 |
| Bachir, Baha', and Khaled, my hosts in El Oued, took me to visit the dunes that rise at the city's edge. |
After leaving the palm groves ringing Biskra, my taxi turned onto a two-lane desert highway that stretched, straight as an arrow, as far as the eye could see into a desolate, sandy void. This, he told me, was the route to El Oued.
The choice of El Oued's name—meaning "the river" in Arabic—must surely have been aspirational, I mused, as we raced past scrub and dunes and not much else. But while the terrain looked to be about as dry as any other in the Sahara, that soon changed. To the left and right of the highway, vast brown expanses appeared through the rippling heat. (It was still late January, but already quite warm at midday.) Further on, the road arced toward one of the mud lakes, and I got a closer look: this was a chott, a muddy depression where the region's brackish groundwater seeps to the surface, turning hundreds of square kilometers into untraversable muck.
