So Doughty spent twenty frustrating days in Maan, becoming well known in the streets and coffee houses, as he tried to glean more information about the monuments of Medain Salih. He also took to wandering through the flint beds just outside the tumbledown clay wall around the town, where he found traces of still earlier inhabitants than those of Petra. Lying near the surface, to his astonishment, were seven flint tools, chipped to a sharp edge. It was a tribute to Doughty’s own powers of observation, sharpened at the archaeological site of Hoxne all those years before, that he recognized them. They were another imaginative link with people from centuries before. ‘We must suppose them of rational, that is an human labour. But what was that old human kindred which inhabited the land so long before the Semitic race?’38
They were, indeed, from long before the Semitic race, some of them dating back to Lower Palaeolithic times, hundreds of thousands of years before the appearance of modern man. Forty years later Doughty presented the axes, amongst other trophies, to Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum – and along with them, incidentally, his own clumsy effort to copy the craftsmen of prehistory.
Today they shine dully in shades of green, brown, and grey, still fitting snugly into the palm of the hand, still sharp along the chipped edges, but each one now carrying a precise little note, in Doughty’s schoolmasterly hand, to say where it was found.
‘They were certainly a significant find – they wouldn’t have seen many pieces like this in Britain in 1915,’ says Alison Roberts, the collections manager in the museum’s Department of Antiquities. ‘Not much was known about the Palaeolithic era in Syria or the Near East at that time, and most European archaeologists would have been as excited as Doughty himself to see them. The writing on them is interesting too – it shows Doughty was a very careful, conscientious collector. A lot of people weren’t, in those days.’
When he found them, though, Doughty’s attention was fixed on Medain Salih. Everything he heard simply whetted his appetite more keenly: the cities lay close together near the pilgrim trail, about halfway between Maan and Medina, their rock chambers like those he had already seen at Petra, but bigger – and every doorway had an inscription and the figure of a falcon or an eagle, wings outspread, carved over it. However close the links with Petra, he believed there was every chance that he might find the remains of a previously unknown desert civilization.
He used all his powers of persuasion with the governor. Although the journey would be difficult and dangerous, he argued, it would not take him into the area of the two Holy Cities which were forbidden to non-Muslims on pain of death. But it was useless: the governor had clearly decided not to take the responsibility of allowing him to make the journey. He would have to travel north to Damascus and try to find more powerful backing.
So, after failing to get permission in Maan, he set off for Damascus. Eager as he was, he does not seem to have hurried on his journey.39 He spent several months wandering through the countryside, adding to his collection of inscriptions and stories of the region’s biblical past. It was hard travelling, often with nothing more than a night under the stars in the shelter of a few rocks at the end of the day – but it took Doughty deep into the history of the ancient land. He found a chain of old watch-towers and fortresses stretching a hundred miles or so into the desert, each one with its own story – one was ‘a kasr of the old Yehud’, a castle of the ancient Jews; another was reported to be a palace, and a third, scattered with broken columns, and with a massive marble stairway leading from the deserted entrance hall, now no more than the den of some wild beast.
There were silent piles of stones still standing where they had been painstakingly gathered in long-abandoned fields; entire towns and villages, ruined and deserted, which seemed to date back hundreds of years.
The ruins … are built without mortar, with the uncanny natural blocks of flintstone and limestone. There are even, in several of the remains of the regular buildings, foundation walls, vaults, and round arches made of square carved stones which on appearance might have been made by Roman hands – column pieces, marble fragments, etc …40
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’.41 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