SAHARAN RAIN by Don Meredith (best book recommendations TXT) 📕

SAHARAN RAIN

By Don Meredith
The bus smoked to a stop at an oil-drum barricade and soldiers swung aboard, AK-47s ready. A slender Bedouin wearing corporal’s stripes and a red beret thumbed through my passport, as a private with a toothy grin and unpolished boots kept me covered. I was entering a military zone, a wide swath of desert along the Egyptian-Libyan frontier.
It was Friday. On Wednesday, I’d ridden along the coast from Alexandria to Mersa Matruh. From the bus, I imagined Anthony and Cleopatra strolling hand-in-hand where silvery beaches met the azure sheen of the Mediterranean. Along the hundred and seventy-six miles of potholed road a scattering of beach resorts and the World War II battlefield at El Alamein, with its stark monuments to those killed in combat, reminded me of the modern world. These and the mud-brick minarets soaring over shabby villages the only changes since the Queen of Egypt and her Roman consort dallied here in the first century B.C. To the south lay the Qattara Depression, ahead the Sahara and the Sand Sea of Calanscio. In the barrens, two hundred miles southwest, were the palm groves of the Siwa Oasis and the 26th Dynasty Temple of Amun-Ra.
It was late when I arrived in Mersa Matruh. In summer this dirt-road town, perched on a miraculous blue curl of Mediterranean, is packed with the oiled bodies of middle-class Egyptians escaping Cairo’s nightmare heat. But with the chill winds of November gusting off the sea, the beach-front hotels shuttered, locals waited out the weather, smoking hookahs and arguing over games of backgammon in the coffeehouses along Alexander Street.
Before continuing south, I needed permission from the military authorities and spent the better part of a day finding where to apply for documents. Whomever I asked directed me to closed offices, wrong addresses. Everywhere in Africa and the Middle East chaos hovers seductively at the door of the simplest activity, adding piquancy to grim reality.
Finally, a ten-year-old driving a carreta, a two-wheeled donkey cart with a ragtop, took me to Military Intelligence on the eastern edge of town and put me down before a white wall with a green gate. Cows loitered along the dusty street; a blustery wind thrashed threadbare palms. The gate opened to reveal a polite young man in a polo shirt and denim slacks who told me in scrupulous English to make copies of my passport and visa and come back at eight that evening. The donkey driver knew the routine and drove me to the town center where, in a dim room sandwiched between shops peddling donkey saddles, caftans, and Kashmiri turban cloths, I discovered a photocopy machine.
At precisely eight a squad of cheerful soldiers in civvies showed me into a small, whitewashed room where they filled out forms, stamped documents, made up packets of official papers. Now and then, they stepped outside to salute dark vehicles passing mysteriously in and out. A moon the color of lemons rose over the barrack’s wall. Eventually, clutching my completed documents, I challenged herds of cows grazing ruinous streets and found my way through the moonlight to my hotel.
* * *
Few travelers ventured to Siwa over the centuries. In the 6th Century B.C. Cambyses’s Persian army, for all its efforts, vanished mysteriously in the desert, failing to reach the Ammonians and destroy their temple. However, Herodotus, Cleopatra, Lysander, Hannibal, Pindar made pilgrimages to the oasis. On February 18, 1874, thirty-six days after leaving Dakhla Oasis, the explorer Gerhard Rohlfs led his desperate men and camels out of the Sand Sea to Siwa’s wells. The British occupied Siwa during World War I, while World War II brought in turn British, Italians, and Germans. General Rommel turned up to chat with several sheikhs, presenting them with sugar and tea, while the sheikhs gave him dates and hearts of palm.
The most illustrious visitor was Alexander the Great, who led a party of men on an eight-day trek to seek the Oracle of the Temple of Amun. Alexander refused to reveal the question he asked the oracle, and its nature has long been the subject of speculation. When he stepped from the sanctuary, he said only that he received the “answer my heart desired.”
My motives for going to Siwa were more modest than Alexander’s but you wouldn’t know it from the Bedouin corporal’s grim look and the grinning private’s flashing weapon at the front of the bus. The Bedouin scowled darkly, then disappeared with my passport into a tin-roofed shack where he spent a suspiciously long time. In the crush of men at the back of the bus, I envisioned a hundred impatient Egyptians smoldering angrily under grubby turbans.
At last, the corporal stepped from the tin-roofed structure and handed my passport to the conductor. He snapped a salute and withdrew, while the smiler covered his rear. The oil drums rolled aside and the bus, spewing smoke, lurched ahead.
For five hours we traversed barren, flinty plains, rugged gray stretches of featureless wasteland. Camels ranged the roadside, gangly, tobacco-colored beasts, apparently wild. We finally stopped at Bir Fuad where I joined my fellow passengers in turning the Sahara into a latrine. In Bir Fuad’s solitary building, a strangely fascinating mud-brick hovel harboring a number of angry green flies, the congregation gathered to swallow scalding tea from foul little glasses and gobble flatbread and fuul, the Egyptian staple, broad beans steamed with herbs and served with garlic, lemon and olive oil.
By mid-afternoon we left the last camel and scrap of thorny vegetation behind. The bus mounted a bleached escarpment and the dusty greens of an oasis appeared below. To east and west spread the silvery skins of shallow lakes. At once, the alluvial fragrance, the salty sunburned decay of irrigated fields perfumed the air and we passed among Siwa’s half-million date palms.
* * *
Arous El Waha, “Bride of the Oasis,” the government rest house, stood on the village’s northern perimeter, its rooms all but empty. I took a single on the second floor, and then ate a late lunch of chicken and rice at an alfresco eatery on the village square. Pretty girls in orange and lavender, their hair covered in hot-pink scarves, and laughing boys in blue and yellow track suits swarmed the streets, playing tag as they hauled armloads of books home from school. Beneath a high, dusty-blue sky, a wheelless World War II military truck stood to forlorn attention at the curb.
After eating, I set out for Cleopatra’s Bath, the most spectacular of the several springs bubbling to the surface at Siwa. In theory an hour’s walk; it took three. Once, I strayed into an army encampment to witness the customary flourish of the ubiquitous machine gun before a pair of handholding soldiers put me on the right path. The track grew narrower, the palms denser, the sky skimmed over with a high haze. Water poured by in ditches and in the groves workers laughed and gossiped while men with pruning saws clamped in their jaws scaled palms to cut out clusters of superb honey-colored saidi, king of dates.
I walked miles through date plantations before stumbling into a clearing to find a low wall circling Cleopatra’s Bath, a stone-lined pool of steaming water fifty feet across and thirty feet deep. Among a tumble of algae-covered boulders, bubbles rose through water so clear it seemed not to exist.
It was dark by the time I swam and walked back to the village. At the café, as Ali the waiter served an oily omelet and a stack of flatbread, an Egyptian joined me.
“My name is Faroz al-Baqi. Welcome to Egypt. You are English?”
“American.”
“Very good,” he said, intensely polite. “In Siwa we like Americans.”
The six-foot tall Faroz wore a snowy djellaba and checked headscarf. A mustache from another century crossed his handsome face. “I am Siwa’s Director of Tourism and wish to be of help.”
While water heated for tea, Faroz sent a schoolboy to his house to fetch books about Siwa. Volumes arrived: aged historical and anthropological tomes in Arabic and German with photos of the palm-roofed café where we sat, the poultry shops and vegetable stalls across the road, the pigeon-house minaret with its rusty loudspeaker down the block, pictures of Siwan women wearing elaborately braided hairdos, heavy silver jewelry cascading from their heads and necks. I asked Faroz why I’d seen no women turned out in such finery.
“It is the road,” he said.
“The road?”
“President Sadat flew to Siwa in a helicopter and asked the elders what they wanted most. A road, they told him. They wished to visit the outside world. They built the road the next year.”
“When was this?”
“It is now completed many years,” Faroz said. “Since then all has changed. The fine silver, the embroidered gowns are for sale in Cairo, in the shops of the Khan al-Khalili. The young people leave and don’t return. The old ways are dying.”
As we drank our tea, I asked Faroz if he could arrange a carreta to take me to the temple next morning.
“It is difficult. The boys are in school. But let us see.” Faroz spoke to a young man in Siwi, a language related to Tuareg spoken by a scattering of Berber tribes. The young man rushed out and returned minutes later with Audn, a pensive teen-ager who agreed to take me if his father gave permission. Faroz summoned the father, a deal was struck and, through the flush of the newly risen moon, I walked wearily back to the Bride of the Oasis to fall into a deep sleep.
In a room behind the kitchen, the wife of the hotel gardener died during the night. There was a great howling and shouting, an eerie din of Berber ululations called shreeing. Women tore their hair and wailed, while men shouted and struck their heads with their fists. A drum thudded heavily. At dawn, the cortege snaked noisily from the hotel and through the village to the cemetery. I slept through the entire thing, only heard of it at breakfast.
On the hotel terrace, I lifted my head to a leaden sky and smelled rain.
“It is impossible for raining,” Ali told me when I ordered tea at the village café. He wore a nylon windbreaker over his djellaba and a woolen cap pulled low over his ears.
“Ali, I can smell it.”
He had never heard of anything so absurd in the Sahara. He treated me like a backward child as he splashed tea into my glass.
Audn arrived with his donkey and shrugged off my worries about the weather. After I settled on a bench in the carreta, the boy urged the donkey into a trot and we jogged out of town.
From the beginning, I was certain the temple lay in the opposite direction. On his journey to Siwa, Alexander’s guides took a wrong turn and led the young conqueror into the desolate heart of the Qattara Depression. Some said crows saved him; others thought a pair of magical snakes led him through the desert to Siwa, “hissing as they went.” I wasn’t anxious to meet snakes, magical or otherwise, neither did I want to get lost. Audn smiled. He knew the itinerary. “You will arrive at the temple soon. There is much to see in Siwa.”
A half-mile north of the village rose Gebel al-Mawta, the Mountain of Death. Audn tethered the donkey and waited while I hiked up the barren slope. At the top, a figure emerged from a