The mystical mountains at the heart of the Sahara

Within the dim anteroom of the hilltop chapel, in the well-thumbed book that the priest had thrust into my hand, one passage caught my eye.

The book told a potted biography of Charles de Foucauld, the Christian hermit who founded this outpost more than 100 years ago. But it also quoted him explaining why, of all the places in the world, he chose to build it here: on a high escarpment, in the heart of the world’s largest hot desert.

“The beauty of the view defies description or even imagination,” De Foucauld wrote. “Nothing could give an idea of the forest of rocky peaks and needles that one has before him . . . it is marvellous.”

I wanted to read more, but the scenery exalted in these sentences was tugging me back outside. Through the low doorway, the sun was starting to drop over the extraordinary Hoggar Mountains.

It should perhaps come as no great surprise that in the deeper reaches of the vast Sahara Desert are spectacular places of which most people outside the region remain unaware. When it comes to Algeria, the Sahara’s — and indeed Africa’s — largest country, this anonymity has been compounded by volatile regional politics.

The brutality of the Algerian civil war in the 1990s, commonly referred to as the “Black Decade”, prefigured the Islamist militancy that continues to beset the huge ungovernable spaces of its southern and eastern neighbours: Mali, Libya and Niger. While those shadows linger, the Algerian government has tended to show more interest in exploiting the oil and gas reserves that lie beneath the desert than the tourism potential of the landscapes on its surface.

Now, however, with the country enjoying a period of relative stability, that shroud is lifting. Last year, I visited Tassili N’Ajjer, a national park in Algeria’s south-east corner, where I was duly stupefied by its unearthly landscape of sandstone pillars and orange dunes. But the Tuareg nomads who accompanied me insisted there was a place to the west that stood comparison.

And so, in March, I flew to Tamanrasset, a dust-blown, fast-expanding town on the Trans-Saharan Highway, 1,000 miles due south of Algiers, and from that inauspicious staging-post hopped into a Land Cruiser, and the company of three more Tuaregs. Guide Mustafa Ghalissou, along with driver Amoud Messeghi and cook Soulimane Zoulami, were here to take me into the heart of the Ahaggar National Park, more often referred to locally as the Atakor: literally “the swell” or “high place”.

It was late afternoon before we encountered our first taste of Hoggar’s special topography. We emerged from a wadi to see a huge basaltic spire shooting vertically from a gravel plain, tapering into a rounded apex.

What’s diverting about this pinnacle, and the hundreds of others that dot the surrounding land, isn’t merely what it is, but what it was. Hoggar’s signature landmarks are volcanic plugs, or necks — residue of intermittent episodes of volcanism dating back 35mn years. What remains today is the viscera of that tumult, the towers of igneous and metamorphic rock left behind after the volcanoes that once enclosed them eroded away.

These ancient structures sit atop a dome of tectonic uplift that is much older still. When rising seas inundated much of the Sahara region, this section of granite plateau, known as the Tuareg Shield, stood clear of the water and the sedimentation that subsequently formed Tassili N’Ajjer’s sandstone. Some of the rocks here, dated to 1.7bn years old, predate the advent of multicellular life on earth.

The next morning began as the others would: with Laughing Cow cheese spread on a baguette, while the Tuaregs sipped from small glasses of syrupy green tea. From here our route headed deeper into the range, across lava fields where the basalt shimmered with patinas of quartz. The horizon bunched with columnar peaks and flat-topped mesas, like shark-fins in a sea of stone.

It was impossible to resist comparisons with Tassili N’Ajjer, for it seemed unfathomable that two such uncanny landscapes could exist at all, let alone that they might sit in relative proximity.

Here, as in Tassili, millennia of human passage have left their imprints. Two or three times a day, Mustafa would lead me by foot along a gorge, or on to an outcropping, hopping between boulders with a litheness that belied his 65 years. “I walk a few miles every morning,” he told me. “It keeps me young.” At intervals he’d point out pieces of rock-art, some etched into the rock, some daubed in carmine paint, many of them dating back several thousand years.

There were paintings of charioteers being pulled by galloping horses, and overhangs cross-hatched with black hieroglyphs. Much of the art alluded to the same story as the one told in Tassili — of giraffes, elephants and ostriches flourishing here during the African Humid period, slowly being supplanted by pictures of cattle as the region’s hunter-gatherers gravitated towards pastoralism. But while many of the 15,000 artworks found on Tassili’s sandstone display a breathtaking, calligraphic elegance, instances in Hoggar, with its coarser rock, were sparser and seldom as artistically beautiful.

Over time it struck me that Hoggar’s greatest impact was felt more in the round than in the detail. Where Tassili, with its eroded sculptures and migrating dunes, presented the desert in motion, Hoggar was a tableau of cosmic stasis. This felt like a journey into even deeper time.

The coming days unspooled in kind: long, meandering drives over stony ground, the folk music of Tinariwen, the celebrated Tuareg band from Mali, tinkling from the stereo. We spent indolent mealtimes beneath the acacia trees that proliferated along the dried-up watercourses, then set off walking in search of millennia-old petroglyphs. In the evening we camped under the stars.

Among the pleasures of travelling in the Algerian Sahara is the relaxed company of the Tuaregs, the joy of experiencing their symbiosis with the desert. Everything felt reassuringly under control, but nothing was ever hurried.

Whenever we encountered other people, whether in the scattered villages that dot the national park’s periphery or the camel caravans moving in between, the men would enter into a lengthy ritual of reacquaintance that sounded faintly choral: “How is your health? How is your family? How are the animals?” In one transient settlement, a nomad family invited us into a hut that had been woven from the same bulrushes we would see later, growing alongside the region’s few reliable streams. We ate from a shared bowl of pasta mixed with fried vegetables. The matriarch who prepared it remained unseen, while the youngest of the seven children scrutinised me from behind the folds of his father’s gown.

Even when we were far from human habitation, the guides’ infectious ease permitted the illusion that the desert was almost hospitable. At each stopping place, Amoud and Mustafa would debate the perfect spot to rest. Decision made, the Land Cruiser was disgorged of blankets, mattresses and cooking utensils. A reed screen was erected to temper any prevailing wind. Within two minutes, Soulimane had vegetable stews simmering in a pressure cooker, and a teapot warming on a fire. (In five days, the Tuaregs’ green tea habit exhausted almost an entire kilo bag of sugar.)

The most surprising diversion was Afilal, a sinuous wetland and a staging post for migrating birds, which we explored one lunchtime. In a region where most animals and vegetation depend on meagre summer rains, these reed-lined ponds were a shock of life in the dust, fed by a year-round spring. I sat watching the darting swifts celebrate this rare abundance, while Mustafa collected stones to build a dam, diverting a rivulet to replenish stagnating rock pools.

Another afternoon, I woke up from a nap to find a goat scavenging our leftovers. When I turned around, all three Tuaregs were lying in patches of shade, gentle snores erupting from behind their shesh headscarves.

These beguiling themes — of the plateau’s immutability and the immanence of the people who live on its terms — seemed to converge as we edged towards the tabletop hill of Assekrem, the northern apex of the circuit. The last few miles were jaw-dropping, the land rising into receding ranks of deeply ribbed pinnacles.

It was to this otherworldly place that Charles de Foucauld, felt himself drawn at the start of the last century. De Foucauld, a scion of Strasbourg aristocracy, had enjoyed a licentious youth, then joined the French colonial army as an officer in 1876. In deployments to Palestine and Morocco, he developed the conviction that to exist in desert places was to get closer to God. A decade later, he had renounced his wealth and committed to an ascetic life in imitation of Christ.

When De Foucauld arrived in southern Algeria in 1905, Tamanrasset was a village of just 20 families. He saw out his years constructing a primitive house for himself here in Assekrem, and spending time among the Tuaregs, whom he revered.

De Foucauld was still compiling his dictionary of the Tuareg language, Tamashek, when, in 1916, amid a Muslim nationalist insurgency, someone kicked in the door. The story goes that a band of Senussi Bedouin marauders took De Foucauld prisoner, before a sudden noise prompted a twitchy 15-year-old captor to shoot him in the head. De Foucauld’s austere life and violent death would earn him martyrdom. He was canonised by Pope Francis last May.

Today, the stonewalled hermitage he built still sits high on the Assekrem escarpment, where it faces the sugar-loaf peaks of Tezouaï and Tidiamaïne. A simple bunkhouse, where travellers can stay overnight, occupies the pass below.

As Amoud and Soulimane unloaded our stuff into one of its blue-walled rooms, I hastened up the switchback path towards the plateau. The overview of Hoggar’s mesas, needles and cinder cones grew with each upward stride. At the summit, a middle-aged man with a weather-beaten face, and a beanie pulled low over gimlet eyes, bid me “bienvenue”.

Frère Ventura, originally from Spain, is a devotee of The Little Brothers of Jesus, a religious order that extols De Foucauld’s example and teachings. Ventura and one other member of the order live here on the hillside, just below De Foucauld’s original building, which is now used solely as a chapel. He told me proudly that he has been on this promontory, maintaining the site, emulating his spirit guide’s desert vigil, for 20 years.

Belying the reserve one might have expected from someone given to such monasticism, Ventura was voluble, keen to impart the expertise of 7,000 sunsets. “Start over there,” he prescribed, in perfect French, pointing to the weather station that sat on the escarpment’s west rim. “But get back here by quarter to seven. That’s when the colours on the mountains are most beautiful.” And they were.

The remainder of the circuit was beholden to Ilamane, an enormous monolith and the region’s most celebrated mountain. (Mount Tahat, Algeria’s tallest peak at 2,908m, is close by and slightly taller, but its trapezoidal profile is rather less eye-catching.) It appeared at the head of a hanging valley and grew in stature as Mustafa and I left the others to complete the penultimate leg of our journey on foot.

Many of Hoggar’s titanic chess-pieces had invited anthropomorphic reveries, but Ilamane was of a different order. Viewed from the west, its flanks descended steeply from a cranial summit, before being interrupted by two diagonal folds, which resembled a pair of interlocking arms. The whole structure looked like a sombre giant wrapped in a cowl.

That night, our last, Soulimane made taguella, a traditional Tuareg bread, baked in the sand beneath a bed of embers. As dusk enveloped the valley, two brilliant points of light — Venus and Jupiter, I’d confirm later — appeared in close communion above the western ridge lines.

It verges on cliché to think of the Sahara as numinous, a place of deep contemplation and spiritual refuge. But in Hoggar, I realised that evening, the totemic land makes that tendency irresistible. You couldn’t sit here, watching the celestial bodies wheel across the big sky, without feeling immaterial in the face of the desert’s size and permanence, and the millions of years that Ilamane has glowered over its mountainous heart.

“I love this desert,” De Foucauld wrote in a letter to his sister, in 1906. “It is so good and wholesome to be alone, face to face with eternal things.” He had settled upon the right place to find them.

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