God’s Fugitive. Andrew Taylor
the horizon. With the scene there before him, he transcends the conventional response; while Shelley had no imaginative answer to the overwhelming power of the desert, Doughty sees the continuing, ageless struggle for survival of the Arabs. Looking around him, he was struck by the awesome barrenness of the sands, white with an efflorescence of salt, and the surrounding bare mountains. But life struggled on imperturbably, with a blank serenity which matched his own matter-of-fact approach. In that contrast, between the vulnerability of human achievement and the permanence of human endeavour, Doughty was to find a lifelong inspiration, which he maintained with a religious force and passion.
It is a breadth of vision, a sense of history, which gradually comes to accommodate not only his unemotional response to the sufferings of others, such as the shipwrecked fishermen of Giardini or the hapless tourists on Vesuvius, but also the dogged courage with which he faces his own dangers.
The little party crossed over an ancient bridge built by the Romans, who had struggled to colonize this harsh country – ‘still strong and good after so many centuries’, Doughty noted approvingly – but for the most part, what signs of man remained were desolate and all but smothered in the blown sand of the desert. He had left far behind him the well-trodden roads and pathways of Victorian Europe, and with them, the ancient and reassuringly familiar civilization they represented. But in the North African desert, with the stolid march of a small group of Arabs along a route marked only by wheel-tracks in the sand, he was discovering a different but equally ancient stability.
It was 22 November when they finally set out from the desert settlement of Biskra, a caravan of ten men with mules and asses loaded with dates, threading their way through the mountains to the west on their way to the oasis of Bou Saida. Perhaps some of the French garrison had warned Doughty of the danger he might be running in such lonely and unsettled country, so soon after a major insurrection; perhaps he instinctively felt the uncertainty of his new position – but an unaccustomed note of caution enters his diary as he leaves on his trek across the mountains. For the first time he was carrying a weapon – a revolver he had borrowed, presumably from one of the soldiers.
He should not approach the Arabs’ tents pitched near their own camp, he was told that evening, in case they were hostile to a travelling European. This, he was warned, was dangerous country. In the circumstances, perhaps it is not surprising that he slept little. ‘We lay upon the ground; the night cold and still … Light cloud covered the ground, foreboding rain. Howling of dogs all the night long.’
It took four more days’ hard travelling before they reached the oasis of Bou Saida, deep in the heartland of the revolt. They were lonely days and hard nights, with the travellers seeking what shelter they could from the driving rain by piling up their baggage and huddling around a smoky fire that guttered in the wind. And yet Doughty, the same man who had grumbled his way across Europe, complaining about the weather, the foreigners, the food and his own health, had clearly enjoyed the hundred-mile trek.
Some of the villages they passed had been friendly, and Doughty had even experienced his first taste of Arab hospitality with a group of wandering bedu – hot griddle cakes, boiled eggs and dates, and a night’s shelter, side by side with a score of newborn kids and lambs in the nomads’ tent. He had, like most Victorian travellers, squirrelled away a collection of notes and ‘specimens’ – plants, a few snail shells and jottings about the birds he had seen and about the landscape and the occasional stone cairns he had passed.
Where his comments about his European travels had frequently been dismissive and critical, the diary of his five-day trek to Bou Saida trembles with the excitement of the unfamiliar. In Europe there was practically nowhere clean or comfortable enough for him; here in the desert, after a night spent on the hard earth with a mattress of dried sods, kept awake by the bleating of farm animals, the barking of dogs and the pounding of rain upon the rough black sacking of the tent, he was content. ‘I had the happiness to pass the Sunday day of rest in cheerfulness and in some hospitality and quiet … There I lay in security, and put away my pistol.’
Notable, too, was his first impression of the Arabs with whom he had come into contact. They had reassured him that they thought the English better at least than the French – faint praise, perhaps, in the aftermath of the revolt. And for his part, despite the earlier fears which had left him quaking by the camp fire and clutching his revolver through the night, he could only note now the continual cheerfulness which they showed despite their hard and unforgiving life – that and their ‘quavered, drawling songs’.
For those of his own party he had nothing but praise. ‘I have taken no hurt, thank God, nor am any the weaker. With the friendly complaisance, gentleness, and hearty kindness of my party of Arabs (three men and a boy) I was very pleased and contented,’ he wrote.
But he set off almost immediately for the coast – a three-day trek out of the mountains, to the first public stagecoach that would take him to Algiers. It was an ironic return to civilization. ‘We were tossed and tumbled enough to break the last bone in our body,’ he wrote after he had disembarked from the diligence. ‘5 p.m., at Algiers. We have made in 21 hours 50 miles, or a little above!’ From there, as there was no ferry for Spain, Doughty took the train to the port of Oran and a steamer to Cartagena. His first Arabian adventure was over.
In what so land thou comest,
Observe their customs and that people’s laws …
Mansoul, p. 72
Doughty must have been well aware as his ferry sailed serenely into Cartagena that Spain was being torn apart by civil war. When he was travelling in North Africa, part of the country at least was firmly under the control of the French troops; here, there was no unchallenged power to enforce order.
When Doughty arrived, the Italian nobleman who had finally been prevailed upon to accept the crown as King Amadeus had been on the throne for three years, in the place of Queen Isabella, who had been driven out in the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ of September 1868. But there was barely a pause in the political chaos, with republicans and royalist Carlists savaging each other in a whole series of confrontations, reverses and political about-turns.
Only a year later Amadeus himself would be dethroned in his turn. It was a time of ferment; and yet, except for the occasional petulant complaint of trains held up by gangs of armed men, Doughty let it pass him by, just as he had the aftermath of the convulsions in France. He had a straightforward, unimaginative physical courage: he was apparently undaunted – and indeed uninterested – by the very real dangers posed by the wandering bands of partisans and militias.
Traces of the Arab world he had left behind on the other side of the Mediterranean were still all about him: the cultures of Christianity and Islam, of Europe and North Africa, the Spanish and the Arabs, had touched each other in Spain over the centuries, and left their mark. There was the architecture left behind by the Moors, and a whole range of Spanish customs and words that were clearly derived from the Arabic. Local peasants wore a kerchief wound around their heads, he noticed – a hakis, virtually the same word as the Arab harki. The villages, with their walls built of baked mud bricks, their houses furnished only with mats spread upon the floor, could have been plucked from the North African landscape of the Maghreb; many of the names of the people could equally well be Arabic as Spanish.
This mingling of the two civilizations, he found later, was a source of continual fascination to the educated townsmen of Arabia. Following their arrival in Gibraltar in 711 the Arabs played a leading role in the life and culture of southern Spain for over 700 years, and although it was nearly four centuries since they had finally been expelled, the legends and tales of Muslim Spain were still current in the coffee houses of the oasis towns.
In Arabia such knowledge would prove an effective way for Doughty to establish friendly relations with the people he met. Here in Spain, it seemed to tie together his interest in language with the great scientific movements of the day. If biological species had evolved gradually over the centuries, if geology