God’s Fugitive - Andrew Taylor

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seems disturbingly uninvolved. It is Doughty at his most detached, as apparently uncaring about the plight of the fishermen as he had been about the villagers on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. In the descriptions he wrote of Vesuvius, he had at least the excuse that he was looking back from a distance of several years on the disaster; here, his notes written down almost as the three bedraggled sailors were taken aboard show merely the curiosity of a tourist looking at a picture. There is not a spark of human sympathy. It is almost as if Doughty feels he has mentally set off for the next stage of his travels, and wants nothing more to do with Sicily or its people: ‘Rowed on board at 10 p.m. in a storm of rain and lightning. Thick weather. Steamed out of harbour towards midnight …’

      Presumably there was still no passage to be had to Spain, because what Doughty found in Malta was a ferry to North Africa, a small Glasgow steamship that would take him to the Tunisian port of Goletta. His initial impressions here were as bad as those of Valetta had been encouraging. ‘A large filthy village’ was his brisk summary of Goletta itself, while Sidi bu Said, where the nearby site of ancient Carthage might have been more to his taste, was dealt with even more contemptuously. ‘A confused, rank, open, unprofitable, uncultivated and miserable territorium, scarcely credible ever to have been any good site, or that ever any great city was built there – much less Carthage …’

      There is a surprising casualness about Doughty’s dismissal of the scene of one of the great cities of the ancient world – though the Romans, of course, had left little of Carthage standing for future archaeologists. But in a sense, this is a fitting farewell to the culture of Europe and the Mediterranean: he had left Europe, at least for a short while, and here in North Africa he was to find not only his introduction to the Arab world, but also the real impetus to his imagination.

      It was in the French colonial town of Constantine, a four-and-a-half-hour train journey from the coast, that Doughty had his first direct encounter with the Muslim religion. It was Ramadan, but there seems to have been no difficulty in gaining entrance to the main mosque – and no sign, either, of the antipathy Doughty would show later for Islam and all its works.

      A basilica with 4 or 5 rows of pillars, roof flat, floor covered with Brussels carpets … Lighted with candles in handsome chandeliers, with worshippers sitting against the columns reading the prayers and service on certain leaves of parchment. Others prostrated themselves on the earth, with their foreheads touching the ground.

      For a traveller leaving Europe for the first time, even for one as determinedly unimpressed as Doughty, it was an irresistibly exotic tableau – but it was also an image of a native Arab culture that was, in Algeria in the year 1872, struggling to survive. For several years the fellahin had faced a succession of natural disasters – epidemics, crop failures and infestations of locusts – but in 1871, heartened by the defeat of the French armies in Europe, some 800,000 of them had joined a holy war aimed at driving out the colonists who ruled them. It had been a savage but hopeless fight, with farms and villages laid waste by rebels and French soldiers in turn. The end was never in doubt. The leaders of the insurrection were killed or captured, and many of them put on trial as criminals before juries packed with French immigrants.

      Elsewhere in the Middle East French, English and Russians nurtured their own ambitions as the moribund Ottoman empire faltered, And in another sense, too, North Africa, Arabia and the Islamic world were under attack.13 Whatever the ambitions of the politicians, Europe’s writers, poets and artists had effectively colonized the Orient for themselves already, and the scene Doughty saw in the Constantine mosque would have been familiar to Victorian England from the paintings and writings about the East that had been fashionable for years. There had been a flood of poems, paintings, novels and fantasies set in a self-consciously Middle Eastern and desert world. By mid century travellers to Arabia were visiting a land and a culture that was fascinatingly strange and different from their own – but one that must at least have seemed, to anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with contemporary thought, reassuringly familiar.

      And yet the Orient of the imagination, the Orient of Flaubert, of Edward Fitzgerald, of Shelley, Byron, and of Beckford, was to a great extent a glorious construction of the artistic community itself – an exuberant celebration of ignorance. The day-to-day contemporary reality of Arabia and the rest of the Middle East was of less importance to the writers and artists than the European tradition of the mystic Orient, of the simple nobility of the desert peoples, the romantic despotism of the sheikhs and rulers, the sexual frisson of the harem. It was that tradition, fitting in perfectly with the romantic imagination to create a deliriously frightening picture of the Arab world, that made Arabia superficially familiar to the travellers.

      But alongside this romantic vision of the East was a vast and rapidly growing body of scholarly knowledge about the languages, the civilizations and the history of the Orient. The first part of the century saw an explosion of learned societies, of university professorships and periodicals all concentrating on the new and fascinating field of oriental studies. But even that supposedly dispassionate academic work was often based on literature rather than direct observation, and seems to a modern eye to be suspiciously supportive of the imperial and economic objectives of the western powers. Even Sir Richard Burton, not the most reliable of friends of the British political establishment, commented in his account of his travels in Arabia: ‘Egypt is a treasure to be won … the most tempting prize which the east holds out to the ambition of Europe.’14

      If anyone could have remained uncorrupted by both romantic myth and imperial dream, it would have been the twenty-nine-year-old Charles Montagu Doughty, with his cantankerous disregard for anything even remotely modern. He avoided both camps: he had no contact with the seductive world of literary orientalism, and precious little with that of the scholastic Arabists,15 and as a result, his observations were essentially his own. If he later seemed prickly, that was because his view of Arabia had been forced into no literary or scholastic preconceptions. He found among the Arabs an ancient world which was foreign to anything he had seen elsewhere – one which appeared to mirror his own sense of antiquity.

      The fighting in Algeria had finished barely five months before Doughty’s arrival, leaving behind a bitterness and unrest that even Doughty, temperamentally blind as he was to political upheaval, could not avoid. The trials and the rounding up of suspected militants were going on around him as he travelled slowly south into the heartland of the revolt.

      As he pushed inland on a stagecoach drawn by seven horses towards the oasis town of Biskra, the romantic potential of the shadowy scene in the mosque left him unmoved. Instead, as the coach rocked on through the moonlight, he was still concentrating on the landscape – ‘stony, arid, and even all bare and naked … Icy chillness devouring. Crests of the mountains powdered with snow.’

      The first stage of the journey took them thirteen hours, rattling over the stony ground in the moonlight, and they pulled into the oasis of Batna at eight in the morning. Even though the reason for travelling through the night had been to avoid the desert sun, noon found Doughty setting off on a four-hour excursion to view the remains of a nearby Roman colony. If his interest had often been lukewarm in Europe, here in Africa it was passionate. He was clearly not sparing himself – and at four o’clock the next morning, as the moon sank low over the Atlas Mountains to the west, he was on his way again.

      Doughty was wide awake throughout the long, hot journey, noticing the landscapes, the occasional caravans and the few local people along the road – a knot of French soldiers surveying the route, Arab women with looped earrings of wire, a farmer ploughing the ‘dry dead country’. And then, almost like a lingering shot from a film, came his first authentic image of the harshness, the implacability he would come to know of Arabia. ‘Passed on the way an Arab dead, wrapped in his burnous, bound upon poles, and laid across an ass or mule. No distinct road, but only the wheelruts’ traces across the country …’

      It is a vivid sketch, like his earlier one of the Sicilian peasants. Here, though, Doughty focuses upon the movement of the dead man, not that of the living Arabs who were presumably taking him for burial. But where Shelley saw only the ‘boundless and bare’

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