“Places where Eberhardt went”- including Annaba, formerly Hippo Regius, where St. Augustine served as Bishop; Algiers, once the seat of the ruling Bey; Tlemcen, with the tomb of 12th Century sufi teacher Sidi Boumediene, a great influence on her own sufi practice; Timgad, site of Roman ruins; and Ain Sefra, where she drowned in a flash flood at age 28 in 1904.
“Places that Eberhardt would have liked to visit”- including Ouargla, Ghardaia, Taghit, El Golea, and Beni Abbes, all deeper in the Sahara than she ever went
-Map showing her Saharan Itineraries, in Writings from the Sand: Collected Works of Isabelle Eberhardt
How did the editor know where in the Sahara Eberhardt would have liked to have gone but never did? Maybe she was like most desert travelers, always wanting to go deeper. The frost-phobic Glenn Gould called the Canadian urge to keep heading farther into the Arctic the “Idea of North”. Maybe there is also an Idea of South that takes hold when you see sand dunes rolling out of sight towards the Niger River.
So I’m not surprised that Eberhardt kept a wish list of places deeper in the desert that she’d like one day to go. I had one of my own, but I gave it up before going.
I turned back from Timbuktu when I was only a few hours away. I’d gotten to Djenne and Mopti and was heading to Gao via Hombori across the Gourma, so Timbuktu was in the wrong direction and we were busy chasing elephants. I’d wanted to go to Wau ever since meeting a guy named Bau who was heading back to his hometown south of El Obeid. Maybe I’d have run into Bau in Wau. And when KhairAllah said to the camera, Everyone in Kutum [a flyspeck village north of El Fasher] knows me, I’ve wanted to go there to see if he had been pulling my leg.
After seeing The English Patient I wouldn’t have minded going to the Cave of the Swimmers, but I’ve since been to Laas Geel and Tassili-n-Ajjer and have seen enough Saharan petroglyphs. There was a full eclipse of the sun whose path crossed over the Waw al-Namus, a cinder cone rising off the desert east of the Fezzan, and I thought that would do Roden Crater one better, but I missed my chance. So now I’ve erased everything on my wish list without having gone to any. Timbuktu, Kutum, Wau and the Waw…they’ll have to wait for somebody else.