“The road was now becoming frequented; and my companions with a certain feeling of pride showed me in the distance the high “Mesallaje”, or minaret, the glory of Agades…But arriving at a new place at night is never very pleasant and must be less so where there are no lamps; it therefore took us some time to make ourselves fairly comfortable…Having spread my mat and carpet on the floor, I slept well, in the pleasing consciousness of having successfully reached this first object of my desires, and dreaming of the new sphere of inquiry on which I had entered.”
-Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, 1848-1855, Henry Barth
Barth arrived in Agades, the first European ever to do so, in the dark as did I. My friend and I had pulled into Niamey on a two day bus en brousse from Gao and needed to hurry on to Agades. The station master said we had to wait for a 9 person van to fill and it would leave immediately after, I told him we would pay for an additional seat each, so we needed 5 more passengers before setting off on the overnight drive.
I was impatient, it was getting late, but was told that few ever started that long trip- about 15 hours- in the evening. Better to wait til morning, he said. I knew from reading Peace Corps veteran Peter Chilson’s harrowing book on Nigerien bush taxi drivers, Riding the Demon, not to press one’s luck on the road at night.
I said we would pay for the whole van, all nine seats, so he rounded up the driver and co-driver and we set out from the bus parking. At the exit a few men were standing by hoping for a part way lift, which were not permitted from inside, but it was up to each driver to say yes or no once underway. I told the driver to consider the entire van full, no room at all, and any empty seat he saw had a phantom passenger I had paid for. But a boy stood out from the crowd at the gate, he said he was going pretty far up the road, to Dogondoutchi or some such place, so I told him it was ok to get on.
About an hour outside of Niamey, as dusk was settling in, we pulled off to eat in a roadside joint and bought plates of meat for the boy and the drivers. When dark was nearing we set out again, and I dozed off across the 3 person rear seat with my friend stretched out in the middle seat.
I didn’t know what finally woke me up, but when I came to I was squeezed upright between three people in the rear, my friend was squeezed the same way in the middle, and there must have been at least fifteen of us altogether. The drivers and the front seat passengers were having a loud conversation.
We were moving fast on a narrow tarmac road, good goudron as they said, through open ground, no electric lights, a few lamps lit at roadside. My watch read after midnight, a good 7 hours after we first set out from Niamey. Brighter lights ahead, Tahoua, halfway to Agades, from here forward bare desert another 6 hours. “We rest here a bit,” said the driver, “Don’t leave your seat, or we may leave you.”
I think I counted the time until we left, it was less than an hour, and we were back on the road in our flying coffin, as share taxis are called in Egypt. My legs were bent and achy, I elbowed my seatmates to mover over, to no effect. It was my van after all, all mine, but I was outnumbered. One in fifteen, or two in fifteen if you counted my friend in the middle seat, lucky to be deep asleep.
Dawn’s first streak came as we barreled down the Agades Depression toward the Aïr Massif which stands behind the town like a bodyguard and the sun was inching up when we pulled through the scrappy outskirts into the city center. And there it stood- tall, mud plastered, stuck with wood spars like a pin cushion- the minaret of Agades, the sight I had come all this way through the night to see. Now for breakfast, having wished that I, like Barth, could have slept on the floor last night.
