A Land of Curiosities

The following day we boarded a truck, with a guide named Abdallah Ali Moussa, and barreled into the western desert. We drove for eight hours, through wastelands of rubble and Martian hills, until we arrived at a desiccated plain. Here, close to the geothermal hot spot of the Afar Triple Junction, where three tectonic plates converge, a forest of pinnacles appeared on the horizon. We had reached Lake Abbé.

At least, we had reached what used to be Lake Abbé. All that could be seen of the lake itself was a navy blur far to the north. Abdallah told us that a recent Ethiopian irrigation project on the Awash River had disrupted the lake’s inflow. The water level, always subject to seasonal fluctuations, had now retreated drastically, marooning the otherworldly landscape of limestone towers for which Abbé is famed. The scene we’d imagined, with colonies of flamingoes strutting around a topaz shore, was instead a dust bowl, friable and desolate.

Though I had to swallow some disappointment to see it, Abbé’s fumaroles, built up over millennia by the accretion of calcareous mineral deposits, still presented an astonishing panorama. In the densest areas, they formed canyons of melted wax which made me think of van Eyck’s “Last Judgment,” a ghastly ars Gothica of wailing faces. Baked from above by the sun and from beneath by geothermal activity, the ground crumbled pastry-like under our shoes.