Agadez

Agadez is the town at the gate of the Sahara: the capital of the Tuareg of the Aïr since the Sultanate settled here in the fifteenth century, the last market before the Ténéré, and the home of a minaret of mud twenty-seven metres high — the tallest adobe structure in the world — that rises, bristling with the beams that hold it together, over the Grand Mosque of 1515. Around it the old town of mud houses with carved doors and shaded courtyards, the palace of the Sultan of the Aïr, whose line has held since 1405, and the quarter of the silversmiths, who hammer the Cross of Agadez, one of the twenty-one crosses of the Aïr, has been a UNESCO site since 2013; on the town's edge the camel market fills at dawn. From here the caravans of salt — the azalai — still leave for Bilma across six hundred kilometres of the Ténéré, where the loneliest tree on Earth stood until a truck knocked it down in 1973; from here the pistes go north to the Aïr mountains and the oasis of Timia, and west to Ingall, where the Cure Salée gathers the herders each September; from here Arlit and its uranium lie a day up the road toward Algeria.

The traveller who has cause to be there comes up from Niamey — two days on the road, or the flight when it runs — and takes the town at the Sahara's pace: the mosque at first light and, with the imam's leave, the climb inside the minaret to the roof of the town; the Sultan's palace and the old quarter with a guide who knows which door belongs to whom; the silversmiths' quarter, to watch a cross beaten from a coin; the camel market before the heat; tea, three glasses, poured from a height in a courtyard at dusk. With days more and an operator who knows the ground, the Aïr — Timia's gardens under the cliffs, the rock art, the granite — and, in the right season, the Ténéré, which is the reason most people ever came.

The Guide's honesty, gently: Niger's winds have been hard — the country changed hands in July 2023, the north has known rebellions and worse, chancelleries counsel against travel to the region, and the Guide does not argue with them: this page, too, keeps a patient lamp, and will be there when the caravans and the charters both leave for ordinary reasons again —; for those with cause to be there, the town runs on cash, French and Tamasheq greetings, and the guides' association is the honest door; the desert is entered only with a permit, a guide and a second vehicle, never alone; the mosque is entered with leave and covered shoulders; photography of people is by permission; and the minaret at sunset, with the swallows around it and the Ténéré going pink beyond the roofs, is one of the sights of the Sahara, which is why the Guide holds this page as it does.