3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great overview of a fascinating land and its peoples, June 12, 2005
This review is from: Sahara: A Natural History (Hardcover)
_Sahara_ by Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle is an interesting and thorough book on the natural and human history of the Sahara. Very informative and comprehensive in scope, the authors tackled a variety of subjects relating to a land known also as the Endless Emptiness or the Great Nothingness.
The Sahara is vast, stretching from the "dried-blood-red cliffs" of Mauritania on the Atlantic coast to the "bleached bone" of Egypt's Eastern Desert on the Red Sea, from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco to the Sahel in the south, a desert that covers 3,320,000 square miles. The Sahara one learns is not one vast sand sea (only about 15% is sand covered), though the dune fields (called ergs) can stretch for hundreds of miles. The desert also contains a nearly invisible network of watercourses, wadis, and riverbeds, as "faint and elusive as Martian canals" when seen in satellite photos, some that haven't born water on the surface for thousands of years; salt flats; dried lake beds; immense, grim gravel plains, utterly without feature; and massive mountain ranges, often the refuge of nomad groups, not unlike islands in the sea that is the Sahara.
The authors point to the ample evidence that the Sahara was not always desert, notably the stands of petrified wood in Algeria, Niger, and Chad and the curious calcified reeds that once grew around now extinct lakes, odd glasslike structures that mark long vanished shorelines. In actuality the region in the last several tens of thousands of years has alternated between desert and moister climes, changing back and forth due to the complex mechanics of global climate and changes in the Earth's orbit. The writers discussed the waxing and waning of the desert (apparently some areas were always arid) over the millennia as well as debates about whether or not the desert is expanding south.
Sand itself is well covered in this book, the authors providing vivid examples of ruins, buildings, and entire towns lost to migrating dunes. The origins of Saharan sand, the physics of dune formation, the various types of dunes, and how one travels through these areas are all discussed.
The chapter on Saharan weather was especially interesting. The most powerful wind is the harmattan, known as the sirocco in Algeria, called by some Tuareg and Tubu clans the shahali or shai-halad or mother of storms, a wind so powerful it has been known to send powdery fine sand up to 500 miles distant, as far as England and northern Germany. In the desert its effects can be quite devastating; ninety-plus mile an hour winds, huge electrical disturbances, drops in humidity to 10 percent, and of course massive, frightening sandstorms.
Saharan wind systems are so strong that their effects are global; fully grown grasshoppers have been deposited in Antigua. Between 60 million and a billion tons of iron-rich sand blows across the ocean each year, in some cases beneficial (important for the nourishment of upper canopy orchids in the Amazon) but more often troublesome (it has been linked to the declining health of coral in the Caribbean and creating huge blooms of toxic red tide in Florida waters).
As dry as the Sahara is, water still exists. In addition to the mighty Nile and the Niger, massive deposits of "fossil water," laid down when the region was moister, would rival the American Great Lakes if they were on the surface. Yields from wells in some areas can be quite high - up to 25,000 cubic feet of water per hour - but there is considerable debate over whether this is a renewable resource or not. Some believe that these ancient aquifers are being renewed more frequently and at a greater volume than previously estimated, a theory that is discussed.
As noted mountains exist; the enormous Ahaggar Mountains cover an area as big as France, while the spectacular Air mountains cover an area the size of Switzerland. The mountains are fascinating regions, home to intricately carved rock, secretive mountain people, and in the Tibesti Mountains, still active volcanoes.
There is an overview of some of the animals of this harsh realm. Some of the more spectacular have vanished thanks to man - elephants were found near Timbuktu as late as 1787, but were since hunted out, while ostriches vanished from Algeria early in the 20th century and hartebeests from Morocco in World War II. Ostriches - and leopards - still survive in some areas, as well as dwarf crocodiles in remote oases, the striped hyena, huge tortoises in the Sudan, monitor lizards, jerboas, fennec foxes, caracals, sand vipers, addax (the desert's largest mammal), and scorpions (much more hazardous and common than any desert snake).
Early history of man in the Sahara is covered, including the famous rock art. Also, the rise and fall of the various empires of the region are discussed, including the Garamantes, Mali, and Songhai. I will have to say this was probably the driest part of the book, as some of the intrigue and various dynasties got a bit confusing at times.
There is excellent coverage of the various nomadic groups present today; the Bedouin, the Moors, the Tubu, the Chaamba, the Berbers, and in particular the fascinating Tuareg.
The final parts of the book look at Saharan commerce and travel, examining the routes taken by caravans, the nature of caravans themselves, and the chief commodities that are bought and sold. Also great information on the all-important camel, an animal that arguably without which there would have been no Saharan civilization. The long vital salt and gold trades are well examined (the salt trade is particularly interesting), but regrettably the most profitable element of Saharan commerce was the slave trade. Until well into the 19th century half the value of Saharan traffic was in slaves. Even more unfortunately, slavery still exists; in many areas slaves weren't officially freed until the late 1960s, though unofficially they are still kept. Slavery was outlawed in Mauritania in 1980 but upwards of one hundred thousand are still slaves.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Moist and Refreshing, April 27, 2005
This review is from: Sahara: A Natural History (Hardcover)
"Sahara" describes an area as large as the United States -- the people, the culture, history and the natural environment -- in little more than 300 pages. That could be as dull as a textbook, but the authors enliven "Sahara" with folklore tales, personal travel ancedotes, and fascinating little facts. The desert is "as rich in story, as the Tuareg say, as a (...) is of milk."
"Sahara" is divided into two parts. The first deals with "the place itself" and the second with "the people." The most interesting chapter is, of course, the one dealing with water -- the constant preoccupation of anyone who travels in the Sahara. And one of the fascinating little facts in this chapter is a story about the blind, edible fish that live in some wells in the desert. A fish dinner in the Sahara! That's worthy of Ripley's "Believe it or Not." Other ancedotes tell about the crocodiles that inhabited the one running stream of the deep Sahara and an actual waterfall in the Air Massif.
The Sahara is one of the most austere environments on earth and the most accomplished of the Sahara-dwellers are the romantic, blue-robed nomadic Tuareg who penetrate the deep desert in search of grazing for their animals, salt, and loot. Tuareg lore is a large and interesting part of the book. How they make their way unerringly across the constantly-changing dune fields and featureless rocky flats of the desert and find a single well in an infinity of wasteland remains, however, a mystery to the authors and the readers.
The few black and white photos in the book are too small to be of much consequence and maps are similarly small and unsatisfying, but the text is colorful and the story is fascinating. "Sahara" rises above the level of the travelogue to become a natural history of the Sahara. If you like to read about lonely places and the few people who inhabit them, this is an excellent book.
Smallchief
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