Illustration by Mary Kirkpatrick
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I often think of one remarkable trip across the Sahara desert. I was backpacking from Casa Blanca, Morocco, to Lagos, Nigeria. I travelled overland alone, across the bulge of Africa. I was doing it according to my backpacking motto: eat with locals, sleep with locals and travel with locals.
I was in Chinguetti, an oasis in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania in the Sahara, an oasis even deeper into the Sahara than famed Timbuktu. I had waited in the little marketplace in the centre of the oasis for a couple of days waiting for the first ride available to Nouakchott, Mauritania.
It was my longest wait and I spent a night sleeping in the market beside a vegetable stand. During the day, as I waited, the women in the market chattered, jeered and laughed constantly and I was often the subject of their humour. Safir, the beautiful young woman who owned the cart beside me, flirted with me while being encouraged by the other older women. She suddenly asked me if I would marry her. In my broken French, the common second language in this former French colony, I stammered awkwardly that I was already married and my wife was home in Canada. (Ann had declined to join me because she didn’t like the idea of going for two weeks without a bathroom.) Safir responded, “That’s okay, you can have four wives here in Mauritania.” She reached over and placed a tribal necklace over my head, signalling to the marketplace that we were married. The cheering of all the market women changed to raucous celebratory ululating. It was a great public joke, enjoyed by all but I was soon picked up by my ride before things went any further.
Public travel in the Sahara is not on any set schedule. Departures occur only when 12 passengers are jammed into the elongated Peugeot wagon, known as motorized camels because the cars last for years. The vehicles don’t drive on roads or highways from oasis to oasis, but move through the open desert and dune fields with deflated tires, heavy duty suspension and incredibly skilled drivers.
The trip to Nouakchott was an overnight drive and there were periodic rest stops when we piled out to stretch, to pray or to urinate. At one stop around midnight, I walked off, away from the car, alone, and in those brief moments I felt an overwhelming sense of awe and peacefulness that I had never experienced before.
I walked into the dark, carefully looking down at my feet, so as not to stumble on the uneven ground. I stopped and looked up, and the night sky fell on me. Suddenly, I wasn’t looking up at the sky – I was seemingly in the sky. A million stars, no, a trillion stars were within hands’ reach as if I could pluck them like plums from a tree.
I thought I knew what looking at a spectacular clear cloudless sky was like in Canada but this was another experience altogether. The millions of stars were luminous, surreal, lambent, incandescent. I can’t find the words to capture how hot they were.
I wasn’t just “in” the starry sky. I was a star.
I walked on and stepped on some lump. I feared it was camel dung but in the light of the night sky I noted a familiar shape. I picked it up and held it my hand, a seashell the size of my palm. I was standing on an old ocean floor! Centuries, millennia swirled through my head, I was not only standing on millions of years in the past on an old ocean floor, but also looking up at billions of years, also in the past. In that extraordinary moment, of a man simply looking at the sky, I was aware that I was a part of an evolving emerging universe, where every part of me was there at the beginning and every part of me, every cell, will be here in a million years. It was an exquisite surreal moment. It felt like a physical, sensual, spiritual and psychological revelation.
The memory and feeling of that night returns to me at random moments. Out of nowhere, I’m there. Sometimes when I am at peace and other times in moments of anxiety.
That remarkable sky is always etched in my brain.
Jerry Diakiw lives in Markham, Ont.