Sand Storm

The two sand storms I witnessed whilst travelling in the Sahara desert in the 1980s were events of gigantic and frightening proportions as befits that pert of the world. At first there was a gradual awareness of an intense calm. Not a breath of wind stirred, nothing moved in the stifling heat and the sun beat down from a sky that seemed too big to be true. Through 360 degrees, the flat, featureless, desert horizon met the arch of the sky along a crisp unwavering line. But looking again at the eastern horizon revealed that it was not quite so crisp as was first perceived - it had assumed a slightly smudged appearance. Ten minutes later the smudge had grown to a dirty brown band now extending over 90 degrees of the eastern horizon. Swiftly, silently, the darkening wall of flying sand rolled on – higher and higher, darker and darker, wider and wider it grew. Now filling half the sky and stretching from horizon to horizon the rolling black monster surged on, tinged here and there with swirling bands of purple and little white plumes of dust streaming off the crest in the manner of a Tsunami tidal wave rising up out of the deep. Darkness fell as suddenly as if some giant hand had reached up and switched off the sun. An imperceptibly low rumbling sound rose gradually to a drumming boom like the roll of distant thunder. Then, in the pitch darkness, it struck with a crashing roar and the air was instantly filled with flying sand and a suffocating white dust. To the strange drumming sound of the wind was added a loud hissing noise – roaring, hissing and drumming, roaring, hissing and drumming – all in total darkness.

From the safety of a motor car the awesome grandeur of these spectacular sand storms can be watched with relative impunity and there is normally just sufficient time to make all the necessary preparations. The necessary preparations are not inconsiderable in themselves, however, and revolve around the indisputable fact that for at least the next twelve hours the traveller will be going nowhere and he will be confined in the car with all the windows shut tight. Food and water have to be brought in if they are on the roof rack, the back of a station wagon type vehicle has to be cleared out to make way for cooking and sleeping. Anything like rucksacks and toolboxes left outside the car must be on the downwind side and tied to the car. Full jerry cans must be lined up along the upwind side of the car to form a barrier to wind passing underneath. Vulnerable glass and paint work must be daubed with a thick layer of grease to prevent sand blasting. And, last but not least, everybody must have a pee. Peeing in a sandstorm is no fun, particularly for women.

No matter what preparations are made, sitting out a sandstorm is a miserable business. Fine white dust coats everything and manages to find its way into the most unlikely places like jars of food and face cream. Nothing, it seems, is spared the sand and dust. Once, after sitting out the main blast of a storm, we drove on slowly for the next two days in brown-out conditions with the wind constantly buffeting the left hand side of the car. When it was all over we found that the window would not wind down on that side. Closer inspection revealed that the entire door panel containing the window cranking mechanism had filled up with sand through the unprotected key hole.

Roaring, drumming and hissing are the only sounds of the Sahara and, remarkably, they are very seldom heard because sand storms are not that common. The usual light winds and breezes make no sound at all - there are no dead leaves to rustle, no grass to whisper, no boughs to sing through – dead silence is the normal sound of the desert. And with no birds, insects, animals or reptiles to add their voices, it is mostly an eerily silent place. The strange feeling of sensory deprivation conjured by the absolute silence is reinforced at night by the totality of the darkness and vividness of the stars shining down from horizon to horizon. It’s no wonder that the people of the desert regions were the first to progress the science of astronomy.