Corporal Salim, who had shown himself to be a popular replacement for Abdullah, had been in the Muscat Regiment for many years, including previous patrols in the Dhofar Mountains. His vehicle, beyond Mugshin, took the lead from mine and he guided us past old isolated oil camps, some no more than a single skeletal derrick and surrounding steel bric-a-brac. We passed pools of oil, steaming in the heat, where the oilmen had struck a surface anticline of no potential. But otherwise in this half-desert world of gravel plains, caked pans of gypsum, low acacia bushes and dwarf palms, the miles passed by in oppressive heat and a harsh white glare.
Despite the absence of any noticeable wind, sand devils, some hundreds of feet in height, would suddenly spiral from nowhere, rush around in a dervish dance, then disappear in a flash.
Mirages of lakes would occasionally stretch ahead across the sunward horizon, quite lifelike for a while before vanishing in haze. They were, according to John Cooper, naturally occurring optical phenomena caused by light rays being bent and thereby producing displaced images of distant objects or, usually, of the sky. They can occur anywhere where the ground is very hot and flat.
I found myself as happy as I ever remember during the long hours that we drove through the great vistas of empty desert. But I was actively angry on seeing oil drums and other detritus left by the 1950s search for oil; jealous perhaps that the oilmen had been here before me. I recall feeling thankful that they had found oil only at Fahud, now hundreds of miles behind us.
I had arrived here in these wonderful empty spaces too late for priority. Some twelve years into the future, in 1980, I would be lucky enough to lead the very first exploration and crossing of a vast area of the high Antarctic plateau and to map it for the first time. But here, in this hottest of all deserts, I was 149 years too late for priority of exploration by a non-native.
The first European to cross Arabia (but not the Empty Quarter) was, in 1819, the British Army Captain George Forster Sadlier, who was sent to persuade the Sultan of Muscat to help the East India Company destroy the Joasmi and Wahabi pirates. His ship ran aground off the Omani coast and in order to reach Saudi Arabia (where he was to request similar support against the pirates), he travelled by horse and camel all the way. He received little recognition then or since for his remarkable journey, and nobody repeated the crossing by any route until, 112 years later, the arrival in Muscat of Bertram Thomas (1892–1950).
Thomas, a native of Somerset and the son of a sailor, left school at sixteen to work for the Post Office. After service in Mesopotamia during the Great War, followed by a spell at Trinity College, Cambridge, he returned to the Middle East as an administrator with a natural flair for charming Arabs. Somehow he worked his way up to being appointed Prime Minister to Sultan Taimur of Muscat, and so was the first Briton to be Prime Minister of any Arab state.
While in Muscat Thomas became obsessed with the idea of travelling from Dhofar’s south coast all the way north and through the Empty Quarter to the shores of the Persian Gulf. Suffering every type of hardship that hot deserts can serve up, he and his Omani bedu guides reached the Gulf shore at Doha fifty-eight days later, thereby achieving the first south–north traverse of the near waterless Sands.
The next man to cross the Empty Quarter was another alumnus of Trinity and like Thomas served in Mesopotamia, but they had little else in common beyond their love of Arabia.
Harry (or Jack) St John Philby, the great Arabist, famous desert explorer, MI6 Secret Service agent, Royal Geographical Society Medal winner, and much trusted diplomat, was also a traitor to British interests, a Nazi sympathizer and father to a notorious Soviet double agent within British Intelligence. He did his utmost from a position of high influence to hinder the establishment of Israel and he used his personal friendship with Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia to ensure that SoCal and ARAMCO of America gained the enormous prize of Saudi oil concessions rather than the British oil interests as represented by the Iraq Petroleum Company.
In 1915 he helped organize the Arab Revolt led by T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) against the Turks, and in 1921 he took over from Lawrence as Chief Liaison Officer in Transjordan, despite the fact that he favoured his friend Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia over Hussein of Jordan as the overall Arab leader.
In 1930, aged forty-five, he converted to Islam and took the Arab name of Sheikh Abdullah. Two years later he became the first European to cross the Empty Quarter from east to west and he is today, as a result, generally remembered as a British hero of exploration, alongside the likes of Bertram Thomas and Samuel Baker of the Nile.
Briefly back in England he stood for Parliament as a member of an anti-war Mosley-type party, lost his deposit and went to Bombay where he was arrested and deported back for brief imprisonment in Britain.
On the plus side he made important contributions, resulting from his extensive Saudi travels, in the fields of cartography, including personally mapping on camel-back what was to become the official Saudi-Yemeni border. While searching for the lost incense city of Ubar, he came across the fabled craters of Wabar, the first European to do so. Additionally he added greatly to our knowledge of the archaeology, linguistics and ornithology of Arabia. Many of his records are today held by the Royal Geographical Society.
Aged sixty, Philby went back to Saudi but disliked the new ruler, King Saud, and criticized him in public for corruption. He was exiled and retired to the Lebanon where, for a while he lived with his son Kim who, like him, was a highly successful traitor to Britain. He died there in 1960.
Next to brave the extreme rigours of an Empty Quarter crossing (twice) was Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003) fourteen years after Philby’s traverse.
I first met Thesiger in the 1970s to interview him for a travel article. I asked him to lunch in London in the salubrious setting of the Officers’ Mess in the SAS headquarters building near Sloane Square, and I remember his lovely wrinkled smile and chuckle when the waitress, Brenda, approached with her notepad and asked, ‘Cheese or pud, gents?’
We discovered not just a joint love of Dhofar’s mountains and tribes but other similarities. We had both been brought up since childhood by our beloved mothers, both of whom had died in their nineties. We had both spent our early years in Africa until, aged ten, we had been sent to English prep schools and Eton. Both of us had excelled at boxing, but not much else. After that he had studied at Oxford and then begun a life of travel and exploration in the world’s hottest places.
I met him several times during his visits to London from his home in Northern Kenya and, finally, when I took him out to lunch near his retirement home in Surrey in the late 1990s. He was by then in his late eighties, but refused to go in my car. So we walked slowly to his favourite local pub. His balance and his eyesight were deteriorating, but he hated cars with a surprising vehemence.
He was born in Addis Ababa in Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, where his father was the chief British Minister and where his love of the remote and the wild became second nature.
Aged twenty-three, back in Abyssinia, he led an expedition through the hottest place on Earth, the Danakil Desert, to discover the source of the Awash River. Narrowly escaping murder by the locals, he knew, on returning to Addis, that he would never again be happy without the excitement of living on the edge with only the very basics of materialistic needs, with an uncertainty of what tomorrow might bring, with some plan always hatching for the next expedition and, above all, without the interference of so-called civilization and its trappings, such as cars and electricity.
In 1935 his beloved Abyssinia was brutally invaded by the Italians, but he achieved his personal revenge a few years later when, in the British Army, he played a prominent role in throwing the Italians out of ‘his’ country. Promoted to major he then joined the SAS to fight in the deserts of North Africa behind German and Italian lines.
At that time my father commanded the Royal Scots Greys tank regiment and played a key part in the battle of El Alamein which began the defeat of Rommel and his
German-Italian Desert Korps.
At the end of the war Thesiger joined the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization with the specific task of travelling the Empty Quarter to locate the breeding grounds of the ubiquitous locust, then the cause of many famines and much misery worldwide. During his five years as a Locust Officer he achieved two notable crossings of the Sands and travelled ten thousand miles by camel. His first crossing led him and his dozen bedu companions from Salalah via Shisr and north through the furnace of the Sands to a point due west of Nizwa, then back to Salalah on a route close to the coast, more or less similar to our own current Land Rover journey. That was in the winter of 1946/47. One day in the heart of the Sands he recorded, ‘The temperature often reaches 115 and sometimes 120 degrees in the shade – and there is no shade.’ He became close family to many of his long-term bedu companions, who knew him as Mubarreq or Miriam.
His second crossing, in the following year, started within the Aden Protectorate near Shibam, led him far to the west of his previous route but also headed north through the Rubh al Khali for 1,500 miles, including one stretch of sixteen days with no water source and the considerable danger of travel through areas of Saudi Arabia without a permit.
After many other remarkable travels in Arabia, he was turned back in his 1950 quest to climb the Jebel Akhdar. This decided him to, regretfully, leave Arabia. He wrote:
For differing reasons, the Sultan of Muscat, the Imam of Oman, Ibn Saud, even the British officials in Aden and Bahrain had, for their own reasons, closed in on me, resolved to prevent further journeys. I had gone to Arabia just in time to know the spirit of the land and the greatness of the Arabs. Shortly afterwards the life that I had shared with the bedu had irrevocably disappeared. There are no riding camels in Arabia today, only cars, lorries, aeroplanes and helicopters.
Understanding the paradox that his travels had actually aided these very intrusions.
I realize that the maps I made helped others with more material aims to visit and corrupt a people whose spirit once lit the desert like a flame . . . I went there to find peace in the hardship of desert travel and the company of desert peoples . . . I resented modern inventions; they made the road too easy. I felt instinctively that it was better to fail on Everest without oxygen than to attain the summit with its use . . . Yet to refuse mechanical aids as unsporting reduced exploration to the level of a sport, like big-game shooting in Kenya when the hunter is allowed to drive up to within sight of the animal but must get out of the car to shoot it. I would not myself have wished to cross the Empty Quarter in a car. Luckily this was impossible when I did my journeys, for to have done the journey on a camel when I could have done it in a car would have turned the venture into a stunt . . . I could remember how bitterly at school I had resented reading the news that someone had flown across the Atlantic or travelled through the Sahara in a car. I had realized even then that the speed and ease of mechanical transport must rob the world of all diversity.
From Arabia in 1950 Thesiger moved to the humid swamps of the Iraqi Marshes, where he lived and travelled for eight years with the people of the marshes until he was thrown out due to a forcible change of the Iraqi government. He continued to make remarkable journeys, usually on foot in remote mountain and desert regions, and the year before I came to Oman he fought for the Yemeni royalists, as had John Cooper and David Bayley before they joined the Sultan’s Army.
This little civil war, which John described as ‘a skirmish’, had remote Islamic origins, as did most Yemeni and Omani clashes. As in Oman, Yemenis often revolted against Caliph control from abroad and installed their own Imams. The Shia doctrine of the Imam Zaidi had survived in royalist north Yemen for a thousand years and was still the religion there. But to the south of the capital Sanaa and in coastal towns like Aden, the orthodox Sunni doctrine prevailed.
In 1962 Imam Badr of the royalist north was overthrown by republicans supported by the Egyptian Army of President Nasser. Fifty thousand Egyptian troops with tanks, artillery and bombers attacked the royalist tribesmen, but by 1966 when Thesiger, John Cooper and other itinerant Brits arrived to help the royalists, the Egyptians had, by clever guerrilla tactics, been evicted from most of north and east Yemen.
Although the USA and most of Europe recognized only the republican government of the south, the British still supported the royalists.
Many years later when interviewing Thesiger, I was spellbound by his memories of narrow escapes, cave bombings and, in the mountain fortress town of Shahra, once a major centre of the incense trade, how he had had to drink water from the public cisterns which was rife with guinea-worms and many citizens spent hours and days winding the long worms out of their legs and around sticks.
Thesiger left the Yemen in 1967, and between 1968 and 1994 settled with a Samburu family in northern Kenya from where he continued his often solo travels, always in hot, arid lands, until in his eighties his failing health forced him to a retirement home in England. He never married and once commented that ‘marriage would be a crippling handicap’. He died nearly blind and suffering from Parkinson’s disease in 2003.
I attended his memorial service, representing HRH The Prince of Wales who was abroad. The service was held with a packed congregation in Eton College Chapel, a building I had as a student scaled by night. I once told this story to Thesiger, much to his amusement and approval.
From Mugshin, once believed to be a main breeding ground of the worldwide locust scourge, and hence the start point of Thesiger’s first crossing of the Sands, our convoy continued its journey south.
On the night of our third day’s travel we reached our goal of Thumrait Camp, known to the oilmen who established it in the 1950s as Midway. When they abandoned it, they left everything behind: generators, radio aerials, living huts, cookhouse and tall derricks, all surrounded by many thousands of old lorry tyres and empty fuel drums, known to the bedu as burmails – a corruption of Burmah Oil. These empty drums were used by the oilmen’s guides as lonely markers all over the areas they prospected. They were left in place to be covered eventually by blown sand, except in the gravel deserts where they remained as eyesores. All the oil prospectors’ tracks outside the dunes also remained intact for years, since there was virtually no rain to the north of the Dhofar Mountains.
As Corporal Salim designated different huts to our five sections, a lone wizened Baluchi in khaki appeared from the cookhouse and gave me an undated scribbled note from an officer in the Northern Frontier Regiment.
‘Hope your journey was good. Go at once to Habarut to secure the airstrip. Then radio Salalah for the Beaver to land and pick up an injured askar from our fort there.’
I tried to radio Salalah or Habarut’s askar garrison, but failed to get through.
Weary, but realizing that a man’s life might depend on our speed, we made ready to get going again after a quick meal and refuelling the vehicles. We left our two lorries at Thumrait.
We had already driven through nearly 600 miles of desert. My back ached from the bouncing.
‘From now, Sahib,’ Corporal Salim said, ‘there may be adoo mines.’ Thus comforted, I watched him drive off down one of many sandy tracks, heading roughly west in the direction of the Yemeni border and Habarut.
I hit one ear hard with the palm of my hand every so often to try and keep awake and so avoid the fate of Patrick Brook (and ridicule from the men of Recce). We were all very tired and very hot. Salim said it would take eight hours’ driving to reach the Yemeni border if we stayed on the main rutted track and ignored the possibility of landmines.
‘Your choice,’ I told him, since he was to lead and would therefore be more likely to set off any lurking mine.
My lips were cracked, despite the protection much of the time when on the move from my Arab shemagh face cloth. And my eyes stung from the dust, as I found that goggles very quickly misted up.
Murad, who seemed indefatigable, shouted above the crunch of wheels on gravel, ‘Tomorrow, Insha’Alla
h, the new moon will show herself in the east. Then will be Ramadan. No food or water by day all month. This is hard. Insha’Allah we will rest much in Ramadan, Sahib.’
Unsure whether this was a statement or a question, I replied, ‘Insha’Allah.’ Many times thereafter I found this to be an extremely useful response, since it is non-committal but denotes the pointlessness of pursuing the matter any further, since God, not the officer, will decide.
At dawn we came to the oasis of Habarut, where a wide wadi crossed in front of us denoting the unmarked border.
On the low cliffs of the Yemeni side, a whitewashed, Beau Geste-like Hollywood dream of a fortress with little towers and crenellated battlements stood guard over the Yemeni-owned springs, while on our Omani side and also on the top of the wadi’s bank our own similar fortress was situated directly opposite. Sentries could be seen pacing both sets of parapets.
The Yemeni outpost, according to our intelligence officer, Tim Landon, had originally been built as an outpost for the Hadhramaut Bedouin Legion by the British, but a year ago the British had left Aden and all of Yemen to the new Marxist-oriented government whose troops now manned the border. The tricolour of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen had replaced that of the Legion.
Our own fort had been built only two years before, but when I returned to Habarut in 1972 it had been demolished to a heap of rubble by the Yemenis.
After greeting our own askars, securing the pebble-floored airstrip three miles up the wadi and, by way of a Morse code message, ordering the Beaver to come quickly, I observed the opposition’s fort through my telescope. A short, moustached officer stood on the ramparts watching me through binoculars. Behind him, skylined, was the outline of a twin-barrelled machine gun pointing tactfully skywards.
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