Dune

The Arabic word for "desert" is "sahara".

Ah, you get it. Before you laugh, consider that we call our mountains: "The Rockies".

Besides, the locals don't call the Sahara "The Sahara". That's the white man's fuck-up. Remember that other time when some native chief on the St Lawrence River said to the British explorers: "Come to my village"? The Brits named our whole damned country "Village".

They- the locals here in Siwa, anyway- call it "The Great Sand Sea".

Tee hee.

The Egyptians say: "Egypt is the River, and Egypt is the Desert." Siwa is the latter; way the hell and gone to the west of the Nile, almost on the border with Libya.

The guy who ran my hostel gave me a brief history of Siwa. Like anything else an Egyptian might tell you, I'd take this with the appropriately-sized grain of salt.

A large number of Berber peoples apparently fled the fighting in the Second World War from Algeria and Morocco, settling in the Siwa oasis. (Was there any fighting in Algeria and Morocco in WWII?) They brought with them a unique Northwest African desert culture, separate from Egypt's riverine, industrial civilization on the banks of the Nile.

The Berbers initially constructed their dwellings out of mud bricks and salt. But "in 1999, 20 years ago!", a heavy deluge collapsed large swaths of Siwa.

You could see the devastation wrought from the top of the Fortress of Shali, a moonscape of stalagmite-like remains; collapsed walls and battlements of formless mud bricks run-together and ruined. I imagine it caved in during the same downpour that flattened the rest of Siwa.

Something else that confused me: Shali was described as "the medieval fortress of Shali".

Well, ok. If the Siwans only arrived during WWII, who built Shali? That Egyptian probably made the whole thing up.

Directly below, a warren of the collapsed dwellings ringing the base of Shali had been taken over (with the fortress) by the Egyptian government, and preserved as a tourist attraction.

Imagine London in 1945... made of mud.

Anything that hadn't collapsed was still being used as a house... or a souvenir shop.

Further out, the modern (and I mean "modern" in a purely relative sense) town was built from brick and concrete; squat, ugly, and functional. But whatever these lacked in charm, they made up for in insolubility.

Siwa only had a real road built to it from the Nile delta in the 1980s. so it's largely caught in a time warp. Donkeys pull carts, spurred on with palm switches by noisy young lads, splattering shit on wide, dusty streets. There are some rattling bicycles here, and the occasional sputtering pickup, but for the most part, donkey carts transport everything from diesel barrels to parsley to people.

Flies buzz on open fruit stands. Chickens jaunt across roofs thatched with dried palm leaves. Thick groves of palm trees ring the town; sometimes rising out of the shells of the collapsed mud huts. Siwa doesn't just run on tourism. The locals harvest dates from the palms, drying them into a kind of natural candy. Many families also own sheep, goats, and cows.

Men- and boys- still wear the gallabiya: the full-length pajama-like robes. Married women wear full, creepily faceless black veils beneath robes and headscarves with brightly embroidered hems, looking like squat, waddling versions of Tolkien's Ringwraiths. Young girls have their hair bound in thick braids, and dress in traditional Bedouin frocks that look like floral, frilly nightgowns.

And of course, there's the usual collection of offensively friendly tourist-trappers and carbon-copy stream of souvenir shops that combine worn collections of Berber handicrafts with 4x4 safari tours into the Great Sand Sea.

There's intermediate signs of a tourist boom. Construction is going up here and there at an Arab pace. (That's somewhere between "slow" and "medium".) Hotels are undergoing renovation. But Siwa is still a true desert town- sleepy, traditional, and for now- Thank God!- largely undisturbed.

And what would a dusty desert town be without the street cats? This is Jessica and Muad'dib. They lived on the roof of my hostel, surrounded by garbage and shards of broken brick.

The day after arriving in Siwa, I took a "safari" out into the dunes. There were five people on the tour: two Japanese girls, a white guy who might have been from Germany or Holland, and a Korean named "Conga". I talked to Conga the most, mostly because I enjoyed saying his name.

Did we really need three Arabs? Of course! One to drive the jeep, and two to hit on the girls.

"The Great Sand Sea." Zero points for originality; but you don't realize how apt the name is until you're standing in the middle of it.

You could get on Google Earth right now and see that the Sahara blankets half a continent and a dozen nations. Or you could Wikipedia its exact measurements, length and breadth. But maps and stats contain only abstract truths; something that your mind pretends it can comprehend without the evidence of the senses.

The Sahara- like everything else, I guess- has to be seen to be believed, and experienced to be understood.

And as our safari party stood on a high windswept ridge, squinting at a low sun as the shadowed dunes faded into a white horizon, nothing poetic or profound came to mind. All I could think was: "Jesus Christ, this desert is big."

Much of the Sahara was covered by water at some point. But then- what wasn't? Something very clever I once read went like this: "How inappropriate to call this planet 'Earth', when clearly, it's 'Ocean'."

This used to be a coral reef.

There are many vast stretches of bone-white fossil beds stretching far into the distance- skeletons of the life that thrived here million of years ago, when the desert lay beneath the waves.

Up close, you can see the individual outlines of seashells and coral.

The desert is well-traveled. And when I say "well-traveled", I mean it's well-traveled in the same way the sky or the sea is. There's heavily-used routes, and the rest of it is impenetrable and unpenetrated. Tracks from previous safaris criss-cross the dunes, slowly being erased by the shifting sands. And off in the distance, you can often make out the small dot of a jeep on another safari, trailing evil-looking fumes and almost swallowed up by the immensity of its surroundings.

The jeep ride was fun. Arabs aren't the most sane of drivers on a city road; can you imagine what they're like in a million square miles of nothingness, with nothing but climbing dunes and steep drops to play around in?

The tour took us to a little oasis in the middle of nowhere, where the local hot spring had been engineered into a little dipping pool. Like most natural hot springs, the water was piping hot, murky, and smelled a little like rotten eggs.

Conga, the German, and I hauled ass to the top of a small, rocky plateau overlooking a small oasis, at the edge of which you can just make out the safari convoy. The Arabs below have lit a small fire, and are serving coffee brewed over the flames to a balding group of Brits.

After this, the German gave a loud shout and launched himself off the top, running full tilt with giant, lurching strides down the slope. After ten steps or so, he lost control of his flailing, gravity-driven limbs, bailed, and ate a faceful of sand.

I tried not to think too hard about this, especially since I was also hurtling down the hill.

Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs.

Sometimes, the vehicular acrobatics go horribly wrong. This isn't our jeep, fortunately. We were up on a high rise, admiring the setting sun, when an approaching jeep carrying a trio of Brits belched a cloud of smoke, ground to an abrupt halt, and skidded down the slope- almost tipping as it finally stopped. Its occupants spilled out helter-skelter, while I hooted and callously documented the whole spectacle.

The Arabs dug the sand out with their bare hands and a shovel, and then rocked the jeep back and forth until it twisted loose and rolled backward downhill- almost crushing one of the Brits, who'd unwisely stationed herself behind the vehicle as it came free from the sand trap.

Look on my words, ye mighty, and despair!

In other news, I have bought a ticket to Barcelona to visit my buddy Garreth. This is money I really don't have, so right now I'm more broke than a Bedouin. I can't even buy a copy of the Economist. I don't know what I'm more worried about: the Canucks making the playoffs, or having enough money to get to Frankfurt.

Thank God for credit cards.