Survivor: The Autobiography (50 page)

Our camels climbed arduously the soft slopes, and, slithering knee-deep, made slow progress. No one remained mounted. Indeed, there were places where we had to dig footholds in the sands to enable our animals to climb, other places where we turned back to find an easier way. No horse could have negotiated these southern sands, even if brought here, and the waterless marches behind us, with many consecutive days of ten hours in the saddle, would have made the bringing impossible. A motorcar, too, would surely have charged these slopes in vain.

‘The gift of God’ – that is the illuminating name by which the Arab nomad knows the camel; and how great is his consideration for her! Time and time again I found myself the only member of our party in the saddle, the Arabs preferring to walk and so spare their mounts, running hither and thither to collect a juicy tuft of camelthorn with which to feed the hungry brutes as we marched along. In the deserts, halts are called, not in accordance with a European watch, but where Nature has, for the nonce, blessed the site with camel pastures. The great ungainly beasts, which you start by despising and learn greatly to admire, are the only means by which you move forward to success or back and out to safety. If camels perish in the remoter waterless wastes, their masters must perish with them.

Christmas Eve was to be a night of excitement and false alarm. We had arrived late in camp, camels had been hobbled and shooed off to the scant bushes, from behind some of which came the brisk noises of merry campfire parties. There was a sudden scream. To me it was like the hooting of an owl or the whining of some wild beast.

‘
Gom! Gom!
– Raiders! Raiders!’ shouted the excitable Bedouin, leaping to their feet, their rifles at the ready; and my Arab servant came running across to me with my Winchester and ammunition. Our
rabias
(safe-escorts) of the Awamir and Karab tribes rushed out in different directions into the night, shouting – ‘We are alert! We are alert! We are So-and-so (giving their names) of such-and-such tribes. These are our party and are under our protection.’
¹¹

The object of this was to save us from raiders of their own particular tribes, if such they were, for these would then stay their hand. The cry, I gathered, is never abused: certainly in 1928 I had owed my life, during a journey through the south-eastern borderlands, to my Harsusi
rabia
, who saved us from ambush by members of his own tribe after these had already opened fire at short range.

Our camels were now played out. Their humps, plump and large at the outset, told a story; for the hump is the barometer of the camel’s condition, and ours had fallen miserably away. To move onwards involved raising fresh camels, a contingency that had been foreseen, and Shaikh Salih sent ahead to search the Rashidi habitat. He and I had at the outset counted on the need of four relays, but in the event three proved sufficient.

Propitious rains (over great areas rain does not fall throughout the year) of last season in the sands of Dakaka had given rise to superior pastures, and to that area, therefore, the herds had this year gravitated. At the waterhole of Khor Dhahiyah we acquired a new caravan and pushed leisurely westward towards where our third caravan for the final northward dash across the sands was to assemble.

My companions scanned the sands for sign of friend or foe.

‘Look, sahib! that’s So-and-so,’ my men said, pointing to a camel’s foot impression that looked, to me, like any other. ‘See! she is gone with calf: look how deep are the impressions of her tracks!’ And so, following these in the sands, we came up with the object of our quest.

The accuracy of their divination was fascinating. Reading sand-imprints recalled fingerprint identifying in the West, except that it is far less laborious and slow, and not at all the technical job of a highly trained specialist. In fact, every Badu bred in these sands reads the sand-imprints with the readiest facility, for all creation goes unshod, except on an occasion when a Badu wears socks against extreme heat or cold – this being rare, because it is considered effeminate.

The sands are thus an open diary, and he who runs may read. Every one of my companions not only knew at a glance the foot impression of every man and every camel in my caravan, but claimed to know every one of his tribe and not a few of his enemies. No bird may alight, no wild beast or insect pass but needs must leave its history in the sands, and the record lasts until the next wind rises and obliterates it. To tell-tale sand-tracks a sand-fox and many snakes, hares, and lizards, which I added to my collection, owed their undoing, for their hiding-places were in vain.

Whenever, in future, we halted for the night, generally just before sunset, Hamad, my Murra
rabia
, would slink back over our tracks for a few miles with my telescope to ensure that we were not being tracked by an enemy, and return just after nightfall with the good news that campfires could now be safely lighted.

I picked up fragments of ostrich eggs, often in a semi-petrified condition, and members of my party had shot ostriches hereabouts in their youth, though these birds appear now to be extinct. So also the
rim
or white gazelle is becoming rare, though I saw horns lying about, while the common red gazelle and the larger edible lizards are inhabitants of the bordering steppe rather than of the sands, as is the antelope, specimens of which I shot, besides bringing home a young live one.

It is the antelope whose long, straight horns occasionally appear to be a single spear when she runs across your front, thus giving rise, as some suppose, to the ancient myth of the unicorn. This legendary guardian of chastity allowed none but virtuous maidens to approach it, when its anger turned to joy; and, singularly, today in these southern marches the only musical instrument known is a pipe made of antelope horn, which the Arab maiden plays on the joyful occasions of marriage and circumcision.

Of animal life in the sands, a small sand-coloured wolf is said to be met with in parts where subsoil water, however brackish, can be reached by pawing; a sand-coloured fox and a lynx – relatively non-drinking varieties – are commoner; and the hare, the most widespread mammal, is hunted by the Bedouin’s
salugi
¹²
dog. Of birds I saw very few – bustards, sand-larks, sand-grouse, owls, and the most common, a black raven, while old eggs in a gigantic nest show that the Abyssinian tawny eagle comes on important visits.

The full moon before the fast month of Ramadhan found us at the waterhole of Shanna, where my third, last, and much-reduced caravan (13 men and 5 pack animals) was to rendezvous. One of our old camels was ailing, and there is only one way with a worn-out camel in the desert – namely, to kill and eat it. The law of Leviticus is also the law of Islam: flesh not lawfully slaughtered is sinful to eat; wherefore the hats went round, and 56 dollars, plus her earnings due from me, satisfied the owner of the almost blind 40-year-old Fatira. The beast was slaughtered, jointed, and divided into heaps after the Arabs had all had a good swig at the contents of her bladder – they had done the same to the antelope’s bladder – and for the joints the Bedouin now cast lots.

In the steppe, where stones availed, they would have grilled the carcass on a heap of heated stones with a fire beneath – the Stone Age manner, surely! Here as much as sufficed for a meal was boiled in brackish water, and the rest they allowed to remain uncooked, and so carried it exposed on their saddles, where all the cooking that it received was drying from the heat of the sun. These saddle-dainties the Bedouin were to nibble with great relish in the marches ahead, and to declare to be very good. My own view, I confess, was one to be concealed!

The zero hour for the dash northward had arrived. Star sights and traverse-plotting showed my position on the 10 January, 1932, to be lat. 19° N, long. 50° 45’ E. My objective, Qatar, on the Persian Gulf, was thus bearing slightly to the east of north, about 330 miles in a straight line across the mysterious sands. Two only of my thirteen Bedouin – the Murras – claimed to have been over this line of desert before. I had rations left for but twenty-five days.

Clearly, no one could afford to fall ill. A hold-up for ten days, an insufficient rate of progress, a meeting with a party of raiders outnumbering us – any of these might spell disaster. Throughout my journey I was screened from any Arab encampments, that, for all I knew, might have been just over the skyline, the single exception being a tiny encampment of Murra, kinsmen of my guide, where an old man lay dying.

It was made up of one or two miserably small tents, roughly spun – doubtless by the womenfolk – of brown and white camel’s hair; tent-pegs that once had been the horns of an antelope; a hammer and a leathern bucket or two – these perhaps typical of the belongings of poor nomadic folk, among whom wealth is counted, primarily, in the noble possessions of camel herds and firearms.

Marching north, the character of the desert sands changed; from the sweeping red landscapes of Dakaka we passed through the region of Suwahib, of lighter hue and characteristic parallel ridges in echelon formation; then the white ocean calms of the central sands, succeeded by a rolling swell of redder colour; and with these changing belts the desert flora changed too, the height above sea level falling progressively.

Contrary to expectation, the great central sand ocean was found to be not waterless. We dug down to water at quite shallow depths – a fathom and a half or so; but it was so brackish as to be almost undrinkable – not unlike Epsom salts both in taste and in its effect on man and beast. There are places where even the camel cannot drink the water, though normally when pastures bring nomads to these parts their camels play the part of distillers, for they drink the water and their masters drink their milk.

The shallow waterholes of the southern sands are sometimes filled in, after water, to hinder a possible pursuer, but in the low, shallowing sands of the north, where patches of hard floor made their first appearance, the waterholes were regular wells, sometimes seventeen fathoms and more deep. They are rare and precious, too, apart from their sweeter contents, for great labour and skill have gone to their making. Both making and cleaning out, which must be done periodically, exact a toll of life, for the soft sides are prone to slip in and entomb the miners, and all that avails for revetment is the branches of dwarf sand-bushes.

Onwards through these great silent wastes my little party moved ever northwards, and my bones no longer ached at the daily demand of eight hours in the saddle. On setting out in the morning the Badu with his first foot forward would mumble some pious invocation – a constant reminder of the great uncertainty and insecurity which shadows him:

Their inborn philosophy of life is strictly fatalistic, holding that whatever comes to pass is according to a Divine and inscrutable Will. Their attitude to me, at first sullen and suspicious, changed with growing intimacy as the days passed, and they could be, with a few exceptions, cheerful and friendly companions. Under the stimulating effects of a juicy patch of camel pasture come upon unexpectedly, they would break forth into merry chanting, while around the night campfire they never tired of telling me stories from their entrancing folklore.

22 January brought the first of a series of sandstorms, and I passed many fitful nights. The hissing of the sand-laden wind, the rattling of pack-cordage, and icy cold feet – for the night temperature often fell to within five degrees of freezing point – made sleeping out of doors, without a roof over one’s head, intolerable.

Eagerly one waited for the dawn. The wind then dropped, and campfires were the scene of huddled, shivering Bedouin who now roused their camels that had been rounded up overnight for safety, and the wretched beasts shuffled off to graze and feel the warmth of the rising sun. For me the nights had tragic results, the sand-drifts having buried my instruments, making some of them of little further use.

But I was on the last lap. And though for many days sweeping, stinging, blinding winds enveloped us in a blanket of yellow mist, a fine morning came when, climbing the towering sandhill of Nakhala, I beheld before me a silver streak of sea along the faraway skyline. Success was in sight. Keeping the coast a day’s march, by report, on our right hand, our northerly course carried us through quarry-like country abounding in fossil shells, the aneroid recording below sea-level readings.

And here we came upon an interesting discovery – a lake in this wilderness. For several miles we marched along its western shore. The Bedouin, walking to the edge, brought away large chunks of rock salt that for a width of twenty feet lined its border. There along the water’s edge, too, was a line of dead white locusts, desiccated specimens of the large red variety which, collected and thrown alive on to the hot ash of the campfire, sizzles into one of the few delicacies of the Bedouin. Wretched creatures, these locusts, for they seem to delight in swarming out from the thirsty desert in springtime, only to take a suicidal plunge into the first water they come to.

Our lake behind us, we trekked on through bleak stony country, the haunt of owl and wolf, that proved to be the base of the Qatar peninsula. A Gulf
sbamal
was blowing, but its attendant cold and drizzling rain were powerless to damp the enthusiasm of my poor companions on the eve of a rare payday. They chanted the water-chants which, alas! I should be hearing for the last time, and our thirsty camels pricked up their ears with eager knowingness. And so, at last, we came to the fort of Qatar’s ruler standing bold and beckoning on the rim of the sea. The dim luxury of a bath and a square meal was at hand. I had lost a stone and a half in weight on my 650-mile camel journey, but the great south Arabian desert, hitherto a blank on our maps, had ceased to be an enigma and a reproach.