A dry subject, you might think, and literally you would be right.  While the Inuit people have hundreds of words for snow, the North Africans have one word for all that sand - Sahara, which means desert in Arabic.  The Sahara is the world’s largest hot desert and second largest desert after Antarctica.  It is 2.5 million years old and covers an area in North Africa almost as large as the United States.  That’s a big sand box.

Cairo is the desert’s largest city, and the Nile valley is one of the few fertile places in this once quite habitable region.  Just after the last ice age the Sahara was a much wetter place.  Over 30,000 petroglyphs of river animals have been found in the Sahara, but around 2500 BCE, due to climatic changes, the monsoon retreated.  Today the Sahara receives less than 25 mm of rain per year.

Humans have lived on the edge of the desert for almost 500,000 years, and today the population numbers over 2.5 million. The Berbers are believed to be the original inhabitants of the region.  The Arabs came much later, after the Greeks and Romans.  The Berbers have held onto their unique language and exotic ways.

A young Berber girl starts her jewelry collection early, and by the time she is ready for marriage she is a walking bank account.  Any bauble given to her is hers absolutely to keep or sell.  She brings these riches to the marriage, which she consents to by telling her intended that he has “captured her liver”.

As you might suspect, camels are the preferred way to get around in all that sand and heat.  If it is midnight at the oasis and you put your camel to bed, be sure to snuggle up next to her.  The temperature can fall to below freezing, and she maintains a body temperature at night of 93° F.  She can go without water for 2 weeks and without food for a month, and her droppings are so dry they can be used for fuel.  How’s that for cheap to keep?

At FootageBank, our tent is always open, and we have a caravan load of Saharan images in mouth-watering High Definition.  To view and download clips of the Sahara, click here.