A desert you can walk across
I left Saint-Louis this morning and came south along the road toward Lompoul, a cluster of dunes on the Grande Côte. The guide I read puts the drive from the island at an hour and a half to two hours, and the last stretch is sand, which is why most visitors arrive in a 4x4 from their camp. Lompoul is small, and the guide says so plainly: from the top of a dune you can almost see where it ends. It is ochre and orange sand, a few kilometres from the Atlantic, on the edge of the Niayes, the low wetland belt of the coast.
The same guide says the place is best in the dry season, November to May, and that the cold comes on all at once at night. It is cloudy and warm today, twenty-eight degrees, so I have not yet seen what the guide calls the red light at sunset. I will write about the dunes as I found them, not as the guide promises them.
The tracks are the first thing to read. A line of camel prints crosses the sand toward a ridge, and the wind has begun to soften their edges. Some of the zircon mining mentioned in the guide has changed part of the scenery, and I have not walked far enough to see how much.
Small enough to cross
A desert that you can walk across before the noon heat finds you, its ridges sharp, its edges honest.
The camels left their prints in a line and the wind is already softening them, the way a sentence loses its edge in the telling.
I expected more than this. I am glad to have been wrong, and glad the sand is small enough to hold.
At night, the guide says, the cold comes down. I will be under canvas for it, with the sky doing whatever it does.