2024-04-23 08:16:49
Once you have crossed the narrow pass of Al Jalab which opens between two steep walls of sandstone rock burned by the sun, an unreal vision opens up before your eyes. You are faced with a panorama of superb beauty: a spectacular and unexpected scenography. An authentic coupe de theater unique in the world. For a few moments you remain still, stunned and speechless in admiration of an authentic “miracle of nature”. The only reaction: to remain speechless, to let go of an obvious “incredible” and to be grateful for being able to enjoy such a majestic beauty that not even the most imaginative mind of the most famous fantasy illustrator would ever be able to conceive.
The Sahara, the desert par excellence, as we know, is a universe that reserves unexpected surprises well beyond the common belief which describes it as a monotonous and boring sea of sand interspersed with some oasis with the inevitable palm trees and its dromedary camels. Nothing more obvious.
The Libyan desert can be reached after a journey of almost seven hours from Cairo and is known locally as “al Sahra el Beyda”, the white desert. After getting on board a 4×4 off-road vehicle in the large Bahayria oasis, you cross the “black desert” until you almost reach the Farafra oasis. It is there that you encounter and dive into the white desert which obviously owes its name to the dominant color that has characterized it for hundreds of millennia: lime white.
The ocher and gold of the sand become complementary, accessories to the snow-white (or, as some prefer, the chalk-white) that characterizes it. White are the mountains and the surreal humpbacked formations that extend for dozens and dozens of kilometers. White are the expanses of salt resulting from the evaporation of the fossil water lakes that seasonally resurface among the desert sands. The fur of the most famous nocturnal inhabitant of the White Desert is also white: the fennec, the elusive desert fox.
Describing the fantastic chalk structures that the desert wind, the khamsin, has created by eroding them inexorably for centuries is not easy. Better to imagine the impossible. An impossibility that however becomes reality. We are in the desert of “special effects”: where for a moment, rather than having landed on another planet, you think you have ended up in the middle of an expanse of surreal ice icebergs. Icebergs which – in the illuminated nights of the Milky Way and from a vault in which millions of stars reverberate their pallor on a dazzling expanse – seem to float in an infinite ocean that extends all around you. Dream or hallucination?
Access to the Withe Desert is regulated. It has long been a national park, a pearl of Egypt’s naturalistic and environmental heritage. You can spend the night there – in a tent and defying the rigors of the Saharan night – but not freely. Wild camping is rightly prohibited so as not to desecrate a wonderful place given to us by millennia of “climate change”. Walking in that unreal forest of plaster sculptures it is nice to “stumble” on splendid fossil shells that emerge everywhere, testifying to the presence, many millions of years ago, of a very rich and abundant marine life.
Of all the deserts – and I have personally been lucky enough to have set foot, eyes and soul in several of them – this is the most spectacular and “sweetest” desert also by virtue of its extraordinary cotton candy colour. At the same time, however, it is also the most mysterious I have ever seen. I like to imagine that the mythical king Cambyses (the one who is said to have disappeared together with his entire army, swallowed up in the sands of the desert in that vicinity) was bewitched by the fatal magical attraction of that white desert, as unusual as it was capable of going beyond reality. Recalling the mysterious end of the Persian king (who also became pharaoh) and his powerful army are precisely those same calcined pinnacles, almost wandering ghosts, that populate the entire Withe Desert. Did Cambyses fall victim to a spell among those sands? Maybe.
2024-04-23 08:16:49