In an unhappy display of camel racism, the three whites generally refused to have anything to do with dark brown Gobber. Interaction between him and this group was generally restricted to provocative attacks – usually bites to his rump – by Bobbles. It was Asfar who bridged this divide, getting on equally well with both camps, and maintaining camel morale with discreet diplomacy. Ned had chosen Gobber as his mount, perhaps out of sympathy, and evidently felt obliged to defend him at all costs, both against my jokes and the regular sallies from Bobbles. Riding Gobber was a perverse decision, though. However good-natured and stoic a camel, he was also unquestionably the slowest. A plodding, barrel-chested animal, if he had been a cricketer he would have been the village blacksmith batting at number eleven.
The next day, with laborious, stuttering steps we climbed a pass east of the ridge of Qa’rat Wallamad and arrived at another bleak plateau at about 2,000 feet above sea level. On the ground were small stones arranged in a definite outline, the size of a small house in circumference, with a marked recess in one side. Next to them was a rectangular mound of stones the length of a man. We stopped for a minute and looked at these strange features.
‘This is an old mosque where travellers in the desert could pray,’ explained Abd al Wahab. ‘Now people do not use it because they do not travel by camel anymore.’ The recess was the qiblah, which indicated the direction in which the faithful should pray to face Mecca. ‘And this,’ he said, pointing to the smaller outline, ‘is the grave of a traveller who died in the desert.’ It was as remote a spot as you could find.
Later that afternoon, two tiny puppies, one a grubby white, the other black and white, suddenly appeared and began to trot beside us, gaining in confidence until they were almost at our heels. We thought they might have been abandoned by their owners because we had discovered them next to car tracks. Their chances of survival seemed slim.
‘No, they will be fine. They belong to farmers over there,’ said the unsentimental Abd al Wahab, pointing vaguely to a line of raised ground in the distance. They looked desperate things, squeaking pathetically and looking exhausted from their efforts to keep up with the massive camels. I felt the same. That evening, after twenty-seven miles – our most productive day yet – my feet were screaming in my stiff new walking boots as we limped across a rambling pasture of rough scrub. In front of us, his profile uncertain in the dreamy glow of sunset, a young Touareg from Dirj, the oasis eighty miles east of Ghadames, was tending a flock of sheep and goats, perhaps 200 of them. The sun was strong but sinking, brightening and blurring the clumps of vegetation into a steaming amber haze as we made a weary camp. Ned and I flopped to the ground with aching legs that felt like iron rods. Abd al Wahab, as unmoved as ever by our exertions that day, walked off purposefully to hunt for firewood. Nothing seemed to tire the man.
Nights were freezing. On this higher plain, as we trudged along the Wadi Qa’rat al Handua, the temperature dipped sharply. Mornings found a pretty covering of frost on our mauve sleeping bags, from which cosiness there was little incentive to depart. I woke each day to the soft cadences of Abd al Wahab beginning his prayers with ‘Allahu akbar’ (God is great). From my sleeping bag he was an undefined silhouette in the darkness. Listening to the steady flow of his prayers and watching his shadowy figure perform the acts of devotion, rising up, kneeling down, bowing down again, his head touching the ground, was a marvellous way to begin the day. You could sense him shivering in the hostile chill as his modulated voice rushed through this first prayer of the day. I lay on my back watching the bruised sky slowly lighten to dawn and listened to this whispered poetry of praise, one of the most beautiful and evocative aspects of Islam.
‘In the desert, prayers are no mere blind obedience to religious dogma, but an instinctive expression of one’s inmost self,’ wrote Ahmed Hassanein Bey, the Egyptian diplomat who in 1923 travelled 2,200 miles by camel and discovered the ‘lost oases’ of Jebel Arkenu and Jebel Ouenat, south-east of Kufra. ‘The prayers at night bring serenity and peace. At dawn, when new life has suddenly taken possession of the body, one eagerly turns to the Creator to offer humble homage for all the beauty of the world and of life, and to seek guidance for the coming day. One prays then, not because one ought, but because one must.’ Richardson, a robust Christian of Victorian England, regarded Muslims as ‘superstitious pharisees’. But he, too, was moved by the religious devotion of his travelling companions.
It was a refreshing, though at the same time a saddening sight, to see the poor Arab camel-drivers pray so devoutly, laying their naked foreheads upon the sharp stones and sand of The Desert. People who had literally so few of the bounties of Providence, many of them scarcely any thing to eat – and yet these travel-worn, famished men supplicated the Eternal God with great and earnest devotion! What a lesson for the fat, over-fed Christian!
Emerging slowly and with the greatest conceivable reluctance from our cocoons each morning, we were met by the instant smash of cold. It numbed limbs and made fingers useless when they were needed to tie and untie knots during the loading of the camels. Unlike any cold I had felt before it seemed to dig deep into my bones. Swathed in blankets and woolly hats, we cut ridiculous figures, panting vigorously, shivering and trying to revive frozen hands around the morning fire. At least we were not alone in feeling the chill. It was just less excusable because we had warmer clothes than Abd al Wahab and down sleeping bags rather than a few woollen blankets to keep us warm at night. Shrouded beneath the erect, pointed hood of his woollen jalabiya, Abd al Wahab looked like a character from the mythical world of Tolkien. He beat his hands together, muttered, ‘Sugga wajid,’ (It’s very cold), and then disappeared to bring in the camels, something for which we were not yet considered ready.
One of the most miserable tasks of the morning (after getting up) was washing up, usually done while Abd al Wahab was fetching the camels. The saucepan, mess tin, spoons, forks and plates were all encrusted with the remnants of the tuna fish pasta from the previous night, the glasses sticky from the heavily sugared tea. With no water to spare, we filled them up with freezing sand and scoured them with bare hands. For the first few times, there was at least a certain novelty about washing up. After that, Ned and I both loathed it equally. If there was ever an opportunity of escaping washing up duty – such as walking off to bring the camels in ourselves – we took it unashamedly. Ned seemed to be particularly skilled at evading the job. Sometimes, usually when I was feeling irritated and therefore petty, it led to arguments. They went like this:
Justin: ‘How come you never do the washing up?’
Ned (heading away from the camp in the direction of the camels): ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Justin.’
Justin: ‘Well, you’re doing it tomorrow. I’m fed up with doing it every morning.’
Ned: ‘Oh, shut up.’
Long (by our standards) walking days ended around dusk when we had found pasturage for the camels and fuel for our fire. In this part of the western desert it was common enough. Later, the grazing would be perilously scarce. Evenings, too, had their own routine. On stopping for the day, the camels were immediately unloaded and hobbled. They pottered off into the thickening darkness while we set about the most important ritual of the day. The first glass of tea in the evening was always a much longed for treat. In England we would have considered it unpalatably sweet, but after a day tramping across this empty wilderness, it was perfect. Hassanein Bey was initially shocked by the sweetness of the tea prepared by his Bedouin. ‘The result would have driven a housewife of the West almost insane,’ he wrote, ‘but it is a wonderful stimulant after a hard day’s trek in the desert, and a glorious revival of one’s energies and spirits.’
For Abd al Wahab, a man whose emotional repertoire did not include excitement, preparing tea was something of a sacred rite. It was unthinkable that either Ned or I could make it. With great care he would extract a small amount of tea leaves from a bag, fill his beaten-up teapot with water and put it into the fire to boil from cold, raking the embers around it. Within a few minutes tea was bubbling from the spout, hissing onto the fire below. It was not strong enough yet for Abd al Wahab so was left to brew noisily.