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

After lunch, we returned to his modest room decorated with a few tokens culled from a long, nomadic life: a walking stick made from a giraffe’s shinbone, a tattered Oriental rug, a black-and-white photograph of Marrakech. Burton, Conrad, Kipling, Sassoon, Buchan and Thesiger on the bookshelves.

On equipment, he was a ruthless minimalist: ‘I wanted to meet the Bedouin on their own terms with no concessions,’ he insisted. For an Old Etonian from Edwardian England, this meant foregoing such staples of travel as tables and chairs. He had travelled barefoot in the desert, armed always with a dagger and a gun. This might be problematic in Gaddafi’s Libya. Radios, as used by Harry St John Philby, the second man ever to cross the Empty Quarter in 1932, were out. ‘When Philby travelled with the Bedouin he liked having a radio to listen to the Lord’s Test Match,’ he growled into his strawberry and vanilla ice cream. ‘To me that would have wrecked the whole thing.’

Back in London we were not having much joy with maps. We needed to get our hands on the Russian Survey maps, the most detailed and accurate maps of the Sahara, which were proving difficult to locate. Stanfords said it might take two months. We needed them in two weeks. Eventually, I tracked down a supplier on the Internet and ordered a set by email. Nothing happened. I telephoned Munich. The German voice on the other end of the telephone said the maps might arrive before we left for Libya but appeared unconcerned about whether they did. In the meantime we had to make do with the US Tactical Pilotage Charts from Stanfords, no doubt helpful if you were flying over the Libyan desert, but curiously short of detail for an expedition travelling by land.

With several days to go before our departure we paid a swift visit to Field & Trek on Baker Street to buy sleeping bags and other equipment. Sleeping bags proved easy. We lay inside threeseason down bags while an assistant enthused about their many features which would make life so comfortable. Choosing walking boots involved a lengthy discourse from him on the merits of Gore-tex versus leather. Ned, easily bored by detail, started to look distracted, as though he wished he were somewhere else. His patience, always finite, was running out.

On to socks, which surely would be straightforward. Before we could pick up a pair, the assistant launched into a glowing recommendation of Coolmax, some sort of high-tech material. Coolmax socks, designed for walking in summer, apparently boasted five special features, such as reinforced heels, ability to wick away moisture from the feet, and so it went on. I wondered what Thesiger would have made of all this. When it came to discussing the best way to filter water, mutiny broke out between the assistant and his more senior colleague. The latter, spotting the chance to talk gadgetry in front of gadget neophytes, had emerged from the farthest recesses of the shop. A peevish argument broke out between them over whether we were better off using iodine treatment or taking a more expensive water filter. Ned had even less interest in this conversation than I had and headed fast upstairs for the exit, past a Field & Trek nylon washing line with four special features.

The next problem was that neither of us knew how to navigate. A Royal Geographical Society publication on desert navigation was explicit on this point. It was imperative that every expedition should include ‘a meticulous, even perfectionist, navigator who worships at the altar of Truth rather than the altar of convenient results’. I had used a compass a long time ago while in the school cadet force. It was not much to go on. Ned was probably more proficient but did not appear to take much interest in the sort of equipment we would need. Sometimes he would telephone and in a curiously detached way make noises about buying a theodolite so we could navigate by the stars, but eventually nothing more was said of it. Perhaps he was waiting for me to find one.

Harding-Newman had shown me the famous Bagnold sun compass, a cleverly designed navigational device that made use of the shadows cast by the sun and was designed to be mounted on the front of a vehicle, but said it would not be of much use to us travelling by camel. Thesiger had surprised us by confessing he had never been able to navigate by the stars and nor did he know how to use a sun compass. My uncle, a retired naval officer, warned us off sextants. The Royal Navy used to run two-week courses teaching men how to use them, he said, and after two weeks they still had only the most basic knowledge of the instruments. We decided on the less romantic, small and inexpensive, battery-powered Global Positioning System devices to back up our compasses. These would pinpoint our location on the globe to within 10 metres or so.

Shortly before we left, the Royal Geographical Society sent me a recent guide on travelling with camels written by Michael Asher, the British desert explorer. It contained plenty of useful advice on how to choose camels, saddles and guides. Asher, a former SAS man, was insistent on fitness. ‘Whatever country you are trekking in, travelling by camel is inevitably going to involve a great deal of walking. Cardio-vascular fitness is therefore the main area to concentrate on in preparing yourself physically for a camel-trek; jogging, long-distance walking, cycling, swimming. Loading camels usually requires a certain amount of lifting so weight training is also appropriate.’

Neither Ned nor I had ever been great fitness aficionados or taken exercise for as long as we could remember. At Ned’s house in Dorset, we were quizzed closely on our preparations by a friend of his. Julian Freeman-Attwood was a mountaineer who announced rather grandly that he only climbed unclimbed peaks. We told him how we planned to get across the desert and he looked at us in amused disbelief. A veteran of many expeditions around the world, he concluded we were thoroughly unprepared.

‘It’s worse than an expedition planned on the back of an envelope,’ he said with authority. ‘You haven’t even got an envelope.’

Two days later we flew to Tunis.

Properly to write the wonderful story of Tripoli, daughter of sea and desert, one must be not only an accomplished historian, a cultivated archaeologist and an expert in ethnology, but profoundly versed in Arabic and the fundamental beliefs and general practices of Mohammedanism, as well as the local customs of that great religion, coloured as it is by differing environment. If one aims to give a clear exposition of this enthralling though tragic coast of northern Africa, he must be a thorough student of political economy, too, with a world outlook on cause and effect in government.

MABEL LOOMIS TODD, TRIPOLI THE MYSTERIOUS

Happy for poor forlorn, dusky, naked Africa, had she never seen the pale visage or met the Satanic brow of the European Christian. Does any man in his senses, who believes in God and Providence, think that the wrongs of Africa will go forever unavenged? … And the time of us Englishmen will come next – our day of infamy! unless we show ourselves worthy of that transcendant position in which Providence has placed us, at the pinnacle of the empires of Earth, as the leaders and champions of universal freedom.

JAMES RICHARDSON, TRAVELS IN THE GREAT DESERT OF SAHARA IN THE YEARS OF 1845 AND 1846

We hired a car in Tunis airport and drove to Jerba, en route to the Libyan border. In 1992, the United Nations imposed sanctions on Libya to bring to heel the alleged culprits of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, in which 270 people were killed. Since that date, all flights into and out of the country had been prohibited, leaving overland travel from Tunisia or a boat from Malta as the main alternatives to reach Tripoli.