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Saharan Stargazing– Mauritanian Style
Enveloped by the peace of a night in the desert
By Andrea Davoust
A desert is a barren, desolate, lifeless place, right? Wrong. Take the Sahara. Yes, it is scorching hot; yes, it is dry as a bone; and yes, it is desperately treeless. But this very bareness is its appeal; for when visiting it, the sensorial experience is like stepping into an abstract painting.
The desert is defined by angles and curves, by stark lines and soft patterns. And for me, a simple overnight stay in the Mauritanian Sahara, between low dunes and an immense sky, culminated in a mystical moment.
My first contact with the desert, though, had not been promising. In Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital, the desert sand worked its way into every corner; sand dusted my skin, sprinkled grit into my food, and coated the city with brown, giving it a neglected air. It did not help that Nouakchott was not even a nice place to begin with, mainly due to the way it came into being.
The city emerged from the desert in 1960, when Mauritania won independence from France. At the time, almost 90 percent of the population– made up of various Arab and Sub-Saharan African tribes– was still nomadic. The brutal transition to urban life gave birth to a dirty, uncontrolled sprawl of low, small-windowed buildings, disintegrating into shantytowns on the outskirts.
Still, some two out of the three million Mauritanians, mostly the ethnic descendants of the former Berber kingdom, pursue a pastoral lifestyle, raising dromedaries in the vast, arid plains that form the three quarters of Mauritania. All the same, as I drove out of Nouakchott for my first ever Saharan expedition, I could not help noticing the quantities of plastic bags littering the desert, along with discarded tires and even rusty carcasses of cars.
After an hour's drive north, the acacias and scrubby bushes gave way to low beige sand dunes – the classic image I expected of the Sahara. Our 4x4 turned onto a track to the west and a few minutes later, we were speeding by the vast sapphire expanse of the Atlantic. Soon we stopped and pitched our tent, a spacious, hand-sewn traditional Mauritanian home, just where the dunes seemed to have halted their seaward advance.
I immediately padded away in to explore. The mounds of sand rolled on and on, each one gently curving into the next, until they melted into the horizon. But as the sun glided lower and lower, the sinuous ridges of the dunes grew sharper, the sea-facing flanks touched with gold and the shadows on the other side growing darker. The tiny ripples covering the dunes also became more defined in the sunset. Apart from the sound of the long evening waves breaking onto the shore, all my senses could perceive was warm, pure light, flowing into the surrounding hills.
But other sensory delights awaited me. My travel companion, Alvaro, pulled a can of beer from the cooler, handed it to me, then clicked his own against it. "To enjoying life!" he toasted. "And now let's slice this critter open," he shouted, dangling the heaviest, most bug-eyed lobster I had ever seen. Cutting up the crustacean was a nasty task, but so worthwhile– once barbecued, its soft, juicy flesh exuded the most delicate marine taste. It melted in our mouths.
By the time we had washed the last morsels down with another beer, the sun had vanished and the air had cooled down. As we reclined on our mats, enveloped by the velvety silence of the night, the stars ascended into the most immense array I had ever seen. Barring the dark shapes of the dunes on the horizon, there was nothing to stop my gaze.
It felt almost as if the firmament were the only perceivable reality. Letting my eyes follow a path from star to star, my mind drifted towards higher levels of abstraction. First I thought of my little self in the vastness of the desert, then I envisioned the body of the Sahara stretched across the upper bulge of the African continent. Then I was seeing our fragile little planet floating in space, among other titanic celestial bodies. At that precise moment, I felt acutely, overwhelmingly aware of the universe as a whole. It was exhilarating. At last, I understood the attraction of the desert.
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