25 May Akakus: The Kingdom of Silence

I remember that day perfectly. There are whole years lost in memory and yet I keep seconds that will remain intact forever. We had just finished eating. We were flying over the sea of Ubari dunes on board a rickety SUV while Tinariwen was playing on the radio, that Tuareg music, monotonous like the very desert that inspires it but which has a special charm that lulls the senses and makes the spirit dream.. Music that I, with my more basic feelings, was getting drowsy, even though some impertinent flies and some AK-74 rifles between our feet prevented us from being as relaxed as the situation demanded.

In that car I was accompanied by two trusted Tuaregs and a friend who had arrived from Spain, a brother by blood, many stories together in strange places, not always easy. Despite the heat, we were wearing the Chéché or Tagelmust to try to go unnoticed, although it seems to me that it looked so bad on my friend and so good on me that we had the opposite effect. The other car with us was being swallowed up by the pink dust of the harmattan, which had begun to blow up the desert with a strong scorching air. You could hardly see it and it was extremely hot.

I like that strange situation that always precedes the adventure, even if in the end it doesn't come together, it doesn't matter, it's that moment when prudence, which has never been my strong point, advises me to reconsider and put on the brakes, that attracts me powerfully. Although if it had been up to me we would have continued on to Lake Gabroun, the most hidden garden in the Sahara, or to the ruins of Germa, the capital of the Garamante empire, the city of the ancient lords of the desert, so close and yet so unreachable. But of all the desires that invaded my dreams that afternoon, the one I would have chosen to fulfil would be to lose ourselves in the mountains of Akakus, and camp in any of those thousands of nameless places that only the Tuareg know, sheltered from the winds and the warmth of a fire made from the remains of acacia trees. Camping and letting the night catch up with us, telling old and new stories or talking about women, while we savoured a sparkling tea, a gin and tonic or any other Fierabras syrup that would make us recover from the long journey.

But that afternoon, while I was enjoying that nap, and I remained curdled but always alert, I heard the Tuareg telling stories of a place always far away, far from everything, a place made of silence and solitude, where a strange mountain of black rock and whimsical formations stood. A mysterious mountain, Jebel Akakus, on whose walls were megalithic monuments and prehistoric drawings of hunters, elephants, giraffes, leopards or crocodiles, reminders of a different past, full of life. Paintings such as the great Martian god that drove Henri Lhote crazy in the Tassili or the cave of the swimmers that made the Count

Almasy in Uweinat. This is the other great hidden wealth of the Sahara.

A marvellous thing that got into my soul as they told us about it. Jebel Akakus, which the Tuareg call Alkamar, the landscape of the moon, a land that has the power to make one travel so far and face the occasional danger. The evil was done, there was no choice but to go.

Since then this place became my obsession, sadly aware of the difficulties and dangers to get there, but determined to do it. I was lucky, because it was only a few days later that I received the big surprise, and that is that sometimes, on rare occasions, Heaven sends you an advance as compensation for the many sleepless nights and sacrifices made in this valley of tears. And this gift from Heaven came to me in the form of an invitation to fly over this mountain.

So there it was at last, before me, that impressive black mass of the Tadrar Akakus, surrounded by silence and desolation. A desolation that showed itself in many different ways, from the endless white dunes we left in the direction of Murzuq to the labyrinths of rocky pinnacles emerging from the reddish sand. From above I could see ghostly rivers, dune corners of a thousand shades or enormous enchanted stone formations, the imagination ran wild... All this I could see, untamed nature.

After an hour's flight we landed in Ghat, the city of the three frontiers, a city forgotten by the passage of history. It was here that the chariots of the Garamantes arrived, then it was an important caravan centre and then the last resting place of those great explorers, if they had one, before they were lost forever on their way to Timbuktu. Little is left of its splendour, converted into a place of passage and frequented by invisible guerrillas from neighbouring countries or by clandestine travellers laden with hope and little else, and if anything, a madman like me, excited.

I had never had such a flight in my life. I was ecstatic and thanked all those great adventurers, such as Alexander Gordon, the Lander brothers, Heinrich Barth, Michael Asher and so many others who had preceded me there, whose tales of adventure had filled my head with little birds and had finally dragged me there.

Gift from Heaven or Divine Punishment, because now I'm going to have to go back, and I'm not going to stay in Ghat.