Into Thick Air (36 page)

“The Danakil kill any stranger at sight,” wrote L. M. Nesbitt in
Hell-Hole of Creation.
He was doubtlessly in a rotten mood after that little incident with the viper in his sun helmet. And it's true that his party, bristling with rifles, met with hostility. Nesbitt believed that only because “a white man commands a certain respect, by reason of his superior fortitude and will power,” did he survive “the criminal Afars, who are easily tamed by a little tact and a few trinkets.”

I offer the man a seat and a Coke. He refuses the Coke—Ramadan—but
takes the seat. He does not speak English, yet his ability to communicate is without peer. Once he understands my destination is Lac Assal, he rises and points to the fresh black cone of the volcano, then pantomimes how it cut off Lac Assal from the Gulf of Tadjoura.

This much is fairly obvious. But this fellow in a purple plaid skirt and a Nike T-shirt takes the geology lecture further. He puts the sides of his hands together and says “Africa” before pulling them slowly apart. He identifies one hand as Kenya, then adds, “Seismo.”

This is exactly right. The Gulf of Tadjoura is where the tectonic slash known as the Great Rift Valley enters the continent of Africa, which it is patiently ripping in two. Kenya and the Horn of Africa will ultimately raft away from the rest, although on a time scale perhaps intelligible only to the Afar.

Seismo.
He carries on with pen and the back of my map, drawing a well tapping into a subterranean force that spins a little turbine. He probably wonders why I'm smiling. I'd presumed that a herder in flip-flops would know nothing of geothermal energy, and I'm happy to be wrong.

But I really wish that a goat had not snatched the Arabic notes from my handlebar bag. It's already chewed its way to the last page by the time we chase it off. The geologist laughs and shakes my hand and strolls back into the heat.

I head over to the flag shack to buy a can of “Choice Pineapple Broken Pieces,” then hop on the bike for the big drop through ten miles of naked lavas. To my surprise, the road is nicely paved, and with joy I sing the geographically inappropriate “City of New Orleans” while rolling down without a turn of the pedals to the lowest point in Africa. A half hour before sundown, I'm standing on the shore of Lac Assal.

It's huge. It's whipped by a terrific wind into saltcaps. It's rimmed by plum-colored mountains and steaming hot springs. And there are no mosquitoes.

The Afar are here, salt-cutters returning from their work to a cluster of stone domes only six feet high. When one man spots me searching for a place to hide from the wind, he offers the international hands-as-pillow symbol. I accept. He further indicates, wait here.

After their prayers, three men and two women clear out an excellent
little hovel, fetch a woven mat, then invite me to their hut for dinner. They break their fast with round breads and lentil stew while a tiny radio emits a faint warble of music. I exhaust my Arabic to discover that all three men are named Ali. The eldest, only twenty-five, speaks so clearly that although I don't understand the words I know what he means: if you have any trouble in the night, come here and we will help you.

I walk back under the splash of stars, and duck into my room of black rocks. It's crazy hot. One of the Alis pokes his head in to give me a candle. The men return to work, firing up a front-loader to stack the slabs of salt.

Mr. Hell-Hole didn't think much of the natives' schedule. “Then at dawn, when they ought to be doing their work, they will fall soundly asleep, and will go on snoring under the noonday sun. The glare and the flies trouble them little; only a touch of your booted toe will recall them to their duties.”

Poor Mr. Nesbitt. Superior fortitude and inferior scheduling had brought him to the pits in June, when the average high is 118 degrees. The below-sea-level savages who mine the salt were nowhere to be seen.

A shame. They're actually pretty nice.

 

DJIBOUTI IS A PETITE REPUBLIC, about the size of New Hampshire or Sicily, and I've no intention of leaving the country after reaching its nadir. My plan is to ride back to the capital by a wholly new route.

But first I linger on the shore of Assal, riding along the salt flats in the morning sun. Crystals cling to the spinning tires, then whiz off in brief parabolas. The air tastes of salt. Like a good tourist, I take photos of the gypsum buttes rising fifty feet from the shallows like sugar-cube castles. The French and Djibouti armies, seemingly in endless pursuit of the American bicyclist, roar past without noticing me crouched with my camera.

The only salt truck stands with its hood open in distress. In the shade of its trailer sits a little nest—goatskin mat, water bottle, and a Koran—but no driver. The Alis have retired into their huts for nap time. A few half-hearted clouds drag hopeful shadows over the 6,000-foot mountain to the east, but fail to reach the pit.

On Everest it's the frozen gasp of altitude that drives humans back
down; on the shore of Assal, the opposite sends me up. As usual, the unseen atoms of oxygen and nitrogen are bumping into each other and creating heat. Squeezing air with the pressure of five hundred feet below sea level is like taking a roller rink and making it half the size—a lot more collisions and sweat.

It's no surprise that the only traffic on the ride back out is the grinding military convoy. By the time I reach the truck stop, even the goats are struck down by the heat, sprawled in the shade of the big rigs. Inside sit a half-dozen Ethiopians. I slip off my shoes and pad in.

“Everybody is waiting for the salt to be ready,” says a neat, balding man with good posture. His name is Sirak and his eyes are astoundingly bloodshot.

A tall, unskinny, and also balding man named Molla invites me to sit for lunch. A woman with red sparkles on her toenails holds a squirt jug over a battered aluminum bowl for hand washing. There are a few stools of cowhide, but they are reserved for the lunch platters. We sit on clean mats and wait with the patient flies.

Molla stares gloomily out at the white heat. “Nothing in Djibouti but salt.”

Lunch is a two-foot-wide spongy pancake with a centerpiece slurry of chili, garlic, onions, and lentils. The men call it
injera
and
wot
. You tear off a piece of the sour
injera
and scoop up the
wot
.

Smoldering chili would not be my first choice in a café opening onto a lava field, but I admit it's pretty good. “This is the cook,” says Sirak, “in the Janet Jackson shirt.”

The cook bows and grins and adds, “She is my wife.” Sirak translates this for the benefit of those who don't speak English. The men crack up. I ask the cook if his children look like Michael Jackson. This sets off an unanticipated discussion.

“I like his sing,” says the man in a Rolex T-shirt. “No like man.”

“Michael Jackson is good,” says Molla with the authority of a man in a button dress shirt. “He is very intelligent man.”

“But now he is a white man!” shouts Sirak, leaning forward with neck veins bulging. “He changed his color. I hate him!”

The first
injera
is demolished. A second is served.

“We love American cinema,” says Sirak between mouthfuls. “
First Blood
.
Second Blood
.
Third Blood
. Action films.”

“Schwarzenegger!” yells a trucker.

“And what of you?” asks Molla. “Did you like
Titanic
?”

I admit that I haven't seen it yet.

Everyone stops eating. They stare at their first living American, their hands arrested in midair, mouths agape as the
wot
slips off the
injera
and plops onto the floor. Molla shakes his head in disbelief and breaks the silence. “But
everyone
has seen
Titanic.
The Chinese president saw it fifty-one times!”

Sensing that this may be beyond the bounds of most
Titanic
fans, Molla adds, “I heard this on the radio.” The truckers nod in agreement, then realize that they must eat the second
injera
before the flies carry it off. They do, and a third is served with spaghetti atop, chopped into pieces with the rim of an overturned cup.

“There is a building called the Pentagon,” says Molla. “Is it true that it is very big and you need three years to walk everyplace in the Pentagon?”

I'm busy cleaning up a splosh of noodles on my pants. Molla answers the question himself. “But how could such a thing be true? It is not.”

Tea is served on a blue enamel platter. The questions continue.

“My sister is in America but cannot get her green card. Why not?”

“How can I get a sponsor for a visa?”

Everyone but me is anxious to head for America. From the truck stop I turn not back to Djibouti Town but toward the port of Tadjoura, on the opposite side of the gulf. It's fifty miles. I pedal only five, to a camp on the seashore. There are Afar huts on the beach, but like the teepees along Arizona's Route 66, they're for tourists. There is only me. I prefer outside, listening to the slosh of the surf until a boat skids ashore at dusk.

Three Ramadan-famished fishermen, with droplets of sea spray clinging to their curly mops, skip through the sand and swiftly build a fire. A small shark is messily dismembered with a big knife, and tossed into a pot of rice and water. One man explores the limits of ventriloquism by holding the decapitated shark's head and working its jaws while mumbling an
invitation to dinner. A funny guy, and I've the funny feeling that the talking shark routine has been performed in this spot, under these stars, for a very long time.

 

IT'S 82 DEGREES at dawn. The Great Rift Valley is blocks, slabs, pavements, waves, and curtains of frozen basalt. Nothing has coughed up since the 1978 eruption, and green combs of slender rushes have already moved in along the roadside. There are three antelope, too, with twitching ears rimmed in black and fly-swatting tails spinning like propellers. One is so terrified by the bicycle that it trips and crashes on the black rocks before bounding away.

A short hike to an Assal overlook brings me to the edge of a crevasse. It runs to the horizon, yet it's an easy hop to the other side. I drop a stone into the slit and wait a couple of seconds for the impact. It's true: Africa is coming apart.

A wobble-wheeled truck passes at 7 AM, struggling on a road that plunges and climbs and switchbacks up the lavas. Following the shoreline is impossible; cliffs drop directly into the sea. The topographic consequence is a 2,000-foot climb to reach a town on the coast, along a route that reminded the gun-running Rimbaud of “the presumed horrors of lunar landscapes.”

I've five quarts of water for the forty-five-mile ride. The only shade is blocks of lava, where I devour oranges and curse God's headwind. There are no Afar to offend.

Three hours later I notice blood on my water bottle, but it's only my wind-cracked lips. Half the water is gone, and it's still over thirty miles to Tadjoura. I feel the first melodramatic stabs of self-pity, mistaking my misery for fear. Do I have enough water? I'd better, because there's nobody on the road. Like a fire lookout built where there's nothing to burn, Djibouti built a highway where there's nothing to drive.

Another hour of climbing, then hope appears as blue sky at the tip-top of a long steep shimmer of asphalt. But it's a false summit. Beyond is a canyon so deep the bottom is not visible from the rim. What
is
visible is the appalling road climbing out the far side. I slam on the brakes and stare,
panting, until the shock squeezes out a panicky laugh, the hysterical cackle of a gladiator tossed into a pit with a dozen lions. I give up!

No less surprising is the slow calm that comes from realizing that there's really no choice. The hill is as terrible as it looks, but I've the road to myself and zigzag to lessen the grade. Another hour and I'm over the top and in a different world.

Low chubby clouds skid out of the gulf and are scooped up like ground balls on the slopes of a big mountain only ten miles inland. The stiff bushes and umbrella-shaped trees return—not a forest by any means, but life enough to bring the scream of cicadas and the huts of the Afar. They're not portable but thatched round houses with conical roofs drawn into a nipple at the peak. There are cows, too, and with their dung come scarab beetles, little emerald bulldozers pushing their treasure home.

There are 10,000 people in Tadjoura, and it seems most are in the streets when I roll in at sundown. With no cars to be seen, the kids are playing hopscotch where they please. The ladies, sitting on empty tins of powdered milk, are selling
khat
and goat milk and fried triangles of dough stuffed with meat or dates.
Samboussa
, they say. The houses are whitewashed cubes, shoulder to shoulder, each distinguished by slapdash additions of squat towers and oddly cantilevered constructions.

Down at the harbor, little drowsy waves collapse on black sands populated mainly by goats. The real action is on the promenade, where people are unrolling mats and setting out
samboussas
and cups of orange drink. Ancient geezers with hennaed beards watch the same old yellow sun creep toward the horizon. On the opposite side of the gulf, high on a mountaintop, the Legionnaires are finishing off their bold cheeses. Over here, it's the Ramadan countdown to chow down.

I attract little attention. Tadjoura is one of the oldest ports in East Africa, and over the last thousand years stranger things than me have walked this promenade. But I do draw a question from a man with a thin beard, toting a plastic sack.

“Can I help you find something, someplace?”

Thank you. Your English is excellent. I'm looking for a place to stay.