God’s Fugitive

By now the winter was drawing in, the weather ‘rough and uncertain’, and Doughty was giving up hope of finding suitable accommodation on the island to see him through the winter. His initial plan had been to take a passage to Spain, but, failing to find a direct service, he decided to explore Malta instead, travelling by boat to Syracuse, where he would join the ferry for Valetta. For a gentleman traveller, the winter storms were a nuisance; for the impoverished local fishermen, they could be disastrous. ‘Took up two fishermen and a boy whose boat was overturned after a storm of rain and wind one hour before. They were sitting in their boat which was full of water ten miles from the shore. Syracuse at 3.30 p.m.…’

Once again, the casual telling of the story seems disturbingly uninvolved. It is Doughty at his most detached, as apparently uncaring about the plight of the fishermen as he had been about the villagers on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. In the descriptions he wrote of Vesuvius, he had at least the excuse that he was looking back from a distance of several years on the disaster; here, his notes written down almost as the three bedraggled sailors were taken aboard show merely the curiosity of a tourist looking at a picture. There is not a spark of human sympathy. It is almost as if Doughty feels he has mentally set off for the next stage of his travels, and wants nothing more to do with Sicily or its people: ‘Rowed on board at 10 p.m. in a storm of rain and lightning. Thick weather. Steamed out of harbour towards midnight …’

Presumably there was still no passage to be had to Spain, because what Doughty found in Malta was a ferry to North Africa, a small Glasgow steamship that would take him to the Tunisian port of Goletta. His initial impressions here were as bad as those of Valetta had been encouraging. ‘A large filthy village’ was his brisk summary of Goletta itself, while Sidi bu Said, where the nearby site of ancient Carthage might have been more to his taste, was dealt with even more contemptuously. ‘A confused, rank, open, unprofitable, uncultivated and miserable territorium, scarcely credible ever to have been any good site, or that ever any great city was built there – much less Carthage …’

There is a surprising casualness about Doughty’s dismissal of the scene of one of the great cities of the ancient world – though the Romans, of course, had left little of Carthage standing for future archaeologists. But in a sense, this is a fitting farewell to the culture of Europe and the Mediterranean: he had left Europe, at least for a short while, and here in North Africa he was to find not only his introduction to the Arab world, but also the real impetus to his imagination.

It was in the French colonial town of Constantine, a four-and-a-half-hour train journey from the coast, that Doughty had his first direct encounter with the Muslim religion. It was Ramadan, but there seems to have been no difficulty in gaining entrance to the main mosque – and no sign, either, of the antipathy Doughty would show later for Islam and all its works.

A basilica with 4 or 5 rows of pillars, roof flat, floor covered with Brussels carpets … Lighted with candles in handsome chandeliers, with worshippers sitting against the columns reading the prayers and service on certain leaves of parchment. Others prostrated themselves on the earth, with their foreheads touching the ground.

For a traveller leaving Europe for the first time, even for one as determinedly unimpressed as Doughty, it was an irresistibly exotic tableau – but it was also an image of a native Arab culture that was, in Algeria in the year 1872, struggling to survive. For several years the fellahin had faced a succession of natural disasters – epidemics, crop failures and infestations of locusts – but in 1871, heartened by the defeat of the French armies in Europe, some 800,000 of them had joined a holy war aimed at driving out the colonists who ruled them. It had been a savage but hopeless fight, with farms and villages laid waste by rebels and French soldiers in turn. The end was never in doubt. The leaders of the insurrection were killed or captured, and many of them put on trial as criminals before juries packed with French immigrants.

Elsewhere in the Middle East French, English and Russians nurtured their own ambitions as the moribund Ottoman empire faltered, And in another sense, too, North Africa, Arabia and the Islamic world were under attack.13 Whatever the ambitions of the politicians, Europe’s writers, poets and artists had effectively colonized the Orient for themselves already, and the scene Doughty saw in the Constantine mosque would have been familiar to Victorian England from the paintings and writings about the East that had been fashionable for years. There had been a flood of poems, paintings, novels and fantasies set in a self-consciously Middle Eastern and desert world. By mid century travellers to Arabia were visiting a land and a culture that was fascinatingly strange and different from their own – but one that must at least have seemed, to anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with contemporary thought, reassuringly familiar.

And yet the Orient of the imagination, the Orient of Flaubert, of Edward Fitzgerald, of Shelley, Byron, and of Beckford, was to a great extent a glorious construction of the artistic community itself – an exuberant celebration of ignorance. The day-to-day contemporary reality of Arabia and the rest of the Middle East was of less importance to the writers and artists than the European tradition of the mystic Orient, of the simple nobility of the desert peoples, the romantic despotism of the sheikhs and rulers, the sexual frisson of the harem. It was that tradition, fitting in perfectly with the romantic imagination to create a deliriously frightening picture of the Arab world, that made Arabia superficially familiar to the travellers.

But alongside this romantic vision of the East was a vast and rapidly growing body of scholarly knowledge about the languages, the civilizations and the history of the Orient. The first part of the century saw an explosion of learned societies, of university professorships and periodicals all concentrating on the new and fascinating field of oriental studies. But even that supposedly dispassionate academic work was often based on literature rather than direct observation, and seems to a modern eye to be suspiciously supportive of the imperial and economic objectives of the western powers. Even Sir Richard Burton, not the most reliable of friends of the British political establishment, commented in his account of his travels in Arabia: ‘Egypt is a treasure to be won … the most tempting prize which the east holds out to the ambition of Europe.’14

If anyone could have remained uncorrupted by both romantic myth and imperial dream, it would have been the twenty-nine-year-old Charles Montagu Doughty, with his cantankerous disregard for anything even remotely modern. He avoided both camps: he had no contact with the seductive world of literary orientalism, and precious little with that of the scholastic Arabists,15 and as a result, his observations were essentially his own. If he later seemed prickly, that was because his view of Arabia had been forced into no literary or scholastic preconceptions. He found among the Arabs an ancient world which was foreign to anything he had seen elsewhere – one which appeared to mirror his own sense of antiquity.

The fighting in Algeria had finished barely five months before Doughty’s arrival, leaving behind a bitterness and unrest that even Doughty, temperamentally blind as he was to political upheaval, could not avoid. The trials and the rounding up of suspected militants were going on around him as he travelled slowly south into the heartland of the revolt.

As he pushed inland on a stagecoach drawn by seven horses towards the oasis town of Biskra, the romantic potential of the shadowy scene in the mosque left him unmoved. Instead, as the coach rocked on through the moonlight, he was still concentrating on the landscape – ‘stony, arid, and even all bare and naked … Icy chillness devouring. Crests of the mountains powdered with snow.’

The first stage of the journey took them thirteen hours, rattling over the stony ground in the moonlight, and they pulled into the oasis of Batna at eight in the morning. Even though the reason for travelling through the night had been to avoid the desert sun, noon found Doughty setting off on a four-hour excursion to view the remains of a nearby Roman colony. If his interest had often been lukewarm in Europe, here in Africa it was passionate. He was clearly not sparing himself – and at four o’clock the next morning, as the moon sank low over the Atlas Mountains to the west, he was on his way again.

Doughty was wide awake throughout the long, hot journey, noticing the landscapes, the occasional caravans and the few local people along the road – a knot of French soldiers surveying the route, Arab women with looped earrings of wire, a farmer ploughing the ‘dry dead country’. And then, almost like a lingering shot from a film, came his first authentic image of the harshness, the implacability he would come to know of Arabia. ‘Passed on the way an Arab dead, wrapped in his burnous, bound upon poles, and laid across an ass or mule. No distinct road, but only the wheelruts’ traces across the country …’

It is a vivid sketch, like his earlier one of the Sicilian peasants. Here, though, Doughty focuses upon the movement of the dead man, not that of the living Arabs who were presumably taking him for burial. But where Shelley saw only the ‘boundless and bare’ sands of the desert, Doughty saw the wheel-tracks threading their way towards the horizon. With the scene there before him, he transcends the conventional response; while Shelley had no imaginative answer to the overwhelming power of the desert, Doughty sees the continuing, ageless struggle for survival of the Arabs. Looking around him, he was struck by the awesome barrenness of the sands, white with an efflorescence of salt, and the surrounding bare mountains. But life struggled on imperturbably, with a blank serenity which matched his own matter-of-fact approach. In that contrast, between the vulnerability of human achievement and the permanence of human endeavour, Doughty was to find a lifelong inspiration, which he maintained with a religious force and passion.

It is a breadth of vision, a sense of history, which gradually comes to accommodate not only his unemotional response to the sufferings of others, such as the shipwrecked fishermen of Giardini or the hapless tourists on Vesuvius, but also the dogged courage with which he faces his own dangers.

The little party crossed over an ancient bridge built by the Romans, who had struggled to colonize this harsh country – ‘still strong and good after so many centuries’, Doughty noted approvingly – but for the most part, what signs of man remained were desolate and all but smothered in the blown sand of the desert. He had left far behind him the well-trodden roads and pathways of Victorian Europe, and with them, the ancient and reassuringly familiar civilization they represented. But in the North African desert, with the stolid march of a small group of Arabs along a route marked only by wheel-tracks in the sand, he was discovering a different but equally ancient stability.

It was 22 November when they finally set out from the desert settlement of Biskra, a caravan of ten men with mules and asses loaded with dates, threading their way through the mountains to the west on their way to the oasis of Bou Saida. Perhaps some of the French garrison had warned Doughty of the danger he might be running in such lonely and unsettled country, so soon after a major insurrection; perhaps he instinctively felt the uncertainty of his new position – but an unaccustomed note of caution enters his diary as he leaves on his trek across the mountains. For the first time he was carrying a weapon – a revolver he had borrowed, presumably from one of the soldiers.

He should not approach the Arabs’ tents pitched near their own camp, he was told that evening, in case they were hostile to a travelling European. This, he was warned, was dangerous country. In the circumstances, perhaps it is not surprising that he slept little. ‘We lay upon the ground; the night cold and still … Light cloud covered the ground, foreboding rain. Howling of dogs all the night long.’

It took four more days’ hard travelling before they reached the oasis of Bou Saida, deep in the heartland of the revolt. They were lonely days and hard nights, with the travellers seeking what shelter they could from the driving rain by piling up their baggage and huddling around a smoky fire that guttered in the wind. And yet Doughty, the same man who had grumbled his way across Europe, complaining about the weather, the foreigners, the food and his own health, had clearly enjoyed the hundred-mile trek.

Some of the villages they passed had been friendly, and Doughty had even experienced his first taste of Arab hospitality with a group of wandering bedu – hot griddle cakes, boiled eggs and dates, and a night’s shelter, side by side with a score of newborn kids and lambs in the nomads’ tent. He had, like most Victorian travellers, squirrelled away a collection of notes and ‘specimens’ – plants, a few snail shells and jottings about the birds he had seen and about the landscape and the occasional stone cairns he had passed.

Where his comments about his European travels had frequently been dismissive and critical, the diary of his five-day trek to Bou Saida trembles with the excitement of the unfamiliar. In Europe there was practically nowhere clean or comfortable enough for him; here in the desert, after a night spent on the hard earth with a mattress of dried sods, kept awake by the bleating of farm animals, the barking of dogs and the pounding of rain upon the rough black sacking of the tent, he was content. ‘I had the happiness to pass the Sunday day of rest in cheerfulness and in some hospitality and quiet … There I lay in security, and put away my pistol.’

Notable, too, was his first impression of the Arabs with whom he had come into contact. They had reassured him that they thought the English better at least than the French – faint praise, perhaps, in the aftermath of the revolt. And for his part, despite the earlier fears which had left him quaking by the camp fire and clutching his revolver through the night, he could only note now the continual cheerfulness which they showed despite their hard and unforgiving life – that and their ‘quavered, drawling songs’.

For those of his own party he had nothing but praise. ‘I have taken no hurt, thank God, nor am any the weaker. With the friendly complaisance, gentleness, and hearty kindness of my party of Arabs (three men and a boy) I was very pleased and contented,’ he wrote.

But he set off almost immediately for the coast – a three-day trek out of the mountains, to the first public stagecoach that would take him to Algiers. It was an ironic return to civilization. ‘We were tossed and tumbled enough to break the last bone in our body,’ he wrote after he had disembarked from the diligence. ‘5 p.m., at Algiers. We have made in 21 hours 50 miles, or a little above!’ From there, as there was no ferry for Spain, Doughty took the train to the port of Oran and a steamer to Cartagena. His first Arabian adventure was over.

Chapter Three

In what so land thou comest,

Observe their customs and that people’s laws …

Mansoul, p. 72

Doughty must have been well aware as his ferry sailed serenely into Cartagena that Spain was being torn apart by civil war. When he was travelling in North Africa, part of the country at least was firmly under the control of the French troops; here, there was no unchallenged power to enforce order.

When Doughty arrived, the Italian nobleman who had finally been prevailed upon to accept the crown as King Amadeus had been on the throne for three years, in the place of Queen Isabella, who had been driven out in the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ of September 1868. But there was barely a pause in the political chaos, with republicans and royalist Carlists savaging each other in a whole series of confrontations, reverses and political about-turns.

Only a year later Amadeus himself would be dethroned in his turn. It was a time of ferment; and yet, except for the occasional petulant complaint of trains held up by gangs of armed men, Doughty let it pass him by, just as he had the aftermath of the convulsions in France. He had a straightforward, unimaginative physical courage: he was apparently undaunted – and indeed uninterested – by the very real dangers posed by the wandering bands of partisans and militias.

Traces of the Arab world he had left behind on the other side of the Mediterranean were still all about him: the cultures of Christianity and Islam, of Europe and North Africa, the Spanish and the Arabs, had touched each other in Spain over the centuries, and left their mark. There was the architecture left behind by the Moors, and a whole range of Spanish customs and words that were clearly derived from the Arabic. Local peasants wore a kerchief wound around their heads, he noticed – a hakis, virtually the same word as the Arab harki. The villages, with their walls built of baked mud bricks, their houses furnished only with mats spread upon the floor, could have been plucked from the North African landscape of the Maghreb; many of the names of the people could equally well be Arabic as Spanish.

This mingling of the two civilizations, he found later, was a source of continual fascination to the educated townsmen of Arabia. Following their arrival in Gibraltar in 711 the Arabs played a leading role in the life and culture of southern Spain for over 700 years, and although it was nearly four centuries since they had finally been expelled, the legends and tales of Muslim Spain were still current in the coffee houses of the oasis towns.

In Arabia such knowledge would prove an effective way for Doughty to establish friendly relations with the people he met. Here in Spain, it seemed to tie together his interest in language with the great scientific movements of the day. If biological species had evolved gradually over the centuries, if geology and landscape were the products of imperceptible change, so too were language and the day-to-day culture of common men. It was the sort of living archaeology that he loved, laying bare the ancient roots of words and habits alike – even if the final similarity between the two cultures which he jotted down wryly in his notebook, remembering his long hours in the Arab caravan of North Africa, was the ‘drawling, insupportable singing’!

His grasp of the political turmoil of the present remained rudimentary; but, with his books still safely in storage, Doughty the observer was waking up to his surroundings, responding more enthusiastically to the people he met.

On his way to Gibraltar, for instance, he paused in Málaga – ‘a large, uncheerful seatown, without any good streets’. There, he took an interest in the civil strife only when he met a republican gran carabinero who gripped him with his description of the conflict that had engulfed the town just a few weeks before. Forty-five people had been killed in the street-fighting between republicans and Carlists – reason enough, perhaps, in Málaga as in Paris, to wipe any cheerful smile off the face of the town.

The soldier had four or five musket balls still lodged in his body, and he was on the way for treatment in the relative peace of Gibraltar. The excitement is almost audible as Doughty hurriedly jots down what his expansive new friend has told him.

He said that if he had the opportunity, he would cut the king in pieces with his knife! That the Italians were a people of fiddlers, and that the king was chosen by 150 men only. That all Andalucia was Republican, that all the paysants were méchants, and that in time of any trouble, they would sally from their houses, and kill any person they might find of the opposite party.

The gran carabinero, all moustache-twirling braggadocio, may sound like a character from an opera, with his loud-mouthed and one-dimensional political analysis – but Doughty does at least take a lively interest in what he has to say about the troubles.

Earlier in his travels, the people he met seem often to have drifted through his diaries half-noticed, like extras on a film-set; now, as he gets more deeply involved in his journeying, the characters come increasingly alive under his more focused gaze.

Over the next few weeks he travelled to and fro across southern Spain, peering slightly wistfully, as a would-be naval officer, at the big artillery pieces which loomed threateningly from the fortified galleries of Gibraltar, searching for Phoenician ruins in Cadiz, jotting down revolutionary slogans from the walls of Seville, and muttering tetchily all the while about his personal discomfort: gnats and crudely executed religious oil paintings in Seville, and another ‘night of purgatory in the diligence’ on the roads through the mountains of the Santa Morena – everything, it seemed, was designed for his irritation.

He arrived in Lisbon on 19 March after another fifteen-hour train journey. The life of a poor wanderer was beginning to pall, and he planned to spend some time in the Portuguese capital gathering his strength and throwing himself with more enthusiasm, at least for a while, into the role of middle-class traveller. He spent sixteen days there, staying at the English-run Barnards Hotel, drawing more funds from home, and meeting fellow travellers and a few compatriots who lived in the city. ‘The banker introduced me to the Gremio, an admirable club … which was immediately opposite,’ he noted. This, perhaps, was more the sort of life that his relatives in Suffolk would have envisaged – although there is still no suggestion that he might resume the studies which had enjoyed such all-consuming importance only a few months before.

He needed the rest because his health was failing – just as the travelling was about to get even more wearing. ‘Two long nights and a day’ in a stagecoach took him to Toledo, and on to Madrid, where he rested for another week. ‘Thence by the night mail 16 hours to Valencia – a journey almost too great for me, being now full of weakness and with a terrible bronchitis, but I trust nearly the last.’

This, perhaps, was the moment he was referring to years later, when he confessed he had been tempted to end his travelling and return home; or maybe he was looking forward to a longer rest in Italy. In any case, there were more hardships to come before he left Spain.

He set off early in the morning for Barcelona, where he hoped to find a ferry out of Spain. But the civil wars were still raging around him, sometimes dangerously close, with the counter-revolutionary Carlist movement mounting a running guerrilla campaign against the liberal and republican forces. For all their Catholicism and dislike of foreigners, and however exciting a character he had found his gran carabinero republican, Doughty might have been expected to feel some sympathy for the arch-traditionalists of the Carlist movement; what troubled him, though, was the disruption of his travel plans rather than the politics or the physical danger. The whole region was ‘infested by assassins, Carlists’, but personal safety never seems to have been a great concern of Doughty’s – not on the slopes of Vesuvius, not in North Africa, not in his later travels in Arabia, and not here either. ‘At Tarragona, we were compelled to halt. Half the distance from there to Barcelona, they occupy the way, having fired upon the train the previous evening, and threatening the lives of the engine drivers if they conducted trains. For this, the traffic is at a stand.’

And, with Barcelona now completely cut off from the landward side, at a stand it continued for three days. Doughty was stuck in the port of Tarragona. The only way past the surrounding Carlists was by sea, and late on the Sunday evening he embarked on a little schooner for the brief run down the coast.

In Barcelona a ship was in port, about to set out for France, and in less than twenty-four hours he was on board. Two nights in Marseilles were spent sleeping under the stars before he found a passage on to Naples, from where he had now decided – his health apparently no longer giving him trouble – to travel on to Greece. ‘The morning of the second day, we cast anchor in the Bay of Naples, a good passage and a fair wind.’