The Aïr Mountains rise from the Sahara like a stone island, high enough to catch rain and hide springs and palm groves in a desert that lets almost nothing live. This granite and volcanic massif spreads about 400 kilometres across northern Niger in a cluster of nine rounded ranges. Its high point, Mont Idoukal-n-Taghès at 2,022 metres, is the tallest ground in the country. The strange part is that the Aïr is a fragment of a wetter world. When the Sahara was green savanna six to eight thousand years ago, people carved life-size animals into its rock, among them the Dabous giraffes, the largest known animal engraving on Earth. The massif and the sand sea beside it make up the Aïr and Ténéré reserves, once the largest protected area in Africa and now on UNESCO's list of World Heritage in Danger.
Water trapped in shaded gullies, called gueltas, feeds small palm oases and a pocket of plants and wildlife found nowhere else in Niger. This is Tuareg country, crossed for centuries by salt caravans bound for the mud-brick city of Agadez. Each year as the rains end, the Cure Salée gathering fills nearby In-Gall with camel parades and the Wodaabe Gerewol dance. By day the spires burn orange against a hard blue sky and deepen to purple at dusk; at night, with no electric light for hundreds of kilometres, the Milky Way stands out to the naked eye. For now, though, the Aïr can only be admired from afar. Niger sits under a do-not-travel warning, the region has seen kidnappings and armed trafficking, and foreigners cannot move here without a military escort.