Chad's Ennedi Massif, a land of ancient geology scarred by recent conflict, gifts Aminatta Forna a true sense of perspective
By Aminatta Forna
From a distance, the sandstone pillars resembled a gathering of giants turned to stone by a displeased god. Our group of eight travellers had set out when the sun was at its zenith, and now, as it made its descent, we arrived at this place with air so pure it seemed to hold no scent, where the only sound was the wind as faint as breath. The rocks are called tassili, and some stand more than 300 feet high. They have been carved by this same, disarmingly gentle wind over many thousands of years. This is what deep time feels like.
When I was a child, a teacher tried to give my class some sense of eternity. Imagine a rock 10,000 miles by 10,000 miles, she said. Every 10,000 years, a small bird comes and wipes its beak this way and that upon the rock. Deep time, earth time, captures the entire process of erosion, until the rock is finally worn away.
The 15,000-square-mile Ennedi Massif, in northeastern Chad, is a plateau the size of Switzerland. Between 350 million and 500 million years ago, this part of the globe was ocean. Then the ocean disappeared, leaving the sandstone floor exposed. The climate shifted from rain-soaked to arid. Sun, wind and water sculpted the sandstone into a dramatic, desolate and unearthly landscape of gorges and valleys, inselbergs and stacks, towering tassili and natural arches. In the desert the delicate threads of life are apparent in trails of tiny footprints scattered across the sands: here, the tear-shaped tracks of a lizard; there, the dimpled prints of a gerbil. I have travelled to many deserts but, as I lay in bed in the open air and gazed directly into the face of the moon, it was clear to me that the Ennedi was the emptiest landscape I had ever experienced.
Chad is not on most Westerners’ radars. A landlocked nation in north-central Africa, it has long been at the cultural crossroads of North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Chad's recent past is full of coups and rebellions, but today it is a relatively safe haven, especially compared with neighbours such as Niger and Sudan. In 2016 the Ennedi was declared a Unesco World Heritage Site. Two years later, the Chadian government partnered with African Parks, a nonprofit organisation that protects and manages reserves and parks across Africa, to create the 19,300-square-mile Ennedi Natural and Cultural Reserve.
We had reached the Ennedi via a three-hour private charter from N’Djamena, Chad’s capital, in a Cessna piloted by a Scot named Angus who swung low “to take a look at the landing strip” before dropping us neatly upon the dry river bed. There we were met by our lead guide, Rocco Ravà, and loaded into a couple of Land Cruisers for the short drive to Warda Camp, the semipermanent base camp operated by our host, the Société de Voyages Sahariens, an adventure travel company owned and run by Rocco and his brother Tommaso Ravà. Our sleeping tents had been erected in a line at the base of the giant rocks. After an arrival lunch of salad and bresaola, we slept during the heat of the day and awoke at four o’clock to explore with Rocco and Tommaso. Everywhere I looked, the towering rock formations took on different shapes: an elephant, an ape. From the tops of the same cliffs, actual animals – pied crows and baboons – followed our progress.
The massif is, somewhat counterintuitively, a water-rich desert landscape composed of sandstone sitting on a granite Precambrian substrata that holds seasonal pools of water, or guilty, which support a remarkable diversity of life. There are more than 525 species of flora and 60 of fauna here – which explains why the massif is dubbed the Eden of the Sahara. Although we couldn’t see much life aside from the baboons and crows, the Ennedi is a stopping-off point for tens of thousands of birds on their migration between the Sahel and Europe, which arrive during the rains in March to join ibises, Nubian and Arabian bustards, African eagles and white vultures. The Ennedi is also home to honey badgers, antelopes and caracals. There may be a few remaining cheetahs, though the brothers haven’t seen one in more than 10 years. Closer to home, morning yielded the footprints of a hyena that, I was told, regularly passes through the camp on the way to its lair after the night’s hunting.
I lay in bed in my tent the next day and watched the sun rise through a gap in the rock. The rose-hued morning light blended with the colour of the sandstone. Two hours later we were driving towards a stone skyline. Our destination was the Guelta de Bachikele, a narrow canyon where rainwater pools in the shade of the rock to form a small oasis. Around it, palm trees sprang and fig trees hewed to the rock. Hundreds of camels were making their way to and from the water, the young in the shelter of their mothers, the old and lame bringing up the rear. Two boys urged their camels to their knees, quickly dismounted and stripped them of the blankets they use as saddles. We watched as the animals raced to join the others wading up to their hocks in the water.
The boys were Zaghawa, the nomadic people who inhabit the Ennedi along with the Toubou, who have a reputation for extreme hardiness (legend has it they can survive three days on a single date: eating the skin on day one, the pulp on day two, and sucking the seed on day three). The duo begrudgingly acknowledged our greetings, waving off our attempts to take a photo of them and their livestock. At this time of year, some nomads drive their camels, sheep and goats from east to west, following the path of the rain, while others journey from north to south, exchanging salt from the north for sugar, flour and millet in the towns they visit.
From the guelta we made our way past hosts of tassili to picnic beneath Aloba Arch, the second tallest natural arch in the world, a dizzying landform about 400 feet high and 250 feet wide. The late afternoon drive home offered further vistas – of rock formations now glowing golden in the dying sun and a shaded canyon through which herds of camels made steady progress.
On our second morning, after breakfast, we drove out until we reached a lookout point on top of a plateau above a massive rock formation known as the d’Oyo labyrinth. A few minutes later I was sitting in the front seat of the lead Toyota, watching Tommaso and Rocco as they conferred at the edge of a ridge that fell away sharply from where they stood. “Andiamo!” Rocco swung himself into the driver’s seat and revved the engine. Over the edge we went, ploughing through the thick sand straight down the vertiginous slope.
At the bottom, we left the cars and walked towards the rocks, slipping into the shadowy gap between two walls. Inside, the labyrinth was made of dark doorways, steep-sided gullies, dead ends and sudden sunlit openings. The geometric precision of their formation is a result, once again, of the combined forces of wind and water. Sandstone is soft, as rock goes, and erodes relatively easily. Over time, rainwater had worked its way into tiny fissures, and the wind followed, gradually widening the fissures into cracks and the cracks into chasms.
In this place of ancient wonders, perhaps none is more arresting than the crocodiles of Guelta d’Archei. Tommaso and a young village woman, who acted as our guide, led us on an arduous two-hour trek to the small waterhole where the crocodiles lived. Tommaso chatted with the woman in Chadian Arabic, in which both Tommaso and Rocco are fluent. (They also speak some Dazaga, the language of the Toubou.) The Ravà brothers were raised right here in the desert. In 1975, their Milanese parents, a biologist mother and a doctor father, spent a period living in Kenya before travelling home through the Sahara, where they fell in love with the desert. They quit their jobs and moved there. The brothers and their sister joined their parents on many of the expeditions they led, first nestled among the guests’ luggage and later as guides themselves. They have been leading tours for researchers, visitors and scientists ever since, including the French naturalist Théodore Monod, a world-renowned expert on the Sahara.
Tommaso warned us that, with only four crocodiles remaining, we might not be rewarded with a sighting. But we were lucky. Lying just beneath the surface of the water was one small creature. The presence of these Saharan crocodiles, Crocodylus suchus, is unexplained. But they are presumed to be a relic of a time, more than 8,000 years ago, when the land was covered in water. These are the descendants of the crocodiles that were stranded in the guelta when the seas slowly evaporated. Supposedly, when the crocodiles disappear from the guelta, so will the water. The reptiles are considered sacred and are safeguarded by the people with whom they live in harmony. There is no record of an attack on a human, goat or sheep. A conservation plan is currently being developed to protect this critically endangered species. In 2019 three of the four animals were caught to determine their sex and collect DNA samples. All three turned out to be females. The sex of the fourth, discovered a few months later, remains unknown.
“If you talk to someone who doesn’t know the desert,” said Rocco, “they believe that the Sahara is just sand with dunes. That’s false. The Sahara is 9 million square kilometres. Sand in all its forms only takes up between 17 and 18 per cent of the space. The rest is large massifs, mountains and, above all, empty spaces we call ‘reg’.” He was talking about stony plains: miles and miles of gravel and pebbles.
That morning, our convoy headed northwest towards Bichagara, a region known for its rock paintings and dramatic formations, where we’d be fly camping, truly out in the elements. When I asked Issa Hissein, a driver and chief navigator, how he knew the route, he explained that during the day he used the position of the sun; at night, the stars. “L’étoile polaire, ça ne bouge pas,” he said. The North Star doesn’t move. When I showed him a compass, he peered at it, seemingly in nonrecognition, before handing it back. The Ravà brothers relied on handheld GPS systems. Still, there were frequent discussions about the route, because the desert winds mean the landscape is continuously changing. Nothing stays the same, and nothing can be relied upon.
Home that night was a tent pitched at the base of a sand dune smooth as brushed gold. The next day, on an early walk, we spotted a caravan transporting salt, journeying across a distant landscape. Tommaso’s words on the attractions and hazards of fly camping came back to me: “If the wind picks up, there is nothing to do; you just need the patience of the nomads.” Fly camping is an important part of any journey in the Ennedi, he told me, for it is as close as visitors can come to understanding what life is like in the desert.
We had a glimpse of past lives as we stood before one of the hundreds of examples of rock art. Here, a line of cows traversed the side of a lone rock. Elsewhere were depictions of giraffes, elephants and rhinos; people dancing, horsemen carrying spears and bows, and herdsmen tending cattle. The images attested to 8,000 years of human presence, along with the changing ecology and climate of the region over the millennia.
The hull of a Libyan tank, abandoned here since a Chadian-Libyan skirmish in 1987, lay half-buried in the sand. The so-called Toyota War saw the forces of the Chadian army in a fleet of Toyota pick-ups rout the better-armed but less-disciplined Libyan army in its tanks. Their victory brought an end to a decade of fighting over this territory, which was then thought to contain oil. That is no longer believed to be the case. The tanks remain as a monument to that triumph and to the many fighters buried beneath the sands.
During our second night spent camping out in the open, deep in the desert, I awoke several times. This was the end of my trip, and sleep felt like a waste. Around me the tassili threw heavy shadows beneath a near-full moon. “To be in the desert,” Rocco had said, “means always having the possibility of moving; of being spartan and light. To be able to benefit from that is the beauty of this space.” I had come to understand the transformation that had taken place in the hearts, minds and souls of the Ravà parents when they made the fateful decision to travel home to Italy through this area all those years ago.
The desert had brought me to an awareness of a beauty both subtle and sublime, an integration of shades of colour, line and shape. I was aware of its impact upon my sense of self; my feeling of vulnerability and smallness, but also of harmony with a world that existed beyond my knowledge and experience, in both space and time. In our world we talk often and glibly of freedom. But we have only the faintest idea of what freedom can mean. This was freedom.
Journeys by Design arranges privately guided explorations of the Ennedi Natural and Cultural Reserve. An eight-night Chadian adventure into the Ennedi starts from about £9,650 per person using Warda Camp on an exclusive basis. Costs are subject to group size and include private camping, desert guides and private charter flights, but exclude international flights. The best time to travel to the northern deserts of Chad is November to March. journeysbydesign.com; wardacamp.com
Read the original article on Condé Nast Traveller.
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