The fact that we were flying over a part of the Sahara Desert called the Empty Quarter should have been my first clue. But there it was, 11,000 metres below, as the plane angled towards Djibouti and the Horn of Africa -- a patch of sheer red nothing.
I found I was breathing quickly. Perhaps it was the malaria pills. Perhaps it was the 22-hour plane ride, and the baby that had been crying all the way from Paris. Perhaps it was even the medical paper I was reading, about how quickly heat stroke mutates into coma and death, especially after the temperature reaches 45 degrees Celsius. At Djibouti's Lac Assal, the very place I intended to visit, 45 degrees was positively springlike.
Or perhaps it was the Empty Quarter, Al-Rub Al-Khali itself. Down below it looked as if the skin of the earth had been flayed and broiled and then peeled back, leaving only dry pink muscle and bone. It was the loneliest landscape I've ever seen.
My destination was somewhere down there, the hottest place on earth. And not just there, either. If the scientists of global warming were right, I was headed straight for the future.
The plane finally landed at 2 in the morning. It was 39 degrees. I checked into my hotel room, which smelled of sewers, and burst into tears. Coming here was a ridiculous idea. I didn't want to die in the African desert. And I certainly didn't want to die in the Sheraton Djibouti.
Temperatures in the forties, a coast-to-coast drought that rivals the Depression Dust Bowl, infestations of aphids: If anything could make even the most phlegmatic, ultra-rational, cardigan-wearing Canadian think that those damn global-warming wackos might actually be onto something, this summer did.
If global warming comes true, and we do end up living in a place that resembles Djibouti, let me be the first to advise you: The most reliable way to make your living will be as a goatherd or, if you're exceptionally lucky, as a camel man. To do this you'll have to get up at five o'clock in the morning.
Your breakfast will consists of some Afar bread, some dates and a little water -- nothing more than you can carry. You'll walk across a landscape of thorn bushes and acacia trees shaped like faint green mouths beseeching heaven for rain. You will do this in heat that by 7:30 in the morning will be pushing 45 C. (You won't need to convert that into Fahrenheit, either; chances are better than even that you won't be able to read.)
At 9 a.m., you'll lie down on the ground and go to sleep, probably behind a low, curved wall you'll build with a few of the millions of red and black rocks that scatter your desert like obdurate turds from a hideous god. At noon you'll wake again, eat some more and go back to sleep. Finally at 4 in the afternoon it will be cool enough for you to rise and walk until dark. If you don't do this, faithfully sleeping the heat away, you'll die.
In this immense and total heat, the daylight will have a physical heaviness, like yellow paste. Unlike humid, smarmy Miami, for instance, heat here in the middle of the volcanic desert will be subtle. You'll feel it grasp your exposed extremities first. Then the hand of the sun will begin to move its way up your arms and legs, squeezing as it goes. There will always be a khamsin, a hot wind. When the temperature reaches the 50s, that wind will feel like a small brush fire racing across your skin.
You may think the dry heat is not so bad, but the sun will suck your brain dry, too. You'll panic easily. The mere thought that you haven't brought enough water will trigger what Djibouti guides call "water psychosis," a mental aquathermia that will make you drink what little water you do have at once.
As a camel man (if you're a woman, sorry, you're stuck back at the village hauling water), you'll wear nothing more high-tech than a foutah, the Djiboutian version of a sarong. You'll carry a stick across your shoulders, and you'll hang your arms over it to conserve energy. From one end of the stick you'll also hang a single bottle of water, wrapped in moist cloth to keep it cool. That's all the water you'll have until you find some more. You'll eat 400 calories a day, and your arms and legs and hips will resemble twigs in a vase in some fancy downtown restaurant. You'll never weigh much more than 140 pounds.
If you're as clever as, say, Lubak Duhale, a camel man in the Djiboutian village of Randa, you'll eventually own 60 camels at $450 a hump. (They last 25 years. That's good value.) You'll be wary of the males in heat, but you'll admire their ability to go for a week without water.
In fact, if you are Lubak, you'll look a bit like a camel yourself -- daintier than a moose, with light-brown dust on your arms. Three times a month you'll lead a caravan -- walking, never riding -- across 100 kilometres of desert to find salt, which you'll then trade for cotton and three types of grain. Each trip will last eight to ten days.
Strangest of all, you'll be happy. You won't even know your own age. You'll love what you do, because being with your camels in the 153-degree heat will mean you're going to earn something.
What Jim Morrison of The Doors did for leather pants in the 1960s, Arthur Rimbaud did for modern poetry and hot weather in the 1870s. As soon as Rimbaud captured Paris's attention with his famous poems, he swore off writing and headed to Africa. He was looking for a place he could be somebody else, free from the man he feared he might become.
He found that place on the western shore of the Red Sea near a French coaling station called Djibouti. Djibouti's sole inhabitant, as one settler in the 1880s put it, was "a jackal dying of hunger under a thorn tree." That was perfect for Rimbaud.
Instead of writing poems, he became an arms dealer. He began trading coffee, but quickly switched to running guns to Abyssinia -- 100 camels at a time loaded with 2,000 guns selling for $8 each. He was very good at it. At the end of his short life, his leg amputated, Rimbaud wanted only one thing: To get back to the heat. He never made it.
A hundred years later, in 1977, the year the country won its independence from France, Djibouti was a thriving garrison town housing 15,000 French troops. Then the Cold War ended. Nothing's been the same since. Today 3,700 French soldiers do time in Djibouti, barely enough for a rousing chorus of La Marseillaise. Three-quarters of the country's children aren't in school, and more than half the adults can't read. These days the capital looks like it fell out of someone's pocket and hasn't been picked up since.
You can still find contraband, though, at prices worthy of Rimbaud. An ounce of marijuana goes for $10. In the bars -- in any bar, in any restaurant, in any club, at any time of day, right here in the heart of Muslim Africa -- you can hire two Ethiopian girls for the night for $25, or about what you pay for three gin and tonics.
The heat in the city peaks at 11 a.m., and stays that way until half-past 3. It presses down into you like an insult. By noon it has stirred up the city's smell -- a complex bouquet of rotting fruit, perspiration and car exhaust, with top notes of urine, charcoal, incense and french fries, followed by a long finish of human waste.
Rimbaud said the smell of Djibouti drove him crazy. No wonder Djiboutians chew khat, a mild but addictive stimulant (a Junior-A version of cocaine) that cools the body while it fires the mind. Eleven tonnes arrive by plane from Nairobi every day at noon, and shut down the entire country for three hours every afternoon. (Khat also siphons off at least $400,000 a day that Djiboutians can't afford.) Once, when Djibouti's air traffic controllers couldn't work, only one plane landed on its own. It was the khat plane from Nairobi. The first and freshest bunch of every delivery is said to go to the Presidential Palace.
The word for water in Afar is la.
One night in the Mickey Bar in downtown Djibouti, Workei, the 17-year-old bartender, suddenly looked at me and said, "Take me with you back to Toronto."
"Why?" snapped Workei's older sister Garnet. "What do they have in Toronto they don't have here?"
"Money," I said.
"Yes," Garnet shot back. "Money, jobs. But in Canada you work all the time-work, work, work, all the time, just to have money to live." She rolled the r's in "work," as if the word were a small engine. "What else?"
"Well," I said. "We have winter. Cold."
"We have cold in Ethiopia too," Garnet said. "Some regions are cold, some hot."
"But not as cold as Canada. Not minus-30 cold." It was the magic number. Whenever I wanted to shock a Djiboutian, I pulled out the minus-30 detail.
Garnet put her hands on her hips and looked straight at me. "That," she said, "is impossible."
If character is fate, so is climate.
I saw this come true that night. Alex, the cook at Mickey's, took me on a tour of Quartier 1. Quartier 1 is where the prostitutes and drug dealers and thieves live. We went everywhere that night. We started at bars full of fetching girls who'd spent the night with you for less than the cost of a drink. They were in their 20s, used fake names like Madonna and Marta and Hannah, and lived four to a one-bedroom apartment in buildings where the hall lights were always burnt out.
If there was more than one man, or the man wanted more than one girl, the girls took turns sleeping on the floor. "We like it when the man falls asleep right away," Hannah told me. "Or leaves." She had a fridge full of casseroles, a bottle of L'Air du Temps, a giant can of air freshener, no books, and a stuffed dog named Ousha, which means "kiss" in Arabic. Ten clients paid the month's rent.
The last time the government checked, back in 1990 (which has to constitute almost-criminal negligence), 10 per cent of Djibouti's prostitutes had AIDS. Today, that number is anywhere between 16 and 50 per cent.
A crazy girl followed Alex and me out of a local speakeasy. We told the girl to go back, again and again, but she wouldn't. Finally she followed us into a burger joint owned by a friend of Alex's named Atosh.
"Atosh!" Alex shouted. "Get rid of this girl!"
Atosh came out of the kitchen with his fists clenched. He was a tall, powerfully built man with a thin moustache.
"Get out!" he screamed at the girl. "What the fuck do you want? Get out!"
He pushed her, hard, but she sat down in a chair and smiled. Atosh didn't like that, so he kicked the chair from under her, and she crashed to the concrete floor like a bag of apples. It was horrible to watch, but interesting to see how well it worked. If I was ever close to becoming African, it was at that moment, as I watched without interfering.
Now she looked scared, and Atosh threatened to kick her in the head. Then Atosh picked the girl up and threw her across the room, and then again out the door, and then again across the verandah, and then finally out into the street. She didn't come back. Atosh did, though, and Alex immediately introduced me as a Canadian.
"Canadian!" Atosh crushed my hand. He was a completely different guy. "Me, too. I lived in Canada for eight years."
"That was something," I said, nodding toward the door.
"I know," Atosh said. "But it's not like Canada here. In Canada, it's always" -- and here he began to mewl -- " 'oh, please, I'm sorry, please, thank you.' But this is Africa. Here they don't understand please and I'm sorry. Here, in Africa, they understand violence and 'fuck off.' "
I left shortly after that. To my surprise it was already morning. Half past 7 a.m., and 45 degrees.
Africans avoid the heat. On Fridays at the local beach at La Siestra, hundreds of them stand in the ocean for hours at a time, often not moving. From a distance their bobbing heads look like peppercorns in a steamy soup of sea.
The whites are a different story: They have to take the heat on. Yah! Beat the heat! We're idiots. The French Navy Seals march three hours a day with 30-kilogram packs and eight litres of water. The Foreign Legionnaires carry 12 litres, but they march slower -- their famous pace is 60 steps a minute -- and longer.
But the Brits are the worst. Clarence Benbow, the manager of the port, likes to play golf in the heat. In fact, he insists. "July, August, 43-degree heat -- that can be stifling," he told me one afternoon. "But I sail in it, golf in it. Never wear a hat, never wear sunblock. I do wear long sleeved shirts, but that's just to be different. And we never go round with fewer than eight to ten cans of beer." He's 52 years old. I admit, I liked him.
Sometimes the heat was too strong, but more often Africa was too much. The beggars got worse the more they knew me. The Somalis always tried one turn too many on a deal. Sometimes the police harassed me. When these things happened, I retreated to my hotel.
The Sheraton, most people agreed, was the best hotel in Djibouti. But like any African hotel, it had its own quirks. The restaurant seemed to shift from one room to another, depending on the day. Sometimes the lounge had furniture, sometimes it didn't. The telephone had been installed by French engineers, never a good sign. At the front desk I was known as MR. I AM BROWN. I took it as a compliment.
And did I mention the toilet? The toilet in my hotel room was truly African in scale, with the span of a satellite dish. It was like sitting in a flying saucer. And why? Why did the hotel know about eating in Africa that I didn't? Why the need for such vast bowl coverage? Exactly how cyclonic did the Sheraton think things were going to get? Every time I looked at the monster bog, I felt a twinge of fear. The first time I flushed, I thought a Mirage jet was doing a victory roll outside.
When these things happened, I headed to the outdoor pool. It was the only outdoor pool I ever saw in Djibouti, and most of the time it was deserted. White, plastic deck chairs circled the blue water like a set of good teeth. Petrus, the Swedish forklift mechanic, was always out there. One afternoon I found him studying the Air France crew as they played in the water.
"I wondered when the plane crew go home again," he said, as if he had been pondering the meannig of all existence. "I was looking at the blonde in the bikini when she was on the plane. She was covering everything up, so I was wondering if she had the very big tits." He paused. "And she does."
On Fridays, the Muslim day of rest, the pool was open to all French citizens. But that was it. The hottest country in the world, without a public swimming pool? That's even more ridiculous than a middle-aged Frenchman in a plaid bikini Speedo.
Eventually I found my way out to Lac Assal, the lowest point in Africa and one of the three hottest places in the world. The temperature at Lac Assal once hit 70 degrees. The day I went, the salt bank was covered in water. It was the first time this had happened since 1967, Hassan, one of the guides, informed me. It was due to unseasonal freak rains.
But it was definitely hot. I could actually feel my skin grilling. According to the Polar Bear thermometer I had in my shirt pocket, it was 51.8 C -- 135 degrees Fahrenheit. At least I think it was that hot: That was as high as the mercury went before the thermometer burst in my hand.
But it got hotter still as we moved up from the lake, onto the magma fields that cascade down to Lac Assal from the volcano Ardukoba. Hot springs bubbled out of the rocks; here and there steam belched and gasped from rents in the ground. They filmed the original Planet of the Apes in Djibouti.
"This isn't just the hottest place on the surface of the earth," Hassan explained. "This is also the place that is closest to the centre of the earth."
So we were here: In the cauldron of the infamous Afar Triangle, in the middle of the Great Rift Valley, with nothing but matte black lava stone as far as the eye could see. This was the Hibachi of the world.
The strange thing is, it felt like nothing at all. My senses evaporated in the blare of the sun. I actually thought I could feel my mind shrinking. Halfway back to the car, I discovered I was muttering "one step at a time," over and over and over again.
I jumped in, and turned the AC full-frontal. "It's hot out there, huh?" I said.
Vincente, the other guide, frowned at me. "Today?"
"Yes," I said. "Today. It's hot, no?"
"Today is not very hot."
"Today was really fresh," Hassan piped in.
"Tonight, in fact," Vincente said, "I turn my ventillator from 5 down to 3."
Arthur Rimbaud came to the Horn of Africa to become someone else. Africa's heat was a haze to disappear behind. For Rimbaud, the essence of Africa was private. The heat that made Africa daunting also guarded his precious solitude.
But Africa isn't private any more. After South Africa, after Rwanda, it may never be again. In the way it so often focuses the world's attention, the hottest place on Earth has become the public conscience of the world.
So let me tell you about one last thing I saw, one last thing I can't forget.
One afternoon, touring Balbala with Alex, we wandered beyond the edge of town. The further we went, the more orange the desert became fire-orange, and covered as always with stones. These stones always surprised me: How did they get there? This is the sort of thing you think about when it's 48 degrees in the car with the air conditioning on.
That was when Alex told me I was actually looking at Djibouti's graveyard.
From the highway, as far as I could see into the orange desert towards the mountains of Somalia, nothing more than piles of stones marked the graves of the dead.
This is the Muslim way. Because it's so hot, the dead must be buried they day they die. But Allah forbids any memorial other than an anonymous pile of rocks. In His eye, we're all the same. The only permitted distinctions are generic ones: two upright stones on top of a man's grave; three for a woman's; a slight evelation for violent deaths or death by hunger (there were a lot of those); a ring of small stones for someone notable.
But no names. After a while it's impossible to distinguish a grave from the millions of stones that lie about by accident. This, I suppose, is the point -- and it's an African point. Life is cheap, individuals are nothing. In a hot, crowded place where there never seems to be enough of anything to go around, there's no choice but to think that way. That's the thing about the hottest country in the world: It's not the heat. It's the humility.
All I can say is, if global warming does occur, and we in the West end up having to live as the Djiboutians do, look out. If you think the Africans are hard-asses, wait'll you see how we behave. Check out the traffic at any intersection in Toronto on a hot Friday afternoon; that'll be a piece of cake by comparison.
I headed back then, to the hotel. I put on my bathing suit, and lay down on a lounger. Fit French soldiers sat dangling their legs in the pool. Their wives talked expressively amongst themselves, resplendent and short-waisted, their Dior sunglasses and small, thick gold earrings winking in the sun. I watched them over the soft curve of my own white belly.