SOUTH FROM BARBARY
Along the Slave Routes ofthe Libyan Sahara
JUSTIN MAROZZI
To Julia
The hour is nigh; the waning queen walks forth to rule the later night,Crowned with the sparkle of a star, and throned on orb of ashen light:The wolf-tail sweeps the paling East to leave a deeper gloom behind.And dawn uprears her shining head, sighing with semblance of a wind:
The highlands catch yon Orient gleam, while purpling still the lowlands lie;And pearly mists, the morning-pride, soar incense-like to greet the sky.The horses neigh, the camels groan, the torches gleam, the cressets flare;The town of canvas falls, and man with din and dint invadeth air …
Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause,He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws.All other life is living death, a world where none but phantoms dwell,A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling of the camel-bell …
Wend not thy way with brow serene, fear not thy humble tale to tell:–The whispers of the Desert-wind, the tinkling of the camel’s bell.
THE KASÎDAH OF HÂJÎ ABDÛ AL-YAZDI
SIR RICHARD BURTON
Contents
CHAPTER III: ‘Really We Are in Bad Condition’
CHAPTER IV: The Journey Begins
CHAPTER VI: Christmas in Germa
CHAPTER VIII: The Hunt for Mohammed Othman
CHAPTER IX: Tuna Joins the Caravan
CHAPTER XII: Drama in the Dunes
CHAPTER XIV: Hotel Arrest in Kufra
CHAPTER XV: ‘Now You Are in Good Condition’
‘Basically, you’re going to be bloody cold.’
ANTHONY CAZALET
‘Help me with this camel,’ said Abd al Wahab, while Ned and I were busily applying Elizabeth Arden Visible Difference Eight Hour Cream to our faces. Abd al Wahab, our guide, understood camels. They were part of his world. Moisturizer was not. Hastily we packed it away, put the finishing touches to the last camel load, and marched off into the desert. We were under way.
For six years I had longed to make the journey we were now beginning. In a way I owed it to my father, for it was he who had taken me to Libya for the first time. Together, in the warmth of February, we had walked through Tripoli as the wind streamed in from the sea; past the forbidding castle, which had seen 1,000 years of wars and intrigues between marauding corsairs, pirates, Spaniards, Italians, Englishmen, Arabs and Turks, and still stared out impassively towards the southern shores of Sicily; through the ancient Suq al Mushir and into an exotic medley of sights, sounds and smells that roused the senses and stirred the imagination. Throngs of prodigiously built matrons haggled ferociously with softly spoken gold- and silversmiths for jewellery they could not afford. Some were still dressed in the same white, sheet-like farrashiyas their forebears had worn hundreds of years before. Others hid behind their gaudy hijabs (Islamic veils) as they sailed through the narrow alleys hunting for perfume. Deeper into the market, beneath a minaret from which the muaddin was calling the faithful to prayer in haunting, ululating cadences, we had found a dilapidated café, its courtyard open to the sky, and taken our places alongside men playing cards and drinking mint tea, hunched protectively over their bubbling shisha pipes stuffed with apple-flavoured tobacco.
My father’s old friend Othman had taken us for a drive around the city in his Peugeot 504, a brave wreck of a car that had somehow survived several decades of neglect. In the squalid port area, men pored over slabs of tuna and disputed prices with the fishermen. One of these, a great hulk of a man, was tenderizing an octopus, throwing it to the ground, picking it up by its tentacles and then hurling it down again and again.
‘We call Tripoli ar Roz al Bahr, the Bride of the Sea,’ Othman told me as we drove past whitewashed houses along the old corniche, watched over by the palm trees that swayed in the coastal breeze. There was something unmistakably forlorn and beautiful about this