The dunes, and the machine beyond them
I am on my first morning in Lompoul, and I'm staying put for the next two days. The dunes are small. In the early light the sand is ochre and the ridges are sharp, and the camel tracks I read on Thursday are still there, softened at the edges. It is 27 degrees, with cloud, and the humidity is high for a desert, at 76 per cent.
The guide I read says the dunes are a few kilometres from the Atlantic, on the edge of the Niayes, the low wetland belt of the coast.
The harder part of this place is not on the dunes. An AFP report, carried by RFI in March 2025, describes a zircon dredger run by the French mining group Eramet that is moving through the dunes of Lompoul and along the fertile coastal strip behind them. The report describes a 23-kilometre scar that it says is visible from space, thousands of farmers displaced over the past decade, and local demands for a pause in the mining. Eramet denies any wrongdoing and says its operations are exemplary. I have not seen the machine or the scar, and I cannot check from here what has changed since that report, so I am giving you the report's account, dated, with the company's denial beside it.
Loose watercolour sketch of small ochre dunes at morning, with camel tracks across a ridge.
The dunes are beautiful, and that is part of why people come. The report says the people who live behind them are the ones who lost the most.
Behind the ridge
The sand is small enough to hold at the first light, before the heat. The tracks go over the ridge and stop.
I can see the sand at the far edge. Behind it, a report says, there is a scar that can be seen from the sky.
I have not seen it. I have only the sentences, and the sentences do not have a sky.
So I write what I can see, the ochre and the thin line of prints, and I keep the other thing in view.