Northern Niger comprises vast tracts of unearthly sand and lava - and is home to the Tuaregs or 'people of the desert'. Dermot Somers joined a caravan of salt traders crossing the most exquisite stretch of the Sahara like refugees creeping through a colossal landscape, pursued in slow motion by history
One journey becomes another, whether consciously or by stealth. When I came home from Siberia I made my way by degrees to the Sahara. I had no idea I was going there; it was meant to be Tenerife.
An island of lava in the Atlantic a couple of hundred miles off the west coast of Africa, Tenerife is more than a horizontal holiday in the sun. Mount Tiede (13,000 feet), the summit of the island is, by a trick of history, the highest mountain in Spain.
The island lifts and gathers in the warm ocean; it climbs to a central plateau - a caldera, a ring of collapsed volcanoes - from which the central cone surges to an alpine height. Seen in the distance on a smoky blue day when the island recedes beyond the horizon and a wreath of low cloud separates Mount Tiede from the sea, the old volcano in its faded shawl of snow seems the grandmother of all mountains, the pure, severe idea of which the others are botched copies.
I was travelling with my wife Maeve and her sister, both pilots. After the ascent of Tiede they acquired a little Piper Archer plane. It looked to me like a model of a seagull. We discussed the options. I was lying on the beach, mountain-blisters on my Siberian frost-nip.
"How far is Africa?" I asked.
We buzzed briskly eastwards in a summer breeze above the vast pool of the ocean. Behind us, Tenerife attempted a weather-pattern. Cloud was spread thinly across the island, stretched to a haze with its own high rim, sharp as any horizon. The apex of the mountain rode this upper skyline like a vast sail, while within the haze the bulk of the island was visible in a shadowy way, submerged in an ocean of air. At the very base there was a luminous glow where sunlight struck a sandy shore.
Africa rose like the idea of itself out of the Atlantic. Beneath the last blue fringes of the ocean the seabed showed sandy yellow. The colour climbed out of the shallows to become an edge of golden strand, continuous, unbroken, a continental rim blurring any notion of beach. Behind it, the desert poured back as far as the eye could see. There was a special thrill to approaching land across the sea in a tiny plane, particularly when the land was a continent and the sea an ocean. Thermal currents swirled and sucked above the hot sands; I knew how migrant birds must feel, peering down with salt-rimmed eyes - is this Africa, or just a very low tide?
But there were faint roads scraped across the sand and patches of vegetation studded with palm-trees, an overlay of scrub and brush; further back were the rough escarpments of riverbeds where the rains flash past in floods, and then an arid town and its desert airfield, stiff with military, the kind of officials who find it hard to accept that you're not the pilot - your wife is. The country: Western Sahara, seeking independence from Morocco.
We stayed outside town on a tiny oasis - palm trees, a gushing stream, cane roofs, carpets. We travelled deeper into the landscape by jeep. Brown camels and their jumpy foals grazed on scrub-vegetation. We scrambled over a line of steep dunes, feet sliding in sand as soft as snow. On the far side was an artesian well, a concrete shaft equipped with rope and winch, the water 50 feet below. There were men in turbans and tunics, youths in ragged modern dress, a herd of camels doing its best to drain the well.
I was intrigued to stumble upon nomads within a week of leaving the Arctic deer- herders behind. So little difference: the snow was sand, the temperature read much the same, except for the single stroke that changes a minus to a plus. The same sense of unremitting toil.
Within the well, a bucket rose and fell in the piston motion I would come to see as the rhythm driving the whole nomadic culture of the Sahara.
A few months later I'm back, flying into Niger (pronounce it in French), a country north of Nigeria, on a TG4 project.
In the high heat of the sun I find myself walking daily in the desert with bowed head, withdrawn into the shadows of an empty mind where no sensation stirs, apart from the low creak of the joints, the rasp of the tongue like an echo in an empty well.
The sand is endlessly diverse; shades of orange, yellow, beige in the ripples, wrinkles, pinches, crimps and rumples. Pockets of a greyer hue lie in every hollow, where the finer grains settle out of the wind, dense and powdery as cement. The patterns at boot-level are repeated on a panoramic scale. The little ripples become wavering dunes, the crests so sharply edged they cut the throat of the imagination. Those rolling dunes, the maze of corridors that curve between them, could just as easily be snow or the steady rolling of the open sea. Until the eyes lift and a line of laden camels moves through the mind like a sentence in an unknown script.
We are filming a salt caravan - 20 camels and three Tuareg traders - travelling across hundreds of miles of sand from the salt oasis of Bilma through the Ténéré desert and on to the market-towns on the border with Nigeria.
The Ténéré is the most exquisite stretch of the whole Sahara; the Tuareg sing of its beauty as we sing of mountains and the sea. The camels trudge up to 30 miles a day, carrying enormous bales of hay, their own fodder, and mountains of coarse salt to be traded deep into the salt-starved Sahel, the fringes of the desert.
Al Hassan, the leader of the caravan, a frail feather of a man full of hidden strength, is in his 60s, nearing the end of an extraordinary career as merchant and desert-guide. Courteous, with a navigator's knowledge of the stars and their mysterious shifts, he leads the camel train all day every day across the unmarked sand, through midday heat and afternoon torpor into the cool of evening and the chill of night, pausing only to pray upon the sand in the required direction five times a day, saying always the long version, while the caravan moves ahead. He catches up lightly and takes the lead again.
Plodding in his wake through drifts of sand, sinking a little at every step, it seems to me that he walks a little above the surface, leaving no footprints at all; particularly during the Ramadan fast, when he eats nothing between sunrise and sunset.
Iliés, the second man, is his son-in-law. Adept at traditional crafts, such as stitching with palm-fronds, twisting súgán-ropes between splayed toes, caulking camel sores with tobacco and tea, he exudes the assurance of the inheritor, like a strong farmer at a fair.
In the high heat of noon the men are mounted on their camels, swaying silently with the loads. I too have a camel, but the motion becomes monotonous and I prefer to walk. Today, the wind is blowing in our faces. The caravan grinds slowly eastwards. In their veils and tunics the men look like refugees creeping through a colossal landscape, pursued in slow motion by history.
In their nodding and swaying, in the whipping of their veils, is the diminished rhythm of some old catastrophe, some biblical displacement. Coated in dust, their faces swathed in rags, they hunch into the wind. Iliés is so bandaged in turban and veil that there is only a dark slit for his eyes. He could be a ravelled mummy, robbed from its tomb, until his voice booms out a greeting.
The north of Niger is almost entirely desert - vast tracts of unearthly sand and lava. Here the Tuareg live, exist, subsist. They are the "people of the desert" famous for their blue veil, haughty physique and great stamina. Nomads of the Sahara for over a thousand years, they were both ravagers and protectors of the rich oases and the camel-trains that traded between them. The Tuareg tapped the great African trade-routes that dealt in gold, slaves and salt. Those commodities were intimately related, as if they were elements in the same periodic table.
THE Tuareg developed a rigidly structured society with fair-skinned nobles at the top and their own black slaves at the bottom. There were freemen too, and an artisan class. The barriers were impenetrable. Indeed, it's not long since the Tuareg were forced by the French - one of their rare benign effects on the continent - to give up the practise of slavery. The nomadic way of life has been ravaged by the savage droughts of the late 20th century which depleted herds and grazing grounds and drove many into economic exile in Libya and Nigeria. In Niger itself, people have crowded to the edges of the few towns and cities, forming vulnerable ghettos.
Since independence, the country has been controlled by conservative power-elites punctuated by military rule. At the moment there is an uneasy compromise, the balance of power held by southern elements. The Tuareg have abandoned their long and sporadic rebellion, a failed attempt to win a homeland with some degree of autonomy in the north. Conversation with certain kinds of men, instantly recognisable, turns to nostalgic talk of Kalashnikovs.
The third man, the hired hand, is an enigma to me. He is tall and gaunt, a soiled white turban shrouding his face. He walks with a rangy stride, hands joined behind his back. He is not a partner, as the other two in some sense are; he owns nothing here. In that coarse black tunic, ankle-length, tightly belted, he reminds me at first of an old Christian Brother pacing the sideline at some lost match; but I've seen him at night when he relaxes by the fire, takes off his turban and his creased black face grows younger as he laughs a little and talks in a slightly high-pitched voice. And then, just as quickly he falls silent, his face stiffens, and an age-old weariness descends, the weariness of the ancestors and the unborn.
I know where I have seen that face and that defeat before. I've seen it in America, on ghetto streets, old wage-slaves slopping out in burger joints. In old photos, black and white - cottonfields in Alabama, black chain-gangs, hoboes, rail-yards - that same face looks out through hooded African eyes with all the weariness of a past robbed of its future.
Home from the Sahara, I found myself at once on a deserted beach in Co Donegal. Bright winter's day, towering clouds, canyons of wild sky, blusters of wind, gusts of hail, champagne sunshine, bottle-green breakers gushing foam. I strode between the dunes and the waves along the line of the tide, saw the sea like a child's first time, explosions of water and light. I laughed with joy at the patterns underfoot. There was a new one.
Where the sand lay packed and shining with the wanton weight of water, polished to perfection under a liquid film, there were veins of pale colour threading the surface like the grain in a piece of wood. All were exquisitely parallel, though they broadened and narrowed, formed whorls and feathery zigzags. The pattern was huge, and yet so delicate it looked like a reflection in the water, but it was imprinted by physics in the texture and the colour of the sand.
Immersed for weeks in the desert, I had turned aside to marvel at the sea and, turning back, had chanced for a moment on the polished grain of the world in a simple stretch of sand.
The first part of Sahara - The Journey West will be shown on Thursday at 10 p.m on TG4 and part two on May 2nd. Each is repeated on the following Saturday. The films are part of Last Chance Journeys - Turas i mBaol, commissioned by TG4 and made by Crossing The Line Films, following some of the oldest, most demanding, scenic and threatened human journeys in the world. Part two of Siberia - The Journey North, first shown at Christmas, is on TG4 tonight.