A truck ran over the only tree within 400 kilometres

Four hundred kilometres in any direction: that was the distance to the nearest tree if you were standing beside the Ténéré acacia, in the Niger desert. It was the only vertical thing on a horizon of sand, which is why it ended up drawn on maps at a scale of 1:4,000,000, where not even a village fits. In 1973 a truck knocked it down.

In 1938 French soldiers dug a well beside it and found the trick: the roots went down thirty-three metres, all the way to the water table. The tree was not living on a miracle; it had its own thirty-three-metre pipe. It was the last survivor of a group of acacias that grew when that desert still had water near the surface: the others dried out and this one held on with its private well.

For the salt caravans crossing from Agadez to Bilma — the azalai, weeks of camels between two oases — the acacia was the checkpoint: if you could see it, you were on course. Back in 1959 a truck had already torn off one of its branches. The final blow came fourteen years later and was struck, according to the version repeated ever since, by a drunk driver: in the place with fewest obstacles on the planet, he found the only one.

The trunk did not stay in the sand. It was carried more than a thousand kilometres to Niamey and today it is kept in the Boubou Hama National Museum. On the exact spot where it stood, in the middle of the Ténéré, there is a metal sculpture shaped like a tree that can be seen, once again, from very far away.