Desert training

Desert Meditation

Saharan heat roasts you from the inside. Even with a light breeze blowing in from the Mauritanian coast, the sensation is of throughways searing. The emotion? Pure submission.

With only a crumbling station in which to shelter, and the vaguest of departure schedules, the wait for Mauritania’s famed Saharan coal train is one of lethargic anticipation. One pair of narrow tracks, dusted with sand as if unused, extends endlessly in either direction, an unspectacular scene. The people crouch, sit, slump in the shade, and wait.

But then the train arrives.

The tracks shudder as the gigantic beast screeches to a halt, all rusted iron and power, stretching as far in each direction as the tracks – completely out of sight. The longest train in the world, at almost two kilometres, is making its arduous run back into the Sahara to pick up iron ore for transport out to this coast.

Now the station becomes a frenzy of activity, reams of people rushing about with an energy previously belonging only to the flies. The train will not linger if that last crate of market goods, that last cloth-bound bundle of possessions, last goat or even last child has not been hauled into the sooty belly of one of the 200 vast open-top carts.

As we curve out of Nouadhibou we are afforded a sidelong view of this colossal machine, snaking behind us in innumerable black segments – an industrial alien in this white land. The final vestige of urbanism we pass, before endless desert, is a shantytown of lean-to shacks, with little children waving, and bigger children hurling stones that clang ominously into our metal walls. I duck, frantically, whilst my Arab companions settle themselves for the long journey, disinterested.

We rattle deeper into the desert, and my sense of physical desolation grows, punctuated poetically by the occasional sight of wandering nomads. Clad in black from head to foot, they stride purposefully in twos or threes, towards a featureless horizon. I can only marvel at their direction, their way of life and survival in a place where I see literally nothing else.

So continues a 10-hour ride of swirling sand and rhythmical chug. The hours pass only with thought and observation, although the starkness of the landscape, eventually, and thankfully, is not reflected inside my cart. As the heat subsides, previously mysterious figures, faces wrapped against the sand, light small stoves, offering me tea and food with smiling eyes.

Truly momentous is dusk, when the seven men in my cart dutifully wash their hands and faces with what little water they have, and stand, arms outstretched, praying to the East. In their unwitting formation, swaying in unison with the movement of the train, lips uttering soundless devotions, I witness breathtaking reverence. An ethereal calm settles in the cart, amidst the rust, the dust and the ceaseless rattling. These hardy people show me humility, and beauty in a bleak environment, and I bend my head to that, as we rumble onward, together.