South from Barbary: Along the Slave Routes of the Libyan Sahara. Justin Marozzi

streets. The contrast was intense. We plunged into a labyrinth of streets and zinqas (alleys), through gloom penetrated every few metres by strong shafts of sunlight shining through the openings between houses. In and out of the light we walked, sometimes emerging into the open air alongside gardens of date palms and vegetables. We climbed up on to one of the roofs and looked down on the tattered maze of paths running between walls of dried mud that sliced through this lush growth. To the south the mosque of Sidi Bedri loomed above the shadowy streets.

      The columns and capitals of its interior are thought to have been removed from the Byzantine basilica that stood here during the time of Justinian, the sixth-century Roman emperor, when Ghadames was an episcopal see. A deathlike stillness lingered over the place, broken occasionally by the bleating of sheep and goats and the hum of a few small farmers tending their plots of land. Against the drab beige desert that pressed in on all sides, Ghadames was a bright emerald splash of life.

      Until recently, these whitewashed rooftops had been the entire world of the women of Ghadames. Only on three occasions in the year – including the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed – were they allowed to descend to the streets and make their way to one of the town’s seven squares to celebrate their return to earth. The rest of their lives they led in airy seclusion on the interconnected roof terraces of the town, surrounded by date palms, passing from one housetop to another to gossip, exchange presents or buy goods such as scarves, silk sandals, brooches and coloured leather slippers from their neighbours.

      ‘It is a very old city – 2,000 years old or 5,000 or 12,000,’ Mohammed said definitely, as we surveyed Ghadames from this lofty vantage point. Ten thousand years seemed to be a wide enough range to cover all the options. ‘I have been on government tourist course,’ he went on. ‘This is what they told us to tell the tourists – 2,000, 5,000 or 12,000 years – but believe me, it is very old city.’ And, then, as an afterthought, he added: ‘There are only six guides in Ghadames but only Mohammed Ali can speak English.’

      Richardson met with little more success in his attempts to establish the exact age of Ghadames when he visited the town in the mid-nineteenth century. Rais Mustapha, the Turkish governor, told him then it was 4,000 years old. ‘The people of the town, I suppose, have told him so,’ the Englishman wrote sceptically, ‘but where is their authority?’

      We know from Pliny the town is at least 2,000 years old. In 19 BC, with war breaking out along Rome’s southern frontier, Cornelius Balbus, the Cadiz-born Proconsul of Africa, set out to conquer the Garamantes, the trouble-making confederation of tribes which then held sway over much of the Sahara. He marched first from the coast to Cydamus (as Romans knew Ghadames), one of their most vital trading centres, and made it an allied city. Two centuries later, it was garrisoned by a detachment of the Legio III Augusta, the celebrated force that for 400 years was the sole Roman legion permanently garrisoned in north-west Africa. From Ghadames, Balbus marched his soldiers almost 350 miles south-east to Garama (now Germa), his enemy’s capital in the Wadi al Ajal. The rout did not stop there. According to Pliny, apart from Ghadames and Garama, Balbus went on to subdue an area containing a further twenty-five tribes, villages, mountains and rivers. It is likely these military successes were exaggerated to emphasize the Roman triumph, but Balbus’ achievements in moving his army across such vast distances in the desert and imposing the pax Romana on a powerful enemy were prodigious. The Garamantes, who had previously enjoyed a trading monopoly far and wide through the Sahara, were soon reduced to the ignominious role of escorting Roman caravans. Balbus was given citizen rights and a triumph, ‘the only foreigner ever so honoured,’ says Pliny.

      When the French traveller Henri Duveyrier visited Ghadames in 1862 he came across a bas-relief that he judged could only be ancient Egyptian in style. Ghadamsis told him then that the town dated back to the time of Abraham. Duveyrier concluded Ghadames was a sister community to the early settlements on the Nile.

      The town’s precise age may never be known, but Ghadamsis tell a popular tale of how it was founded. Long ago, a group of travellers heading south stopped in the area for lunch one day before continuing their journey. One of them forgot to take his iron plate with him when he left, the loss of which he only discovered the following morning. Returning to the spot, he wandered about searching until he found it. As he did, his horse kicked the ground and out burst a fountain of water. And so the town took its name from the place where the travellers had eaten lunch (gheda) yesterday (ams).

      Another legend has it that Oqba bin Naf’a, the seventh-century Arabian conqueror who wiped out the last vestiges of the Garamantes’ empire in Fezzan, arrived in Ghadames after a gruelling journey. He searched in vain for water to quench his burning thirst. Like the travellers before him, his mare then stamped her hoof, and a spring was found. It was named ‘Ain el Fars (Mare’s Spring) and, until recently, was the city’s main water supply.

      Water, the most valuable resource deep in the desert, had always been measured and distributed with the greatest care in Ghadames. After collecting in the large rectangular basin at ‘Ain el Fars on the fringes of the medina, it passed beneath ground level to a vaulted grotto in which sat the gaddas, the man responsible for measuring the quantity of water passing through the canal into the town’s gardens via a network of narrow channels. The gauge was a small copper bucket with a hole in the bottom, through which the water flowed in a certain number of minutes. For each bucket emptied the gaddas tied a knot in a cord of palm leaves, before refilling the bucket and continuing his thankless job. There were three such men in charge of the water supply, employed day and night on rota. They were not paid for their pains but received a ration of barley, fruit and dates from the town.

      Mohammed took us into Mulberry Square, formerly the market for male slaves. Women were purchased in nearby Little Mulberry Square. Traces of its miserable past were still evident when an English traveller visited Ghadames in pre-war Libya. ‘Where once human flesh was exposed for sale the walls are slimy and foul: the thousands of slaves have left their mark,’ he wrote. Today, there are no such signs and the square was empty. The last time I had been here, I met two refugees from Sierra Leone whitewashing the walls in preparation for the annual tourist festival.

      We padded along empty alleys, kicking up veils of dust that glittered in the stabbing sunlight, past stone benches built out from the walls of houses where the town’s old men had once sat and gossiped together, past abandoned house after abandoned house, their massive doors made of date palm trunks tightly closed to the world. Some were still decorated with scraps of coloured rags that showed the owner of the house had performed the haj (pilgrimage) to Mecca. The old Turkish school, built in 1835 and later used by the Italians, burnt uselessly under the sun, its roof caved in, its stairs falling ruinously apart.

      This was the sad silence of decline and fall. For centuries Ghadames had been a great trading city whose fame and influence stretched thousands of miles across the Sahara. From Bornu to Timbuctoo, Ghadamsis had held sway commercially and had their own affluent quarters in far-flung southern cities like Jenne and Kano, now northern Nigeria. The Ghadamsi quarter of Timbuctoo was the most flourishing of the entire city, a visitor noted in 1591. Not so long ago, the streets of Ghadames had been filled with the hubbub of commerce, the cries of slaves and slave-buyers, children reciting their lessons in school and the muaddin’s mellifluous call to prayer. Now, all that had gone. The houses were empty. No-one lived here anymore, and the city sat in the heavy stupor of the desert.

      Of the half dozen historic trade routes running from the Mediterranean coast across the Sahara, three were in what is now Libya, and Ghadames had sat astride the richest. Caravans from Tripoli, southern Tunis and Algeria assembled here before taking their goods farther south in three separate directions. Some went south-west via Tuat to Timbuctoo, others south to Ghat and Kano, and a third group travelled south-east through Murzuk to Bornu. For hundreds of years, until the mid-nineteenth century at least, the caravan trade was the bedrock of the town’s economy and most of the trading enterprises, bankers and wholesalers operating in the interior were headquartered here.

      In the twelfth century, Venetians were bringing arms, textiles, glassware and exotic products like Arabian spices, Indian gems and Chinese silks to Tripoli, carried off by local merchants into the desert. By Leo Africanus’s time, four centuries later, European cloth