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ACCORDING TO THE early explorers of the Empty Quarter, the local Bedouin had not so much as heard of the “Rub’ al-Khali.” Bertram Thomas, the first outsider to cross the desert, noted that “they neither use the term nor understand it in its literal sense.” When Wilfred Thesiger mentioned the Rub’ al-Khali to his guides, they responded: “What is he talking about? What does he want? God alone knows.” For them it was only ar-Rimal—“the Sands.”
A depression the size of France, occupying a third of the Arabian Peninsula, the Empty Quarter is bounded to the north and east by the uplands of Qatar and northern Oman, and by the mountains of Oman’s Dhofar governorate and Yemen to the south and west. This tremendous bowl of sand has been stirred, clockwise, for perhaps two million years, by two great winds: the shamal that sweeps across the Arabian Gulf from Iraq, and the kharif that brings the south-west monsoon to soak Dhofar.
In 1904 the Arabist David Hogarth wrote that the Rub’ al-Khali “has yet to be tried by a stranger, and we have no absolute assurance that even a native has ever crossed the heart of it. It is a name of terror throughout Arabia.” The Empty Quarter was not entirely the virgin territory that Hogarth and his fellow Arabists perceived it to be, but during the two centuries of European presence in Arabia it had come to represent the archetypal desert void, and the archetypal test. Nineteen years after Amundsen and Scott reached the South Pole, Bertram Thomas was still able to describe the Empty Quarter as the “last considerable terra incognita.” For Richard Burton, travelling in Arabia the previous century, it had been simply an “opprobrium to modern adventure.”
Every year perhaps half a dozen expeditions set out in Thesiger’s footsteps, completing all or part of his route across the Empty Quarter’s eastern edge, north-east from Salalah to the Emirates or Qatar. Of the three formative British explorers of the Empty Quarter—Bertram Thomas and Harry St. John Philby in the 1930s, and Wilfred Thesiger in the 1940s—it is Thesiger whom modern-day travellers follow, and always his first, 1946, crossing, along the desert’s eastern edge, rather than the more troubled westerly crossing that he made the following year. It is not just that Thesiger is the more romantic and notorious figure (the better writer, certainly): like the courses of Philby and Thomas, his second crossing ventured deep into what is now off-limits Saudi Arabia, whose border encloses some 80 per cent of the Empty Quarter. If, as a non-Saudi, you wish to cross the Rub’ al-Khali, it will probably be in the footsteps of Thesiger.
He was born in 1910 in what was then Addis Ababa, where his father was a British minister. It was those early years, and his experiences in the Sahara during the Second World War, that generated his love of arid places. Published in 1959, more than ten years after his crossings, Arabian Sands is full of nostalgia for a way of life—the ascetic nomadism of the desert Bedouin—that, in his view, was doomed by the discovery of oil under the peninsula’s deserts. “They are too lovely to last in the utilitarian age.” His belief in the fundamental Nobility of the Bedouin echoed the sentiments not only of nineteenth-century European Romantics but of the fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, who maintained that the “desert people are closer to being good than settled peoples because they are…removed from all the habits that have infected the hearts of settlers.”
“It is curious how the desert satisfies me and gives me peace,” Thesiger wrote to his mother. “You cannot explain what you find there to those who don’t feel it too, for most people it is just a howling wilderness.”
But the desert, despite appearances, is not immune to the progress of time. Few desert travellers can bring themselves to conclude their accounts without lamenting the intrusion of mechanised transport upon the desert’s sanctity. Or worse yet, other people.
One January evening I attended a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society in London. Two years earlier, the man on stage had crossed the Empty Quarter’s eastern flank by camel, with two Emirati Bedouin companions, travelling from Salalah in Oman to Abu Dhabi in forty days. And that was why he was here. The project was called “Footsteps of Thesiger.” Authenticity, he told us, had been everything—he and his team had planned to carry only what Thesiger had carried, and dress as he’d dressed, in Bedouin garb. And yet, he admitted, he had been obliged, under pressure from the authorities (and his sponsors), to endure the presence of a support crew, which trailed behind in a convoy of four-wheel-drives, bearing the photographer, the cameraman, the soundman, GPS and radios, medical supplies and, of course, food and water; they would also taxi the adventurer to the nearest hospital when he came off his camel. No longer was it necessary to be vigilant for raiders, the “feared puritans of Islam,” as Bertram Thomas called them, who would glory in a Christian’s slaughter.
Thomas went on to describe the hostile tribes of the Sands as being “of two kinds: that whose tribe and yours have no blood feud [and] that where a blood feud exists. Both want your camels and arms, the second your life as well.” Those times were gone. The Bedouin had been enfranchised, after a fashion. It was a further blight on the modern expedition that the Omanis of the desert edge were eager to see the procession as it passed, bestowing unwelcome gifts of yet more food and water, and insisting on feasting the travellers and their entourage each night. The stringencies enjoyed by Thesiger and his predecessors were denied them; you were as likely to gain weight on such a trip as lose it, and the eastern Sands were as footprint-riddled as Clacton-on-Sea.
It has become difficult to be a pioneer. The world has been done. There are only the adventurers now, this new breed of fanatic: rangy large-toothed guys seeking not knowledge or even territory but novelty, managed suffering, “experience,” material, sponsorship—K2 by canoe, the Amazon by bike, the North Pole on stilts. And then there are those who seek out the footsteps of the surveyors of the epic era.
Such expeditions might still yield lessons for the budding CEO: “These guys put the team ahead of the individual,” said the speaker. He was talking about the Bedouin. He had planned the expedition “like anyone wanting to succeed in business.” A question from the audience, the roving mic dispatched: where did he stand vis-à-vis the rumours about Thesiger’s “shall we say ‘unorthodox’ lifestyle”? (Thesiger’s tender descriptions of his “disturbingly beautiful” guide, Salim bin Kabina, remain unignorable.) A brief catlike rigidifying, then the recovery of sangfroid. “Personally? I firmly believe they were just good friends.”
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FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE Thesiger’s crossings, Harry St. John Philby wrote to his wife, Dora, “With me, nothing counts but the Rub’ al-Khali, and I can find no peace of mind till that is over and done with. Curse!” It was “this beastly obsession which has so completely sidetracked me for the best years of my life.”
A Foreign Office functionary since his graduation from Cambridge, Philby had been Bertram Thomas’s superior in the British Political Service in Iraq, where both had been drafted in 1917 following the capture of Baghdad. Philby’s obsession with the Empty Quarter dated from his earliest excursions into Arabia, as revenue commissioner in Iraq, then as adviser to the minister of the interior. In 1924 he became Britain’s political representative to the founding monarch of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud. This acquaintance was to prove central to his future expeditions, for it was only with the king’s sanction that safe passage into the Empty Quarter could be assured.
It was vital that he should be the first. “To that effort and its consequences,” he wrote, “I sacrificed everything—the security of an orthodox career and the rest of it.”
It was not until December 1930 that Ibn Saud gave serious consideration to his request, recognising that the success of such an expedition under his patronage would vindicate his claim to dominion of the desert. Indeed, the Empty Quarter, with its vast oil deposits, would soon prove central to the wealth of the Saudi nation. Finally Philby was summoned to the king’s p
alace in Riyadh: “We will send Philby to the Empty Quarter.”
But his departure was to be stymied by that old hindrance to adventuring, tribal unrest. As he wrote later, “A year’s delay would not be of serious moment—so all thought except myself.” For Philby had been made aware that the thirty-three-year-old Bertram Thomas, his onetime underling, was in the south of the peninsula, preparing an expedition of his own.
Thomas’s biography prior to the army is sketchy: born in 1892, he volunteered at the age of twenty-two and was sent to Flanders, where he served for two years before being dispatched with his regiment first to India, then to Baghdad. While posted in Shatrah in Iraq he would serenade the local sheikhs on the piano he had brought with him. Their favourite, claimed Gertrude Bell, who encountered him there, was Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique.
Having gained a reputation for securing the trust of Iraqi tribal leaders, in 1922 he was appointed financial adviser, wazir, to the Sultan of Oman. His appointment was a condition of the British government’s agreement to bail out the indebted sultan. Oman might not have been a colony, but its proximity to the strategically vital straits of the Persian Gulf, and its promise of oil, meant it could not be allowed to escape British influence. Thomas was not a particularly effective financial adviser. He was preoccupied, and not with his piano.
From the moment of his arrival, he began to map a route across the Empty Quarter, using his annual leave to make several long recces to the desert’s edge. Finally, on the evening of 4 October 1930, he set off from Muscat, aboard a British oil tanker that would drop him along the southern Arabian coast, near what was then the small fishing town of Salalah. As Thomas writes in his account of his travels, Arabia Felix, he “avoided the pitfalls of seeking permission,” knowing that such permission would very likely be withheld by both the sultan and his own British superiors.
Some six weeks later a deputation of the Rashidi tribe, whom Thomas had been in contact with, appeared from the desert, ready to accompany him across the Sands. At the same time, however, according to Thomas’s account, a gunboat appeared offshore, carrying a summons from the sultan. Mr. Thomas must return to his post immediately. He made up his mind: he would send the gunboat back to Muscat without him, while he would “join fortune with those attractive ruffians…and take the plunge with them into the uncharted wilderness.” In Muscat his British bosses quietly fumed.
Thomas is still elusive. He was the first foreigner to cross the Empty Quarter, but unlike his successors, Philby and Thesiger, his name is barely known. There is no biography. Arabia Felix, a bestseller in its day and superior to Philby’s turgid The Empty Quarter, has long been out of print. In 1945, fourteen years after his crossing, Thomas was posted to the mountains above Beirut as the first director of the British army’s School of Arabic Studies. A year later he had resigned to take up a position as Shell’s head of operations in the Gulf, tasked with reporting on the movements of rival oil-company representatives and “the aspirations of various Arab rulers regarding petroleum concessions.” From his base in Cairo in 1950 he wrote to a friend: “Tobacco and alcohol are cheap but these I have to go slow on at the moment.” Five years later, at the age of fifty-seven, alcoholic and overweight, Bertram Thomas died. I thought of Buzz Aldrin’s depression, his alcoholism, the way his existence was at once magnified and belittled by the experience of walking on the moon.
I hadn’t any intention of pussyfooting in Thomas’s footprints, but I wanted to stand in the desert he had laboured in, and try to imagine what it might do to a person who abandoned himself to it. And of course there was the name of the place.
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THE FIRST TOPOGRAPHERS of England, standing on the edge of some boggy realm like Dartmoor, some place that had not been colonised or cultivated, wrote “desert” or “desart” in their reports. From the Latin adjective desertus, past participle of deserere: “to abandon.”
The chief characteristic of such places, then, was not a lack of water but of humankind. And they were not only unpeopled but in the original sense forsaken. Shakespeare’s “desert inaccessible” in As You Like It is not arid, it is woodland; and when Noel Thomas Carrington in his poem “Dartmoor” calls the moor a “silent desert,” he doesn’t mean it metaphorically. On my shelves was an 1872 book by the French naturalist Arthur Mangin, The Desert World, in which he seeks to describe all the regions “where Nature has maintained her inviolability,” including the Russian steppes, the “prairies, pampas and llanos” of the New World, the Poles and the Pyrenees, and even Dartmoor itself.
Europeans had no real conception of the world’s dry deserts until they started going to them. Look at the paintings of St. Antony. It was not only that vegetation was a requisite compositional device in European landscape-paintings. Even for the most visionary painter, one who had pored over Athanasius’s hagiography, the sheer sparsity of the Egyptian desert was as beyond imagining as the moon. Scarcely any of these paintings are without trees, and many show the abbot sitting primly in a landscape as lush as the Apennines in spring. In The Temptation of St. Antony, painted around 1560 by a follower of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, he occupies a bosky hillside overlooking a broad river that might be the Rhine. In a painting of the same name by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch, the desert anchorite sits on a lawn, in the shade of what might be an ash tree, overlooking a slow-moving brook, while in the distance the spire of a church rises behind a line of trees.
A kind of paradise, but a Netherlandish one. The desert, then, was European, until Europeans began to conquer it. Only then did a narrowing, an aridifying, of the word’s usage begin.
A Dominican friar from Germany, Felix Fabri made two pilgrimages in the Holy Land, in 1480 and 1483. If we are to characterise what the desert is in the cultural, religious and psychological senses, his description remains persuasive five centuries later. I skimmed through the three-volume account of his journey, Wanderings in the Holy Land, and found both his retelling of St. Antony’s walk to the dying St. Paul, and a description of his own arrival at the edge of the “wilderness of Sin,” which lies between Mount Sinai and the Red Sea.
“Holy Scripture tells us in many places about this wilderness, of what kind of thing it is and what it lacks” (my emphasis). Fabri attributes to the environment no fewer than twenty conditions:
Firstly, this country is called the desert because it seems to be, so to speak, deserted by God, as though God had used it to improve or adorn the rest of the universe…Secondly, this country is called the lonesome place, because no one longs for that land…Thirdly, this country is called the solitary place, because it is solitary and unfrequented by men. It is solitary because none of the countries which lie round about it wish to have any connection with or likeness to that land…
He goes on to tell us that the desert is “the image of death,” that “nothing grows there,” that it is waterless, salt, pathless, inhabited only by serpents, scorpions, dipsades (a kind of snake whose bite causes intolerable thirst), worms, dragons, fauns and satyrs; that it is—as St. Antony knew—a place of demonic temptation, “where great merit is acquired,” and “where the laws and commandments were given.” But it is also, says Fabri, “the place of manna and of Divine comforting,” a retreat from the world.
Finally—twentiethly—it is a place of devotion and contemplation, “wherefore we read in the Psalms, ‘In a barren and dry land where no water is have I looked for thee in holiness.’ ”
There it was: the hyper-arid zone in all its abundance: solitary, godless, lonesome, deathly, barren, waterless, trackless, impassable, infested, cursed, forsaken—and yet, at the same time, the site of revelation, of contemplation and sanctuary. Amid its horrors, peace—peace magnified by those horrors.
The fact that Fabri had set foot upon its gravel plains and slept beneath its stars made the wilderness of Sin no less a symbolic realm for him. It was the wilderness know
n to Christ, Moses and St. Antony. Fabri’s description draws on his own journey, naturally, but his understanding is influenced to an even greater extent by scriptural symbology, and especially St. Jerome’s account of the life of St. Paul and the limestone mountains of the Eastern Desert of Egypt, seething with “Fauns, and Satyrs, and Incubi.”
To make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, for Fabri and the thousands of religious tourists who went after him, was less to unscroll a map than to open a book. Even for the twenty-first-century visitor, equipped with satellite phone and Evian, it is very much through that same biblical filter that the desert is comprehended. “I was like Moses,” writes Philby, the man who titled his autobiography Forty Years in the Wilderness.
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BY THE END of winter I’d given up most of my stuff. Apart from the bed, the flat in London was empty. The bed, and some photos—and the books. I’d taken most of them, hundreds of them, to Oxfam, but I kept the desert ones—a library of twenty or so, few enough to fit inside a wheeled flight case. I spent a week accumulating the gear I’d need, or thought I’d need. I bought a “hydration system” called a CamelBak—a blue plastic bladder that slips inside your backpack and has a spigoted rubber catheter that snakes over the shoulder for on-the-go suckling. I bought sunglasses and two cheap hats and a cotton scarf and three identical beige shirts labelled “Craghoppers.” I bought sixty sachets of blackcurrant-flavour rehydration powder. I bought half a dozen family-sized dispensers of factor-50 sunblock (I’m a redhead), which I’d decant into pocket-sized sprays.
During those early days of planning, I came upon an interesting historical document. Written by an American named W. J. McGee, “Desert Thirst as Disease” appeared in a 1906 edition of the Interstate Medical Journal. It’s a unique study in the stages of dehydration and heatstroke, and no less alarming for being scientifically outdated.
The Immeasurable World Page 2