God’s Fugitive

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The villages that were still inhabited bore a striking resemblance to the ruins in their design and construction: in the past, Doughty’s guides told him, this had been a thriving farming region, which had been laid waste years before by a bedu sheikh. Myth, history, or a combination of the two, the awestruck stories told by the Arab farmers bore witness to the dread they still felt of the half-savage nomadic tribes who could descend upon them so suddenly and so brutally. Fear, too, could survive almost unchanged down the generations.

Sometimes, Doughty paid an Arab guide to accompany him on his way; where he had to, he travelled alone, trusting to his luck and his ability to talk his way out of trouble. But whenever possible he fell in with other travellers going on the same track: there were stories to be heard along the way, and some safety to be found in numbers. As he left Maan, for instance, he joined the military captain of the Hadj road and twenty or so of his peasant soldiers, on their way to Nablus. They were well enough armed to frighten off any casual groups of bedu tribesmen they might meet – but he still had to rely on his own wits rather than on the loyalty of his companions. On one occasion, threatened by a group of nomads, he resorted to a straightforward bluff, and shouted orders to the men to arrest them, as if he were a military commander. The soldiers, of course, who had anyway not been paid for nearly a year and a half, were even less likely to obey him than their own captain – but the Arabs didn’t know that, and they rode off in panic from the scruffy little troop and their guns.

It was now June, and the countryside was blooming. Doughty had reflected as he left Maan on how the land must indeed have seemed to flow with milk to the Israelites as they trekked wearily out of the wastes of Sinai. Now he found rose-laurel and rushes growing in profusion around the cattle pools, swollen with the spring rain; the grass was a yard high, and the corn growing fat. The bedu he met were turning their cattle loose on some of the richest pasture of the year, and, unpredictable as ever, they were happy to slaughter a sheep for dinner in honour of their guest.

He paused briefly in the town of Kerak, a rough settlement with a bloody history of wars and conquests, which had the air of a frontier town, where criminals and murderers could seek refuge from the stern justice of the Ottoman empire. The countryside round about was dotted with ruined forts, towers and villages, but he did not linger. It was still June when he was a good hundred miles further north, wading up to his waist in the tepid waters of Wadi Zerka, as they tumbled towards the river Jordan.

The biblical land of Gilead, through which he passed on the way to Jerash and Damascus, sounds like a paradise, ‘full of the balm-smelling pines, and the tree laurel sounding with the sobbing sweetness and the amorous wings of doves! In all paths are blissful fountains; the valley heads flow down healing to the eyes with veins of purest water’.

(#litres_trial_promo) For all that, though, it remained outside the law. The people, ‘uncivil and brutish, not subject to any government’, slashed and burned the woodland as if they were living in some remote rainforest: it was a grim and primitive land.

All the time, he was becoming more familiar with the Arab way St Mary’s Church, Martlesham, Suffolk: ‘The atmosphere of the simple little church, its unimpeachable, unassuming Englishness and its dignified reserve, reflect one facet of his character.’ of life and culture, even though he had yet to learn more than a smattering of the language. The wild bedu, still largely unknown and untrusted, seemed to people an uncivilized world in which they made their own law, while on the desert fringes the hard-working farmers and traders eked out a living that seemed to have been unchanged for centuries. ‘These desert men lean to the civil life, and are such yeomen perhaps as Esau was. Other of their tribesmen I have seen, which are settled in tents, earing

(#litres_trial_promo) the desert sand near Gaza; their plough is a sharpened stake, shod with iron, and one plough-camel draught …’

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But these industrious farmers, too, could turn on him in a moment. They distrusted foreigners and particularly those who, prying into ancient ruins, might prove to be spies. A European and a Christian in a strange land, either alone or with few companions, he was an easy target either for religious bigotry or simple banditry by farmers and nomads alike – the more so when he steadfastly refused to adopt a disguise or make up stories to justify his presence.

There had been his brush with the villagers around Petra; and there had been another incident south of Wadi Zerka when Doughty, sick and weak with his long travelling, was abandoned by his guide at a bedu encampment. At first he was well enough treated: the Arabs made at least a pretence of trying to find the guide who had deserted him, and gave him food and shelter. But they were moving on, they said, and after one night they delivered him to a second encampment.

There, Doughty found only women – and when the men returned later in the day, it was to threaten him, and demand a ransom in return for letting him go. It was a gross abuse of the laws of hospitality – but Doughty was becoming more skilled in the ways of handling the nomad tribesmen. First he protested that he had been given milk to drink by the women of the tribe, and should therefore be treated as a guest; and when that failed, he suggested that the leader of the group, Sheikh Faiz, should give him his horse in return for the ransom – one gift for another.

When Faiz’s mare was brought forward, though, he looked at it in disgust, and told the sheikh it was not even good enough to accept as a present. Faiz, presumably, was not particularly popular among the tribesmen; at any rate, they took Doughty’s side, and laughed at their leader’s discomfiture. Winning support with a pointed joke and a pained expression remained one of his favourite survival techniques.

He arrived in Damascus weary and sore. His six months in the deserts, the mountains and the wadis had been a completely different experience from anything that had gone before. Physically, it had been an exhausting and draining ordeal, struggling by camel and mule over some of the most inhospitable country in the world – but, more than that, he had been more alone, more exposed, than at any time in his life.

As well as his excitement at the prospect of finding the ruins of Medain Salih, he was finding aspects of daily life and culture among the Arabs that inspired his deep and lasting respect; but, for all his occasional sense of kinship with travellers who had gone before him, it was knowledge won against a background of remoteness and fear. In Europe, after all, he had been surrounded on his travels by the comforts and reassurances of a familiar way of life: even when he slept under the stars, it was within reach of people who shared his standards and values, people with whom he might enjoy a mutual understanding. When he trekked out into the desert of North Africa, it had been a brief excursion into a foreign land – and an excursion made still under a recognizable framework of European colonial law and authority.

Doughty may have lived as a poor traveller before, but it had been in a sympathetic world. His poverty, too, had been at least partly assumed – there had been times, as in Lisbon, where he could briefly drop back into the comfortable lifestyle of an Englishman of a certain class.

Here in the Bible lands he was isolated under the arbitrary and uncertain law of a cruel and largely hostile country, and travelling always on the fringes of what appeared to be a wasteland of lawless savagery. The familiarity which his biblical knowledge might have brought to the terrain often served simply to emphasize the gulf between the magnificence of the past and the squalid meanness of the reality. Physically and emotionally, Doughty remained a man alone.

There were, of course, occasions when he had been welcomed into the Arab tents, fed and entertained. The sheikhs who had killed sheep for him to eat and brought milk for him to drink might seem approachable, even welcoming. In the desert, though, and occasionally crossing his path threateningly, were the wandering bedu. He would learn more about them later – but for now they seemed to represent the very heart of darkness.

But if Doughty’s travels had revealed how terrifying life could become without the reassurance of the rule of law, Damascus showed how frustrating the rules and restrictions of officialdom could be. Doughty had been told in Maan that the Hadj caravan might lead him to Medain Salih; but in Damascus, when he asked the Wali, the Ottoman governor of Syria, for permission to accompany the pilgrims, he was fobbed off. The Wali asked the British consul, a career diplomat and Middle East specialist named Thomas Sampson Jago, for his advice, but the consul wanted nothing to do with Doughty or his impetuous plans. ‘He had as much regard of me, would I take such dangerous ways, as of his old hat. He … told me it was his duty to take no cognisance of my Arabian journey, lest he might hear any word of blame, if I miscarried.’

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The governor in Maan had refused to take responsibility; the Wali in Damascus had refused to take responsibility; and now the British consul was refusing to take responsibility. They hoped that this foolish and importunate Englishman would go away and forget his dangerous obsession with Medain Salih, but Doughty kept on pestering them. In what was no doubt another effort to brush him aside, the Wali told him that only an official firman or permit from the Sultan himself would gain him acceptance with the pilgrim train.

But the British consulate, through which he would normally have applied for such a document, had washed its hands of him: Doughty would have to find another mediator and, with barely two months to go before the pilgrims would be gathering to depart, there was no time to be lost.

He had already written to the British Association seeking support; now he would approach the Royal Geographical Society to make representations on his behalf. There were also pressing reasons to leave Damascus for a while – there had been an outbreak of cholera in the city, and the troubles of the Ottoman empire had led to rumblings of anti-Christian feeling among the Muslim population. In addition, Doughty had given his brother Henry an address in Vienna where a letter might be left for him to collect. By travelling back into Europe, he might at the same time gather welcome news from home, speed his own message to London on its way, and also avoid a disease-ridden and unfriendly city. Tired as he was, he set off through the north gate of the city, turning his back at least for a while on the Arab world.

It was another hard journey, and Doughty gives a full account of it in one of the few letters from him that have survived. Writing to his brother from the Hotel Wandl after he arrived in Vienna, he described the inhumanity shown by the Turks in the Balkans. ‘I saw all their tithes of corn rotting in the fields – the barbarous paschas will have money, and the poor wretches have none to give, and offer them in kind as usual,’ he wrote. Hundreds of miles of good land were unfilled: ‘The Bulgarians are a people of cultivators; but they have not dared hitherto to occupy the land, afraid of the ferocity of the old Turks.’

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What he saw awakened Doughty’s passionate interest in the social and political situation around him, both now and when he returned to Damascus. The Ottoman empire, the ‘disorderly Turkish domination’, was dying on its feet around him, with what he dismissed contemptuously as ‘a handful of degenerate Turks’ uneasily maintaining their rule over some five million Slavs. There was a tense, suspicious mood, with the poverty-stricken Muslims being forcibly conscripted to put down a revolt by Slav peasants in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Doughty himself, wandering through the countryside alone and on foot, was almost picked up as a suspected spy.

Instead of the camel and mule he had relied on to travel in Sinai and up the Jordan valley, he now enjoyed the relative luxury of steamships and, at least as far as the end of the line in Bulgaria, the railway. Elsewhere, rustic horse-drawn carts without springs kept up a brisk eighty miles a day, but offered little comfort over the bumpy roads: ‘The bridges only were bad, and often broken through in more than one or two places, but it was rough work … Sometimes I thought I should have vomited my heart as we dashed at some terrible stone. I stayed at the towns to recover a little,’ he wrote to Henry, far away in the remembered comforts of Theberton Hall.

But he was back in Europe, and there was a clear sense of relief. Restless and threatening as the atmosphere might be, it was still recognizably more like home than the foreign lands he had been travelling through. ‘The aspect of the country is wholly European – it is green and northern. The houses are built a la Franca with pitched roofs and chimneys, the populations mostly Christian,’ he wrote. And when he arrived in the then Hungarian capital of Pest on the Danube, he marvelled at the palatial buildings, the wide streets and the tramways. ‘I was surprised and astonished and pleased at such a new and advanced world,’ he said: eighteen months away had clearly sharpened his appetite for the more relaxed, familiar culture of the west.

They had also sharpened his memories of Theberton. There are few signs of homesickness in his journals, but the letter from home that was waiting for him at the post office in Vienna left him thinking wistfully of the life he had left behind. The renovations had apparently restarted in Theberton Hall, and Henry told him of a garden party and ball he was planning to hold there on 13 September – the very day that his brother collected the letter on the other side of Europe. ‘I calculated the hour an hundred times to think what you ought to be then doing. How could you have got on in the old Pict. Gallery, with a floor of earth and mortar! Finally I am settled here, my limbs ache, I am so weary, and my head also,’ Doughty wrote as he sat alone in his room at the Wandl. In a man who usually appeared so dignified and controlled, it is an appealing human moment of excited nostalgia.

But 13 September 1875 was too busy a day for him to spend much time moping over Theberton and the familiar social excitements of village life. In the same post as his letter home to Theberton he sent off a more formal message to the Royal Geographical Society in London, asking not only for the society’s help in obtaining an official pass from the Ottoman authorities, but also for a grant towards the cost of the expedition. Eight years later he would sit before the members of the society to hear its president, Sir Henry Rawlinson, describe him as being ‘in the front ranks of Asiatic travellers’ after his ‘adventurous and perilous journey’;

(#litres_trial_promo) however, as he hurried hopefully to the Vienna post office, he was no more than an unknown supplicant, using every means he could think of to attract Sir Henry’s favourable attention.

He detailed the journey he had already made through Sinai and north to Damascus: already, he said, ‘without resources and with great fatigue’, he had established that the Sinai peninsula had been only recently raised from the sea; he had found more than 300 ruined cities and villages scattered across the region between Maan and Kerak; and he had personally gathered several specimens of ancient flint tools on the gravel plains to the east of Petra. Doughty, a continent away from London, had no way of finding out what were the special interests of the members of the society’s council: he was at pains to cast his net as widely as he could in order to catch at least somebody’s attention.

Most urgently of all, he told them what he had heard so far of Medain Salih, and what he could hope to find there.

Here are the traces of an unknown people, of inscriptions unknown. Of what interest they are, I think it is manifest. I wish shortly to go down with the pilgrims – they are jealous of that country, where they say no Frank has set foot. I have trusted to the R Geogr Society to obtain the firman necessary … My desire is to return immediately to go with the pilgrims to the discovery of these unknown cities and inscriptions.

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He had, he said, worked with the society’s cooperation before, and he described his expedition to Norway.

I borrowed from the Socy. at the instance of Sir Rod. Murchison, President, a theodolite with which I measured the daily motions of several Norwegian glaciers, at which time I made other observations of interest to geologists that Sir Chas. Lyell, then preparing the last ed of his Principles, spontaneously visited me to make a number of enquiries and used my assistance largely in that part of his labours …

The word ‘largely’ is something of an exaggeration: whatever help the young graduate was to the eminent Lyell in his ground-breaking study was at best peripheral. But Doughty’s anxiety to impress and his desperation are clear in every hurried line and every dropped name. At last he had found a focus for his study which might win him recognition: as he travelled to Vienna from Damascus, he must have gone over and over the tempting prospect of Medain Salih in his mind. The hardships and the threat of disease he could cope with, but to get permission to set out at all he needed help – and he believed that he deserved it.

If the society could be persuaded to act quickly, a letter of recommendation might be obtained through the embassy at Constantinople within three weeks or so – thus neatly avoiding the unenthusiastic Mr Jago in Damascus. But after five years on the road Doughty was seeking more concrete help.

The cost of the expedition is too much for a man of slender income. I have hitherto lived as a traveller with the Arabs at a small expenditure, but the results are always less than they might have been with sufficient means, added to fatigues which might have been spared in that penetrating climate, a country now ravaged by cholera …

He had, he said, already asked the British Association for a contribution of £100, but his letter might have gone astray; would the Royal Geographical Society support him with one of its grants?

He signed the letter as formally, and as graciously, as he could – ‘I am Sir, hoping at some future time I may have the pleasure to know you, your obedt. servant, Charles M. Doughty, MA, Cambridge, of Theberton Hall, Suffolk.’ After his gruelling time as a despised, homeless wanderer, it was clearly time to play once again the part of a country gentleman of standing.

He submitted a report on his wanderings in Sinai, and on his hopes from Medain Salih, for the Viennese Geographical Society.

(#litres_trial_promo) He wrote knowledgeably of the topography and geology of the region: the whole peninsula, he believed, had only recently been thrust up out of the sea, a parched land that had been formed by the buffeting and erosion of long-dried-up torrents of water and retreating tides.

But his real interest was in the mysterious ‘mosquito huts’, the ruins scattered through the mountains of Edom, and, best of all, the stories he had heard of the lost cave cities of Medain Salih. Doughty described with enthusiasm the discoveries he had already made about them at second-hand, through the tales of the Arabs he had met, and was frank about the urgency with which he wanted to set off to see them for himself. ‘I don’t doubt the existence of such towns; I’ve heard about them from about a hundred people, who … all report in the same fashion. They resemble the former cliff town Petra, and are of the same ilk, as if they had been built by the same master builders …’

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He had been continuing his investigations into the lost settlements since he left Maan. In Damascus itself, and in the towns and villages along the way, he had heard the same stories – some fifteen or sixteen towns, some in the mountains and others hidden nearby in the desert, known only to the wandering Arabs.

He had, he claimed, ‘certain evidence’ – though it can have been little more than the hearsay of other travellers – that the carvings to be found there would prove to be ancient inscriptions, similar to those he had already sketched at Petra.

Doughty must have known that his chances of getting permission in time to join that year’s pilgrimage were slim. Even if the Royal Geographical Society had replied at once, with all the influence such an august body could muster, there would barely be time for the Ottoman functionaries in Constantinople to go through the formalities – and he had already discovered in Damascus how the official talent for prevarication could eat into the days and weeks.

But neither the Royal Geographical Society nor the British Association was interested in sponsoring his journey. Much of the area he was travelling had already been studied, and the rest was due to be surveyed during the next couple of years, they noted. And there was no urgency about their deliberations: Doughty never heard from the British Association at all, and by the time the RGS considered his letter in November, he was on his way back to Damascus.