The call to prayer shivers dawn’s dry chill. In shaded glades and simple white houses, work stops for a few quiet minutes, then is taken up again. This is an oasis in the Sahara, surrounded by that great sea of sand, where the sun must be respected, and water carefully husbanded, and the harvest gathered in. In Nefta, in Tamerza, at Kebili and tens of other oases here in southern Tunisia, men harvest dates. An ordinary date may be bready and dry, or dark and treacly, or chewy and hard – and each has its place – but here, one date is king, the commander of high praise and high prices. That date is the deglet nour. Blonde, slim and elegant, deglet nour dates (whose name means ‘fingers of light’) are rich in texture and long, complex and full in the mouth, with both fresh and dried flavours and a sweet, velvet taste.
Ten men form a caterpillar up the trunk, their feet bare or shod in tartan carpet slippers
As the sun is risen, breakfast is also promised, a meal of plump dates, bread, eggs, yogurt, wild honey and mint tea, and here we meet Mohsen Bourjbel. Mohsen is a subtle type of chap, tall, with careful hair and an expensive leather jacket; he speaks quietly, in honeyed, Arabic-inflected French. Deglet nour dates are Mohsen’s life: “Miraculous,” he calls them. “Eat one and you feel like a lion!” Tunisia is a world-leading producer of deglet nour dates and Mohsen, for all his modesty, is Tunisia’s biggest buyer. During the December harvest, he travels the Saharan oases, meeting growers, tasting, striking bargains and eating huge amounts of couscous.
“With us, hospitality is a way of life,” he explains. “It is unthinkable to refuse it.” Mohsen’s desert peregrinations are tinted with a magical, Arabian Nights quality, where welcomes are elaborate, and fealties sworn, where the air is light, and camel trains stretch across the bleached blanket of sand.
The Sahara here is unpolished: raw rock and shrubs pock its face like acne. “It is a world of silence, of emptiness and dryness,” he reflects, “but also of life. Look – even the dunes are alive.” It’s true: they march with the winds that whip the desert’s face.
Look hard and prints of gazelle and cape hare pattern the desert floor; lizards skit, small grey birds flit, and the heather-hued scrub produces four-leafed flowers of delicate lilac. Look harder and your imagination sees glorious mirages that hover above the sands. Actual oases seem like mirages, so shockingly green, fertile and sustaining are they. It rains here just about never, and the sun beats hard – even in winter, daytime temperatures reach the mid-30s (in summer, 48°C is unremarkable). Most oasis-dwellers are settled Bedouin, used to the desert’s desiccated vicissitudes: they deal with the relative cool of this season by turning the car heater to full and dressing like Nanook of the North.
“There are two types of oasis,” murmurs Mohsen. “Natural ones, here water gushes spontaneously, and new, where water is drilled for.” In some cases, he says, you have to bore two kilometres into the ground, and the water, when it rises, is boiling hot. In the natural oases we visit, the date palms are tall and close-grown, creating the impression of a crazy profusion of feather dusters. To harvest them, ten young men form a caterpillar that clings to the vertebrae of a palm trunk, feet above head above feet, from dusty ground to leafy crown. Their feet are bare or shod in tartan carpet slippers, the footwear of choice in the desert. The topmost man, his body braced by a sling passed around the trunk and his waist, cuts bunches of deglet nour, each weighing up to 30 kilos, which are passed precariously groundwards, man to man.
In newly drilled oases, the trees are planted in neat grids and are stubby, short. A ladder is climbed, and bunches are dropped to a blanket spread beneath. When finished, the harvester cries a prayer and slides elegantly down. Teams then carefully grade the deglet nour, trimming the bunches into branches of four and hanging them on A-frames for Mohsen’s inspection. The dates glow in the desert sun with an inner light that appears almost spiritual – fitting for fruit often eaten in this special season.
Everywhere he visits, before business is concluded, Mohsen receives tributes in the form of nips of stewed, stomach-scouring mint tea, and in great bowls of couscous. He accepts all this with unfailing politeness in the face of guaranteed indigestion – “a small price to pay for excellent fruit,” he says. The dates are later sent to his factory near Tunis for another quality check.
So Mohsen navigates the straight ribbons of road along the Algerian border. The men he buys from have often supplied him for a generation, and together they plan for the next 25 years.
“It’s a case of being patient and cordial,” he says, “and of encouraging quality above all.” In this land of hot sand and dust, Mohsen Bourjbel practises respect and trust. Quietly, he worships the Saharan peace, and deglet nour dates, too. “They are,” he says, shivering with delight, “a heavenly blessing.”