First, let’s put on some Morocco traditional music made by the Oud – a type of lute to get us in the mood. In Fes, IT went to a class to learn how to play the oud.
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What did we do in the desert ? We set off in two 4-wheel drive SUVs in relative comfort to tour around the areas around Merzouga, and nearby settlements, Tissardmine, and Hassilabied.
The drivers took us north from our camp in the dunes (see our earlier post here). We were soon traveling on tracks over mostly solid rock, skirting around the eastern edge of the Erg Chebbi sand dune.
While the semi-arid desert looks inhospitable, there are human activities scattered all over the area – some are modern like this communication installation, and some are old, e.g., a ghost town (see our later post).
Our first stop was a fossil field, where one can just pick up fossils from the ground. It was in the middle of nowhere, no sign and not even tracks.
Morocco has vast deposits of Devonian limestone which dates back three hundred fifty million years. The Sahara desert was a warm shallow sea and the seafloor was abundantly populated by various extinct life forms – ammonites, trilobites and belemnites.
We found only ammonites (see photos) which have a coiled tubular shell. Apparently, they are excellent index fossils, and it is often possible to link the rock layer in which they are found to specific geological time periods.
While we were all bending down looking for the perfect specimen, a man spotted us and came over on a motorcycle to sell us an assortment of stuff from oil to rocks, laid out neatly on the ground. We did not see where he came from – a kind of traveling salesman. Shopping was not on our minds as there were so many things to discover around our feet.
Our next stop was a brief look at an open-cast antimony mine in the same area, worked by two men – one inside a big crack in the ground to load the ores into a bucket, and another above ground operating a diesel-powered crane of lift the ores out.
We could not see the bottom as it was really dark with the shadow cast by the vertical walls. It wasn’t very deep but we could not see how the ores were extracted from the rocks. Antimony is an ancient metal and its compounds were recognized and used in ceramics.
Our guide told us that the men were mining stibnite (antimony sulphide, Sb2S3) that had been used traditionally to make a blue-black mascara, known as khol, widely worn by men and women in North Africa. Antimony is commonly used as an alloy to harden other metals, such as lead in batteries, and lead and tin in type metal for printing.
Under a cloudless sky, there was no one in sight and the only sound was made by the sputtering diesel motor. There was no shade to get away from the sun, except to go underground. It must be several degrees cooler down in the pit.
While traveling across the relatively flat desert, we noticed rows of small rock piles which presumably act as markers of certain boundaries, probably relating to land ownership.
From time to time, we saw camels roaming in the open desert, without riders or handlers. They were surely not wild, probably just taking a break from providing tourist rides or walking long distance in a caravan.
Our next post will be about lunch in the desert.