Chinguetti

Chinguetti is a town of dry-stone houses on the edge of a sea of sand, on the Adrar plateau of Mauritania, that Islam counts — by a tradition the town holds dear — as its seventh holy city: founded in the eighth century and refounded in the thirteenth as a stage on the caravan road to Timbuktu, it gathered pilgrims for Mecca from the whole western Sahara and, with them, books. A dozen family libraries still keep them — manuscripts of the Koran, of law, astronomy and mathematics, some from the eleventh century, on the shelves of the Habott and Ahmed Mahmoud families and their neighbours, shown by descendants who know each volume — beside the Friday mosque whose square minaret of unmortared stone, crowned with ostrich eggs, is the emblem of the country. The wadi divides the old ksar, which the dunes of the Erg Warane are slowly burying, from the new town of auberges and tea; Atar, the regional capital, is eighty kilometres west over the Amogjar pass, and Ouadane, the other ancient ksar, a hundred and twenty north-east on the way to the Eye of the Sahara.

The traveller comes up from Atar — the winter charters land there — over the pass and the plateau, sleeps in an auberge of the new town, and crosses the wadi at first light to walk the ksar before the heat: the mosque from the outside, the lanes of stone, and the libraries one by one, sitting on the floor while a keeper unwraps a book from its cloth; drinks the three glasses of tea, bitter, sweet and gentle, as the afternoon demands; climbs the first dunes of the erg for the sunset over the roofs; and, with two more days, goes out on camels with a guide from the town for a night under more stars than seem possible, and on to Ouadane and, with a 4×4 and a long day, the great ring of the Richat structure that only astronauts see whole.

The Guide's honesty: the Adrar reopened to travellers a few years ago after a long closure and it remains a place to reach informed — read the advisories, travel with a Mauritanian operator or an auberge that arranges the guides and the permits, and let them set the route; the season is November to February and the rest is heat, harmattan or both; the libraries ask a small fee that keeps the books in their cloths — pay it gladly, and do not touch; the sand is winning slowly against the old town, and the traveller sees a place that will not look the same in twenty years; there are few services beyond the auberges and the tea; the flight into Atar exists some winters and not others — check; and the silence of the erg at night is the reason the pilgrims stopped here, and it has not changed.