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Worzels World - Memories of Desert Days


I sit, breakfast is done, a fire dances in the grate of my wood oven, the day is dank and drizzly with an icy feel about it. It is decision-making time. Do I brave the weather and embark on some good honest labour in unpleasant conditions, or do I sit here and remember the Sahara Desert? It’s a tough one, and requires further consideration. I lay another smallish log in the fire and put the jug on.

The vastness of the Sahara Desert is almost incomprehensible. It is, I think, the most extreme definition of vast in this world. It is also largely desolate. A place inhospitable to man and beast and plant. It is not though, as is often depicted, endless horizons of rolling sand dunes, although in the Grande Ergs there is plenty of that too.

These Grand Ergs cover a collective area larger than the South Island and are comprised not of sand as imagined but of topsoil, dried by incessant sunshine. It is picked up and winnowed by wind storms then deposited all in two separate areas of around 500 miles diameter. Nothing lives there at all; it is completely barren. Neither Tuareg nor Bedouin venture in. The richest topsoil in central Africa, for want of water, cannot support life.

The remainder and majority of this incredibly vast desert is comprised, naturally enough, of soil stripped rock and clay – hard packed plains seldom interrupted by hill, tree or anything much else. There is a mountain range, The Hoggar Mountains, where a constant sandblasting wind has left only hardened volcanic rock cores to produce a surreal unearthly landscape.

In this inhospitable environment, and much against the odds, life pits itself against the elements and survives. Somehow, where there is shade, life persists. Creatures, though, are not plentiful and almost all, like snakes and scorpions, are nasty. Dessert rats are of a harder more brazen variety than their city cousins.

There are also odd spots where underground aquifers bring water from somewhere and deliver it to the surface. Here in the oasis life thrives. Palm trees, mostly dates, provide wind breaks, topsoil builds up and can receive water, that elixir of life. The dates are moist and sweet, the tomatoes plump and juicy, the oranges divine.

One such place that has access to a little water is the village of Herefok. In desert miles, substantially longer than country ones, it is not far from the Hoggar Mountains and only a three-day camel ride from the Sahara’s largest and best watered oasis town of Tamanrasset. The year we visited was also a year that they

had been visited by less welcome travellers: locusts. These surprisingly large winged insects, when they arrive, come in plague proportions. In only days they will pass through leaving hardly a blade of grass behind, along with devastation, despair and death by slow starvation.

These are amongst the things that I have seen in the course of a fairly eventful life and may go some way to explaining why I was unable to treat the vague threat of coronavirus very seriously.

It happens that another plague of locusts has swept over that continent this year. It is said to be a larger one than ever before. New Zealanders may have missed it in the news, preoccupied as the media were with a few deaths here from a stray virus.

In the village of Herefok that year, of the 80 or so residents all will have gone hungry Some will have starved, the aged the infirm, some infants will have died, killed not by war or drought, not by disease or virus, not by snake or scorpion but by locusts. The rest will suffer but enough will survive to bring in a harvest the following year. As I write this there is enumerable towns and villages on the African continent in the same predicament.

In the US, and by extrapolation most likely throughout the industrialised West, flu is listed as the eighth leading cause of death, just ahead of kidney disease and just behind diabetes. It is way behind other diseases of the rich and the old – heart disease, cancer, accident and Alzheimer’s.

In spite of the global panic over the new flu this is still likely to be the case this year. In Africa and parts of locust plagued Asia these will, in all likelihood, be greatly surpassed by that time-honoured killer, simple starvation.

n Feedback? Email prof_worzel@hotmail.com


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