|
|
A black and stony desert, sometimes disturbing,
a mineral area where a scarce and very sparse vegetation achieves
survival only by launching long roots towards the last underground
drips of the Oued Guir. The light slopes ending the Anti-Atlas
mountains, soon getting sandy and lost in the huge Sahara, that’s
our desert, at the doors of Tazzarine, the Guir Hamada, which
will further away cross the Algerian border and finally stop
at the limits of the Big Occidental Erg, near Beni-Abbès.
In the past it was fertile, even maybe swampy (many fossils
are found there, amidst saurian, and one of the oldest dinosaur
in the world). It has been inhabited for proto-historic ages,
when the pre-Muslim tumuli of Hassi Beraber were built. Marbles
are also found, and, near Mezgarne, a quarry is still in activity.
|
To travel through this wide plain
bordered by steep cliffs, rocked by the balanced walk of a camel,
soft and like floating over sand, stronger and more beaten over
the rocks, with no other shield against the sun than the thin fabric
of the turban, that’s to start the travel of the nomads.
The heat of the Hamada can kill, in a few hours, in two or three
days, when one has no water in the core of the summer. The sun reverberation
over the black stones gives a very special light, maybe the example
of this “obscure light”, and the dark leaves of the
few thorny bushes disappear in the landscape. |
The Hamada is still travelled by nomads making a living out
of meagre herds, going from oasis to oasis, walking at night,
in the moonlight, to avoid the heat. To cross the desert under
the moonlight is an experience that can be compared to no other.
The nearly complete lack of pollution displays a Milky Way dense
as one cannot imagine it, which light adds to the brightness of
the Ayour (Moon in Berber), and one could say he sees like in
the midday, for the lack of colours….
Isabelle Eberhardt, the Saharan, used to say it “O Sahara,
threatening Sahara, hiding your beautiful dark soul in the middle
of your gloomy and inhospitable loneliness! Yes, I do love this
country of sand and stone.”
|
|
