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

From an aesthetic perspective alone, it was difficult not to be won over by Asfar. Tall and slender, with his head held high, he walked with the dignified gait and self-confident bearing of a thoroughbred. His coat was the colour of honey, his black eyelashes were of an excessive, dandified length and he had the tuftiest ears imaginable. He was a handsome fellow and knew it. A good-natured beast with gentle manners, he was also the swiftest of our small caravan and walked with a quick, light step. Where Gobber thundered and Bobbles (named after the three protuberances on his nose) whined, Asfar simply purred. The other camels seemed to be fond of him, too.

In an unhappy display of camel racism, the three whites generally refused to have anything to do with dark brown Gobber. Interaction between him and this group was generally restricted to provocative attacks – usually bites to his rump – by Bobbles. It was Asfar who bridged this divide, getting on equally well with both camps, and maintaining camel morale with discreet diplomacy. Ned had chosen Gobber as his mount, perhaps out of sympathy, and evidently felt obliged to defend him at all costs, both against my jokes and the regular sallies from Bobbles. Riding Gobber was a perverse decision, though. However good-natured and stoic a camel, he was also unquestionably the slowest. A plodding, barrel-chested animal, if he had been a cricketer he would have been the village blacksmith batting at number eleven.

The next day, with laborious, stuttering steps we climbed a pass east of the ridge of Qa’rat Wallamad and arrived at another bleak plateau at about 2,000 feet above sea level. On the ground were small stones arranged in a definite outline, the size of a small house in circumference, with a marked recess in one side. Next to them was a rectangular mound of stones the length of a man. We stopped for a minute and looked at these strange features.

‘This is an old mosque where travellers in the desert could pray,’ explained Abd al Wahab. ‘Now people do not use it because they do not travel by camel anymore.’ The recess was the qiblah, which indicated the direction in which the faithful should pray to face Mecca. ‘And this,’ he said, pointing to the smaller outline, ‘is the grave of a traveller who died in the desert.’ It was as remote a spot as you could find.

Later that afternoon, two tiny puppies, one a grubby white, the other black and white, suddenly appeared and began to trot beside us, gaining in confidence until they were almost at our heels. We thought they might have been abandoned by their owners because we had discovered them next to car tracks. Their chances of survival seemed slim.

‘No, they will be fine. They belong to farmers over there,’ said the unsentimental Abd al Wahab, pointing vaguely to a line of raised ground in the distance. They looked desperate things, squeaking pathetically and looking exhausted from their efforts to keep up with the massive camels. I felt the same. That evening, after twenty-seven miles – our most productive day yet – my feet were screaming in my stiff new walking boots as we limped across a rambling pasture of rough scrub. In front of us, his profile uncertain in the dreamy glow of sunset, a young Touareg from Dirj, the oasis eighty miles east of Ghadames, was tending a flock of sheep and goats, perhaps 200 of them. The sun was strong but sinking, brightening and blurring the clumps of vegetation into a steaming amber haze as we made a weary camp. Ned and I flopped to the ground with aching legs that felt like iron rods. Abd al Wahab, as unmoved as ever by our exertions that day, walked off purposefully to hunt for firewood. Nothing seemed to tire the man.

Nights were freezing. On this higher plain, as we trudged along the Wadi Qa’rat al Handua, the temperature dipped sharply. Mornings found a pretty covering of frost on our mauve sleeping bags, from which cosiness there was little incentive to depart. I woke each day to the soft cadences of Abd al Wahab beginning his prayers with ‘Allahu akbar’ (God is great). From my sleeping bag he was an undefined silhouette in the darkness. Listening to the steady flow of his prayers and watching his shadowy figure perform the acts of devotion, rising up, kneeling down, bowing down again, his head touching the ground, was a marvellous way to begin the day. You could sense him shivering in the hostile chill as his modulated voice rushed through this first prayer of the day. I lay on my back watching the bruised sky slowly lighten to dawn and listened to this whispered poetry of praise, one of the most beautiful and evocative aspects of Islam.

‘In the desert, prayers are no mere blind obedience to religious dogma, but an instinctive expression of one’s inmost self,’ wrote Ahmed Hassanein Bey, the Egyptian diplomat who in 1923 travelled 2,200 miles by camel and discovered the ‘lost oases’ of Jebel Arkenu and Jebel Ouenat, south-east of Kufra. ‘The prayers at night bring serenity and peace. At dawn, when new life has suddenly taken possession of the body, one eagerly turns to the Creator to offer humble homage for all the beauty of the world and of life, and to seek guidance for the coming day. One prays then, not because one ought, but because one must.’ Richardson, a robust Christian of Victorian England, regarded Muslims as ‘superstitious pharisees’. But he, too, was moved by the religious devotion of his travelling companions.

It was a refreshing, though at the same time a saddening sight, to see the poor Arab camel-drivers pray so devoutly, laying their naked foreheads upon the sharp stones and sand of The Desert. People who had literally so few of the bounties of Providence, many of them scarcely any thing to eat – and yet these travel-worn, famished men supplicated the Eternal God with great and earnest devotion! What a lesson for the fat, over-fed Christian!

Emerging slowly and with the greatest conceivable reluctance from our cocoons each morning, we were met by the instant smash of cold. It numbed limbs and made fingers useless when they were needed to tie and untie knots during the loading of the camels. Unlike any cold I had felt before it seemed to dig deep into my bones. Swathed in blankets and woolly hats, we cut ridiculous figures, panting vigorously, shivering and trying to revive frozen hands around the morning fire. At least we were not alone in feeling the chill. It was just less excusable because we had warmer clothes than Abd al Wahab and down sleeping bags rather than a few woollen blankets to keep us warm at night. Shrouded beneath the erect, pointed hood of his woollen jalabiya, Abd al Wahab looked like a character from the mythical world of Tolkien. He beat his hands together, muttered, ‘Sugga wajid,’ (It’s very cold), and then disappeared to bring in the camels, something for which we were not yet considered ready.

One of the most miserable tasks of the morning (after getting up) was washing up, usually done while Abd al Wahab was fetching the camels. The saucepan, mess tin, spoons, forks and plates were all encrusted with the remnants of the tuna fish pasta from the previous night, the glasses sticky from the heavily sugared tea. With no water to spare, we filled them up with freezing sand and scoured them with bare hands. For the first few times, there was at least a certain novelty about washing up. After that, Ned and I both loathed it equally. If there was ever an opportunity of escaping washing up duty – such as walking off to bring the camels in ourselves – we took it unashamedly. Ned seemed to be particularly skilled at evading the job. Sometimes, usually when I was feeling irritated and therefore petty, it led to arguments. They went like this:

Justin: ‘How come you never do the washing up?’

Ned (heading away from the camp in the direction of the camels): ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Justin.’

Justin: ‘Well, you’re doing it tomorrow. I’m fed up with doing it every morning.’

Ned: ‘Oh, shut up.’

Long (by our standards) walking days ended around dusk when we had found pasturage for the camels and fuel for our fire. In this part of the western desert it was common enough. Later, the grazing would be perilously scarce. Evenings, too, had their own routine. On stopping for the day, the camels were immediately unloaded and hobbled. They pottered off into the thickening darkness while we set about the most important ritual of the day. The first glass of tea in the evening was always a much longed for treat. In England we would have considered it unpalatably sweet, but after a day tramping across this empty wilderness, it was perfect. Hassanein Bey was initially shocked by the sweetness of the tea prepared by his Bedouin. ‘The result would have driven a housewife of the West almost insane,’ he wrote, ‘but it is a wonderful stimulant after a hard day’s trek in the desert, and a glorious revival of one’s energies and spirits.’

For Abd al Wahab, a man whose emotional repertoire did not include excitement, preparing tea was something of a sacred rite. It was unthinkable that either Ned or I could make it. With great care he would extract a small amount of tea leaves from a bag, fill his beaten-up teapot with water and put it into the fire to boil from cold, raking the embers around it. Within a few minutes tea was bubbling from the spout, hissing onto the fire below. It was not strong enough yet for Abd al Wahab so was left to brew noisily. At intervals he would remove the lid, inspect the tea knowingly and put the pot back on to boil. Sugar – enough to make a diabetic tremble – was then added to the pot. There was no such thing as stirring. It was dissolved instead by pouring out a glassful, returning it back to the pot, pouring out another and so on. This last process sometimes continued to what seemed to us – tired and thirsty as we were – unnecessary lengths, frequently until the tea was no longer hot but merely warm.

When Abd al Wahab finally deemed it ready (having tasted it first), the tea was then poured out with great ceremony. The spout was initially held close to the rim of the glass, steadily rising up a foot or so until it required definite skill to aim the sputtering stream. The height to which the teapot was raised depended on how flamboyant he was feeling or whether he was in good spirits. The tea came from China, as did the teapot, but the end product was regarded as definitively Touareg.

After this glass or two of tea, the blackness of the night was complete, intensified by the golden light of the fire. It was a little awe-inspiring to watch Abd al Wahab dissolve into the darkness to collect the camels. Twenty minutes later – it varied according to how far they had roamed – a sound of shuffling announced their return. They were still invisible. One by one they were made to kneel down. ‘They knelt without noise: and I timed it in my memory,’ wrote T. E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

First the hesitation, as the camels, looking down, felt the soil with one foot for a soft place; then the muffled thud and the sudden loosening of breath as they dropped on their fore-legs, since this party had come far and were tired; then the shuffle as the hind legs were folded in, and the rocking as they tossed from side to side thrusting outward with their knees to bury them in the cooler subsoil below the burning flints …

At night, hobbled upon the ground close together, they were a wonderful sight, great beached ships of the desert irregularly illuminated by the jumping flames of our fire, sniffing the air and searching the ground about them for tufts of grass or other delicacies. Sleeping looked a less romantic affair. The camel would begin in the light doze position, which consisted of craning out his neck to its full extent and lowering it until only the underside of the jaw was resting on the ground. The rest of the neck slanted stiffly aloft. With the whole weight of the beast’s great neck resting on the chin, it looked comically uncomfortable. Later, the eyes would close and the neck progressively relax until all of it was resting on the ground, at which point the camel had an air of gentle helplessness. However well secured at night, if they had a mind to move they did, and mornings would often find them thirty or forty yards away. Sometimes they went farther.

Rejoining us after settling the camels, Abd al Wahab would dip his huge hands near the fire to burn off the cold that set in briskly after sunset. He would cast an expert eye on its structure and, without a word, rearrange any branches we might have added in his absence.

‘What are we having for dinner?’ he would ask either Ned or me, as though addressing his wife.

‘Tuna fish pasta,’ was invariably the reply.

Rightly, he did not appear to rate our culinary skills highly. A packet soup – perhaps chicken and cumin or, more exotically, Stilton, cauliflower and potato – would be followed by endless variations of this meal. One night, in a crude attempt to vary our diet, I threw together a stew of lentils, potatoes, tomato puree, garlic, onions and tuna. It was revolting. Ned obviously felt the same but, ever polite, murmured something about it being ‘interesting’. Abd al Wahab dutifully pushed a spoon around his bowl for a few minutes and then retired to bed earlier than usual. I looked for it the next morning, thinking it might do for a quick lunch on the move. Abd al Wahab had emptied it into the sands.

The country continued remorselessly flat, stony and grey. The horizons were unchanging. The sense of limitless space, of being a tiny, insignificant party moving through a timeless continuum, was affecting. We felt a great freedom, contemplating the surrounding wilderness that was purged of modern life, slipping into a more natural state of eating when hungry, sleeping when tired, waking with dawn, and forming a strengthening bond with the five camels without whom we could not get across this bland, burning expanse.

But it was difficult to concentrate on the landscape for long. More often than not it was too monotonous: there were too few features of interest to break the flint-strewn emptiness. Dwelling on it for too long made you realize how slowly the caravan was travelling and what a vast distance still lay ahead. Sometimes we talked to while away the time, bringing the camels alongside each other as we smoked cigarettes, sometimes we drifted several hundred yards apart and lost ourselves in our own thoughts.

The country was so flat and lifeless that the slightest shape in the distance aroused great excitement. ‘What’s that black thing over there?’ one of us would shout. Twenty minutes later we would be inspecting a discarded oil barrel or wandering through debris from an old army camp – junked machines, water tanks, rusting equipment. We kicked through piles of flints despondently and asked ourselves how long this sort of country would last.

On the seventh day, it changed gloriously. In a fulgor of sunshine we arrived at the top of a steep, boulder-strewn pass that looked out over an immeasurable plain flanked on the south by the outer shores of the Awbari Sand Sea and on the north by an unbroken ridge of ruddy sandstone, cropped off to a level height. We split the camels into smaller groups and picked our way down, obsessed with sand and impatient to put the boredom of flint behind us. The camels did not share our enthusiasm. After a week on the flat, the gradient was an affront. They descended in lurching jolts with heavily planted steps and terror in their eyes. Only Gobber was unruffled. As ever, thick creamy cords of saliva poured from his mouth: walking within thirty feet of him in a rasping wind was a hazardous affair. Sometimes, when I was lost in a deep daytime reverie, Gobber’s billowing streams of spit, spangling attractively in the sunlight, splashed across my face and I came to with a start.

We skidded the final yards on to the plain. Our first sight of sand dunes was unforgettable. They started several miles away across the flats, piled high, row after row of them massed together like troops ready for battle, an unconquerable army whose rearguard reached deep into the horizon. The first few rows were clearly delineated and the smooth curves of their outlines were distinct, now stretching towards the sky, now plunging sharply into deep troughs, blown into elegant shapes by the invisible wind. As you looked farther into the distance, their contours started to fade under the blaze of sun, merging into each other until all that remained was a mass of eye-dazzling sand bearing only the faintest trace of shape or slope.

On the plain it felt as though we were entering a no-man’s land between two ancient foes of sand and rock. To the south, among the first soothing waves of the incandescent sand sea, hulks of dark rock stood like advance scouts behind enemy lines, a rallying point for the next attack. It was a hopeless conflict that neither side would ever win.

We passed a couple of acacia trees – the first we had come across – and Abd al Wahab said this was Nahiyah, an area in which we would reach another well that evening. In late afternoon we sighted a broad band of green that marked the watering point. There seemed to be signs of life among the blur of scrub, but from this distance it was impossible to say what they were. Gradually, as we approached, they became clearer, until we could make out three tiny silhouettes, immobile on a shoulder of elevated ground above the plain. They faced us directly across the plain and there seemed to be an open challenge in their manner. Was this a Touareg reception committee? A fearless party of desert raiders? Or were they hostile tribesmen guarding their well against the hated infidel?

With each step we took towards them, the figures grew larger. One was a tall, lithe figure, an elegant man wearing a jalabiya. Around his head, the ruffled outline of the tagilmus was clearly visible. There was, even from this distance, a marked nobility and self-assurance about him. The figure next to him could hardly have been more different. His profile was enormous. Part Sumo wrestler, part urban Arab, he wore a dark anorak over a voluminous jalabiya, making the latter look like a clownish flowing skirt. This comic trio was completed by a much smaller figure, dwarfed by his two companions, in army jacket, purple trousers, and shades worn over a khaki attempt at a shish that looked like a bandanna gone wrong. He seemed full of nervous energy. While his companions stood stock still, he was bustling about, growing more animated as we drew nearer. When we were yards away, this mad figure hurried forward at us. It was Mohammed Ali. He had said he might drive out to see us in a week.

‘Ohhhhhh,’ (this in a tone of prodigious satisfaction), ‘Mr Jesten and Mr Nid, really I am happy to see you!’ he shouted into the bloody sunset. ‘God bless you. How are you? Fine? As soon as you left Ghadames I was worrying about you and wondering if you were OK. I thought maybe you died from no water or something. Now I see you, I am in good condition. How are you? Fine?’

It was like meeting up with a long-lost friend. He was a bouncy ball of enthusiasm, rebounding between patches of scrub, amassing a towering pile of firewood, and repeating at intervals his delight at seeing us (‘I am too happy now, believe me!’). Ibrahim, a man whose figure suggested a heavy and lifelong involvement with food, smiled and suggested a dinner of tuna fish pasta. The most unobtrusive newcomer was Ali, Abd al Wahab’s elder brother.

Mohammed Ali, our air traffic control expert, produced a roaring beacon of a fire that could have been seen for miles around. While Ibrahim attended to the cooking, Abd al Wahab and Ali set about dividing a fifty-kilogram sack of sha’eer (barley) among the camels. The scattered pasturage we had come across every day had been decent enough feeding for them. This was an added luxury. Eagerly, they hustled forwards on their knees to the troughs made from empty oil barrels sliced in two, and pounced on the grain.

It had taken the party from Ghadames ten hours to cover what we had travelled in a week. Mohammed Ali was anxious to know how it had been.

‘How is the desert? How are the camels? Fine? Are you too tired now? Have you been cold at night? How are your sleeping bags?’

‘Everything has been fine, alhamdulillah,’ we replied.

‘How are you? Fine? Are the camels thirsty now? How is Abd al Wahab as a guide?’

‘Abd al Wahab has been an excellent guide.’

Ali nodded wisely. ‘Yes, he is a good guide, but he is still learning.’ It would have been unseemly for an elder brother to praise his younger sibling too effusively. This would have upset the pecking order.

‘How is your health? Fine?’ added Mohammed.

As the oldest man among us, Ali was the master of ceremonies that night. Preparing the tea was thus his prerogative. He went through the familiar process but finished with a new flourish, pouring out the tea from such a height that each glass had a layer of froth on the top. We were not sure what the point of all this was (after all these exertions the tea was disappointingly warm), but it looked pretty.

Abd al Wahab ate heartily for once. I asked Mohammed Ali to find out what our guide thought of our cooking.

‘He says everything is all right,’ Mohammed Ali replied quickly.

‘No, but ask him what he really thinks of it. Tell him he doesn’t have to be polite,’ I persisted.

‘Abd al Wahab says when you are in the desert you must eat whatever you are given,’ came the reply.

The cold was seizing. Mohammed Ali disappeared on several occasions during dinner, reappearing each time with a new layer of clothing. On retiring for the night he looked like a bizarrely muffled Michelin man wearing three pairs of socks, four pairs of trousers, seven shirts and jumpers. With so many clothes on, he could move about only with difficulty. His walk, shambolic at the best of times, was reduced to a teetering stagger. Every time he stood up he looked as though he would fall over. In hysterics, his Ghadamsi friends teased him mercilessly. He fought back gamely, with a few well-placed remarks about Ibrahim’s obesity. His British Army sleeping bag also attracted several wry comments. But Mohammed Ali had the last laugh. He, at least, was not cold that night.

In the morning we watered the camels at the well and met a distinguished-looking man called Saleh Omar, a wealthy farmer who had come to inspect his camels, which were being cared for in the desert by two camel boys. On learning that his old friend Ali was with us, he joined him for a lengthy exchange of greetings and several glasses of tea. We remained at the well, and watched as about 150 camels streamed in from behind the dunes. Most were brown dromedaries: a dark shifting mass with a handful of bright specks that were the taller white Meharis. Our own caravan, whose aesthetic qualities we had much admired for the past week, suddenly looked of little consequence.

‘Saleh is a very rich man,’ observed Mohammed reverentially. ‘Maybe he has 200 camels.’ Owning a large herd of camels denotes considerable wealth by rural Libyan standards. It was doubly true in the sixteenth century, when the traveller Leo Africanus visited North Africa. ‘The Arabians esteeme [their camels] to be their principall possessions and riches,’ he reported. ‘So that speaking of the wealth of any of their princes or governors, he hath (say they) so many thousand camels, and not so manie thousand ducates.’

Goodbyes were protracted that morning. This would be the last time we would see Mohammed Ali. ‘Really, I will miss you too much now,’ he thundered in his staccato English. ‘I am too sad because you are leaving. Believe me, you must be careful in the desert, but you will have a very good journey with Abd al Wahab.’ Before he left, he gave Abd al Wahab a pair of fake Adidas trainers. It was a timely present. The thin pair of leather sandals our guide had been wearing offered no support for the ankles and for the past two or three days he had been walking heavily (and uncomplainingly) on a swollen ankle the size of a pear. He exchanged the sandals for the trainers and thanked Mohammed Ali in his customary quiet and understated style.

Full of tuna and with camels fed and watered, we left the three Ghadamsis packing up their vintage Toyota Landcruiser (regulation royal blue in Libya). Ned and Abd al Wahab stayed on the plain. Childishly keen to climb my first dune, I headed for the nearest one, a giant caramel blancmange, and grunted my way up slowly. On its steeper inclines close to the summit, it was thankless going. For each yard climbed up, half a yard was lost as the sand gave way beneath my feet and I sank in to just below the knee. The twenty-minute ascent (smoker’s lungs screaming all the way) purged me of my romantic ideas about sand seas. Ethereally beautiful things to look at, they are hellish to scale.