McGee, a doctor and geographer, sets the scene: he has established his field camp in south-western Arizona—close to the Tinajas Altas Mountains on the Camino del Diablo, one of the most feared of the Sonoran Desert’s ancient migration routes. “Hardly a mile of the 200 from Santo Domingo to Yuma remains unmarked by one or more cruciform stone-heaps,” he writes. The events he goes on to describe take place in August 1905. The subject is a prospector called Pablo Valencia (“one of the best-built Mexicans known to me, albeit lightly burdened with acute sensibility”). With his Sancho Panza, the “erratic and inconsequent and little dependable” Jesus Rios, Valencia passes through McGee’s camp en route to an abandoned gold mine, which the two men intend to claim and revive.
Having set out on 15 August, Rios turns back with both horses to fetch more water, arranging to rendezvous with Valencia the following day, an agreement McGee pronounces “inane if not insane.” Rios leaves the camp once more early in the morning, only to return exhausted and dehydrated, having failed to find Valencia at the agreed place. A local tracker is sent out to follow “old Jesus’s ill-chosen trail,” but he too returns to the camp alone.
Four further nights pass. Valencia has been in the desert for eight days, with water sufficient for one day. There is no question but that he is dead. On 23 August, McGee is woken by what he recognises as the roaring of a bull, “an ear-piercing bellow of challenge and defiance.” Some distance from the camp, they find him, “the wreck of Pablo,” motionless under an ironwood tree.
Pablo was stark naked; his formerly full-muscled legs and arms were shrunken and scrawny; his ribs edged out like those of a starvling horse; his habitually plethoric abdomen was drawn in almost against his vertebral column; his lips had disappeared as if amputated, leaving low edges of blackened tissue; his teeth and gums projected like those of a skinned animal, but the flesh was black and dry as a hank of jerky; his nose was withered and shrunken to half its length; his nostril-lining showing black; his eyes were set in a winkless stare, with surrounding skin so contracted as to expose the conjunctiva, itself black as the gums; his face was dark as a negro, and his skin generally turned a ghastly purplish yet ashen grey, with great livid blotches and streaks; his lower legs and feet, with forearms and hands, were torn and scratched by contact with thorns and sharp rocks, yet even the freshest cuts were as so many scratches in dry leather, without trace of blood or serum; his joints and bones stood out like those of a wasted sickling, though the skin clung to them in way suggesting shrunken rawhide used in repairing a broken wheel.
Desert gothic. It is as if he has been possessed by the spirit of the desert or rendered into some calculus of all its extremes. The impression above all is of an organic being reduced to the mineral—this is what the desert does, before it scatters you. He is half-deaf, half-blind; and there’s one last foul detail: “his tongue shrunken to a mere bunch of black integument.”
McGee douses him with water, “the skin first shedding and then absorbing it greedily as a dry sponge.” From shrunken rawhide to sponge. Valencia’s revival from living mummy is in fact remarkably quick: within an hour he is drinking, within two he can manage a little “bird fricassee with rice and shredded bacon.” All it takes is water.
In the days that follow he becomes strong enough to recollect his ordeal. Having set out on foot, he became disoriented and exhausted. His canteen was soon empty. “He found some relief—after the fashion of all Mexicans and most Americans in like cases—by occasionally filling his mouth and gargling his throat with urine.”
On 17 August, two days after leaving the camp, he lay down in an arroyo and discarded his shoes and trousers. This shedding of clothes is common among those dying in the desert—instinctive but lethal, since clothing is often all that shields you from the sun. The following day he chewed some paloverde twigs and ate some spiders. He became convinced that Rios had deliberately abandoned him (and who knows, perhaps he did), planning to claim the goldmine for himself. It was this conviction that “spurred him on with the aim of knifing his deceiver.”
On 19 August he recognised the Old Yuma Trail, which would return him to the camp, but “soon fell under the heat and lay all day long in an arroyo.” That evening, as he made his way along the old trail, he glimpsed a coyote following him at a distance. By now the urine he had been carrying in the canteen was mucho malo, “very bad.”
On 21 August, five days after Valencia’s last taste of water, the buzzards which had been monitoring him for two days “came almost within hand-reach.” The next day, his urine having ceased to flow, “he felt his last recourse gone.” The following evening McGee was woken by those distant bellowings. The dead man was alive, or rather he was not wholly dead.
T. E. Lawrence believed that “thirst” was an “active malady”—“not a long death…but very painful.” McGee isolates five stages of what he too calls thirst: “normal dryness,” “functional derangement,” “the cottonmouth phase,” “the phase of the shrivelled tongue,” “the stage of structural degeneration” and “the final phase”—death. His stages correspond roughly to the three stages used by modern medics in describing dehydration and heatstroke: mild (dry mouth, rapid breathing), moderate (reduced skin-turgor, sunken eyes and irritability) and extreme (cold extremities, no identifiable blood-pressure or pulse).
Valencia was fortunate. Once he was strong enough, he was taken by cart to Yuma, where he “spent practically the whole of August 31 deliberately and methodically devouring watermelon.”
* * *
—
TWO DAYS BEFORE flying to Oman, tetchy with waking visions of the desert, I caught a train to Cambridge and went to the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. There, one after another, while the rain pattered on the windows, I was brought the items I had requested from their Bertram Thomas archive. It was the map of his crossing I was interested in, pasted onto thin boards but now so dog-eared and friable that it required painstaking unfolding in order to avoid new tears. It seemed to have been drawn up from his records and subsequently corrected by him. Discredited or misdrawn features had been scrawled out in pencil, and new ones added. The Rub’ al-Khali itself, otherwise a blank, was dense with the author’s own pencilled features and labels—the courses of the dry riverbeds (wadis), dune formations and plains, as well as blots of what looked like coffee.
In a footnote in Arabia Felix, he itemises the geographical features as he and his party move from south to north: “high, red dune country”; “elevated, less-rugged, red sands, with horseshoe hills”; “parallel white ridges with intervening red valleys”; “flat or gently undulating white sands with transverse red hills”; “steppe, salt plain, and red hills alternating.” Running from bottom to top of the map was a careful darker pencil line, coursing north-west from the coastal plain of Salalah. It passed over the Qara mountains to the waterhole of Shisur, into the dune regions known as Ramlat Fasad and Ramlat Mitan, before veering briefly west and then, for three hundred kilometres, following the sparse dots of waterholes north to the Persian Gulf.
Also in the collection were Thomas’s tables, with columns for date, place, hour, course, rate and bearing: hundreds of entries over five or six pages, drawn up from the notes he took during his journey and recording his party’s precise course, hour by hour. As the Sands are entered, the proper names are left behind and replaced by mere descriptions—“white sands,” “dune ridge,” “dunes and basin,” “salt plain,” “white plain”—repeated again and again, until place names return as the Gulf is neared.
* * *
—
A WEEK LATER I was standing in Ramlat Fasad opposite someone called Nigel. He was so close I could feel his breath on my eyeballs. He lived in Northampton, he was saying. His life had not been easy, but nor, given the chance, would he exchange it for another.
We had left the peripheral gravel plains behind. Underfoot was a floor of cracked white clay dusted
with red sand. Between us and the mountainous pink dunes that formed the horizon were only two saltbushes, long dead. Nigel was bonneted in a Sahara cap, tied in a bow under his chin, his face crusted with factor-50. The headmaster, he was saying, the headmaster had been “more of a politician than an educator,” and it was he who, five years ago, had engineered Nigel’s dismissal from the school where he worked. A breakdown followed; divorce; a son’s alienation. At the age of sixty, he moved three hundred kilometres north and became a postman. As he continued, my eyes traced the tracks of the four-wheel-drive that had left us here, to the brow of a rise. The sand had reddened further, to the colour of a mouth’s interior. The land was ablaze.
As retirement approached, Nigel was saying, he began to seek out challenges of a controllable kind: first he ran 160 kilometres along the South Downs; then, in the Sahara, he ran the Marathon des Sables—six marathons in six days. Most recently he had succeeded, after two previous attempts, in completing the Yukon Arctic Ultra, towing a sledge 690 kilometres solo across northern Canada.
And now he was here, to ride a camel in Arabia, alone but for his guide. It was not, on this occasion, about distance, he said. As a young man, he had watched David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia and read Thesiger’s Arabian Sands. Finally, in his early sixties, he’d joined them, those men. When he looked back on his life, or even as he went about his work next week, he’d be able to describe to himself what he had done.
As Nigel spoke, the realisation was dawning on me that I would die if Hassan, our guide, did not return. Never before had I known so intensely my life’s dependence on another. It was as if I had been dosed with a poison whose antidote he alone possessed. And where was Hassan?
* * *
—
I HAD ARRIVED in the southern coastal city of Salalah two days before, and was met by Hassan at my guesthouse on the beach. “There’s a small problem,” he had said, “but you should relax, and then we will talk.” I asked him what the problem was. I didn’t want to relax, thanks. The problem was this: he was too busy to take me to the desert. Right, I said.
It would be fine, there was a cousin. His cousin knew the desert well, but the problem, the other problem, was that he didn’t speak English. I bridled. I was tired from the flight. I came up with an English phrase, the phrase of an Englishman complaining to a call centre: “It’s not good enough.” I said it again. Hassan said he would go away and give the problem some thought. The solution, an hour later, was that he himself would take me to the desert, after all. I was relieved, but our relationship had been soured. I’d played the monoglot Englishman who knows his mind; he the supplicant Bedu. It was 1914.
For two hours, this afternoon, he and I had followed the tracks of Nigel’s camel and the Land Cruiser that was accompanying him, which was driven by Hassan’s son, Mohammed. When we had finally found them, Nigel was exhausted. Hassan had driven us both to this spot, ten minutes away, where we were to make camp, and then gone back to help Mohammed bring the camel. I imagined the words they would be exchanging about their English clients.
How long had they been? Twenty minutes? An hour? Nigel had regained his energy and did not seem at all concerned. My eyes scanned the horizon and I cocked an ear for engine-noise as his lips continued to move.
In The Arabian Nights is a story entitled “Ma’aruf the Cobbler.” Pretending to wealth he does not possess, Ma’aruf is reported to the king by his frustrated creditors. The king’s wazir (in Richard Burton’s 1885 translation) sends Ma’aruf into exile, summoning a jinni, or demon, and commanding it to “take up yonder wretch and cast him down in the most desolate of desert lands, where he shall find nothing to eat nor drink, so he may die of hunger and perish miserably and none know of him.” Snatching up the cobbler, the jinni tells him: “I go to cast thee down in the Desert Quarter”—and there, “in that horrible place,” Ma’aruf is abandoned.
The thought occurred to me that, while the desert was a sort of heaven—look at it—to be cast down here terminally would be an affirmation of Virgil’s idea that hell was a desert. “I’m not worried,” Nigel said finally, peering out into the dazzling wastes, “but I’m beginning to wonder if they’re having trouble with Soran.” Soran was the camel.
* * *
—
A DAY EARLIER, Hassan and I had left Salalah, with its date plantations and lawns, for the Qara mountains. On a globe you can make out two unruly hoops of shaggy yellow-brown, almost unbroken but for the oceans, circling the earth thirty degrees north and south of the equator respectively. They are the deserts. Warm air rising above equatorial regions loses its moisture to condensation as it moves north and south, hence the intense rainfall associated with the wet tropics. These poleward-rolling scrolls of circulation are known as Hadley cells, after the English meteorologist (George) who discovered them. As the risen air travels north and south it dries, cools and returns to the surface. In the course of the planet’s circling of the sun, it is these bands of dryness, close to the equator and unimpeded by cloud, that undergo the greatest heating. But desert formation is a local process too, and there are other kinds of desert. Along the western coasts of the continents, sea winds cool the air, reducing its capacity to hold moisture and preventing the formation of clouds, contributing to the creation of “coastal” deserts such as Chile’s Atacama and southern Africa’s Namib. This effect is amplified, in the Southern Hemisphere, by the influence of anti-clockwise ocean gyres, which carry cold water to the west coasts of the continents. Meanwhile winds arriving from the east have surrendered any moisture to the parched land. Moreover the sheer remoteness and size of many deserts—those of Australia and Central Asia, for example—mean that vapour from the sea simply can’t reach them. So dryness is partly a factor of isolation. Topography also contributes to desert formation. The deserts of China—the Gobi and the Taklamakan—are bounded by mountains. In Oman fertile land exists in two thin strips: the arable corridor of Batinah, which runs north-west from Muscat; and in the south the Dhofar coastal plain, where Salalah lies. When air confronts a mountain range, such as the Jabl Qara, it cools as it climbs, forming rainclouds that sap its moisture. (In the Empty Quarter average annual precipitation is five millimetres.)
Progressively, as we followed the pass north, the limestone slab that forms the mountains assumed the shallow down-slope that would continue for a hundred kilometres to the edge of the Sands. The legacy of the monsoon—trees, grass, scrub, however sere—resolved into a sequence of pallid landscapes denuded of all but the wiriest black bushes and frankincense trees.
We entered the nejd, a rubbled karstland dissected by broad wadis that had not run for generations and scattered with cement-coloured bergs of limestone. Pink sand had been banked along the road’s eastern verge by last night’s winds. The nejd became the semi-arid “rocky desert,” the hamadah. All along the roadside were discarded tyres. They would still be there in a thousand years. I saw two armchairs, set side by side, a hundred metres from the road and ten kilometres from the nearest turn-off. The alluvial boulders strewing the hamadah became rocks; the rocks became smaller black nodules of basalt, laid down in rows upon the paler grit as if by a harrow. The land had been progressively degraded, growing flatter and smoother as it became drier. Hanging a hundred metres up against the electric sky was a pale unmarked blimp.
Hassan was from a mountain tribe, he said. He was in his early fifties and had a neat black beard and a steady, strategising gaze of the kind I associate with both artists and military men. He was quick to judge any situation, and was sensitive to danger. In the boot of the Land Cruiser, I’d noticed, was a giant wooden club, but he carried no gun. He wore a white headcloth, and a white dishdasha, grease-fingered across its front. On his feet were perished black rubber sandals. In the late 1960s, during the Dhofar uprising against the Sultan of Oman, he had trained as a paramedic at an insurgents’ school across the border, in what was then the People’s De
mocratic Republic of Yemen. When all of his friends had been killed, as he put it, and the Soviets and Chinese had co-opted the rebellion, he accepted an amnesty offered by the new sultan (who had deposed the previous sultan, his father) and made his way to Salalah. And that was where he lived still. But the mountains, the plains and the desert remained his home, the home of his father, even if the Bedouin as a nomadic people had practically ceased to exist.
In the Sands he couldn’t be lost. He became a different man there: no-nonsense, a figure of authority. And as we put the coastal plain behind us and approached the desert, the unease between us lifted. I might have been a camel. He would lead me, I would follow.
His father, as it happened, had met Bertram Thomas in the late 1920s, when Thumrait—the town above which the blimp was bobbing—was nothing but a waterhole. “The Englishman is crazy,” the Bedouin told one another: he had been seen walking in the midday heat, stopping every so often to build a small pile of rocks (he was surveying the site). Take him the corpse of a mouse, or a snake, or an eagle, and he’d pay in gold: “The Englishman is crazy.” And it was not only animal remains he had an interest in.
Thumrait is the last town before the desert, a stopping-off place for HGVs and camel traders travelling to and from Qatar—at once abandoned-seeming and bustling. Everything carried a sifting of red dust. There was an air of impermanence and urgency. Cats crawled about under the cars, mewling. Unfinished buildings going to ruin stood beside a new Shell garage. The tall palms planted alongside the road appeared to be dead. Outside the al-Khayam Bakery, three pickups were lined up, and in the bed of each one, couched under netting, a silent black camel.
The Immeasurable World Page 3