Into Thick Air (35 page)

A sweet acacia breeze urges me west, along the main highway to Ethiopia. The wreck has emptied the westbound lane, and I need only to watch out for the trucks coming east from Ethiopia—they cut to the inside of a corner, regardless of the lane. The drivers wave but don't honk, and I like that.

Of course I'm happy just to get through the morning without being pelted with rocks. Djibouti possesses the quiet advantage of being a country in which the worst is expected. When it fails to happen, it's easy to believe that the trip will be more than plain survival.

So when I reach the road junction heading north for Lac Assal, I instead continue west on the main road, heading for Ethiopia but planning a little detour to the town of Ali Sabieh simply to satisfy my curiosity. The skies are clean and the sun is tolerable. The locals live anywhere there's something edible for their goats and camels. Camp is a portable desert igloo: a dome of sticks knitted together with woven mats or blue plastic tarps for shade.

Little butterflies tag along. The land dries and the plants shrink until there is nothing but a desiccated lake bed, a playa called Petit Bara.
Despite my sunglasses, the zealous light off the nude earth is overwhelming. In the distance a line of camels walks across the playa with legs that grow longer with each step. They stretch until their legs are strings holding the balloons of their bodies high above the quicksilver earth. Then they disappear into thick air.

At the far end of the Petit Bara the road parallels a long low ridge. My peripheral vision begins to nag me. I've been infected with that absurd warning:
In the rocks. Watching you.
I stop and see only a few rocks like sentinels along the ridge.

I ride until I hear the grunting. When I stop and scan the ridge, the sentinel rocks are gone. Then someone appears, a backlit silhouette that walks on all fours before standing to reveal itself as a baboon.

No—baboons. At least a half-dozen, less than a hundred meters away. They're watching me, stretching, scratching their red butts while the rest of their clan peeks over the ridge until they, too, are overcome with curiosity. I stop counting after forty baboons. The big boys have wild manes.

They don't follow me onto the Grand Bara. Perhaps they're put off by fifteen miles of dried mud polygons without a speck of growth. More likely the baboons are terrified by the sudden appearance of the French and Djiboutian armies. Tanks and troop carriers and over a hundred jeeps and trucks grind past Baboon Ridge, and there's really no choice but to swerve off the road and let them pass.

That's when I discover that I can ride where I please on the lake bed. At the same time the air force decides they can land where they please. A big four-prop plane lands and takes off again and again. Just practicing, I assume, but I worry that the plane may land on my head.

The monster roars aloft one last time. Meanwhile, the entire convoy continues down a highway that now appears to be a very long diving board over a shining pool. At the end of the board each and every vehicle vanishes in the mirage.

The spur road to Ali Sabieh rises out of the playa and climbs a valley between corroded hills of sandstone flecked with goats. It's late, and the slopes of sharp-edged rubble glow orange, and so do the blond tufts of dry grass. Then the crickets start up as the valley falls into shadow. Ladies
bent under loads of firewood drift into town. The call to prayer rings out, echoing off a mountainside ringed with concrete gun emplacements. They face south, to the border with Ethiopia and Somalia.

 

THE THREE-MAN STAFF of the Hotel de Palmeraie sits under the stars, enchanted by a Yemeni television show on the miracle of drilling artesian water wells. Ali Sabieh is far from the cozy balm of the Indian Ocean, and the evening temperature has already sunk to 70 degrees. To survive the near-polar conditions, the
khat
-chewing staff wear hooded sweatshirts and keep a fire blazing at their side.

“Heat hurts, but cold kills,” is a Somali proverb repeated by the great wanderer Richard Burton in his
First Footsteps in East Africa
. He passed just south of Ali Sabieh in 1854 (the town did not yet exist), traveling among the Somali-speaking Issa who still live here; farther west were the Oromo, with their own quaint folklore.

Such bipolar sentiments thrilled Burton, who at some risk paid particular attention to the shape and habits of the local virgins. “One of their peculiar charms is a soft, low, and plaintive voice . . . whose accents sounded in my ears rather like music than mere utterance.”

Burton admired the creed of the nomadic Issa (“Every free-born man holds himself equal to his ruler”) although it was a recipe for both liberty and turmoil. In a land where kinship means everything, they were ungovernable by outsiders. And despite being “soft, merry, and affectionate souls, they pass without any apparent transition into a state of fury, when they are capable of terrible atrocities.”

Burton eventually took a spear through his cheeks, topside. I've better luck with the Issa. Mohammed, who runs the hotel, speaks only Somali and French, but is thoughtful enough the next morning to pantomime a warning: don't go south toward the border. There is a refugee camp.

I spend the day in Ali Sabieh. The town is built of stone, usually with rough stucco but sometimes prettied up by painting the stones one color
and the mortar another, for a truly stone-age look last seen in Flintstones cartoons. The feeble train from Djibouti Town to Ethiopia crawls past, with three tankers and six flatbeds piled with sacks and people, including a few candidates for amputation standing on the couplings.

It's a shy town. The people duck into mosques or slip between the tall split doors of their homes, leaving the slit-eyed glare of midday for the shadows within. The street market smells sweetly of dates and oranges. No one approaches me. I've no idea that anyone speaks English until I notice that somebody is stealing my bike.

I'd brought it into a store with me, and now a young man wearing only a skirt is wheeling it toward the door. I place myself in front of him and say, Peace be with you. He stops and glares and says something in what may be Somali. He is six feet tall, with a body that is an anatomy lesson in musculature, and finally I see that he's potentially dangerous. I nervously try a few words of explanation—bicycle, Djibouti Town, Ali Sabieh—but before I finish he yells something with a fervor that freezes everyone in the shop.

I hold out my hands, palms up, and say in English, What do you want? A man speaks in English: “He says he is hungry. He says he is angry. He says give him money.”

My natural inclination is to not give a single franc to the person who tried to make off with my bicycle. The feeling is promptly overruled by a conflicting emotion. It's not, I'm sorry to say, empathy for his situation but for my own. He looks capable of terrible atrocities.

I reach into my pocket and give him the first cash I touch: five hundred francs—about three dollars. He turns and vanishes.

“No worry,” says the same man in English. “No problem.”

I ride through the dirt alleys, scattering the goats, at once fearful and fuming. It's true that the actions of one can damn a nation. Now I'm sympathetic to Burton's claim that the “savages” are prone to not only robbery but all sorts of nonsense. “Those who chew coffee beans are careful not to place an even number in their mouth, and camel's milk is never heated, for fear of bewitching the animal. The mosquito bite brings on . . . deadly fevers: the superstition probably arises from. . . .”

I've got to admit that the Issa were right on the last one; they deduced the vector of malaria long before the Europeans.

I head to a gas station for stove fuel, but find only diesel. A passerby detects my disappointment and stops and asks for my pen. Drawing on his own forearm, he cleverly manages to explain that I must listen for the sound of a generator. There I will find gasoline.

His kindness begins to change my mind about Ali Sabieh. The hotel completes the process. I'm the only guest, treated to shish kebabs and spaghetti in a dining room hung with plastic garlands and year “2000” stencils. The latter are apparently left over from a millennium celebration, and perhaps saved for the Muslim millennium, which should roll around in about six hundred years.

In my room I slap mosquitoes and study the map. Lac Assal is sixty-five miles north, in the home of the Afar, also known as the Danakil, also known as the castrators. Burton cheerfully described them: “The men were wild as ourang-outangs, and the women fit only to flog cattle.”

Fine: I'd rather deal with cow-floggers than refugees. I pack and retire, for a dawn departure. My sleep is interrupted, however, by the opposite of a nightmare. The dream is of a man on a flight in the not-so-distant future. He's staring at the fantastically complicated seatback of the row in front of him. Not only does it include his personal telephone, video, and computer, but also his food selection. The screen reads: “The cuisine on Flight 327 has been declared
Festive
by the Grand Prix du Chefs held annually in Akron, Ohio. To automatically sand and dip your baguette, press the # key.”

The man does exactly that, creating such a grinding commotion within the device that the person sitting in the seat turns and . . .

I wake to my own laughter, rub my eyes, then realize:
Christ! I'm in Djibouti!

I step outside to check. A rooster is crowing prematurely. The Big Dipper is rising in the east. At 3 AM comes the call to prayer, which at this hour includes the motivating chant,
Prayer is better than sleep. Prayer is better than sleep
.

The call to prayer seems unusually loud and long, and I know why. This moonless night kicks off the most holy of Muslim rituals. Of all the times
to visit the slimmest nation on earth, I've chosen the month of fasting that is Ramadan.

 

CLUTCHING HIS PRAYER BEADS as he walks, a man with a white skullcap glances up as the sun clears the horizon over Ali Sabieh and vanquishes the possibility of eating until sundown. If he's sincere in his belief, he'll also abstain from sex, lying, and spiteful gossip. Purity of spirit, they say, allows one to draw closer to one's maker.

With the exception of my secret Ramadan food stores, I do my best to follow suit. I wheel into a desert with no hope for sex and no need for lying, and as close as I'll ever be to my maker. This slice of Africa is known to geologists and anthropologists as the Afar Triangle. Only a hundred miles west is where the bones of
Australopithecus
were first discovered—the first primate to walk on two legs. This is the only place on earth where you could ask a local how long they've called it home, and the honest answer would be,
Forever.

The bike and I fly down the valley through the goose-bumpy chill and onto the Grand Bara. There are no mirages this morning, only a shirt-snapping headwind. I crouch lower and pedal on, backtracking to the Petit Bara. A pair of midget antelope called dik-dik bound across the road like horned jackrabbits, or perhaps the mythical jackalope.

After four more dik-dik and a panicked whirl of sandgrouse, like pigeons in desert camouflage, I reach the Lac Assal turnoff I'd passed two days earlier. There's a truck stop here, a tin-roofed patio with a ceiling of woven mats to repel the heat. The cook and the truckers are from highland Ethiopia, land of the crucifix, so I can sit down for a bowl of panting hot lentils and onions.

They speak English, so I ask what they are hauling.

“Salt from Lac Assal,” says a young driver with pretty good shoes. He jots his name in my notebook,
Endalkachew Taye from Ethiopia
. “Six hundred bags, fifty-five kilos each, every three days.”

Salt was the original currency of the Afar, whose homeland includes not only Djibouti's Lac Assal but also the immense below-sea-level Danakil Depression in Ethiopia and Eritrea. I'm told the Afar's territory begins just
north of the truck stop, but to my eye their camps look like the Issa's—the same portable huts and yellow plastic water jugs. The ponderous camels ignore the Brownian motion of the insatiable goats. Peewee children race up to see me pass. Stopping to say hello causes them to flee in terror.

The road crests a saddle above the Gulf of Tadjoura. This forty-mile-long bay nearly slices little Djibouti in two before ending abruptly at the volcano defending Lac Assal from the sea. To reach the pit, the road must first climb the stepped plateaus whose flanks are clawed by canyons that drop 2,000 feet into the drink. At the deepest gorge I leave the bike and creep up to the verge to look straight down hundreds of feet. The moment I do, a pair of warplanes burst over the horizon and pass so low that I duck.

When the echoes subside there is nothing but the wind and the sound of falling stones. Far below the rimrock, a girl is winging rocks at a herd of goats, driving them to a waterhole that shines like a drop of mercury. She stands alone atop a pinnacle, green dress and yellow scarf flapping in the breeze, crying “
Ay! Ay! Ay!
” She is queen of her domain.

Dead ahead is Lac Assal, a bull's-eye of deepest blue ringed with purest white, sunk far below in a black spill of lavas from the volcano. At the turnoff to the pit stands a flock of Afar huts, a single sheet-metal shack painted the green and blue of the Djiboutian flag, and two open-air truck stops. I choose the one with plastic crates of empty Coke bottles forming a windbreak for the patio, and a satellite TV dish connected to nothing.

There are no customers—just me and the buzzing miasma of flies. I order a Coke and rest my eyes in the shade. When I open them I see that a lone man, whittled by the sun into a form that hardly casts a shadow, is walking toward the truck stop.