“This is where the real Sahara begins,” shouts Azima, my Tuareg guide, struggling to be heard above a relentless wind, six hours north of Timbuktu. Atop a vast sand sheet, a hallucinatory void, I watch Azima, his luminous blue robes billowing in the eddies that snake across the earth. It could be the apocalypse, this infernal scene of a veiled man shrouded by the wind, tearing in manic haste for firewood from the last, dead tree on earth. I shudder. When Azima returns to the 4WD, he is exultant: “Isn’t it beautiful?”

Two hours later, on a sand dune to the north, a lone mud-brick building looms out of the swirling wind, ghostly, then disappears again. We labour up the dune in low gear. From alongside the abandoned building, thirty bleak mud dwellings come into view. We survey the scene in silence. Then Azima says in a quiet voice, “Welcome to Araouane”.

Older than Timbuktu, Araouane was for centuries one of the most important caravan towns in the Sahara, famed for its scholars and saints and for the sweet water from its wells. North of here, the nearest settlement is Taoudenni, a series of salt mines 600km away across the fearsome Tanezrouft. Unlike so many villages in Africa that sought to escape slave traders and invading armies, Araouane was built atop the highest point for miles around. This is a village that needs to be found. If you do not find Araouane, you die.

But more than 1000 years after it was founded, it is Araouane that is dying. Camel caravans have dwindled, and with them the village’s population: barely 100 people now live here. In the late 1980s an American adventurer, Ernst Aebi, sought to make the town self-sufficient; he built a hotel and planted  vegetable gardens. The project was a success, but in the early 1990s the Tuareg rebellion forced Aebi to flee. And, ever since, Araouane has been disappearing beneath the sand.

We take refuge from the wind in the home of Mohammed Bashir, the young imam of Araouane. “This is my second home,” says Mohammed, who leaves the village only once a year to buy supplies in Timbuktu. “The house I was born in was buried by the sand. I can’t tell you where it is now. Somewhere out there, to the north.”

I wonder how anyone can live in such a place.

“They are Muslim,” says Azima. “They trust in God.”

But for Mohammed it is more than that: “Araouane is my home. I don’t want to live anywhere else. If we could grow our own food here, I would never leave,
even to Timbuktu. If Araouane dies, I would rather die here with it than leave.”

In the gauze light of a wind-shrouded sunset I watch the mosque’s old Moorish muezzin through the doorway. Bare-footed in the sand, he calls the faithful to prayer, bellowing into the wind like a divine madman. In the absence of water, Azima performs his ablutions with sand. It is Islam unchanged in fourteen centuries.

At night, the wind drops, but still roars across the dunes like waves breaking on an ocean shore. Voices muffled by the wind murmur behind mud walls. Men wrapped in blankets to ward off the January night chill fill the imam’s house, talking from time to time. A loquacious man whose name Azima cannot remember, enlivens the night, a true desert Arab who seems to have leapt from the pages of Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands.

“Do you like Araouane?”

“Very much.”

“You must come back to build a house here.”

Time moves slowly here. People pass the daylight hours huddled behind windward walls, sheltering in heat and silence. I sit in the house of the imam, watching the wind sweep over everything. I sleep. I walk with wonder through Araouane in a howling gale; my footprints are erased in seconds.

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After a meagre lunch, the men of the village discuss the rebellion. Araouane sits in the eye of a storm that has spread fear across the open desert and its campfires. “Two days ago,” Mohammed tells me, “the day before you arrived, the bandits, Islamists from Mauritania, crossed the desert close to here.”

“The rebels have their contacts, even here in Araouane,” Azima tells me later when we are alone. “They know everything. They know how many cars are coming, which route they take, and the nationality of the people who come. Did you see how they had food ready when we arrived. Araouane knew we were coming.”

“So the rebels know that we are in Araouane now?”

“…Yes… Of course.”

On my last morning in Araouane, I stir to the whispers of people shuffling out for morning prayers. An hour later, I wake again to find the room filled with silent faces, regarding me as I rise. After a breakfast of three-day-old bread, I climb to the highest dune, behind the imam’s house. The air is unusually still and the sunrise shadows are long. A few people emerge from their homes, cowled in blankets.

Azima walks along the dune towards me.

“We must return to Timbuktu.”

“I know.”

After a few minutes of quiet, Azima breaks the silence.

“I want to stay.”

“So do I.”

Sadly, it’s not long before we are speeding down the dune, headed south. When I turn for one last look at Araouane, it is no longer there.