TAMANRASSET - In the city of nomads, a brief encounter with a half-blind nun leaves us with words to live by on a trek into the Sahara: "We only see well with our hearts."
Swallowed by the desert the following day, its foreign silence, beauty, and endlessness force me inward. I stare out from the ridge of a mountainous dune. The big issues that have not found firm homes in my heart and mind are cast onto the sand like items from a drawer flung empty.
I was looking forward to the desert void, but had no idea what to expect. A small group of friends who had been several times before organized a trip into the southern Algerian Sahara and Hoggar Mountains with a local agency. They promised we would sleep under the stars, climb dunes to their tops, and see mountains that would have made the late Western movie director John Ford green with envy.
There were a few downsides: They talked so much about the stringy camel meat we would be eating that I brought extra floss. A false alarm. There were the hygiene stories: "Showering" is a moist towelette rubdown. Asked where the restrooms are, your guide may simply grin and make a sweeping gesture across the landscape.
Desert silence is disconcerting, melting time and perspective, leaving you listening to the blood swish through your veins as Polaris and the Southern Cross play cat and mouse across the night sky. Later, the sense of time dissolves and the silence becomes addictive: literal quiet comfort that allows the beauty of the desert and the people who live here to reveal themselves.
"We don't follow time," says guide Abdou Zounga as we share a pungent lamb, barley, and vegetable stew called chorba. "No one here ever asks what time it is."
Zounga, 30, is a Touareg, desert nomads descended from Berbers who have roamed the northwest African desert for millennia. Though he earned a degree in computer programming and had a desk job in the city of Tamanrasset, the call of the desert was too strong.
"I told my father, 'I'm sorry. I can't do this,' " he says of life connected to a keyboard. "I want to be physically tired at the end of the day. . . . In [the 9-to-5] life, my eyes were red, I trembled, I couldn't sleep," he says, taking up the hunched-over form of a programmer as he talks.
"Sometimes the Touareg are hard people and the Sahara can be a hard place," says Zounga, "but even when life is hard, it is beautiful."