The desert is not silent

Everyone arrives at Erg Chigaga expecting silence, and spends the first evening quietly disappointed. The dunes are not silent. Sand moves against itself all night with a sound like a hand on paper, the tent breathes, and somewhere behind the camp a camel makes a noise no one is ready for.

The correction happens on the second night, and it happens to everybody. You stop listening for silence and start hearing the actual thing, which is more interesting.

Two other corrections we make in the same first evening. The desert is cold — genuinely cold, four degrees before dawn in February, and the people who suffer are the ones who packed for a photograph of a desert. And distance reads wrong: a dune that looks like a ten-minute walk is forty minutes of soft sand uphill.

We drive the last hour in low light on purpose. Not for the photograph, though you will take it. Because arriving while you can still see the shape of the erg is what makes the first night make sense.

The camp is eleven tents and no generator. Light comes from lamps that are carried in and carried out. There is a shower, it is warm, and it holds about four minutes of water — which we mention here because it is the single most common question we are asked, and nobody likes to ask it.