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Tassili N'Agger
"At the heart of the Sahara, land almost devoid of life has mysterious paintings of
animals and hunters"
The well-heeled come by light aircraft. The less so, or the more adventurous, approach the great bulwark of Algeria's Tassili mountains by four-wheel drive truck, crossing gravel, rock and shifting sand where the air shudders above a ground temperature that can reach 70degrees celsius (158degrees Fahrenheit).Their destination is not a mountain range in the usual sense, though it rises up to 7400ft (2250m) above sea level. Rather, it is a 400 mile (640Km) long sandstone plateau, dissected into separate massifs which are themselves split and divided again by numberless ravines and wadis into a chaos of cliffs and pinnacles of naked rock. It is a place of strange beauty that has few equals.Best, perhaps, to see it first at dawn, when its twisted buttresses are touched by fire, rose and purple and throw indigo shadows across the intervening sand. Then, with only a touch of fancy, the eroded rock turns into skyscrapers and cathedrals, spires and chimneys.Though sand-laden wind was the artist that carved the softer rocks into shapes for the imagination to seize upon, the principal architect was water. Rushing torrents gouged out ravines, isolated bluffs from stacks and monoliths, split seams and fissures and excavated shallow caves.The area now know as the Sahara once had a wetter climate. Many of the dry, sand-filled wadis and ravines on the desert's southern margin were then rivers or occupied by lakes. What is now desert was once green grassland.In the most vivid and immediate way, paintings and carvings on rock faces and in caves tell the story of the life and death of Tassili N'Ajjer. The nomadic Tuareg people of the Sahara have always known about Tassili's art, but the outer world knew little of it until the French explorer and ethnologist Henri Lhote, with his assistants, spent two years making thousands of tracings and photographs during the 1950's.Though most of the paintings share an immense vitality, economy of the line and brilliant colour-sense, their style and subject group them into fairly distinct periods. The earliest, perhaps painted between 6000 and 4000 BC, show men of negroid appearance hunting elephants, buffaloes, hippopotamuses and wild sheep with huge horns - the animals of a greener Sahara - or wearing ceremonial dress for some tribal rite. Among them are huge, white creatures, half-animal, half-human, perhaps representing gods.The second group, executed perhaps between 4000 and 1500 BC, shows a pastoral people tending large herds of long-horned, piebald cattle with giraffes and ostriches among them. There are scenes too, of banquets, a wedding, children asleep beneath animal skins, a woman pounding grain to make flour.By the third period, however, about 1500 to 300 BC, the Sahara has become as dry as it is now, and a new people have arrived. They appear to be armoured soldiers, driving two and three-horse chariots at stretch gallop, but whether they are invaders, allies or a Mediteranean army fleeing the wrath of Pharoah, is incertain. Gradually, around 200-100 BC, the horses disappear and childlike drawings of camels take their place. After that, there are no more drawings.What is left is an almost unbearable curiosity. What became of the people who painted the pictures? Did they migrate south as the land grew arid, or did they simply die out? Perhaps we shall never know.Drying was a slow, slow process; the very name Tassil N'Ajjer translates as 'plateau of the rivers', though it has been arid since long before the beginning of the Christian era.Staunchly surviving from this wetter time are small groups of gnarled, cypress trees whose roots burrow into the rocks in search of water. They are reckoned to be 3000 years old and are the last of their life, for although they produce viable seed, the ground is too dry for it to germinate. Another survivor from a livelier past is the wild mountain sheep with immense curved horns that shares its arid habitat with jerbilis, and with a wheatearwhich builds a nest that can cope with the desert climate.Once, however, the plateau supported a very different fauna. There were giraffes and antelopes, hippopotamuses, lions, and elephants - even men and women who lived by herding cattle and goats. Some of this is known from ancient animal bones dug out of the sand, but far more evidence comes, painings found among the towering cliffs and wondrous rock formations of Tassil N'Ajjer.
