Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [8]
The Tuareg nomads of the Deep Desert call the sirocco the harmattan, the "hot breath of the desert." Sometimes the Tuareg and Tubu clans of the Ahaggar and Tibesti call the harmattan the shahali or shaihalad, the mother of storms, a phrase later picked up, to much ridicule, by Saddam Hussein. The wind's name is supposed to be derived from the Arabic word for evil thing; if it is, most people in the desert would agree it is well named. "When the wind blows the desert trembles," the Tuareg say, the dunes literally shiver and shift and horizons disappear. According to a chronicler in France's Foreign Legion in Beau Geste: "And across all the harmattan was blowing hard, that terrible wind that carries the Saharan dust a hundred miles to sea, not so much as a sand storm, but as a mist or fog of dust as fine as flour, filling the eyes, the lungs, the pores of the skin, the nose and throat, getting into the locks of rifles, the works of watches and cameras, defiling water, food and everything else, rendering life a burden and a curse." He didn't know the half of it: The harmattan brings out Raoul, the Drummer of Death, and his reach is greater by far than that of the Great Nothingness of the Sahara. Three hundred, four hundred, five hundred miles to the north, the hot breath of the desert commonly layers fine dust on Marseilles, on St. Tropez and Nice, and the swimming pools of the rich in the hills above the Cote d'Azur become filled with gritty milk. Dust from north Africa is also commonly found in northern Germany and England.
I've felt the effects of the harmattan myself. I once crossed over the border from the arid north of Cameroon to the arid south of Chad and its capital, N'Djamena, in such a blow. Before I even reached the city, half the Sahara seemed to be passing overhead, visibility was down to less than one hundred yards, and the air was thick with grit. The air had been stripped of what little moisture it contained; when the harmattan comes, humidity has been tracked to fall from 80 percent to 10 percent within hours. When the gale is in full cry, visibility is reduced to a few yards. Sand penetrates everything. Grit gets into the food, the water, on the sheets in the hotels. If you close the windows against the sand, as you must, the temperature can climb steadily, and reach 120 degrees, 125, and the air sears the lungs.
Many other winds in the desert have names: The dry northeast wind is called the alizes, and blows hot toward the equator. The dry, desiccating south winds that carry the glowering towers of dust are known variously as the ghibli, chili, samunjefhya, and irifi. The ghibli is bad, and can seem never-ending. In the Fezzan of southwestern Libya, the camel masters say that if the ghibli blows forty days, God preserve us from the evil! The camel becomes pregnant without the intervention of the male. "Nothing can be more overpowering than the south wind, Elghibli, or the east wind, Elshirghi, each of which is equally to be dreaded," British explorer George Lyon wrote in his journals in 1818. "In addition to the excessive heat and dryness, they are so impregnated with sand that the air is darkened by it, the sky appears of a dusky yellow and the sun is barely perceptible. The eyes become red, swelled and inflamed, the lips and skin parched and chapped, while severe pain in the chest is invariably felt in consequence of the quantities of sand unavoidably inhaled." 16 In the North African Campaign of World War II, several major battles were interrupted by the khamsin. Gales of 90 miles an hour and electrical disturbances so profound that compasses became useless forced the troops of both sides to hunker down, waiting for a lull.
In the Gobi Desert, the whistling winds were said to have been named for the sirens of the open sands, whose passion was to lure men to their deaths, but, of course, in reality it was the other way around: The sirens were invented to explain