On August 13, Laing departed Beni Ulid. The explorer and his party negotiated steep, dry watercourses that in geological times had drained the plateau northeastward into the Gulf of Sidra. Leaving the coastal plain, they spent days climbing and descending the steep rocky banks of a range of wadis, or dried riverbeds. Then they began the torturous crossing of the Hamada el Homra, the “great red wilderness,” a seemingly endless, waterless plain spreading over 40,000 square miles whose surface was covered with sharp flints reflecting a blinding, merciless sun. On this plain, previous caravans had left their dead behind in such numbers that Laing could follow his route through the trackless waste simply by following the bones lining the way.
For five days in the Hamada el Homra, the horizon stretched around the travelers in an unbroken line, as at sea—one indefinite plain as far as the eye could reach. The wind sighed mournfully among the polished stones. The arch of sky, steel blue to the edge of the horizon, domed the endless disk of red rock over which the caravan slowly made its way. It was unlike any land Laing had ever seen.
A mountain range barred the road to the south, rising in a vast plateau of chalk 1,800 feet above the plain, a mighty sheet of rock 360 miles from east to west and about 140 miles broad where the road crossed it. For days they crawled past the skirts of these black hills, the Jebel es Sawda.
The caravan was marching close to the rocky massif to the south, but soon those mountains curved in a great arc away from the most direct course to Ghadames and the caravan was confronted with what looked like another eternal plain. Its dimensions were magnified, low on distant horizons, by isolated peaks and tabletops of rock. These made for confident navigation, for they were marked on the crude charts Laing had obtained in Tripoli and London, but their greatest effect was to provide a scale to the panorama, reducing men and camels to fleas. The travelers felt themselves creeping toward a far rim of the world that might never be reached, across pure and unbounded space in which they had no hope of encountering anything from the world left behind. No one would offer them comfort here.
The surface of the plain was rock littered with red stones and bits of chalk. Over the eons, heat and cold had shattered the exposed veneer of this rocky floor and an incessant wind had carried away all loose particles of sand. The surface was swept clean, as if with a broom, and the smooth stones appeared varnished from the polishing action of drifting sand.
On most days, Laing’s caravan set off early in the morning, usually well before dawn. They camped in the heat of the day when the sun lit the sky ablaze and the horizon trembled. During late afternoon and dusk, once the suffocating heat had abated, the caravan resumed its journey, traveling into the night. The sun was their only timekeeper (though Laing carried several functioning nautical chronometers). Distances were measured in days, never in miles.
The daily routine varied little. Morning prayer was the opening business, followed by the first tea of the day, weak and syrupy, a desert staple. Breakfast usually involved zummita paste* or a ball of foul-smelling dried fish steeped in camel’s milk. Next came rounding up the camels, let loose to forage for what they could find. This could take hours, depending on how far they had wandered. If there was no forage, the camels ate what they carried on their backs, remaining hobbled through the night, their bony legs tied together painfully so they could move only a few yards from camp. With loads restored, the caravan moved out, the baggage masters checking to see that loads did not shift. They mounted their own camels only when satisfied that nothing could fall loose.
Around noon Babani usually called a halt and the camels were unloaded again and left to find food. After prayers, more tea was brewed and “lunch” (usually more zummita and some dates) was served. After an hour or two, the handlers rounded up the camels and the caravan plodded on until after dusk. The evening devotions were longer and the evening meal more substantial, usually including camel or goat meat, milk, and more dates—and, of course, tea. They seldom pitched tents (except for Laing); the caravanners simply wrapped themselves in their blankets and slept on the sand. The far slope of the closest dune served as latrine—too often distressingly nearby; it was the wise man who exercised caution when walking at night. Hands were washed with sand, not water, and no other cleansing of bodies took place until the caravan reached its destination. Chewing on fiber kept teeth and gums healthy; stalks of sugarcane were specially brought for this purpose.
Hunger, a need for food that was persistent, gnawing, and demoralizing, rivaled thirst as the caravanner’s enemy. As a rule, Europeans did not find desert cuisine sustaining or appetizing: “It is a point of great politeness with the Arabs to tear the meat for a stranger, as well to squeeze up the bazeen [a Tripoli dish made with barley, onion, olive oil, and lamb] with the sauce for him,” Lyon wrote of his trip. “And as this is sometimes done with unsavoury fingers, hunger becomes an absolute requisite to induce a novice to touch an Arab meal.”
The appetite of a Saharan traveler, like that of his camel, was elastic. In the desert, he might live for days, even weeks, on little more than dried dates, a handful of zummita mixed with water and a little rancid fat for flavoring, and salt. Food was so scarce in the Sahara that a plague of locusts, regarded as a disaster in the agricultural regions to the north, was welcomed as a gift from heaven in the desert by the men, who gathered them up by the sackful. They could be broiled, fried with red peppers, salted, or preserved in oil.
The temperature at midday usually hovered around 120 degrees. There was a shortage of water, and water ruled all life in the desert. Humans needed two gallons daily. A supply was carried on the backs of camels in goatskin bags called guerbas, but drinking the water from these required a strong stomach. The water was muddy, tinged red from the leather, and full of foreign matter (including goat hairs). It was tepid, even hot, and tasted of sulfur and magnesium. Laing found it nauseating at first, but thirst soon made him less squeamish.
In the vastness of the Sahara, finding a well required great skill and a measure of luck. Whole caravans of a hundred men had simply vanished like ships in the ocean because their calculations were off by a hundred yards. Once wells were located, the real work began, as they were often covered over with sand. Digging out clogged wells was an operation that could take days, and the suffering from thirst became more intense beside a well (because one knew the water was so near). Even after hours spent in excavation, the well might be found dry, or containing barely inches of muddy water, hardly enough for men, much less for animals. The hole might be a deep one with no bucket and rope to draw the water, or, if provided, the water might be so spiked with chemicals it was undrinkable.
At the sight of a well, the caravan usually dissolved into a stampeding rabble. The animals could smell the water before the men saw it, and both beasts and men ran toward the well or oasis. “I was presented with a hallucinatory vision,” wrote a French explorer, who watched one parched caravan rush toward a water hole. “Children crushed in the stampede let out heartrending cries, camels, donkeys, zebus rushed with their heads lowered into the mob to get closer to the precious liquid; the women called for water with agonized cries; a terrifying spectacle, a Dantesque vision.”
Travelers were too thirsty to examine the water they were drinking closely, and this may have been a blessing. Water holes were small pools idyllically set among golden dunes and shaded with date palms, “peeping from amidst the hills of sand, like a few evergreens amidst the snows of December,” as Laing once wrote. On closer inspection, the water was revealed to be covered with a thick green scum liberally peppered with animal droppings, and often containing the marinating bodies of dead camels. The wisest travelers dug wells beside these oases. Those who drank the polluted and sulfuric water straight were plagued by stomach disorders and might suffer kidney failure. But even polluted water was precious; quarrels broke out over who got the sewage-like liquid.
The desert west of Beni Ulid was reported to be rife with plundering tribes, and so Babani, whose ca
mels were loaded with merchandise, insisted on making a dogleg of the route, going south to Tamsawa (Tesawa), only twenty-five miles from Murzuk, and then turning back to the northwest to head for Ghadames. It didn’t seem to matter whether they traveled by day or by night; Babani never lost his way.
Crossing the reddish, wind-scarred sandstone, biscuit-colored and dusty, the caravan’s passage was oddly silent, even secretive. Camels’ feet made no noise on the dunes, and even on the hamada or ergs their soft feet made a padding sound. Leather creaked; water sloshed in the skins; camels grumbled and moaned like old men.* The caravanners talked softly with their neighbors and sang mournful dirges. Even when the pace picked up—when a water hole loomed nearby or the sun beat overhead and shade was within reach, or simply because the drivers suspected some unknown peril—sound rose only slightly.
Rarely did shouts ring out, the crack of whips punctuating irritated curses. Camels that would not go faster were induced to extra exertion by an exquisite cruelty: drivers sliced into their necks and poked the fresh wounds, gouty with congealed blood, with a sharp stick. Riders who pitilessly goaded their camels also goaded themselves. Babani said that a man who is indifferent to pain (because he has long grown used to it) is unlikely to recoil from giving pain to others. In the desert, human beings willingly inflicted apparently limitless pain on themselves. And yet they remained, in all other respects, kindly men.
When the route was clearly marked, following the dry bed of a wadi or leading to a distant escarpment, the travelers dismounted and walked together. Their gait resembled that of the camels: shambling, loose, and long-legged, covering the ground efficiently. Hot air trembled over the land, reflecting the sky in every depression, distorting distant objects into moving, fantastic shapes. Hollows in the rocks appeared as dim blue lakes and wandering camels became dark palm groves or strange hills. These were the games of the “hamada devils,” Babani told Laing, games they played to terrify and mislead luckless caravans. It was an environment given to letting the mind wander, to mesmerization.
In nineteenth-century Saharan Africa, the caravan, more than merely a mode of travel, was the heart and pulse of desert commerce. Merchants like Babani who fitted them out were solely responsible for its losses and gains. Great care was taken in the selection of camels and the men who accompanied them. Caravans varied in size, from lone nomadic traders who trudged beside a solitary “ship of the desert” to great trans-Saharan trade caravans with thousands of camels, donkeys, goats, sheep, and dogs. The largest caravans were infrequent since they took a year or more to outfit and a great deal of money, invested by Arabs and Jewish merchants, to set up. Lesser caravans whose sheikhs believed in the safety of numbers delayed their departures for months just to attach themselves to one of these moving cities.
Sunbaked Ghadames, Laing’s destination, was close enough to the coast—usually no more than twenty days distant by camel on the direct route from Tripoli—that it had long figured as an important crossroads in the caravan trade. From Ghadames ran the route to the Sudan by way of Ghat and Djanet. By reason of its location alone, Ghadames was a city of many fonduks* and a common stopping place.
Laing’s thousand-mile roundabout journey took him into the northern Fezzan. He was still in the heart of the great desert of the Idehan Fezzan, crossing into the Tinrhert Hamada, another flat, rocky wasteland the size of Kentucky, when, on August 28, 1825, Hugh Clapperton departed Spithead, the ancient English sea terminus on the eastern flank of the English Channel between Southampton and the Isle of Wight, on HMS Brazen. Two weeks later, on September 13, eight weeks after leaving Tripoli, Laing approached the sequestered oasis city of Ghadames from the south, having succeeded in avoiding marauding bands. His party had maintained an unshakable pace of seventeen miles a day across some of the most unforgiving terrain in the world.
AFTER NEARLY TWO MONTHS in the wilderness, Laing saw Ghadames “situated like an island in the ocean, in the midst of an extension between plains, and enveloped in a green mantle of date trees.” Upon sighting the city walls, Laing ordered his retinue to dress in white Turkish shirts with English linen trousers. He put on “light European dress” and a blue military cloak, and the group entered the town of 6,000 people, Laing wrote, “as Christians and subjects of His Majesty the King of England.” Crowds came out to meet them. Their reception was “truly cordial, decent and respectable.”
Ghadames, pearl of the desert, was one of the oldest Saharan cities. For centuries this medieval citadel had resisted assaults of sand and climate, its limewashed mud-brick walls and close-set covered alleys providing protection from the heat and cold of the stony wasteland. Ghadames was known for inventive architecture, designed to fight the extremities of the Sahara. Houses were made of mud, lime, and palm tree trunks, constructed with covered alleyways between them and adjacent roofs, granting passage from one house to another in complete shade and privacy, much like the skywalks that connect modern office towers. The city was a labyrinth, lit by gardens and squares open to the sun. Though the town had always been a stopover on the caravan routes crossing the Sahara, its importance had peaked with the slave trade, and this traffic had already begun its decline when Laing arrived, shrinking the city’s economic base.
Laing was an accomplished draftsman, preparing this map on the two-month trip from Tripoli to Ghadames. One can see clearly how far out of his way he went to avoid bandits, and the range after range of mountains he had to negotiate. This map was saved because Laing had the good sense to send it to Warrington by courier from Ghadames, and Warrington forwarded it immediately to Lord Bathurst aboard a British warship. Maps like this were considered beyond price in London—British lives were literally sacrificed to obtain them—for whoever possessed such maps gained detailed knowledge of the strange, unknown world called Africa, and held an advantage over European competitors for colonial domination of this last great frontier.
Scattered over low hills, Ghadames seemed abandoned. The heat was fierce, even for September, and a deep silence gripped the narrow streets. At its worst, Ghadames appeared as an improvised anthill, attracting the poor and the desperate from the harshness of the desert. And yet, Ghadames, the ancient city, had a timeless appeal. Defended by high walls, its peculiar remoteness, and scores of triangular rooftop crenellations soaring above labyrinthine alleys, it offered the peace of an immemorial refuge.
Laing’s equipment was already badly damaged; the ether in his hygrometers had evaporated, his naval chronometers had stopped, “and a camel, having placed his great gouty foot upon my rifle one night as I lay with it by my side in the ground, snapped the stock in two.” The animals had suffered as much as the men, for along the route there had been “as little herbage for them as in the bottom of a tin mine in Cornwall,” Laing wrote. Yet if he regretted having taken on his ambitious journey, he showed no sign of it. Laing spent his days visiting buildings, making drawings, and talking to the denizens of mosques and libraries. He wrote long letters to Emma. A message from Warrington caught up with him, reassuring him that “your dear wife, you may believe me, is well and happy as it is her duty to be [emphasis added].”
As far as Laing could tell, Ghadames had not been visited by Lyon, Clapperton, or any European since the Romans had occupied it a millennium and a half earlier, making it the southernmost African frontier of the Roman Empire. While there was evidence of earlier settlements, Herodotus and Ibn Batuta record that the first Roman garrison was established there around 20 B.C. The Romans found it a difficult post to hold, however, for the Berbers of that era were as tough as those of 1825. By the fourth and fifth centuries, Ghadames became an episcopate under the Byzantine Empire, and four bishops served there until the Arab invasion of 667. The Arabs established Ghadames as a trading center, and in the sixteenth century, Ghadames became a satrap of the bey of Tunis. By Laing’s day, the influence of the bashaw of Tripoli was already ascendant (by 1860, Ghadames would be completely controlled by Tripoli).
Sheikh Babani
was fond of the city, and said that as pearls imprisoned the languid light of moonbeams, so Ghadames, pearl of the sand sea, throbbed with the life of the sun. It was the water of the oasis, not light, that gave life to all things in Ghadames, flouting the desert, which could rob only the city’s crystalline and transparent air, but not its land, of moisture.
Braced for misery, Laing had arrived at Ghadames sick with fatigue. Through a dilapidated gate, the traveler would enter “the dark intricate labyrinths of [the] closely built town.” The streets, covered passages running beneath the houses, were so complex that it was impossible to negotiate them without a guide. They opened periodically onto squares surrounded by stone benches where old men sat and gossiped. A plain mosque graced the central plaza, along with the governor’s residence and a few shops.
Laing was fascinated by the houses of the town; he sketched dozens of them. Contrasting with the streets, which contained mounds of rubbish, they were clean and comfortable, though spare. A central room on the first floor acted as a courtyard, with all other rooms leading off it. The central room was lit by an ingenious hole high in the ceiling, letting in sunlight that reflected off the white walls, thus illuminating the whole room. The top floor in most houses was reserved for women. These dwellings combined a certain elegance with practicality. “Of square construction with terraced roofs, and only dead walls exposed to view,” Laing wrote of them,
the interior of the houses exhibits nevertheless a degree of comfort, and occasionally even of elegance, the walls of the house being plastered with considerable skill, divided into paneling of oblong squares, painted ornamentally, with recesses in which are fixed pier glasses [and] small earthen ornaments…. The rooms on the ground floor have no other light than that admitted by the doors which open into the square courtyard, but those in the upper stories have the advantage of skye light.
Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa's City of Gold Page 18