LITMIR.BIZ

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time.

      It was not exactly a Grand Tour that he undertook: Europe was in ferment, with either open fighting or sullen, smouldering peace in France, North Africa, Spain and the Balkans. Doughty faced the prospect not just with courage but with all the insouciance of an English gentleman as he picked his way from troublespot to troublespot, peering superciliously past the shattered landscapes and the weary people to jot down his reflections about the ancient ruins he had come to see.

      For his first few months out of England, though – ‘a long year’, he called it later⁵ – he stayed in Leiden and the nearby Dutch towns, following his lonely studies and applying himself to learning the language.

      He had a vague idea of investigating the historical background of the English civilization which fascinated him – but when he left Holland, he had, like Sandys before him, no plan for where his travels or his studies would lead him. The opportunity to observe the life of the travelling Arabs at first hand – the opportunity which was to provide him with the raw material for his greatest literary work – came to him by chance rather than by intent. One of his greatest talents was in allowing his life to be taken over by such chances and in seizing the benefit of them.

      The next two years are the first period of Doughty’s life for which his own detailed and contemporary records exist. His diary, painstakingly written in his neat, precise hand, with its occasional pen and ink or pencil diagrams and sketches of landscapes, archaeological remains, or whatever else caught his attention, is far from exhaustive: some vital moments are casually skipped, there are occasional long gaps with no entries at all, and the whole account ends in March 1873, with Doughty still in Italy. His later travels around Greece, Egypt, Sinai and the Middle East can only be pieced together from letters, later memories and other patchy records. Even more frustrating, for much of the time as he wandered around Europe, his imagination seemed infuriatingly disengaged. But the hardback notebook which is now kept in the library of Caius College, Cambridge, faded and battered at the edges, gives an intimate picture of his intellectual and emotional development over a crucial spell of his young adulthood.

      It starts as he leaves Leiden for Louvain, with a distaste for his surroundings which was to become familiar over the next few months: Doughty’s impressions of northern Europe were less than enthusiastic. In Louvain – a ‘very filthy and unwholesome’ town – he noted ‘the obscene manners of the people who piddle openly in every place’, although the observation was carefully crossed out in the diary. Presumably it was a little too crude even for a personal notebook. It remains legible, though, behind Doughty’s pencil scribble, as his fastidious indictment of the Belgian people.

      He presents much the same litany of dissatisfaction that any middle-class traveller from Britain at that time might have recited. The people, being foreign, were grubby, unhealthy and – worst of all – Catholic.

      As he toured the small towns of Holland and Belgium, Doughty displayed an almost comically fastidious obsession with cleanliness: the details that do excite his imagination are those that arouse his distaste – the people of Louvain piddling in the street, or the ‘slack, ill complexions’ of the Belgian women. But what is noticeable throughout the young Doughty’s notes of his travels in Europe is how conventional, dismissive and simply unobservant they generally are. For the most part, the man who would later tease out the most intimate, most significant details of life among the Arabs appeared to take only the most cursory interest in the places and people he met. It was the primitiveness and frequent brutality of Arabia which would excite his imagination; travel in Europe was often little more than inconvenient, uncomfortable, and not notably relieved, for him at least, by any architectural beauty.

      His courage is already evident; but though there is no note of fear or nervousness as he describes his journey through northern France, there is no sense of personal involvement either. His interest was never engaged by politics, even though he was travelling through a Europe that was in political turmoil. Only a few months before, Bismarck had swept aside the French army and the government of Napoleon III: France was buzzing with ideas and arguments, alive with revolutionary and anarchist institutions. While Doughty was in Louvain, observing with distaste the ill-manners and grubby habits of the Belgians, some 25,000 people were being massacred in Paris as the French troops of the government of Adolphe Thiers crushed the Commune⁶ – but his only response, as he reached the frontier town of Tourcoing a few weeks later, was to note the inconvenience that such political activity caused the independent traveller. ‘Stayed there that night having no passport, as I had not heard it was become necessary. Thiers elected President the day before …’

      Paris itself, a city which had in the last few months experienced defeat at the hands of the Prussian forces, which had seen tens of thousands of its citizens flee as the revolutionary Commune was established, and thousands more killed or arrested as it was put down, he described as ‘brown, cold, humid, deserted, uncheerful looking’.

      After such a political cataclysm any city could perhaps be excused for being slightly less than cheerful. Doughty’s undoubted patriotism and sense of civic pride took little account of what he perhaps saw as the mere passing fads of a moment, like revolutions; his mind was set on a longer, greater timescale. And anyway, he might have thought, this was not England.

      But he was not staying in Paris. It was now early autumn and, planning to take lodgings for the winter in one of the small towns dotted along the Mediterranean coast, he set off hopefully in the late summer sun, trudging from settlement to settlement.

      For a man who complained frequently of his frail physical condition and his lack of robustness, a journey by foot of over 150 miles eastwards from Marseilles, through Cassis, Cannes and Nice, must have been a painful struggle anyway – and one after another they fell short of his exacting standards of comfort and cleanliness. There would be many more times in Doughty’s life when he would complain of his weakness and demonstrate his hardihood.

      But at length he arrived in the town of Menton, where he seems to have felt at once that he could happily pass the winter. His room at the Pension Trenca, Beau Rivage, looked south over the sea, the mountains towering behind, and here he stayed for several months. For the first time a note of real enthusiasm comes into Doughty’s writing as he describes

      happy long family voyages and hungry, beautiful, and aromatic wanderings in the mountains … The vineyards, the orchards of oranges and odoriferous lemons, everywhere open to be traversed by a thousand paths; the hundred happy and sheltered valleys, smiling with every gift of nature …

      He was still complaining querulously of his ill-health and his weak constitution, but according to his diary, he was also deep in his studies throughout the winter. When he left his books, he would tramp along the mountain paths to see the tiny villages, the meadow flowers, the tumbling rivers and, most of all, ‘the antique caverns and relics of human habitation’. Doughty already had in mind the outline of the epic poem he saw as his greatest work, which would deal in part with the struggle of the ancient Gauls for conquest in northern Italy.⁷

      In his wanderings during his five months in Menton Doughty built up such an affection for the region that, twenty years later, he would return to live just a few miles up the coast. But once the winter was over, he set out on foot again through the mountains.

      It was a solitary time: the occasional references to family outings from Menton, to some ‘agreeable Germans’ he met later in Pisa, or to the ‘many excellent and agreeable persons, the librarian Dr Snellaert and others’ he remembered from Ghent, only serve to emphasize how lonely his travelling generally was. Solitude, after all, was what he was searching for.

      Doughty pressed on with his hard and energetic journey: thirty miles or so up into the Piedmontese uplands one day, another forty miles the next, a brief day’s rest in the cool of the mountain valleys, and then another thirty miles down a river valley to the coastal town of Ventimiglia. It was the country plantations, the flowers and the oranges, the twisting mountain paths overlooking the sea, that caught his imagination; when he reached the cities of Genoa, Livorno, Pisa and Florence, the

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