A Night With the Aallas

Aalla is maybe twelve years old. That is how he puts it: Not “eleven going on twelve” or “almost thirteen” but “maybe twelve.” No one really knows, exactly. He is a bright boy whose face, flushed from the chill of the desert night, is at this moment fixed in a quarter smile, placid almost to the point of blankness. But he is full of questions, delivered in a staccato Berber dialect that sounds almost like stuttering, which reveal a deep, persistent, aching longing. It is the longing of a 12-year-old boy buzzing on hormones, but it is more than that. It is wrapped up in the hunger that has driven his tribe back and forth across the Sahara Desert for a thousand years, but which now has no focus, no route to follow, and, for that matter, no shared tribal community anymore. Aalla does not yet know that he wants a Game Boy, but he wants to get there, wants to focus his longing, wants to know what he longs for. He senses the possibilities of wanting.

Seeing his image on a digital camera will make it worse.

Aalla has never seen a house, and he wants to. Until today he had never ridden in a car, and the experience was initially nerve-racking. He was uncomfortable with the closing of the doors, but in the end, willing. He and his brothers had watched the headlights on the horizon for hours after sunset, bouncing over boulders, through the dark oasis, approaching them as they walked alone with their herd of long-haired goats, headed home. The man behind the wheel spoke Berber, but there were five men in the car, and two, it turned out, were Americans, visitors from a distant galaxy. Their arrival energized and infected everything. Aalla’s family, whose surname is also Aalla, lives in a goat-hair tent that is perhaps fifty years old. They heat tea and cook over stick fires, tend to their goats, find forage and water for them, spend hours scouring the burning sand for fossils, ostensibly to sell. They are as free and disengaged as their goats. Now and then the father rides his battered moped five or six hours to the oasis of Merzouga, where he buys oil for the lamps and Tide detergent for washing clothes and hands. Except for the Tide and the mo-ped, theirs is a way of life that has changed little over the last millennium, though the family might as well be living in a box beneath an overpass for all the comfort their tradition provides. The boys can find their way home from anywhere by the stars, but it gets harder each year to find what they need, to move and to stay, to ignore the impossibly wealthy tourists with digital cameras who push deeper and deeper into the desert, searching for someone who has hung on in the margins, especially if by a thread. The tourists want people like the Aallas to continue living like this. They need them to live like this. But there is a part of the Aallas that wants to strike the tent for good, to close the door on a thousand years. It’s like a marriage that’s falling apart and there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s out of your control, and you kind of want it to happen.

The stars are bright in the Sahara Desert, bright enough to startle you when you wake in the night, hanging in the air just above your face. It’s easy to find direction, with stars like that. That’s what everyone remembers, though memory is just a construct, there’s no way to remember it the way it is. Each time you see it is as profound as the last, then it fades to memory. So when the headlights of the old Land Cruiser sweep across three boys squinting back from a herd of long-haired goats, seven thousand miles of emptiness behind them, you see starlight in a different way, but for the Aallas the constellations are as familiar as a network of well-trod roads, leading nowhere.

We had been wandering the Moroccan desert for hours, refusing to admit we were lost, but literally going around in circles. The sun had set long ago, briefly turning the stark landscape of the stony hamada as red as henna. Now a full moon was rising above the escarpment that defines the forbidden border with Algeria, and still the nomads were nowhere in sight. Zigzagging through the rocky sand beneath the cliffs in an old Land Cruiser, we reached a dead end and were forced to turn around. The Algerian border is not negotiable -- in places it’s fenced, in others, mined, and for hundreds of miles it is patrolled by soldiers in
3 four-wheel-drives, the result of an international dispute over an area known as Western Sahara. The Algerian side is also home to an array of bandits, rebels and terrorists. As Brahim Karaoui steered his old Land Cruiser in what he hoped was the direction of a familiar nomad camp, the border kept getting in his way. It felt strange to be hemmed in at the edge of something as vast as the Sahara. The magnitude of the desert is immediately evident at the end of the paved road that descends from Morocco’s Mid Atlas Mountains, where tracks of four-wheel-drives fan out across the sand toward the horizon, presenting seemingly infinite possibilities. But aside from occasional incursions by a few rogue nomads, the view is an illusion. Since 1994, when Algeria and Morocco fell into dispute, one of the world’s oldest routes of human migration has been essentially closed, complicating the already burdensome life of the northern desert’s nomads, whose culture is predicated upon moving, but who today have few places to go.

Brahim wanted to introduce my friend John and me to the world of true nomads, as opposed to those who camp by the highway selling souvenirs and photo ops to tourists. His own parents were once true nomads, and his father was a leader in his tribe, though he eventually settled down and went to work in a fossil mine. Brahim grew up in a stucco house in the desert village of Merzouga, which stands at the end of one of the many new roads that are opening remote regions of Morocco to commerce and tourism while simultaneously siphoning people from the hinterlands into the cities. The village is about 40 miles from the section of hamada, or stony desert, that we are now traversing. It is remote and, by our standards, exotic, but relative accessible, which makes it a popular jumping-off point for camel treks in the orange Erg Chebbi dunes, where tourists can sample a world made famous in movies like Lawrence of Arabia. Because of its archetypal desert landscape, Merzouga has been the setting for numerous movies and TV commercials, as well as an episode of the MTV show “Road Rules,” in which the curiously unhappy cast participated in contrived adventures and staged encounters with bewildered Moroccans. There are a few new auberges going up beside the dunes, and Merzouga’s population is swelling with displaced nomads, but the region receives few American tourists these days, due to a decline in Western tourism in all Islamic countries, post-9/11.

Brahim is a tour guide and rug and jewelry merchant. He speaks nine languages, including a dialect of Berber used by the local nomads, which is not unusual among Moroccans whose livelihoods have long depended upon interacting with an ever changing cast of foreign characters. We met in his shop in 2000, during my first trip to Morocco, when getting to Merzouga still required four-wheel-drive. On that trip, my traveling companion and I had been adamant about not wanting to buy rugs, having been subjected to carpet shop ambushes by every guide we had hired, and by strangers whom we had simply asked for directions, from the moment we stepped off the ferry in Tangier. After being deposited in Brahim’s shop by a guide who had previously agreed to skip the carpet ordeal, I explained that he could show us his rugs, describe the significance of the various designs and tell us about the Berber nomads who made them, but that there would be no sale. That was fine with him, he said. “We drink tea, talk about life.” And so we had. Such is Brahim’s acumen as a salesman that we bought rugs anyway, and before the deal was cinched, had discovered an odd kinship. Brahim ended up closing his shop and traveling with us for a few days. Afterward we continued to correspond through e-mail, and in the time since have become close friends, traveling together in the United States and various Muslim countries before and after September 11, comparing notes on the changing world.

The world of the nomads changed little during the last thousand years, until recently, Brahim said. Profound changes now loom, and like journalists and intrepid tourists in every supposedly forgotten corner of the world, John and I were eager to catch a glimpse of something unique and endangered before its moment passed. By Brahim’s reckoning the family we were looking for should have been camped near the Azekam oasis at this time of year, but as he probed the darkness with his high beams he was forced to concede that they had moved on. Trying not to sound discouraged, he assured us, “We will find nomads.” His cousin Lahcen Boujouija, who had accompanied us, along with another relative, Ahmed Koggott, added, “Nomads change place.” We nodded. Of course.

Lahcen and Ahmed are also from former nomad families and know the desert ways. Though nomad movements may by inscrutable to outsiders, their life is not about aimless rambling, as Lahcen explained. They have clear agendas, subtly adjusted to changing markets and the seasonal availability of water and forage for their livestock. The routes they follow have long historical backdrops. Morocco’s nomads are descendants of tribes of Berbers who were driven from the more productive parts of North Africa into the desert and the mountains by Arab invaders beginning in the 7th century, and further scattered by French colonists around the turn of the 20th century. The word “Berber” was an Arab invention, later degraded to “barbarian” by Europeans.

Traditionally, nomads roamed over hundreds, even thousands of miles in a given year, trading between present-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya and sub-Saharan Central and West Africa. Changing markets and transportation systems brought an end to the largest caravans long ago, but the fractured culture hung on. Surviving nomads, who are often called Tuaregs or Blue Men (in reference to the indigo dyes used on their robes), eke out a measured living from trade in camels, wool, rugs, dates, indigo, henna and spices. They are increasingly vulnerable to restrictions in their movements, such as the closing of the Algerian border, particularly during periods of protracted drought, which the northern desert has experienced for more than a decade. The combination has brought increasing poverty and desperation, even as news spreads of expanding wealth and convenience elsewhere. It is an old story, this search for shifting opportunities, but it is reaching a crescendo in the Moroccan desert, where the nomads’ perennially mobile life is becoming far more variable than before, and in new and bewildering ways. As a result, “The nomads are settling down very, very fast,” Lahcen said. “The true nomads will be gone in 10 years – 15 at the most.”

In Lahcen’s view, that is not necessarily a bad thing. He believes nomads deserve more of what the modern world has to offer. Only cultural voyeurs like John and me could see romance in an admittedly pure yet utterly poor existence, in which the nomads are left hanging by a cultural thread. When I suggested that a person need not have a Starbucks on the corner to live a full and rich life, Lahcen simply shook his head. With terrorists and anti-terrorists disrupting commerce and travel, with talk of satellite TV and cell phones and opportunities for health care and education planting hunger in the nomad’s heart, “You can’t blame them for wanting to move into the village,” he said. His only concern was that the cumulative knowledge of Berber and nomad culture will be lost in the shuffle, which to us seemed inevitable.
Leaning against the back of the front seat, watching our headlights bounce over boulders, sand and, at one point, the tilting stones of a nomad cemetery, Lahcen predicted that the transition would be hard for the nomads who remain. “People are scared about the future,” he said. “It’s so obscure. The nomad, what will he do in the village? These people have only an oral tradition. Their problem is poverty and misery. Now they don’t care about tradition, only money. They’re looking for a way out. Tourism brings money but it spoils things.” Already we had encountered nomads who pretend to be themselves for a living, holding forth for tourists in contrived camps by day and retiring to houses at night. It is a process of cultural reduction. Countless true nomads still roam truncated routes across Morocco and deeper Africa, but their numbers are declining everywhere, to varying degrees. The irony is that their restless culture is being subverted by increasing unsettlement in the world today. The urge to pick up and move is increasingly directing them to villages and cities.

The question of what is to become of such ancient cultures has dogged Brahim and me throughout our travels. Everywhere we look, the new world appears to be undermining the old. In the Muslim world, traditional merchants and traders are being thwarted by fundamentalists bent on driving Western tourists away. The problem is also a result of rapid technological advances. At the southern edge of the Sahara, in Timbuktu, cell phone service recently arrived, though sewage treatment, garbage pickup and adequate health care have not. In the Moroccan city of Fez, nearly every rooftop in the medieval medina sports a satellite dish. In Mali’s Dogon country, cliff-dwelling animists who have resisted assimilation for five centuries now sell artifacts to authenticity-starved travelers along mountain trails, while children with visible maladies, including tumors, go untreated. Change may be inevitable, but its pace is increasing at an alarming rate, and it is both pervasive and strangely random. In a span of five years, Brahim has watched the new highway shunt remaining travelers away from the old center of Merzouga, where his shop stands, even as faux nomad camps sprout in the dunes and a hideous neon sign hawking Maroc Telecom dims the stars over the town.

Brahim has a cell phone as well as satellite TV and internet access, but he is concerned that the modernization will go too far, and kill the very thing that people come to the desert to see. But how much is too much, and who draws the line, and where? For that matter, can such a line be drawn at all? Tellingly, when Brahim visited my home in the United States in 2002, he was determined to shop at Wal-Mart, and during a subsequent visit, asked my help in picking out teeth-whitening products to erase the dental stains that are ubiquitous among his people.

Complicating matters for the nomads is the fact that the desert, which has always been a dangerous place, is now part of a larger battleground. In addition to longstanding conflicts in Algeria and Western Sahara, the desert’s southern rim has become a new front on the American war on terror, with Green Berets training counter-terrorism militias in places such as Mali and Chad, which some locals say has politically empowered what were formerly little more than bands of nomadic thugs. Kidnappings of tourists have increased. Although there are regions of the Sahara into which a traveler can venture in comparative safety, they are mostly found around the edges, where the majority of the remaining nomads are marooned, and even there, descendants of a millennium-old tradition are reeling from the storm surge building from the deeper desert and beyond.

For all these reasons, and because it was getting late, we were thrilled to see three shepherd boys materialize in our headlights, amid a herd of long-haired goats, as we drove across the dark hamada. The boys, who had no doubt been monitoring our approach from the moment our lights flickered on the horizon, looked more curious than startled as we rolled to a stop. “Wait here while we talk to them,” Brahim suggested, so John and I remained in the truck, listening to the cries of the agitated goats and to the 8 ensuing conversation, which took place in a staccato Berber dialect that sounds almost like stuttering. Soon Brahim, Lahcen and Ahmed returned with the two younger boys, who were not from the family we were looking for but agreed to take us to their own camp. The older brother would follow, on foot, with the herd.

 The boys, dressed in a mix of traditional nomad attire and Western-style jackets and knit caps, were all eyes as they climbed into the Land Cruiser. They scanned the interior cautiously, unsure how to operate the doors and reluctant to shut them after we showed them how. Apparently they did not want to be enclosed. At Lahcen’s urging they finally agreed, and stared silently ahead as we drove on. This was their first ride in a vehicle, Lahcen said, and they seemed mesmerized by the opportunity, which came out of nowhere. “They speak only Berber – they do not even speak Arabic,” he said. “This will make it very difficult for them when they have to give up this life, which will happen very soon.”

 A half-hour later our headlights swept across a tent pitched near the base of the Algerian escarpment, before which stood a mustached man in an immaculate white caftan and turban. The man looked perplexed, and interested, as our vehicle approached. When we got out, Brahim introduced himself. The man’s name was Yusef Aalla. He was the father of the shepherd boys. I had imagined nomads to be fiercely independent and perhaps unwelcoming to outsiders, but Yusef extended his hand to each of us and offered the traditional Muslim greeting, “Salaam alikum.” Then, speaking in Berber, which Brahim translated, he said, “It is nice to have someone stop by.” Hearing this, Lahcen whispered in English, “He is glad to see us. They are perhaps lonely, because their community is gone. The family has only each other.”

The Aalla camp consisted of a woven goat-hair tent of two rooms that had been in the family for generations; a small, comically leaning shelter of branches, blankets and plastic sheeting that serves as a kitchen, with pots and pans hanging from protruding branches; a goat pen cobbled from sticks and brush; a campfire delineated by a circle of 9 stones; and a small clay oven for baking bread. The sand around the camp was heavily pocked by footprints.

Yusef motioned for us to enter the tent, which was lit by a single kerosene lamp, and then to sit upon the brightly colored camel-hair rugs while his wife – who, typically for this part of the world, was not introduced -- delivered a shovel-load of coals from the kitchen to heat a pewter pitcher of water for tea. His wife would return only toward the end of the evening, to sit silently weaving a rug on a large loom that also acted as a room-divider. The rug’s design centered on a butterfly motif, which Lahcen said symbolizes the freedom of the nomads.

 Three of the five children joined us in the tent, their faces flushed by the chill of the desert night. The youngest child, a toddler, stayed with her mother, while the oldest, whose name was Adi, tended the campfire. Each time someone entered or exited the tent, moonlight fell through the open flaps to the carpeted floor and I caught a glimpse of Adi squatting by the campfire, and the mother stirring pots over a small fire in the kitchen, the toddler on her hip. We had brought a moveable feast – a large bag of carrots, servings of lamb, sheep fat, liver and tripe, onions, potatoes and the other makings for brochettes and tajine, as well as a supply of sugar and candy bars for the children, which they held quietly for a long time before carefully unwrapping.

Yusef was a quiet, contemplative man whose dark, craggy features seemed to personify the desert that his family has roamed for longer than anyone knows. He spoke to Brahim in a quiet, sure voice, asking what brought us to the hamada tonight, nodding as Brahim explained the curiosity of his American friends. His expression was calm, only now and then broken by a beguiling, resigned smile. He said the family has camped on this site for five years, tending their goats, collecting dates from the palms of the oasis and searching for fossils that he occasionally sells in Merzouga, where he traveled on his battered moped. The children listened quietly as he talked, their eyes wide, sometimes with their heads cocked to the side. Their expressions were confident, curious and reserved, not at all shy. Their eye contact never wavered, and they smiled when John tore a sheet from his  notebook and made a paper airplane for them to fly to each other across the tent. The family seemed placid in a way that might be misconstrued as aloof, which was perhaps a reflection of the equilibrium of days and nights that change incrementally, even as the outside world flexes and looms. The stasis of nomad life was evident when Lahcen asked the middle son, whose first name was also Aalla, his age, and he answered, “Maybe twelve.”

John and I were pretty wide-eyed ourselves, scanning the interior of the tent with the kind of enthusiasm one might feel after miraculously stumbling upon a still-inhabited Anasazi ruin. There were stacks of homemade blankets, rugs woven in warm-hued, geometric designs, large sacks of flour, a flashlight, the loom and various plastic bags containing essentials that hung from the crooked wooden support posts. I kept having to remind myself that this tent was the home of a family of seven, the only home the children had ever known, and that it doubled as a small-scale rug factory. It was not quite tall enough to stand, its high point supported by two poles inserted into a piece of carved, oval wood that nestled in a cradle of fabric sewn into the roof. Yusef saw me eyeing the structure and said, through Brahim, that the goat hair swells when it rains, which prevents it from leaking. “If you repair a tear as soon as it develops, a tent will last a very long time,” he said. Before the family settled on this spot, he said, they moved periodically in search of grazing land. They picked this location because it was well drained, which matters during the flash floods of the brief rainy season, and because the escarpment provided a buffer from sandstorms. They now ranged over about ten square kilometers, never crossing the nearby border.

I was curious to know if any other nomads cross the border. Although the dangerous trans-Sahara crossing is today made mostly by outlaws and the occasional journalist or adventurer mining the terrain staked by T.E. Lawrence – essentially, people up to no good or on reckless ego trips, I had read that a few nomads still make the journey surreptitiously, believing that their culture supercedes international boundaries and contemporary government authority. But this was apparently not a subject anyone wanted  to discuss tonight. All eyes fell to the floor when I brought it up. Ahmed and the otherwise talkative Lahcen focused on skewering sheep’s liver and fat for the kabobs. In the momentary silence, Aalla tilted his paper airplane toward his smiling brother, Mohammed, and launched it across the tent.

I asked Lahcen what the children normally do for fun. “Nothing,” he said. “There is no time. Their lives are directed, every moment, by their father.” But surely all children create games for themselves, I suggested. He shook his head. “Everyone in the family works,” he said. “Always they work. It is a hard life.”

 Days for the Aallas follow familiar routines. They herd their goats to water and forage, care for the kids and tend to the animals’ occasional injuries. They search for fossils to sell to the tourist trade, for the remains of prehistoric marine life and for a local favorite, the desert rose, a small sandstone formation created by wind and rain. They prepare and cook their meals. The mother weaves blankets and rugs. They visit distant camps rarely, for special occasions. Our meal tonight was an extravagance, something normally reserved for a wedding or funeral. The common thread to their life is work and moving, Lahcen said. Yet movement was no longer free, and the returns are diminishing.

Nomads who settle sometimes have difficulty adjusting to a sedentary life “inside,” Lahcen said. Perhaps the old men end up sleeping on a terrace of the roof, under the familiar stars. “When things are good, you have milk and dates, you have this proud tradition,” he said. “My mother says she remembers it fondly until there are torrential rains and the kids in the tents are cold. And now it’s dry. No grass. There used to be surface water where there is none now. Merzouga was very green, but it’s been dry for longer than 15 years.” We would catch a glimpse of nomad culture’s former exuberance a few days later, in Merzouga, where the concentration of Berbers has kept alive traditions that are only infrequently enjoyed by truly traditional families such as the Aallas. One night the entire village was animated by a wedding party that lasted until after midnight, the air filled 12 with the ululating of women and the music of drums and various ringing instruments. Women in festive caftans and scarves crowded a narrow sand street, dancing in circles around the jubilant, bedangled bride, singing beautifully complicated chorals to which the men responded in chants as powerful as soccer stadium cheers. It was the kind of joyful communal outpouring that once occurred in countless tent encampments across the desert, but rarely does today.

Such celebrations are no longer integral to the lives of true nomads. As Yusef explained through Brahim, he was the last of his family to roam the desert. His sister and three brothers (one of whom was, of all things, a house builder) had all settled in Merzouga, and if he had the means, Yusef would do the same. In the open desert there are no other children, no prospective spouses.

 Suddenly the middle son, Aalla, spoke up in what was, for John and me, indecipherable chatter. Brahim translated: “Aalla says, ‘It’s a pity, I wish I could go to school.’ He says, ‘I’d like to go to school, even for a while.’ He also says he has never been inside a house, and wishes to see one. He is very bright, this boy, but he can only learn so much from his parents and from the world around him. He wants more.” It occurred to me that Aalla’s life was boring. We all stared at Aalla as he turned the paper airplane over in his hands. His younger brother, Mohammed, and sister, Miriam, watched us watching him.

“The boy will soon find himself in a very different world,” Lahcen said, offering a gentle admonition to anyone who might be unconvinced.

“But if he goes to school, he won’t come back,” I said. “And aren’t there different kinds of education? Here’s a boy who can find his way home in the desert, in the middle of the night, alone. In the U.S. you hear about kids shooting each other for sneakers. Rich kids have everything they want, and they don’t care.”

“The boy should have a chance to go to school,” Lahcen said, flatly.

 I leaned back against my pack. It was hard to argue. We could engage in philosophical debate about the awkward stumble of history, and I could exult in the fact that there are still places in the world where children find their way home by the stars, but none of it carried the power of the nascent longing in Aalla’s eyes.

Soon Ahmed entered the tent, trailing the scent of cedar smoke from the fire, and announced that the first course of food was ready. In preparation, Yusef passed around a bowl of Tide detergent, for washing. We each took a pinch and he made the rounds with a pitcher and bowl, pouring the water over our hands once to lather and again to rinse. As the brochettes were served, Brahim reminded us, “The youngest children have never known a true nomad’s life. They’ve been living here in the same spot for five years.” He seemed determined to convince us that what was in store for the Aallas was for the best.

John asked if Aalla would have difficulty in school, if the other children would make fun of him because he was a nomad, and therefore backward, in their minds. Brahim said the children would probably tease him for a while but that he would soon fit in. “It doesn’t take long for kids,” he said. What would truly be hard, he said, would be to find himself grown, with limited communication skills, facing significant cultural differences in a competitive environment. Then he wrapped his arms around Mohammed, who sat beside him, and offered first in Berber and then in English to take him to Merzouga and send him to school. Yusef smiled politely but said nothing. “I mean it!” Brahim said. “I will take him to my house like one of my kids, and send him to school!” Then, only in English, he added, “The future will be very, very hard if they move to the city. No schooling. There is no family education. They just learn what they see, and from other families.”

 “The boy will be caught in the gap,” Lahcen said. “His own father says this is disappearing, and no one is preparing him or helping him prepare himself. When Aalla grows up, he has no choices -- no preparation for a world he will inhabit. Because he will not be here. This life is ending. There are only one or two families still in this area. The adult nomad thinks for himself and he thinks for his son. That’s it. He is prepared for nothing more.” I had the feeling that Lahcen and Brahim believed our opinions somehow matter, as if they might have any bearing on what would happen, though John and I were outsiders. But perhaps they were merely trying to convince themselves.

 I noticed Mrs. Aalla in the darkness of the other room, listening and working on her rug. “Actually, this is rude -- discussing this family’s fate in their own home, in a language they can’t understand,” I said.

“It’s true,” Lahcen said, then translated for Yusef, who smiled and gave an almost imperceptible shrug.

 I wanted to know how the Aallas felt about all of this, and to have some semblance of a normal conversation, but the language and cultural barriers contrived to reduce our exchange to the level of an awkward interview. We could do little more than smile at one another across the divide. Yet the exchange was not entirely stilted. The Aallas seemed interested, too.

We spent the remainder of the evening talking, through Brahim and Lahcen, about schools and sandstorms and topography and water – topics that seemed mundane on the surface, but were meaningful for the Aallas. Eventually Mrs. Aalla retrieved another shovel-load of coals for a final round of tea, and afterward everyone began to retire. We unrolled our sleeping bags in the living area and the Aallas disappeared.

 Before going to sleep, John and I decided to take a last stroll in the moonlit desert, so we trudged across the sand and climbed the loose rocks of the bluff. The sky was full of stars. It was cold. We gazed toward unapproachable Algeria, then below at the tiny nomad camp in the darkness by the dying fire. The goats were quiet. The Aallas’ world was far different from our own, but comfortably familiar in small but important ways. What we could not get past was the look on Aalla’s face. We talked about putting together a kit of tools and other provisions, which we would ship to Brahim and have him deliver to the Aallas. Another flashlight would be handy. Certainly a knife. A supply of 15 batteries. Clips. Some rope. We would include things to make their lives a bit easier. But what we were talking about was offering provisions to make it easier for them to stay as they are, when the one thing that truly intrigued them was John’s digital camera.

 When the cold grew uncomfortable we headed back to the camp, where we found Yusef waiting patiently outside the tent, holding back the flap for us to enter. We had not realized, as we tarried in the moonlight, that as a good host Yusef could not go to sleep until we were tucked in. We smiled apologetically and he nodded in a way that said not to worry. We crawled into our sleeping bags and he spread a heavy woolen blanket over both of us, which weighed us down. Then he turned in for the night. John said he felt as if we were all in the womb together.

 I was awakened before dawn by an insistent, rhythmic pounding from outside the tent. When John and I climbed out on our way to watch the sun rise, we saw the source of the sound: Mrs. Aalla, making dough for breakfast bread. She was covered from head to toe, and did not look up.

 We watched the eastern horizon warm from pale yellow to vivid red, while behind us the western horizon was saturated with the blue of litmus paper. Slowly the sun inched above Algeria and the cliff’s shadow contracted, exposing the Aallas’ camp to a new day. In the distance we saw the silhouettes of Ahmed and Lahcen, in their pointed djellabas, staring at the ground and occasionally stooping to pick something up. When we investigated, we found that they had stumbled upon an outcropping of desert roses, the pinkish-orange sandstone flowers, flecked with the glitter of quartz, of many different sizes. We all filled our pockets, then headed back to the tent for tea.

After breakfast everyone except Mrs. Aalla posed for group photos, and Yusef took John and me aside and wordlessly gave each of us a polished fossil. As we made our way toward the waiting Land Cruiser, Brahim stopped for a moment by a little fossil stand that the Aallas had set up beside the seldom-used desert track. The placement of the stand made a sad statement, in a way, because no doubt weeks or even months go by without any vehicles passing, and even those are probably the jeeps of soldiers. Yet it also illustrated that the Aallas did not feel entirely alone.

 Strolling around the dusty display, I felt the same response I have whenever I am encouraged to buy something in a poor country: Resistance. It is a reaction to what are usually annoying hard sells, and to an unwelcome and corresponding feeling of guilt. Fortunately, the Aallas seemed equally uninterested in making a transaction, so we simply looked at the fossils, smiled, then looked away. Yusef and Aalla pretty much did the same.

The day was growing hot as we climbed into the Land Cruiser for the drive back to Merzouga. We said goodbye to Yusef and Aalla, who waited beside the stand as we drove away, waving slowly and looking vaguely forlorn. REM resumed playing on the stereo. The camp of the Aallas soon vanished in our cloud of dust, and a landscape that looks like Arizona, but feels nothing like it, began unfolding before us again. “I think they are sad for us to go,” Brahim said as he drove, and judging from the look on his face, they were not alone

. -- Copyright 2007, Alan Huffman