(“Water is life, and life is water.”)—TAMACHEK SAYINGTime has drained out of this reality, I think to myself as I shove a needle through yet another set of blisters on this, the third long day of walking through the sweltering central Sahara with Tuareg nomads on salt caravan. I never knew that nothingness could take up so much space. And, since I can speak exactly three words of the Tuareg’s native language of Tamachek—tanenmert (“thank you”), el ma tovlid? (“how are you?”), and iy uhen (“hello”)—I pass the hours ruminating on the concept of ethereal nothingness—which takes up a surprising amount of time. When my mind starts to bead up and roll off and disappear into this overwhelming landscape, like runaway mercury from a cracked thermometer, I latch onto some more tangible activities: counting the razor-sharp whiskers that pop out of my camel’s muzzle, miming to my blue-swathed, all-male comrades, or tossing over in my brain how I could know so little about Niger, a West African country that is five times the size of Britain and sits just left of Chad.The Scottish explorer Mungo Park traipsed through sub-Saharan Africa in search of the source of the Niger River in the early nineteenth century, although it was the French who eventually jimmied themselves into the position of colonialist power by playing tribal powers off one another.
