Assekrem stands in a field of extinct volcanoes, and the last of them were probably still erupting while people lived beneath them. The plateau rises to 2,726 metres in the Hoggar Mountains of southern Algeria, at the centre of the Atakor — a volcanic field of some 450 vents that fired in pulses beginning 20 million years ago. The youngest pulse ran almost to the present: lava here buried lake sediments and pottery only about 10,000 years old, and Tuareg oral tradition still tells of mountains that burned. What you see today is only the hardest part of that field. The loose ash and cinder washed away, leaving the tough plugs that once clogged the volcanoes' throats standing alone — a skyline of black needles, spires and pyramids with almost nothing growing between them.
You come for the first ten minutes of the day. Travellers sleep on the plateau and climb the stone footpath in the dark; at sunrise the spires turn from flat black cut-outs to burnt orange, ridge by ridge, in complete silence. The small hermitage on the summit was built in 1911 by Charles de Foucauld, a French cavalry officer turned hermit who spent his last years here writing down the Tuareg language instead of preaching. He was killed at Tamanrasset in 1916 and declared a saint in 2022, and the Little Brothers of Jesus still keep his house and open it to whoever has walked up. Beside it sits a working weather station, one of a handful worldwide trusted to measure the planet's background air. Getting there is the hard part: about 80 kilometres of rough piste from Tamanrasset by 4x4, and foreign travellers come through a licensed Algerian agency.