South from Barbary: Along the Slave Routes of the Libyan Sahara

Abd as Salam told us the removal of the town’s population from the Old City had started in 1972, when Gaddafi authorized the construction of new houses. We asked him about the solitary inhabitant of the ancient medina. One old lady, whose house we had seen, had refused to move. ‘She is still in love with her husband,’ he replied. ‘He died several years ago. She does not want to leave because it was his house and she has memories of him there.’ What of the rest of the medina, we wondered? ‘There will be big programme to increase tourists,’ he replied optimistically. ‘We will have fairs and festivals, new hotels, cafés, and handicraft shops. We will not forget Old Ghadames.’

That evening, we revisited the camels, tried out the saddles, and packed up the bags ready for a morning start. At last we were ready to set off into the desert. ‘Really, I am happy now because you are leaving,’ boomed Mohammed, staring up at the evening sky with his lazy eye. ‘Believe me, before we had too much problems. Now you have camels, you have Abd al Wahab and you can go into the desert and we are all in good condition, alhamdulillah.’

We returned to Othman’s house, made final preparations for the journey, and retired to sleep after thanking our host for all his kindness and hospitality. He had been good natured throughout our stay, despite the constant invasions of his house by parties of unknown Touareg men and daily interruptions from the high-spirited Mohammed Ali.

This was our last night in civilization, and it was another freezing one, but neither Ned nor I really noticed it. Submerged under heavy blankets, my mind was racing, already dreaming of the desert and its open spaces, of unbroken horizons and long nights beneath the stars with our small caravan of five camels and Abd al Wahab. Tomorrow it would all begin.

CHAPTER IV

The Journey Begins

The transition from camel to car is under way; it cannot be checked. But the passing of a romantic tradition is certainly sad. We can but console ourselves with the thought that it has all happened before – that Roman travellers must have felt the same sense of sacrilege when the hideous camel was introduced to penetrate the sanctity of mysterious desert fastnesses, destroying all the romance of donkey journeys.

RALPH A. BAGNOLD, LIBYAN SANDS

Though your mouth glows, and your skin is parched, yet you feel no languor, the effect of humid heat; your lungs are lightened, your sight brightens, your memory recovers its tone, and your spirits become exuberant; your fancy and imagination are powerfully aroused, and the wildness and sublimity of the scenes around you stir up all the energies of your soul – whether for exertion, danger or strife. Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded: the hypocritical politeness and the slavery of civilisation are left behind you in the city. Your senses are quickened: they require no stimulants but air and exercise … There is a keen enjoyment in mere animal existence. The sharp appetite disposes of the most indigestible food; the sand is softer than a bed of down, and the purity of the air suddenly puts to flight a dire cohort of diseases. Hence it is that both sexes, and every age, the most material as well as the most imaginative of minds, the tamest citizen, the parson, the old maid, the peaceful student, the spoiled child of civilisation, all feel their hearts dilate, and their pulses beat strong, as they look down from their dromedaries upon the glorious Desert. Where do we hear of a traveller being disappointed by it?

SIR RICHARD BURTON, PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF A PILGRIMAGE TO AL-MADINAH AND MECCAH

We left Ghadames on 4 December, making our way through a series of farewells that began at the camel pen and carried on right into the desert. Looking less crafty than usual, Abd an Nibbi and his friend Billal came to wish us well, joined by Ibrahim and our host Othman. Mohammed Ali pulled up alongside in a minibus as we left the road.

‘Really, I am going to miss you, believe me,’ he bellowed across the plain. ‘I am too sorry you are leaving now but I am happy also because you are in good condition. You must be very careful now because the desert is too dangerous. Maybe I will come to see you after one week, inshallah.’

One by one they left and the silence of the desert began to enfold us. It was a still day and the heat bore down on us steadily as we marched away from the diminishing smudge of green that was Ghadames. The noises of the town receded into nothing. None of us spoke. Only the rhythmic padding of the camels and our own footsteps broke the quiet. There was something mesmerizing about these first steps into the desert, a sense of wonder that increased as we left behind the familiar comforts of civilization.

In front, the vastness of the Hamada al Hamra (Red Plain) unfurled before us. It was golden and supremely monotonous, stretching out as far as the eye could see and disrupted only at its extremities by the distant bosoms of hills, discernible as sloping summits floating above the ground, their bases lost to sight in the vaporous shimmering light that rolled over the horizon like a pool of mercury. It was impossible to estimate their distance from us on a plain like this. The light played too many tricks. They could have been three or four hours away or a whole day’s march. Even Abd al Wahab, a man who had grown up in the desert, confessed he did not know how far off they were.

At last we were under way. The desert expedition, which I had longed to make for six years, was beginning. Behind us were all the delays, negotiations and hitches which had felt so interminable, although it had taken us only three days from our arrival in Ghadames to get started. By the standards of nine-teenth-century travellers in Libya, we had not tarried unduly. Ritchie had arrived in Tripoli in October 1818, joined by Lyon a month later. Beset by difficulties in arranging the expedition and receiving permission to visit the interior, they did not set off until the end of the following March. Their plans to reach the Niger from the north were subsequently ruined, first by the exhaustion of their limited funds and then, on 20 November 1819, by the pitiful death of Ritchie from bilious fever in Murzuk. Three decades later, Richardson, who had also intended to penetrate farther south, this time to Kano, found himself marooned in Ghadames for three months while waiting for a caravan to Ghat. There, in failing health and running out of medicines, he was forced to abort his plans to continue and diverted north-east to Murzuk instead.

Abd al Wahab walked at the head of the caravan, leading the five camels roped together. I brought up the rear, watching the five great bottoms – three white, one brown, one beige – swaying regularly beneath their awkward-looking loads. Ned wore a Moroccan porkpie hat that cut quite a dash but completely failed to protect either his face or neck from the mid-morning glare. When his nose had been burnt red, he exchanged the hat for the more practical cotton shish, the best protection against the desert sun. Abd al Wahab was already wearing his tagilmus. For the next two weeks he would rarely be seen without it, day or night.

For centuries, his ancestors had derived their living from escorting caravans through the desert. Merchants had been ‘encouraged’ to retain guides or armed guards for the journey through areas under Touareg control. Charges were based on the estimated value of the goods in transit and the supposed wealth of the owners. Those caravans which did not co-operate ran the very real risk of being plundered by the same men who had offered themselves as escorts. This payment might be in addition to the fees levied by tribal chiefs mentioned by Leo Africanus, the sixteenth-century traveller and diplomat from Granada. ‘If any carouan or multitude of merchants will passe those deserts, they are bound to pay certaine custome vnto the prince of the said people, namely, for euery camels load a peece of cloth woorth a ducate,’ he noted. The Touareg supplemented these earnings by raiding neighbouring territories for booty, livestock and slaves, trading salt with merchants from the north, and maintaining herds of camels, sheep and goats.

Richardson, who was among the first Europeans to come into contact with the Azger Touareg, or ‘Touarick’ as he called them, was not impressed by their manners. They showed, he thought, ‘an excessive arrogance in their manners. They look upon the Ghadamsee people with great disdain, considering them as so many sheep which they are to protect from the wolves of The Sahara.’ What struck Lyon most about the Touareg was what he regarded as their extraordinary lack of personal hygiene. ‘No people have more aversion to washing than the Tuarick generally have,’ he sniffed.

Many attempts were made by us to discover the reason why they kept themselves in such a dirty state; but to all our inquiries we obtained the same answers: ‘God never intended that man should injure his health, if he could avoid it: water having been given to man to drink, and cook with, it does not agree with the skin of a Tuarick, who always falls sick after much washing.’

Richardson’s attempts to establish their historical origins met with little success. One Ghadamsi told him the Touareg were ‘formerly demons’, another that they ‘sprang out from the ground’. He cited one scholarly opinion that they formed one portion of the tribes expelled from Palestine by Joshua. After their first rendezvous at Oujlah, near the Egyptian oasis of Siwa, they then dispersed south and west to people these arid regions.

The Azger Touareg, who have long enjoyed a reputation for courage and derring-do, are regarded by some scholars as the purest of the Touareg. They were known to Leo as the Lemta, one of the four divisions of the Muleththemin (People of the veil), and occupied the desert and steppe between Air and Tibesti, from Ouargla and Ghadames in the north to Kano in the south, an area that encompassed Ghat and western Fezzan in modern Libya. Over the centuries the Touareg drifted south-west under pressure, first from the east and later, with the European scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century, the north. The southern portion of Lemta territory, which reached Lake Chad, as well as the Kawar road and the steppe north of Chad, was lost to the Azger Touareg as the Kanuri and Tubbu tribes swept across from the east. This ethnic pressure on their eastern borders forced the Touareg to look elsewhere for their expansion. Some moved to Air, others to Tademekka.

The exact origin of the Touareg is probably unfathomable. It may be, as one historian surmised, that their claim to have reached Africa during the Himyaritic migration from the east coast of the Red Sea, is no more than an attempt to root themselves firmly in the history of Arabia and thereby strengthen their links with the Prophet. This might be compared with the scattered evidence that the Touareg were once Christian. The symbol of the cross features widely among Touareg accessories. Swords, shields, spoons and ornamental strips around doors all bear the cross, as does the Touareg saddle. The latter, in particular, is worth comment since it patently has no practical use. Watching Abd al Wahab swing his legs awkwardly over the crucifix-like fork protruding from the saddle in his flowing jalabiya, while twisting his camel’s upper lip to ensure it remained kneeling as he mounted, confirmed that. Certain words in the Touareg’s Temajegh language also suggest a contact with Christianity. Mesi for God; anjelous for angel; arora for dawn (from the Latin aurora). The German traveller Dr Henry Barth, who accompanied Richardson on the latter’s second expedition to the African interior in 1849, thought the word Touareg came from the Arabic tereku dinihum, meaning ‘they changed their religion’.

The Touareg’s use of the veil has also baffled scholars for years. The confusion stems from the curious anomaly that the classical authors never referred to the veil when writing about the ancestors of the Touareg. It has to wait until the Arab writers for recognition. ‘They that will seeme to be accounted of the better sort, couer their heads … with a peece of blacke cloth,’ wrote Leo, ‘part whereof, like a vizard or maske, reacheth downe ouer their faces, couering all their countenance except their eies; and this is their daily kinde of attire.’

Sociologists and historians have agonized over its significance. If, for example, it is simply to protect against the sun, why is it then that only the men wear the tagilmus and Touareg women remain unveiled? Whatever the answer, the veil has remained a defining, some would say romanticizing, symbol of the Touareg. ‘Almost all Tuareg, unless they have become denationalised, would as soon walk unveiled as an Englishman would walk down Bond Street with his trousers falling down,’ observed Francis Rodd, author of People of the Veil, the seminal study of the Touareg, in 1926. The slit left for the eyes and part of the nose was no wider than an inch, Rodd observed, and sometimes less. To judge by Abd al Wahab, such strict sartorial standards have slipped somewhat and it is no longer the heinous offence it once was for a Touareg to let another man see his mouth. The Touareg used to lift up the lower part of the veil to eat but would cover their mouth with their hand as they did so. Abd al Wahab, a gentle and well-mannered man in his early forties, was not so prudish.

We had walked for three or four hours on our first day when Abd al Wahab suggested we stop for lunch. Here, in a small patch of pasturage, we received our first ominous insight into what a camel trek involved. All five camels first had to be couched and unloaded, a slow and awkward process for the inexperienced. To prevent them escaping, they then had to be hobbled. To us, this looked a formidably difficult and dangerous undertaking. With one hand holding the head-rope, Abd al Wahab crouched down alongside the two colossal forelegs and plaited an already doubled length of rope about a foot and a half long around the ankles. A large knot in one end fitted neatly through a loop at the other, and the hobble was complete. He then loosened the knot that kept the mouth-rope firmly attached, the camel happily lowering his head to help get rid of this undignified halter. With a firm slap on the rump the animal was encouraged to go off to feed, a stimulus that was rarely necessary. He was already making a beeline for the nearest morsel of unappetizing-looking scrub. Trailing thick twines of frothy saliva, the head-rope was thrown to the ground and the whole process repeated on the next camel. Hobbling the camels enabled them to move about grazing without, in theory, wandering too far. The scope for disaster – such as a swift hoof in the head – seemed huge. Not the least of the difficulties was getting the camel to stand still while the hobble was tied. Every time Ned or I approached one, he would shy away with a flustered flick of the head. Abd al Wahab would not let us attempt it for now. ‘The camels do not know you yet and they are frightened,’ he said. ‘They have to become familiar with you first. You must wait for a few days.’

The sun was fierce and the shade elusive as we fell upon our first lunch of tuna fish sandwiches. I watched the camels receding in the distance, moving ever onwards to the next patch of food. I began to think we had bought fine specimens, for in no way were they ugly animals, as many people suppose camels to be. Perhaps ours was an unusually vain caravan, but together they formed an extremely handsome group. When not hobbled they walked proudly with carefully placed steps, always minutely aware of the slightest obstruction on the ground. Even the darkest and least elegant of the five had a certain dignity of bearing. His svelte, confidently planted legs suggested a long-legged Frenchwoman striding prettily into a brasserie. In due time he would be christened Gobber, due to his habit of spraying anything or anyone around him with generous quantities of saliva.

The hobble reduced the camels to an amusingly inelegant gait. Unable to stretch out their forelegs to anything like their full extent, they shuffled forward instead with tiny steps, an awkward mince that was an absurd contrast to the great length of their limbs. When they wanted to cover ground more quickly while hobbled – whether from fear or having spotted food – they lurched forward with both forelegs together in a rude canter. Their lower lips fell down and quivered each time their padded hoofs landed with a jolt.

By the time we were ready to move on again, lunch had lasted more than two hours. This was far too long. Travelling by camel was already a slow business without holding it up further. We came to the reluctant conclusion that having a lunch stop and covering a respectable distance in a day were mutually exclusive. Having seen us fumble around uselessly while attempting to repack and load the baggage on to the camels, Abd al Wahab, who was never a great eater anyway, thought the same, and we never unloaded the camels again for a lunch break.

The absence of this midday meal was the ‘first inconvenience’ suffered by Frederick Horneman, the explorer who in 1796 was commissioned by the African Society to explore the continent from Cairo. He had had a difficult start to his expedition. The French fleet had landed at the coast and the invasion of Egypt was under way. Initially imprisoned, he was later presented to Napoleon himself, who offered the traveller his protection for the onward journey. ‘Young, robust, and, in point of constitution and health, suited to a struggle with different climates and fatigues,’ Horneman nevertheless was a man who liked his food. ‘We had travelled from day-break till noon, and no indication appeared of halt or refreshment,’ he groaned, ‘when I observed the principal and richest merchants gnawing a dry biscuit and some onions, as they went on; and was then, for the first time, informed, that it was not customary to unload the camels for regular repast, or to stop during the day-time, but in cases of urgent necessity.’

Our first and last lunch break ended as soon as Abd al Wahab had retrieved the camels, who had wandered off several hundred yards. A camel is an intelligent and stubborn animal. He understands life is more comfortable without a heavy load on his back so can hardly be blamed for trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the deposited baggage whenever the occasion presents itself. Besides, there is always the siren call to freedom across the desert. It has always been like this. Richardson’s camels were no different. ‘The camels are terrible things for straying,’ he complained. ‘If they are surrounded with immense patches of the most choice herbage, even which is their delicium, they still keep on straying the more of it over miles and miles.’ In this respect, Gobber was the worst culprit. Whatever time of day we stopped, he would always make a doomed bid for freedom, invariably heading for his beloved Ghadames with unerring accuracy. The other four, buoyed by his confident departure for better things, would soon follow his lead. Sometimes they would wander maddeningly far.

The first week passed in an aching, weary blur. A little dazed and more often than not exhausted, I did not manage to keep a diary. Part of the problem was a lack of fitness. I had never walked more than twenty miles a day, day in, day out and now wished I had paid a little more attention to Asher’s exhortations on pre-departure fitness. It was also a question of acclimatization, learning the routine of desert travel – the early nights and the waking at dawn – and becoming used to the meagre quantities of food, which seemed to consist almost entirely of tuna fish in various guises. We existed in a condition of permanent ravenousness. By the end of each day bones were groaning, stomachs were rumbling and feet were in shock. There never seemed to be a free moment. We were either walking or riding, cooking or washing up, packing or unpacking the camels, hobbling the camels one minute, rounding them up and removing the hobbles the next, adjusting loads or repairing saddles. The only time when there was nothing to do we slept.

The days of hungry monotony marching across unrelieved plains were enlivened periodically by the sight of Ned filing his nails carefully on the back of Gobber, who became his favourite mount during this early stage. At other times I would look across to see a figure striding away from the caravan at some arbitrary tangent, lost in P. G. Wodehouse’s Life at Blandings, his scruffily arranged shish flapping hopelessly behind him in the wind, tufts of hair sprouting between the gaps. Occasionally, he would look up to see where he was, check his course abruptly, and then wander off again.

For the first two mornings, getting started was frustratingly slow. Too tired at night to pack away the opened boxes of food, we woke late to find a confused mess of loads strewn across the camp. Abd al Wahab, an exemplar of quiet efficiency, had removed the five hobbles tied around the camels’ knees (in addition to those around the ankles) to prevent them escaping at night, and set them off grazing. Too polite to wake us, he had already lit a fire and was preparing tea. With breakfast over, the camels had to be rounded up, hobbled at the knee again, and loaded. Abd al Wahab and Abd an Nibbi had prepared several camel bags for us. The design was simple but ingenious. A rope was tied around a stone inside the top of each side of the bag and made into a loop. The two loops were then passed over the camel’s back, slipped into corresponding loops from a bag on the camel’s other side, and held in place by two pieces of wood inserted at right angles. Water bidouns, tied together in specially sewn bags, were similarly loaded.

‘What time is it?’ asked Abd al Wahab as we set off after our first night in the desert. Embarrassed, I told him it was 11 a.m. He looked mortified. We needed kicking into shape. ‘This is not good. We must leave at 8.30 or 9,’ he admonished. Earlier than that, it was too cold to start, he added. He told us we had to repack the bags at night and make sure the things we needed for dinner – such as food, teapot, mess tins, saucepan and plates – were in one readily accessible bag and not buried at the bottom of different sacks. We should also get up much earlier in the morning, he said pointedly.

We had only been walking an hour after this inauspicious start when a smart Land Rover in British Racing Green appeared on the plain. It was Abd an Nibbi and Billal coming to check up on us and deliver fresh bread and a large bag of oranges. They teased Abd al Wahab for the extremely modest distance we had covered in the past twenty-four hours – thirteen miles that had felt like fifty. ‘My God, you are slow!’ said Abd an Nibbi.

Demonstrating great and undeserved loyalty to his new travelling companions, Abd al Wahab rebuffed their comments. He told them we were doing well and our camel skills, still next to nonexistent, were improving. It was kind of them to come but we hoped this was not going to be a daily event. We had not come to the desert to see cars.

We settled into a certain routine, continuing across the plains, already yearning for a change of scenery and what we then fondly considered the romance of sand dunes. Instead, we traversed an unending, rolling mass of flinty grey and wondered why this expanse was called the Red Plain. In the daytime the desert sun sucked all colour out of the landscape, leaving a dazzling blandness in its place. It was only at dawn and dusk that it came to life with the richest lilacs, mauves, navy blues, pinks, reds and ambers flooding across the horizon to chase off this searing austerity.

Moving up a wadi (dried riverbed) filled with scrub we reached our first well on the fourth day. A trough made of rough pieces of stone ran next to the well itself, which was covered with a sheet of metal, complete with rope and rubber vessel. Seeing the water being drawn up by Abd al Wahab splashing into the trough, the camels registered a flicker of interest and walked over to see what all the fuss was about. An effete bunch of young men – all were geldings – they quickly arranged themselves to best effect, the three whites flanked by the dark mass of Gobber on one side and Asfar, my beige, on the other. In unison, they lowered their heads gracefully, sucked up a formidable quantity of water and walked off with a look of supreme indifference, spraying us with their dripping muzzles as they tossed their heads from side to side.