Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa Read Free

how grumpy or self-absorbed they looked two seconds before.
    I never detected even a whiff of hostility, not from a single person. Libyans seemed a decent, gentle, welcoming people with terrible luck. It wasn’t their fault the neighborhood stank of oppression.
    Most apartment buildings were more or less equally dreary, but one did stand out. Architecturally it was just another modernist horror. But a 6-by-8-foot portrait of Qaddafi was bolted to the facade three stories up. It partially blocked the view from two of the balconies. The bastard couldn’t even leave people alone when they were home.
    The posters weren’t funny anymore. There were too damn many of them, for one thing. And, besides, Qaddafi is ugly. He may earn a few charisma points for traveling to Brussels and pitching his Bedouin tent on the parliament lawn, but he’s no Che Guevara in the guapo department.
    I felt ashamed that I first found his portraits even slightly amusing. The novelty wore off in less than a day, and he’d been in power longer than I’d been alive.
    He was an abstraction when I first got there. But after walking around his outdoor laboratory and everywhere seeing his beady eyes and that arrogant jut of his mouth, it suddenly hit me. He isn’t merely Libya’s tyrant. He is a man who would be god.
    His Mukhabarat , the secret police, are omniscient. His visage is omnipresent. His power is omnipotent.
    And he is deranged. He says he’s the sun of Africa. He threatens to ban money and schools. He vanquished beauty and art. He liquidates those who oppose him. He says he can’t help it if the people of Libya love him so much, they plaster his portrait up everywhere. Fuck him. I wanted to rip his face from the walls.
     
    *  *  *
     
    If you go to Libya, you simply must visit Ghadamis. Known by travelers as the jewel of the Sahara, it’s worth all the money and all the hassle you have to put up with to get there.
    In the early 1980s, Qaddafi’s regime emptied the ancient Berber Saharan city by decree. Everyone was shepherded into the modern concrete “new town,” which begins right outside the mysterious tomblike adobe gates of the old.
    The old city doesn’t look like a city when you’re inside. It looks like a vast underground system of tunnels and caves lit by skylights. It’s not underground; it was built with a roof over the top to keep the infernal summer heat out and the meager winter warmth in. Some of the streets (which really are more like passages) are pitch black even at noon. There was no need for light. The inhabitants had memorized the walls.
    It is not a small town. It’s an enormous weatherproofed adobe mini metropolis. There are seven quarters and seven gates, one for each resident tribe. Everything you’d expect in a city is there—streets, homes, offices, markets, public squares and mosques, all made of painted mud and sparkling gypsum. The only thing missing from the old city is people.
    If Libya were a normal country—and if Ghadamis were a normal city—the old city would be packed with hotels, coffee shops, restaurants, bookstores, Internet cafés and desert-adventure tour offices. But Libya is not a normal country, and Ghadamis is an unwilling ghost town.
    My travel agency replaced Abdul with a second guide for the trip to Ghadamis and into the desert. “Yasir,” I said to him. “Why were the people of Ghadamis forced out of their homes?”
    I knew the answer already. It was part of Qaddafi’s plot to Arabize the Berbers and to construct the New Man, a ludicrous ideal hatched in the Soviet Union. (Berbers were also forbidden to write anything publicly in their own language.) But I wanted to see if a local was permitted to say it. He couldn’t—or at least didn’t—answer my question. He only shook his head and laughed nervously. There were others around who could hear.
    The old city was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO. A few engineers were inside shoring up the foundations of an old