Views of Africa @ National Geographic Magazine

Views of Africa @ National Geographic Magazine: "By David Quammen
Photographs by George Steinmetz
Armed with two small planes and infinite determination, explorer and conservationist J. Michael Fay set out to create an unprecedented record of human impact on the land.

Just north of the old caravan town of Agadez, in central Niger, stretches the Aïr Massif, a vast range of cinder gray highlands standing up from the Sahara like a coal barge afloat on an ocean of cream. The peaks and plateaus of the Aïr have been shaped over time from a complicated mixture of rock types—including magmatic ring dikes, granitic intrusions, Paleozoic sandstone, and recent flows of lava—but the overall impression they convey can be captured without geologic jargon: big mountains, arid and dark and steep. Their gulches (koris, in the local terminology) are water carved but, in dry season, brim only with sand. Old hoof trails, scratched across high ledges, suggest that once this was good habitat for Barbary sheep, Ammotragus lervia, a hardy species now extinct or endangered across most of its North African range. Maybe the habitat is still good, but the sheep seem to have been hunted out. There are no paved roads and few settlements amid these mountains. Apart from four-by-four tracks up the larger koris, the main signs of human presence are igloo-like rock piles sparsely polka-dotting the foothills. Each dot is an ancient grave. The graves are remote, inconspicuous, mostly unopened by pillagers, and best seen from a low-flying plane. That's how J. Michael Fay sees them, on a mild December morning, as an heirloom Cessna 182 carrying him and three others approaches the northeastern edge of the massif. "