Taghit is a town of mudbrick on a rock spur in the Béchar province of western Algeria, founded in the eleventh century, wedged between a palm grove twenty kilometres long along the Oued Zousfana and the dunes of the Grand Erg Occidental, which rise almost 190 metres straight from the palms behind it, and it is climbed above at sunset, walked through in covered lanes and visited for the animals carved on its cliffs when the Sahara was green. The Grande Dune stands over the town with its soft flank climbed in the last hour of light, when the mudbrick rooftops, the green canopy of the grove and an ocean of sand come into one frame, and the old ksar below is built from clay dug straight out of the valley floor, shaped by hand and dried in the sun, its covered passages cutting the daylight down to slots and bars so that the walk goes from glare into near-dark every few metres; in 1903 some four thousand Berber fighters surrounded a small French garrison sheltering inside the ksar, outnumbering it ten to one, and the siege was broken from Béchar. The palm grove of more than 120,000 trees runs along the river and is picked from June to November.
On the cliff walls above the grove at Zaouia Tahtania the rock is engraved with elephants, giraffes and ostriches, no fantasy but the animals that grazed here when the desert was open savanna some eight thousand years ago, found with someone from the town who knows where the faces are, and the villages of the grove downstream, Zaouia Tahtania and Barrebi, keep their own ksour. The town is the Saharan escape of the Algerians of the north, full at the winter holidays for the dune and the camel rides, and the guesthouses stand at the foot of the sand. Taghit is a town between a river of palms and a sea of sand, and the cliffs above it remember the giraffes.