On the Shores of the Mediterranean (39 page)

Tobruk, with its shuttered shops and dusty streets full of garbage, which made it look as if a civil rather than a world war was going on in it, was still the noisy, unlovely place it had always been, the only real difference being that now there was more of it. It was also still extremely dangerous. Even in the town people were still being blown sky-high by mines and booby traps, reminding me of the day when a corporal had gone through the roof of a dwelling, having sat on a long-unused lavatory seat that had been booby-trapped way back by some member of the opposing side with a grotesque sense of humour. ‘Must have been something he’d eaten,’ was the comment of someone with an equally macabre idea of what was funny who had witnessed his ascent.

So, not believing for a moment that we would be allowed to, I asked if we could make an expedition to Bir Hakim, one of the so-called boxes, the desert fortresses that had been the scene of one of the many big battles that had preceded Rommel’s capture of Tobruk in June 1942, the biggest disaster suffered by the Allied armies since Dunkirk.

Bir Hakim, which, depending on where you put the accents, means either the Well of the Ruler or the Well of the Doctor, and can also be spelt Hacheim or Hukayyim, according to taste, lies about fifty or sixty miles south-west of Tobruk and about forty miles south of the Gazala Inlet on the Mediterranean which is, itself, about forty miles west of Tobruk.

Neither of the Beduin brothers had ever heard of Bir Hakim but they were thrilled at the prospect of getting away from the town even for half a day, although they did say that the whole area was infested with mines and terribly dangerous; and they immediately set off to talk to the Secretary of the Tobruk People’s Committee, the equivalent of a mayor, a courteous, intelligent man who had welcomed us on our arrival, to ask the police for the loan of a couple of four-wheel-drive vehicles, to find a Beduin in whose tribal area the place lay to act as a guide through the minefields to it and save us all from being blown to pieces, and to organize a picnic, all of which kept them occupied for a bit.

The following morning we set out in a couple of Nissan patrol cars and out beyond the anti-tank ditch at El Adem, about twenty miles south of Tobruk, we picked up the Beduin who was to take us through the minefields. He was waiting for us at one of the new supermarket-type
souks
which had been set up here in what was the middle of nowhere.

The Beduin, whose name was Adem Gamary, was a member of the Omar Mukta, a tribe whose territory, the large area of desert on which its members grazed their camels, sheep and goats and
to some extent raised crops, was bounded to the east by the land of the Obeidad Beduin, a boundary invisible to an outsider but one that by them is very accurately delineated. All Beduin are extremely jealous of their possessions and land boundaries are one of the principal causes of the innumerable quarrels that are always breaking out between them, a characteristic that extends to all Arabs and makes unity of purpose almost impossible among them except for relatively short periods.

He was about thirty years old, had a drooping moustache and wore a long overmantle made of the same goat-hair material as the Beduin tents are made from, for which his wife had spun and dyed and woven the wool; on his head he wore a white kerchief known as a
mandil
. The only European items were his shoes. When he wasn’t living alone in the desert, tending his camels and his sheep and goats, he lived in a small, single-storey house not far from the Commonwealth cemetery on the outskirts of Tobruk. As the man who was to take us to Bir Hakim and, one hoped, back again, without being blown up, he sat next to the driver in the first Nissan.

It was a brilliant morning, almost windless, with a few tattered rags of cirrus high in what was otherwise a cloudless sky, in which from time to time one of the Leader’s Migs or Mirages made a sudden ear-splitting appearance, streaking low across the northern horizon. Everything was crystal clear, the air dry and cold, like a morning in early spring in England. What we were in was a treeless steppe, here and there slightly undulating, in which the tussocks of vegetation were interspersed in some places with expanses of scattered stones. This was the terrain in which the opposing armies fought, fly-infested and horribly hot in summer when the temperature sometimes rose to around 120°F and the vehicles churned the powdered limestone into a fine, stifling, penetrating dust which often, when the wind blew, for days on
end became a pea-soup fog, halting everything. In winter it could be bitterly cold and when it rained in some places the surface turned to mud that could bog almost any sort of vehicle, wheeled or tracked.

Although apparently endless, this semi-desert was only about fifty miles wide. Beyond it to the south was the real desert in which the main bodies of the armies never operated, well beyond the range of their armour. The real desert was left to such specialist organizations as the Long Range Desert Group which carried out long-range reconnaissances and took agents behind the enemy lines, and the SAS on their way to attack Axis airfields.

Down there the only flies were the ones these intruders brought with them, the only rain a freak thunderstorm, otherwise it might not rain for ten or twenty years, down in the
hammadas
and the
serirs
, the stony and gravel deserts, and among the massifs, some of which were up to 6000 feet high. Down in the sand seas it never rained: in the Great Sand Sea, the one that was as big as the whole of Ireland, the Calanascio Sand Sea, the Rebiana and the Murzuk Sand Seas, in which there is not even a stone, let alone a shrub, seas in which when one of the storms called the
quibli
arise the sand sometimes moves across the face of the desert in what appears to be a solid wall up to 2000 feet high.

Knowing these things it is difficult to believe that 10,000 years ago, before the water failed, what is now desert was not desert at all but a region in which men kept cattle, hunted ostrich and depicted these happenings of their day to day life on the rocks.

Here, in the semi-desert, travelling through the middle of what is probably the most mine-infested battlefield in the world on a track that because of them was for most of the way only one vehicle wide, there was ample evidence of life. Little bands of wagtails, perhaps attracted by the rain that had fallen in the last few days, were flying low in search of insects, and wherever one
looked there were big herds of sheep and goats, and hundreds of Arabian camels, dromedaries with single humps, all browsing the
agram
and
hillab
bushes. From time to time we passed a place where the Omar Mukta Beduin had scraped the surface and planted it with wheat or barley, fencing it in to keep the animals out with barbed wire that had been lying about for forty years or more, crops that were already turning the land a brilliant green and would be ready to harvest in what in Europe would be springtime. And soon, if it rained again, it would be alive with wild flowers. Occasionally, in the distance, but few and far between, we saw one of the Omar Mukta herdsmen who, like their kinsman in the leading Nissan, would stay out here in the wilderness for anything from ten days to a fortnight at a time, wherever there was water for the animals, subsisting on camel’s milk, sleeping on the bare earth wrapped in their mantles, after which they would return to their families for a while, like sailors coming home from the sea.

The Omar Mukta who owned these herds were rich. Camels that in the 1960s had changed hands at the equivalent of £60–70 ($84–98) now fetched £250–600 ($350–840) in the camel markets, while sheep sold for around £120 ($168) and lambs £60 ($84) or so. If, as sometimes happened, a herd of camels walked into a field of pressure mines or tripped a wire on an anti-personnel mine, the loss could be disastrous. And sometimes the herdsman walked into one, too.

It is not difficult to understand why the camel is so prized by the Libyan Beduin now that so many of them who had previously taken jobs as cheap, unskilled labour with foreign companies carrying out contracts in Libya have gone back to living a semi-nomadic, pastoral life on the edge of the great deserts, as their forefathers did before them.

Every summer they shear the valuable, long, fine, woolly hair
from the underside of the animals’ necks, from their humps and from the upper parts of their legs. The hide is thick and tough and it used to be said that the best leather for making sandals came from the camel-hide sacks that had been used to keep dates in. They eat and enjoy the flesh. The meat of a young camel is rather like veal. The hump provides them with lard. They drink the milk, the dung provides them with fuel, and the urine is, or was, used by men and women to wash their hair, and also to wash their babies. A camel costs nothing to maintain, lives for between forty and fifty years, can carry loads of up to 1000 lbs, 25 miles a day for a total of three days without water, and can continue to do so provided that it is given water every fourth day. Carrying nothing but a rider and his waterskin it can travel anything up to 50 miles a day for five days, or 100 miles a day if given water daily.

They are incredibly hardy. A camel can support itself on a diet of dry sticks or twigs while other animals die of starvation. A camel will never sink down, even when heavily laden, except on the orders of its master, unless to die. Even when ordered to rest, at a halt in the journey, it prefers to do so in the full heat of the sun, never in the shade. A camel can never be left alone to find its own fodder in areas where there are plants that are poisonous to it as it is unable to distinguish between what is poisonous to it and what is not, as a band of explorers discovered when they crossed the Australian continent from east to west with camels. On the other hand, they have a highly developed sense of smell, especially for water, which enables them to detect its presence up to a mile away. Untameable in the sense that a wild horse can eventually be tamed, even though born in captivity, a camel never deigns to admit that it recognizes its owner even after forty years have passed, although in fact it must be able to do so. Quite often it will develop such a violent, malevolent and totally irrational hatred for him that it can only be assuaged by the owner taking
his clothes off and getting a third party to offer them to the camel, which satisfies its feelings by trampling on them and kicking him to death, as it were,
in absentia
, while the owner remains concealed at such a distance – presumably something over a mile – that the camel cannot smell him. So much for the Arabian camel, or dromedary, which, commonsense suggests, should be left to the Beduin to deal with.

And that was all that there was to be seen in this part of the desert, apart from old, rusty cans that had contained bully beef, jam, Lusty’s Meat Loaf (one of the deadlier secret weapons used in the Second World War), German
Leberwurst
and suchlike, some barbed wire, a few bust-up motor tyres and mines.

I had expected the desert to have been more or less as it was when I was last in it, a graveyard, or rather a series of graveyards full of smashed and burnt-out tanks that had not been worth recovering, vehicles, guns and crashed aircraft and all the other imaginable and unimaginable debris of war. The tank graveyards were particularly sinister. I once passed through one of them south of the Trigh Capuzzo, near El Adem, but because derelict tanks sometimes still had the remains of their crews inside them, the driver perhaps sitting at the controls, the commander still gazing into what was left of the periscope, I never looked inside them. Later, in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, I met a gunner officer who told me he knew a man who, when he passed a knocked-out tank with its hatches closed, used to open them, to free the spirits locked up inside.

Now, apart from the wire and the tins and the mines, the desert was almost as empty as it had been before the fighting began. This was because, some time in the fifties, a scrap metal merchant, said to be an Israeli named Nahoum, had appeared at Tobruk and offered the Beduin the prospect of unheard-of wealth, something like 20 piastres, for every 500 lbs of scrap metal they could bring
in on their camels; and in order that they could reduce the metal to manageable proportions he had them taught how to lift antitank mines, extract the explosive and use it to blow the tanks apart. This led to a spectacular increase of loss of life among the Beduin who now, in addition to stepping on mines and being blown to pieces while engaged in the everyday work of looking after their herds and flocks, began to blow themselves up, either in the process of constructing their home-made bombs, or when setting them off, often together with their women and children whom they had roped in to help in the business. One of those killed while engaged securing a straying camel was an uncle of Mr Jedalla, one of the Beduin brothers, who stepped on a mine a few yards to the east of the road from Tobruk to El Adem. Hearing the explosion at a distance his nephew at once set off in search of him, but by the time he reached the place what was left of his uncle was already being eaten by birds of prey.

As the sun rose higher and the land began to warm under its influence, it became the subject of mirage. Away on the southern horizon, what looked like plantations of bushy-topped trees, magnified versions of the
agram
and
hillab
bushes, came into being to be glimpsed momentarily across equally transient lakes of shimmering, non-existent water, while the camels were subject to the same distorting process, alternatively expanding and contracting as if they were inflatable toys.

As the sun rose, so did the wind. It raised dust devils, thin columns of dust twenty or thirty feet high, miniature whirlwinds that looked like long corkscrews and went chasing one another across the face of the desert until they reached some stony or damp expanse in which there was not enough dust to fuel them, where they fell dead in their tracks.