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  We met a French graduate student called Pierre who was going our way and needed extra cash. We’d form a partnership. In return for our paying his expenses, he was delighted to carry our tents, spare tires, water cans, and fuel cans in a battered pickup truck whose grill and lights were shielded by steel bull bars. His pockmarked face had a ready smile, and he seemed charming and civilized. He would make a fine traveling companion.

  Over the next three days our small caravan covered a thousand miles along a desert road that was mostly paved, the easy part of the trip.

  And what a desert! What finely sculpted dunes and daring sand formations! Hour after hour, mile after mile, the dunes’ elegance, grace, and voluptuousness bore down on us. The monotonous beauty wore down my ordinary way of looking at the world. Molded by the wind’s harsh caresses into daring waves no sculptor or engineer could dream of duplicating, the dunes began to remind me of the sensuous curves and swooping arcs of Tabitha’s body.

  Early in December we reached Tamanrasset, the fabled jumping-off city on the northern edge of the roughest part of the desert. Named after a famous beautiful woman, it was the geographical center of the Sahara.

  Tamanrasset is one of my favorite towns, a jumble of Land Rovers, mud houses, and hardened desert travelers. We stayed here several days to rest. Even though it was newly built, clean, and active, goats wandered the streets. Along with donkeys, camels were parked outside modern houses. The supermarket offered mainly canned food, peaches, and meat.

  Most of the locals were extraordinary in appearance, with stately turbans and white robes. From time to time the Tuareg, the nomadic blue-robed Berbers of the Sahara, sailed through on camels. These tribespeople went back and forth across the border between Niger and Algeria, not recognizing any national boundaries and proving the absurdity of having borders in the middle of the desert.

  Originally Tamanrasset had been an outpost of the French Foreign Legion. In 1950, it had thirty people, but now it had thirty thousand—a real boomtown.

  It was a major crossroads for long-distance African travelers. Everybody traveling on the continent was either here, had just been here, or was due to arrive. Camaraderie sprang up between travelers as we shared maps and travel stories.

  “Watch out for the owner of the Antelope in Nigeria.”

  “Stay at the Moon Inn in Zimbabwe.”

  “This road here is washed out; take the route through the mountains.”

  The hotel bar was a good place to hang out, one of the few in Tam where you could get a cold beer—or as close to cold as you could find in an Islamic desert. Pierre joined us with a Malian woman he had picked up at the campground.

  We swapped tips with Makoto Yamamoto, a Japanese who had spent eleven months traveling around Africa. Another Japanese we met had been a student in Africa for two years and was now visiting as many African countries as he could pack in. We met single hitchhikers and bicyclists as well as couples from Parisian society in designer clothes and designer Land Rovers who had brought along designer meals from Därr’s back in Munich.

  The main street of Tam was lined with two rows of rough-and-ready restaurants, each with a few battered tables outside and inside and surrounded by vendors selling chicken on rotisseries. Travelers gathered at these cafés and table-hopped, asking questions and gathering information in a swaggering yet egalitarian spirit.

  Parked out front like horses in the Old West were trail bikes, Japanese bikes, Toyotas, and Land Rovers festooned with sand ladders and bull-catchers. Shovels were bolted on, and strapped on top were sleeping bags, camping equipment, and steel boxes of clothes. Every vehicle carried a plentiful number of green or gray jerry cans loaded with gas and water, as well as extra tires.

  The talk in the street cafés came to center on three topics: border officials, bribes, and the risks presented by crossing the Sahara. Due to breakdowns and the lack of fuel, dozens of Europeans and Africans died every year in the desert.

  A year before, a French family’s Land Rover, off the main route, had broken down halfway to Arlit. For days the mother had kept a diary of her, her husband’s, and her two small children’s battle against heat, hunger, thirst, and despair as they waited in vain for help to come. Her diary ended with the faint scrawl of a plea for help reflecting her and her family’s fatal debilitation.

  A few months before, a caravan of five cars and ten people had set out along the same route. As happens easily in the Sahara, where there are no roads but only the crudest of trails across hundreds of miles of rocks and dunes, they, too, had become lost. One car had broken down, and its occupants had piled into the other four. One by one, three of the other cars broke down or ran out of gas until the ten travelers all rode in the last car. Then it broke down under the strain, and the ten perished under the desert sun as they waited for help.

  Story after story like this made us sober about the dangers we faced. Obviously we should stay on the main route at all costs, a feat we were told repeatedly wasn’t easy because of the lack of a true road.

  In other conversations, the travelers identified for us and each other those border guards who would help and those we had to bribe, and told horror stories about travelers caught with contraband. Desperate for hard currency, Algeria, like many African countries, had strict exchange controls, insisting that travelers exchange all their hard currency for the country’s worthless dinars.

  No traveler could afford to change all his money ten to fifteen times as he passed through successive African countries. Not only would he lose money as the local currencies depreciated and as he paid the money changers’ fees, but he wouldn’t be able to exchange some currencies at all. Outside of Algeria nobody wanted its dinars, and there were no banks at the southern end of the country.

  Thus all travelers crossing the continent were forced to become smugglers. Finding this undeclared currency was an important source of revenue for the country—or for the border guards, who made big efforts to discover travelers’ secret stashes. Frequently, in addition to confiscating the stash, they fined the “smuggler” two or three times as much as they found. All this led to much talk among Tam’s café society about the best place to hide contraband, where on your person and where on your vehicle.

  The only thing Tabitha and I ever worried about hiding was money, because we didn’t carry drugs or other contraband. I wore a money belt, which to my delight was never discovered by any border guard on our entire trip. One of our motorcycles had a mud-splattered manual underneath the seat in a filthy, dusty pocket. We hid money between its pages because it was too grubby to examine. In the frame under my gas tank there was a hollow pipe into which we slipped money.

  The adventurousness of the travelers in Tam astonished us. We met two Amsterdam schoolteachers who had taken a year or two off to travel Africa. A New Zealander was making his way by ground back to New Zealand from London. There were 3 million people in New Zealand, he said, and seventy thousand of them—or 2 to 3 percent of the population—were in the United Kingdom at any time. But traveling through Africa I never saw any other Americans except for one missionary family.

  Tamanrasset was the last town on the paved road, so we had to check out with the customs and immigration office. Here we had our passports, carnets, and currency declarations stamped for exit. Our minicaravan of two cycles and a truck pushed off into the Sahara proper.

  We asked our way out of town, as there were no signposts. Up to Tam the roads had been good, two-lane blacktop in fair repair. As we knew from the other travelers, however, from here on south the roads stopped and turned into a nightmare of sand. Thirty-one miles out of town the pavement indeed petered out and we hit sand, hundreds of miles of it in every direction, just like in the movies. We dipped into a ravine and started a descent from forty-five hundred feet.

  Because the desert is flat and open a traveler can make his route anywhere. The route we followed was a band of truck tracks, perhaps two miles wide. If a sand storm had hit, the tracks would have
been blown away and we would have had to use compasses to navigate an empty sea of sand.

  For a quarter of an hour I suffocated on Tabitha’s billowing cloud of dust and then called a huddle. Because of the dust, we would stretch out, Tabitha in front, me a half mile or so behind and a quarter mile to her right, and Pierre several miles farther back.

  The terrain became more desertlike the farther we moved into the Sahara. Dunes of sand and scrubby rock rose on both sides. The way was overblown with sand, threatening to throw us over and preventing any speed.

  Sometimes road markers, fifty-five-gallon drums or tall poles stuck in the sand, showed us the way.

  Where the sand hadn’t covered them, Tabitha followed tire tracks. She hoped whomever she was following knew where he was going, that we weren’t following bandits, smugglers, or someone who himself was lost. As perhaps fifty tracks wove back and forth in front of her, she stuck to those more heavily traveled. Every three or four hours a truck, perhaps a mile or so distant, passed heading north, or one overtook us, heading our way but never getting close, making us again wonder if we were on the main route, if in fact there was such a thing. The trucks always made us feel better, that we were more or less in the right place, but shortly after they disappeared, doubt would creep back.

  The clusters of burned-out wrecks of cars we came upon made us feel better, too, indicating we were probably on the main route. As spare parts were in great demand, these were completely stripped.

  As the lead vehicle, Tabitha drove slowly, working to pick the firmest surface across the ocean of sand. Despite her best efforts, however, she would become stuck in sand so deep it covered her tailpipe. Here was where teamwork was most important. I would get off my bike, put a board underneath its kickstand to keep it from falling over, and with her on the bike, push or dig the sand away from her wheels so she could inch forward. We carried a fold-up military shovel, but it wasn’t particularly useful. Using my hands to scoop away the sand worked better.

  Once I’d removed it, however, Tabitha couldn’t simply accelerate. She had to release the clutch slowly to prevent the wheel from spinning and digging her deeper into the loose sand, yet she had to release it far enough so as not to burn up the clutch. Every time we smelled asbestos burning it alarmed us; an extra couple of clutch plates weren’t spare parts we had thought to pack. In one patch of sand it took three hours to cover fifteen miles; we were constantly getting stuck, constantly digging out, constantly pushing.

  Once Tabitha’s bike was freed, I would walk forward several yards to find the best way to continue. Often we couldn’t drive straight, as the loose sand ahead was even worse, and we would have to plot another path to the side.

  Sometimes we passed over a stony area sporting a patch or two of scrubby bush. Other times the sand became firm and we hummed over it at thirty-five miles an hour. We had to be on the lookout for deep pockets of loose sand, traps that had wrecked the numerous stripped, burned cars along the way.

  The first day we covered only seventy-five miles, even though we were on the road for ten hours.

  That night, exhausted yet feeling triumphant that our teamwork was mastering this ocean of sand, the three of us camped in the desert. We brewed tea and cooked on small butane stoves. There was no need to put up a tent, as here the terrain was as bare as the surface of Mars. It was not going to rain, the air was dry and cool, and there would be no dew. We didn’t have to worry about animals or insects attacking us, as there was no wildlife for hundreds of miles, not a leaf, not a lizard, not an ant, not even a midge.

  The desert’s silence was so clean it was like nothing I’d ever experienced. Without life, the Sahara lacked the background chatter we normally experience. No bird chirped, no remote insect buzzed, no faraway airplane droned, no leaf rustled. I realized I’d never been in pure silence.

  It seemed a sacrilege, but I broke the silence by tuning in the BBC. The tension between the Allies and Iraq had increased again. We were glad to be putting miles between us and Arab Islamic culture.

  In the middle of the night, Tabitha and I both woke up, sure someone had turned the lights on. We jumped out of our sleeping bag and walked around.

  The canopy of stars was even clearer than in Alaska or Siberia. The full moon had come out, made exceptionally huge and bright by the desert atmosphere’s lack of moisture, dust, and pollution. Nimble and vivid, our moon shadows followed us everywhere. We got out a book, and we were actually able to read by the extraordinary moonlight.

  The brazen moon … the deep quiet … the sensuous dunes—this exotic yet comforting nightscape brought Tabitha and I close and was so wonderfully romantic that I think of it as one of the world’s most perfect honeymoon spots, tough to get to as it is.

  The next day we rose early and pushed on.

  At the top of rises the sand, blown away by the wind, wasn’t so deep but snowy drifts had been deposited in the dips, causing us to flounder. A couple of times when one of the bikes fell over, gas spilled from the tanks and carburetors. The desert was wrestling with us, trying to take charge.

  We encountered more stripped and abandoned cars, always near thick sand, often in clusters and on their sides or backs, victims of sand traps. Probably they had been traveling at high speed, hit a pocket of deep sand, and flipped over. I was reminded of old cartoons about the desert showing bones around a water hole, but here it was cars that hadn’t made it.

  Navigating continued to be difficult. Any of the tracks might be the main trail, if such a thing existed; any might lead into trackless wastes and death. At times, without a visible marker, the trails shot off in so many conflicting directions that the only way to navigate was by climbing on top of a wrecked car and peering southward to spot the next marker or, failing that, the next cluster of abandoned cars. We hoped these vehicular skeletons marked the main trail.

  We passed a Land Rover stuck in soft sand. Its passengers had put two ten-foot sand ladders under its front wheels and were inching forward. They would repeat this till they were through the soft patch.

  Even though it was December, it was blazing hot, the sun roasting us an hour after sunrise. The white sand absorbed the sun’s rays and reflected them back, throwing heat at us from above and below. In the middle of the day we sweated profusely, especially when bogged down in sand. Afraid of spills, however, we continued to wear our leather jackets and chaps. A few times I sweated right through both my jeans and my chaps, something which, except for rugged days in Siberia, hadn’t happened before in all my twenty-five years of riding.

  Several days into the Sahara, I thought I saw my first mirage, a tandem bicycle ahead of us carrying two people dressed completely in white.

  Amused, I watched and waited for this shimmering white image to disappear. As we clattered abreast of the mirage, the white-outfitted pair turned their heads, focusing on us black swimmer’s goggles, aliens out of a feverish dream.

  I was so startled I flagged them down and asked, “God, what are you doing here? Where are you from?”

  They were a French couple on their honeymoon who had set out to bicycle across the Sahara. They were remarkably chipper and in good spirits. It had taken them ten days to pedal across what so far had taken us five days.

  A few miles later we came upon an Italian headed north whose motorcycle had broken down. We offered to take him back south to Arlit, but he refused, fearful of losing his bike to bandits or the desert.

  Our tanks were low, so we swapped him water for the gas he no longer needed. He hoped a truck would come along and give him and his motorcycle transportation north, but I had major doubts. Suppose this was one of the less frequented desert trails?

  Remembering the stories we’d heard in Tam about people never returning from the desert, I’ve often wondered if that Italian motorcyclist is still there waiting for a truck, his stripped bike and skeleton a grim reminder of the Sahara’s unforgiving harshness.

  Finally we hit the flat part of the desert near its southern
rim. Small thorn trees told us there had to be water nearby.

  Tabitha was grinning madly as we moved along at thirty-five miles an hour, the dust in long, high coils behind us. She was delirious we’d made it across, shouting and waving.

  I felt good, too, relieved we hadn’t been one of those who had died in this Martian landscape of beauty and death. This had been a tough part of the trip, days of sweaty effort, but we’d come through without undue mishap. As we barreled along, over and over again I sang:

  Oh, see, C. Rider

  See what you have done.

  You’ve made me love you

  When we stopped for water, still grinning Tabitha said, “When I was in the first grade, I went ice skating one Sunday for the first time. I remember how I felt when I was able to skate across the whole pond by myself—I kept saying to myself, ‘Proud! Proud! Proud!’ That’s how I feel today—Proud! Proud! Proud!”

  Everything changed as soon as we crossed from Algeria into Niger.

  We were coming out of North Africa, an Arabic-Islamic culture, into Arlit, which, while still Islamic, was the first big city of black Africa. As we crept south, the monotonous dunes turned into broken rocks, weeds, and scrub, the first growth we had seen in days.

  With only a few miles left to Arlit, we saw smoke. We passed a French-run uranium mine and an airstrip.

  The closer to Arlit, the better the road. The sand here was packed hard and we made great time. We hit a four-lane dirt road, doubtless here to provide access to the uranium mine.

  Arlit, another travelers’ town, was a mixture of old and new, mud huts and modern houses. From time to time topless buxom women with goods on their heads and babies on their backs sauntered past the open butcher shops and vendors cooking meat and doughnuts on fires.