The hobble reduced the camels to an amusingly inelegant gait. Unable to stretch out their forelegs to anything like their full extent, they shuffled forward instead with tiny steps, an awkward mince that was an absurd contrast to the great length of their limbs. When they wanted to cover ground more quickly while hobbled – whether from fear or having spotted food – they lurched forward with both forelegs together in a rude canter. Their lower lips fell down and quivered each time their padded hoofs landed with a jolt.
By the time we were ready to move on again, lunch had lasted more than two hours. This was far too long. Travelling by camel was already a slow business without holding it up further. We came to the reluctant conclusion that having a lunch stop and covering a respectable distance in a day were mutually exclusive. Having seen us fumble around uselessly while attempting to repack and load the baggage on to the camels, Abd al Wahab, who was never a great eater anyway, thought the same, and we never unloaded the camels again for a lunch break.
The absence of this midday meal was the ‘first inconvenience’ suffered by Frederick Horneman, the explorer who in 1796 was commissioned by the African Society to explore the continent from Cairo. He had had a difficult start to his expedition. The French fleet had landed at the coast and the invasion of Egypt was under way. Initially imprisoned, he was later presented to Napoleon himself, who offered the traveller his protection for the onward journey. ‘Young, robust, and, in point of constitution and health, suited to a struggle with different climates and fatigues,’ Horneman nevertheless was a man who liked his food. ‘We had travelled from day-break till noon, and no indication appeared of halt or refreshment,’ he groaned, ‘when I observed the principal and richest merchants gnawing a dry biscuit and some onions, as they went on; and was then, for the first time, informed, that it was not customary to unload the camels for regular repast, or to stop during the day-time, but in cases of urgent necessity.’
Our first and last lunch break ended as soon as Abd al Wahab had retrieved the camels, who had wandered off several hundred yards. A camel is an intelligent and stubborn animal. He understands life is more comfortable without a heavy load on his back so can hardly be blamed for trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the deposited baggage whenever the occasion presents itself. Besides, there is always the siren call to freedom across the desert. It has always been like this. Richardson’s camels were no different. ‘The camels are terrible things for straying,’ he complained. ‘If they are surrounded with immense patches of the most choice herbage, even which is their delicium, they still keep on straying the more of it over miles and miles.’ In this respect, Gobber was the worst culprit. Whatever time of day we stopped, he would always make a doomed bid for freedom, invariably heading for his beloved Ghadames with unerring accuracy. The other four, buoyed by his confident departure for better things, would soon follow his lead. Sometimes they would wander maddeningly far.
The first week passed in an aching, weary blur. A little dazed and more often than not exhausted, I did not manage to keep a diary. Part of the problem was a lack of fitness. I had never walked more than twenty miles a day, day in, day out and now wished I had paid a little more attention to Asher’s exhortations on pre-departure fitness. It was also a question of acclimatization, learning the routine of desert travel – the early nights and the waking at dawn – and becoming used to the meagre quantities of food, which seemed to consist almost entirely of tuna fish in various guises. We existed in a condition of permanent ravenousness. By the end of each day bones were groaning, stomachs were rumbling and feet were in shock. There never seemed to be a free moment. We were either walking or riding, cooking or washing up, packing or unpacking the camels, hobbling the camels one minute, rounding them up and removing the hobbles the next, adjusting loads or repairing saddles. The only time when there was nothing to do we slept.
The days of hungry monotony marching across unrelieved plains were enlivened periodically by the sight of Ned filing his nails carefully on the back of Gobber, who became his favourite mount during this early stage. At other times I would look across to see a figure striding away from the caravan at some arbitrary tangent, lost in P. G. Wodehouse’s Life at Blandings, his scruffily arranged shish flapping hopelessly behind him in the wind, tufts of hair sprouting between the gaps. Occasionally, he would look up to see where he was, check his course abruptly, and then wander off again.
For the first two mornings, getting started was frustratingly slow. Too tired at night to pack away the opened boxes of food, we woke late to find a confused mess of loads strewn across the camp. Abd al Wahab, an exemplar of quiet efficiency, had removed the five hobbles tied around the camels’ knees (in addition to those around the ankles) to prevent them escaping at night, and set them off grazing. Too polite to wake us, he had already lit a fire and was preparing tea. With breakfast over, the camels had to be rounded up, hobbled at the knee again, and loaded. Abd al Wahab and Abd an Nibbi had prepared several camel bags for us. The design was simple but ingenious. A rope was tied around a stone inside the top of each side of the bag and made into a loop. The two loops were then passed over the camel’s back, slipped into corresponding loops from a bag on the camel’s other side, and held in place by two pieces of wood inserted at right angles. Water bidouns, tied together in specially sewn bags, were similarly loaded.
‘What time is it?’ asked Abd al Wahab as we set off after our first night in the desert. Embarrassed, I told him it was 11 a.m. He looked mortified. We needed kicking into shape. ‘This is not good. We must leave at 8.30 or 9,’ he admonished. Earlier than that, it was too cold to start, he added. He told us we had to repack the bags at night and make sure the things we needed for dinner – such as food, teapot, mess tins, saucepan and plates – were in one readily accessible bag and not buried at the bottom of different sacks. We should also get up much earlier in the morning, he said pointedly.
We had only been walking an hour after this inauspicious start when a smart Land Rover in British Racing Green appeared on the plain. It was Abd an Nibbi and Billal coming to check up on us and deliver fresh bread and a large bag of oranges. They teased Abd al Wahab for the extremely modest distance we had covered in the past twenty-four hours – thirteen miles that had felt like fifty. ‘My God, you are slow!’ said Abd an Nibbi.
Demonstrating great and undeserved loyalty to his new travelling companions, Abd al Wahab rebuffed their comments. He told them we were doing well and our camel skills, still next to nonexistent, were improving. It was kind of them to come but we hoped this was not going to be a daily event. We had not come to the desert to see cars.
We settled into a certain routine, continuing across the plains, already yearning for a change of scenery and what we then fondly considered the romance of sand dunes. Instead, we traversed an unending, rolling mass of flinty grey and wondered why this expanse was called the Red Plain. In the daytime the desert sun sucked all colour out of the landscape, leaving a dazzling blandness in its place. It was only at dawn and dusk that it came to life with the richest lilacs, mauves, navy blues, pinks, reds and ambers flooding across the horizon to chase off this searing austerity.
Moving up a wadi (dried riverbed) filled with scrub we reached our first well on the fourth day. A trough made of rough pieces of stone ran next to the well itself, which was covered with a sheet of metal, complete with rope and rubber vessel. Seeing the water being drawn up by Abd al Wahab splashing into the trough, the camels registered a flicker of interest and walked over to see what all the fuss was about. An effete bunch of young men – all were geldings – they quickly arranged themselves to best effect, the three whites flanked by the dark mass of Gobber on one side and Asfar, my beige, on the other. In unison, they lowered their heads gracefully, sucked up a formidable quantity of water and walked off with a look of supreme indifference, spraying us with their dripping muzzles as they tossed their heads from side to side.
From an aesthetic perspective alone, it was difficult not to be won over by Asfar. Tall and slender, with his head held high, he walked with the dignified gait and self-confident bearing of a thoroughbred. His coat was the colour of honey, his black eyelashes were of an excessive, dandified length and he had the tuftiest ears imaginable. He was