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

mosque.
    “It’s astonishing,” one of them said when I chatted him up. He was an Arab who had studied engineering at a Western university and spoke masterful English in fully formed paragraphs. “The sophistication and aesthetic perfection in the old city contrasts markedly with the failures in the new.”
    No kidding. I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere else in the world. Neither have you. Because there is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. And there never will be.
    “We’re here to make this place livable again because someday, you know . . .” He trailed off, but I knew what he wished he could say. Someday Qaddafi would die. When his bones pushed up date palms, the people of Ghadamis could abandon their compounds of concrete and move back into the city that’s rightfully theirs.
    I returned to the old city at night by myself and saw a single square of light in an upstairs room of an ancient house. The owners were forbidden to stay there at night. But it was nice to know that some of them still left the lights on.
     
    *  *  *
     
    When you visit another country, it’s inevitable: you are going to meet other travelers. And you’ll almost certainly talk about other places you’ve been. Go to Costa Rica, and conversations will turn to Guatemala and Bolivia. If you hang out in Cancún, you’ll meet people who like the Virgin Islands and Hawaii. In Paris you’ll hear talk of London, Prague and Vienna.
    So what happens when you bump into others in Libya? In Tripoli, I met a photographer who spends every summer in Darfur. Out in the dunes, I met a long-haired, goofy, bespectacled English guy named Felix. This was the first time he had ever set eyes on a desert. (He really went for it.) He had a thing for totalitarian countries. “I like to visit places based on ideas,” he said. Then he checked himself. “That doesn’t mean I like the ideas.”
    “Where to next, Felix?” I said.
    “North Korea, if I can get in.”
    “I’d like to see North Korea,” I said. “But after that, what’s left?”
    “Only the moon,” he said and laughed. “This is great, meeting you here. It’s nice to know someone else who’s open to nuttiness.”
    You’ll find nuttiness in Libya even out in the boonies. On the treacherous so-called road from Ghadamis into the dunes, someone used an enormous piece of ordnance that looked like a mini-Scud missile to mark a 3-foot chassis-busting hole in the ground.
    Yasir couldn’t take me on that road in his van. So we hired Bashir to come with us. He was a burly man with a turban and a beard who taught philosophy in school. We didn’t hire him, though, for his brain. We wanted his Land Rover.
    The three of us left Ghadamis and headed straight toward the Algerian gate only a couple of miles away.
    Just beyond it, a 300-foot-tall mountain of sand was piled in layers.
    “You see that sand,” Bashir said and pointed. I could hardly take my eyes off it. “Two weeks ago I drove some Japanese tourists out here. The old guy asked me who built the dune.” He chuckled and shook his head. “I told him, well, my grandfather worked for a while on that project, but now he’s dead.”
    “We can’t go there,” Yasir said. “We must visit Libyan sand. Last month some German tourists were kidnapped right on the other side of the border.”
    More than 100,000 people were killed in Algeria during the 1990s and into the 2000s in a civil war between the military regime and Islamist fanatics.
    “Have you ever been to Algeria?” I asked.
    “No one here goes to Algeria,” he said.
    We drove over a hill and were surrounded on three sides by dizzying, towering, impossibly sized dunes. We slogged our way to the top, gasping, with calves and thighs burning, not daring to look down, to watch the sunset.
    The top was unreal. The desert floor was another world far below ours. If birds were in flight, I could have looked down on them. On the western horizon was the Grand Erg Oriental,