SOUTH FROM BARBARY
Along the Slave Routes ofthe Libyan Sahara
JUSTIN MAROZZI

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.

The next problem was that neither of us knew how to navigate. A Royal Geographical Society publication on desert navigation was explicit on this point. It was imperative that every expedition should include ‘a meticulous, even perfectionist, navigator who worships at the altar of Truth rather than the altar of convenient results’. I had used a compass a long time ago while in the school cadet force. It was not much to go on. Ned was probably more proficient but did not appear to take much interest in the sort of equipment we would need. Sometimes he would telephone and in a curiously detached way make noises about buying a theodolite so we could navigate by the stars, but eventually nothing more was said of it. Perhaps he was waiting for me to find one.

Harding-Newman had shown me the famous Bagnold sun compass, a cleverly designed navigational device that made use of the shadows cast by the sun and was designed to be mounted on the front of a vehicle, but said it would not be of much use to us travelling by camel. Thesiger had surprised us by confessing he had never been able to navigate by the stars and nor did he know how to use a sun compass. My uncle, a retired naval officer, warned us off sextants. The Royal Navy used to run two-week courses teaching men how to use them, he said, and after two weeks they still had only the most basic knowledge of the instruments. We decided on the less romantic, small and inexpensive, battery-powered Global Positioning System devices to back up our compasses. These would pinpoint our location on the globe to within 10 metres or so.

Shortly before we left, the Royal Geographical Society sent me a recent guide on travelling with camels written by Michael Asher, the British desert explorer. It contained plenty of useful advice on how to choose camels, saddles and guides. Asher, a former SAS man, was insistent on fitness. ‘Whatever country you are trekking in, travelling by camel is inevitably going to involve a great deal of walking. Cardio-vascular fitness is therefore the main area to concentrate on in preparing yourself physically for a camel-trek; jogging, long-distance walking, cycling, swimming. Loading camels usually requires a certain amount of lifting so weight training is also appropriate.’

Neither Ned nor I had ever been great fitness aficionados or taken exercise for as long as we could remember. At Ned’s house in Dorset, we were quizzed closely on our preparations by a friend of his. Julian Freeman-Attwood was a mountaineer who announced rather grandly that he only climbed unclimbed peaks. We told him how we planned to get across the desert and he looked at us in amused disbelief. A veteran of many expeditions around the world, he concluded we were thoroughly unprepared.

‘It’s worse than an expedition planned on the back of an envelope,’ he said with authority. ‘You haven’t even got an envelope.’

Two days later we flew to Tunis.

CHAPTER II
Bride of the Sea

Properly to write the wonderful story of Tripoli, daughter of sea and desert, one must be not only an accomplished historian, a cultivated archaeologist and an expert in ethnology, but profoundly versed in Arabic and the fundamental beliefs and general practices of Mohammedanism, as well as the local customs of that great religion, coloured as it is by differing environment. If one aims to give a clear exposition of this enthralling though tragic coast of northern Africa, he must be a thorough student of political economy, too, with a world outlook on cause and effect in government.

MABEL LOOMIS TODD, TRIPOLI THE MYSTERIOUS

Happy for poor forlorn, dusky, naked Africa, had she never seen the pale visage or met the Satanic brow of the European Christian. Does any man in his senses, who believes in God and Providence, think that the wrongs of Africa will go forever unavenged? … And the time of us Englishmen will come next – our day of infamy! unless we show ourselves worthy of that transcendant position in which Providence has placed us, at the pinnacle of the empires of Earth, as the leaders and champions of universal freedom.

JAMES RICHARDSON, TRAVELS IN THE GREAT DESERT OF SAHARA IN THE YEARS OF 1845 AND 1846

We hired a car in Tunis airport and drove to Jerba, en route to the Libyan border. In 1992, the United Nations imposed sanctions on Libya to bring to heel the alleged culprits of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, in which 270 people were killed. Since that date, all flights into and out of the country had been prohibited, leaving overland travel from Tunisia or a boat from Malta as the main alternatives to reach Tripoli.

For as long as I was behind the wheel Ned was a difficult passenger. Repeatedly, he told me what a poor driver I was and how unsafe he felt. Coming from a man whose entire driving career seemed to have consisted of writing off one car after another, this was especially irritating. I took exception to his comments and drove even faster. As night fell on us and the road became progressively harder to navigate, Ned’s warnings became ever more insistent. I told him to shut up. Moments later, to my horror, I found I was driving straight towards a head-on collision with an enormous lorry. Ned shouted something furiously, I jerked the wheel to the right, swerved across the road and only narrowly managed to keep the car on four wheels. We skidded violently to a halt and one of the tyres burst. ‘Justin, you’re a complete idiot,’ he said, fuming. I let him drive for the rest of the night.

We slept on Jerba, an island that was, according to the Greek geographer Strabo, ‘regarded as the land of the Lotus-eaters mentioned by Homer; and certain tokens of this are pointed out – both an altar of Odysseus and the fruit itself; for the tree which is called the lotus abounds in the island and its fruit is delightful’. Herodotus also mentions the islanders, ‘who live entirely on the fruit of the lotus-tree. The lotus fruit is about the size of the lentisk berry, and in sweetness resembles the date. The Lotophagi even succeeded in obtaining from it a sort of wine.’

Two hours into our taxi ride to Tripoli the next morning, we joined the languid snake of cars wriggling across the Libyan border. Our bags were searched and I was asked whether I had a camera. I was then led into a cavernous warehouse, derelict save for a rickety table that stood in an inch of dirty water, behind which sat a Libyan customs official. All around him piles of rotting debris emerged from their bed of slime and wafted up a disgusting stench. His temper appeared as foul as his surroundings. He looked me up and down, almost incredulous, as I was, that I should be referred to him for possessing a camera. Other customs officers were inspecting the boots of Mercedes saloons for contraband. I was small beer. Gruffly, he condescended to stamp my passport with the information that I was carrying photographic equipment and waved our car through. Outside, the first of many propaganda portraits of Muammar al Gaddafi welcomed us to the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, or GSPLAJ for short. Sporting a hard hat and shades, he was presiding benignly over a scene of oil wells in the Sahara. The border area was an ugly scattering of buildings and warehouses and the heat was intense, but none of this mattered. We were a step nearer the desert.

Before preparing for the camel journey in Tripoli, we first had to visit the Roman ruins of Sabratha, forty miles west of the capital. With its more august sister city of Leptis Magna, 120 miles to the east, Sabratha is one of the Mediterranean’s great Roman sites. If it had been in Tunisia, the city would have been clogged with tourists. Thanks to Libya’s status as one of the world’s last remaining pariah states, we had the place to ourselves.

Sabratha dates back to Phoenician times, probably between the late fourth and seventh centuries BC, when it was established as an emporium or trading post, but is an essentially Roman creation. Sabratha, Leptis Magna and Oea (as Romans knew Tripoli) together formed the provincia Tripolitania – province of the three cities – created by the Emperor Diocletian in AD 284. All three both grew through commerce with the Garamantes, the great warrior-traders of southern Libya, and through commercial exchange with Rome. Before the Romans set foot in North Africa, the Phoenicians had introduced agriculture to the coastline, encouraging the cultivation of olives, vines and figs. Tripolitania was, above all, a great exporter of olive oil for use in Rome’s baths and oil lamps, if not its kitchens. The Romans considered African olive oil too coarse for their palates.

After olive oil came wild animals, exported in staggering numbers to feed the bloodlust of Rome’s circusgoers. Tens of thousands of elephants, flamingoes, ostriches, lions, and wild boar were shipped to their destruction. Titus marked the inauguration of the Colosseum by dispatching 9,000 animals into the arena to fight the gladiators. Augustus recorded that 3,500 African animals were killed in the twenty-six games he gave to the people, while Trajan had 2,246 large animals slaughtered in one day. On one occasion, Caesar sent 400 lions into the arena to kill or be killed by gladiators, outdone by Pompey, who sent in 600. North Africa’s ‘nursery of wild beasts’, as noted by Strabo, could not take such wholesale decimation and its animal population never recovered.

By contrast with this northern-bound traffic, the desert trade, whose staple products would later include gold, ivory and ostrich feathers, was not yet advanced. ‘Our only intercourse is the trade in the precious stone imported from Ethiopia which we call the carbuncle,’ remarked Pliny in the first century AD. With abundant sources of slaves in both Asia and Europe, the Romans felt little need to tap the Sahara. Negro slaves, besides, could be procured from the North African coast without having to venture farther south.

We walked slowly through the Forum Basilica, where Claudius Maximus, Proconsul of Africa, had acquitted the Latin writer Apuleius of Madura of a fabricated charge of witchcraft in AD 157. Behind us the magnificent theatre, a warm terracotta in the fading afternoon sun, dominated the eastern part of the city. It was built in the late second century at the outset of the Severan dynasty, a time that would prove to be Roman Africa’s finest hour. It is hard to imagine a more romantic or dramatic spot for a theatre: the cool blue sea is visible only yards behind the three-storey scaenae frons that towers 25 metres above the stage. Gracious marble reliefs on the stage front depict the three Muses, the goddess Fortuna, Mercury with the infant Dionysus, the Judgement of Paris, Hercules, and personifications of Rome and Sabratha joining hands alongside soldiers. Intoxicated by his plans to recreate the Roman Empire, Mussolini reinaugurated the theatre in 1937, almost 1,800 years after its birth. Inside, we came across a small family of Libyans from Tripoli, the only other visitors in Sabratha that afternoon. Passing the crumbling mosaics of the seaward baths, unprotected from the elements, we headed to the easternmost part of Sabratha, to the serene Temple of Isis, smoked cigarettes and stared across at the elegant ruins of the city as a lilac sunset flooded across the sea.

Anxious to press on the next morning, we commandeered a taxi to take us the last few miles to Tripoli. Gleaming white, it rose before us, staring out across the Mediterranean as it had done for three millennia since the bold seafaring Phoenicians established a trading post here. For centuries it had been the principal terminus of the slave-trade routes of Tripolitania that penetrated across the Sahara deep into Black Africa. Today, the city steamed under a shocking noon sun, its fierce glare an unforgettable feature of arrival for as long as anyone can remember. ‘When we approached, we were blinded by the brilliant whiteness of the city from which the burning rays of the sun were reflected. I was convinced that rightly is Tripoli called the “White City”,’ wrote the Arab traveller At Tigiani during his visit of 1307–8.

Arriving by boat from Jerba on 17 May 1845 James Richardson, the opinionated British explorer and anti-slave-trade campaigner, part of whose travels in Libya we would be following, thought it massive and imposing. He admired the slender limewashed towers and minarets that rose towards the heavens, dazzling in the shimmering sunlight. But, he went on deflatingly, ‘such is the delusion of all these sea-coast Barbary towns; at a distance and without, beauty and brilliancy, but near and within, filth and wretchedness’.

We checked in at a small hotel in Gargarsh, formerly the American part of town in the more cosmopolitan, pre-revolution times of King Idris. In those days, the streets were lined with foreign restaurants and eating out in Tripoli was a joy. If you were looking for Greek food, you could choose between Zorba, the Akropol in front of the Italian Cathedral, and the Parthenon in the Shooting and Fishing Club. If it was Italian you were after, there was Delfino, Romagna and the Riviera, while Chicken on Wheels, Black Cat and Hollywood Grill catered for the thousands of Americans in town, together with a long list of French, Tunisian and Lebanese restaurants. Now they had all gone, replaced by the occasional hamburger bar and second-rate Libyan pizza outlet. Here in Gargarsh, a rusting miniature Eiffel Tower, which once had marked the hottest nightspot in town and was now home to the local post office, was all that remained of those livelier days.

On the ground floor of the hotel were the offices of a small tourism company owned by a man called Taher Aboulgassim, whom I had met during my visit to Libya the previous September. He was a smooth, straight-talking businessman in his mid-thirties, one of the new generation of Libyan entrepreneurs, who had been intrigued by the plans I had put to him. No-one had attempted anything like this in recent years, he had informed me, but he would do everything in his power to assist us with the purchase of camels, selection of guides and so on. He had another office in his home town of Ghadames, from where we would probably set off into the desert. During the three months that I would be back in England, he would begin preparations on my behalf and would be waiting for us when we got to Tripoli. The initial encounter inspired confidence. Taher looked like a man we could do business with.

The first hint that arranging a camel trek in Libya might be more difficult than anticipated was that there was no sign of him in his office the next morning.

‘Taher no come,’ said Hajer, his Sudanese office assistant. He said it with some satisfaction. In a country where little was certain here was an incontrovertible fact, and he relished it.

‘Where is he?’ I asked.

‘No problem. He will come,’ he replied with the confident air of one who had inside information.

‘What time will he come?’

‘Maybe 12 o’clock. Maybe 5 o’clock,’ came the vague reply.

‘Which one?’

‘He will come.’

Hajer’s hairstyle, an exuberant greying Afro, suggested a man still caught in the giddiness of the seventies. On times and appointments he was consistently casual. He had heard of our plans and, like his boss Taher, heartily approved of them.

‘No-one do anything like this since Second World War,’ he declared. Excitable and warm by nature, he launched into a passionate recommendation that we extend our desert crossing into Sudan. ‘If you are British and you have money, you can do anything in Sudan,’ he promised. ‘We like the British too much.’

I told him Ned was a farmer in England.

‘Then you must invest in Sudan agriculture,’ was the unhesitating reply. ‘You will have a letter from the government and then you can do anything. ANYTHING.’ His eyes grew large with enthusiasm. ‘You want farm? You can buy farm. You want camels? You buy camels. No problem in Sudan. You do ANYTHING you like.’ He spoke in an excited, breathless staccato, a patriotic investment adviser in overdrive. There was no stopping him. ‘Sudan is VERY, VERY rich country. We have EVERYTHING in Sudan.’

For years Sudan had been one of the poorest countries in the world, crushed by civil war, famine and corrupt, xenophobic governments. None of this had dented Hajer’s boundless optimism.

‘You must see it. Not for one month or two months. No,’ he went on emphatically, ‘you must go for nine months.’

‘First we must talk to Taher,’ I said, trying to steer the conversation around to the present.

‘The government will help you too much if you like Sudan agriculture,’ he went on, looking meaningfully at Ned.

‘Perhaps we can discuss this a little later,’ I suggested. ‘But could you tell us where Taher is. He should be expecting us.’

Hajer looked upset. He had not expected to be diverted from his talk on Sudanese agriculture. ‘He will come,’ he said stubbornly.

Taher did not come. We waited several hours and still there was no sign of him.

‘Do you think he’s reliable?’ asked Ned over lunch in a semi-derelict hotel opposite our own. Like most swimming pools in Tripoli, this one was empty and looked as though it had been for years. Ned looked bored. I was, too, but was used to waiting for appointments in Libya.

‘As reliable as you can expect in Libya.’

‘Well, it doesn’t look like he’ll come today. Shall we go to Leptis Magna?’ he went on. We waited another couple of hours and returned to the office.

‘Taher come tomorrow,’ said Hajer, as though he had known this all along.

‘Come on, let’s go,’ said Ned, who had waited long enough.

We called a taxi and drove to the stately ruins of Leptis Magna, Libya’s most imposing Roman city.

Leptis owes its greatness to its most famous son Septimius Severus, the first African Roman emperor. He seized power in AD 193, after the murders of the emperors Commodus and Pertinax in quick succession. Elevated to greatness in Rome, Septimius never lost sight of his African origins and Leptis rose to the height of imperial grandeur, becoming one of the foremost cities of the empire. Architects and sculptors descended in droves from Rome and Asia Minor to create monuments such as the two-storey basilica, overwhelming in its sheer scale, gorgeous in its design, paved with marble and ruthlessly decadent, with soaring colonnades of Corinthian columns embellished with shafts of red Egyptian granite. Up went the Arch of Septimius Severus, built in AD 203 for the emperor’s visit to his birthplace, an immense testimony to Rome’s mighty sway, with marble reliefs detailing triumphal processions, naked winged Victories, captive barbarians and a united imperial family. A new forum was erected, the circus was enlarged and the port rebuilt to accommodate 1,000-ton ships guided into the harbour by a 100-foot lighthouse. Leptis had never known such glory and would never again. When Septimius died campaigning in York in AD 211, the city embarked upon a long decline from which it did not recover. Fifteen centuries later, Louis XIV had many of the city’s treasures exported to Paris.

For the art historian Bernard Berenson, Leptis was unforgettable. ‘We went on to the Baths, the Palestra, and the Nymphaeum,’ he wrote to his wife in 1935. ‘Truly imperial, even in their ruins, for one suspects that ruins suggest sublimities that the completed building may not have attained. In their present state they are evocative and romantic to a degree that it would be hard to exaggerate.’ Today, we wandered along the shore and clambered undisturbed over these neglected buildings, past piles of fallen columns and discarded pedestals lying strewn under the wide African sky. The hot silence of the place was overpowering. Deep in drifts of sand and choked by spreading trees and plants, Septimius’s city slept.

Through his encouragement of camel breeding on the North African littoral, the African emperor had provided a huge fillip to Saharan trade. The merchants of Leptis are thought to have been the first to benefit from the introduction of this animal. The days of the horse, used for centuries to great effect by the formidable Garamantes, were numbered. The camel offered improved performance in the desert, was economical to run, and comfortable to ride. The Romans wasted little time in increasing the numbers of this versatile beast. By AD 363, when Leptis was invaded by the Austurians, a group of tribes from the central region of Sirtica, Count Romanus, commander of Roman troops in Africa, demanded 4,000 camels from the townsmen as his price for intervening on their behalf.

We met Taher in his office the following morning. He appeared taken aback by our arrival, like a burglar caught in the act. Sheepishly he confessed that nothing had been arranged.

‘I thought maybe you would not come to Libya,’ he said feebly.

‘But Taher, I told you exactly when we were going to arrive,’ I replied, exasperated. My previous trip to Libya seemed to have been for nothing.

‘We have too many problems in Libya,’ he said, as though this explained everything.

‘Well, it’s a great start,’ I said, turning to Ned. He was phlegmatic about this first upset to our plans. I should have been, too. Planning anything in advance in Libya was a lost cause. The country didn’t work like that. You had to be there on the ground to get anything done.

‘Now you are here I will go to talk to my friend,’ Taher said more hopefully. ‘Maybe you can buy your camels in Tripoli.’ It seemed unlikely.

We headed into Tripoli’s Old City and threaded our way through Suq al Mushir, the gateway into the medina, to drink tea, smoke apple-flavoured tobacco in shisha pipes, and mull over our situation, which did not seem particularly promising. On the outside of the old British Consulate on Shar’a al Kuwash (Baker Street) was a plaque put up by the Gaddafi regime describing the building’s history. Reflecting the leader’s distrust of western imperialism, it referred to the pioneering nineteenth-century missions into the Sahara that left from here as ‘the so-called European geographical and explorative scientific expeditions to Africa, which were in essence and as a matter of fact intended to be colonial ones to occupy and colonize vital strategic parts of Africa’.

Built in 1744, it served first as a residence for Ahmed Pasha, founder of the great Karamanli dynasty. Turkey had administered Tripoli since 1551, when Simon Pasha overcame a small force of the Knights of the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, who until then had been maintaining the city as ‘a Christian oasis in a barbaric desert’. The Karamanlis themselves hailed from the racial mix of Turkish soldiers and administrators who had married native women.

From the second half of the eighteenth century, the building became the British Consulate, from where successive consuls kept London up to date on the Saharan slave trade, various measures to suppress it, and the continued obstruction of such measures by the Turkish authorities. Local officials tended to disregard with impunity Constantinople’s imperial firmans (decrees) and vizirial orders outlawing the trade for the simple reason that they benefited enormously from it. Typical of the correspondence between London and Tripoli was the instruction in 1778 to the British Consul Richard Tully to provide

an account of the Trade in Slaves carried on in the Dominions of the Bey of Tripoli, stating the numbers annually brought into them and sold, distinguishing those that are natives of Asia from those that are natives of Africa, and specifying as far as possible, from what parts of Asia and Africa the slaves so sold in the Dominions of the Bey are brought, and stating whether the male slaves are usually castrated.

Such correspondence makes grim reading. For all the British determination to stamp out this ‘miserable trade’, it continued apace and for more than a century after Tully’s time, consuls would write to London of the Turkish authorities’ ‘apathy and utter indifference’ to the slave trade, their ‘palpable’ neglect and ‘flagrant infraction’ of orders from Constantinople. In 1848, the sultan prohibited the Turkish governor of Tripoli and his civil servants from trading in slaves and in 1856 slave dealing itself was outlawed throughout the Ottoman empire. But in practice, the trade continued, albeit in reduced volume. In 1878, 100 years after the letter to Tully, Frank Drummond-Hay, the British Consul, was telling the Foreign Office that ‘the vigilance required in watching the Slave Trade, in thwarting the devices resorted to by the local authorities in order to evade the execution of the orders for its suppression, in obtaining information on the arrival of slaves by the caravans from the Interior, of intended shipments and other numerous matters in connection with this traffic’ justified a substantial increase in his salary.

On the other side of a massive wooden door was the cool marble floor of an elegant courtyard, decorated with plants, on one side of which a worn flight of steps led up to the ‘general scientific library’ to which the building was now devoted. This was the house in which Miss Tully, sister of the British Consul, composed her fascinating Narrative of a Ten Years’ Residence at Tripoli in Africa between 1783–93. This doughty lady lived through the great plague of 1785 that carried off a quarter of Tripoli’s inhabitants and regularly witnessed slave caravans arriving from the Sahara. One limped into town in the dreadful heat of summer in 1790. ‘We were shocked at the horrible state it arrived in,’ she wrote. ‘For want of water many had died, and others were in so languishing a state, as to expire before any could be administered to save them from the parching thirst occasioned by the heat. The state of the animals was truly shocking; gasping and faint, they could hardly be made to crawl to their several destinations, many dying on their way.’

An intimate of the Pasha of Tripoli’s family, Miss Tully heard eyewitness accounts of the assassination in 1790 of Hassan Bey, his eldest son and heir. Sidi Yousef, the Pasha’s youngest son and pretender to the throne, had been feuding with his elder brother for some time before announcing he was ready for the sake of the family to effect a reconciliation in front of their mother Lilla Halluma.

The Bey replied, ‘with all his heart’ that ‘he was ready’ upon which Sidy Useph rose quickly from his seat, and called loudly for the Koran – the word he had given to his eunuchs for his pistols, two of which were brought and put into his hands; when he instantly discharged one of them at his brother, seated by his mother’s side. The pistol burst, and Lilla Halluma extending her hand to save the Bey, had her fingers shattered by the splinters of it. The ball entered the Bey in the side: he arose, however, and seizing his sabre from the window made a stroke at his brother, but only wounded him slightly in the face; upon which Sidy Useph discharged the second pistol and shot the Bey through the body.

Hassan’s gruesome murder – Miss Tully informs us he was stabbed repeatedly by Sidi Yousef’s black slaves as he lay dying and had eleven balls in him when he perished – plunged Tripoli into chaos. Further assassinations of leading figures followed and the Karamanli dynasty, which had ruled Tripoli since 1711, found itself under siege. Fighting broke out against the neighbouring Misratans and the rapacious Sidi Yousef prepared to attack Tripoli Castle. From its ‘situation and strength’, the British Consulate was regarded as the only safe asylum among the consular houses. Miss Tully braced herself for an invasion: ‘The Greeks, Maltese, Moors and Jews brought all their property to the English house. The French and Venetian consuls also brought their families; every room was filled with beds; and the galleries were used for dining-rooms. The lower part of the building contained the Jewesses and the Moorish women with all their jewels and treasures.’

While the family’s internecine conflict raged, on 29 July 1793 a Turkish adventurer named Ali Burghul – well acquainted with the turmoil – sailed into Tripoli harbour with a fleet of Turkish vessels claiming to have a firman from the Grand Signior to depose the Pasha and assume the throne. The crimson flag with the gold crescent was raised over Tripoli, Turkish guards rampaged through the city and the Tullys fled. After the failure of their initial attempt to repel the usurper, the princes Sidi Yousef and his second brother Sidi Hamet escaped to join their father who had taken refuge with the Bey of Tunis.

By 1795, the father and his two sons had made up their differences and a reunited Karamanli family expelled the Turkish impostor from Tripoli, installing Yousef as the new Pasha. His rule dovetailed neatly with growing British interest in unexplored Africa, born of the desire both to extend commercial relations with the continent and to investigate and suppress the Saharan slave trade. In 1788, in recognition of the fact that ‘the map of the interior of Africa is still but a wide extended blank’, the Society Instituted for the Purpose of Exploring the Interior of Africa (African Society for short) was founded in London. European knowledge of the continent and its peoples had hardly developed since the times of Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny and Ptolemy. Arab writers and travellers of the Middle Ages such as Abu Obeid al Bekri, Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Battuta, the fabled fourteenth-century adventurer who blazed a swathe through the lands of Islam, had forged ahead. In the sixteenth century the Arabs pressed home their advantage, most notably through the travels of Ali Hassan Ibn Mohammed, or Leo Africanus (the African Lion), who crossed the Sahara to Timbuctoo in 1513. It fell to Jonathan Swift to lampoon this lamentable European ignorance.

So Geographers in Afric-Maps

with Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps:

And o’er unhabitable Downs

Place Elephants for want of Towns.

As Pasha of Tripoli, Yousef later gave assurances to the British government that he would, for a princely fee, guarantee safe conduct to any expedition to the River Niger. He held sway over parts of Fezzan, south of Tripoli – the central province to the south of Tripolitania that extended as far west as the borders with modern Algeria and, to the south, as far as the borders with present-day Niger and Chad – and claimed to be on friendly terms with the Sultans of Bornu and Sokoto in the heart of what Britons knew as ‘Negroland’ or ‘Soudan’, from where the caravans dragged their wretched human cargo across the Sahara to the Mediterranean coast. London duly dispatched the adventure-seeking surgeon Joseph Ritchie to Tripoli in 1818. His brief, as ambitious as it was unlikely, was to attempt an exploration from the north across the Sahara, install himself as British Vice-consul in Fezzan and chart the Niger. Like many of his assurances, Yousef’s promise of safe conduct proved worthless – the lands he controlled extended no further south than Ghadames, not, as the British believed, as far as Timbuctoo and Bornu. But what tempted London to launch the Ritchie expedition was the fact that it offered a considerably less expensive alternative to penetrating towards the Niger from the west coast of Africa. An expedition from Sierra Leone had already been devastated by disease and would end up costing Britain £40,000. Ritchie was given £2,000.

Once landed at Tripoli, he and Lyon met the redoubtable British Consul Colonel Hanmer Warrington, who took them to an interview with the Pasha to discuss their journey into the Sahara. Warrington, a brilliant servant of the Empire and a leading figure at the Pasha’s court, would watch British expeditions into the interior come and go during his residency from 1814 to 1846. Such was his influence that to many of his contemporaries, including the French Consul, it appeared that it was he, rather than the Pasha, who was running the country.

It was to the British Consulate once more that a sunburnt and bearded James Richardson headed on arriving in Tripoli in 1845. Sponsored by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Richardson had volunteered to investigate the Saharan slave trade, which he regarded as ‘the most gigantic system of wickedness the world ever saw’. His initial reception by Warrington was inauspicious. ‘Ah!’ said the British Consul, ‘I don’t believe our government cares one straw about the suppression of the slave-trade, but, Richardson, I believe in you, so let’s be off to my garden.’ Warrington, by now approaching the end of his marathon posting, was as superior as ever in his observations. ‘Whether the extraordinary indolence of the people proceeds from the climate, or want of occupation, I know not,’ the British Consul told the new arrival, ‘but they are in an horizontal position twenty hours out of the twenty-four, sleeping in the open air.’ Richardson and Warrington did not hit it off. With typical acuity, the supremely pragmatic British diplomat recognized Richardson as a loose cannon. ‘I wish again to say your conduct and proceedings require the greatest prudence or you may lose your life or be made a slave of yourself and carried against your will into the Interior,’ Warrington advised him in a letter. ‘Over zeal often defeats the object but I pray for your health and success.’ After waiting interminably and in vain for letters of recommendation, Richardson departed Tripoli for Ghadames ‘without a single regret, having suffered much from several sources of annoyance, including both the Consulate and the Bashaw’.

Fifty years later, it was the turn of Mabel Loomis Todd, an American writer who adored Tripoli, to descend on the British Consulate, this time to observe the eclipses of 1900 and 1905. Around her, excited Tripolitans watched the heavens in awe.

The fine Gurgeh minaret with its two balconies towering above the mosque was filled with white-robed Moslems gazing skyward. As the light failed and grew lifeless and all the visible world seemed drifting into the deathly trance which eclipses always produce, an old muezzin emerged from the topmost vantage point of the minaret, calling, calling the faithful to remember Allah and faint not. Without cessation, for over fifteen minutes he continued his exhortation, in a voice to match the engulfing somberness, weird, insistent, breathless, expectant.

Todd was also one of the few travellers to witness the final moments of the great caravan trade. The large expeditions that for centuries had carried off European arms, textiles and glassware into the desert, were no more, replaced now by much smaller and more infrequent missions into the interior. One morning, after ten months in the desert, a caravan of more than 250 camels was sighted approaching the city. Todd hurried over to watch its entrance:

The camels stepped slowly, heavily laden with huge bales securely tied up – ivory and gold dust, skins and feathers. Wrapped in dingy drapery and carrying guns ten feet long, swarthy Bedouins led the weary camels across the sun-baked square. In the singular and silent company marched a few genuine Tuaregs, black veils strapped lightly over their faces and enshrouded in black or dark brown wraps … In their opinion even the veils were hardly protection against the impious glances of hated Christians, and with attitudes expressive of the utmost repulsion and ferocity they turned aside, lest a glance might be met in passing. All were ragged beyond belief and incredibly dirty.

We left the Consulate and descended a gloomy street to Tripoli’s only Roman ruin, the four-sided triumphal arch dedicated to the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus in AD 163. With innocent disregard for the city’s glorious past, a young boy was urinating on its base. We exited the medina and walked around the fish market next to the port, where mountainous men were hacking tuna into pieces. Behind them rose the ghostly water pipes commemorating Gaddafi’s Great Man Made River, at one time the largest engineering project in the world, designed to bring fresh water up from the desert to the coast via 5,000 kilometres of pipelines. The last time I had been here, this bizarre urban sculpture had been a working fountain. Today, there is no sign of water. It is probably still too early to know whether the project is an act of genius or an ecological catastrophe waiting to happen. Certainly, it had an inauspicious start. When, with great fanfare, Gaddafi turned on the taps in September 1996, as part of the 27th anniversary celebrations of the revolution, half the city’s streets promptly exploded. After decades of corrosion by salty water, the antiquated pipes could not take the pressure. Many of the streets across the capital still lay in rubble, monuments to the leader’s madness.

Looping back into the Old City, we passed through throngs of African immigrants selling fake Nike and Adidas T-shirts, tracksuits and trainers, and drank more tea in a café belting out mournful love songs from Oum Koulthoum, the late queen of Arab music. Opposite us was the elegant Turkish Clock Tower (all of its timepieces stuck at different times, its windowpanes dusty and broken), given to the city in the mid-nineteenth century by its governor Ali Riza Pasha. In Green Square, renamed by Gaddafi as another reminder of his revolution, we went into the Castle Museum. After the open-air glories of Leptis and Sabratha, it was of less interest, except for the top floor, which was given over entirely to Gaddafi propaganda. Photos traced the leader’s development as international statesman from the meeting with his then hero Nasser shortly after the 1969 revolution to later encounters with revolutionaries like Syria’s President Assad and Fidel Castro (the latter being the winner of the 1998 Gaddafi Prize for Human Rights). On the walls were reality-defying slogans from Gaddafi’s Green Book.

‘Representation is a falsification of democracy’

‘Committees everywhere’

‘Arab unity’

‘Forming parties splits societies’

We picked up a copy in a hotel. It was marked 1.5 dinars but the man behind the counter (who thought we were lunatics) let us have it for nothing. Libyans have to live with the grinding follies of their leader on a daily basis. ‘The thinker Muammar Gaddafi does not present his thought for simple amusement or pleasure,’ the dustcover proclaimed. ‘Nor is it for those who regard ideas as puzzles for the entertainment of empty-minded people standing on the margin of life. Gaddafi’s ideas interpret life as it erupts from the heart of the tormented, the oppressed, the deprived and the grief-stricken. It flows from the ever-developing and conflicting reality in search of whatever is best and most beautiful.’ The Green Book rejects both atheistic communism and materialistic capitalism in favour of the Third Universal Theory. Libyans have yet to work out what it all means.

There is an unmistakable whiff, then, of Orwell’s 1984 about Tripoli, an Oceania on the shores of the Mediterranean, a city whose people just about get by. The wonderful climate is deceptive. The first-time visitor sees a handsome, whitewashed city basking in the sun. A refreshing breeze blows along the boulevards lined with palm trees and grand stuccoed buildings from the Turkish and Italian era. In the square to the south of the castle, water dances in the Italian fountain. Here and there are cafés, filled with men smoking shisha pipes, playing chess and backgammon. Women bustle along, window-shopping in the brightly lit gold boutiques. Bride of the Sea and gateway to the desert, Tripoli is an elegant place.

But these are only first impressions. When he looks more closely, the visitor finds that much of this handsome city is falling apart. Even the charm of the medina, with its colonial-era architecture, shaded streets and small, labyrinthine suq is one of decay. Its graceful Turkish and Italian buildings, once the finest homes in the city, are crumbling away. The visitor finds, too, that the men are smoking pipes and playing chess in the cafés because they have no jobs to go to. And the women waddling through the suq are window-shopping because they can only afford the bare necessities.

Nonetheless, children of senior government officials, chic in designer clothes, chat into mobile phones and congregate in the new fast-food outlets springing up around the town. Together with high-ranking military personnel, they hurtle along the roads in black Mercedes and BMW saloons with tinted windows, past less favoured government employees rattling along in ancient Peugeot 404s held together with string, while African immigrants from Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Sudan sit by the roadside, waiting for construction and painting jobs that may never come.

Back at the hotel there was no sign of Taher in his office.

‘It might be a good sign,’ I said to Ned. ‘Perhaps he’s still talking to his friend about buying camels.’ I didn’t really believe a word of it. Ned looked equally unconvinced. Fearing the worst, I checked in with Hajer to see if he could shed some light on Taher’s prolonged disappearance.

‘Taher go to Tunisia,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘He go to meet new tourists.’

This was testing our patience excessively. It was all very well waiting in the hope of something happening, but Taher was obviously over-stretched and doing nothing on our behalf. There was no point delaying any further in Tripoli. We had to get on with looking for camels ourselves. Hajer looked uncomfortable, as though he feared the worst from his boss should he let us leave during Taher’s absence. He implored us to stay. We shook our heads. He changed tactics.

‘Taher very angry you go Ghadames.’

‘Well, we’re very angry he went off to Tunisia without even telling us,’ I replied.

‘No, you stay in Tripoli,’ said Hajer. ‘Taher go to Tunisia.’

‘We go to Ghadames,’ we responded firmly.

CHAPTER III
‘Really We Are in Bad Condition’

Libya is – as the others show, and indeed as Cnaeus Piso, who was once the prefect of that country, told me – like a leopard’s skin; for it is spotted with inhabited places that are surrounded by waterless and desert land. The Egyptians call such inhabited places ‘auases’.

STRABO, THE GEOGRAPHY

The details of the [slave] traffic are really curious. A slave is heard of one day, talked about the next, reflections next day, price fixed next, goods offered next, squabblings next, bargain upset next, new disputes next, goods assorted next, final arrangement next, goods delivered and exchanged next, etc., etc., and the whole of this melancholy exhibition of a wrangling cupidity over the sale of human beings is wound up by the present of a few parched peas, a few Barbary almonds, and a little tobacco being given to the Soudanese merchants, the parties separating with as much self-complacency, as if they had arranged the mercantile affairs of all Africa.

JAMES RICHARDSON, TRAVELS IN THE GREAT DESERT OF SAHARA IN THE YEARS OF 1845 AND 1846

Outside Tripoli, we got out of our taxi and stopped in a roadside restaurant for a hasty supper. The news bulletin was just beginning. Until recently, the opening sequence had showed Libya and the Arab world as a solitary block of green in a black world. In the heavens hung a copy of The Green Book, growing steadily brighter as a ray of light beamed up towards it from Tripoli. Then, like a satellite sending out signals, the book started zapping countries one by one until the whole world had succumbed to Gaddafi’s malevolent genius and turned green itself. All this was until 1998, when invitations were sent to Arab leaders to join the celebrations in Tripoli for the 29th anniversary of the revolution. Not one turned up. Several premiers, including Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, had arrived several days earlier and made a discreet exit before the ceremonies began. Foreign heads of state were limited to a handful of African leaders. Stung by this snub from his Arab brethren, the man who had spent three decades in power campaigning for a single Arab nation, declared that henceforth Libya was an African, not an Arab, nation. The news no longer showed the outline of the Arab nations. Libya beamed out green light to the black continent of Africa instead.

The main item tonight was the meeting in Libya between the All African Students Union, an African president and Gaddafi. The African leader sat in impressively colourful costume, nodding off periodically during a long ranting speech from his host. Flanking the Libyan head of state was Louis Farrakhan, the American Muslim firebrand, who had probably been given a handsome stipend to lend revolutionary Islamic chic to an otherwise tedious function. Dutifully, he praised his Libyan host. ‘We admire your great moral stature in international affairs and your fight against the imperialist policies of colonialism,’ he droned on sycophantically. ‘You are one of Islam’s great revolutionary leaders. We salute you for your work around the world in support of our Muslim brothers.’ The next item reported claims made by the renegade MI5 officer David Shayler that Britain had plotted to assassinate Gaddafi. ‘It was a pity they didn’t kill him,’ muttered a driver on the neighbouring table.

We sank into the seats of our Peugeot taxi and sped through flat, barren country, listening to French rap, soft Arab rock and All Saints. All that broke the emptiness of the evening landscape were occasional car scrapyards, unsightly heaps of abandoned Peugeot hulks next to squat Portakabins, and thick bands of rubbish on the roadside, mostly car tyres, food packets, and empty tins and bottles. And then darkness fell. At three in the morning, we nosed into the black mass of Ghadames and drove to the house of Othman al Hashashe, where I had stayed the last time I was here. Othman, a gangling twenty-six-year-old accountant and devoted Manchester United fan resplendent in Nike leisure suit, rubbed the sleep from his eyes wonderingly, recognized me and let us in. It was a bitterly cold night inside the house, a harbinger of things to come.

Richardson reached this oasis on 24 August 1845, after an uncomfortable two weeks on camel. He had been preceded by a letter announcing him somewhat disingenuously as the ‘English Consul of Ghadames’. Initially, he was ecstatic. By his own account he was only the second European ever to set foot in this holy trading city. Another Briton, Major Alexander Gordon Laing, had passed through twenty years before en route to becoming the first European to reach Timbuctoo, but had been murdered shortly afterwards. Back in 1818, Ritchie and Lyon had intended to travel to this far-flung town but had been discouraged by Yousef Karamanli ‘on account of the alledged dangers of the road’.

‘I now fancied I had discovered a new world, or had seen Timbuctoo, or followed the whole course of the Niger, or had done something very extraordinary,’ Richardson gushed. ‘But the illusion soon vanished, as vanish all the vain hopes and foolish aspirations of man. I found afterwards that I had only made one step, or laid one stone, in raising for myself a monument of fame in the annals of African discovery!’ For the time being, the great mission to investigate and help eradicate the slave trade had been forgotten. Richardson’s personal ambitions as an African explorer were proving more immediately compelling.

I awoke next morning to a familiar booming voice. Mohammed Ali, who had acted as guide and interpreter for me during my last visit, was breakfasting with Othman. I joined them and was instantly bombarded with a barrage of greetings from Mohammed.

‘Mr Justin, kaif halek (how are you)? Fine? Really, I have missed you, believe me. I thought maybe you were not coming to Libya. How are you? Fine? How is your family? Now I am happy to see you, alhamdulillah (praise God). Believe me, I am too shocked now you come to Ghadames. Alleye berrik feik (God bless you). How is your father? How are you? Fine?’ The exchange of greetings lasted some time. Libyans are an exceedingly courteous people. It reminded me of Lyon’s first impressions of Tripolines in 1818, when he observed:

Very intimate acquaintances mutually lift their joined right hand, repeating with the greatest rapidity, ‘How are you? Well, how are you? Thank God, how are you? God bless you, how are you?’ which compliments in a well bred man never last less than ten minutes; and whatever may be the occasion afterwards, it is a mark of great good breeding occasionally to interrupt it, bowing solemnly and asking, ‘How are you?’ though an answer to the question is by no means considered necessary, as he who asks it is perhaps looking another way, and thinking of something else.

Mohammed was small and stodgily built, bordering on the portly, with a hurrying ramshackle gait and a baritone laugh. A man of constant good humour, he had a lazy right eye, so it was often difficult to know if he was addressing you or someone else. On the basis of my brief time in Ghadames the previous September I was now considered an old friend. Throughout our stay in Libya, Mohammed would behave like an old friend too – unstintingly helpful and loyal. Without our asking for assistance, he had taken today off from his job as one of Ghadames’s three air traffic controllers to show us the Old City and help us look for camels. With an average of one incoming flight every month or so, it was not a demanding job. Before the 1992 embargo, there had been three flights a week to Tripoli and two to Sebha, the capital of Fezzan. Mohammed owed his staccato command of English to a nine-month course at the Anglo-Continental Educational Group of Bournemouth. This was our first experience of the Libyan Dorset connection that would resurface bizarrely during our time in the Sahara. Trained at Herne airport in Dorset in 1978, Mohammed was an ardent Anglophile, though this probably owed more to his extracurricular activities than to any great love of air charts. He spoke fondly of his time in Badger’s and Tiffany’s nightclubs, where he had spent many happy hours slow dancing (‘Oh, my God, really very slowly, believe me’) with the belles of Bournemouth and a girlfriend called Anne.

‘Now we go to Taher’s office,’ he said reassuringly. ‘Believe me, soon you will have camels and then you will leave Ghadames.’ Ned and I exchanged glances – would it be so easy? – and followed Mohammed to the office, a whitewashed hole in the wall run by Taher’s younger brother Ibrahim. He could hardly have looked less like his brother in Tripoli. Where Taher was slim, well-dressed, alert and enjoyed handsome, aquiline features, Ibrahim was a dozy mountain of a man, shambolically clad in a voluminous jalabiya which hung off him like a tent. Overweight and unhurried, he contemplated his surroundings with a lazy air of equanimity. Everything about him took place in slow motion. He was as laid-back as you needed to be in the sleepy town of Ghadames, where nothing much happened these days. If it had been a mistake to count on Taher to get things done, the prospect of definite assistance from Ibrahim seemed infinitely remote.

We discussed the first leg of our journey from Ghadames with him and asked if he could find a guide to take us to Idri, a little less than 300 miles south-east of Ghadames. Ned and I had already agreed that it would be better to look for the camels ourselves, rather than go through a middleman who would doubtless receive some sort of commission and force up the price. Ibrahim considered our request for a couple of minutes, talking intermittently to Mohammed Ali as he did so, and then turned back to us.

‘I find you good guide,’ he said slowly. He knew someone suitable to escort us to Idri and would talk to him later that afternoon. ‘No problem,’ he continued, ‘I arrange everything for you.’

Perhaps we looked unconvinced. Mohammed, as unswerving in his optimism as Hajer in Tripoli, was quick to reassure us all would be well.

‘Believe me,’ he confided sotto voce, ‘Ibrahim is very good man. My God, he will help you. Really, he will do everything for you. Don’t worry about a thing. Mohammed is also praying for you.’

We left Ibrahim to it and set off with Mohammed to explore the old city of Ghadames, one of the most evocative oases in the Sahara. From the searing noon heat and light that bleached everything in sight a painful white we stepped into the deep shade and delicious cool of its covered streets. The contrast was intense. We plunged into a labyrinth of streets and zinqas (alleys), through gloom penetrated every few metres by strong shafts of sunlight shining through the openings between houses. In and out of the light we walked, sometimes emerging into the open air alongside gardens of date palms and vegetables. We climbed up on to one of the roofs and looked down on the tattered maze of paths running between walls of dried mud that sliced through this lush growth. To the south the mosque of Sidi Bedri loomed above the shadowy streets.

The columns and capitals of its interior are thought to have been removed from the Byzantine basilica that stood here during the time of Justinian, the sixth-century Roman emperor, when Ghadames was an episcopal see. A deathlike stillness lingered over the place, broken occasionally by the bleating of sheep and goats and the hum of a few small farmers tending their plots of land. Against the drab beige desert that pressed in on all sides, Ghadames was a bright emerald splash of life.

Until recently, these whitewashed rooftops had been the entire world of the women of Ghadames. Only on three occasions in the year – including the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed – were they allowed to descend to the streets and make their way to one of the town’s seven squares to celebrate their return to earth. The rest of their lives they led in airy seclusion on the interconnected roof terraces of the town, surrounded by date palms, passing from one housetop to another to gossip, exchange presents or buy goods such as scarves, silk sandals, brooches and coloured leather slippers from their neighbours.

‘It is a very old city – 2,000 years old or 5,000 or 12,000,’ Mohammed said definitely, as we surveyed Ghadames from this lofty vantage point. Ten thousand years seemed to be a wide enough range to cover all the options. ‘I have been on government tourist course,’ he went on. ‘This is what they told us to tell the tourists – 2,000, 5,000 or 12,000 years – but believe me, it is very old city.’ And, then, as an afterthought, he added: ‘There are only six guides in Ghadames but only Mohammed Ali can speak English.’

Richardson met with little more success in his attempts to establish the exact age of Ghadames when he visited the town in the mid-nineteenth century. Rais Mustapha, the Turkish governor, told him then it was 4,000 years old. ‘The people of the town, I suppose, have told him so,’ the Englishman wrote sceptically, ‘but where is their authority?’

We know from Pliny the town is at least 2,000 years old. In 19 BC, with war breaking out along Rome’s southern frontier, Cornelius Balbus, the Cadiz-born Proconsul of Africa, set out to conquer the Garamantes, the trouble-making confederation of tribes which then held sway over much of the Sahara. He marched first from the coast to Cydamus (as Romans knew Ghadames), one of their most vital trading centres, and made it an allied city. Two centuries later, it was garrisoned by a detachment of the Legio III Augusta, the celebrated force that for 400 years was the sole Roman legion permanently garrisoned in north-west Africa. From Ghadames, Balbus marched his soldiers almost 350 miles south-east to Garama (now Germa), his enemy’s capital in the Wadi al Ajal. The rout did not stop there. According to Pliny, apart from Ghadames and Garama, Balbus went on to subdue an area containing a further twenty-five tribes, villages, mountains and rivers. It is likely these military successes were exaggerated to emphasize the Roman triumph, but Balbus’ achievements in moving his army across such vast distances in the desert and imposing the pax Romana on a powerful enemy were prodigious. The Garamantes, who had previously enjoyed a trading monopoly far and wide through the Sahara, were soon reduced to the ignominious role of escorting Roman caravans. Balbus was given citizen rights and a triumph, ‘the only foreigner ever so honoured,’ says Pliny.

When the French traveller Henri Duveyrier visited Ghadames in 1862 he came across a bas-relief that he judged could only be ancient Egyptian in style. Ghadamsis told him then that the town dated back to the time of Abraham. Duveyrier concluded Ghadames was a sister community to the early settlements on the Nile.

The town’s precise age may never be known, but Ghadamsis tell a popular tale of how it was founded. Long ago, a group of travellers heading south stopped in the area for lunch one day before continuing their journey. One of them forgot to take his iron plate with him when he left, the loss of which he only discovered the following morning. Returning to the spot, he wandered about searching until he found it. As he did, his horse kicked the ground and out burst a fountain of water. And so the town took its name from the place where the travellers had eaten lunch (gheda) yesterday (ams).

Another legend has it that Oqba bin Naf’a, the seventh-century Arabian conqueror who wiped out the last vestiges of the Garamantes’ empire in Fezzan, arrived in Ghadames after a gruelling journey. He searched in vain for water to quench his burning thirst. Like the travellers before him, his mare then stamped her hoof, and a spring was found. It was named ‘Ain el Fars (Mare’s Spring) and, until recently, was the city’s main water supply.

Water, the most valuable resource deep in the desert, had always been measured and distributed with the greatest care in Ghadames. After collecting in the large rectangular basin at ‘Ain el Fars on the fringes of the medina, it passed beneath ground level to a vaulted grotto in which sat the gaddas, the man responsible for measuring the quantity of water passing through the canal into the town’s gardens via a network of narrow channels. The gauge was a small copper bucket with a hole in the bottom, through which the water flowed in a certain number of minutes. For each bucket emptied the gaddas tied a knot in a cord of palm leaves, before refilling the bucket and continuing his thankless job. There were three such men in charge of the water supply, employed day and night on rota. They were not paid for their pains but received a ration of barley, fruit and dates from the town.

Mohammed took us into Mulberry Square, formerly the market for male slaves. Women were purchased in nearby Little Mulberry Square. Traces of its miserable past were still evident when an English traveller visited Ghadames in pre-war Libya. ‘Where once human flesh was exposed for sale the walls are slimy and foul: the thousands of slaves have left their mark,’ he wrote. Today, there are no such signs and the square was empty. The last time I had been here, I met two refugees from Sierra Leone whitewashing the walls in preparation for the annual tourist festival.

We padded along empty alleys, kicking up veils of dust that glittered in the stabbing sunlight, past stone benches built out from the walls of houses where the town’s old men had once sat and gossiped together, past abandoned house after abandoned house, their massive doors made of date palm trunks tightly closed to the world. Some were still decorated with scraps of coloured rags that showed the owner of the house had performed the haj (pilgrimage) to Mecca. The old Turkish school, built in 1835 and later used by the Italians, burnt uselessly under the sun, its roof caved in, its stairs falling ruinously apart.

This was the sad silence of decline and fall. For centuries Ghadames had been a great trading city whose fame and influence stretched thousands of miles across the Sahara. From Bornu to Timbuctoo, Ghadamsis had held sway commercially and had their own affluent quarters in far-flung southern cities like Jenne and Kano, now northern Nigeria. The Ghadamsi quarter of Timbuctoo was the most flourishing of the entire city, a visitor noted in 1591. Not so long ago, the streets of Ghadames had been filled with the hubbub of commerce, the cries of slaves and slave-buyers, children reciting their lessons in school and the muaddin’s mellifluous call to prayer. Now, all that had gone. The houses were empty. No-one lived here anymore, and the city sat in the heavy stupor of the desert.

Of the half dozen historic trade routes running from the Mediterranean coast across the Sahara, three were in what is now Libya, and Ghadames had sat astride the richest. Caravans from Tripoli, southern Tunis and Algeria assembled here before taking their goods farther south in three separate directions. Some went south-west via Tuat to Timbuctoo, others south to Ghat and Kano, and a third group travelled south-east through Murzuk to Bornu. For hundreds of years, until the mid-nineteenth century at least, the caravan trade was the bedrock of the town’s economy and most of the trading enterprises, bankers and wholesalers operating in the interior were headquartered here.

In the twelfth century, Venetians were bringing arms, textiles, glassware and exotic products like Arabian spices, Indian gems and Chinese silks to Tripoli, carried off by local merchants into the desert. By Leo Africanus’s time, four centuries later, European cloth was still a staple of the Saharan caravan trade. Together with clothes, brass vessels, horses and books, it was exchanged for gold, slaves and zebed (civet). This olfactory delight was procured from civet cats, which were kept in cages and periodically harangued and taunted until through intense perspiration they secreted a perfume from glands beneath the tail. They were then secured, the goo was scraped from their nether regions, preserved in small boxes of hide and sold at great expense as a scent-fixer for perfumes (did Victorian women know what they were dabbing onto their necks?). ‘A savage old cat will produce ten or twelve dollars’ worth in three heats,’ noted Lyon in 1819 (at the ripe age of twenty-two and without consulting anyone he had promoted himself from lieutenant to ensure a more respectful reception from the natives). ‘Their price is enormous, some being sold for three or four slaves.’

Lyon provided one of the most comprehensive accounts of the goods traded along Libya’s second trade route running south from Tripoli to Murzuk, Bilma and Kukawa, west of Lake Chad. It gives an idea of what the caravans were trading with Ghadames at the same time. From the coast came horses, beads, coral, needles (‘four of which purchase a fine fowl’), silks, copper pots and kettles, looking-glasses, swords (‘very long, straight and double edged; bought greedily by the Tuarick’), guns, carpets from Tripoli, Venetian glass, muslins and woollen cloaks. Among goods brought up from the south, slaves still predominated, accompanied by civet, cottons, gold in dust and small bars or rings, leather, ostrich skins and feathers, ornamental sandals, gerbas (water skins made of goats’ hides), honey, pepper, elephants’ teeth and gooroo nuts, a luxury that went at the rate of four to the Spanish dollar. ‘It is said, that in certain years when the nut has been scarce, people in Soudan have given a slave for one of them,’ the indefatigable Lyon reported. Ghadamsi merchants meanwhile brought swords, guns, powder, flints, lead, ironware and clothing to Murzuk for the annual spring market.

By the time Richardson arrived, Ghadames had passed its apogee. Turkish rule, with its capricious system of extortion, was hurting. During the Karamanli dynasty, the city had paid an annual tribute of 850 mahboubs to Tripoli. Richardson learnt that when the Turks took control of the city after their reconquest of Tripoli in 1835, they had demanded a forced contribution of 50,000 mahboubs, stripped women of their gold and silver, ransacked houses, and instituted an annual tribute of 10,000 mahboubs from the city. To make matters worse, Tripoli had just demanded an extraordinary levy of 3,200 mahboubs, which the beleaguered merchants said they were unable to pay. Richardson, who was soon on friendly terms with the Turkish governor, listened to him explaining the essence of Ottoman colonial policy in the territory. ‘You know Arabs to be very devils,’ he told the Englishman.

There are two ways to consider Arabs, but whichever way they are robbers and assassins. When they are famished, they plunder in order to eat; when their bellies are full, they plunder because they kick and are insolent. Now we (Turks) keep them upon a low diet in The Mountains; they have little, and always a little food. This is the Sultan’s tareek (government) to manage them. Their spirits are kept down and they are submissive.

Having mulled over his own ambitions as an explorer, Richardson now rediscovered his ‘humane mission on the behalf of unhappy weak Africans, doomed by men calling themselves Christians, to the curse of slavery’, and set about his investigation of the trade. It did not take him long to realize the scale of the challenge facing the abolitionists: ‘Slave-dealing is so completely engendered in the minds of the Ghadamsee merchants, that they cannot conceive how it can be wrong. They are greatly astonished that slavery is not permitted among us.’

One day, he watched a caravan of forty slaves arrive from Bornu. ‘They were as much like merchandize as they could be, or human beings could be made to resemble it,’ he recorded. ‘They were entirely naked, with the exception of a strip of tanned skin tied round the loins. All were nearly alike, as so many goods packed up of the same quality. They were very thin, and almost skeletons, about the age of from ten to fifteen years, with the round Bornouse features strongly marked upon their countenances.’ As the Turks had taxed Ghadamsis with such ferocity, there were few merchants in the town who could afford to purchase the slaves, and Richardson had to fend off repeated attempts by the Touareg and Tubbu slave owners to get him to buy these hapless creatures himself. The merchants had hoped to sell them for forty to fifty Spanish dollars a head, but were reduced to disposing of them for twenty, of which half went to the government in duty.

Later, he encountered another slave caravan and was deeply moved by the misery of these

poor little children – child-slaves – crawling over the ground, scarcely able to move. Oh, what a curse is slavery! How full of hard-heartedness and cruelty! As soon as the poor slaves arrived, they set to work and made a fire. Some of them were laden with wood when they came up. The fire was their only protection from the cold, the raw bitter cold of the night, for they were nearly naked. I require as much as three ordinary greatcoats, besides the usual clothing of the day, to keep me warm in the night; these poor things, the chilly children of the tropics, have only a rag to cover them, and a bit of fire to warm them. I shall never forget the sparkling eyes of delight of one of the poor little boys, as he sat down and looked into the crackling glaring fire of desert scrub.

Since the slave drivers were paid per capita to deliver their charges to their destination, they saved expenses by giving them as little food as possible. As a result, they were kept on survival rations consisting of barley meal mixed with water. Richardson’s attendant, he noted, ate more for dinner than a slave’s entire daily ration. By the time they got to their destination, they would be no more than ‘living-skeletons’.

Richardson stayed in Ghadames for three months, spending much of his time dispensing medicine to treat the most common illnesses – ophthalmia (inflammation of the eye), diarrhoea, dropsy, smallpox and syphilis – telling his unsuspecting patients it came from the Queen of England, ‘which, I have observed, heightens its value in their eyes’. He was something of a chameleon, at one moment the impassioned liberal, the next a Christian bigot, sometimes a patriotic British imperialist, at others the vitriolic anti-slave trade campaigner. But whatever his mood, he was a consistently – perhaps unintentionally – entertaining observer of his surroundings. The discovery that some men wore kohl to blacken their eyelids, for instance, completely threw him. ‘I confessed I was surprised at this monstrous effeminacy,’ he fumed.

More importantly, his investigations led him to conclude that two merchants under British protection were providing credit to slave-traders. He promptly wrote a letter to that effect to Colonel Warrington in Tripoli, asking him not to publicize this information until he himself was safely out of the desert, for fear of reprisals. The correspondence must have made Warrington squirm:

We may expect one of these days to see some American President coming forward in the Congress of the United States, as the late Mr Slaveholder Tigler, or some French Deputy in the Chamber with a statement to the following effect: ‘that whilst the British Consuls of Barbary, and the agents of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society are labouring for the suppression of the Slave Trade in Northern and Central Africa, the traffic in Slaves between Soudan and Tripoli is principally carried on by the means of British capital’.

Worse still was the news that Richardson had tactlessly conveyed his allegation (‘I do not believe one word of it,’ Warrington wrote London) to the Anti-Slavery Society in England, thereby undermining the British Consul’s own position. The diplomat’s response was equally direct. A public notice was put up announcing ‘the strictest inquiry’ into the affair and threatening a tribunal. Richardson, meanwhile, was pressed by Warrington to provide evidence to support his controversial claims, ‘or I apprehend you will be subject to an action’. Furious with the British Consul for revealing his allegation and jeopardizing his safety in Ghadames, and unable, he claimed, to procure hard evidence, Richardson retreated to his journal and vented his spleen there instead.

The whole affair, which was still occupying Warrington seven months later when Richardson returned to the coast, caused a great scandal both in Tripoli and Ghadames and was illustrative of the changing climate. From the mid-nineteenth century, the combination of the official prohibition of slave-dealing and mounting international opposition made life increasingly difficult for the illegal traffickers in human flesh. By the turn of the century, new economic realities had added to the slavers’ troubles. Transportation costs from Black Africa to Europe had been reduced with the advent of a train link from Kano to Lagos and the introduction of steamers from the African coast to Liverpool. It cost £3 to transport one ton of goods from Liverpool to Kano in 1905 and more than double that just to send the same consignment from Tripoli to Kano. The Saharan caravan trade was under threat as never before.

For Ghadames, the accelerating demise of the slave trade, on whose back the city had grown so prosperous, was the first calamitous setback. With fewer and fewer slaves available to irrigate the gardens and keep back the ever-encroaching sands, the city started shrinking, and emigration started apace. After the middle of the nineteenth century, the decline proved irreversible, but Ghadames lived on, propped up by the Italian Fascists in the early twentieth century through improvements to the water supply. It was in 1986, however, that Gaddafi’s government dealt the age-old medina a potentially fatal blow. All the inhabitants were ordered to vacate the Old City and move into newly constructed houses outside the city walls, equipped with the usual modern conveniences. These houses, unimaginative squares of cheap concrete, are already deteriorating fast. Those inside the medina, though they did not have such luxuries as running hot water, had lasted hundreds of years. Since this forced relocation, the Old City, quite unlike anything else the length and breadth of the Sahara, has been crumbling away steadily. If its oldest houses remain empty, Ghadames’s days are surely numbered.

We still needed camels. That afternoon, we mounted Mohammed’s battered Peugeot 404 pick-up, a clattering veteran of eighteen years of erratic driving, and drove off to see Haj Jiblani, an elderly Touareg who several months before had taken me for an introductory ten-mile camel ride. We sat on the ground and chatted above a depression in which his two white Mehari camels were being fed. Next to the old man, two young boys amused themselves by piling large stones on a tiny helpless puppy. They were toying with the animal as though it was the most normal recreation in the world.

In 1995, at the age of seventy, Jiblani had performed his haj by camel, from Soloum – on the Libyan border with Egypt – to Mecca. We asked if he was interested in selling us his camels and accompanying us as guide on the first leg to Idri. He replied softly, from beneath the shroud of white cloth that covered most of his head and face, that these camels were all he had so he could not part with them. As for guiding us, he would have liked to but could not leave Ghadames because he had a sick relative in the hospital. We should find someone younger and fitter. I had already spoken to another local Touareg called Okra, a man whose main claim to fame was that he had played Sophia Loren’s youthful lover in a film shot around Ghadames many years ago. He had said he was not fit enough for the journey. We did not seem to be making much progress. Even Mohammed, the most optimistic of our trio, seemed to agree.

‘Really we are in bad condition,’ he lamented. A selfless man, he was entering whole-heartedly into the spirit of our quest for camels and guide. ‘You will be the first to do this trip for 1,000 years,’ he enthused with a questionable degree of historical accuracy. ‘Really, we are not used to this. Everyone in Ghadames is surprised by you.’

For most of Gaddafi’s three decades at the helm tourism has not fitted comfortably within the regime’s broadly anti-imperialist mindset and a foreign policy that has led inexorably to isolation. It was only in the early nineties that a faltering programme of encouraging tourists to the country began and tourist visas were issued in greater earnest. For many Libyans we met, the whole notion of a long camel trek by foreign travellers was simply incomprehensible.

Mohammed suggested what was beginning to appear inevitable: ‘I think you must go to the Mehari Club of Ghadames.’ This was an organization that owned several riding camels and hired them out for special occasions.

‘If we do, it’s not going to be cheap,’ I said to Ned.

Abu Amama, its head, had previously offered to sell me five camels at a rate that seemed murderously excessive. We were a captive market in a nine-camel town. The collapse of the slave trade, followed decades later by the arrival of the motor car, meant that the town, through which countless caravans had passed over the centuries, now struggled to equip a tiny party like our own with five camels. Bracing ourselves for a financial showdown, we arranged through Mohammed to have an inspection of the animals the next day.

‘We must look as though we know what we’re doing,’ said Ned firmly when we were both back in Othman’s house. He was in serious mode now. Most of the time he was not, so it was sometimes difficult to adjust.

‘We haven’t got a clue,’ I replied.

‘Yes, but you mustn’t let them see that.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, but I can’t see us pulling it off for long,’ I said doubtfully. Somehow I could not see us fooling the assorted officers of the camel club that we were anything but neophytes as far as camels were concerned.

The next morning, taking another day off from monitoring Ghadames’s untroubled airspace, Mohammed collected us from Othman’s house. We squeezed into the front seat of his pick-up and he tried unsuccessfully to hotwire the ignition. ‘Really, this car is in bad condition,’ he boomed blithely, bustling about beneath the bonnet and tinkering with the engine. This was an understatement. Most of the basic components of a vehicle – such as seats, windows and dashboard – had disappeared long ago and if you looked down between your feet, there was more road than car. It said much both for Peugeot engineering and Ghadamsi mechanics that the car was still, albeit precariously, on the road. After several more attempts, it rattled reluctantly to life and we howled off several kilometres out of town to see the animals, clutching our paper by Michael Asher on how to choose camels.

‘Judging a camel’s age and condition takes experience and a novice will need the help of a local,’ it warned,

However, certain facts can be ascertained by examining the animal closely. First, make the camel kneel and inspect its back and withers. Any open galls or wounds immediately rule it out as a mount: on a long desert trek it can mean death. Let the animal stand again and look for obvious defects like crooked legs, in-growing nails, a hobbling pace, excessive fat on the legs. Check the inside of the front legs where they meet the chest: if you find evidence of rubbing there, the camel will be weak and slow. Generally, look for an animal that is well covered: no ribs showing, a fairly robust hump, bright eyes, well formed long legs and an erect carriage of the head. Finally, have someone saddle and ride the camel: note whether it snaps, bolts or roars at its handler; lead it around and see that it walks freely; make it kneel and stand up several times.

We thought we could manage that. Abd an Nibbi, who was deputizing for Abu Amama during the latter’s absence in the southern town of Ghat, welcomed us to a makeshift camel enclosure on a patch of wasteland. He looked faintly amused, and at the same time – was it our imagination? – crafty. There were seven Mehari camels inside, of which it took no expertise to see that two were clearly unsuitable for a long journey. They were puny youngsters, half the size of the others. It did not leave much room for choice. We needed five.

At close quarters, they looked terrifying. Huge hulks of beasts with mighty, towering legs, together they formed a striking picture of grace and power. The first Mehari camel Richardson had seen walking into the medina of Ghadames had had a similar effect on him. ‘It amazed me by its stupendous height. A person of average size might have walked under its belly.’ An Arab philologist suggested to him the word Mehari derived from Mahra, the Arabian province on the south-east coast adjoining Oman, from where the animal was supposed to have originated. ‘This remarkable camel, which is like the greyhound amongst dogs for swiftness and agility, and even shape, they train for war and riding like the horse,’ he wrote. The Touareg warriors of Ghadames sitting astride their Meharis looked ‘splendid and savage’ to him.

Massive, disdainful and apparently in no mood to be paraded around for our convenience, these Meharis roared terribly, jerked from one side to another and lashed out at the handlers with their legs to show their displeasure. Not a man to be cowed by mere animals, Abd an Nibbi entered the fray. Masterfully he subdued them, throwing a rope around their heads, pulling down their necks and grabbing their nose-rings with supreme assurance. Once he had hold of the nose-rings he tugged at them vigorously until the camels were completely cowed. Within seconds they had been transformed from proud, dangerous-looking beasts into the meekest creatures conceivable. Abd an Nibbi shot us a knowing look, as if to make sure we had witnessed this demonstration of camel skills. I remembered Ned’s advice of the night before and thought ruefully of what amateurs we were. There was no going back now. We had to look convincing. One by one, Abd an Nibbi brought the five camels in front of us.

I looked across at Ned, who had begun to scribble notes with what I imagined was the practised calm of a professional camelbuyer. He looked every bit the part. It was time to join the act. Together, we walked slowly around each one, trying to look as though it was the most normal thing in the world. We bought camels all the time, of course. We nodded sagely, conferred and shook our heads regretfully (we did not want to look over-eager), checked their legs (all of which to our untrained eyes looked crooked), stared into their eyes, slapped their flanks with what we hoped was the air of connoisseurs, and pondered carefully. Ned continued to take notes throughout the inspection. Mohammed Ali pottered about here and there, pausing occasionally to admire a particular animal. ‘Ohhh, really, these are good camels, Mr Justin. They are in good condition.’

At this initial viewing, three of the camels appeared particularly impressive. Cream in colour, they exuded a definite aristocratic hauteur and swaggered about with the greatest nonchalance. They paid us little attention beyond a certain sneering look before continuing their perambulations. Another, a barrel-chested brown, did not seem to be on good terms with the whites, but looked a robust mount. A handsome and effeminate beige, slighter than the others but with the demeanour of a lively thoroughbred, completed the party.

Ned looked up from his notes for a second. ‘Get them to trot,’ he said to me, as though addressing his camel boy. All that training on horseback in the Andes had not been for nothing. He was warming to the task. I looked at the tall beast beside me and wondered how I could get it to do anything, let alone trot. Then I remembered it was essential to show no fear in front of a camel. Grabbing the rope that was attached to its nose-ring, I ran off with the first. Disturbed from an otherwise peaceful afternoon munching hay, the camel appeared to think this was the greatest impudence but within seconds broke into a light trot behind me. At last. I was in control.

‘That’s good,’ said Ned, with the same air of authority. ‘Keep going.’

We took it in turns to take them trotting and got them to kneel down and stand up again repeatedly. Whether we presented a convincing picture to the Ghadamsis around us was a moot point. Judging by his face, Abd an Nibbi was struggling hard not to laugh.

Undaunted, Ned continued taking notes. I saw them several days later. They went something like this:

(1) 13 years old. Wound on front left leg. Slightly knock-kneed.

(2) 12 years old.

(3) White. Bobbles on nose.

(4) ‘V’ on neck. Good temperament.

(5) Brown.

All were for sale, Abd an Nibbi told us with a confident expression that indicated he knew something we did not. We started discussing prices, at which point he pulled out his own paperwork. It consisted of a letter from Abu Amama saying on no account were the camels to be sold for a dinar less than the figure he had quoted me on my last trip. In other words, they were going for £800 each. We could take it or leave it. There was to be no haggling.

We returned to Othman’s house to think it over.

‘What do you think?’ asked Ned.

‘It’s a lot of money,’ I replied, ‘and I don’t like the way there’s no haggling.’

It was too much money, certainly. Our problem was that Abu Amama was not even particularly keen on selling the camels. He would have preferred to hire them to us, he had said before, since if he sold them he would then have to make a long journey south to Niger to replace them. Meharis were relatively rare in Libya, he had explained, freely admitting that this was why they were so expensive. More importantly, if we were determined, as we were, to buy our camels here, we had little alternative, and everyone in Ghadames knew it.

‘What do you think are our options?’ Ned went on.

Short of having a look for camels down in Ghat or, less practically, Kufra (a little under 900 miles away as the crow flies, much more by road), there appeared to be no alternative. Besides, we would lose valuable time leaving Ghadames and would still have to pay the transportation costs to bring the camels back to our starting-point. I didn’t think there was much we could do but pay the exorbitant sum demanded.

‘You know what Anthony Cazalet would say in this sort of situation?’ Ned said.

‘Something about being bloody cold no doubt.’

‘No, he’d say it’s time to throw money at the problem.’

It was. There seemed nothing else for it. We returned to our lodgings and, after holding off an attempt by Abd an Nibbi to dispute the black market exchange rate, handed over several thousand dollars. Everyone was smiles. The transaction was complete. The camels were ours. Now we needed a guide. The next morning Mohammed Ali arrived with a message from Ibrahim saying one had been found. ‘You see, Mr Justin, really we are in good condition. I tell you Ibrahim help with everything, alhamdulillah.’

Things were looking up. We trooped back into the hole in the wall to find a fat man with two lazy eyes waiting for us. With him and Mohammed Ali in one room, it was almost impossible to know who was speaking to whom. He shook hands without warmth and was introduced to us as Mohammed Ramadan from Awbari. There was something unpleasant about his manner. He did not seem at all interested in getting to know the people with whom he was volunteering to travel several hundred miles across the Sahara. This was a simple business transaction, no more, no less. In a bullying tone, he told us he knew the area between Ghadames and Idri intimately and was ready to go with us. We started to discuss the route in more detail and asked him how he travelled in the desert. Things went rapidly downhill from there and his manner became ever more aggressive and confrontational. He would only travel by camel if we had a car as back-up, he insisted. It would carry food and water supplies for us and the camels. Each day his sidekick would drive ahead of us for thirty miles or so and in the evening we would rejoin the car for dinner. Mohammed Ali looked embarrassed. He knew this was not what we wanted to do.

Having talked over the route together and ascertained there were several wells en route to Idri, we asked Mohammed Ramadan why he needed a car. We were happy to go without one. It seemed an unnecessary, profoundly unromantic and expensive means of travel. He took this as an attack on his desert skills and pounded his fist on the table.

‘The journey is very difficult and dangerous,’ he insisted. ‘There is no food or water for the camels for many days.’

‘But you’ve just said there are several wells along the route, so how can it be so dangerous?’ I asked.

‘I go with a car or I don’t go at all,’ he spluttered aggressively. He banged the table with his fist again and his pudgy face wobbled with the impact.

I thought of Michael Asher’s notes again.

Choosing a guide or companion is very much more difficult than choosing a camel. As the Arabs say, ‘you cannot know a man until you have been in the desert with him’ … Many who present themselves as desert guides may have only a rudimentary knowledge of camels. Even those who are official desert guides may have become so used to travelling in motor vehicles that they have grown lax. Do not fall for the ‘Wise old Arab’ syndrome.

A heated exchange followed between Ibrahim and Mohammed Ramadan about taking the car. The latter repeated his conditions, pounding the table at intervals to drive home his point. The meeting was over. This was not the man we wanted to travel in the desert with and it appeared the feeling was mutual.

‘So much for that,’ I said to Ned as we returned in low spirits to Othman’s house.

‘Look on the bright side. He was too fat for the job,’ came the phlegmatic reply. Never one to moan about our bad luck, Ned was adept at making light of such failures.

Mohammed, too, had his own style. ‘Really, I am sorry for you,’ he mourned sympathetically. ‘Now we are in bad condition. I am embarrassed about this, really I feel shy.’

I asked him if he knew anyone else in Ghadames who might agree to come with us.

‘Really, I don’t know, Mr Justin, because you are the first to do this,’ he replied sombrely. ‘Oh my God, you like camels too much. Other people go by car. But I am also wanting you to go by camel now. Maybe tomorrow we will find good guide for you, inshallah (God willing).’ From the tone of his voice, it was clear he thought our chances of success extremely limited. And then, in a gesture that took both Ned and me by surprise, he suddenly raised his hands to the heavens in the most theatrical supplication to the Almighty. ‘Please God, help us so they can do the journey without a car!’ he implored. Would He listen?

The next day, Ibrahim confessed he no longer held out great hopes of finding another guide prepared to travel from Ghadames to Idri by camel. He had lost the urge, never very great in the first place, to look for one. Mohammed Ali, a more enterprising character altogether, said he would talk to some of the people from the Mehari Club. Buying camels in one of the ancient centres of the caravan trade had been difficult but manageable. We now wondered whether finding a guide prepared to exchange the comforts of travel by Toyota Landcruiser for the hardships of a camel trek would prove too much in late-twentieth-century Ghadames.

While we waited to hear the results of Mohammed’s efforts, we visited the museum, a very basic series of rooms in the old fort containing traditional Ghadamsi costumes, utensils, folkloric medicines, a Touareg tent and the usual Gaddafi propaganda. In one room lay a few stones with barely legible Roman inscriptions. In another was a rope above a sign saying ‘It used for climbing tree’ and a photograph of a man delicately balanced with a rope tied around his waist and the date palm, resting his feet on the trunk. Mohammed Ali’s uncle had fallen to his death several years ago while collecting dates from a tree. The museum did not do justice to Ghadames’ past, but after those of Tripoli, Leptis and Sabratha there was something to be said for brevity. A tour took about ten minutes.

Outside Ibrahim’s office, an elderly Land Rover with two gerbas (waterskins) attached to the wings had arrived. Two languid Frenchmen came to say hello. They were looking for another vehicle with which to make a convoy down to Ghat. We said we could not help, but there seemed to be a fair amount of tourist traffic heading that way if they waited around. Moments later, a monstrous Mercedes Unimog desert vehicle pulled in. Emblazoned on the sides in lurid colours was a romanticized desert scene and the hideous caption ETHNOGRAPHISCHE EXPEDITIONEN. Its German occupants spilled out. They too were en route to Ghat. ‘Ja, ve make documentary about ze Touareg und little bit about ze Sahara,’ they told us. Ned and I retired to one side. The Frenchmen, whose faces had fallen when they saw this brute of a vehicle arrive, approached the Germans reluctantly. It was obvious they would rather not have gone with them but had no alternative. We British sat apart from the Continental throng. ‘A microcosm of Europe,’ said Ned.

Mohammed reappeared later that afternoon in a state of excitement. ‘Now really we are in good condition!’ he bellowed. ‘I have found someone who will go with you. His name is Abd al Wahab and he is very good guide.’ He had spent several hours talking to the Touareg of the Mehari Club. ‘Now you can go without car, inshallah. Believe me, this will be good for you. I know you are liking the camels!’ He would bring the man to see us in the evening.

Ruminating over this apparent change in our fortunes, we were interrupted by the unannounced arrival of Taher Ibrahim, an oleaginous Ghadamsi travel agent I had bumped into on my last visit. He spoke fluent English with a Cockney accent, unexpected in someone whose contact with England had been limited to two years in Colchester.

‘You speak excellent English,’ said Ned.

‘Yes, I know, best in Ghadames,’ he replied smugly. He started prying. How much were we paying for the camels? How much was the guide going to cost? Where were we going? How long would we be in Ghadames? To the last we replied shortly: ‘As long as it takes.’ This expression reminded him of an encounter with a prostitute on London’s Gloucester Road. Captivated – as he seemed to think we were too – by the recollections of his sexual triumph, he launched into an account of the episode.

‘I asked her how much. She said £20 or something like that. How long do I get with you, I asked? As long as it takes, she said.’ He burst into laughter.

We met Abd al Wahab for the first time that evening. A handsome Touareg possessed of the silent gravitas of the desert nomad, he had a dignified bearing, benevolent eyes that peered out from his clean white tagilmus (the veil worn by all Touareg men), and a large slug of a moustache that crawled greedily across his upper lip and would have reached the bottom of his sideburns if he had worn any. He was smartly dressed in a black woollen burnous and his manner was calm and retiring, a welcome contrast to the aggressive hectoring tone of Mohammed Ramadan. When he spoke – and he did so rarely – it was in a soft assured voice. We discussed the journey and his terms for accompanying us around a dinner table on a dais in Othman’s house. I repeated to Abd al Wahab what Mohammed Ramadan had told us about the great dangers of the route. He shook his head.

‘It is not so dangerous,’ he replied quietly. We would reach our first well after three days, the second after another three and thereafter they would appear regularly, so we need not be concerned about water for the camels. ‘Also, it is winter now, and the camels can go longer than that without water,’ he went on. ‘Of course, we do not need to take a car.’ Everything about him inspired confidence.

This was our man. We shook hands with him, delighted at having overcome our first serious difficulty, and arranged to go the next day but one. Leaving, he did not look where he was going, stepped down from the dais onto a bed below and was promptly trampolined into the air, before returning to the floor in a confused heap of white cotton and black wool. He laughed at himself good-humouredly, if somewhat sheepishly, and excused himself. He looked as though he would be far happier in the desert than surrounded by these trappings of modern civilization.

The next morning was a flurry of shopping. We descended on the town’s market to buy ten- and twenty-litre plastic water bidouns, cooking pots, buckets, a tarpaulin and blankets to cover the riding saddles that we were buying from the club. Neither of us had ever provisioned for a journey of two weeks, so it was a hit-and-miss affair. Mohammed Ali totted up our bill while we both raided the shop shelves. We thought it best to err on the side of generosity, and tin after tin of tuna fish duly flew into cardboard boxes, joining a plethora of pasta, tomato puree, tea, coffee, sugar, bread, biscuits, tinned fruit, olive oil, garlic, onions and oranges. These complemented our scanty supplies from England. I had brought packet soups, packet sauces and a pot of Marmite. Ned, more of a minimalist, had half a dozen bottles of Encona West Indian Hot Pepper Sauce to enliven the pasta. Having heard that arguments with guides over food were notorious in the desert, we took pains to ensure Abd al Wahab liked everything we were buying. Ned picked up a tin of beans. Here was a chance to practise the Arabic he had been learning on his Linguaphone course.

‘Are you a fasulya bean?’ he asked him, in flawless classical Arabic.

Abd al Wahab smiled and nodded.

The last things we needed from the market were some suitable clothes for the desert. I suggested to Ned we buy a couple of cotton jalabiyas, the free-flowing garment worn throughout the Arab world, as well as a shish, a five-metre length of cotton to protect our heads from the desert sun. As Michael Asher had written,

it seems to me that the West has devised no better dress for travelling than that worn by desert people. The long, loose-fitting shirt allows a layer of cool insulating air to circulate beneath it. The baggy trousers or loin-cloths worn by most desert tribes are extremely comfortable for riding. The turban or headcloth, with its many layers not only keeps the head cool but can also be used in a number of other ways, including veiling the face in a sand storm.

Ned, resolutely English, was initially unconvinced and took some persuading of the advantages of going native. While he hesitated I bought the last large cotton jalabiya in the shop. All that was left in his size was one in diarrhoea-coloured polyester.

Hearing of our imminent departure, Othman had kindly arranged an interview for us with his uncle, Abd as Salam, the chief government official of Ghadames. Minders showed us into his office where he welcomed us graciously. He sat behind a desk sporting a pair of glasses with lenses so thick they distorted his eyes into a demonic grimace. Despite the daytime heat, he wore a heavy beige cardigan, two jumpers, a shirt and thermal vest. This was midwinter for Ghadamsis.

The town dated back to 895 BC, he told us, and had long been an important transit point for goods going north and south across the desert. ‘I tell you something else you do not know,’ he said, with an air of mystery. ‘Ghadames was first city in world to have passports, post office, free market and water gauge.’ ‘Passports’ had once been necessary, he explained, to cross from one half of Ghadames into the other. The system of gates dividing the town into two sections – one each for the predominant but mutually hostile Bani Walid and Bani Wazit tribes – dated back more than 2,000 years. When a man from one tribe wanted to visit someone from the other, he had to have a certain paper, like a passport, that enabled him to pass through the gateway into the neighbouring quarter. Richardson called these two long-feuding tribes ‘the Whigs and Tories of Ghadames’. On asking his guide about the history of their conflict he was told: ‘The Ben Weleed and the Ben Wezeet are people of Ghadames, who have quarrelled from time immemorial: it was the will of God they should be divided, and who shall resist his will?’ These strict tribal divisions no longer existed and intermarrying was increasingly common, Abd as Salam informed us.

The postal service consisted of a small box, into which people would place letters to various destinations across the Sahara. Anyone setting out by caravan to Tripoli, for example, first had to see if there were any letters bound for that area. ‘If he do not look in box before he go, he make big mistake,’ Abd as Salam said. ‘He will be in big trouble with the people.’ The world’s first free market consisted of a square with mosques on two sides. Both the Bani Walid and Bani Wazit were at liberty to meet here and conduct business.

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.

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.

The summit wave commanded a view over many miles. To the south, beyond the patches of scrub where we had camped the night before, were lines of rocky outcrops dribbled over with sand, like cakes sprinkled with sugar. Here and there, silent kingdoms of sand were piled up independently among them, in greater and greater numbers until the rocks were no more and the dunes were one sweeping mass hurrying towards the horizon. To the north were the matchstick figures of Ned and Abd al Wahab leading the camels away from the splash of blue Toyota and beyond them the neat ridge of sandstone, mile after mile of it, like a smudged crayon dashed across the sky.

We moved on towards Idri, covering 20–25 miles a day. Most of the time we walked. Abd al Wahab, who gave the impression of being completely indefatigable, rarely asked us whether we wanted to ride and we were too proud to suggest it ourselves. It was always a joy, then, to hear him ask ‘Tibbi tirkub?’ (Do you want to ride?). Ned and I would consult each other first, so as not to look overeager – the result of the conference was always a foregone conclusion – and roar ‘Nirkubu!’ (Let’s ride!). The camels would then be halted and made to kneel down.

To mount from the camel’s left flank, you first grabbed his upper lip, a sensitive part of his anatomy that he was very keen not to have interfered with. Coquettishly, he would duck and swish his head away until, after several attempts, you managed to grab it. Twisting it a little in your hand for maximum control over the animal, you then pulled his head round towards his left side, enabling you to stand with all your weight on your left foot on the camel’s reclined left foreleg. Keeping your outstretched left hand on his lip – if you did not, he might throw you off vengefully for the indignity and discomfort of it all – you then swung your right leg over the pommel of the saddle. As soon as your bottom touched the saddle, he would lurch up violently, first the rear legs, which catapulted you forwards, then his forelegs, which would throw you backwards.

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