South from Barbary: Along the Slave Routes of the Libyan Sahara. Justin Marozzi
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.
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