Deserting the bedouin

Yearning for a glimpse of the nomadic way of life, yoginder sikand travels across the Sahara, only to find that city life has taken its place.

The bus chugged down the clogged thoroughfare, over the bridge across the Nile and out of Cairo. An hour later, we were speeding through pure, uninhabited desert — the Sahara. Not a tree or even a bald patch of grass was to be seen.

At noon, the bus pulled into Bahariya, one of the few oases that lie scattered across the vast Egyptian desert. I had originally planned to get off here, but as the bus drew into the settlement I quickly changed my mind.

It was certainly not the remote, changeless Bedouin outpost in the middle of nowhere that I had imagined it would be. Heaps of garbage accumulated in towering pyramids.

Long-haired western tourists and locals zipped about on motorbikes and pick-up trucks, sending up whirls of dust. Satellite television dishes sprouted like algae on the roofs of squat adobe houses.

Mass tourism and economic ‘development’, it was evident, had completely transformed the Sahara, and desert life was now a far cry from the idyllic pastoral simplicity I had supposed it would be.

Beyond the stereotype

Luckily, the bus I was seated in was heading to the farthest oasis in the western Egyptian Sahara — to Dakhla, a journey of another eight hours, and I slipped back inside. In a while, we entered the White Desert, a vast empty plain that runs for over a hundred kilometers, dotted by eerie chalky white rock formations sculpted into various twisted forms by howling winds over the centuries.

I saw no Bedouins leading camel caravans, as I had expected I would — most of the camels that did once abound in the desert, the man sitting next to me said, had been eaten up years ago, for the nomads had almost all been settled and had replaced their dromedaries for Japanese-made pick-up trucks.

Two hours later, the desert was suddenly interrupted with a burst of parrot-green buckwheat fields, and rows of stunted olive trees, fringed with date palms. Water gurgled in neatly-set channels, irrigating dense mango and banana plantations. Cows munched in Alpine-like pastures.

This was the oasis of Farfara, which, too, seemed to have been overrun by hordes of camera-clicking foreign tourists, enticed by touts promising what they called “the genuine Saharan experience.”

There were no nomads dressed in swirling robes that I had imagined I would see in hordes, and it was only in shops that catered to foreign tourists that one could find ‘traditional’ Bedouin turbans and gowns, which the locals seem to have long since abandoned.

Trundling ahead, the bus swam through a vast sea of sand. Long after darkness had fallen, when the sky was littered with a million blinking stars, just as I had dreamt it would, we finally arrived at Dakhla, where I lumbered off.

A swank, modern town was what I found when I arrived next morning. Large bungalows, nudging shoulders with modern schools and hospitals and swank hotels that advertised ‘traditional Bedouin hospitality’, opened out into leafy parks. I trudged up a knoll to the Qala, the fort inside which the denizens of Dakhla lived till just a few decades ago, before the new, ‘modern’ town came up.

Labyrinthine lanes wound their way up to the summit, criss-crossed with shaded passageways lined with mud houses, now all in a state of ruin. Only a few of these were still inhabited, presumably by families that could not afford to shift to the ‘modern’ town below.

The tough walk to the crest of the fort was well worth the effort, for the panoramic view that it afforded: of an enormous stone ridge, below which nestled hundreds of homes and on the other three sides a vast sandy ocean, whose enormous untouched dunes stretched for unknown hundreds of miles.

I spent a couple of blissful, uncluttered days in Dakhla, practising my very basic Arabic at roadside cafes, and hiking to nearby settlements strewn across the oasis. On my last day, I travelled to Al-Qasr, an hour’s ride by bus at the very end of the oasis. The scenery was stunning, with brilliant green fields and verdant orchards, contrasting with the bare stone ridges in the distance, beyond which the Sahara rolled on endlessly.

The ruins of Al-Qasr were visible from a distance. Mud structures crowded at the base of a hillock. The warren of some 200 structures that make up the settlement was remarkably well preserved, consisting of numerous dwellings (some of them four-storied), the dwellings of the chieftain of the town, two mosques, public halls, factories for pressing oil, and barns for storing dates and olives, all carved out of soft mud, with palm trunks bound together for roofing.

Shaded corridors wound their way through the maze of buildings, keeping out the harsh desert sun and the sand. The doors of the houses were crafted from shanks of palm wood, and decorated with wooden lintels bearing delicate Quranic calligraphy and, in some cases, Pharaonic hieroglyphics purloined from ancient ruins.

No one lives in the ruined city any more, which stands as a mute testimony to a way of life that lasted for centuries until the Sahara was opened up to ‘development’. For a handsome fee, Al-Qasr’s museum provides some pale glimpses of a centuries-old mode of existence that has now almost completely vanished. The Sahara, at least in this remote western corner of Egypt, has finally been tamed and ‘civilised’.

Hardly any nomadic Bedouins, in whose company I had dreamt of traversing the treacherous desert, remain. An entire way of life built on a symbiotic relationship between the desert and its denizens has been irrevocably transformed. The oases of the Egyptian Sahara have now become the most remote outposts of ‘modernity’.

It was somewhat of a let-down, I had to admit — coming all this way, hundreds of miles into the largest desert of the world just to see city life in miniature. But was it at all fair, I ask myself, to expect the Bedouins to remain what I had hoped they would be for my own gratification — exotic objects, frozen in time forever, untouched by the sweeping winds of change?

That, of course, is a question that bedevils all ‘traditional’ cultures as well as those who want to preserve them as they are, or as they imagine they should be.