The Ubari Lakes are about twenty pools of brine lying in the troughs of a sand sea, and the people who lived on their shores were called the worm eaters. The sand sea is the Idehan Ubari, in the Fezzan of southwestern Libya, and no road reaches it. Getting there is hours of dune driving, up soft slopes and down the far side, sand ridges in every direction. Then you come over one last wall and the oasis is below you: blue water and a thick belt of date palms. Evaporation has worked on these pools for a very long time, and they run about five times as salty as the sea. One animal puts up with that, a red brine shrimp the length of a grain of rice, and that is the crop the name refers to. The Dawada scooped them out of the shallows, dried them and pressed them into dark cakes to eat at home and trade to the caravans.
In the 1980s the government moved the families into concrete housing away from the water. You can still see their mud walls, roofless among the palms on Gaberoun's western shore, with the visitors' camp along the same beach. Umm al-Maa, the Mother of Water, is the one to be at early. Before the wind gets up the surface goes completely still and holds the palms leaning over it upside down in near-black water. From the sand slope above the shore you can hear the reeds moving and nothing else. The lakes themselves are in trouble now. Irrigation pumps draw on the same water table, and the level drops year by year. Mandara, one of the three everyone used to come for, is a floor of wrinkled salt and dried mud, its palms dying back around a hollow with no water in it. The shrimp are built for exactly this. Their eggs lie in dry salt for years with everything inside them shut down, and hatch within hours of water returning — which on Mandara's bed means waiting for a water table that is still falling.