Madame de Breughel, the Dutch consul’s wife, wrote of the time preceding Emma’s wedding in a memoir she later published:
Emma fell ill, and all the family were plunged into despair. The Doctor was immediately called, and, after an examination, he concluded that It was a case of poisoning. Tortured by violent cramps, Emma admitted that she had wished to finish her life, since her father had refused his consent to her marriage with Laing. She had therefore poisoned herself. She was immediately offered an antidote, but in spite of her agonies, she refused it until her father had given his consent to the marriage.
It is also evident that Emma, genuinely distraught, wanted to frighten her father. In this she succeeded, but only partly. Warrington agreed to marry the couple in his capacity as consul, but would do so only conditioned on their solemn agreement not to cohabit until Laing returned. It is very remotely possible that Laing, too, threatened to kill himself unless permitted to marry Emma, though this would be a strange act by a man of such overweening ambition. On the other hand, Laing had a tendency to what was then called “melancholia,” or, in more modern terms, depression. He suffered from a “liver complaint,” a term used in that era to describe a psychological condition, not an actual illness of the liver. There was a complex, artistic, questioning, imaginative, slightly feminine, and wayward side to Laing’s character, an unusual dimension in a man of such stupendous physical and moral toughness. His letters also show that he was given to extremes of enthusiasm and pessimism.
Laing and Emma spent exactly seventy days together from the night of their first meeting to the morning of his departure. They were often alone, without a chaperone. Had they wanted to, they could easily have found the privacy to make love. It is remotely possible that at the time of Laing’s departure for Timbuktu, Emma feared she might be pregnant and that Laing pretended to threaten to kill her and then kill himself unless Warrington allowed them to marry.
Warrington agreed to perform the ceremony only “under a most sacred and solemn obligation not to cohabit [as he put it] until they could be remarried by an ordained priest.” Their last hours together, we know, were passed under the stern eye of Consul Warrington and the timid eye of his wife. On the other hand, would it truly have been possible for Warrington, a man who drank heavily every night and who slept profoundly, to prevent a determined young couple, just married, from consummating their marriage? In fact, even given the pre-Victorian times and mores, it seems incredible that they had not become lovers long before.
THE STORY of the ivory miniature sheds an interesting light.
After Laing’s departure, Emma asked the Spanish consul, Joseph Gómez Herrador, an amateur artist, to paint a tiny portrait of her on a smooth lozenge of carved ivory similar to one Laing had given her of himself on the day of their wedding, one of many small gifts they exchanged on that day. She planned to send it, along with her letters, as a good-luck charm for her “dearest Laing.” When it was finished, the Warringtons held a family conference. The focus of discussion was this: Should a piece of pink silk “twice the size of a dollar” or a piece of white paper be placed beneath the ivory?
Papa Warrington argued that the delicate tinge of the pink silk was more effective and produced a stronger likeness than “the pallid and melancholy appearance” produced by the paper. On this rare occasion, his wife and daughters overruled him, maintaining that the pink tint made Emma look like a milkmaid, whereas the pale and dejected look imparted by the white paper made her appear “more interesting.”
When Hatita joined Laing, he carried the ivory miniature with him, conveyed to him by couriers from Tripoli, together with a packet of letters from Emma. In her letters, contrary to her father’s assurances, Emma pleaded that the strain of constant and increasing anxiety about Laing was driving her to the brink of madness. Gazing at the tiny portrait in his stifling room in Ghadames, Laing reacted exactly as Warrington had predicted. He was shocked by her deathly mien. He had a grim night, one of sleeplessness and foreboding. The next morning, September 29, Laing lost his nerve and decided on the spot to abandon his mission and return to his wife. He wrote an emotional letter to his father-in-law announcing his revised intentions.
While I am writing thus boldly, my heart throbs with sad pulsations on account of my dearest, most beloved Emma. You say she is well and happy, but I fear, I feel, she is not. Good God, where is the colour of her lovely cheek, where the vermillion of her dear lip? Tell me, has Mr. Herrador, or has he not, made a faithful likeness? If he has, My Emma is ill, is melancholy—her sunken eye, her pale cheek and colourless lip haunt my imagination, and adieu to resolution.
Was I within a day’s march of Tombuctoo and to hear My Emma was ill, I wou’d turn about, and retrace my steps to Tripoli—What is Tombuctoo? What the Niger? What, the world to me? Without my Emma? Shou’d anything befall my Emma, which God forbid, I no more wish to see the face of man; my course will be run—a few short days of misery, and I shou’d follow her to Heaven.
I am agitated, but you will bear with me I hope. Never since this terrestrial ball was formed was there a man situated as I am—never, never, and may no man ever be so placed again—it requires rather more than the fortitude which falls to the general lot of mortals, to enable me to bear it—I must again entreat that you will.
“Bear with my weakness, my brain is troubled.”—I must lay down my pen awhile … Oh, that picture!
Warrington exploded when he read this. He upbraided Emma for sending Laing letters she must have known would make him feel guilty about his decision to leave her. But before the consul had a chance to respond to Laing’s decision, his son-in-law wrote again, in a letter carried by the same courier, to say that he had changed his mind a second time. He would continue his journey to Timbuktu after all.
Warrington père expressed glee at this news. He forgave Emma and wrote cheerfully to Laing: “The importance of the mission, the certainty of success and the honor and glory in reserve for you will inspire you with everything necessary to accomplish the object. Your dear Emma is well and happy, be assured, and for God’s sake do not think otherwise, and make yourself unhappy.”
Had Emma deliberately picked the backdrop that made her appear pale and sick because it signaled to Laing her feared pregnancy? And had Laing understood this secret message (Oh, that picure!) regarding her “interesting” condition only too well?
IN A LONG LETTER written just before his departure from Ghadames dealing with his travel plans, Laing penned an ominous phrase: “The Bashaw’s authority finishes at Ghadames.” Laing recognized just how alone he was going to be in the next leg of his journey. But in spite of (or because of) his emotional turbulence, Laing’s next letters are exuberant, almost maniacal. He joked in one that “I have attained great celebrity as a medico [among the Ghadames locals].… I shall, like the apothecary who had only two drawers in his shop, one for magnesia and the other for money, do little harm.” Another letter to Emma’s father railed against his competitor, showing a growing obsession with his mission: “Clapperton may as well have stayed at home,” he wrote, “if the termination of the Niger is his object.”
He had developed a tremendously optimistic, some would say unrealistic, schedule.
I expect to go through in the following order with regard to time—Tuat, October 28th—Tombuctoo, December 10th—where I shall remain till the 1st January, when I shall cross the river, and traverse a desert of ten journeys [ten days’ travel], which will bring me to Wangara, and the Lake where I presume the Niger terminates—a month more, the middle of February, and I am on the coast, where, if I find a Man of War, I shall instantly embark, calling at Sierra Leone and Gibraltar on my return, for letters….
The discovery of Timbuktu and the source of the Niger—and the precarious emotional and physical condition of his wife—these were the opposing themes that battled in Laing’s psyche during his long wait at Ghadames. In yet another letter—this one about money, camel-loads for the caravan, and gifts for
the sheikhs on the route—he paused to ask if, when he returned to Tripoli, he would be released from the promise his father-in-law had extracted from him:
Very Private,
Will you still consider it necessary to keep me to the promise [he wrote Warrington] which you have from me in writing [his emphasis] (and which wou’d be sacred was it merely verbal) or will you absolve me from it? Do not be offended at my putting such a question—As I merely do it to prevent a disappointment which might take place was I to return to Tripoli without being so liberated; for I made a solemn promise to my Dear Emma, the night of our separation, (that melancholy night which you will well remember), never again to part from her when it shou’d please God to restore us to one another…. I therefore trust that you will understand me, that I ask for the sake of information and to prevent an awkward dilemma hereafter.
Was he concerned that Emma was already pregnant? “The promise,” presumably, was that he would not sleep with her until their marriage had been solemnized by an Anglican priest, though this is not precisely clear from the context.
With these thoughts turning somersaults in his head, Laing left Ghadames on November 3 after a stay of fifty-one days. “At length, my dear Consul,” he wrote on that day, hastily, while a messenger waited,
I have it in my power to say that I am on the road to Tombuctoo—The camels are all loaded, and only wait for me while I give you notice of the event.
Then, after a line about his plans for the journey, with a poignancy which later events would only accentuate:
My mind forebodes nothing ill—I have a strong presentiment that my Dear Emma is well, but it is truly painful to remain so long in the dark. Had I but a single line from her dear hand, I shou’d mount my camel satisfied.
Of course, she had written many letters to him, but they were weeks, even months old. Laing was concerned about her condition at that moment, again suggesting the possibility of her pregnancy.
Then an unrelated event took place that seemed to restore his sense of well-being: in that month, November, as evening fell over the wastes of the Sahara, a large comet could be seen moving southward across the heavens. Each night, Laing watched its silvery wisps in the sky as it moved slowly down toward the horizon: “I regard it as a happy omen,” he wrote. “It beckons me on & binds me to the termination of the Niger and to Timbuktu.”
The caravan had left Ghadames for In Salah (Insalah, in present-day Algeria), traveling southwest along the edge of the eastern sand sea (the Great Eastern Erg in what today we know as southern Tunisia). The journey was arduous. Only caravanners who had crossed these lands all their lives could tell one sand dune from another. Laing watched the forward guides run to the top of a sand hill, so that within minutes they seemed to be a long way off, minute white-robed figures signaling from the top of a mountain.
The fear of Tuareg was unrelenting, despite Hatita’s comforting presence. Paradoxically, as Hatita’s role made clear, Tuareg also made trade possible through their protection as escorts. In return for fees, these warriors, mounted high on their lurching camels, accompanied caravans to the outskirts of their territory, providing safe-conduct. If paid enough, they accompanied the caravan through adjoining districts where they might be called upon to fight their own kin. They did battle on these occasions as for their own cause, with the ferocity of lions. And yet, during the march, they were prone to treat those paying them as captives or servants. If a Tuareg saw something of an Arab merchant’s that appealed to him, that object quickly changed owners.
Five hundred miles separated In Salah from Ghadames by the crooked route Babani and Hatita insisted on taking. There were many nights when shadowy figures loomed out of the swirling obscurity of the desert, men on camels plodding steadily through a veil of sand. They passed within yards of Laing’s camp, but no one called out or raised a hand in greeting. Their tall camels had impossibly long and knobby legs and an imperious look, snorting and burping as they moved like derelict old men with bad digestion.
The nomads riding them were draped in blue, and veiled, only their eyes showing. These were the deep-desert Tuareg, the lords of the Sahara.
Each carried a long staff pointed downward at an angle past his mount’s neck, and broadswords in leather scabbards. Many had rifles slung over the shoulder. Water in goatskin bags sloshed faintly against the animals’ sides.
These figures moved through the camp silently and then vanished into the shroud of the desert, nothing to mark their passing, as elusive and mysterious as wraiths. Where were they going, these Tuareg nomads of the remote desert? Where had they come from? On what errand? And how, in this trackless land of no horizons, in this minuscule universe at night of maybe twenty feet, did they know their path? They headed north, but to the north was nothing but weeks of difficult traveling to nowhere. To the south waited the hellish Tanezrouft, but to the north—nothing—nothing but a thousand miles of desolation that ended with the sea.
A Tuareg mounted on his swift mehari dromedary near Murzuk, from a sketch by George Lyon in 1820. Twenty veiled men like this one pined Laing’s caravan, uninvited, in the dangerous crossing of the Tanezrouft.
Laing was now traversing lands well beyond any influence of the bashaw, lands controlled by raiding tribes who lived on the plunder of caravans. He succeeded in his crossing without incident in four weeks, in spite of frequent stops to replot the route. On December 3, Laing reached In Salah. News of the coming of a Christian traveler had preceded him, and large crowds were assembled to meet him—the first European to visit the territory.
A mile from the oasis, “upwards of a thousand people of both sexes came out to greet me. I have been in the habit of late of covering my face à la mode Tuareg, as a convenient protection against the sun, and as nothing but my eyes were yesterday visible, the curiosity of the multitudes was not gratified and my poor attendants were beleaguered by a thousand questions—Is he white? Is his hair like a Turk’s? Has he a beard? Can he fire a gun without a flint?” The local sheikh welcomed Laing and gave him use of a house.
Three months had elapsed since Laing set out, and yet he was only a quarter of the way to Timbuktu. He occupied himself studying the customs of his hosts. Laing tried not to think of the chasm of time as well as the great distances that increasingly separated him from Emma.
“Indeed,” he wrote to her in a letter that was surely more honest than the one he had recently penned to her father, “I so much despair of hearing again from Tripoli that I no longer look back. My whole ideas, my thoughts, my prospects, are forward, driven by ambition, for I cannot enjoy a moment of happiness till I return to you.”
The anticipation of Clapperton breathing down his neck may have played a part in Laing’s renewed resolve. Though he didn’t mention his competitor, he took pains to reaffirm his goal. “Do not think I despond, My Dearest, or that my enthusiasm which, for a while, lay Dormant, is in the least abated. No, I am still the African traveller, and as eager as ever for discovery, though I lament every moment which my enthusiasm inclines me to devote to it [emphasis added].”
He must have realized the risks he would soon be taking. The ergs, or seas of sand, were bad enough, but the most dreaded part of the Sahara, even among seasoned travelers, was the Tanezrouft, southeast of its equally dreadful partner, the Erg Chech. These were lands of fear and loneliness where any man foolish enough to wander by himself was certain to die. Each one covered 70,000 square miles, an area twice the size of Scotland. Of the pair, the Tanezrouft was the most frightening, an endless level plain with not so much as a single blade of grass.
This was the wilderness that lay ahead.
*“Tuat” is still the Tuareg name for the region comprising all the oases in the western part of what we know today as the Algerian Sahara, including the oases of Gurara in the north and Tidikelt in the south, as well as the trading hub of Insalah. Laing and Warrington often used “Tuat” interchangably with “In Salah” in their letters.
*François Talma w
as a French actor and friend of Sarah Bernhardt.
†Sheikh Babani, though a prominent merchant and resident of Ghadames, was never its governor.
Chapter Fourteen
THE WIDOW ZUMA
WHEN DAWSON DIED of ether poisoning, Clapperton’s party was 150 miles due north of the point on the coast, in the Bight of Benin, from which they had started. They were mired in the great swampy forests of the Yoruba.
The rain stopped and the expedition resumed its march. Just as the explorers’ prospects seemed most bleak, they came to the far edge of the jungle and into a well-cultivated country of hills, valleys, and trees. In this rural district the villagers were more friendly and cooperative.
The outlook improved, but it was too late for Robert Pearce, who had contracted fever in the jungle. He became delirious and had long imaginary conversations with his mother, asking her questions that he then answered for her. He fell into a stupor and died, aged twenty-eight, two days after Christmas, a holiday not noted in any of the journals. Clapperton read the burial service surrounded by his shrinking band of men. Less than 200 miles from their point of departure, Dickson, Morison, Pearce, Dawson, and several of the African porters were already in their graves—a disastrous beginning for Clapperton’s second expedition.
Peaceful Chiadoo (Igboho) put new life into the survivors. Looking toward the rugged mountains, they were uplifted by the thought that, though a strenuous hike lay ahead, it would surely be an easier path than through the soggy vegetation. With renewed courage they marched through a hard, almost alpine terrain. Steep overhangs and cliffs, craggy paths, and high summits made progress slow, but it was liberating to the men, who had felt stifled for so long, losing their footing in the tangled brambles of the rain forest. “We almost forgot our misfortunes,” Clapperton notes.
Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa's City of Gold Page 21