Abdullah's olives

The late December sun was low in a brilliant blue sky when our car came to a shuddering halt.  We were in the middle of a ribbon of two-lane road that stretched empty to the horizon.  Our driver had been nodding with fatigue, twisting his head from side to side in the classic gesture of someone trying to relieve the tension of driving for seven hours without relief.   After the nonstop noise of the motor, the sudden silence of the Sahara was stunning.   I realized my ears were ringing.  The driver restarted the engine, put the car in first, and let out the clutch.  His efforts were answered by a feeble, shuddering lurch as the engine died once more.  We had a dead transmission.
                                                                                               
We were only a couple of hours from our destination of Sioua (sometimes spelled 'Siwa'), an oasis in western Egypt only 20 km from the Libyan border.  Renowned as one of the few places in the country with an intact, traditional Berber culture, Sioua is home to a very unusual hotel.  Built entirely from local stone, earth, palm wood and fiber, the hotel has no swimming pool and worse--or better, depending on your point of view--not even electricity.  Vegetables from the hotel's organic garden are served at mealtimes.  Behind the hotel, a nearly pure white, rounded cliff rises dramatically out of the sand, and a saline lake spreads a blue mirror before it.  The rooms are small individual houses, all just as earthen as the main buildings.  Really my cup of tea. 

But alas, we weren't there yet.  The driver seemed stunned by his dead vehicle.  Denis' suggesting he push it off the road seemed to pull him out of his state of shock.  He got the car out of harm's way as much as possible, and then a flurry of dual cell phone conversations ensued:  the driver with his boss in Cairo, Denis with the travel agency in Paris, the driver with another driver...  Tempers were flaring, not least my own.Turns out our trusty vehicle's odometer read nearly 200,000 km!  Plus--we learned later--it was illegal for a lone chauffeur to drive for more than 4 hours at a stretch.  By law, we should have had two drivers.

By now, it was almost dark.    No vehicles had passed since we'd broken down.  Supposedly a vehicle was coming to rescue us from Sioua, about 2 hours away.  I took out a high-powered mini flashlight I fortunately had in my purse and plunged my nose into a novel, settling in for a long read.  Lucky for all concerned that I had this distraction, because I take very badly to waiting with nothing to do.  Without that book, I might have gotten myself kicked out of the car for my nonstop bitching!

It had been dark for a long time when a 4x4 much bigger than our own pulled up behind us--not from the direction of Sioua.  The driver, with the mustacheless beard and long flowing robes of traditional Islam, conferred with our chauffeur for a moment, then disappeared.  Our driver stuck his head into the car.  "He'll be taking you to Sioua in about 10 minutes," he announced.  "He's praying."

Denis and I:  "..."  Our nerves were frazzled.  It was a moonless night.  And this driver--who could have been anybody--spoke neither French nor English.  For a fleeting moment, as I got ready to climb in the back seat  of his enormous 4x4, I wondered if this was a turning point  that could lead to...well, an unforeseen end.  But I got in anyway.

The driver snapped a cassette into the player, beginning the sequence of Koranic suras that would play nonstop for the totality of our trip.  We hurtled off into the darkness.  At least this vehicle had a powerful engine and its driver was putting it to good use.  After about 15 minutes, we saw lights up ahead.  The driver slowed and pulled into the driveway of what looked like a combination truckstop and habitation with a small auxiliary building standing  off to the side.  The driver got out and was immediately joined by another man from the home/restaurant.  They went into the small, open side building...to pray.  Denis and I looked at each other in the faint glare of an overhead sodium lamp.  Were we going to have to stop for prayers every 15 minutes? 

We settled back to wait.  It had been hours since I, of the notoriously small bladder, had been able to relieve myself.  But when I suggested to Denis that I might head off into the dark bushes on the other side of the house, he hissed, "Absolutely not!  All we need is for them to find you exposing yourself during their prayers!"  Suddenly sobered at this thought, I tried to ignore my throbbing bladder.  Each minute seemed to last an hour.  After about fifteen of them, the driver reappeared and we roared off into the night, suras blaring from the tapedeck.

Thankfully, the next hour and half elapsed uneventfully.  We began to discern a few scattered lights puncturing the distant darkness.  Of course, they couldn't have been our hotel, which had no electricity!  Suddenly the driver slammed on the brakes, put the car in reverse, and turned onto a small dirt track.  I made out reeds growing in the sweep of the headlights, so we were clearly in an oasis.  A few minutes later the driver cut the engine.  The silence seemed to roar in our ears.  We tumbled stiffly out of the 4x4 and were greeted by soft voices and white teeth glinting through smiles. Three young men carrying flashlights were waiting to greet us.  They loaded our luggage onto a big wooden wheelbarrow and off we went into the darkness.  I looked up.  An endless vault of stars struck me speechless, and I began to feel the tension of our harrowing trip seep out of my body.

After becoming briefly acquainted with our rooms, we were led off to dinner--by candlelight, of course.  We were in a private room, and the food seemed to materialize out of the darkness itself.  And it was my kind of food--earthy, simple, and delicious.  We began with an unforgettable whole eggplant roasted until its skin was a thickly blackened shell, served with an herby relish of fresh tomatoes.  The rest, to be honest, faded into the profound fatigue released by hot delicious food and good red wine.

The hotel promised to offer you a different adventure every day, no matter how long you stayed.  We had spent the morning wandering the old town of Sioua.  But in late afternoon, we were to have our first trip into the surrounding desert--the Sahara of storybook dunes and nightskies without end.  Abdullah (left) was waiting to take us to his rugged 4x4.  "You're on time!" he smiled.  "I like that."  His Oxford-tinged English was flawless and crisp. 

Within minutes, Abdullah had transported us into a landscape of unearthly beauty.  It's one thing to look at photos of the Sahara; everyone has.  But it's quite another to find yourself in that landscape.  All the descriptive words I can come up with sound pitifully inadequate:  breathtaking, humbling...  Oddly, perhaps 'unearthly' is the best way to describe my impression the first time I saw the unmarred perfection of these sinuous dunes sweeping away from me in every direction.  And yet, this was the earthliest of landscapes; it consisted of nothing but earth.  The Saharan dunes testify how earth can look without any trace of man, and the sight of this absence is fantastically thrilling.

We soon learned that Abdullah was a master of driving in the trackless desert.  He handled the vehicle with flawless intuition, and stopped at points he had selected for our admiration.  "Ah!" he sighed.  "I'm so happy you came!  I haven't had a chance to be out in the desert in over a month and I've missed it."  (The "events" in Egypt had meant that tourists had been scarce.)  We learned that Abdullah was the local superintendant of schools, as well as working as a desert guide.  "I have three jobs," he said, smiling his serene smile.  "In the evenings, I make silver jewelry."

I regretted that he hadn't brought any of it along to show us.  I would have liked nothing better than to carry away a memento of this man I was quickly learning was very remarkable.  I suspected the hotel forbade him to "hawk" his work to their clients but I didn't ask.  Evening was falling and Abdullah had come to a halt in a spot that seemed to have been grafted onto the skin of the earth from the moon.  And with his perfect knowledge of the terrain, he had stopped here at the ideal moment--the very end of the day--to best appreciate the sight.   The low light outlined millions of delicate fossils which seemed to be emerging from the earth.  In fact, this is exactly what they were doing, as the desert winds scoured away the soft sandstone embedding them.  Abdullah commented that we were at the bottom of the ocean; indeed, we were looking at the bed of a sea that had retreated millenia ago.

I was so entranced by this sight that every other thought was chased from my mind.  I scurried from fossil to fossil, taking photos, but at the same time trying to tiptoe among them so as not to break them.  Clams, cockles, coral, unidentifiable creatures of a sea millenia ago swarmed around me in the golden light.  Thank you, Abdullah; it was unforgettable.

Abdullah eventually packed us back into the car to initiate us into his sunset ritual:  the making of tea.  Of course, un thé au Sahara has an apocryphal sound to a French person because it is the French title of the Bertolucci film Under the Sheltering Sky, after the novel by Paul Bowles.  Abdullah stopped at another breathtaking vantage point, and pulled his tea fixings out of the truck.  These were:  some crumpled paper, bits of olive wood, and a traditional Berber basket from which he pulled teapot, glasses, tea, sugar, and matches.  In the strong twilight wind, he expertly built a miniscule fire, balanced the teapot on top to boil, and had brewed up his tea in a jiffy.  We slurped it greedily as the night chill of the Sahara rapidly penetrated to our bones.  "No point in putting it out," Abdullah pronounced, gesturing at the fire.  "There's nothing around that can burn, and the wind will leave no trace of it by morning."

On the way back to the hotel that evening, Abdullah mentioned that the love of his life was his small, organic olive orchard, where he spends every spare minute.  So, I said to myself, this dynamic man actually has four jobs.  He's also a farmer!   I felt excited:  organic olives!  I asked Abdullah if we could see his olive trees, and it turned out we'd pass right by them on the way to tomorrow's 'adventure.'  I made sure my camera battery was charged in the hotel office (served by a generator) that night.

Abdullah has, by American standards, a very small parcel of land--under 5 acres, if I remember correctly.  He grows his trees using traditional desert farming techniques:  sunken beds, manure as fertilizer (visible covering the soil around the trees at left), and flood irrigation.  His trees are only 4 years old and are already nearly twice a man's height.  Abdullah pointed to some miserably tiny trees in another field nearby.  "Those trees will never do will," he remarked, "because they're on drip irrigation.  Drip is more efficient, yes, but here with our saline soil, it concentrates the salt level around the roots, which stunts the trees."

Abdullah is fortunate to have a generous well on his property, which pumps into a reservoir (right).  From the reservoir, a network of gravity-fed minicanals (visible in photo above) allows the water to flow throughout the orchard, flooding the sunken bed surrounding each tree when the sluice gate is opened.  This ancient method of dryland irrigation requires a lot of backbreaking labor and precision to install.  When we passed the orchard in the dark later that evening, Abdullah had to stop to chase off some people who were bathing in his reservoir and--probably--planning to haul off some water.


Abdullah grows three varieties of olives, among which Kalamata, which were ripe now.  The trees were lush and the fruit plump and gleaming black.  The sight of them excited me in a visceral way, as ripe fruit always does. ( I think I was meant to be a farmer.)  Abdullah thrust an empty glass jar into my hands.  "Let's pick!"  There was both joy and pride in his voice. 

We stripped handfuls of the ebony fruits directly into the jars where they landed with a satisfying plunk.  Abdullah had an elegantly simple way of 'processing' his olives.  He packs them into the clean jars, covers them with brine, and screws on the lid.  "In about a month," he said, " they're ready to eat.  You can take some back to Paris with you!"  I was thrilled, but Denis rolled his eyes.  He was thinking, I knew, of the difficulties of transporting a liquid back on the plane.  "Laisse moi faire," I said, cutting short his protest.  Let me handle it.  It's true, I did have to go through many crafty maneuvers to get my precious gift safely through the next 10 days of the trip..  Not to mention the transport of a nonhermetic liquid-containing jar in the non-pressurized hold of an airplane.  But I was not about to refuse Abdullah's beautiful gift.  I'd do my problem-solving later.






Our jars were filled in a matter of minutes.  I was a bit sad about this, as I would have liked to go on picking.  I had switched into my compulsive harvesting mode and had trouble switching off. The verdant orchard, gentle and proudly smilling  Abdullah--I could have kept this up for hours!  Pick-your-own olives, well, it doesn't get much better than that.








But Abdullah guided us back to the water reservoir where there was a large blue  plastic barrel.  He pried off its lid and ladled the brine inside over our olives, filling the jars.  His brine, he said, in answer to my inquiry, was of a specific gravity of 15.  I was dumbstruck with admiration for the low-tech, accessible simplicity of Abdullah's enterprise.  He markets his olives through a cooperative.

We had gotten back in the car to return to the hotel when Abdullah hopped back out.  He returned a minute later cradling a bouquet of fresh greenery in his hands.  "Mint for tomorrow's tea!" he announced.  "It grows beautifully next to my well!"

As we rode back to the hotel, I watched Abdullah as he maneuvered around potholes, memorizing  his kind profile.  I reflected about people's reactions when I had mentioned we were going to Egypt for the end-of-the-year holidays:  Raised eyebrows, questioning looks.  And I felt so fortunate to have made the acquaintance of this particular Egyptian.  He had given me a glimpse into traditional Egypt, with its history of excellent education, hard work, and strong agrarian community  traditions.  Abdullah worked 4 jobs to keep body, soul, and his family together.  He was extremely educated and highly cultivated, even in this remote corner of the desert.  He expressed rueful compassion and regret for the uprooted Bedouins who now plied the desert between Libya and Sioua running contraband cigarettes for easy money (we observed them several times).  He cared actively for his community with his work as superintendant of schools.  And he cared passionately for the parcel of earth entrusted to him, turning it green with olives and pomegranates by the sweat of his brow.  Abdullah was in the truest sense of the word a gentle man--a gentleman.

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