Chinguetti is a caravan town on the Adrar plateau of Mauritania, in the western Sahara, with sand spilling through the doorways of its medieval quarter and libraries of hand-copied manuscripts of law, astronomy and the Koran kept in the back rooms of family houses, and it is counted as one of the holy cities of Islam, the gathering point of the pilgrims of the western Sahara on their way to Mecca. A dry riverbed splits the town in two, and the walk crosses open sand from the lived-in newer town to the old ksar, with herders in indigo robes bringing their camels the same way, to the Friday mosque of the thirteenth century, whose square minaret carries ostrich eggs set into its finials, a motif repeated across Saharan mosques and read here as a mark of the divine; the manuscripts, some a thousand years old, sit not in a museum but in a dozen family libraries where the descendants of the scholars who copied them still act as their librarians, unwrapping the books from their cloths for visitors, the pages of gazelle skin and the ink faded. This Chinguetti moved here once already, since the first town is under the sand nearby.
The dunes of the erg are burying the old quarter, and camels carry visitors from the last houses straight into them, where from the crest of one the line between town and sand shows how thin it has worn; on the edge of town the palm grove is fighting the sand, some trunks knee-deep in it and others buried to their fronds, with a wall of dune rising behind the green. In 1916 a French officer said he had been led blindfold across the desert near the town to a hill of solid iron, never found again. From mid-July to the end of August the grove comes into fruit and families camp among the palms for the guetna, the date harvest, in the town's liveliest weeks and worst heat. Chinguetti is a library in the sand, and the sand is winning.