Sahara Unveiled: A Journey Across the Desert | William Langewiesche

Sahara Unveiled: A Journey Across the Desert | William Langewiesche | A memorable book

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Sahara Unveiled: A...

	Sahara Unveiled: A Journey Across the Desert William Langewiesche Vintage, 1997 - 302 pages average customer review:based on 23 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The world's most vast and forbidding desert is revealed in all its cruelty and wonder in this masterpiece of contemporary travel writing by the author of Cutting for Sign. Determined to see the Sahara as its inhabitants do, Langewiesche crossed this enormous desert from Algiers to Dakar, braving its natural and human dangers and depending on its sparse sustenance and suspect charity. Photos.

Dune Physics and Five Kinds of Thirst

Nothing lives for hundreds of miles in the vast Tanzenrouft of Adrar, where the annual rainfall is less than an inch, the daily temperature is 128oF, there is no shade, and the sky is nearly white. The Great Eastern Erg of El Oued is a literal sand sea, uninhabitable except in sparse areas where survival depends on a kind of "farming:" a lifetime of days removing sand by shovel and bulldozer to protect the date palms and the entire city itself from burial.

William Langewiesche, in his travel memoir, Sahara Unveiled, never gives a reason for his journey, but only that: "The Sahara is not a natural destination and never will be. A writer writes about it, as a reader reads about it, to satisfy his curiosity about an unseen part of the world." He doesn't try to explain the allure of the Sahara as Paul Bowles did, especially in terms of the immense silence of the dunes at night, the profound solitude, the confrontation of one's own insignificance - the very things that Western culture was built to obscure. Like William Vollman in Atlas or Butterfly Stories (or Melville...or embedded journalists) Langewiesche abandons the instinct for self-preservation in search of his story. The result is a rich view from the inside of the geographical landscape and its inhabitants, considered within an historical context.

For example, in Tadart, a hostile, remote region near the Algerian border with Libya, in search of ancient rock paintings, Langewiesche finds himself deceived and abandoned in a desolate area by his driver, a self-aggrandizing Tuareg with embroidered pants and white aviator scarf who will "watch himself in any reflection." Until then, the driver's romantic depictions of himself are pretty funny, such as when they blow out a tire: "Don't worry." He held two fingers together. "This is how I am with the desert. If you love a woman she can never hurt you. The desert is my woman." He went on to explain his hatred for American women: in 1992, after American scientists discovered that exercise was bad for them, they still did it. He says, "Someday you will introduce me. I will ravage them. I will make them beg for my love." Of which Langewiesche writes: "I doubted it."

Other characters include John Stingely, a lone Oregonian forester remaining in Mauritania after the rest of the Peace Corps left due to sickness and discouragement, still trying to cultivate saplings of mesquite and acacia he hoped could relieve some of the region's poverty. And Lag-Lag, an aged drunk who twice survived being lost in the Eastern Erg, and Ameur Belouard, nicknamed the King of Ouargla, who lived a double life and left chaos behind when he died unexpectedly. A date farmer insisting that milk and dates are all a person needs to survive, whether raw from the branches, dried, baked, boiled, or fried, and whose hydrologist partner explained that in America, research at a big university revealed that dates "help against cancer."

In addition to the truth about Timbuktu, we learn the sand dunes: the barchan, crescent-shaped with projecting shallow horns and a gentle windward slope and steep leeward face, advancing by small avalanches, and the seif, the parallel serpent-like dunes arising from bi-directional winds. (I'll admit this: I actually had to find a copy of The Physics of Blown Sand!). We learn classifications of thirst: eudipsia (ordinary thirst), hyperdipsia (temporary intense thirst) and polydipsia (the kind of thirst that will drive you to drink anything, such as radiator water, gasoline, urine, and finally, blood); the material properties of adobe; and the horrible fate of a Belgian family who became lost south of Tamanrasset, the details preserved in the wife's journal, which the judge of the province allowed Langewiesche to peruse.

We learn that the glorified nomadic Tuaregs invaded the central Sahara from the north 3,500 years ago, and in the Middle Ages converted to a form of Islam. Opportunistic raiders and herders, they siphoned from the prosperous trade routes between richer African civilizations and the Mediterranean, but were eventually conquered by French colonialism around the turn of the century. The ancestors of today's Fulani nomads were cattle herders that migrated from possibly Ethiopia around 5,000 B.C. and introduced a rich period of art. Around 1500 B.C. light skinned Berber warriors from the north, probably ancestors of the Tuaregs, enslaved the remaining cattle herders, whose descendants now represent 90% of central Saharan society and form the bottom of the rigid Turareg hierarchy.

Langewiesche is a fully trustable writer: he doesn't try to glorify anything, but allows a vision to emerge of the resilience of life and the existence of something where nothing is granted out of such brutal sparseness. The whole thing fits together well: the textured but restrained (and even poetic) prose helps evoke the landscape. The entries are not dated, and the time between Algiers and the novel's oddly abrupt ending in Dakar is unclear. But there must have been a lot more in the original journals and writings - and you wish he'd included it.

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A memorable book

William Langewiesche is an excellent writer with eyes and a mind that miss little. "Sahara Unveiled" tells of his travels, by land, south from Algiers on the Trans-Saharan Highway and west across the Sahel to Dakar. It is also a tale of Algeria's Islamic revolution, the Tuareg rebellion, and the Sahel's extreme poverty, all told through encounters with locals along the way. For me, the outstanding feature of this book was not the physical journey across the Sahara. Rather, it was the chance to meet the Saharans as modern people, our equals, making their way through life the best they can in unforgiving circumstances.

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What a story

This book contains a series of compelling stories, woven together in travel. You will find vivid mental pictures of the people and the landscape. I bought this book after reading Langewiesche "Unbuilding" articles in the Atlantic magazine. Mr Langewiesche, thank you for this book! You are at the top of your game as a writer.

A very enjoyable book

An informative and interesting view of the Sahara and it's people. William Langewiesche has a terrific way of painting pictures with words. He makes you feel the grit of the sand and 100+ degree temperatures. Definately worth the read.

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Interesting & Abrupt

Northern Africa is generally not easy to learn about. There just isn't that much information out there. When I ran across Sahara Unvieled, I found it to be a very interesting travelogue. Not a place I would want to go! Only problem with this book, though, is the ending: It just stopped, mid-stride. It ended about two chapters too early.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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