There are two ways of describing the city of Dorothea: you can say that four aluminum towers rise from its walls flanking seven gates with spring operated drawbridges that span the moat whose water feeds four green canals that cross the city, dividing it into nine quarters, each with three hundred houses…Or else you can say, like the camel driver who took me there: “I arrived here in my first youth, one morning, many people were hurrying toward the market, the women had fine teeth and looked you straight in the eye, three soldiers on a platform played the trumpet, and all around wheels turned and colored banners fluttered in the wind. Before then I had known only the desert…
-Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, Cities and Desires I
Ghadames is one of those cities that should not exist, excepting in the mind or on a map. It is in Libya yet touches on Tunisia and Algeria, with sand all round. Its people are not of the desert and not of the coast. They speak their own language uncorrupted by those spoken nearby. The women are said to live in the open air on the terrace tops, and the men live apart and below them but also above ground, on the second stories over the bottom floor store rooms. No one’s feet ever touches terra firma.
I spent the night there with a Libyan driver and guide assigned to me on a visit just as Qaddafi was opening himself to the West, just after 9/11 when he feared he’d be next on Cheney’s list. We toured the old city, through its outer gate and winding through its seven family quarters and their small date orchards owned by each household and watered by green canals according to an ancient irrigation time keeper.
One house was open for visits. The others were mostly locked. Qaddafi had been trying to modernize his country into something new, therefore its old cities had to go. They had to be made invisible, except for an old house here and there made for newly arrived tourists. It was empty but richly furnished with pillows and bolsters and painted on its walls and ceiling with arabesque abstractions.
Ghadames was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site but is now threatened with delisting. The listing document is full of facts and figures- how many homes, how many miles of irrigation canals, how many square feet of habitable upper terraces, etc. Its delisting determination will be made because of war and mayhem, unrepaired rain damage and neglect. Would that Ghadames were immeasurable and invisible.
