Justin Marozzi - South from Barbary - Along the Slave Routes of the Libyan Sahara

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 bidoun s, 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 a handsome fellow and knew it. A good-natured beast with gentle manners, he was also the swiftest of our small caravan and walked with a quick, light step. Where Gobber thundered and Bobbles (named after the three protuberances on his nose) whined, Asfar simply purred. The other camels seemed to be fond of him, too.

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.