The Sahara (21 page)

It is striking that the guerrilla resistance led by Omar Mukhtar lasted five times as long as the First World War, although the impact of that conflict in the region was minimal because there were virtually no German colonies in Saharan Africa. Getting to North Africa was a different matter, as Edith Wharton noted: “In 1918, owing to the watchfulness of German submarines in the Straits and along the northwest coast of Africa, the trip by sea from Marseilles to Casablanca, ordinarily so easy, was not to be made without much discomfort and loss of time.” How inconvenient war can be to one’s travel plans!

The armed opposition to the Italian invasion continued in the desert regions of Libya throughout the Great War, and in Egypt’s Western Desert the Sanussi periodically harried British troops. In response, the British were forced to deploy the newly created Imperial Camel Corps and the Light Car Patrols in offensive engagements and reconnaissance missions against the religiously-inspired Sanussi. Today this minor piece of soldiering on the fringes of the larger conflict is almost entirely forgotten, but thankfully not entirely. For one thing, there is a small bronze memorial to the Imperial Camel Corps in Victoria Gardens on the Embankment in London. The statue features a soldier atop his war-camel and on the plinth is inscribed, “To the Glorious and Immortal Memory of the Officers, NCO’s and Men of the Imperial Camel Corps-British, Australian, New Zealand, Indian-who fell in action or died of wounds and disease in Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine, 1916, 1917, 1918.”

T E. Lawrence was also in Egypt for a part of the First World War, before Arabia. Based in Cairo with the Arab Bureau, it is curious to note that Lawrence spent more time in Egypt than he did in Arabia, working in the Cairo Intelligence Department, a unit of British intelligence formed after a suggestion by Sir Mark Sykes, whose name was later attached to the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Lawrence spent his time preparing maps and writing the daily intelligence bulletins for, as he put it, “the edification of 28 generals”. A life-long lover of desert places, before the war Lawrence spent time working on an archaeological dig close to the Nile and although he never wrote a great deal about this time, it certainly contributed to his reputation for being able to work in harsh conditions. The Arab Bureau was also responsible for running a network of agents in the Sahara, who were supplying information about the Sanussi and gun-running operations in the Western Desert.

Tied to Lawrence by friendship, the poet, novelist and translator Robert Graves spent the first half of 1926 in Egypt, teaching English literature at Cairo University. When Graves wrote to Lawrence for advice about his forthcoming move to Egypt, Lawrence replied that “Egypt, being so near Europe, is not a savage country,” which he followed up by advising Graves to “Roam about - Palestine. The Saharan oases... Wilfred Jennings Bramley’s buildings in the Western Desert.” It was not a happy time for Graves, and he and his family and his mistress, who all travelled to Egypt together, left again after six months.

Short though it was, Graves’ Egyptian interlude inspired his most famous short story,
The Shout
. Set in a mental asylum, Graves said the idea for the story came to him “while I was walking in the desert near Heliopolis in Egypt and came upon a stony stretch where I stopped to pick up a few misshapen pebbles; what virtue was in them I do not know, but I somehow had the story from them.” Graves ventured into the Sahara a number of times fostering his life-long fascination with Egyptian, and Greek, mythology.

Motors, Mars and Planes

“People condemn the motor-car as unromantic. I am afraid this is natural, for no one can become fond of a thing he does not really understand, and the ordinary person understands a camel, if in concept only, because it is an animal like himself.”

Ralph Bagnold,
Libyan Sands: Travels in a Dead World
(1935)

From the first upright steps of
homo sapiens
to the birth of motor transport, the greatest speed people had experienced was on the back of a galloping horse. For most, their maximum speed was limited to however fast they could propel themselves. The development of the motorcar radically changed this. With the arrival of motorcars, large areas of the Sahara were accessible for the first time. The arrival of the car did not, however, herald the end of camels or cameleers.

Even as some said camels would become obsolete in the face of motorized transport, some of the most adventurous camel-powered desert exploration was taking place. In the winter of 1920 the Oxford-educated Egyptian diplomat and politician, two-time Olympian and grandson of the last admiral of the Egyptian fleet, Ahmed Hassanein Bey, set off for the oasis of Kufra, in the heart of the Libyan Desert. Accompanied by the English travel writer Rosita Forbes, the small band crossed the Sahara from Ajdabiya, near the Gulf of Sirte, without a car in sight.

Forbes’ account of the journey,
Kufara: the Secret of the Sahara
, was rightly criticized for not giving sufficient credit to Hassanein for his central role in the expedition. Yet she did dedicate the book to him, the father of Egyptian exploration: “To Ahmed Mohammed Bey Hassanein. In memory of hours grave and gay, battles desperate or humorous, of success and failure in the Libyan deserts.” Walking through the winter, the coolest and so best time for Saharan exploration, the pair and their retinue headed south towards the famously closed oasis.

Apart from its geographical isolation, the oasis had stood aloof from outsiders since becoming home to the Sanussi brotherhood in the 1890s. Hostile to all foreign occupation of the Sahara, the Sanussi clashed at various times with the French, Italians and British. Part of Forbes’ motivation for making the journey was because it was forbidden. As she says, “For a year I had worked and plotted to reach Kufara because the thought of this holy oasis, nucleus of the greatest Islamic confraternity, rigidly guarded from every stranger, the centre of the mighty influence against which every European Power has battled in turn, stirred my imagination.”

The book charts their four-month round trip of more than a thousand miles to Kufra and back via Jaghbub and Siwa, and contains all the requisite elements for a gripping yarn including fractious camels and disgruntled guides. Forbes remembers with fondness the journey’s privations and expresses a common desire to return to the magical: “Some time, somehow, I knew not where or when, but most assuredly when Allah willed, I should come back to the deserts and the strange, uncharted tracks would bear my camels south again.”

Although Forbes was the first non-Arab woman to visit the Sanussi’s home oasis, she was not the first European to do so. The German explorer Gerhard Rohlfs and the botanist Paul Friedrich August Ascherson travelled there from Dakhla in the winter of 1873. En route, they came across Abu Ballas, Pottery Hill, so-called because of the remains of hundreds of smashed pots that litter the desert there. The legend is told that the oasis of Dakhla suffered regular raids from the west, an area of completely waterless desert. The raiders were only able to attack Dakhla if they kept a supply of water on their path through the wilderness. After one raid some Dakhla inhabitants followed the raiders. Although they failed to catch them, they did find the raiders’ water-filled pots, and smashed them all. The raids stopped, the raiders presumably dying the next time they approached Dakhla and finding their vital supplies gone.

Writing about the trip that he and Forbes made, Hassanein said that the journey “only whetted my appetite for more”, which is why he set out again, in 1922, on a longer, more perilous journey. On his second expedition Hassanein skirted the Great Sand Sea, which stretches across the Egypto-Libyan border, before heading south through Darfur to al-Obeid in the Sudan. This impressive trek took Hassanein eight months and covered 2300 miles. In the process he discovered Jebel Arkenu and Jebel Uweinat in the extreme south-western corner of Egypt, the so-called lost oases of the title of the book he later wrote about the trip. If the scale of Hassanein’s journey was not impressive enough, he also discovered the exceptional collection of rock art that occurs in the isolated Gilf-Kebir, Great Barrier, region that straddles Egypt, Libya and the Sudan.

Writing in the
Geographical Journal
, Hassanein outlined the hard daily routine of a camel-powered expedition: “Twelve to thirteen hours of walking, [that] if conditions have been good, bring us to the end of the day’s trek, though sometimes we cannot go on so long. The order is given to halt, the camels, with grunts of satisfaction, kneel to have their loads removed ... The men of the caravan are not slow to prepare and eat the evening meal, to feed the camels and then to dispose themselves for sleep. But I must compare my six watches and wind them, record the photographs and geological specimens taken and collected during the day, change the cinema films in the darkness, and write up my diaries.” For this journey Hassanein was awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s Founder’s Medal in 1924.

Even as Hassanein was presenting his findings in London, the Sahara was opening up for cars as well as aircraft, which offered a completely new perspective on the great desert. With technological developments allowing aircraft to cover greater distances, trans-Saharan journeys became possible which did not even require the traveller to set foot in the desert at all, unless things went badly wrong.

Among the pioneers of aerial trans-Saharan routes was Captain Rene Wauthier, a Frenchman who in the early 1930s flew across the Sahara on numerous occasions, including to Lake Chad and Agadez via Tamanrasset and In-Guezzam. Wauthier’s experiences at the vanguard of desert flying were retold in
Air Adventure: Paris-Sahara-Timbuctoo
by the American occultist, asylum inmate and one-time cannibal, William Seabrook. Notorious in his day, Seabrook wrote about flying when the experience was still a novel one and the glamour of flight still made heroes out of flyers. Conversely, however, its newness meant that risks were still acute.

Seabrook was not embarrassed to admit that in his case much of the danger was caused by his own lack of preparedness. As he recalls:

It was only when the sandstorm rose up from the Great Sahara, ripped us down out of the pretty sky, and taught us that it could make skeletons out of airplanes as easily as camels, that we really began to get acquainted with the desert, or to take it or ourselves seriously. In fact the whole adventure had been cooked up so casually, so suddenly, and had moved so quickly in time and space, that it had been impossible from the first, for me at least, to focus on its reality.

Flying with primitive navigational equipment and weak radios, disaster stalked every flight, and success seemed little more than good luck.

The most famous pioneer of trans-Saharan flight was Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Most famous today for
The Little Prince
, his fable for children and adults, Saint-Exupery was nonetheless a noted pilot, opening up aerial routes over the desert for the burgeoning international postal system. Saint-Exupery writes most movingly about the Sahara in
Wind, Sand and Stars
(in French,
Terre des homes
), particularly about his and his navigator Andre Prevot’s crash and near-death experience five days after Christmas Day 1935 during a long flight in bad weather.

With a cash prize of 150,000 francs for the fastest flight time from Paris to Saigon it is scarcely surprising that they took risks. On crashing, Saint-Exupery and Prevot knew that, even if a search party were sent, they were not likely to be found and Saint-Exupery, thinking about what he had been taught about the desert, observes:

In the Sahara humidity is a constant 40 per cent, but there it drops to 18 per cent. And life evaporates like a haze. Bedouin tribesmen, travellers and colonial officials all teach that a man can last for nineteen hours without water. After twenty hours his eyes flood with light, and it is the beginning of the end: thirst’s onslaught is devastating.

With this grim knowledge in mind, the men decided to try to walk out of the desert. But here too they were faced with a troubling dilemma. Not knowing where they were, in which direction should they head? After four days a Bedouin found them and led them to safety: “The Arab simply looked at us. He placed his hands firmly on our shoulders, and we obeyed him. We lay down upon the sand. There are no races here, nor any languages, nor any discord ... There is this poor nomad who has placed his archangelic hands on our shoulders... All other pleasures seem trivial to those of us who have known the joy of a rescue in the Sahara.”

The crash also features in
The Little Prince
. Translated into 180 languages, the book has sold more than eighty million copies worldwide, the best-selling French-language book of all time. With line drawings by Saint-Exupery, it tells the tale of a little prince who comes from asteroid number B216 which, he explains, is the size of a house. The tale’s narrator is an airman who has crashed in the desert where he meets the Little Prince.

The novel brilliantly encapsulates Saint-Exupery’s experiences of the desert both before and after his rescue, with the airman worried about his impending death and the Little Prince focused rather on the joy of friendship. ‘“My friend the fox -’ the little prince said to me. ‘My dear little man, this is no longer a matter that has anything to do with the fox!’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because I am about to die of thirst...’ He did not follow my reasoning, and he answered me: ‘It is a good thing to have a friend, even if one is about to die. I, for instance, am very glad to have a fox as a friend.’”