At length the wide shallow valley of Khufra came in sight, a sprawl of townships surrounding a marvellous stretch of blue water. The shuddering greens of the palms, the glittering whitewash of the mosques and houses, the shining oasis itself, were at first almost blinding. I was awed by it but Kolya said the oasis struck him as vulgar, though he admitted it was a scene which a few months earlier he would have gasped at. Even the fine palm-shaded houses and gardens of the wealthy failed to impress. He had cultivated those ascetic desert disciplines which produced the spare beauty of Al-Hambra; he had grown to prefer deeper colours, the textures of red stone and tawny sands, repeated in an infinity of subtle variation like some classical Egyptian melody. The settlements of Zurruk, Talalib and Toilet were spread out across the valley, their myriad shaded stalls selling the bounty of Africa and the Mediterranean, the detritus of Northern Europe and America. Above all this brooded the eroded Libyan mesas, while here and there the orange, white and green banners of Italy flew upon the few bastions of Western civilisation. From these our latter-day Romans, unsupported by the rest of Christendom, attempted to control the growing threat of Carthage which their ancestral blood recognised, respected and feared. Kolya and I avoided the whirling dust of the Italian half-tracks and lorries, their staff cars and their motorbikes. To Kolya their presence was an offence - as if a rowdy party were taking place in a sanctuary. Realising I was a little unnerved by the size of the garrison, Kolya became warily amused. ‘They presumably plan to claim the whole of Central Africa for their Empire. Will they raise the new Byzantium in the Congo, do you think, Dimka dear?’
Even then, still lacking most kinds of discrimination, I thought Kolya’s remarks in doubtful taste, but he was distracted. His friends had failed to meet him near the Toom road. Approaching the centre of Khufra across from the largest mosque and a comfortable distance from the nearest army post, an agitated Kolya left me in charge of the camels while he went about his business. He was clearly familiar with the town and its satellites. I sat down in the shade of a shrine and whenever anyone addressed me I simply grinned at them and screeched, flapping my arms, ‘al Sakhr! al Sakhr!’ while our camels, chiefly from habit, made desultory nips at my person. Kolya returned with a spring in his step, evidently much relieved. ‘Stavisky’s people went on. By now they’ve already crossed the Red Sea and are into the Hadjiz. They were carrying too much contraband to risk waiting for me. That’s excellent news, Dimka dear.’ His smile was wonderful. ‘They’ll hear rumours of my death. It won’t be in anyone’s interest to pursue me. Stavisky will write off his losses and forget all about me. Even if he finds out eventually that I’m alive, we’ll have disposed of any unwelcome evidence.’
I pointed out, sotto voce, to Kolya that we might well be overheard. He shrugged and said, in English, ‘We’ll ride with the caravan as far as al-Jawf, but we can’t risk being recognised by any more of Stavisky’s people coming up from Benghazi so we’ll have to head further over and get to Tunis, perhaps. I’m going to need a buyer. We’ll steer clear of Tripoli and Tangier because someone’s bound to spot one of us. That means selling to a local dealer up here, which means going to Zazara, I suppose. Another oasis the authorities deny exists!’ He was satisfied with his plan. ‘From there, if need be, we can make our way south, following the tropic of Capricorn all the way across the Sahra al-aksa!’ Even I had heard that such a route was a myth, frequently searched for and never found. Kolya shook his head at this, laughing. ‘Everyone knows Zazara and the Darb al-Haramiya here, though they wouldn’t admit it to the Rumi. The Darb al-Haramiya is the old Thieves’ Road. It’s the secret slavers’ route out of Chad and French West across the top of the world. The Arabs insist it is the most dangerous trail in the whole Sahara. The Berbers, who are its undisputed masters, call it the Road of Courage.’ His smile continued to broaden. ‘Isn’t it strange, Dimka! It has a thousand names yet appears on no map. That’s why it’s safe for us. The British and French, for instance, have officially declared its non-existence. The Italians claim to have destroyed it. Are these the responses of men who have failed to control something, I wonder? Sour grapes, as Achmet al-Imteyas might point out.’
I ventured that not one of those names made it sound in any way attractive. I had no further curiosity about any other aspects of the slave-trade. So far we had travelled in easy-going, amicable company. But I had seen the blue-veiled warriors. Such as these would doubtless be our company on the Thieves’ Road. How would they receive us?
‘They will recognise men of courage,’ Kolya informed me with cheerful insouciance. ‘After all, there is no route mapped to Zazara. Men must find it for themselves. With a map and a compass.’ He held up an old leather case attached to his belt. I admired my friend in so many ways but I must admit I had no great faith in his scout-craft. I believe now he was more desperate than he admitted. He was, I gathered, in the process of stealing a commodity of huge value. Stavisky had a hold over Kolya and had been blackmailing my friend in Paris, perhaps threatening to give him up to the Chekists, now about half the city’s émigré population. There had been some trouble, too, over an Apache girl. I did not judge. I, too, have had moments when I have been unable to act like an absolute saint. Il fallait être idiot ou hypnotisé pour périr dans ces fameux camps. Chacun a toujours être maître de son destin.
Our journey, which would end, we hoped, in Tangier, had hardly begun. All we knew was that it would not be the leisurely and predictable trek we had so far enjoyed. By now, however, I had learned to respect the desert and never to trust it - the only attitude permitting survival. As yet we had hardly experienced the ‘real’ desert, that ‘abomination of desolation’ as Leonard Woolworth had it, although he was referring, I think, to Ur.
Egypt conquered Phoenicia but made the mistake of letting her people settle in Canaan. They had a theory that the ‘Philistines’ would control the Jews. And of course reckoned without Samson.
Paradoxically relieved to leave the lonely citadel of Christendom behind us, we took up with a party of tall white-robed Sheul making a trading circuit which would bring them back to Chad as wealthy men. They spoke thickly-accented Arabic and bad French. But the blacks were cheerful company for the two weeks it took us to reach al-Jawf, a typical oasis with the usual assemblage of clay hovels, ramshackle places of worship, ragged awnings and rickety stalls, but boasting a collection of Jew merchants who, judging by their relatively rich clothing, possessed the only wealth in the place and with whom Kolya did some discreet business. He disposed of our oldest and weakest camel at a price which surprised and delighted him. When he showed me the purse of gold, my heart sank. Now the Tuareg were bound to attack us. I had been listening to some of the drivers and suggested we follow one of the other routes down as far as Djarba and from there make our way to Tunis, but he said it would be too dangerous. We must be sure never to live in fear once we returned to Europe. Also we could not risk the French and Italian patrols who nowadays habitually covered those roads. The only sensible route for us was the one he had chosen.
I asked him if he was absolutely certain the Darb al-Haramiya existed. He laughed loudly at my question but did not offer a direct reply. He said I should prepare myself. In less than a week we would be making our way into the Sand Sea, en route for ‘the Lost Oasis’. ‘We’ll be the first white men ever to see it!’
With good riding-camels and three of our pack animals exchanged for two fresh sturdy beasts we had traded with the Tebu who had brought them to al-Jawf to sell, we allowed the momentum of the next caravan to carry us from the oasis while our prayers were still echoing amongst the eroded hills. Kolya had insisted we needed cover so we were carrying fabrics and clothing, much of it in colours favoured by the Berbers. We now claimed to be Palestinian haberdashers from Haifa. As I had guessed, the Zazara Oasis was not marked on any map, and most believed it a myth, but Kolya’s information came, he said, from an Arab slaver in al-Jawf who travelled that way regularly. It lay far into the Sand Sea, a pl
ace of lush vegetation and sweet water, hidden by a great rocky overhang so that it could be seen neither from the air nor from the ground. ‘He swore it gives the purest water in the world.’
Everyone on the caravan guessed we were planning to go south-west to trade with the Tuareg and to a man declared us both mad. One Sudanese spice-merchant told Kolya he now realised he was ‘as foolish as your brother. You are clearly of one blood!’ He begged Kolya as a friend not to choose certain death. This caused me to sink into a peculiar, expectant calm from which it was almost impossible to arouse myself. Having failed to convince us to avoid the Thieves’ Road, he shrugged and left us to the Will of God, but continued to behave as if he had persuaded us to stay with them and give up all thoughts of the Darb al-Haramiya. This was a form their courtesy took.
Again, I found it remarkable how different were all these people, all of whom were conditioned and moulded by the desert. The Sahara is a pitiless wasteland of sand and rock relieved here and there by peaceful waters and waving fronds of blood-red flowers when the palms and cactus are in bloom, yet places of sanctuary are found even in the most run-down and overpopulated of the oasis townships. It is the basis of the desert nomad’s sense of order. Outside is threatening Chaos, uncertain Fate. Within the tribe, within the camp, within the family, within the tent, must be harmony. It is why the Moslem divides his world into Zones of War and Zones of Peace. Their architecture provides havens of tranquillity in the din of the city. They have developed a philosophy which seeks to accommodate the world’s realities, not abolish them. This is a fundamental difference between the Christian and the Moslem and especially between the Moslem and the Westernised Jew who has done so much to tinker with the great machinery of our existence. With his ‘social experiments’ and his theoretical physics, he has led us nowhere but to self-destruction. This the Arab understands; it is what informs his realistic assessment of his old friend, the Jew. Otherwise he has more in common with his Semitic cousin than he has differences. This is the only ironic amusement one can gain from the Arab’s superstitious notions of race. Those superstitions, to which he clings with proud insanity, are the rocks against which he dashes even his finest brains, all his ambitions, his yearning desires. Like the natives of New Guinea, he has developed a religion of self-destruction, of perpetual defeat. Sometimes, to me, this Arab seems noble in his quixotic combination of hard common sense and crazed hallucinatory vision. Perhaps Don Quixote has his most profound psychic origins in some Moorish desert where to survive you must also go mad.
These people are tender and kind-hearted. They care for one another. Finally, however, the desert allows room for too much abstract thought, especially when it concerns the outside world. Inevitably the desert gives you the mentality of a hermit, a great tendency to think in terms of broad and simple issues. The hermit comes in from the desert after ten years and he goes to the city’s central square. ‘I have,’ he says, ‘a message.’ The people gather around him. They send their friends to fetch other friends. They wait, patiently, but with mounting eagerness. And when they are all congregated there, in silent respect, he looks upon them and smiles. ‘Love one another,’ he says.
It could be that the city complicates issues. The city is a complicated organism after all, the finest creation of mankind. What human mathematics can describe a city? The city’s complexities mirror the complexities of God’s universe. Yet the nomad has a clarity of vision the city-dweller will never know. That is why our cities must fly; the best of both worlds.
‘It makes yer git everyfink art o’ proportion, Ivan,’ says Mrs Cornelius. ‘Like orl big spaces. It wos ther same when we went ter Dartmoor. Or up in Yorkshire. Ya git a littel bit o’ news an’ yer blow it up too much.’ It made me think again of the attitude towards Christians which, say, the Wahabi Arabs have, or indeed, how the Cossack perceives the Jew. Perhaps that was why I sensed such a feeling of belonging in the desert. Stippi or baria’d, the invariable view has much the same effect on the mind. As I discovered from the Bedouin, the less one sees of a supposed enemy, the more sinister he becomes. Then, of course, one’s imagination has done its work. You do not recognise your enemy when you see him. Not all Jews, for instance, are Communist Fifth-Columnists; not all Christians are hypocrites.
I told Kolya I thought the Sudanese had made sense. We should employ a guide. If not a Bisharin some kinsman of the Tuareg, perhaps? But he was adamant. ‘The trail is not known. The trail that leads to the trail has been lost. That is why Europeans have failed to locate it. When we find it we shall be establishing our own route. A secret which will give us a permanent advantage if we wish to do further business in this area.’ Then he showed me the map the Senussi had helped him draw. It could have been of anything. But he had longitudes and latitudes. ‘Once we reach Zazara, there is a well-defined trail again. More than one. Most of the rest, of course, lead to the interior. The slave roads come out of Africa, here and there, out of French West and Rio d’Oro, out of Abyssinia. Almost all black slaves go through Zazara now. From there they can go east to Cairo and the Hadjiz, to Iraq or Syria; west to Tripoli, Algeria and Morocco. The Romans no more invented the road network than they gave us mathematics. We owe both to the Arabs.’
It is true that the Arabs invented algebra. It is also true that Einstein used algebra to invent the nuclear bomb. A fine example of Arab and Jew working together. Nicht wahr?
And who was responsible for the triumph of the primitive decimal system over the subtle duodecimal? The Sumerians, first to celebrate the discovery of their own mental treasure-trove, gave us the flexible mathematics of the dozen, infinitely more manipulable and therefore infinitely better able to represent and examine the world. But it was the rationalising Jews with their tens of this and their tens of that, the Arab’s undivided finger, who found a way of narrowing and simplifying our achievements. This numerological imperialism earned its final great victory when Britain fell to that mathematical dullard, Monsieur Dix. Twelve groats to the penny, twelve pennies to the shilling and twelve shillings to the pound would have been ‘rationalisation’ enough! Without her ‘illogical’ currency, England was nothing. Use of such currency cultivates a subtlety of mind. The history of this century will record with cruel irony that our worship of Lord Rationality was our most ludicrous folly.
One must, I suppose, blame the French for this. In the hospital it was the same. That psychiatrist told me he was experimenting with cats. The human brain, he said, is like a computer. Oh, certainly! What he meant was he had found a model he could understand. So he promptly called the model Reality. I pointed out to him a simple truth, that the computer is the invention of Man. Man’s mind, however, is the invention of God; the former comfortably finite, the latter unfathomable in its infinite variety. And for that the double-six is a better representative than the half-score. We are spurning the heritage of our first great city-builders. God gave them twelve. We have since converted His gift to ten. With our present education standards we shall soon be asking for ‘one and one and one’ because we no longer know how to count to three. By means of these economies do we slip steadily away from Eden. Shall we ever begin the journey home?
We left our caravan at night, before the morning call to prayer. We were out of sight beyond the rocks as the dawn rose to reveal the flat daffa. This waterless and barren plain of unbroken brown monotony eventually gave way to dunes which stood like rollers frozen in time, a memory of when huge rivers had boiled down the shallow dales and everywhere had been green and rich and in these lush lands rose the cities of the people who came before Atlantis, who made laws and developed great arts and sciences and knew peace. Now, with all this unearned wealth, the Arab could easily make his homeland blossom again, see it grow rich with trees and grass, but of course he has made a virtue of his desert necessities. Now his ambition is to create further wastelands wherever he has the opportunity. I do not blame this on the Moslem religion. Persia does not waste her wealth on weapons. ‘But an Arab,’ as Cap
tain Quelch would say, ‘genuinely loves a gun.’
That was why, I think, Kolya had hidden our Lee-Enfields within heavy bales of cloth. Under our robes and general Bedouin impedimenta we carried Webley’s revolvers with a dagger or two for outer decoration to show, as the Mozabites say, we had not taken the Woman’s Way. A man without weapons was looked upon with considerable suspicion by the Bedouin who, like the American cowboy, tends to wear a gun as a form of sexual identification. Some of the cowboy guns were so old, and in such bad condition, that they lived in terror of ever having to fire one. This was also true, I was told by Buffalo Bill’s nephew, himself a famous Circus Master, of the Old Frontier, where a knife, an axe and a bow remained, for many years, the only reliable weapons. Only the rarest of buckaroos sported a good Colts’ or a Henry’s and was usually loth to employ it in any action which might mark it. Young Cody asked me to imagine how difficult it was for the Chief of Scouts to keep his buckskins, especially the white ones, so clean and bright on the buffalo trail. Constant changes were needed to ensure that the Dandy of the Plains was never dusty. And Custer took a valet with him, said Cody, to the Little Big Horn. Indeed, one legend spoke of the same valet surviving the massacre and attending his new master, Sitting Bull, on his famous Grand Tour of Europe. Wherever he went Texas Jack, for instance, would always take three wagonloads of outfits and a fourth wagon full of weaponry. Kit Carson, called Pe-he-haska (Golden Curls) by the Sioux, was known to have escaped at least twice from certain death with the aid of nothing but his manicure set. And, Cody had added, Jim Bridger’s Palomino was the best-groomed and sweetest-smelling pony in the whole Arizona territory. He had showed me pictures of all these people. It was true. I had never realised before what emphasis America’s great frontiersmen placed upon personal hygiene and smart appearance. Their spacemen are the natural successors to the plainsmen of yore. There is a lesson in this for those boys of today who come into my shop and complain because I have had an overcoat cleaned before I feel I can offer it for sale!
Jerusalem Commands - [Between the Wars 03] Page 45