Tichit

Tichit stands where the Dhar Tichitt escarpment meets the sands of the Aouker, a line of springs and wells at the foot of a cliff in otherwise waterless country. The setting was occupied long before the town: along the escarpment, archaeologists have recorded hundreds of stone-walled village sites left by herding and farming peoples between roughly the second and the first millennia BC, when the Sahara was wetter, making the Dhar Tichitt one of the most important prehistoric landscapes in West Africa.

The present town is medieval, founded in the twelfth century and shaped by the caravan trade. Salt from the northern mines, dates, grain and enslaved people moved along routes that linked the Sahara with the Niger bend, and Tichit was a halt and a market on them, tied by trade and scholarship to Oualata to the east and to the Adrar towns to the north-west. Its builders developed the distinctive local architecture of flat stones laid without mortar and set in coloured patterns, a technique found in only a handful of places.

As the caravans declined the town declined with them, and drought, the collapse of herding and the pull of Nouakchott have reduced it further within living memory: houses in the old quarter have fallen in, and sand has taken gardens and lanes. Tichit was inscribed in 1996 as part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Ancient Ksour of Ouadane, Chinguetti, Tichitt and Oualata, and conservation work has been attempted, though the town's remoteness makes both maintenance and visiting difficult.

Tichit's culture is Saharan and Moorish, Hassaniya-speaking, and it preserves the manners of the desert with little dilution because so few outsiders come. Time is given to greetings and to guests: a stranger is taken in, fed and given tea in three rounds, poured from a height to raise foam, and the visit is not hurried along. Refusing hospitality outright is close to an insult.

Like the other old ksour, the town belongs to a tradition of Islamic learning. Families kept manuscripts and taught in household schools, and religious authority and lineage still order social life. The mosque is the centre of the old quarter, and prayer times, not the clock, mark the day. Craft skills survive in the stone building tradition and in leather, wood and metalwork made for household use.

The year's great occasion is the Guetna, the summer date harvest, when families gather in the palm groves, eat fresh dates and stay for weeks despite the heat; it is as much a reunion as a harvest. Dress follows the national pattern, the loose daraa for men and the wrapped malahfa for women, with a head covering that also serves against the sand. Visitors are a rarity rather than an industry here, and the courtesy expected of them is simply to arrive with a local guide, dress plainly and ask before photographing anything.

Tichit is small — a few thousand people at most, far fewer than in its trading days — and it is losing residents steadily to Tidjikja, Nouakchott and the towns of the coast. Households live from date palms and small irrigated plots, goats and camels, a handful of government jobs in the school and the clinic, and money sent home by relatives working elsewhere. There is no industry and practically no cash trade beyond the few shops.

Isolation defines the town. Supplies arrive irregularly by truck over a long desert track, so shortages are ordinary; water comes from wells; electricity is limited, often from solar panels and generators; mobile coverage is patchy. A serious illness means a journey of many hours. Sand is the constant labour, drifting against walls, into lanes and across the gardens, and the ruined parts of the ksar grow slowly larger.

Days start before the heat, pause through the afternoon and resume in the evening, when people sit outside and tea goes round. Summer belongs to the groves and the harvest. The town's future turns on questions it cannot answer alone: whether the road improves, whether conservation money reaches the old houses, and whether enough young people stay to keep the palms and the stonework in repair.

Eating in Tichit is the desert diet at its plainest: dates, milk, grain and meat. The groves supply dates all year, fresh in the harvest and dried or pressed into a paste that keeps indefinitely, and they are offered to anyone who arrives, with tea. Camel's and goat's milk, drunk fresh or soured, matter as much, and zrig — soured milk thinned with water and sweetened — is the everyday drink through the hot months.

Cooked meals are rice, couscous or pasta with goat, mutton or camel in a sauce of onion and tomato, with whatever vegetables have come in on the last truck, served in one dish and eaten with the right hand on a mat. Millet and sorghum appear in porridges and couscous-like dishes. Strips of dried meat keep for journeys and are cooked into sauces. A whole animal roasted as méchoui marks a wedding, a feast day or the arrival of an important guest.

Bread is baked at home, sometimes in hot sand, and wheat flour, oil, sugar and tea are the staples brought in from outside. Green tea, strong, very sweet and full of mint, is brewed on a small charcoal stove and served in three successive rounds over an unhurried hour; it accompanies every meal and every conversation. Alcohol is illegal in Mauritania.