We all woke up around 5 am, intent on climbing a dune that
must have been at least 150 m in height, with the ultimate purpose of seeing
the sunrise over Algeria (yes, we are very close to the border). The climb was
tough because the sand is loose and the air you breath is very dry, but the
beautiful sunrise was worth the effort. Unfortunately our guides kept calling
us down (Yalla, yalla!), so I had to
make a dash for the top (I was the only one who made it), just to turn
immediately around. The effort brought a series of coughing fits, which only
abated once I had drank many little sips of water to moisten my throat.
Right away we got back on the camels, and made it back to
our kasbah, for breakfast, just as
the sun started beating miserably on us.
Back on the bus we went back to Erfoud, and from there took
the road east along the Anti Atlas. We were heading for the town of Tinejdad , crossing the
toughest dessert you can imagine, when we came to a landscape dotted with small
mounds, about 2 m high and 5 m in diameter. There were hundreds of these
mounds, aligned in rows. We stopped in a small store by the side of the road,
and learned that these were khanats,
a type of irrigation scheme practiced in Persia ,
north Africa, and Mexico .
Imagine a plain that rises gently toward the mountains; the water table would
be at a higher elevation near the mountains, so you start excavating a tunnel,
maybe 10 m deep, throughout the plains and toward the mountains, with just
enough slope that, if it had water, it would allow said water to flow toward
the valley. Digging such a long tunnel 700 years ago was a mind-boggling feat
of engineering, and since they didn’t have tunnel boring machines a vertical adit
would be dug, by hand, every 20 meters, down to the target depth of 10 m. I
always thought these tunnels would be barely large enough for a kneeling man to
go through, but no, these tunnels were 3 m high and a couple of meters wide.
Anyway, you keep going this way toward the mountains, until eventually you hit
the elevated water table, after which groundwater seeps into the gallery
excavated at such cost of manpower and time, and now you have a pipeline
bringing water into the valley, and the adits then become wells from which
water can be extracted with a camel skin bucket, a balanced pole with a pot at
the end (shadouf), or with a
camel-driven water wheel. What is even more mind boggling is that these khanats are several kilometers long, and
to cover the valley they were built parallel to each other, maybe 50 m apart.
If one is an impressive piece of ancient engineering, 20 of them must represent
the labor of several generations of desert dwellers.
For lunch we made a stop in the most amazing village, El
Khorbat. On first sight it appeared to be one kasbah after another, so the complex looked like a very complicated
fortress. On close inspection, the kasbahs
are joined to each other through a maze of covered corridors, so the people
can move within the village without having to go into the blazing sun. The kasbahs are large buildings, four
stories high plus the level of the watch towers, built with adobe. Each floor
is very tall, maybe 4 m tall, so the hot air can rise and keep the room
bearable. The walls are 50 cm thick, and are “poured” like concrete using
portable forms, but instead of concrete what is poured is a mixture of mud and
straw. Surprisingly the walls are very strong, so one floor can be added over
the other. The ceilings are supported by beams cut from the date palms, which
are apparently bug resistant and can stand for centuries.
El Khorbat has embraced tourism as a good industry, so
everyone is friendly, there is a good hostel, and the locals have developed all
sorts of options for eco-tourism, including guided bike rides and hikes into
the canyons of the High Atlas. They also have a great little museum of Berber
No comments:
Post a Comment