скачать книгу бесплатно
It was a starry, moonlit night, with a chill wind blowing clouds of smoke down from the volcano upon Doughty and his guide as they struggled up towards the crater, their breath catching with the reek of sulphur. For someone who had already witnessed the flaming rocks and molten lava of Vesuvius, it must have been a terrifying experience. There were occasional muffled explosions deep within the mountain, and sudden belches of smoke and gas from the summit, while a layer of new-fallen sand which covered everything around the crater seemed to suggest that a new eruption was imminent – but the same detachment which left Doughty immune to the beauty of many of the places through which he passed quashed any fear for his own safety, leaving him as calm and aloof as if he had been in a laboratory, rather than on the summit of a rumbling volcano.
Edge of crater a soft, moist mould, wet with sulphurous vapours which rise everywhere. Saw no yellow colour, or gathering of sulphur, but everywhere the like brown mould; the walls of the crater of the same – no ribs of rocks, nor horrible rendings as at present in Vesuvius, but terraced and easy to be descended into on a cord …
The last temptation, that of being lowered into the smoking crater of a rumbling volcano, he resisted – but he set off down the mountainside calmly and at his own pace. On the way, indeed, he stopped to admire the dawn, sketching the edge of the sun and its ‘deep ruddy and heavenly hues’ as it peeped above the horizon out at sea – and, as the sun rose, so another Doughty, a sensitive, appreciative observer, took over.
Many miles of thick white clouds, much like some Arctic sea with towering icebergs – a strange spectacle … Opposite the arising sun, the immense shadow of the mountain, as it were another Etna raised into the air in a perfect sharpened pyramid, presently with the increasing light seemed to spread along the ground,
he wrote, finishing his sketch. That image of the volcano’s shadow stayed with him for over fifty years, until, in the revised edition of Mansoul, he described ‘a summer night of stars’, and a journey up the mountainside. The plan, he says, was to
reach, ere day, his cragged utmost crest,
And from those horrid cliffs, surview far out
Trinacria, and great Italia’s mighty foot,
And Etna’s immense shadow on the Dawn-mist
That sunrising should cast …
(#litres_trial_promo)
The journey downhill took him some four hours, including stops to inspect an old smoking fissure in the mountainside near the foot of the cone, and then the Roman ruins of the Torre del Filosofo.
The circular foundations remain – the bottom of a pillar, or stonework cemented in the midst of the passage of so many centuries – not buried under falling sand, but remains as at the first!!! Desert of black sand and water – 4 or 5 poor plants. The way all a waste of sand and lavas – with many wild craters on either hand …
Like the rest of the notebook, they are, of course, merely rough jottings. But, especially when compared with the bland, conventional judgements Doughty makes about towns and architecture, it is impossible to miss the enthusiasm with which he turns to the immensity either of time or of open spaces – the huge shadow of Etna or the centuries of history of the stone foundations. As a writer and as a traveller, his mental horizons are vast, his sense of time almost geological in its scope. It is the sight of human creativity and endeavour set against a background of desolation which suddenly brings his imagination to life.
His enthusiasm is sparked by ruins and remains, by the thought that buildings – or, for that matter, languages or peoples – may still bear some relation to the way they were hundreds of years ago. It is a conventional enough romantic response – half a century before, Shelley had described how ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert’ – all that remained of the magnificent statue of the proud King Ozymandias. Had Doughty been the ‘traveller from an antique land’ in Shelley’s poem, his description of the statue might have stressed the same sense of hubris in the dead king, and the same all-pervading bleakness in the landscape. But there is nothing to suggest that Doughty had ever paid any attention to Shelley or any other romantic writers; this is his own emotional response. Conventional as it may be, it is one of the first signs of genuine interest or involvement in his travelling.
In his observation of the people whom he met, his broader judgements and generalizations are often almost comical in their smug dismissiveness. But occasionally, his notes pick out the minutiae of habits or behaviour with a precision that can bring individuals to life like the detail of a Brueghel painting. ‘The countryman’s salutation “Benedici”, their feet in sandals or unshod. The Sicilian curiously daubed carts, with saints and Bible stories. The Sicilians ride on a pack saddle without stirrups (staffe).’ The eye roves over the peasants as they go by, registering specific points apparently at random, seeming to note their friendliness and devout Christianity almost in passing. But each individual item is significant – the religious greeting, the biblical paintings on their wagons, their humble way of travelling around. And while Doughty determinedly remains an outsider – the carts are ‘curiously’ daubed – the pedantic little Italian translation shows how his appreciation of the people will grow through his observations, and also through an understanding of their language. It was the same painstaking, word-by-word linguistic technique which had led him to pore over Latin and Anglo-Saxon grammars in the Bodleian, and which would later see him quizzing his Arab companions about the exact distinctions between different Arabic expressions.
By now the winter was drawing in, the weather ‘rough and uncertain’, and Doughty was giving up hope of finding suitable accommodation on the island to see him through the winter. His initial plan had been to take a passage to Spain, but, failing to find a direct service, he decided to explore Malta instead, travelling by boat to Syracuse, where he would join the ferry for Valetta. For a gentleman traveller, the winter storms were a nuisance; for the impoverished local fishermen, they could be disastrous. ‘Took up two fishermen and a boy whose boat was overturned after a storm of rain and wind one hour before. They were sitting in their boat which was full of water ten miles from the shore. Syracuse at 3.30 p.m.…’
Once again, the casual telling of the story seems disturbingly uninvolved. It is Doughty at his most detached, as apparently uncaring about the plight of the fishermen as he had been about the villagers on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. In the descriptions he wrote of Vesuvius, he had at least the excuse that he was looking back from a distance of several years on the disaster; here, his notes written down almost as the three bedraggled sailors were taken aboard show merely the curiosity of a tourist looking at a picture. There is not a spark of human sympathy. It is almost as if Doughty feels he has mentally set off for the next stage of his travels, and wants nothing more to do with Sicily or its people: ‘Rowed on board at 10 p.m. in a storm of rain and lightning. Thick weather. Steamed out of harbour towards midnight …’
Presumably there was still no passage to be had to Spain, because what Doughty found in Malta was a ferry to North Africa, a small Glasgow steamship that would take him to the Tunisian port of Goletta. His initial impressions here were as bad as those of Valetta had been encouraging. ‘A large filthy village’ was his brisk summary of Goletta itself, while Sidi bu Said, where the nearby site of ancient Carthage might have been more to his taste, was dealt with even more contemptuously. ‘A confused, rank, open, unprofitable, uncultivated and miserable territorium, scarcely credible ever to have been any good site, or that ever any great city was built there – much less Carthage …’
There is a surprising casualness about Doughty’s dismissal of the scene of one of the great cities of the ancient world – though the Romans, of course, had left little of Carthage standing for future archaeologists. But in a sense, this is a fitting farewell to the culture of Europe and the Mediterranean: he had left Europe, at least for a short while, and here in North Africa he was to find not only his introduction to the Arab world, but also the real impetus to his imagination.
It was in the French colonial town of Constantine, a four-and-a-half-hour train journey from the coast, that Doughty had his first direct encounter with the Muslim religion. It was Ramadan, but there seems to have been no difficulty in gaining entrance to the main mosque – and no sign, either, of the antipathy Doughty would show later for Islam and all its works.
A basilica with 4 or 5 rows of pillars, roof flat, floor covered with Brussels carpets … Lighted with candles in handsome chandeliers, with worshippers sitting against the columns reading the prayers and service on certain leaves of parchment. Others prostrated themselves on the earth, with their foreheads touching the ground.
For a traveller leaving Europe for the first time, even for one as determinedly unimpressed as Doughty, it was an irresistibly exotic tableau – but it was also an image of a native Arab culture that was, in Algeria in the year 1872, struggling to survive. For several years the fellahin had faced a succession of natural disasters – epidemics, crop failures and infestations of locusts – but in 1871, heartened by the defeat of the French armies in Europe, some 800,000 of them had joined a holy war aimed at driving out the colonists who ruled them. It had been a savage but hopeless fight, with farms and villages laid waste by rebels and French soldiers in turn. The end was never in doubt. The leaders of the insurrection were killed or captured, and many of them put on trial as criminals before juries packed with French immigrants.
Elsewhere in the Middle East French, English and Russians nurtured their own ambitions as the moribund Ottoman empire faltered, And in another sense, too, North Africa, Arabia and the Islamic world were under attack.
(#litres_trial_promo) Whatever the ambitions of the politicians, Europe’s writers, poets and artists had effectively colonized the Orient for themselves already, and the scene Doughty saw in the Constantine mosque would have been familiar to Victorian England from the paintings and writings about the East that had been fashionable for years. There had been a flood of poems, paintings, novels and fantasies set in a self-consciously Middle Eastern and desert world. By mid century travellers to Arabia were visiting a land and a culture that was fascinatingly strange and different from their own – but one that must at least have seemed, to anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with contemporary thought, reassuringly familiar.
And yet the Orient of the imagination, the Orient of Flaubert, of Edward Fitzgerald, of Shelley, Byron, and of Beckford, was to a great extent a glorious construction of the artistic community itself – an exuberant celebration of ignorance. The day-to-day contemporary reality of Arabia and the rest of the Middle East was of less importance to the writers and artists than the European tradition of the mystic Orient, of the simple nobility of the desert peoples, the romantic despotism of the sheikhs and rulers, the sexual frisson of the harem. It was that tradition, fitting in perfectly with the romantic imagination to create a deliriously frightening picture of the Arab world, that made Arabia superficially familiar to the travellers.
But alongside this romantic vision of the East was a vast and rapidly growing body of scholarly knowledge about the languages, the civilizations and the history of the Orient. The first part of the century saw an explosion of learned societies, of university professorships and periodicals all concentrating on the new and fascinating field of oriental studies. But even that supposedly dispassionate academic work was often based on literature rather than direct observation, and seems to a modern eye to be suspiciously supportive of the imperial and economic objectives of the western powers. Even Sir Richard Burton, not the most reliable of friends of the British political establishment, commented in his account of his travels in Arabia: ‘Egypt is a treasure to be won … the most tempting prize which the east holds out to the ambition of Europe.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
If anyone could have remained uncorrupted by both romantic myth and imperial dream, it would have been the twenty-nine-year-old Charles Montagu Doughty, with his cantankerous disregard for anything even remotely modern. He avoided both camps: he had no contact with the seductive world of literary orientalism, and precious little with that of the scholastic Arabists,
(#litres_trial_promo) and as a result, his observations were essentially his own. If he later seemed prickly, that was because his view of Arabia had been forced into no literary or scholastic preconceptions. He found among the Arabs an ancient world which was foreign to anything he had seen elsewhere – one which appeared to mirror his own sense of antiquity.
The fighting in Algeria had finished barely five months before Doughty’s arrival, leaving behind a bitterness and unrest that even Doughty, temperamentally blind as he was to political upheaval, could not avoid. The trials and the rounding up of suspected militants were going on around him as he travelled slowly south into the heartland of the revolt.
As he pushed inland on a stagecoach drawn by seven horses towards the oasis town of Biskra, the romantic potential of the shadowy scene in the mosque left him unmoved. Instead, as the coach rocked on through the moonlight, he was still concentrating on the landscape – ‘stony, arid, and even all bare and naked … Icy chillness devouring. Crests of the mountains powdered with snow.’
The first stage of the journey took them thirteen hours, rattling over the stony ground in the moonlight, and they pulled into the oasis of Batna at eight in the morning. Even though the reason for travelling through the night had been to avoid the desert sun, noon found Doughty setting off on a four-hour excursion to view the remains of a nearby Roman colony. If his interest had often been lukewarm in Europe, here in Africa it was passionate. He was clearly not sparing himself – and at four o’clock the next morning, as the moon sank low over the Atlas Mountains to the west, he was on his way again.
Doughty was wide awake throughout the long, hot journey, noticing the landscapes, the occasional caravans and the few local people along the road – a knot of French soldiers surveying the route, Arab women with looped earrings of wire, a farmer ploughing the ‘dry dead country’. And then, almost like a lingering shot from a film, came his first authentic image of the harshness, the implacability he would come to know of Arabia. ‘Passed on the way an Arab dead, wrapped in his burnous, bound upon poles, and laid across an ass or mule. No distinct road, but only the wheelruts’ traces across the country …’
It is a vivid sketch, like his earlier one of the Sicilian peasants. Here, though, Doughty focuses upon the movement of the dead man, not that of the living Arabs who were presumably taking him for burial. But where Shelley saw only the ‘boundless and bare’ sands of the desert, Doughty saw the wheel-tracks threading their way towards the horizon. With the scene there before him, he transcends the conventional response; while Shelley had no imaginative answer to the overwhelming power of the desert, Doughty sees the continuing, ageless struggle for survival of the Arabs. Looking around him, he was struck by the awesome barrenness of the sands, white with an efflorescence of salt, and the surrounding bare mountains. But life struggled on imperturbably, with a blank serenity which matched his own matter-of-fact approach. In that contrast, between the vulnerability of human achievement and the permanence of human endeavour, Doughty was to find a lifelong inspiration, which he maintained with a religious force and passion.
It is a breadth of vision, a sense of history, which gradually comes to accommodate not only his unemotional response to the sufferings of others, such as the shipwrecked fishermen of Giardini or the hapless tourists on Vesuvius, but also the dogged courage with which he faces his own dangers.
The little party crossed over an ancient bridge built by the Romans, who had struggled to colonize this harsh country – ‘still strong and good after so many centuries’, Doughty noted approvingly – but for the most part, what signs of man remained were desolate and all but smothered in the blown sand of the desert. He had left far behind him the well-trodden roads and pathways of Victorian Europe, and with them, the ancient and reassuringly familiar civilization they represented. But in the North African desert, with the stolid march of a small group of Arabs along a route marked only by wheel-tracks in the sand, he was discovering a different but equally ancient stability.
It was 22 November when they finally set out from the desert settlement of Biskra, a caravan of ten men with mules and asses loaded with dates, threading their way through the mountains to the west on their way to the oasis of Bou Saida. Perhaps some of the French garrison had warned Doughty of the danger he might be running in such lonely and unsettled country, so soon after a major insurrection; perhaps he instinctively felt the uncertainty of his new position – but an unaccustomed note of caution enters his diary as he leaves on his trek across the mountains. For the first time he was carrying a weapon – a revolver he had borrowed, presumably from one of the soldiers.
He should not approach the Arabs’ tents pitched near their own camp, he was told that evening, in case they were hostile to a travelling European. This, he was warned, was dangerous country. In the circumstances, perhaps it is not surprising that he slept little. ‘We lay upon the ground; the night cold and still … Light cloud covered the ground, foreboding rain. Howling of dogs all the night long.’
It took four more days’ hard travelling before they reached the oasis of Bou Saida, deep in the heartland of the revolt. They were lonely days and hard nights, with the travellers seeking what shelter they could from the driving rain by piling up their baggage and huddling around a smoky fire that guttered in the wind. And yet Doughty, the same man who had grumbled his way across Europe, complaining about the weather, the foreigners, the food and his own health, had clearly enjoyed the hundred-mile trek.
Some of the villages they passed had been friendly, and Doughty had even experienced his first taste of Arab hospitality with a group of wandering bedu – hot griddle cakes, boiled eggs and dates, and a night’s shelter, side by side with a score of newborn kids and lambs in the nomads’ tent. He had, like most Victorian travellers, squirrelled away a collection of notes and ‘specimens’ – plants, a few snail shells and jottings about the birds he had seen and about the landscape and the occasional stone cairns he had passed.
Where his comments about his European travels had frequently been dismissive and critical, the diary of his five-day trek to Bou Saida trembles with the excitement of the unfamiliar. In Europe there was practically nowhere clean or comfortable enough for him; here in the desert, after a night spent on the hard earth with a mattress of dried sods, kept awake by the bleating of farm animals, the barking of dogs and the pounding of rain upon the rough black sacking of the tent, he was content. ‘I had the happiness to pass the Sunday day of rest in cheerfulness and in some hospitality and quiet … There I lay in security, and put away my pistol.’
Notable, too, was his first impression of the Arabs with whom he had come into contact. They had reassured him that they thought the English better at least than the French – faint praise, perhaps, in the aftermath of the revolt. And for his part, despite the earlier fears which had left him quaking by the camp fire and clutching his revolver through the night, he could only note now the continual cheerfulness which they showed despite their hard and unforgiving life – that and their ‘quavered, drawling songs’.
For those of his own party he had nothing but praise. ‘I have taken no hurt, thank God, nor am any the weaker. With the friendly complaisance, gentleness, and hearty kindness of my party of Arabs (three men and a boy) I was very pleased and contented,’ he wrote.
But he set off almost immediately for the coast – a three-day trek out of the mountains, to the first public stagecoach that would take him to Algiers. It was an ironic return to civilization. ‘We were tossed and tumbled enough to break the last bone in our body,’ he wrote after he had disembarked from the diligence. ‘5 p.m., at Algiers. We have made in 21 hours 50 miles, or a little above!’ From there, as there was no ferry for Spain, Doughty took the train to the port of Oran and a steamer to Cartagena. His first Arabian adventure was over.
Chapter Three (#ulink_a38d408c-afec-5710-a1df-dccce9da57b2)
In what so land thou comest,
Observe their customs and that people’s laws …
Mansoul, p. 72
Doughty must have been well aware as his ferry sailed serenely into Cartagena that Spain was being torn apart by civil war. When he was travelling in North Africa, part of the country at least was firmly under the control of the French troops; here, there was no unchallenged power to enforce order.
When Doughty arrived, the Italian nobleman who had finally been prevailed upon to accept the crown as King Amadeus had been on the throne for three years, in the place of Queen Isabella, who had been driven out in the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ of September 1868. But there was barely a pause in the political chaos, with republicans and royalist Carlists savaging each other in a whole series of confrontations, reverses and political about-turns.
Only a year later Amadeus himself would be dethroned in his turn. It was a time of ferment; and yet, except for the occasional petulant complaint of trains held up by gangs of armed men, Doughty let it pass him by, just as he had the aftermath of the convulsions in France. He had a straightforward, unimaginative physical courage: he was apparently undaunted – and indeed uninterested – by the very real dangers posed by the wandering bands of partisans and militias.
Traces of the Arab world he had left behind on the other side of the Mediterranean were still all about him: the cultures of Christianity and Islam, of Europe and North Africa, the Spanish and the Arabs, had touched each other in Spain over the centuries, and left their mark. There was the architecture left behind by the Moors, and a whole range of Spanish customs and words that were clearly derived from the Arabic. Local peasants wore a kerchief wound around their heads, he noticed – a hakis, virtually the same word as the Arab harki. The villages, with their walls built of baked mud bricks, their houses furnished only with mats spread upon the floor, could have been plucked from the North African landscape of the Maghreb; many of the names of the people could equally well be Arabic as Spanish.
This mingling of the two civilizations, he found later, was a source of continual fascination to the educated townsmen of Arabia. Following their arrival in Gibraltar in 711 the Arabs played a leading role in the life and culture of southern Spain for over 700 years, and although it was nearly four centuries since they had finally been expelled, the legends and tales of Muslim Spain were still current in the coffee houses of the oasis towns.
In Arabia such knowledge would prove an effective way for Doughty to establish friendly relations with the people he met. Here in Spain, it seemed to tie together his interest in language with the great scientific movements of the day. If biological species had evolved gradually over the centuries, if geology and landscape were the products of imperceptible change, so too were language and the day-to-day culture of common men. It was the sort of living archaeology that he loved, laying bare the ancient roots of words and habits alike – even if the final similarity between the two cultures which he jotted down wryly in his notebook, remembering his long hours in the Arab caravan of North Africa, was the ‘drawling, insupportable singing’!
His grasp of the political turmoil of the present remained rudimentary; but, with his books still safely in storage, Doughty the observer was waking up to his surroundings, responding more enthusiastically to the people he met.
On his way to Gibraltar, for instance, he paused in Málaga – ‘a large, uncheerful seatown, without any good streets’. There, he took an interest in the civil strife only when he met a republican gran carabinero who gripped him with his description of the conflict that had engulfed the town just a few weeks before. Forty-five people had been killed in the street-fighting between republicans and Carlists – reason enough, perhaps, in Málaga as in Paris, to wipe any cheerful smile off the face of the town.
The soldier had four or five musket balls still lodged in his body, and he was on the way for treatment in the relative peace of Gibraltar. The excitement is almost audible as Doughty hurriedly jots down what his expansive new friend has told him.
He said that if he had the opportunity, he would cut the king in pieces with his knife! That the Italians were a people of fiddlers, and that the king was chosen by 150 men only. That all Andalucia was Republican, that all the paysants were méchants, and that in time of any trouble, they would sally from their houses, and kill any person they might find of the opposite party.
The gran carabinero, all moustache-twirling braggadocio, may sound like a character from an opera, with his loud-mouthed and one-dimensional political analysis – but Doughty does at least take a lively interest in what he has to say about the troubles.
Earlier in his travels, the people he met seem often to have drifted through his diaries half-noticed, like extras on a film-set; now, as he gets more deeply involved in his journeying, the characters come increasingly alive under his more focused gaze.
Over the next few weeks he travelled to and fro across southern Spain, peering slightly wistfully, as a would-be naval officer, at the big artillery pieces which loomed threateningly from the fortified galleries of Gibraltar, searching for Phoenician ruins in Cadiz, jotting down revolutionary slogans from the walls of Seville, and muttering tetchily all the while about his personal discomfort: gnats and crudely executed religious oil paintings in Seville, and another ‘night of purgatory in the diligence’ on the roads through the mountains of the Santa Morena – everything, it seemed, was designed for his irritation.
He arrived in Lisbon on 19 March after another fifteen-hour train journey. The life of a poor wanderer was beginning to pall, and he planned to spend some time in the Portuguese capital gathering his strength and throwing himself with more enthusiasm, at least for a while, into the role of middle-class traveller. He spent sixteen days there, staying at the English-run Barnards Hotel, drawing more funds from home, and meeting fellow travellers and a few compatriots who lived in the city. ‘The banker introduced me to the Gremio, an admirable club … which was immediately opposite,’ he noted. This, perhaps, was more the sort of life that his relatives in Suffolk would have envisaged – although there is still no suggestion that he might resume the studies which had enjoyed such all-consuming importance only a few months before.
He needed the rest because his health was failing – just as the travelling was about to get even more wearing. ‘Two long nights and a day’ in a stagecoach took him to Toledo, and on to Madrid, where he rested for another week. ‘Thence by the night mail 16 hours to Valencia – a journey almost too great for me, being now full of weakness and with a terrible bronchitis, but I trust nearly the last.’
This, perhaps, was the moment he was referring to years later, when he confessed he had been tempted to end his travelling and return home; or maybe he was looking forward to a longer rest in Italy. In any case, there were more hardships to come before he left Spain.
He set off early in the morning for Barcelona, where he hoped to find a ferry out of Spain. But the civil wars were still raging around him, sometimes dangerously close, with the counter-revolutionary Carlist movement mounting a running guerrilla campaign against the liberal and republican forces. For all their Catholicism and dislike of foreigners, and however exciting a character he had found his gran carabinero republican, Doughty might have been expected to feel some sympathy for the arch-traditionalists of the Carlist movement; what troubled him, though, was the disruption of his travel plans rather than the politics or the physical danger. The whole region was ‘infested by assassins, Carlists’, but personal safety never seems to have been a great concern of Doughty’s – not on the slopes of Vesuvius, not in North Africa, not in his later travels in Arabia, and not here either. ‘At Tarragona, we were compelled to halt. Half the distance from there to Barcelona, they occupy the way, having fired upon the train the previous evening, and threatening the lives of the engine drivers if they conducted trains. For this, the traffic is at a stand.’
And, with Barcelona now completely cut off from the landward side, at a stand it continued for three days. Doughty was stuck in the port of Tarragona. The only way past the surrounding Carlists was by sea, and late on the Sunday evening he embarked on a little schooner for the brief run down the coast.
In Barcelona a ship was in port, about to set out for France, and in less than twenty-four hours he was on board. Two nights in Marseilles were spent sleeping under the stars before he found a passage on to Naples, from where he had now decided – his health apparently no longer giving him trouble – to travel on to Greece. ‘The morning of the second day, we cast anchor in the Bay of Naples, a good passage and a fair wind.’
There are four brief lines in his diary noting that he spent some time in the Pension Guidotti, that he climbed Vesuvius again, that he visited the ruins at Herculaneum, and that he spent two or three days on the nearby island of Ischia; but there, abruptly, his own account ends.
With all its infuriating gaps, and with all the obvious limitations of notes scribbled briefly in a traveller’s spare moments, the diary is practically the only clue there is to how the bland, conventional twenty-seven-year-old young man who had left for Holland three years before could develop into the acute observer who would later write the Travels in Arabia Deserta. Although we know from occasional mentions in the diary that he wrote lengthy and descriptive letters home – he refers, for example, to accounts of Madrid and a great bullfight he witnessed there – hardly any of them survive.
That is not an accident: Doughty had throughout his life a passionate sense of his own privacy, and was never a friend to biography. Personal enquiries were answered tersely, if more or less accurately. Almost all his letters home were burned, according to his wife – and after his death she herself carefully destroyed those he had written later to her,
(#litres_trial_promo) while Doughty himself replied with horror to an apparently harmless request for a picture of himself for a book on Arabian travel. ‘I have not such a photograph in the world. I may be allowed to say it would be rather contrary to my perhaps now old-fashioned ideas to see a portrait of myself, a private person, in a published book.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
It is another dimension of his loneliness, the desire for privacy stretching beyond his immediate surroundings. For all its shortcomings, and often despite Doughty himself, the diary offers a rare first-hand, contemporaneous account of three formative years of the life of this determinedly ‘private person’.
It is often little more than a collection of jottings, much like the notebooks he later filled as he wandered through the Arabian desert, with words repeated, sentences unfinished, and judgements half-formed – and yet it still shows the first stirrings of his own writing style, with its incisive, familiar images, its occasional pomposities, and its striving for a proper, judicious scientific detachment.
For the next three and a half years, following his travels is a matter of picking up snippets from letters which were often written years afterwards, references in his later works, grudging notes of his memories in old age. Not until he sets off into the Arabian desert with the Hadj caravan and begins once again to keep a detailed notebook will there be so precise a record of the growth of the writer’s mind.
In the spring and summer of 1873 he based himself in Athens, ‘gypsying’ around the countryside, as he put it – staying at lodging houses or occasionally sleeping under the stars.
A few memories from those days surfaced later as vivid markers in his writings. In The Dawn in Britain, for example, he would describe how the Gauls, in their ill-fated assault on Delphi, were led through the mountains above the Oracle by Thracian guides until they reached the
… parting of two ways, from the cliff-steeps,
Where, of some antique hero, shines white tomb.
(#litres_trial_promo)
The aching cold of the lonely mountain wanderer is remembered in Doughty’s description of the Gauls encamped on the inhospitable Greek hillside as the snow begins to fall.
Brennus and few lords with him, founden hath
Uncertain shelter, the wild eaves of craigs;
Whereunder, hunger-starved, when fallen this night,
And without fire, they daze, with stiffened joints …
(#litres_trial_promo)
He was alone, travelling light, and still without most of his books. The passionate devotion to his ‘studies’ was now firmly behind him; his priority the ruins on the ground rather than the words on the page.
On the other side of the Bosphorus the archaeologist J. T. Wood showed him how those ruins could be brought to life. At the ancient Greek site of Ephesus, Wood was painstakingly revealing the remains of the Temple of Artemis. Doughty was spellbound: the history of Ephesus itself formed an imaginative bridge between his own various interests. The temple linked it with the sites of ancient Greece he had just been visiting; there was the Christian foundation of St Paul to involve his sense of religious history, and the story of the destruction of the city by the Goths in the third century to excite his interest as a student of the tribes of northern Europe.
Stone by stone, the temple was emerging from the ground. Wood, standing with his wife in the middle of the excavation, and sketching out on a sheet of The Times possible designs and elevations of the way it might once have looked, readily rebuilt it in his imagination for his fascinated guest.
Doughty’s earlier experiences at Hoxne had hardly prepared him for anything like this. The diggings had been going on for ten years already, and he had never seen work on such a scale before. It was a foretaste of the imposing ruins he would see over the next few months and years.
Having reached Ephesus, on the Asian side of the Aegean, his taste for archaeology fired by Wood, he must have thought it would be as easy to go on towards the Holy Land as to go back towards Europe. After all, England held few attractions for a thirty-one-year-old scholar of uncertain expectations – no home, no close family ties, no career, and only the uninviting prospect of a slightly shabby and threadbare life of genteel poverty.
He described himself later as ‘interested in all that pertains to Biblical research’,
(#litres_trial_promo) and it would have been very like Doughty to want to be able to place the books of the Old and New Testaments in a physical context for himself. But he was still not planning any extensive journeys among the Arabs: his taste of Islamic culture in North Africa and Spain remained just another element in the general experience of his travelling.
On he went, towards the Promised Land. Years later, he sketched out an itinerary for his wife – Latakia, Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon, Tyre and Acre, the route of scores of tramp steamers carrying freight and passengers from port to port. At Sidon and Tyre he collected some Roman mosaic tiles, later presented to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford – but it seems likely that Doughty abandoned his ‘gypsying’ at least for a while to travel by sea. From Acre, though, he told his wife that he set out on foot again, on the slow journey to Jerusalem. Now he was travelling along roads he had read about and been told about since his infancy, through a landscape where the place-names rang with the sounds and rhythms of the Authorized Version.
But the only brief glimpses of Doughty coming face to face with the realities of the traditions he had drunk in so avidly come through occasional references written down years later in Travels in Arabia Deserta. As he set out with the Hadj the following year on his way south to Medain Salih, for instance, his attention was drawn to the devout Persian pilgrims just starting their journey.
These men, often red-bearded and red dye-beards, of a gentle behaviour, much resemble, in another religion, the Muscovite Easter pilgrims to Jerusalem. And these likewise lay up devoutly of their slender thrift for many years before, that they may once weary their lives in this great religious voyage …
(#litres_trial_promo)
It is easy to picture the tall, retiring Doughty, red-bearded himself, watching intently from a distance as the Russian Christians arrived in the narrow streets of Jerusalem, amazed at their fanaticism and yet admiring their devoutness. Their great voyage was over; his was yet to begin.
Doughty’s travels during the next two and a half years took him through Gaza to Egypt, from where he struck out into the Sinai peninsula on a three-month expedition, before making his way back north towards Damascus.
