Algeria (1/2)

The first thing one notices about Algeria, at least on a map, is that it is large. Very very large. It is the second largest country in Africa (after Sudan), and shares borders with Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Mali, Niger and Mauritania. It also has an extensive Mediterranan coastline.

The country's geography is quite varied--from the coast one moves down through fertile lands, towering mountains, and the Sahara Desert. **An important note regarding the Sahara: The Sahara, contrary to public imagination, is not one big, continuing and impassable desert, but rather a number of smaller (at time quite large) deserts that spread across the upper third of the African continent. The Sahara is at times as we often imagine it (rolling sand dunes). More often, however, the Sahara presents itself in an even more barren-seeming fashion--in dark blacks and browns, rocky and inhospitable.



I recently traveled to the Sahara (see writing on Morocco), and so was quite interested to read about Algeria, where the desert figures so prominently in the national landscape. And so, my first Algeria-related book was "Sahara Unveiled: A Journey Across the Desert," by William Langewiesche, a foreign correspondent for Atlantic Monthly.



In this book, Langewiesche travels throughout the Sahara in a variety of conveyances--public bus, taxi, boat (on the edges of the desert). He spends a great deal of his trip in Algeria (it really is quite big). The book is enthralling at times, and Langewiesche's descriptions of the desert--both physical and metaphysical--are at times wonderful. Similarly, his refusal to romantacize the people of the Sahara is refreshing and enlightening. Take, for example, the opening lines of the book:

"Do not regret the passing of the camel and the caravan. The Sahara has changed, but it remains a desert without a compromise, the world in its extreme. There is no place as dry and hot and hostile. There are few places as huge and wild. You will not diminish it by admitting that its inhabitants can drive, and that they are neither wiser nor purer nor stronger than you. It is fairer to judge them squarely as modern people and as your equals. They were born by chance in a hard land and in a hard time in its history. You will do them no justice by pretending otherwise. Do not worry that their world, or yours, has grown too small. Despite its roads, its trucks, its television, the Sahara remains unsubdued."

At the same time, Langewiesche's attempt to distance himself as a narrator in the book, as well as his semi-omniscient telling of his tale, can become quite stale at times. The author has the habit, at times annoying, of reinterpreting every bit of dialogue that he provides. Take, for example, the following conversation with an American man he meets while traveling:

Chuck said, "What does it matter? It's all desert out here anyway."
He meant the world away from home, including Britain.

These types of conversations, and Langewiesche's somewhat condescending tone, do get a bit old. However, he recovers force through his telling of the desert, his vivid rendering of a harsh land, and his explanations of how the Sahara is growing, spreading quickly over the African continent. Interestingly, as he shows, much of today's Sahara was once fertile grasslands. Cave paintings in now barren lands show hunters, wild animals, and herds of grazing cattle. Environments change, however, and continue to do so, and today such scenes are absent from the lands of the Sahara.

In addition to Algeria, Langewiesche travels through Niger, Mali, Mauritania and Senegal. He explores the desert in its myriad forms, crossing national boundaries. He has adventures and nearly dies. He gets sick and suffers from dehydration. And, while he does learn a great deal from the Sahara ("the desert teaches by taking away"), I left the book most affected by a simple lesson, straightforward and lacking in all romantacism, taught to him by some Algerian men early in the book:

"He explained that the bus from the M'Zab did not go all the way. The Safari was the name of the hard-sprung truck to which eventually I would have to transfer to cross the mountainous central desert. He said, 'Why don't you fly?'
'Because I want to see the desert up close.'
'Buy a postcard.'
'But I want to feel the desert.'
'It feels bad.'"