As word of his wandering spread, Doughty was becoming something of a legend among the Arabs: a European Christian traveller, with an unaccountable interest in unregarded ruins and old carvings, and an insatiable appetite for anything fellow-travellers, villagers or wanderers on the road could tell him about their life. The Arabs with whom he travelled told him that the region had hardly been seen by Europeans, despite its moderate climate and plentiful water; if he encountered occasional suspicion and hostility, he appears to have been treated much of the time with a sort of amused acceptance. Mohammed Aly, later to be his unpredictable host at Medain Salih, was one of a number of people whom he met during this period; so too was Mohammed Said, the Kurdish pasha who was in charge of the Hadj caravan which Doughty eventually joined. The latter, Doughty boasted, had ‘known me a traveller in the lands beyond Jordan, and took me for a well-affected man that did nothing covertly’.21 It was to prove a useful, as well as a creditable, reputation.
In Sinai he found a naked country, its rocky mountains camouflaged by neither vegetation nor soil, and the memory stayed with him through his life, to surface in his last years, in the poem Mansoul.
An austere soil is that …
Whose bald, sun-bleached, gaunt untrod mountain rocks
Stand, like some bone-work of a former earth … 22
The memory is geological in its scale, and there is also a sense of a lost, disappeared world – a sense that is reinforced by the few mysterious traces of human life.
Doughty was on a lonely track south of Suez, heading for an old Greek Christian monastery, when he saw what seemed to be a strange stone cottage, its doorway blocked up with rocks and brushwood. An ageing Arab camel-driver barred his way. ‘I would have removed some sticks to look in, but the old Beduin cameleer made signs with the hand … that men lay therein, stark upon their backs with closed eyes, and with the other, he stopped his nostrils …’23
His curiosity had taken him to the doorway of a bedu burial chamber, one of dozens of round, stone-built huts he found huddled together in little groups in the most barren and secluded parts of the region.
Later he described them as ‘mosquito huts’, supposedly built by the former inhabitants of Sinai for protection through the night from swarms of insects. In reality, neither he nor the Arabs who were travelling with him had any idea of their original purpose, their age, or who had built them, but they caught his imagination as unchanged remnants of a distant past. ‘They could easily have been in existence for just a few years, or even a few centuries. I have a conjecture they could have been the huts of immigrants who had spread out across the entire Egyptian stretches of desert since the time of Antonius …’24 As the bones of the landscape were naked to the eye, so too were the rare marks of man – not buried or ruined, not needing reconstruction like the buildings at Ephesus, but simply left behind on a barren landscape, among the
Inhuman silent solitude of sharp dust;
Wind-burnished stones and rocks.25
And the feeling that nothing changed was reflected, too, in the few people who scratched a meagre living in Sinai. They lived along the Red Sea coast as they had done for centuries. Neither the lush imaginations of the Victorian orientalists nor even the poverty he had seen himself in North Africa can have prepared Doughty for this glimpse of timeless Arab hardship. ‘These people had neither clothing nor a roof for protection: in the main they live miserably from the food which they can fish or gather from along the shore. The Arabs rightly put down their dark skin colour to their perpetual hunger and nakedness.’26
Even in the grim hierarchy of suffering that Arab life represented. these nomadic fishermen must have been near the bottom. Later, as he travelled with the bedu tribesmen, Doughty would focus upon the life and the culture that could lie behind hardship; here, no doubt still feeling himself to be the detached European traveller studying a strange and savage people, he saw no further than their grinding poverty.
It was here in Sinai that his search for the roots of humanity really began. The landscape, the mysterious buildings, even the people themselves, showed little sign of having been changed by the centuries: here for the first time he could see the perspective that his travels would offer of the origins of human life. The search for the distant history of Arabia, he believed, would help to supply an answer to the question which Isaiah had posed in the Bible, and which rang in his mind: ‘What was that old human kindred which inhabited the land so long before the Semitic race? Does not the word of Isaiah come to our hearts concerning them? … “What was the rock whence ye were hewn, and the hole of the pit whence ye were digged?’”27
Most of his notes from Sinai deal with the geology and the structure of the region: to an even greater extent than elsewhere on his travels, this was a land where history could be read in the rocks and stones, and picked up from the occasional ruins of human habitation. But that history was clear, the links between past and present undisguised. Within this bare, forgotten and cruel land could be found not only the ancient soul of Arabia, but also the first clues to the origins of human civilization.
In the spring of 1875 Doughty left Sinai, apparently without much regret, making his way north through the complex system of wadis and granite cliffs towards Aqaba and on through the biblical land of Edom to Damascus. With him were an Egyptian and a bedu guide, fellow-travellers on a journey where every encounter with the tribesmen could mean either mortal danger, or the warmest of welcomes.
The town of Maan,28 which was their first destination, lay at the edge of a desolate plain, covered with flints and stones, with no shelter from the wind or the beating sun. Here, in a dip in the ground, they waited nervously until nightfall before setting out across the open country to the town. His two companions, more alive to the dangers of the route than Doughty was, warned that any passing group of nomads might now be a threat: their only safety lay in hiding until dusk. It was midnight before they arrived at the town. ‘The place lay all silent in the night. We rode in at the ruinous open gateway and passed the inner gate, likewise open, to the suk: there we found benches of clay and spread our carpets upon them, to lodge in the street.’29 Doughty’s plan now was to travel on to Petra, the Nabataean city which had been made famous by the young Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt30 more than sixty years before. This, surely, would be the climax of his painstaking studies of ruined settlements and inscriptions. ‘I had then no other intention than to see Petra. I could speak very little Arabic, not having before studied the history of those countries,’ he wrote later.31
The ancient rock city was only five hours’ ride away, and he set off eagerly, past another ruined site, long stripped of its white marble pavements by the rich traders of Damascus, and on through the outlying cornfields of Maan – fields where the desert met the sown, in Gertrude Bell’s later phrase, and where the farmers had no choice but to offer half their crops to the bedu as a bribe for an untroubled life.
How would the local Arabs react to the arrival of this mysterious red-bearded European, riding a mule and wearing