Arabian Sands Read online

  On my return I went into Fasher – the Provincial Headquarters – for Christmas. At dinner there was talk of the Italians having occupied Bir Natrun. Recently they had seized the small oasis of Uainat on the Sudan-Libyan frontier which had been assumed to belong to the Sudan. This incident had led to protests and the exchange of notes. Now I heard that Dongala had reported to Khartoum that some Arabs had recently seen white men at Bir Natrun, and that this was assumed to be further aggression by the Italians. ‘Emergency measures’ had been taken and aircraft had been moved to Wadi Haifa. I interrupted to say that I could not believe this since I had just returned from Bir Natrun, where I had only seen a few Arabs. A stunned silence followed, and then the CO. of the Western Arab Corps said grimly, ‘I suppose you are the Italians.’ A little later, when I went through Khartoum on leave, it was pointed out to me firmly but sympathetically by the Civil Secretary that it was not customary to travel in someone else’s district without the D.C.’s consent, and certainly not to tour in another province without the Governor’s permission.

  At the end of 1937 I heard that I was to be transferred to

  The Sudan

  Wad Medani, the headquarters of the Blue Nile Province and the centre of the Gezira Cotton Scheme. I was appalled at the idea of spending two years or more in this African suburbia. On my way through Khartoum on leave I persuaded the Civil Secretary to let me resign from the permanent Political Service and rejoin as a contract D.C. on the understanding that I should not be asked to serve except in the wilds. This meant that I should no longer be eligible for a pension, but I doubted that I really wished to spend the rest of my active life in the Sudan. I had been happy in Darfur. I had found satisfaction in the stimulating harshness of this empty land, pleasure in the nomadic life which I had led. I had loved the hunting. It had been exciting to stalk barbary sheep among the craters of Maidob, or kudu in the Tagabo hills, or addax or oryx on the edge of the Libyan desert. It had been wildly exciting to charge with a mob of mounted tribesmen through thick bush after a galloping lion, to ride close behind it when it tired, while the Arabs waved their spears and shouted defiance, to circle round the patch of jungle in which it had come to bay, trying to make out its shape among the shadows, while the air quivered with its growls. I had grown fond of the people among whom I lived. I valued the qualities which they possessed and was jealous for the preservation of their way of life. But I knew that I was not really suited to be a D.C. as I had no faith in the changes which we were bringing about. I craved for the past, resented the present, and dreaded the future.

  I was posted to the Western Nuer District of the Upper Nile Province. I went there on my return from leave, part of which I had spent in Morocco.

  The Nuer are Nilotics, kin to the Dinka and Shilluk, and they live in the swamps or Sudd which borders the White Nile to the south of Malakal. A pastoral people who own great herds of cattle, they are a virile race of tall, stark-naked savages with handsome arrogant faces and long hair dyed golden with cow’s urine. The District had only been administered since 1925, and there had been some fierce fighting before they had submitted, but they were a people who had exerted a fascination over nearly all Englishmen who had encountered them.

  I lived on a paddle-steamer with Wedderburn Maxwell, my District Commissioner. We were left to ourselves; all that the Governor asked was that he should get an occasional letter to say that we were all right. We kept a few files for our own convenience, but were not bothered with the mass of paper which accumulated on office desks in more conventional districts. We were happily out of touch with the rest of the Sudan, for there were no roads anywhere in the district; it was only possible to get there by steamer and to travel in the district with porters. The country was full of game. I once saw a thousand elephants in one vast herd along the river’s banks. There were buffalo and white rhinoceros, hippopotamus, giraffe, and many kinds of antelope, and there were leopards, and a great number of lions. I shot seventy lions during the five years I was in the Sudan.

  This was the Africa which I had read about as a boy and which I had despaired of finding in the Sudan when I first saw Khartoum: the long line of naked porters winding across a plain dotted with grazing antelope; my trackers slipping through the dappled bush as we followed a herd of buffalo; the tense excitement as we closed in upon a lion at bay; the grunting cough as it charged; the reeking red shambles as we cut up a fallen elephant, a blood-caked youth grinning out from between the gaping ribs; white cattle egrets flying above the Nile against a background of papyrus, such as is depicted in the Pharaohs’ tombs; Lake No and the setting sun reflected redly in water that shone like polished steel; hippopotamus grunting close by in a darkness that was alive with other sounds; smoke rising over Nuer cattle camps; the leaping, twisting forms caught up in the excitement of a war dance; the rigid figures of young men undergoing the agony of initiation. Earlier in my life this would have been all that I could have asked, but now I was troubled with memories of the desert.

  In 1938 I spent my leave in the Sahara and visited the Tibesti mountains, which were unknown except to French officers who had travelled there on duty. I left Kutum early in August accompanied by a Zaghawa lad, who had been my servant since I came to the Sudan, and an elderly Badayat who knew the language of the Tibbu, having lived in Tibesti. I hired camels in Darfur to take us as far as Fay a; after that we should need camels used to the mountains. We travelled light, the distances being great and the time short.

  Among the Nuer I had lived in a tent apart from my men, waited on by servants; I had been an Englishman travelling in Africa, but now I could revert happily to the desert ways which I had learned at Kutum. For this was the real desert where differences of race and colour, of wealth and social standing, are almost meaningless; where coverings of pretence are stripped away and basic truths emerge. It was a place where men live close together. Here, to be alone was to feel at once the weight of fear, for the nakedness of this land was more terrifying than the darkest forest at dead of night. ID the pitiless light of day we were as insignificant as the beetles I watched labouring across the sand. Only in the kindly darkness could we borrow a few square feet of desert and find homeliness within the radius of the firelight, while overhead the familiar pattern of the stars screened the awful mystery of space.

  We did long marches, sometimes riding for eighteen or twenty hours. At last we saw, faint like a cloud upon the desert’s edge, the dim outline of Emi Koussi, the crater summit of Tibesti. As we drew near it dominated our world, sharp blue at dawn, and black against the setting sun. We climbed it with difficulty, and stood at last upon the crater’s rim, 11,125 feet above sea-level. Beneath us in the crater’s floor was the vent, a great hole a thousand feet deep. To the north were range upon range of jagged peaks, rising from shadowed gorges, an awful scene of utter desolation. Everywhere the rocks were slowly crumbling away, eroded by sun and wind and storm. It was a sombre land, black and red and brown and grey. We travelled across wind-swept uplands, over passes and through narrow gorges, under precipices, past towering peaks. From Bardai we visited the great crater of Doon, 2,500 feet in depth. We camped in the Modra valley beneath Tieroko, the most magnificent of all the Tibesti mountains. When we returned to Darfur we had ridden over two thousand miles in three months.

  In the desert I had found a freedom unattainable in civilization; a life unhampered by possessions, since everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance. I had found, too, a comradeship inherent in the circumstances, and the belief that tranquillity was to be found there. I had learnt the satisfaction which comes from hardship and the pleasure which springs from abstinence: the contentment of a full belly; the richness of meat; the taste of clean water; the ecstasy of surrender when the craving for sleep becomes a torment; the warmth of a fire in the chill of dawn.

  I went back to the Nuer, but I was lonely, sitting apart on a chair, among a crowd of naked savages. I wanted more than they could give me, even while I enjoyed being with t
hem. The Danakil journey had unsuited me for life in our civilization; it had confirmed and strengthened a craving for the wilds. The Nuer country would have met this need, but three years in Darfur and my recent journey to Tibesti had taught me to ask for more than this, for something which I was to find later in the deserts of Arabia.

  I had been posted back to Kutum, but was still on leave when the war started, and being without a district I was allowed to join the Sudan Defence Force in April 1940. For me the Abyssinian campaign had the quality of a crusade. Ten years earlier I had watched the Emperor Haile Selassie being crowned in Addis Ababa; six years after this I had seen him descend from the train at Victoria into exile. I am proud to have served in Abyssinia with Sandford’s mission which prepared the way for Haile Selassie’s restoration, and to have fought in Wingate’s Gideon Force which took him back from the Sudan through Gojam to Addis Ababa. From Abyssinia I was sent to Syria, where I served in Jabal al Druze and later worked for a year among the tribes.

  The deserts in which I had travelled had been blanks in time as well as space. They had no intelligible history, the nomads who inhabited them had no known past. Some bush-men paintings, a few disputed references in Herodotus and Ptolemy, and tribal legends of the recent past were all that had come down to us. But in Syria the patina of human history was thick along the edges of the desert. Damascus and Aleppo had been old before Rome was founded. Among the towns and villages, invasion after invasion had heaped ruin upon ruin, and each new conquest had imposed new conquerors upon the last. But the desert had always been inviolate. There I lived among tribes who claimed descent from Ishmael, and listened to old men who spoke of events which had occurred a thousand years ago as if they had happened in their own youth. I went there with a belief in my own racial superiority, but in their tents I felt like an uncouth, inarticulate barbarian, an intruder from a shoddy and materialistic world. Yet from them T learnt how welcoming are the Arabs and how generous is their hospitality.

  From Syria I went to Egypt and then to the Western Desert, where I was with the Special Air Service Regiment. We travelled in jeeps and were divided into small parties which hid in the desert and attacked the enemy’s lines of communication. We carried food, water, and fuel with us; we required nothing from our surroundings. I was in the desert, but insulated from it by the jeep in which I travelled. It was simply a surface, marked as ‘good’ or ‘bad going’ on the map. Even if we had stumbled on Zarzura, whose discovery had been the ambition of every Libyan explorer I should have felt no interest.

  In the last year of the war I was again in Abyssinia, where I was Political Adviser at Dessie in the north. The country required technicians but had little use for political advisers. Frustrated and unhappy I resigned. One evening in Addis Ababa I met O. B. Lean, the Desert Locust Specialist of the Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome. He said he was looking for someone to travel in the Empty Quarter of Arabia to collect information on locust movements. I said at once that I should love to do this but that I was not an entomologist. Lean assured me that this was not nearly as important as knowledge of desert travel. I was offered the job and accepted it before we had finished dinner.

  All my past had been but a prelude to the five years that lay ahead of me.

  2. Prelude in Dhaufar

  The Wall of Dhaufar collects a

  party of Bait Kathir at Salala to

  escort me to the sands of Ghanim.

  While waiting for their arrival

  I travel in the Qarra mountains.

  The deserts of Arabia cover more than a million square miles, and the southern desert occupies nearly half of the total area. The southern desert stretches for nine hundred miles from the frontier of the Yemen to the foothills of Oman, and for five hundred miles from the southern coast of Arabia to the Persian Gulf and the borders of the Najd. The greater part of it is a wilderness of sand; it is a desert within a desert, so enormous and so desolate that even Arabs call it the Rub al Khali or the Empty Quarter.

  In 1929 T. E. Lawrence wrote to Lord Trenchard, Marshal of the Royal Air Force, suggesting that either the R100 or R101 should be deviated on its trial flight to India to pass over the Empty Quarter. He wrote ‘to go over the empty quarter will be an enormous advertisement for them. It will mark an era of exploration. Nothing but an airship can do it, and I want it to be one of ours which gets the plum.’ Nevertheless in 1930 Bertram Thomas crossed this desert from south to north, and a few months later another Englishman, St John Philby, crossed it again, this time from the north. Thomas and Philby had proved that the Empty Quarter could be crossed with camels, but when I went there fifteen years later they were the only Europeans who had travelled in it, and vast areas between the Yemen and Oman were still unexplored.

  When I was at Oxford I had read Arabia Felix in which Bertram Thomas described his journey. The month which I had already spent in the Danakil country had given me some appreciation and understanding of desert life, and Lawrence’s Revolt in the Desert had awakened my interest in the Arabs; but while at Oxford I longed only to return to Abyssinia. It

  Arabia

  was not until later that my thoughts turned more and more insistently to the Empty Quarter. Although I had travelled in the deserts of the Sudan and the Sahara, others had been before me and the mystery was gone: the routes and wells, the dunes and mountains were marked on maps; the tribes were administered. The thrill that I had known when travelling in the Danakil country was missing. The Empty Quarter became for me the Promised Land, but the approaches to it were barred until this chance meeting with Lean gave me my great opportunity. I was not really interested in locusts. I certainly would not have volunteered to go to Kenya or the Kalahari to look for them, but they provided me with the golden key to Arabia.

  Nowadays one of the chief obstacles to travel in the few unexplored places of the world that remain is getting permission from the governments which claim them. It would have been difficult, perhaps even impossible, for me to have approached the Empty Quarter without the initial backing which I received from the Middle East Anti-Locust Unit, but once I had been there and had made friends with the Bedu I could travel where I wished, I had no need to worry about international boundaries that did not even exist on maps.

  I had already seen plenty of locusts in the Sudan, and during the year I was at Dessie I had watched swarms rolling across the horizon like clouds of smoke as they arrived on the Abyssinian uplands from their breading places in Arabia. I had watched them going past, long-legged in wavering flight, as thick in the air as snowflakes in a storm. I had seen branches broken from trees by the weight of the settled swarms, and green fields stripped bare in a few hours; but although I knew how destructive they could be, I knew practically nothing about their habits. Therefore, before going to the Empty Quarter, I was sent to Saudi Arabia for two months to learn about locusts from Vesey FitzGerald, who was running a campaign there. Few Europeans had previously been allowed to enter Saudi Arabia, and almost all of them had been confined to Jidda, the port on the Red Sea, where the diplomats and the commercial community lived. Locust officers, however, were allowed to travel freely in nearly all parts of the country.

  During the war a species of locust called the ‘desert locust’ had threatened the Middle East with famine. It was known that one of the main breeding grounds was the Arabian peninsula, and in 1943-4 the Middle East Anti-Locust Unit was given permission by King Abd al Aziz ibn Saud to carry out a campaign against them in Saudi Arabia.

  Vesey FitzGerald told me of the discoveries which had been made in recent years and which were the reason for my journey into the Empty Quarter. Dr Uvarov, who was head of the Anti-Locust Research Centre in London, had discovered that both the desert locust and a large solitary grasshopper belonged to the same species, although they differed in their habits, their colours, and even in the structure of their bodies to such an extent that naturalists had named and described them as separate species. These solitary grasshoppers occasionally de
veloped gregarious habits that were probably due to overcrowding. Their numbers would increase after a season of plentiful vegetation, and then in the next dry season when they were confined to a smaller area they would swarm and migrate, ceasing to be solitary grasshoppers and becoming desert locusts. The small initial swarms increased very rapidly, for locusts breed several times a year, and each locust lays as many as a hundred eggs at a time. The eggs hatch in about three weeks and the young locusts or hoppers reach maturity in about six weeks.

  In Saudi Arabia with Vesey FitzGerald I saw densely packed bands of hoppers extending over a front of several miles and with a depth of a hundred yards or more, and yet he told me that these were only small bands. I knew that with favourable wind locusts can cover enormous distances, but I was amazed when he told me that swarms can breed in India during the monsoon, move in the autumn to southern Persia or Arabia, breed there again, and then pass on to the Sudan or East Africa. Some of these swarms cover two hundred square miles or more. Eventually disease attacks them and they vanish as quickly as they had appeared. Then for a time there are no more desert locusts in the world, only solitary grasshoppers.

  Doctor Uvarov believed that the ‘outbreak centres’ were restricted to certain definite areas and that if these could be located and controlled it would be possible to prevent the solitary grasshoppers from ever swarming. The first thing to do was to locate all these outbreak centres. He thought that some of them might be in southern Arabia, especially at Mughshin,1 where Thomas had discovered that the great watercourses which ran inland from the coastal mountains of Dhaufar ended against the sands of the Empty Quarter. Dhaufar was known to get the monsoon, and it seemed probable that enough water flowed inland each year to produce permanent vegetation along the edge of the sands. If this were so, the area would almost certainly be an outbreak centre. I was to go there and find out, but so little was known about this part of southern Arabia that wherever I went I could collect no useful information.