Sahara Guide Needs Only the Stars

Deep in the world’s largest desert, the guide, a proud man with leathery skin and a bright blue robe, gestures across the vast emptiness that he has wandered for 50 years.

To nearly everyone else, the Sahara is an eye-swimming sea of sand, a desperately foreign and confusing expanse.

For Mohammed Lamine Ould Daya--human sextant, self-taught meteorologist, sometime huckster and well-known guide to the deserts north of Timbuktu--it’s home. And he navigates its nearly invisible trails with the assurance of a New Yorker heading up Seventh Avenue.

“Each dune, I know,” he says, waving an arm toward a far-off hill of sand rising at the edge of the horizon.

Lamine laughs. He knows his listeners don’t understand. To outsiders, each dune appears as one undulating repetition of the last, each stretch of rocks just another rocky stretch sprawling in every direction.

Often there is little that breaks the horizon at all. Bir Ounane, for instance, is just a knee-high well along the all-but-indiscernible trail that goes from the legendary city of Timbuktu to hand-dug salt mines far to the north.

In a high-tech world--even Timbuktu now sports a few Internet connections--Lamine is a happy anachronism and a window into the disappearing world of desert wanderers.

A century ago there were hundreds of men like Lamine, if not thousands.

The desert economy, based largely on long camel caravans that carried trade goods, slaves and books between the heart of Africa and the Mediterranean, thrived under the care of the Sahara’s guides.

These days most of the long trade routes are abandoned, and caravans are increasingly rare. And so, of course, are the guides who shepherded them through the sands.

But some still survive, and in the small world of Malian desert guides, Lamine is a self-proclaimed force. He loves little more than burnishing his already polished reputation, telling stories of his exploits and showing off letters of recommendation from previous clients.

He’s not quiet about his skills. “I know all of it--anywhere you want to go,” he says.

As long as you can pay his fee--about $35 a day, a decent living in one of the world’s poorest countries.

Everyone comes to Lamine: aid agencies, scientists, government officials and the occasional tourists who venture into the deep desert.

Need to get from Timbuktu to the Moroccan city of Marrakech--a distance of some 1,175 miles across the roadless heart of the Sahara? Call Lamine. He can take you there, or to just about anywhere else in Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Morocco and parts of Algeria.

Perhaps only the desert smugglers can match his breadth of knowledge, the men who race across the Sahara taking black-market cigarettes from Mauritania to Algeria, or the nomadic Tuareg fighters who ferried guns into Mali before their rebellion ended in 1995.

The son of a nomadic camel herder who guided French colonial soldiers, Lamine has spent his entire life working in the Sahara. A Moor--one of the olive-skinned, Arabic-speaking peoples of North Africa who have roamed the desert for centuries--he cared for his family’s camels as a child, guided Malian soldiers for nearly 20 years and finally turned freelance.

“My father took me out from the time I was 3 or 4 years old. . . . I know all the desert,” he boasts yet again as his driver, a fellow Moor named Zany, an often-silent man who regularly plays sidekick to Lamine’s Lone Ranger, nods in agreement.

Lamine’s skills are decidedly low-tech. He seldom bothers with compasses, even less with maps, and he disdains such modern navigational instruments as the Global Positioning Satellite system, which signals precise locations to hand-held receivers.

“It can’t tell you if there’s a route somewhere, or a well somewhere,” he snorts, as Zany again nods. “In the desert it’s not enough” to simply know where you are, Lamine says.

Lamine draws from generations of desert knowledge, using a combination of subtle landmarks, wind direction and the stars to guide his clients.

To him, the desert itself is a tool. He takes constant note of tiny ripples in the sand to gauge wind direction. Since winds are relatively predictable here--blowing in specific directions depending on the time of day and the season--he can chart his route by cutting at the appropriate angle through the ripples.

But perhaps most astonishing are his astronomical abilities. Lamine navigates by a handful of constellations, primarily the North Star and a pair of early-evening stars--La Ouaze, or “the Intermediaries.”

He insists he can even see stars in the daytime. Faced with an unbelieving listener, he stops his truck one evening just before nightfall, proclaiming that as the sun goes down, the two stars that make up La Ouaze will appear on either side of the tire tracks, indicating he is heading due south.

His robe flaps in the cold desert wind as he stares into the darkening sky.

Slowly, La Ouaze appears. One star is just to the left of the tire tracks, the other just to the right.

Lamine walks away, smiling.