Abu Bakir, our driver and factotum, carried a large carpet shoulder bag that had belonged to his father and grandfather before him. It contained tea-making equipment: a beaten silver tray, two silver beakers, a teapot and a camel-hair buffing cloth. Wherever camp was established, Abu Bakir would settle on a square of carpet laid on the sand and commence the tea ritual. Foam held the key to a successful brew, hence a lot of high pouring from beaker to teapot and back. After turning in each night, I fell asleep to the clink of tea glasses and low murmur of voices.
It is a ritual that has been taking place across the Sahara for centuries.
A thousand years before camels came to north Africa, merchant caravans journeyed to the Niger bend in pursuit of ivory, essences and rare woods. The voyage back to the coastal ports, where Punic merchants jingled silver coins, was more than 2,200km. It was one of the most ancient trading routes, linking the heart of Africa with successive northern empires. Yet despite its remote and treacherous terrain, the Libyan Sahara still services commerce, as I found out on my own journey.
The road south from Tripoli is a study in desiccation. Following the trade route, my guide, 27-year-old Abbas, drove through the foothills of the Jebel Nafusa and the landscape dried out before our eyes. In the middle of our first day on the road, Abbas announced that we were to visit a smugglers' warehouse. We pulled up outside Qasr al-Haj, an almost perfectly intact 12th-century Berber granary. The sky was clear blue, and the slopes of Jebel Nafusa shimmered. The pottery colours of the Qasr seemed to grow out of the desert. Inside, a dusty corridor opened on to an arena lined with five-metre-deep cubby holes, each once used for a family's winter supply of barley and wheat, and now, apparently, a hiding place for contraband.
The oasis settlement at Nalut on the western edge of the Jebel Nafusa has been a resting place for traders since the fourth century BC. It remains a staging post but, following Muammar Gaddafi's new idea that each town in the Libyan interior must be painted in its own co-ordinated colours, the municipal buildings are now decked out in outlandish peach and green.
People melt away as one tracks the traders south: 85% of Libyans live on the Mediterranean coast. Libya may be the fourth-largest country in Africa, but only 10% of its land is cultivable. The interior was immune to the cultural flux that shaped the coast. It is Berber territory. Abbas never missed an opportunity to promote his own Berber ethnicity. Although he lived in Tripoli, he said he did not feel Libyan. "The only thing we share with Arabised Libyans," he said, "is religion."
Walking the covered lanes of Ghadames, an oasis town 550km from Tripoli, one sensed the ghostly presence of medieval traders, reclining in the shade of pomegranate trees in cool courtyard gardens. Ghadames was once the pre-eminent Saharan trading hub (today the walled old town is a Unesco world heritage site). Marseilles cloth and Venetian paper went south, precious stones and ostrich plumes headed north – and news came in from everywhere. On my journey the scent of crushed lemon leaves filled the empty lanes, and rods of light fell through vertical skylights on to white mud-brick houses. The temperature outside reached 36C.
The hotel on the outskirts of Ghadames new town was characteristic of tourism in the Libyan interior. (The Revolutionary government moved 6,000 residents from the medieval lanes in the early 1980s, a gesture towards the fabled modernisation Gaddafi craved.) Leaflets in the huge marble lobby advertised an impressive range of facilities. I made enquiries. The pool? "Is not built." Internet? "Is not working." Laundry? "Is no bags." But they did have an espresso machine.
According to the authorities, unemployment in Libya stands at 40%, but the figure is meaningless in a country with a burgeoning private sector without fiscal status. Abbas had a government job in addition to being a guide, though he appeared rarely to attend. When I asked him, after a week on the road, how he managed so much time away from the office, he said he got his cousin to sign in for him.
South of Ghadames, we entered the wilderness of Hamada al-Hamra and passed three cars in 150km. This expanse of desert scrub has been keeping smugglers safe since the time Europeans were emerging from their caves. Traffic thickened only as we approached Sebha, where we stopped at a shop for dates, stored, as everywhere, in boxes in the deep freeze, and ate some cashews and Ecuadorean bananas. Sebha is a horrible modern hole. Today's traders deal in people, spiriting Africans up to the coast and across to Sicily.
At the Ubari petrol station, young men filled rows of jerrycans strapped to the roofs of their Toyota Land Cruisers, the whole forecourt a seething souk of Tuareg and Berber faces. Petrol is 10p a litre in Libya, and 10 times that in neighbouring Tunisia, and around Ghadames and Ubari people fill cans and custom-built 100-litre tanks to siphon off in more lucrative markets.
I asked Abbas if fuel accounted for the majority of illegal trade, "No!" he laughed. "We smuggle anything. I made a lot of money last year importing canned dog and cat food from Tunisia. I bought cans there and sold them for 10 times as much here." At Ubari, we linked up with three further team members and a second jeep. The three – cook and headman as well as Abu Bakir – were Tuareg, proud men of the once nomadic tribe of the central Sahara who protected the trade caravans. The dapper Abbas, his black hair gelled, appeared in a different western outfit each day, at one point sporting a thigh-length teddy boy coat. But his three Tuareg assistants stuck to their hooded burnouses and the tagelmust, the 6ft length of fabric wound into a turban and face cover. They enjoyed teaching me to put one on, but I always ended up looking bandaged.
Off road, we entered the desert proper through Masak Mastafat, the northern gateway to the Acacus massif's basalt columns, sandstone buttresses and rolling sands; lots of rolling sands. There, the five of us camped for four days and four nights. Everyone enjoyed it. Darkness crashed down with African haste at 6.25pm, and after making our pop-up tents secure, we sat around a fire eating barley soup and camel couscous sharpened with dollops of harissa. There was talk about the sexually invigorating properties of the ubiquitous harissa. Eaten, I wondered, or applied?
At mealtimes, a desert sparrow might visit our camp. But it was at night that the Sahara came alive. Ensconced in my tent, I listened to gerbils (a foot long and meaty, not the hutch variety) scratching around the guy ropes. In the morning, I followed the delicate tracks of wolves and fennec foxes. Soon after striking camp one day, we surprised two heavily laden vehicles, with five men and two children loitering nearby. Spotting us, the adults knelt down and pretended to pray. I asked Abbas what was stashed under the tarpaulins. He shrugged, and suggested Sport cigarettes, the red-and-white packets that decorate every street in Tripoli. But I wondered.
On the last night we pitched camp in the lee of a volcanic outcrop. Desert rain had washed away the porous rock, creating a wild and fantastic outline. When lightning struck, phantasmagorical rock silhouettes leapt to life. The camp was hard by Mandara, one of a dozen lakes in the south-western Libyan Sahara. A water project had dried it to the bed, but the next day I swam in Umm al-Maa, a block of opaque green water nestled in a palmy basin. It was so salty my feet wouldn't stay under. All around, Niger Tuareg played noughts-and-crosses in the sand.
Driving out, a cry went up in our Land Cruiser. "Signal!" We stopped. Everyone got out. I remember the figure of Abu Bakir, burnouse flapping, holding his phone aloft in salute and squinting into the sun.
