South from Barbary: Along the Slave Routes of the Libyan Sahara

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We left Ghadames on 4 December, making our way through a series of farewells that began at the camel pen and carried on right into the desert. Looking less crafty than usual, Abd an Nibbi and his friend Billal came to wish us well, joined by Ibrahim and our host Othman. Mohammed Ali pulled up alongside in a minibus as we left the road.

‘Really, I am going to miss you, believe me,’ he bellowed across the plain. ‘I am too sorry you are leaving now but I am happy also because you are in good condition. You must be very careful now because the desert is too dangerous. Maybe I will come to see you after one week, inshallah.’

One by one they left and the silence of the desert began to enfold us. It was a still day and the heat bore down on us steadily as we marched away from the diminishing smudge of green that was Ghadames. The noises of the town receded into nothing. None of us spoke. Only the rhythmic padding of the camels and our own footsteps broke the quiet. There was something mesmerizing about these first steps into the desert, a sense of wonder that increased as we left behind the familiar comforts of civilization.

In front, the vastness of the Hamada al Hamra (Red Plain) unfurled before us. It was golden and supremely monotonous, stretching out as far as the eye could see and disrupted only at its extremities by the distant bosoms of hills, discernible as sloping summits floating above the ground, their bases lost to sight in the vaporous shimmering light that rolled over the horizon like a pool of mercury. It was impossible to estimate their distance from us on a plain like this. The light played too many tricks. They could have been three or four hours away or a whole day’s march. Even Abd al Wahab, a man who had grown up in the desert, confessed he did not know how far off they were.

At last we were under way. The desert expedition, which I had longed to make for six years, was beginning. Behind us were all the delays, negotiations and hitches which had felt so interminable, although it had taken us only three days from our arrival in Ghadames to get started. By the standards of nine-teenth-century travellers in Libya, we had not tarried unduly. Ritchie had arrived in Tripoli in October 1818, joined by Lyon a month later. Beset by difficulties in arranging the expedition and receiving permission to visit the interior, they did not set off until the end of the following March. Their plans to reach the Niger from the north were subsequently ruined, first by the exhaustion of their limited funds and then, on 20 November 1819, by the pitiful death of Ritchie from bilious fever in Murzuk. Three decades later, Richardson, who had also intended to penetrate farther south, this time to Kano, found himself marooned in Ghadames for three months while waiting for a caravan to Ghat. There, in failing health and running out of medicines, he was forced to abort his plans to continue and diverted north-east to Murzuk instead.

Abd al Wahab walked at the head of the caravan, leading the five camels roped together. I brought up the rear, watching the five great bottoms – three white, one brown, one beige – swaying regularly beneath their awkward-looking loads. Ned wore a Moroccan porkpie hat that cut quite a dash but completely failed to protect either his face or neck from the mid-morning glare. When his nose had been burnt red, he exchanged the hat for the more practical cotton shish, the best protection against the desert sun. Abd al Wahab was already wearing his tagilmus. For the next two weeks he would rarely be seen without it, day or night.

For centuries, his ancestors had derived their living from escorting caravans through the desert. Merchants had been ‘encouraged’ to retain guides or armed guards for the journey through areas under Touareg control. Charges were based on the estimated value of the goods in transit and the supposed wealth of the owners. Those caravans which did not co-operate ran the very real risk of being plundered by the same men who had offered themselves as escorts. This payment might be in addition to the fees levied by tribal chiefs mentioned by Leo Africanus, the sixteenth-century traveller and diplomat from Granada. ‘If any carouan or multitude of merchants will passe those deserts, they are bound to pay certaine custome vnto the prince of the said people, namely, for euery camels load a peece of cloth woorth a ducate,’ he noted. The Touareg supplemented these earnings by raiding neighbouring territories for booty, livestock and slaves, trading salt with merchants from the north, and maintaining herds of camels, sheep and goats.

Richardson, who was among the first Europeans to come into contact with the Azger Touareg, or ‘Touarick’ as he called them, was not impressed by their manners. They showed, he thought, ‘an excessive arrogance in their manners. They look upon the Ghadamsee people with great disdain, considering them as so many sheep which they are to protect from the wolves of The Sahara.’ What struck Lyon most about the Touareg was what he regarded as their extraordinary lack of personal hygiene. ‘No people have more aversion to washing than the Tuarick generally have,’ he sniffed.

Many attempts were made by us to discover the reason why they kept themselves in such a dirty state; but to all our inquiries we obtained the same answers: ‘God never intended that man should injure his health, if he could avoid it: water having been given to man to drink, and cook with, it does not agree with the skin of a Tuarick, who always falls sick after much washing.’

Richardson’s attempts to establish their historical origins met with little success. One Ghadamsi told him the Touareg were ‘formerly demons’, another that they ‘sprang out from the ground’. He cited one scholarly opinion that they formed one portion of the tribes expelled from Palestine by Joshua. After their first rendezvous at Oujlah, near the Egyptian oasis of Siwa, they then dispersed south and west to people these arid regions.

The Azger Touareg, who have long enjoyed a reputation for courage and derring-do, are regarded by some scholars as the purest of the Touareg. They were known to Leo as the Lemta, one of the four divisions of the Muleththemin (People of the veil), and occupied the desert and steppe between Air and Tibesti, from Ouargla and Ghadames in the north to Kano in the south, an area that encompassed Ghat and western Fezzan in modern Libya. Over the centuries the Touareg drifted south-west under pressure, first from the east and later, with the European scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century, the north. The southern portion of Lemta territory, which reached Lake Chad, as well as the Kawar road and the steppe north of Chad, was lost to the Azger Touareg as the Kanuri and Tubbu tribes swept across from the east. This ethnic pressure on their eastern borders forced the Touareg to look elsewhere for their expansion. Some moved to Air, others to Tademekka.

The exact origin of the Touareg is probably unfathomable. It may be, as one historian surmised, that their claim to have reached Africa during the Himyaritic migration from the east coast of the Red Sea, is no more than an attempt to root themselves firmly in the history of Arabia and thereby strengthen their links with the Prophet. This might be compared with the scattered evidence that the Touareg were once Christian. The symbol of the cross features widely among Touareg accessories. Swords, shields, spoons and ornamental strips around doors all bear the cross, as does the Touareg saddle. The latter, in particular, is worth comment since it patently has no practical use. Watching Abd al Wahab swing his legs awkwardly over the crucifix-like fork protruding from the saddle in his flowing jalabiya, while twisting his camel’s upper lip to ensure it remained kneeling as he mounted, confirmed that. Certain words in the Touareg’s Temajegh language also suggest a contact with Christianity. Mesi for God; anjelous for angel; arora for dawn (from the Latin aurora). The German traveller Dr Henry Barth, who accompanied Richardson on the latter’s second expedition to the African interior in 1849, thought the word Touareg came from the Arabic tereku dinihum, meaning ‘they changed their religion’.

The Touareg’s use of the veil has also baffled scholars for years. The confusion stems from the curious anomaly that the classical authors never referred to the veil when writing about the ancestors of the Touareg. It has to wait until the Arab writers for recognition. ‘They that will seeme to be accounted of the better sort, couer their heads … with a peece of blacke cloth,’ wrote Leo, ‘part whereof, like a vizard or maske, reacheth downe ouer their faces, couering all their countenance except their eies; and this is their daily kinde of attire.’

Sociologists and historians have agonized over its significance. If, for example, it is simply to protect against the sun, why is it then that only the men wear the tagilmus and Touareg women remain unveiled? Whatever the answer, the veil has remained a defining, some would say romanticizing, symbol of the Touareg. ‘Almost all Tuareg, unless they have become denationalised, would as soon walk unveiled as an Englishman would walk down Bond Street with his trousers falling down,’ observed Francis Rodd, author of People of the Veil, the seminal study of the Touareg, in 1926. The slit left for the eyes and part of the nose was no wider than an inch, Rodd observed, and sometimes less. To judge by Abd al Wahab, such strict sartorial standards have slipped somewhat and it is no longer the heinous offence it once was for a Touareg to let another man see his mouth. The Touareg used to lift up the lower part of the veil to eat but would cover their mouth with their hand as they did so. Abd al Wahab, a gentle and well-mannered man in his early forties, was not so prudish.

We had walked for three or four hours on our first day when Abd al Wahab suggested we stop for lunch. Here, in a small patch of pasturage, we received our first ominous insight into what a camel trek involved. All five camels first had to be couched and unloaded, a slow and awkward process for the inexperienced. To prevent them escaping, they then had to be hobbled. To us, this looked a formidably difficult and dangerous undertaking. With one hand holding the head-rope, Abd al Wahab crouched down alongside the two colossal forelegs and plaited an already doubled length of rope about a foot and a half long around the ankles. A large knot in one end fitted neatly through a loop at the other, and the hobble was complete. He then loosened the knot that kept the mouth-rope firmly attached, the camel happily lowering his head to help get rid of this undignified halter. With a firm slap on the rump the animal was encouraged to go off to feed, a stimulus that was rarely necessary. He was already making a beeline for the nearest morsel of unappetizing-looking scrub. Trailing thick twines of frothy saliva, the head-rope was thrown to the ground and the whole process repeated on the next camel. Hobbling the camels enabled them to move about grazing without, in theory, wandering too far. The scope for disaster – such as a swift hoof in the head – seemed huge. Not the least of the difficulties was getting the camel to stand still while the hobble was tied. Every time Ned or I approached one, he would shy away with a flustered flick of the head. Abd al Wahab would not let us attempt it for now. ‘The camels do not know you yet and they are frightened,’ he said. ‘They have to become familiar with you first. You must wait for a few days.’

The sun was fierce and the shade elusive as we fell upon our first lunch of tuna fish sandwiches. I watched the camels receding in the distance, moving ever onwards to the next patch of food. I began to think we had bought fine specimens, for in no way were they ugly animals, as many people suppose camels to be. Perhaps ours was an unusually vain caravan, but together they formed an extremely handsome group. When not hobbled they walked proudly with carefully placed steps, always minutely aware of the slightest obstruction on the ground. Even the darkest and least elegant of the five had a certain dignity of bearing. His svelte, confidently planted legs suggested a long-legged Frenchwoman striding prettily into a brasserie. In due time he would be christened Gobber, due to his habit of spraying anything or anyone around him with generous quantities of saliva.

The hobble reduced the camels to an amusingly inelegant gait. Unable to stretch out their forelegs to anything like their full extent, they shuffled forward instead with tiny steps, an awkward mince that was an absurd contrast to the great length of their limbs. When they wanted to cover ground more quickly while hobbled – whether from fear or having spotted food – they lurched forward with both forelegs together in a rude canter. Their lower lips fell down and quivered each time their padded hoofs landed with a jolt.

By the time we were ready to move on again, lunch had lasted more than two hours. This was far too long. Travelling by camel was already a slow business without holding it up further. We came to the reluctant conclusion that having a lunch stop and covering a respectable distance in a day were mutually exclusive. Having seen us fumble around uselessly while attempting to repack and load the baggage on to the camels, Abd al Wahab, who was never a great eater anyway, thought the same, and we never unloaded the camels again for a lunch break.

The absence of this midday meal was the ‘first inconvenience’ suffered by Frederick Horneman, the explorer who in 1796 was commissioned by the African Society to explore the continent from Cairo. He had had a difficult start to his expedition. The French fleet had landed at the coast and the invasion of Egypt was under way. Initially imprisoned, he was later presented to Napoleon himself, who offered the traveller his protection for the onward journey. ‘Young, robust, and, in point of constitution and health, suited to a struggle with different climates and fatigues,’ Horneman nevertheless was a man who liked his food. ‘We had travelled from day-break till noon, and no indication appeared of halt or refreshment,’ he groaned, ‘when I observed the principal and richest merchants gnawing a dry biscuit and some onions, as they went on; and was then, for the first time, informed, that it was not customary to unload the camels for regular repast, or to stop during the day-time, but in cases of urgent necessity.’

Our first and last lunch break ended as soon as Abd al Wahab had retrieved the camels, who had wandered off several hundred yards. A camel is an intelligent and stubborn animal. He understands life is more comfortable without a heavy load on his back so can hardly be blamed for trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the deposited baggage whenever the occasion presents itself. Besides, there is always the siren call to freedom across the desert. It has always been like this. Richardson’s camels were no different. ‘The camels are terrible things for straying,’ he complained. ‘If they are surrounded with immense patches of the most choice herbage, even which is their delicium, they still keep on straying the more of it over miles and miles.’ In this respect, Gobber was the worst culprit. Whatever time of day we stopped, he would always make a doomed bid for freedom, invariably heading for his beloved Ghadames with unerring accuracy. The other four, buoyed by his confident departure for better things, would soon follow his lead. Sometimes they would wander maddeningly far.

The first week passed in an aching, weary blur. A little dazed and more often than not exhausted, I did not manage to keep a diary. Part of the problem was a lack of fitness. I had never walked more than twenty miles a day, day in, day out and now wished I had paid a little more attention to Asher’s exhortations on pre-departure fitness. It was also a question of acclimatization, learning the routine of desert travel – the early nights and the waking at dawn – and becoming used to the meagre quantities of food, which seemed to consist almost entirely of tuna fish in various guises. We existed in a condition of permanent ravenousness. By the end of each day bones were groaning, stomachs were rumbling and feet were in shock. There never seemed to be a free moment. We were either walking or riding, cooking or washing up, packing or unpacking the camels, hobbling the camels one minute, rounding them up and removing the hobbles the next, adjusting loads or repairing saddles. The only time when there was nothing to do we slept.

The days of hungry monotony marching across unrelieved plains were enlivened periodically by the sight of Ned filing his nails carefully on the back of Gobber, who became his favourite mount during this early stage. At other times I would look across to see a figure striding away from the caravan at some arbitrary tangent, lost in P. G. Wodehouse’s Life at Blandings, his scruffily arranged shish flapping hopelessly behind him in the wind, tufts of hair sprouting between the gaps. Occasionally, he would look up to see where he was, check his course abruptly, and then wander off again.

For the first two mornings, getting started was frustratingly slow. Too tired at night to pack away the opened boxes of food, we woke late to find a confused mess of loads strewn across the camp. Abd al Wahab, an exemplar of quiet efficiency, had removed the five hobbles tied around the camels’ knees (in addition to those around the ankles) to prevent them escaping at night, and set them off grazing. Too polite to wake us, he had already lit a fire and was preparing tea. With breakfast over, the camels had to be rounded up, hobbled at the knee again, and loaded. Abd al Wahab and Abd an Nibbi had prepared several camel bags for us. The design was simple but ingenious. A rope was tied around a stone inside the top of each side of the bag and made into a loop. The two loops were then passed over the camel’s back, slipped into corresponding loops from a bag on the camel’s other side, and held in place by two pieces of wood inserted at right angles. Water bidouns, tied together in specially sewn bags, were similarly loaded.

‘What time is it?’ asked Abd al Wahab as we set off after our first night in the desert. Embarrassed, I told him it was 11 a.m. He looked mortified. We needed kicking into shape. ‘This is not good. We must leave at 8.30 or 9,’ he admonished. Earlier than that, it was too cold to start, he added. He told us we had to repack the bags at night and make sure the things we needed for dinner – such as food, teapot, mess tins, saucepan and plates – were in one readily accessible bag and not buried at the bottom of different sacks. We should also get up much earlier in the morning, he said pointedly.

We had only been walking an hour after this inauspicious start when a smart Land Rover in British Racing Green appeared on the plain. It was Abd an Nibbi and Billal coming to check up on us and deliver fresh bread and a large bag of oranges. They teased Abd al Wahab for the extremely modest distance we had covered in the past twenty-four hours – thirteen miles that had felt like fifty. ‘My God, you are slow!’ said Abd an Nibbi.

Demonstrating great and undeserved loyalty to his new travelling companions, Abd al Wahab rebuffed their comments. He told them we were doing well and our camel skills, still next to nonexistent, were improving. It was kind of them to come but we hoped this was not going to be a daily event. We had not come to the desert to see cars.

We settled into a certain routine, continuing across the plains, already yearning for a change of scenery and what we then fondly considered the romance of sand dunes. Instead, we traversed an unending, rolling mass of flinty grey and wondered why this expanse was called the Red Plain. In the daytime the desert sun sucked all colour out of the landscape, leaving a dazzling blandness in its place. It was only at dawn and dusk that it came to life with the richest lilacs, mauves, navy blues, pinks, reds and ambers flooding across the horizon to chase off this searing austerity.

Moving up a wadi (dried riverbed) filled with scrub we reached our first well on the fourth day. A trough made of rough pieces of stone ran next to the well itself, which was covered with a sheet of metal, complete with rope and rubber vessel. Seeing the water being drawn up by Abd al Wahab splashing into the trough, the camels registered a flicker of interest and walked over to see what all the fuss was about. An effete bunch of young men – all were geldings – they quickly arranged themselves to best effect, the three whites flanked by the dark mass of Gobber on one side and Asfar, my beige, on the other. In unison, they lowered their heads gracefully, sucked up a formidable quantity of water and walked off with a look of supreme indifference, spraying us with their dripping muzzles as they tossed their heads from side to side.

From an aesthetic perspective alone, it was difficult not to be won over by Asfar. Tall and slender, with his head held high, he walked with the dignified gait and self-confident bearing of a thoroughbred. His coat was the colour of honey, his black eyelashes were of an excessive, dandified length and he had the tuftiest ears imaginable. He was a handsome fellow and knew it. A good-natured beast with gentle manners, he was also the swiftest of our small caravan and walked with a quick, light step. Where Gobber thundered and Bobbles (named after the three protuberances on his nose) whined, Asfar simply purred. The other camels seemed to be fond of him, too.

In an unhappy display of camel racism, the three whites generally refused to have anything to do with dark brown Gobber. Interaction between him and this group was generally restricted to provocative attacks – usually bites to his rump – by Bobbles. It was Asfar who bridged this divide, getting on equally well with both camps, and maintaining camel morale with discreet diplomacy. Ned had chosen Gobber as his mount, perhaps out of sympathy, and evidently felt obliged to defend him at all costs, both against my jokes and the regular sallies from Bobbles. Riding Gobber was a perverse decision, though. However good-natured and stoic a camel, he was also unquestionably the slowest. A plodding, barrel-chested animal, if he had been a cricketer he would have been the village blacksmith batting at number eleven.

The next day, with laborious, stuttering steps we climbed a pass east of the ridge of Qa’rat Wallamad and arrived at another bleak plateau at about 2,000 feet above sea level. On the ground were small stones arranged in a definite outline, the size of a small house in circumference, with a marked recess in one side. Next to them was a rectangular mound of stones the length of a man. We stopped for a minute and looked at these strange features.

‘This is an old mosque where travellers in the desert could pray,’ explained Abd al Wahab. ‘Now people do not use it because they do not travel by camel anymore.’ The recess was the qiblah, which indicated the direction in which the faithful should pray to face Mecca. ‘And this,’ he said, pointing to the smaller outline, ‘is the grave of a traveller who died in the desert.’ It was as remote a spot as you could find.

Later that afternoon, two tiny puppies, one a grubby white, the other black and white, suddenly appeared and began to trot beside us, gaining in confidence until they were almost at our heels. We thought they might have been abandoned by their owners because we had discovered them next to car tracks. Their chances of survival seemed slim.

‘No, they will be fine. They belong to farmers over there,’ said the unsentimental Abd al Wahab, pointing vaguely to a line of raised ground in the distance. They looked desperate things, squeaking pathetically and looking exhausted from their efforts to keep up with the massive camels. I felt the same. That evening, after twenty-seven miles – our most productive day yet – my feet were screaming in my stiff new walking boots as we limped across a rambling pasture of rough scrub. In front of us, his profile uncertain in the dreamy glow of sunset, a young Touareg from Dirj, the oasis eighty miles east of Ghadames, was tending a flock of sheep and goats, perhaps 200 of them. The sun was strong but sinking, brightening and blurring the clumps of vegetation into a steaming amber haze as we made a weary camp. Ned and I flopped to the ground with aching legs that felt like iron rods. Abd al Wahab, as unmoved as ever by our exertions that day, walked off purposefully to hunt for firewood. Nothing seemed to tire the man.

Nights were freezing. On this higher plain, as we trudged along the Wadi Qa’rat al Handua, the temperature dipped sharply. Mornings found a pretty covering of frost on our mauve sleeping bags, from which cosiness there was little incentive to depart. I woke each day to the soft cadences of Abd al Wahab beginning his prayers with ‘Allahu akbar’ (God is great). From my sleeping bag he was an undefined silhouette in the darkness. Listening to the steady flow of his prayers and watching his shadowy figure perform the acts of devotion, rising up, kneeling down, bowing down again, his head touching the ground, was a marvellous way to begin the day. You could sense him shivering in the hostile chill as his modulated voice rushed through this first prayer of the day. I lay on my back watching the bruised sky slowly lighten to dawn and listened to this whispered poetry of praise, one of the most beautiful and evocative aspects of Islam.

‘In the desert, prayers are no mere blind obedience to religious dogma, but an instinctive expression of one’s inmost self,’ wrote Ahmed Hassanein Bey, the Egyptian diplomat who in 1923 travelled 2,200 miles by camel and discovered the ‘lost oases’ of Jebel Arkenu and Jebel Ouenat, south-east of Kufra. ‘The prayers at night bring serenity and peace. At dawn, when new life has suddenly taken possession of the body, one eagerly turns to the Creator to offer humble homage for all the beauty of the world and of life, and to seek guidance for the coming day. One prays then, not because one ought, but because one must.’ Richardson, a robust Christian of Victorian England, regarded Muslims as ‘superstitious pharisees’. But he, too, was moved by the religious devotion of his travelling companions.

It was a refreshing, though at the same time a saddening sight, to see the poor Arab camel-drivers pray so devoutly, laying their naked foreheads upon the sharp stones and sand of The Desert. People who had literally so few of the bounties of Providence, many of them scarcely any thing to eat – and yet these travel-worn, famished men supplicated the Eternal God with great and earnest devotion! What a lesson for the fat, over-fed Christian!

Emerging slowly and with the greatest conceivable reluctance from our cocoons each morning, we were met by the instant smash of cold. It numbed limbs and made fingers useless when they were needed to tie and untie knots during the loading of the camels. Unlike any cold I had felt before it seemed to dig deep into my bones. Swathed in blankets and woolly hats, we cut ridiculous figures, panting vigorously, shivering and trying to revive frozen hands around the morning fire. At least we were not alone in feeling the chill. It was just less excusable because we had warmer clothes than Abd al Wahab and down sleeping bags rather than a few woollen blankets to keep us warm at night. Shrouded beneath the erect, pointed hood of his woollen jalabiya, Abd al Wahab looked like a character from the mythical world of Tolkien. He beat his hands together, muttered, ‘Sugga wajid,’ (It’s very cold), and then disappeared to bring in the camels, something for which we were not yet considered ready.

One of the most miserable tasks of the morning (after getting up) was washing up, usually done while Abd al Wahab was fetching the camels. The saucepan, mess tin, spoons, forks and plates were all encrusted with the remnants of the tuna fish pasta from the previous night, the glasses sticky from the heavily sugared tea. With no water to spare, we filled them up with freezing sand and scoured them with bare hands. For the first few times, there was at least a certain novelty about washing up. After that, Ned and I both loathed it equally. If there was ever an opportunity of escaping washing up duty – such as walking off to bring the camels in ourselves – we took it unashamedly. Ned seemed to be particularly skilled at evading the job. Sometimes, usually when I was feeling irritated and therefore petty, it led to arguments. They went like this:

Justin: ‘How come you never do the washing up?’

Ned (heading away from the camp in the direction of the camels): ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Justin.’

Justin: ‘Well, you’re doing it tomorrow. I’m fed up with doing it every morning.’

Ned: ‘Oh, shut up.’

Long (by our standards) walking days ended around dusk when we had found pasturage for the camels and fuel for our fire. In this part of the western desert it was common enough. Later, the grazing would be perilously scarce. Evenings, too, had their own routine. On stopping for the day, the camels were immediately unloaded and hobbled. They pottered off into the thickening darkness while we set about the most important ritual of the day. The first glass of tea in the evening was always a much longed for treat. In England we would have considered it unpalatably sweet, but after a day tramping across this empty wilderness, it was perfect. Hassanein Bey was initially shocked by the sweetness of the tea prepared by his Bedouin. ‘The result would have driven a housewife of the West almost insane,’ he wrote, ‘but it is a wonderful stimulant after a hard day’s trek in the desert, and a glorious revival of one’s energies and spirits.’

For Abd al Wahab, a man whose emotional repertoire did not include excitement, preparing tea was something of a sacred rite. It was unthinkable that either Ned or I could make it. With great care he would extract a small amount of tea leaves from a bag, fill his beaten-up teapot with water and put it into the fire to boil from cold, raking the embers around it. Within a few minutes tea was bubbling from the spout, hissing onto the fire below. It was not strong enough yet for Abd al Wahab so was left to brew noisily. At intervals he would remove the lid, inspect the tea knowingly and put the pot back on to boil. Sugar – enough to make a diabetic tremble – was then added to the pot. There was no such thing as stirring. It was dissolved instead by pouring out a glassful, returning it back to the pot, pouring out another and so on. This last process sometimes continued to what seemed to us – tired and thirsty as we were – unnecessary lengths, frequently until the tea was no longer hot but merely warm.

When Abd al Wahab finally deemed it ready (having tasted it first), the tea was then poured out with great ceremony. The spout was initially held close to the rim of the glass, steadily rising up a foot or so until it required definite skill to aim the sputtering stream. The height to which the teapot was raised depended on how flamboyant he was feeling or whether he was in good spirits. The tea came from China, as did the teapot, but the end product was regarded as definitively Touareg.

After this glass or two of tea, the blackness of the night was complete, intensified by the golden light of the fire. It was a little awe-inspiring to watch Abd al Wahab dissolve into the darkness to collect the camels. Twenty minutes later – it varied according to how far they had roamed – a sound of shuffling announced their return. They were still invisible. One by one they were made to kneel down. ‘They knelt without noise: and I timed it in my memory,’ wrote T. E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

First the hesitation, as the camels, looking down, felt the soil with one foot for a soft place; then the muffled thud and the sudden loosening of breath as they dropped on their fore-legs, since this party had come far and were tired; then the shuffle as the hind legs were folded in, and the rocking as they tossed from side to side thrusting outward with their knees to bury them in the cooler subsoil below the burning flints …

At night, hobbled upon the ground close together, they were a wonderful sight, great beached ships of the desert irregularly illuminated by the jumping flames of our fire, sniffing the air and searching the ground about them for tufts of grass or other delicacies. Sleeping looked a less romantic affair. The camel would begin in the light doze position, which consisted of craning out his neck to its full extent and lowering it until only the underside of the jaw was resting on the ground. The rest of the neck slanted stiffly aloft. With the whole weight of the beast’s great neck resting on the chin, it looked comically uncomfortable. Later, the eyes would close and the neck progressively relax until all of it was resting on the ground, at which point the camel had an air of gentle helplessness. However well secured at night, if they had a mind to move they did, and mornings would often find them thirty or forty yards away. Sometimes they went farther.

Rejoining us after settling the camels, Abd al Wahab would dip his huge hands near the fire to burn off the cold that set in briskly after sunset. He would cast an expert eye on its structure and, without a word, rearrange any branches we might have added in his absence.

‘What are we having for dinner?’ he would ask either Ned or me, as though addressing his wife.

‘Tuna fish pasta,’ was invariably the reply.

Rightly, he did not appear to rate our culinary skills highly. A packet soup – perhaps chicken and cumin or, more exotically, Stilton, cauliflower and potato – would be followed by endless variations of this meal. One night, in a crude attempt to vary our diet, I threw together a stew of lentils, potatoes, tomato puree, garlic, onions and tuna. It was revolting. Ned obviously felt the same but, ever polite, murmured something about it being ‘interesting’. Abd al Wahab dutifully pushed a spoon around his bowl for a few minutes and then retired to bed earlier than usual. I looked for it the next morning, thinking it might do for a quick lunch on the move. Abd al Wahab had emptied it into the sands.

The country continued remorselessly flat, stony and grey. The horizons were unchanging. The sense of limitless space, of being a tiny, insignificant party moving through a timeless continuum, was affecting. We felt a great freedom, contemplating the surrounding wilderness that was purged of modern life, slipping into a more natural state of eating when hungry, sleeping when tired, waking with dawn, and forming a strengthening bond with the five camels without whom we could not get across this bland, burning expanse.

But it was difficult to concentrate on the landscape for long. More often than not it was too monotonous: there were too few features of interest to break the flint-strewn emptiness. Dwelling on it for too long made you realize how slowly the caravan was travelling and what a vast distance still lay ahead. Sometimes we talked to while away the time, bringing the camels alongside each other as we smoked cigarettes, sometimes we drifted several hundred yards apart and lost ourselves in our own thoughts.

The country was so flat and lifeless that the slightest shape in the distance aroused great excitement. ‘What’s that black thing over there?’ one of us would shout. Twenty minutes later we would be inspecting a discarded oil barrel or wandering through debris from an old army camp – junked machines, water tanks, rusting equipment. We kicked through piles of flints despondently and asked ourselves how long this sort of country would last.

On the seventh day, it changed gloriously. In a fulgor of sunshine we arrived at the top of a steep, boulder-strewn pass that looked out over an immeasurable plain flanked on the south by the outer shores of the Awbari Sand Sea and on the north by an unbroken ridge of ruddy sandstone, cropped off to a level height. We split the camels into smaller groups and picked our way down, obsessed with sand and impatient to put the boredom of flint behind us. The camels did not share our enthusiasm. After a week on the flat, the gradient was an affront. They descended in lurching jolts with heavily planted steps and terror in their eyes. Only Gobber was unruffled. As ever, thick creamy cords of saliva poured from his mouth: walking within thirty feet of him in a rasping wind was a hazardous affair. Sometimes, when I was lost in a deep daytime reverie, Gobber’s billowing streams of spit, spangling attractively in the sunlight, splashed across my face and I came to with a start.

We skidded the final yards on to the plain. Our first sight of sand dunes was unforgettable. They started several miles away across the flats, piled high, row after row of them massed together like troops ready for battle, an unconquerable army whose rearguard reached deep into the horizon. The first few rows were clearly delineated and the smooth curves of their outlines were distinct, now stretching towards the sky, now plunging sharply into deep troughs, blown into elegant shapes by the invisible wind. As you looked farther into the distance, their contours started to fade under the blaze of sun, merging into each other until all that remained was a mass of eye-dazzling sand bearing only the faintest trace of shape or slope.

On the plain it felt as though we were entering a no-man’s land between two ancient foes of sand and rock. To the south, among the first soothing waves of the incandescent sand sea, hulks of dark rock stood like advance scouts behind enemy lines, a rallying point for the next attack. It was a hopeless conflict that neither side would ever win.

We passed a couple of acacia trees – the first we had come across – and Abd al Wahab said this was Nahiyah, an area in which we would reach another well that evening. In late afternoon we sighted a broad band of green that marked the watering point. There seemed to be signs of life among the blur of scrub, but from this distance it was impossible to say what they were. Gradually, as we approached, they became clearer, until we could make out three tiny silhouettes, immobile on a shoulder of elevated ground above the plain. They faced us directly across the plain and there seemed to be an open challenge in their manner. Was this a Touareg reception committee? A fearless party of desert raiders? Or were they hostile tribesmen guarding their well against the hated infidel?

With each step we took towards them, the figures grew larger. One was a tall, lithe figure, an elegant man wearing a jalabiya. Around his head, the ruffled outline of the tagilmus was clearly visible. There was, even from this distance, a marked nobility and self-assurance about him. The figure next to him could hardly have been more different. His profile was enormous. Part Sumo wrestler, part urban Arab, he wore a dark anorak over a voluminous jalabiya, making the latter look like a clownish flowing skirt. This comic trio was completed by a much smaller figure, dwarfed by his two companions, in army jacket, purple trousers, and shades worn over a khaki attempt at a shish that looked like a bandanna gone wrong. He seemed full of nervous energy. While his companions stood stock still, he was bustling about, growing more animated as we drew nearer. When we were yards away, this mad figure hurried forward at us. It was Mohammed Ali. He had said he might drive out to see us in a week.

‘Ohhhhhh,’ (this in a tone of prodigious satisfaction), ‘Mr Jesten and Mr Nid, really I am happy to see you!’ he shouted into the bloody sunset. ‘God bless you. How are you? Fine? As soon as you left Ghadames I was worrying about you and wondering if you were OK. I thought maybe you died from no water or something. Now I see you, I am in good condition. How are you? Fine?’

It was like meeting up with a long-lost friend. He was a bouncy ball of enthusiasm, rebounding between patches of scrub, amassing a towering pile of firewood, and repeating at intervals his delight at seeing us (‘I am too happy now, believe me!’). Ibrahim, a man whose figure suggested a heavy and lifelong involvement with food, smiled and suggested a dinner of tuna fish pasta. The most unobtrusive newcomer was Ali, Abd al Wahab’s elder brother.

Mohammed Ali, our air traffic control expert, produced a roaring beacon of a fire that could have been seen for miles around. While Ibrahim attended to the cooking, Abd al Wahab and Ali set about dividing a fifty-kilogram sack of sha’eer (barley) among the camels. The scattered pasturage we had come across every day had been decent enough feeding for them. This was an added luxury. Eagerly, they hustled forwards on their knees to the troughs made from empty oil barrels sliced in two, and pounced on the grain.

It had taken the party from Ghadames ten hours to cover what we had travelled in a week. Mohammed Ali was anxious to know how it had been.

‘How is the desert? How are the camels? Fine? Are you too tired now? Have you been cold at night? How are your sleeping bags?’

‘Everything has been fine, alhamdulillah,’ we replied.

‘How are you? Fine? Are the camels thirsty now? How is Abd al Wahab as a guide?’

‘Abd al Wahab has been an excellent guide.’

Ali nodded wisely. ‘Yes, he is a good guide, but he is still learning.’ It would have been unseemly for an elder brother to praise his younger sibling too effusively. This would have upset the pecking order.

‘How is your health? Fine?’ added Mohammed.

As the oldest man among us, Ali was the master of ceremonies that night. Preparing the tea was thus his prerogative. He went through the familiar process but finished with a new flourish, pouring out the tea from such a height that each glass had a layer of froth on the top. We were not sure what the point of all this was (after all these exertions the tea was disappointingly warm), but it looked pretty.

Abd al Wahab ate heartily for once. I asked Mohammed Ali to find out what our guide thought of our cooking.

‘He says everything is all right,’ Mohammed Ali replied quickly.

‘No, but ask him what he really thinks of it. Tell him he doesn’t have to be polite,’ I persisted.

‘Abd al Wahab says when you are in the desert you must eat whatever you are given,’ came the reply.

The cold was seizing. Mohammed Ali disappeared on several occasions during dinner, reappearing each time with a new layer of clothing. On retiring for the night he looked like a bizarrely muffled Michelin man wearing three pairs of socks, four pairs of trousers, seven shirts and jumpers. With so many clothes on, he could move about only with difficulty. His walk, shambolic at the best of times, was reduced to a teetering stagger. Every time he stood up he looked as though he would fall over. In hysterics, his Ghadamsi friends teased him mercilessly. He fought back gamely, with a few well-placed remarks about Ibrahim’s obesity. His British Army sleeping bag also attracted several wry comments. But Mohammed Ali had the last laugh. He, at least, was not cold that night.

In the morning we watered the camels at the well and met a distinguished-looking man called Saleh Omar, a wealthy farmer who had come to inspect his camels, which were being cared for in the desert by two camel boys. On learning that his old friend Ali was with us, he joined him for a lengthy exchange of greetings and several glasses of tea. We remained at the well, and watched as about 150 camels streamed in from behind the dunes. Most were brown dromedaries: a dark shifting mass with a handful of bright specks that were the taller white Meharis. Our own caravan, whose aesthetic qualities we had much admired for the past week, suddenly looked of little consequence.

‘Saleh is a very rich man,’ observed Mohammed reverentially. ‘Maybe he has 200 camels.’ Owning a large herd of camels denotes considerable wealth by rural Libyan standards. It was doubly true in the sixteenth century, when the traveller Leo Africanus visited North Africa. ‘The Arabians esteeme [their camels] to be their principall possessions and riches,’ he reported. ‘So that speaking of the wealth of any of their princes or governors, he hath (say they) so many thousand camels, and not so manie thousand ducates.’

Goodbyes were protracted that morning. This would be the last time we would see Mohammed Ali. ‘Really, I will miss you too much now,’ he thundered in his staccato English. ‘I am too sad because you are leaving. Believe me, you must be careful in the desert, but you will have a very good journey with Abd al Wahab.’ Before he left, he gave Abd al Wahab a pair of fake Adidas trainers. It was a timely present. The thin pair of leather sandals our guide had been wearing offered no support for the ankles and for the past two or three days he had been walking heavily (and uncomplainingly) on a swollen ankle the size of a pear. He exchanged the sandals for the trainers and thanked Mohammed Ali in his customary quiet and understated style.

Full of tuna and with camels fed and watered, we left the three Ghadamsis packing up their vintage Toyota Landcruiser (regulation royal blue in Libya). Ned and Abd al Wahab stayed on the plain. Childishly keen to climb my first dune, I headed for the nearest one, a giant caramel blancmange, and grunted my way up slowly. On its steeper inclines close to the summit, it was thankless going. For each yard climbed up, half a yard was lost as the sand gave way beneath my feet and I sank in to just below the knee. The twenty-minute ascent (smoker’s lungs screaming all the way) purged me of my romantic ideas about sand seas. Ethereally beautiful things to look at, they are hellish to scale.

The summit wave commanded a view over many miles. To the south, beyond the patches of scrub where we had camped the night before, were lines of rocky outcrops dribbled over with sand, like cakes sprinkled with sugar. Here and there, silent kingdoms of sand were piled up independently among them, in greater and greater numbers until the rocks were no more and the dunes were one sweeping mass hurrying towards the horizon. To the north were the matchstick figures of Ned and Abd al Wahab leading the camels away from the splash of blue Toyota and beyond them the neat ridge of sandstone, mile after mile of it, like a smudged crayon dashed across the sky.

We moved on towards Idri, covering 20–25 miles a day. Most of the time we walked. Abd al Wahab, who gave the impression of being completely indefatigable, rarely asked us whether we wanted to ride and we were too proud to suggest it ourselves. It was always a joy, then, to hear him ask ‘Tibbi tirkub?’ (Do you want to ride?). Ned and I would consult each other first, so as not to look overeager – the result of the conference was always a foregone conclusion – and roar ‘Nirkubu!’ (Let’s ride!). The camels would then be halted and made to kneel down.

To mount from the camel’s left flank, you first grabbed his upper lip, a sensitive part of his anatomy that he was very keen not to have interfered with. Coquettishly, he would duck and swish his head away until, after several attempts, you managed to grab it. Twisting it a little in your hand for maximum control over the animal, you then pulled his head round towards his left side, enabling you to stand with all your weight on your left foot on the camel’s reclined left foreleg. Keeping your outstretched left hand on his lip – if you did not, he might throw you off vengefully for the indignity and discomfort of it all – you then swung your right leg over the pommel of the saddle. As soon as your bottom touched the saddle, he would lurch up violently, first the rear legs, which catapulted you forwards, then his forelegs, which would throw you backwards.