revised destination for Milburn once his planned visit to the Western Sahara got nixed by the impending war. Accompanied by the agreeable and sharp-eyed Bazo, all sorts of fascinating discoveries are made in this little-visited part of the Aïr; it is the core of the book.
Like others I know, Milburn seems to be driven by an urge to uncover and classify and by doing so, understand. He shows an indefatigable enthusiasm for tracking down and logging these structures while speculating modestly on their origin and meaning, hoping that some day some pros will come down and do a proper investigation (those days seem long gone). He then shoots off back to Tam, then returns south to spend time in the Laouni region north of In Guezzam with another guy and where, surprisingly, many more ancient discoveries are made among what you presume are the outcrops of Gara Eker. Then it’s back up to Tam and alone up to In Salah where he undertakes a dash over to Illizi via Amguid with some Germans, a stage that gets covered in a page or less. In Illizi they organise a camel recce of nearby Oued Djerat, the first Saharan rock art site to be well documented by Europeans back in the 1930s, and which Lhote had written about a year earlier. That done, MM manages to drive some 600km southwest to Hirafok in a day in his 88” because the route north of Illizi was closed and Tin Habedra to the west via Erg Tifernine was too sketchy alone. He then zips up to the Moroccan border, delighted to be out of Algeria, and a day or two later even more thrilled to be back in Spain. These last chapters end in such a rush when you think back to the protracted start of the book, you wonder if he’d suddenly exceeded a word count or ran out of time. A few weeks after writing this I was advised by someone who knows that: ‘…[SoSS] is deliberately misleading…’ as in, presumably, protecting new locations for later study.
So overall I was disappointed by what was an uneven read from someone who even then, had much experience of the Sahara, and has acquired much more since. It would be nice to think one day Mark Milburn may retire and write ‘Memoirs of a Saharan Tomb Grader’. Among Brits he is rare and even appears to have a lighthearted edge judging by the picture left where he suggests the direction Land Rover should have taken.
The regular grumbling about lazy Spanish, sloppy Moroccan mechanics and any number of slack-arsed or obstructive Algerians, and not least his 88″, all get in the way of what must have been a great adventure and so should have been a better story. I was surprised to be unsatisfied by Secrets of South Sahara as a travelogue, but learned enough about the enigma of pre-Islamic tombs (as well as their very profusion, once you start looking) to make it worth reading. It just reminds you how much more there is to see of the Sahara once you slow down and look closer.
The book has a few so-so photos; you’d think he must have come up with better; perhaps they were saved for other publications. The few graphics of tomb layouts are much better. The cover itself is a graphic of the intriguing ‘Air man with handbag’ which the author never saw, but mentioned that Lhote had found repeated over much of the Aïr. We ourselves found one at the popular site of Anakom (left) on the east side of the Aïr.
Sahara Overland 