26 Mar The Cave of Fools

Pay attention, let me tell you a story that will make your imagination fly. Come with me to the desert, discover a distant and hidden world. Listen

So began a story I recently heard from the Tuareg Bubakar, an old acquaintance, as he offered us dates and camel yoghurt in the courtyard of the Al Uweinat mosque. I could not yet have imagined that this day would change my destiny. I had arrived there fleeing the cold of Madrid and the irresistible temptation of Netflix and a blanket, eager for warmth, adventure and trouble in equal parts.

I was accompanied by three friends, among them Omar, a gigantic, bearded sheikh, who never left my side, not even with a huge heavy machine gun, which gave me a certain peace of mind, although sometimes the opposite was true...

We had arrived there after several hours on a road that lost its way to the south, half devoured by an immense sea of dunes. I remember the monotony of the landscape, the intense smell of overheated asphalt and the litany of Tinariwen's music, my eternal companion in the deserts. Several Tuareg checkpoints along the route were determined to break the boredom of the morning. Greetings, tea ceremony, and back to the sleep until the next post. The daily routine.

Outside, the relentless Gibbli was blowing, that hot wind from the south that brings the distant desert of Borkou in the air... You could barely make out the horizon until you reached the palm grove of Uweinat, the gateway to this hidden world.

It was there that Bubakar began to tell the story of a place, not so far away, where the dunes were so magical that they changed colour continuously, turning red every sunset. There were only two wells, but the water was so hot that it seemed to rise from the very bowels of the earth. Beside them grew a group of rickety tamarisk trees, nothing else could live there, only tamarisk trees, and djinns, the evil spirits of the desert. Bubakar claimed to have heard them a few nights sleeping in the dunes, and so did I. He said that in those dunes they used to sleep. He said that between those dunes rose huge rocky mountains, with ghostly shapes, which sometimes disappeared in the wind.

And behind those rocks was hidden a cave, inhabited for thousands of years by madmen, because they must have been mad to choose such a place to live, subjected to that scorching sun and the relentless wind. On its walls they drew giraffes, elephants, gazelles and even strange beings that seemed to be from another planet, yes, they must have gone mad, all of them. Since then they call it Kafel Gonoun, which means something like "you have to be crazy if you want to go there", and according to what I was told, it's been a long time since anyone has been there. Although for me the name sounded like a very clear "there is no..." and of course, there was no reasoning for that. Besides, we had everything we needed, fuel, ammunition, water and a couple of live goats, so we set off immediately into the desert.

We stopped for lunch in the shade of a tamarisk tree, next to one of the boiling water wells, just as Bubakar had described. A group of Tuareg nomads had set up camp next to the well. And there, next to them, among dunes, camels and comrades, we slaughtered the goats and cooked them on the fire with acacia wood.

At sunset, after tea, we climbed the dunes, which were already turning a deep red colour. And then we saw it, between the dunes there was a huge cliff with strangely shaped rocks, which protected the access to the cave of the madmen. The place was impressive

The vision lasted only a few minutes, the Gibbli had risen again with great force, that same wind that in the east is called the Khamsin and in Western Sahara is the Irifi, but which is always equally maddening and drags the same desert. And so, as I watched the mountain fade away, my heart thought only of staying there, of going through every part of the Awis or getting lost among the cliffs of the Tadrar, following the traces of some waddan.

I don't know, maybe it was that wind, the Irifi, which entered me so many years ago through one ear and has never been able to get out, that took me that day to the Cueva de los locos...