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

Dedication

To Julia

Epigraph

The hour is nigh; the waning queen walks forth to rule the later night,Crowned with the sparkle of a star, and throned on orb of ashen light:The wolf-tail sweeps the paling East to leave a deeper gloom behind.And dawn uprears her shining head, sighing with semblance of a wind:

The highlands catch yon Orient gleam, while purpling still the lowlands lie;And pearly mists, the morning-pride, soar incense-like to greet the sky.The horses neigh, the camels groan, the torches gleam, the cressets flare;The town of canvas falls, and man with din and dint invadeth air …

Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause,He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws.All other life is living death, a world where none but phantoms dwell,A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling of the camel-bell …

Wend not thy way with brow serene, fear not thy humble tale to tell:–The whispers of the Desert-wind, the tinkling of the camel’s bell.

THE KASÎDAH OF HÂJÎ ABDÛ AL-YAZDI

SIR RICHARD BURTON

Contents

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

CHAPTER I: Desert Fever

CHAPTER II: Bride of the Sea

CHAPTER III: ‘Really We Are in Bad Condition’

CHAPTER IV: The Journey Begins

CHAPTER V: Onwards with Salek

CHAPTER VI: Christmas in Germa

CHAPTER VII: Murzuk

CHAPTER VIII: The Hunt for Mohammed Othman

CHAPTER IX: Tuna Joins the Caravan

CHAPTER X: Wau an Namus

CHAPTER XI: Hamlet in Tizirbu

CHAPTER XII: Drama in the Dunes

CHAPTER XIII: Buzeima

CHAPTER XIV: Hotel Arrest in Kufra

CHAPTER XV: ‘Now You Are in Good Condition’

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

CHAPTER I

Desert Fever

‘Basically, you’re going to be bloody cold.’

ANTHONY CAZALET

‘Help me with this camel,’ said Abd al Wahab, while Ned and I were busily applying Elizabeth Arden Visible Difference Eight Hour Cream to our faces. Abd al Wahab, our guide, understood camels. They were part of his world. Moisturizer was not. Hastily we packed it away, put the finishing touches to the last camel load, and marched off into the desert. We were under way.

For six years I had longed to make the journey we were now beginning. In a way I owed it to my father, for it was he who had taken me to Libya for the first time. Together, in the warmth of February, we had walked through Tripoli as the wind streamed in from the sea; past the forbidding castle, which had seen 1,000 years of wars and intrigues between marauding corsairs, pirates, Spaniards, Italians, Englishmen, Arabs and Turks, and still stared out impassively towards the southern shores of Sicily; through the ancient Suq al Mushir and into an exotic medley of sights, sounds and smells that roused the senses and stirred the imagination. Throngs of prodigiously built matrons haggled ferociously with softly spoken gold- and silversmiths for jewellery they could not afford. Some were still dressed in the same white, sheet-like farrashiyas their forebears had worn hundreds of years before. Others hid behind their gaudy hijabs (Islamic veils) as they sailed through the narrow alleys hunting for perfume. Deeper into the market, beneath a minaret from which the muaddin was calling the faithful to prayer in haunting, ululating cadences, we had found a dilapidated café, its courtyard open to the sky, and taken our places alongside men playing cards and drinking mint tea, hunched protectively over their bubbling shisha pipes stuffed with apple-flavoured tobacco.

My father’s old friend Othman had taken us for a drive around the city in his Peugeot 504, a brave wreck of a car that had somehow survived several decades of neglect. In the squalid port area, men pored over slabs of tuna and disputed prices with the fishermen. One of these, a great hulk of a man, was tenderizing an octopus, throwing it to the ground, picking it up by its tentacles and then hurling it down again and again.

‘We call Tripoli ar Roz al Bahr, the Bride of the Sea,’ Othman told me as we drove past whitewashed houses along the old corniche, watched over by the palm trees that swayed in the coastal breeze. There was something unmistakably forlorn and beautiful about this city, a sense of wistfulness and a largely unspoken resentment. For centuries it had been a thriving commercial metropolis – cosmopolitan, elegant and refined. Now there was nostalgia and regret in the peeling paint of the colonial Turkish and Italian mansions that, one by one, were being targeted for demolition as vainglorious symbols of the white intruders onto African soil. Thirty years of the revolutionary regime had almost brought the city to its knees – cars fell apart, homes crumbled away, roads rotted – and now sanctions held the city in a tight and unforgiving embrace. My father knew Tripoli well. He had got caught up in the 1969 revolution and had met the young Muammar al Gaddafi just as the old order of King Idris was being consigned to oblivion, but for me it was all new and instantly, wildly, romantic.

Before we left, my father took me to one of Tripoli’s few English-language bookshops, where I picked up the book that for the first time thrust the desert before me in all its guises. Here was silence and loneliness, the glory of wide African skies, unbroken plains of sand and rock, loyalty and companionship, adventure, treachery and betrayal. It was an account of the 1818–20 expedition into the Libyan Sahara led by Joseph Ritchie, ‘a gentleman of great science and ability’ – a diplomat, surgeon and friend of Keats – tasked by the British government to reach and chart the River Niger from the north, one of the last remaining puzzles of African exploration. The enormity of his mission was not matched by corresponding resources and eight months after leaving Tripoli disguised as a Muslim convert, the penniless Ritchie had perished from fever in the insalubrious town of Murzuk, leaving his ebullient companion Lt George Francis Lyon to record their adventures for posterity. Back in London, reading his high-spirited tale, I felt the pull of the desert and started to dream of a similar journey by camel.

Like many ideas, it eventually faded away into a distant fantasy. Six years later, I was working in Manila for the Financial Times, when Ned, an old friend from school days, arrived unexpectedly. During lightning trips south to visit the jungle headquarters of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front rebels, and north to go duck shooting with a gun-toting provincial governor, we started discussing a longer expedition. I had spent almost two years in the Philippines and felt it was time to move on. Ned, a Dorset farmer, was feeling equally restless. We had travelled together several times over the years, from Hong Kong to Costa Rica, and knew and got on well enough with each other to attempt a more serious journey. Deep in the tropical jungle of Maguindanao I revived the long-dormant idea of crossing the Libyan Sahara by camel.

Ned would be the ideal companion. Solid and unflappable, with a keen sense of the absurd, he had travelled widely, was always ready for an adventure, and was practical in a way that I was not. Several years before, he had travelled across the Andes on horseback, and so was probably good with knots and would know what to do if a camel fell sick. At least, that was how I saw him. The truth was that neither of us knew the first thing about desert travel, but with some research in London and a reconnaissance trip to Libya much of our ignorance could be put right. The idea appealed to Ned at once. So much so that he wanted to know whether I was really serious about the expedition. I told him I was going with or without him. He said he was coming. Perhaps he felt the same lure of the desert. His great-uncle David Stirling, founder of the SAS, had fought in the Libyan Sahara during the Second World War, taking men like Wilfred Thesiger, the great desert explorer, on daring raids behind enemy lines.

From the jungle we returned to Manila where Joseph Estrada, the flamboyant former movie star, hard-drinking womanizer and self-confessed philanderer, had just been elected president in a landslide vote. The country looked as though it was heading back to the extravagant corruption of the Marcos era. Foreign investors cringed nervously on the sidelines, wondering if the currency would fall through the floor again. One by one, the Marcos cronies were welcomed back into the fold. The stock market was plummeting. Watching the rot set in again was depressing. ‘See you in Libya,’ said Ned at the airport. My boss thought otherwise, but it was time to leave.

Six weeks later I was back in England planning the journey with Ned. Poring over maps of Libya in the Royal Geographical Society, we decided we would retrace the old slave-trade routes into Africa, making our way across the desert in a south-easterly direction by way of Ghadames and Murzuk, two of the three principal slave-trade centres in Libya, to the third, the fabled and inaccessible oasis of Kufra. A brief trip to Libya in September confirmed it would be wisest to start the expedition from Ghadames, an ancient and once prosperous Saharan town 300 miles south-west of Tripoli. Although camels were not as plentiful as they had been 150 years ago, when Ghadames was still a major centre of the slave trade, they would be more easily procured there than in the capital. More importantly, so would a guide who understood, as we did not, the practicalities of desert travel.

From Ghadames we would head south-east, for the most part skirting the wastes of the Awbari Sand Sea, to the small outpost of Idri. Then it would be several days’ hard going across the mountainous dunes to Germa, which several thousand years ago had been the capital of the fearsome Garamantes. This desert warrior race had once held sway over vast swathes of the Sahara between the Nile and the Atlantic and had, until its final defeat, refused to be cowed by the mighty Roman armies sent to subdue it. Next on our route was the central town of Murzuk, where in 1819 the gallant Ritchie, betrayed by avaricious tribesmen, floundering in delirium and beset by agonizing kidney pains, had succumbed to fever. After Murzuk it would be a week’s march or so to the remote settlement of Tmissah, the last town for 350 miles, and from there a bleak journey to Kufra via a handful of tiny oases – Wau al Kabir, Wau an Namus, Tizirbu and Buzeima – that would test our camels’ endurance to its limits. Kufra, the far-flung oasis town that lay on the most easterly, and least old, of the country’s three slave-trade routes, formerly home of the fiercely ascetic Sanusi confraternity, would be our endpoint. One of the most romantic and elusive Saharan oases, it had remained unseen by Western eyes until the late nineteenth century when the pioneering German explorer Gerhard Rohlfs arrived, only to find a hostile reception from xenophobic tribesmen, from whom he narrowly escaped with his life.

The best time to start our journey would be in December, to allow us enough time to cross the desert in the cooler temperatures of winter. If we left much later than that, the weather would make travel unrealistically difficult and dangerous. The next thing to arrange was some language training. The Arabic I had picked up over the years from trips to the Middle East and North Africa would not be sufficient for a long journey in the Libyan desert with guides who do not speak English. I duly enlisted for a course in colloquial Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Several days later, a small bespectacled man in a thick woollen three-piece suit (tailored in Cairo) greeted me warmly in the SOAS language centre and introduced himself as Mohammed al Mahdi. I had told the school I would be spending several months in Libya and would prefer to learn colloquial Libyan Arabic rather than the more customary and widely spoken Egyptian. Mohammed was my man. An Egyptian who had spent five years in Tripoli in the early seventies teaching Libyan fighter pilots English, he was the only teacher in the school familiar with the dialect. His opening announcement was inauspicious. ‘I felt a complete stranger in Libya for the first ten days,’ he told me. ‘I just couldn’t decipher their dialect. It was like a completely foreign language. I didn’t know what to do.’ This was particularly galling because the little Arabic I knew was Egyptian.

For the next six weeks before our departure for Tripoli I put myself in Mohammed’s hands. I asked him to keep the lessons as relevant as possible. In practice this meant conjuring up hypothetical desert situations and finding the appropriate expression in Arabic. Lessons alternated between translating phrases such as ‘Please help me unload this camel,’ and ‘I am thirsty because I have been in the sun too much today,’ to spontaneous asides from Mohammed on a bewildering range of subjects, some connected with Libya, others concerning the various women he had been chatting up in the coffee room. Sitting across the table from me as I waited for him to conjugate a verb, he would suddenly remove his glasses and look at me with an expression of avuncular sympathy.

‘Do you know how to ride a camel?’ he would ask solemnly. ‘It’s absolutely awful. Be very, very careful.’ He might then return briefly to the verb in hand before interrupting himself again to deliver another piece of advice. For an effete urban Cairene who had hardly set foot in the desert, he was not afraid to venture strong opinions on the Sahara and its people. ‘I am positive you will never have any problems in the desert,’ he declared. ‘It is true the people may lack polish, yes they do, but that does not mean they are dangerous or have evil intentions, so don’t worry at all. You will be 100 per cent protected by the people.’

For those occasions during our travels when things were not proceeding well, Mohammed advised a particular expression. By its direct appeal to the Almighty, the judicious use of ‘Itaq Illeh’ (Fear God) should ensure we were not ripped off or misled by an unscrupulous merchant or guide. We would use it several times on the journey to amusing, if not entirely profitable, effect. One afternoon he suggested the stronger term ‘Enta gazma’ (You are a pair of shoes) to deter any troublemakers, before deciding against it. ‘No, no, no, on second thoughts you must not say this because the response will be fatal. This is considered a very big insult. Please don’t use it. If anyone said that to me I would spring at his throat and kill him.’

While the Arabic lessons proceeded at this relaxed pace, we sought advice from various quarters. First we consulted Anthony Cazalet, an old friend of Ned’s and the rotund veteran of several trans-Saharan expeditions by car. Apart from an apparently inexhaustible supply of smooth Scottish malts, this yielded very little. The sum of his guidance was distilled into the frequently repeated observation: ‘Basically, you’re going to be bloody cold.’ Unfortunately, this did not lead to any practical suggestions about how we might combat such extreme temperatures. Might it be a good idea, we asked, to take down sleeping bags, or wear special fleece jackets? To which the answer was that it really didn’t matter. Whatever we did, whatever equipment we took, we were going to be ‘bloody cold’. This amused him greatly and he appeared to take a perverse delight in telling us how freezing we were going to be. Not knowing at this stage how accurate his forecast was, we thought little more of it, consoling ourselves with the thought that perhaps he felt the cold more than most, although his generous padding suggested otherwise. Besides, he had a certain reputation for travelling in great comfort, if not splendour. On one desert expedition he had shocked his companions by turning up with a deluxe camp-bed and, more eccentrically still, a ‘thunder-box’ – a portable commode. Travelling by camel, such luxuries would be beyond us.

Through the Royal Geographical Society I was put in touch with Brigadier Rupert Harding-Newman, who had been one of the first men to travel in the Libyan desert in the twenties and thirties in heavily modified Model T and Model A Fords. Well into his eighties, he was still straight-backed and sprightly and he and his wife welcomed me into their home outside Inverness with great hospitality. Over a fine chicken pie and claret, he talked with relish about those ground-breaking days of Saharan exploration and showed me an old film of improbably built Fords sliding down mountainous sand dunes before grinding to a halt and having to be dug out and started up again. As the youthful cook, quartermaster and mechanic on those expeditions from Cairo led by the desert explorer Major Ralph Bagnold, he had always taken a supply of ‘fancy biscuits’ to help keep up morale. He and his companions would invariably stop for elevenses and afternoon tea. We might like to do the same, he suggested. It was only later that we learnt such stops were impossible when travelling by camel. Whereas Harding-Newman and team had been racing across sand flats at speeds of up to sixty miles an hour, we would have to be content with the camel’s more leisurely pace of three miles an hour. Making such ponderous progress through the desert, more often than not we could not even afford to stop for lunch. That did not stop us thinking wistfully of the Harding-Newman tea and biscuit breaks.

Our last port of call was to Britain’s greatest living explorer. At eighty-eight, Sir Wilfred Thesiger, the man who had twice crossed the Empty Quarter of Arabia by camel in the late 1940s, was now marooned in a genteel retirement home in the suburbs of Surrey. He was waiting for us by the entrance, impeccably clad in a thirty-year-old three-piece suit. As we walked across to the neighbouring golf club where we were to lunch, he leant heavily on my arm, quietly reminiscing about his times in the desert.

I had been advised not to be too discouraged by this interview with Thesiger. He would almost certainly pooh-pooh the whole idea and dismiss our proposed journey as a meaningless stunt. Fortunately this was quite untrue. He was obviously cheered by our visit and honest about the difficulties we would face in trying to get an expedition like this off the ground. ‘Your trouble will be that people will say why on earth go by camel,’ he said. ‘They’ll say you can do the journey perfectly well in a car. Arab life and tradition has all changed. It used to consist of loyalty to one’s travelling companion, undergoing hardship together and so on. When you had that you could count on them. They wouldn’t know how to do it now. They would think it absurd.’ He stopped himself for an instant. ‘Oh dear, I’m being very depressing I’m afraid.’

He recommended the Royal Geographical Society for maps of Libya, in particular those that had been used by the SAS and Long Range Desert Group in the Second World War. His cold azure blue eyes glowed as he recalled the campaigns in Libya, when he had approached David Stirling to volunteer for action, saying he spoke Arabic and knew how to travel in the desert. He was taken on and subsequently fought with the SAS behind enemy lines where he ‘shot up’ tentfuls of soldiers in enemy camps.

As far as riding camels was concerned, he said it took some time to get used to their strange loping gait. ‘The first day I rode one I found it very hard to get up the next day,’ he said. ‘You swing around a lot when they walk.’ He had once ridden 115 miles in twenty-four hours in what is now the northern Sudanese province of Darfur, and did not know of anyone who had ridden farther in one day. Travelling long distances with a small caravan, however, it would be inadvisable for us to go faster than walking pace. The camels would not be able to sustain it. Besides, with heavy loads, trotting would be a perilous affair that risked throwing off and smashing valuable bidouns of water.

After lunch, we returned to his modest room decorated with a few tokens culled from a long, nomadic life: a walking stick made from a giraffe’s shinbone, a tattered Oriental rug, a black-and-white photograph of Marrakech. Burton, Conrad, Kipling, Sassoon, Buchan and Thesiger on the bookshelves.

On equipment, he was a ruthless minimalist: ‘I wanted to meet the Bedouin on their own terms with no concessions,’ he insisted. For an Old Etonian from Edwardian England, this meant foregoing such staples of travel as tables and chairs. He had travelled barefoot in the desert, armed always with a dagger and a gun. This might be problematic in Gaddafi’s Libya. Radios, as used by Harry St John Philby, the second man ever to cross the Empty Quarter in 1932, were out. ‘When Philby travelled with the Bedouin he liked having a radio to listen to the Lord’s Test Match,’ he growled into his strawberry and vanilla ice cream. ‘To me that would have wrecked the whole thing.’

Back in London we were not having much joy with maps. We needed to get our hands on the Russian Survey maps, the most detailed and accurate maps of the Sahara, which were proving difficult to locate. Stanfords said it might take two months. We needed them in two weeks. Eventually, I tracked down a supplier on the Internet and ordered a set by email. Nothing happened. I telephoned Munich. The German voice on the other end of the telephone said the maps might arrive before we left for Libya but appeared unconcerned about whether they did. In the meantime we had to make do with the US Tactical Pilotage Charts from Stanfords, no doubt helpful if you were flying over the Libyan desert, but curiously short of detail for an expedition travelling by land.

With several days to go before our departure we paid a swift visit to Field & Trek on Baker Street to buy sleeping bags and other equipment. Sleeping bags proved easy. We lay inside threeseason down bags while an assistant enthused about their many features which would make life so comfortable. Choosing walking boots involved a lengthy discourse from him on the merits of Gore-tex versus leather. Ned, easily bored by detail, started to look distracted, as though he wished he were somewhere else. His patience, always finite, was running out.

On to socks, which surely would be straightforward. Before we could pick up a pair, the assistant launched into a glowing recommendation of Coolmax, some sort of high-tech material. Coolmax socks, designed for walking in summer, apparently boasted five special features, such as reinforced heels, ability to wick away moisture from the feet, and so it went on. I wondered what Thesiger would have made of all this. When it came to discussing the best way to filter water, mutiny broke out between the assistant and his more senior colleague. The latter, spotting the chance to talk gadgetry in front of gadget neophytes, had emerged from the farthest recesses of the shop. A peevish argument broke out between them over whether we were better off using iodine treatment or taking a more expensive water filter. Ned had even less interest in this conversation than I had and headed fast upstairs for the exit, past a Field & Trek nylon washing line with four special features.