The Sahara Desert

Departure. Lobster Bob is in Morocco, on the eastern edge of the Sahara, at Erg Chebbi. The track is Land. The type is Adventure. The dunes here rise to 150 metres and run for 28 kilometres along the Algerian border. La Mula LAM-001-VE has crossed this country three times.

She has refused to start once. The lesson Bob brought back from Erg Chebbi did not come from the dunes. It came from the camel that walked him across them.

What follows is the postcard from that crossing. It is the fourth edition of Postcards from Lobster Bob, and the last one of Phase 1.

Lobster Bob's postcard follows.

Hola Mijo! Lobster Bob here...

I have crossed the Sahara three times. The first crossing was the one I thought I understood. La Mula LAM-001-VE was new to me then. We agreed about almost nothing.

I want to tell you about the morning I walked next to a camel called Hakim.

The dune was 130 metres tall. The light at six in the morning was the colour of an unripe apricot. The sand at that hour is cold. Not cool. Cold. The grain is fine enough that when you press a hand into the dune, it gives way slowly. You leave a print. The wind takes it before you finish lifting your foot. The dune does not remember you were there.

Hakim walked. I walked. We walked at exactly the same pace. Hakim's pace. The man leading us was called Brahim. He explained, quietly, that this was the only pace the camel walked at. He also explained that nobody had yet found a way to change the camel's mind about this.

I have been faster than camels in vehicles. I have been higher than camels in aircraft. On foot, in soft sand, beside a working camel, you walk at the camel's speed. There is no other speed available to you. The camel does not speed up because you are an explorer. The camel does not speed up because you have a schedule. The camel walks the way the camel has always walked. You arrive when the camel decides you have arrived.

I tried to walk faster. Once. For about forty seconds.

Brahim watched me without saying anything. Hakim watched me without saying anything. The dune watched me without saying anything. I sank to my knees in soft sand, accepted what had just happened, and rejoined the line at Hakim's speed.

We walked for four hours. The sun came up properly at hour two and the light went from apricot to white. I drank the water Brahim had told me to drink at the times he had told me to drink it. La Mula was four kilometres behind us, in the shade, with the engine cooling. She had taken us as close as she could. The last bit was always going to be on foot.

The school-yard fact for this edition is this. The Sahara is around 9.2 million square kilometres in size. That is roughly the same size as the entire United States. The camel has been crossing this desert with people for about ten thousand years. The earliest carvings of camels and people in the rock are at the Tassili Plateau, just over the border in Algeria. Nobody has improved on the camel for this work in ten thousand years. Engineers have tried. The camel is still here.

I do not know if Hakim was an unusually wise camel, or whether camels in general are wise and Hakim was just one of them. I asked Brahim. Brahim said this was a question only foreigners asked. Then he laughed at me. Then we walked some more.

The dune at the end was not the destination. Brahim sat down on the leeward side, took out a small kettle that I had not noticed him pack, and made tea. The camel knelt. I sat down. The wind moved across the top of the dune the way water moves across a tin roof. The sand sang. It is real. The dunes here sing. It is to do with the friction between the grains and the temperature of the air. I cannot explain it properly. I have heard it.

Mike will tell you I came back from this trip considerably quieter than I went out. He is right. I had been on the move for thirty years before I met Hakim. Hakim slowed me down by walking exactly as fast as he was going to walk and not one step faster.

That was his lesson. He did not state it once.