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

a sea of dunes bigger than France that looked from the side like a distant Andes of sand. Bashir prepared bread and sticky mint tea.
    I watched the sun go down and the sky go out.
    By Libyan standards, this was radical freedom. Life goes on even in countries like this one. No government, no matter how oppressive, can control all the people all the time—especially not in the vast and empty Sahara.
    We ran down the sand and climbed back into the Land Rover. Bashir hit the gas. He zigged us and zagged us up, down and across the 300-foot-tall dunes along the border with Algeria. At one point—and I couldn’t tell if he was joking or serious—he said we had actually crossed into Algeria.
    The stars came out. A full moon rose, turning the sand into silver. We laughed like boys as we rode the dunes in the moonlight.
     
    *  *  *
     
    I didn’t go back to Tripoli to hang out in Tripoli. Tourists use the city as a base to visit the spectacular nearby Roman ruins of Sabratha and Leptis Magna. I’m not exactly a ruins buff, but trips to these places came with the package. So I went. And I saw. And I was nearly alone. I shared Leptis Magna with only my guide and some goats. Sabratha would have been empty if the vice president of the Philippines hadn’t dropped by at the same time.
    But I was glad to be back in Tripoli. This time my hotel was in the Italian Quarter, just two blocks from Green Square. Not again would I have to walk through a swath of Stalinist blocks to get to a proper neighborhood.
    My new hotel was more upscale than the first. The management (or was it the state?) pretended to have tighter security. The metal detector just inside the entrance wasn’t being watched by a college kid. It was staffed by the military.
    Okay, I thought. Now they’re gonna be serious. I stepped through and the metal detector screamed. The soldiers ignored me, joked with each other and never looked up. The same thing happened every time I walked through it.
    Libya was a totalitarian police state. But it was an awfully lethargic totalitarian police state. It’s been a while, I thought, since anyone there drank the Kool-Aid.
    The heater in my room sounded like a chopper over the jungles of ’Nam. It was broken and stuck forever on Cold, but the maid left it on anyway. So while it was 60 degrees and cloudy outside, it was a teeth-chattering 50 degrees in my room. I opened the window, and the cold wind off the Mediterranean actually warmed the place up.
    A bath could have made me feel better, but the hot-water knob came off in my hand. The hotel had the outward appearance of spiffiness, so I’m sure there was hot water somewhere in the building behind the hole where the knob had come off in my hand. I just couldn’t get to any of it.
    The elite were downstairs in the lobby. Slick men in suits, mostly from Arab countries, all but ignored the French delegation that was in town while Jacques Chirac cut new oil deals with Qaddafi. There were no Americans, no tourists and no women. I felt underdressed and out of place in my khakis and sandals, but what could I do? I was in a hard-line, oily-sheened Arab police state. I couldn’t have blended in if I tried—except, perhaps, in one little corner of the Italian Quarter.
    If you were dropped from the sky onto the main street that ran through that district, you could be forgiven if you thought you were somewhere in the West. It was strung from one end to the other with hip, cutting-edge perfume and clothing stores. These places had bright lights, colored walls and fancy displays. They piped in Western music through sophisticated sound systems. The salespeople wore snappy, stylish clothes. The customers were young and cool. There were, amazingly, hardly any portraits of Qaddafi in this part of town. (Perhaps the warehouse was out of stock and the new stores had them on back order.)
    There was far less commerce in Libya than in most countries, but this little micro-corner was bustling. I found