South of Ouarzazate, the road leads to M’Hamid along the valley of Oued Drâa. The thin strip of river, not much more than a stream, is lined by luxurious palmeries, a 100km long, thin, cool line of shade meandering through this bleak anti-Atlas landscape. I pass the Tiniffift pass, and pause to look at the spectacular hills – reading their names off the Michelin map: Djebel Kissane, Djebel Bou Zeroual, Djebel Zagora. Twisting and turning between them flows the Drâa: you cannot always see the stream, but the dense palms never fail to show where the water is. It was from these oases that the Saadians launched their conquest of Morocco in the 16^th century – today the rubble of a handful of fortresses scattered on the tops of the hills mutely marks the sovereignty of time.

By late afternoon, past the oasis of Qsebt er-Rommad, a wind picks up. It is hot, dessicating, acutely uncomfortable. It is from the east ... or is it the north east? Dust blows in, I have to raise the windows, and a haze builds up quickly. I feel a delicious thrill as I realize I may have stumbled onto a chergui -- the demoniac wind of the Sahara that can turn the desert into a choppy sea filled with whitecaps of sand for days on end, with 150 kmph 40°C gusts. It is 4 o’clock; Zagora is about 25 kms ahead; the oasis I left behind is still visible. Should I press on, knowing that if it is indeed a chergui, the road could get obliterated by sand long before I’d reached shelter in Zagora? I pull up on a spur and take stock.

Located in the trade winds belt, the Sahara is subject to winds that are invariably strong and that blow constantly from the northeast, between the subtropical high-pressure zone and the equatorial low-pressure zone. These dust-laden winds are variously known as the chergui – or sharqi, from the Arabic sharq, east – in Morocco; sirocco in Algeria; chehili in Tunisia; and the harmattan in sub-Saharan nations. Other names for the desert winds of the Sahara are the simoom – from the Arabic samum, poison wind; and the khamseen – a variant that blows in the winter from the south-east, named after the Arabic number 50, signifying the number of days over which the phenomenon occurs.

Here on the slopes of the Anti-Atlas facing the desert there are other complications. Another set of hot winds results from the ascent of moist air up the windward slopes I left behind at Tichka pass. As this air climbs, it expands and cools, till it becomes saturated with vapor. Thereafter, its moisture condenses as rain or snow, releasing latent heat. By the time it reaches the peaks and stops climbing, the air is dry. The ridges of mountains such as the Atlas , the Alps or the Himalayas are usually hidden by a bank of clouds, which marks the upper limit of condensation on the windward slopes. As the air crosses the peaks and rolls down the leeward side, it is compressed. Because there is little water to evaporate and absorb heat, the air now warms rapidly all the way down-slope through adiabatic compression; so it is warmer and drier when it reaches the bottom of the leeward slope than when it began its windward ascent. This is a classic föhn wind, and I have experienced it many times in the Tyrolean Alps, where it is notorious for bringing down a smell of dung from the mountain pastures. Here in the Atlas, the föhn wind is called the ghibli. Elsewhere, such winds have different local names: chinook in the American Rockies, leveche in the Spanish Pyrenees, warm braw in the New Guinea highlands, zonda in the Argentine Andes.

In the summer, the inter-tropical front shifts northwards into North Africa. Along the southern edges of the Sahara in Sudan, this is associated with large sand storms and dust storms -- borne on the back of the haboob. Haboobs, named after the Arabic habb -- wind, may transport huge quantities of sand or dust, which move as dense walls that can reach a height of 900 metres. A great storm in the desert rivals one in an ocean: walls of sand stretch for miles, and, as in a haboob, can be half a mile high. Herodotus wrote of an entire Persian army lost in the Sahara in such a storm, never to be seen again.

The star attraction of Zagora is apparently a battered sign that says ‘Tombuktoo 52 jours’ (by camel caravan, that is), and I would very much have wished to see this. But the sand storm shows no sign of abating. I reckon I’m already a day behind from my Dakhla convoy appointment, and cannot risk getting stuck at M’Hamid because of this infernal Sharqi. Emerging from the Hôtel de la Palmerie the next morning, I reluctantly abandon further exploration of the Drâa and Dades valleys and turn back north towards Ouarzazate and then west towards Agadir, the wind howling triumphantly as it chases me away.

As the sun climbs, it gets hot and parched. We are doing a comfortable 80kmph on this paved stretch, so it does not seem unreasonable to open the windows to get some air. But outside it is a furnace, the desert forcing hot dry air onto your face, searing your lungs. So we close the windows, and soon it feels like being in an oven. We turn on the fans, and sit still, perspiring in the hot air oppressively blowing around inside. My 10 o’clock, my clothes are drenched with sweat, I feel drained. Anders keeps saying that all the dust and salt in the air is not doing the engine any good, and gradually we start worrying with him – there’s nothing else to do.

Tarfaya is the last outpost of pre-1975 Morocco. Once we leave it behind, the ground begins to dip, and we slowly enter the Tah depression, a curious geological feature that takes the road nearly fifty meters below sea level for a dozen miles. We drive on towards the bottom of this bowl; the air turns fetid, and the sun disappears over the tilted-up western horizon. As evening falls, we cross over the 26^th parallel into the former Spanish territory of Western Sahara. Polisario country.

The history of this windswept, parched piece of hammada is as fascinating as it is controversial. Unknown hands engraved elephants, rhinos, giraffes in the desert – between 5000BC and 2500 BC, this Atlantic seaboard was lush savannah. The rock engravings also show iron wielding, chariot-riding, ox-herding Berbers arrive from the north. These peoples were related to the Berbers of the Atlas, and called themselves the Sanhaja. As the desert formed, the Sanhaja were unable to form population centers like their kin in Southern Morocco; without oases, agriculture never developed, and, somehow, in spite of being close to the coast, the tribes never learnt to build boats or fish. They became, instead, ‘sons of the clouds’, following the scattered rain in a never-ending search for fresh pasture, supplementing their dependence on livestock with salt mined from the desert, or with guiding caravans on the trade routes between West Africa and Europe.

In the 13^th century, the Beni Hassan, a bedouin tribe from Yemen, arrived in the Western Sahara, skirting the fringes of the desert in a long trek across Egypt, Libya and Algeria. The Sanhaja were forced into serfdom by these newcomers, giving rise to a caste system of tribes. The victorious Arab tribes became ahel mdafa – people of the gun – a caste of free warriors. The upper echelons of Sanhaja society, the zawiyya tribes -- were relieved of the duty of arms, but allowed to dedicate themselves to religion and teaching; the regular ranks became serfs – znaja, the word itself a corruption of Sanhaja – and forced to pay the annual horma tribute. At the bottom of the social structure were the abid – slaves (mostly black), and the haratim – freed slaves.

As centuries of increasing drought increased over the Sahara, the pastures shrunk; so, over time, rather than Khaldûnian tamaddun creating supra-tribal associations, the tribes became more fragmented. The ghazzi or internecine tribal raid (usually for livestock), accompanied with the notion of the diya or blood-debt, became standard features of Sahrawi life. The Sultans of Morocco considered this territory part of Bilad es-Siba, the Land of Dissidence, and seldom bothered with it other than to cast an occasional avaricious eye on the caravan-trade routes.

In the 15^th and 16^th centuries, the great naval powers of Spain and Portugal rose in Europe, charting and exploring the Atlantic coast. But the land, they found, was arid, and any attempt at settlement drew fusillades of ferocious ghazzis from the tribes. It wasn’t till 1884 that Spain found reason enough to set up and hold a settlement named Villa Cisneros near the village of Dakhla on the Oued ed-Dahab (Rio de Oro) bay. Madrid declared the Western Sahara Area a protectorate, and various frontier-drawing conventions with the French carved out a desolate foothold for Spain in otherwise-French-dominated western Africa. Unlike the French, who tried to ‘pacify’ the Sahrawi tribes, the Spaniards established a modus vivendi with them by leaving them alone in the hinterland, in exchange for maintaining peace in the settlements.

In the aftermath of World War II, the growing independence movement in Morocco culminated in the end of French rule and a restoration of the Sultanate in 1956. Tribal guerrillas, who had played a part in this independence struggle, could now focus on the Spanish; they had considerable success, and by 1957, Spanish troops had abandoned all garrisons in the interior, falling back to Laayoune and Dakhla. At the same time, the guerrillas were dismayed to learn that the Moroccan state now wanted to move in and claim Western Sahara for itself. The world took notice -- the UN General Assembly adopted its first resolution calling for self determination in the Western Sahara in 1965.

The stakes were raised when traces of oil and, more importantly, the world’s sixth-richest deposit of phosphates were discovered in Western Sahara in the late 60s. The growing towns and mines led to settlement; by 1974, 40000 Sahrawis lived in the coastal towns, along with 20000 Spanish settlers. But after the 1974 coup in Portugal which spelled the end of Lisbon’s African colonies, it became increasingly hard for Spain to justify being the sole remaining colonial power in Africa.

General Franco started a process of devolution which led to a consultative assembly of loyalist tribal sheikhs. Madrid also promised to implement the UN calls for a referendum. Political parties other than the Polisario began to appear. Morocco looked at these events with alarm, since it seemed Western Sahara was headed towards independence. The armed forces of Morocco, who had twice tried to depose Hassan II in the early 1970s, started raising a spectre of jihad to reclaim the ‘amputated Sahrawi provinces’ from the European infidels. Hassan, his grip on the throne uncertain, when pushed from the right, had no choice but to go along with the radicalization of the Moroccan position.

As Spain was preparing to pull out of Western Sahara, a UN visiting mission concluded that the overwhelming majority of the population wanted independence. The UN General Assembly asked the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion on two questions:

"At the time of its colonization by Spain was the Western Sahara a territory without a master (terra nullius) ? "

"What were the juridical links of this territory with the Kingdom of Morocco and the Mauritania ? "

To the first question, the Court responded that at the time of its colonization, the Western Sahara was not a ‘terra nullius’; and quoted various documents from the historical record to show that before the arrival of the Spaniards, a political authority had been exercised continuously over the population of the territory.

To the second question, the Court said that "at the time of the colonization of the Western Sahara by Spain the Sharifian state had a particular character is certain. This particularity lay in that it was founded on the religious link of Islam which united the populations and on the allegiance of the various tribes to the Sultan through the intermediary of their Qaids or their Sheikhs, more than on a notion of territory."

In other words there was, strictly speaking, no sovereignty in the European sense, but another kind of authority exercised by the Sultan of Morocco over the Saharan tribes. The tribes owed the Sultan allegiance, which they had sworn on a hereditary basis. Further, the Court noted that these links of allegiance between the tribes and the Sultan were internationally recognized -- states called upon to recognize the Sovereign of Morocco were aware of the allegiance he was owed by the tribes of the Sahara. But did this mean that the tribe’s territory could be passed on to the Moroccan state? The difference between classic territorial sovereignty and allegiance to the Sovereign is that the former establishes a link between State and Territory, in accordance with the Roman, patrimonial origins of the concept of sovereignty; whereas the latter derives from the co-extension of political power and religious power as often practiced outside Europe, in places where itinerant tribes often roam over overlapping territories. However, the Court said that while "no rule of international law demands that a state have a particular structure as testified by the diversity of state structures which exist at present in the world, " the primacy of the concept of self-determination meant that any pre-colonial claim could not be binding on the present people of Western Sahara. Whatever rights Morocco or Mauritania may have enjoyed over Western Sahara in the past, they had to be revalidated again through referendum.

Against this backdrop, Spain negotiated and signed, in complete secrecy, the Madrid agreement which partitioned Western Sahara between Morocco and Mauritania. Morocco got the lion’s share, with all the phosphate mines, and Mauritania got the left over, a 100,000 sq. km slab of the resourceless Tiris el-Gharbia desert. Franco died six days later. Spain pulled out rapidly. Moroccan and Mauritanian troops moved in.

Both the Sultan of Morocco and the Mukhtar of Mauritania had, however, underestimated the Sahrawis’ determination to fight back. One day after the Spanish pulled out, the Polisario declared the founding of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, retreated into the hammada with its fighting troops, and began to lobby Algeria, Libya, Moscow for arms.

The first priority for the Polisario was to knock out the weaker of its opponents – Mauritania, one of the poorest countries in the world, one with a small army guarding a large desert border. Polisario columns repeatedly raided the railway connecting interior iron mines (the only sources of hard currency exports) to Nouadhibou, and almost caused economic collapse. The demoralized Mauritanian army finally deposed Mukhtar Ould Daddah and signed a cease-fire with the Polisario in 1979. Nine days later, Morocco moved in and unilaterally annexed Tiris el-Gharbia, preventing the SADR flag from flying in Dakhla.

Throughout 1980, war between Morocco and the Polisario intensified. Morocco held the coastal towns and the Polisario the hinterland. Armed with columns of armored personnel carriers and anti-aircraft weapons supplied by Algeria (which had its own reasons to fear irredentist Moroccan expansionism), the Polisario began to take a heavy toll of the Moroccan forces, which began to abandon their positions in the interior. Hassan relented, and at the OAU conference in 1981, he agreed to an internationally supervised referendum.

As domestic outcry erupted in Morocco, Hassan began to equivocate. He said in 1982 that he saw any vote as ‘confirmation’ of Moroccan rule; he would allow refugees to return and vote only if they agreed not to press for independence; and so on. The Organization of African Unity (OAU) formally recognized the SADR in 1984, and more and more non-aligned countries started to do so now. (India recognized Western Sahara and started diplomatic relations in 1986.) By 1990, about 75 countries around the world had recognized the SADR, while support for Morocco’s ‘occupation’ was scarce, typically limited to her Arab allies. The OAU recognition of Western Sahara caused tremendous anger in Morocco, leading to her withdrawal from the OAU, a situation which remains to this day.

The collapse of Algeria into chaos and the isolation of Libya brought some relief to the Moroccans. The major backers of the Polisario started disengaging, and the loss of aid damaged its military prospects, frittering away the diplomatic gains. In 1988 the UN and the OAU started co-operating in order to develop a peace plan for Western Sahara and the surrounding region. The peace plan was finalized in 1991, and at the same time as the parties to the conflict agreed on a cease-fire, which is still in force. A list of Sahrawi voters eligible to vote in a referendum was to be drawn. The Polisario created its own records of ‘original’ Sahrawis and submitted them confidentially to the UN. Within the UN bureaucracy, perhaps aided by the Americans, these records were leaked to Morocco. (The US needed Moroccan cooperation during the Gulf War to isolate Iraq amongst the Arab states.) Morocco responded creating its own list showing that 120000 Moroccans were resident in Western Sahara by 1974, thrice the number in the Polisario records.

Laayoune

It is late evening when we arrive at Laayoune, perhaps the only town with a grassy football stadium in the Sahara. It is laid out in the precise geometry of a military barracks – which it resembles, crawling with Moroccan soldiers and UN ‘observers’ of the cease-fire. As a result, the accommodation situation is tight. Laayoune is El Eiyun in Arabic; the Spanish took over a village made it the capital of Western Sahara. Wandering around, we were to find no trace of old Spain; instead the UN has managed to produce a cosmopolitan feel – Restaurant San Francisco sells American burgers and fries, and Parador Buenos Aires has sizzling churrasco. Spain has come to Laayoune, if at all, by way of the New World.

Perhaps the desert exists to rob you of your arrogance. It waits for you to make one small mistake, and then, like the ocean with a careless sailor, it tosses you up and swallows you.

We push the vehicle off the road in the blazing heat, and then get the rear wheels raised with a jack so that the damage can be assessed. The impact somehow seems to have loosened the halves of the differential case: some oil is leaking from the gasket. Is it possible that sand can now enter the differential and completely mess up the coupling?

There’s absolutely no way we can manage to repair a differential if anything is the matter with its internals.

Dakhla

We park at an impromptu campsite by the road just before Dakhla on Wednesday night. I watch the sun sink into the ocean from the crest of an escarpment that rises like a cliff edge, separating hammada from ocean. As it darkens, a different emptiness swallows each side of the road seemed, each a darkness beyond reason, each with its own murmurs and cadences. A white moon rises. I light the propane tank to make some soup, and the flames leap up, fighting bravely against the incessant desert wind.

We finally leave at noon, and drive for 350 kms in convoy, till visibility becomes poor at around 6pm. We have stopped twice during the long, hot afternoon: dunes had come up to the road and had had to be carefully skirted. Campsite is where the asphalt ends, 7 kms before Mauritanian border.

At 8 am we set up convoy again; our passports are returned to us. We drive for a few more kms, and stop. The army scout takes out his binoculars and shows us the Mauritanian border post, a concrete hut 5 kms away in the middle of nowhere. Our escort will now return; relations being testy, they do not like to fraternize with the other side. There is no road, only sand. Small red markers mark the passages which have been mine-swept. The trick is to know whether to drive to the inside or the outside when you come upon a solitary ballis.

Late Sunday night, all formalities are finally done; we're ready to drive to Nouakchott, return the 4x4 there, and then catch a flight back to Marrakech. I sit by staring deep into fire in Nouadhibou camp, my last night in the hammada, listening to the ever-present wind.

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