Through the Tassili N'Ajjer to Djanet Oasis

Recently I reread Philippe Diolé’s  1955 book, The Most Beautiful Desert of All, translated from the French Le Plus Beau Désert du monde and rather unimaginatively published in America as Saharan Adventure.

I had found this book in a second-hand bookshop not too long after I had returned to New Zealand from travelling through Africa.  Diolé had been one of Jacques Cousteau’s offsiders during many of his diving expeditions around the world, but he also spent time in the Sahara which he loved, and in the introduction to this book he draws certain parallels between the tranquillity and fascination of the deep, with similar sentiments in the vast open reaches of the Sahara Desert: The sea and the desert gnaw equally at the wrecks lost upon their surfaces: the stranded truck eaten away by rust, the ship aground on the sands, prone on its side. In the solitude of the sea, in the silence of the desert sand-hill, there is some anonymity, the same melancholy of things dying rather than dead, given over defenceless to the sands of the sea bottom, to the sands blown by the wind.

I had travelled across much of the area that Philippe Diolé had traversed twenty years earlier, albeit by lorry rather than by camel. But on rereading his book, it brought back vivid memories of my own fascinating journey in 1973.

Coming out of the desert at Ouargla

Three days after we had passed through the interesting little desert town of Ouargla, also the starting point for Diolé  - although he had flown from here, we reached a little settlement now called Ilizi. In Diolé’s day it was still known by the French name of Fort Polignac. Diolé describes it thus: 'Fort Polignac, now Ilizi can only be described  as the most drearily uninviting of all the Saharan posts.  Polignac is stark emptiness.' I had scribbled in the margin ‘couldn’t agree more!’ He goes on: 'It is nothing but a dot on the map. Before the French took over and built the blockhouse , it was not even a native village.  There is not tree, no bush, not so much as a tuft of drinn, that woody plant growing in clumps that can withstand the aridity of the Sahara.

 Yet it is with tenderness , with nostalgia, that I think of that extravagantly spacious esplanade …  For Polignac is the gateway to the Tassili of the Ajjer. It is even more a port than a gateway. It is where one embarks for the silences of solitude.’  I had also noted the ‘extravagantly spacious esplanade’, during the hour or so we spent in this godforsaken place. It was laid out straight for possibly a kilometre. There were pavements and street-lighting standards but as I also noted in the margin of my copy of Diolé’s book: ‘street lights with no globes or tubes.'  

There was just one small shop, and while our drivers reported our intentions and our planned route to the Mairie, I bought, from memory a loaf of bread – surprisingly good – and a small tin of sweetened condensed milk. I used to love this as an after school treat as a youngster.  Just out of town there was a small settlement of basic scrub and thorn huts, with a few lethargic inhabitants, probably Tuaregs, sitting or standing around.

Basic desert huts at Ilizi (Fort Polignac)

From Fort Polignac/Ilizi, after first having to push our two vehicles through a sand drift, we headed into the rocky, steep vastness of the Tassili N’Ajjer, a barren mountain range that cuts across this part of the Algerian Sahara. Diolé crossed this area by camel looking for Neolithic paintings in the remote valleys of the Tassili. I noted in my diary at the time that the Tassili N’Ajjer was: 'one of the most barren, desolate regions on earth; a region of broken, shattered rock, chiefly sandstone, strewn as far as the eye can see. The area is very hilly and the road a mass of corrugations, bumps & rocky outcrops. We are climbing all the time at the average speed of 12 mph. The odd tree & clumps of vegetation can be seen & we saw several gazelle during the day. We are camped tonight fairly high up in the Tassili, presumably miles from anywhere.'

The road through the rocky terrain of the Tassili N'Ajjer in Mid-Sahara

The following morning we drove through what I described as even  'more spectacular with rocky mesas, canyons, cones etc. a true lunar landscape.' Before we eventually descended to the desert and skirted around the base of the mountains on the road to Djanet. At the time the spectacular scenery gave rise in my imagination that this must be what J.R.R. Tolkein had envisaged the Land of Mordor to look like in his Lord of the Rings Trilogy which I had read for the first time just before I left Britain.

As we drove through the Tassili N'Ajjer, virtually devoid of vegetation, I felt that this could be what J.R.R. Tolkein envisaged the dark land of Mordor, in his epic Lord of the Rings trilogy, would have looked like. 

On our last day’s drive into Djanet we passed a camel caravan of around 30 camels making their way in our direction. This age-old mode of transport was even then fast disappearing from the desert. Perhaps they were bringing salt from the salt pans of Bilma Oasis in Niger!

The camel caravan, maybe bringing saly from Bilma Oasis, heading to Djanet

I liked Djanet right from the minute I arrived, as did Diolé: "Djanet is a smiling place, and I really think it is the most beautiful oasis in the world; but it remains inscrutable, reserved rather than hostile, very small and very deeply rooted in its own long-enduring life. In the houses with their walls of very white clay, and in the gardens, silent men work with a seriousness which belongs to another age, and which is scarcely Arab. We have little knowledge of what an inhabitant of Djanet really is. … Perhaps he is the descendant of a Neolithic shepherd or farmer, issue of a stock as old as the grain he grows – that grain of the oasis which is not related to any grain ever known, unless it is to the grain of a prehistoric era.'

I had scribbled in the margin: ‘couldn’t agree more’. I awoke on my first morning in this beautiful oasis to see, in the early morning sun, the spectral figures of Tuaregs leading yesterday’s camel caravan through the oasis date palms.

Tuaregs leading their camels through the date palms of Djanet Oasis

© Neil Rawlins  text & photography

Read the full story of my travels in my books published on Amazon

One Foot in Front of the Other - First Steps & One Foot in Front of the Other - Full Stride