Another Egyptian aristocrat, Ahmed Hassanein, led a camel expedition from the Mediterranean along the western side of the Great Sand Sea to a Libyan oasis called Kufra, and from there to Darfur in Sudan. Beyond Kufra, he came to a mountain called Uweinat, half-mythical till then, a mass of sandstone rising out of the desert that looked like “some colossal crumbling citadel surrounded down below by the mounds of its ruined town.”7 Uweinat was so massive that it caught rare clouds and knocked the rain out of them, so it had two pools at its base. In a gorge in the mountain, Hassanein found drawings of lions, ostriches, and giraffes and men with bows and arrows from a prehistoric era before a climate change burned savannah to desert.8
Hassanein made his eight-month, twenty-two-hundred-mile journey while on leave from the Egyptian Foreign Office. In his account of the expedition, he wrote of how the desert had bewitched him: he was like a man “deeply in love with a very fascinating but cruel woman. She treats him badly and the world crumples in his hand; at night she smiles on him, and the whole world is a paradise. The desert smiles, and there is no place on earth worth living in but the desert.”9 Afterward the Foreign Office sent him to represent Egypt in Washington and London. He returned from the diplomatic stints to become an adviser to kings, spending his life in meeting rooms and intrigues in Cairo, exiled from the desert.10
The Royal Engineers moved Bagnold to India, but he kept thinking about the Libyan Desert. There were areas out there the size of whole European countries, and no one knew anything about them.11 This thought possessed him. On leaves, he came back to Egypt and set out into the emptiness.
To lighten their cars for traveling on sand, he and his friends stripped them of hoods, bumpers, and radiator covers. To save water, they designed a way to funnel the steam boiling out of the radiator into two-gallon cans on the running boards, where it cooled and could be reused. The dilettantes became professionals, who became pioneers of desert travel. The sands were devoid of landmarks, and the steel of the vehicles deceived compasses. Bagnold invented a solution: a sun compass. It looked like a sundial but worked in reverse. A sundial stays in one place, and the shifting direction of a shadow as the sun moves in the sky tells the time. Bagnold’s sun compass rode on the dashboard. The navigator’s watch told him the time of day. His readings of the stars at night provided each day’s starting location. With that information and the shadow cast by the compass’s needle, the navigator could calculate the precise direction for driving for days across blank, lifeless sands.12
Pictures of Bagnold from life outside the desert show him clean-shaven but for his precise moustache. The part in his dark hair is a sharp line; his expression is usually serious. In a photo from his 1929 expedition, he wears a wide-brimmed hat, a beard, and a delighted smile.13 The beard was a necessity; water was too valuable for shaving. Even for drinking it was rationed to four pints per day.14 On that trip, he and a new friend, Lieutenant Guy Prendergast, and their companions made their first foray into the Sand Sea. When they couldn’t find a hoped-for passage between the waves of sand, Bagnold aimed his stripped-down Ford truck directly at a dune and pressed the accelerator. “Suddenly the light doubled in strength as if more suns had been switched on… The lorry tipped violently backwards… We floated up and up on a yellow cloud.” Rather than sinking, they found themselves at the top.15
The next year, better prepared, they set out again. Prendergast, as infatuated with the desert and with automobiles as Bagnold, had become his constant partner. In five days, they and their companions crossed four hundred miles of dunes and came out on the Libyan side of the Great Sand Sea. The barrier was not impassable. But it contained mysteries. Bagnold wondered how the dunes could “behave like living things”—how a dune miles long could slowly march forward in a straight line, keeping its shape, like some immense worm, and how mature dunes could give birth to baby dunes that would run ahead of their mothers.16
From the Sand Sea they headed south to the Gilf Kebir, and beyond to the haunting rock paintings at Uweinat. Near the mountain, the transmission in one of their cars gave out. Bagnold was a careful man; the expedition traveled in three cars so that the loss of one didn’t strand them. But “it was a mournful business leaving that car behind,” Bagnold would recall.17 “It looked so small and pathetic… it had carried me so far and struggled over so many obstacles.”
From Uweinat, they turned east through Sudan, and reached the town of Wadi Halfa on the Nile. There Bagnold and his friends chanced on Pat Clayton, an Englishman who worked for the Egyptian government mapping the desert. In a Greek cafe, the thirsty men drank beer together and declared themselves the founders of a club dedicated to finding Zerzura—the Oasis of the Little Birds—a lush, legendary place known from unreliable medieval texts and from stories that earlier explorers heard from the scattered Arabs of the interior. Bagnold was still mourning his car. Clayton agreed to look for it, and Bagnold said he’d send spare parts and new tires.18
Searching for Zerzura would not be easy. Descriptions of the place and of its location contradicted each other wildly.19 The one constant was water, flowing from the springs. Daughters and sons of the desert longed for a place of rushing streams and green trees. Sons and daughters of cloudy forested lands in the north came south and gave their hearts to sunlight and dunes. Their dreams met in the stories of Zerzura.
The Bagnold crew drove back into the desert and headed north toward Cairo. For the last part of the journey they followed the Darb el Arbain, the abandoned caravan route once used by traders bringing spices and human beings from sub-Saharan Africa to sell in the markets of Egypt. It was marked by the skeletons of camels that died along the way. There were no human skeletons; the single mercy of the slavers had been to bury the bodies of their merchandise.20
THE SPARE PARTS from Cairo arrived in Wadi Halfa by railroad and riverboat. In February 1931, Clayton set out toward Uweinat with his local drivers on his next surveying mission. Near Bagnold’s car, they spotted the “tracks of a large party of Arabs, with camels and horses,” Clayton reported. “Careful examination of the tracks showed footprints of women and children.” This was a riddle: horses suggested a Beduin raiding party; footprints of women and children said the opposite.
Clayton left some men to work on the car and went on to one of the pools at the base of Uweinat, where he found a family of ten Beduin “in a starving and pitiable condition. The women’s feet were so raw they could only crawl on hands and knees.” They’d come across two hundred miles of lifeless land from the oasis of Kufra in Libya. They “had had no food in days, and no chance of either getting food or making their way on foot to any inhabited spot.” They were fleeing Italian troops under General Rodolfo Graziani, and the machine guns of his airplanes that had pursued them.
Bagnold’s car, it now seemed, had been deposited at Uweinat by providence. Clayton’s men succeeded in repairing it. He loaded up all ten members of the family and drove more than two hundred miles through a sandstorm to his campsite. From there he sent them with one of his drivers on the two-day journey to Wadi Halfa, where the local hospital managed to save all of his passengers. In the weeks that followed, Clayton and his men covered five thousand miles in the desert, searched for tracks, personally rescued another twenty-seven people, and helped hundreds of others find paths to safety. And he learned of many others who laid down in the sands and died.21
Their bodies were small dots that made up part of a much larger picture. In 1911, Italy had gone to war with the Ottoman Empire and invaded Libya, the last piece of Africa still ruled from Constantinople. Libya was also the part of Africa closest to Italy. More importantly, other European powers had already grabbed almost all of the continent; Italy came late to the feeding frenzy. Its tenuous hold on the African coast nearly vanished during the Great War. When Benito Mussolini took power in 1922, he ordered the riconquista—the reconquest—of Libya. General Graziani, chosen to carry out the mission, called the Arabs and the Berber population barbari, barbarians, a t
erm borrowed from the Roman Empire that the Fascist regime sought to renew.
Graziani became known as the Butcher. His forces not only killed armed rebels but murdered children and old people. Death often came from the sky; the Italian air force struck villages with poison gas and machine guns. The terror escalated when Mussolini appointed Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio governor of Libya in 1928. He and Graziani drove the inhabitants of inland Libya into concentration camps, where disease and starvation ruled. Badoglio ordered his soldiers to be “ferocious and inexorable.” An estimated eight hundred thousand people lived in Libya when the Italian campaign began. One in eight—one hundred thousand people—died directly at the hands of Graziani’s troops or starved to death in the riconquista.
The strongest guerrilla resistance came from the Senussi, an Islamic religious order that had spread among the Beduin in Cyrenaica, the eastern half of Libya. Kufra, a cluster of oases deep in Cyrenaica near the border with Egypt, was the Senussi religious center and stronghold. In January 1931, two columns of Graziani’s forces converged on Kufra, supported by warplanes. Hundreds of men, women, and children with their camels and horses fled toward Egypt, Sudan, and the Chad province of French Equatorial Africa. The family near death that Clayton found at the Uweinat pool was a human communiqué to the outside world of Graziani’s lopsided victory.22
The Italian conquest of Kufra shifted the meaning of exploring the desert. The border between Libya and Sudan—the latter officially under joint Egyptian and British rule—was disputed. In which territory did Uweinat lie, with its pools of drinkable water on the way to Wadi Halfa? The border between Egypt and Libya was merely a line drawn through vaguely known lands. And if Mussolini wanted a new Roman Empire, it was quite obvious that the old empire had ruled the Nile and the Levant. The Duce’s dreams did not stop at an unmarked line in the sand.
BAGNOLD WASN’T THE first explorer to travel the Darb el Arbain—the Forty-Day Path—in an automobile. Laszlo Almasy did it the year before as the last part of a seventy-five-hundred-mile journey from Mombasa in Kenya to Cairo, with a millionaire adventurer as his companion and a Beduin guide.23 His companion survived the trip. This wasn’t always the case with Almasy. In an earlier venture driving wealthy tourists into the desert, he’d lost at least one.24
Almasy was the son of wealthy but titleless Hungarian aristocrats. He was a tall, thin man with a right triangle of a nose and a receding chin that together gave his face the profile of a large-beaked bird, such as the sparrow-lark of the Sahara.25 Almasy longed for flight. As a gymnasium student during the very early years of aviation, he’d built his own aircraft—and crashed it, and spent months in a hospital.26 He started the Great War as a cavalry officer in the Austro-Hungarian army but was transferred to the newly created air force. In a mission over the Italian Alps in 1918, his plane was hit by Italian fire. He made it back over the lines, crashed, and again found himself in a hospital bed. This didn’t cure him of flying.27 His later career suggests that surviving two crashes made a stronger impression on him than the crashes themselves.
Almasy had more bad luck: he’d fought for an empire that no longer existed when the war was over. In 1921, he took part in two failed attempts to put Charles, the last Habsburg emperor, on the empty throne of now independent Hungary. Charles rewarded Almasy by making him a count. The title came from an uncrowned king and was never confirmed by the Hungarian parliament. In Hungary, Almasy didn’t use it.28
More misfortune: he was the second son, the one who didn’t inherit. After the failed restoration, he worked as a bishop’s private secretary. He led hunting parties, and drove in road races for the Austrian automobile company Steyr. He became an official of the Hungarian Boy Scouts, which may merely have shown attraction to “manly” pursuits. Then again, the scouts were tied to the paramilitary Hungarian National Defense Association, led by Hungarian fascist and anti-Semite Gyula Gömbös.29
Yet Gömbös had led the opposition to the royalist restoration.30 Had Almasy switched right-wing factions, or simply found a convenient patron? His precise loyalties could be as uncertain as his title.
In 1926, at the age of thirty-one, Laszlo Almasy met the desert. It took time for him to realize that he had discovered the love of his life, to be convinced that “the desert is terrible, and it is merciless, but to the desert all those who once have known it must return.”31
(Almasy wrote those words in a travelogue in Hungarian, saying they were a Beduin proverb. He’d actually taken them from Hassanein’s book in English. Almasy’s accounts of his own exploits also flare and flicker like lights on unreliable current.32 He did not, however, steal Hassanein’s metaphor of the desert as a “fascinating but cruel woman.” It spoke to him less.)
Almasy came to Egypt as the representative of Steyr Automobiles. Away from Hungary, he began calling himself Count Laszlo de Almasy.33 The job included driving the company’s cars into roadless territory to show off what they could handle. On his first trip, he and a Hungarian prince followed the Nile into the Sudan. Where the river takes a wide bend, they cut across rocky desert, then continued south for big-game hunting. The shortcut introduced him to the desert. The next year, on impulse, he took a Beduin guide and drove 220 miles from Cairo across the sands to the Bahariya oasis, carrying two and a half gallons of water and no food. Getting there and back alive rivaled surviving an airplane crash.
These were flirts. The Darb el Arbain trip, he wrote, “was when the desert made me captive forever.”34
In his telling, his Beduin guide on the caravan route first told him about Zerzura. Naturally he wanted to find the lost paradise. Almasy decided that the oasis must be in Gilf Kebir and that the way to find it was from the air. He went to England, bought a Gypsy Moth, a light plane, and flew in hops through Europe to the Middle East. Caught in a storm in northern Syria, he crash-landed, wrecking the plane.
But word of his planned expedition reached a wealthy twenty-three-year-old British baronet, Sir Robert Clayton, who was a newly trained Royal Navy pilot. He was no relation of desert surveyor Pat Clayton, rescuer of the Kufra refugees, who was recruited as the expedition’s navigator. Almasy also brought in a Royal Air Force pilot, Hubert Penderel. They headed out to Gilf Kebir in the spring of 1932.
From a plane above the desert plateau, one could in fact see a hidden wadi lush with trees. But it was the British pilots who first spotted it. Almasy was away at the time, on a dash across the desert to Kufra to get water and fuel, of which he hadn’t taken enough. There the Italian military commander of the oasis hosted him and the soldiers cheered him.
Unknown to his British friends, Almasy promised the Italian commander the map he was preparing of Gilf Kebir. Hungary’s one dependable ally at the time was Fascist Italy. Yet Almasy also gave Pat Clayton photos of the Italian headquarters in Kufra. Perhaps he was still working out his allegiances. Perhaps he wanted to bank favors with everyone who controlled part of the desert.35
A year later, Almasy arrived in Kufra again, this time as a scheduled supply stop on yet another expedition. Back in Hungary, fascist leader Gyula Gömbös had just become prime minister. Almasy told the Italian intelligence officer at Kufra he’d received a message from Gömbös to provide “all help possible to Italy.” He did. He turned over the map he’d promised of Gilf Kebir. It showed a pass that he and Penderel had discovered, which cut all the way through the plateau.36
In Italian military hands, the pass was a potential shortcut from Kufra to Upper Egypt. It would save an invading force the long loop southward around Gilf Kebir and Uweinat. Almasy may or may not have known that in the fall of 1932 Bagnold and Prendergast had met an Italian military patrol at an isolated well, in a piece of desert claimed by both Egypt and Italy. The Italian commander, Major Orlando Lorenzini, turned old fuel barrels on their sides, laid a tabletop across them, and served Bagnold’s group a dinner of chicken, spaghetti, and Chianti spread on a white tablecloth. Rather indiscreetly, Lorenzini mused out loud, “The Nile at Aswan
is only 900 kilometers from Uweinat. If there is a war, what fun it would be to take a battalion to Aswan and seize the dam. What could you do?”37
FOUR DECADES AFTER his death, “Count de Almasy” would come back to life as the central character in Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The English Patient. In the novel, Almasy discovers a cave deep in the desert with prehistoric paintings of people swimming in since-vanished water. Just as war is about to erupt, he’s on an expedition with an English couple—a pilot and his wife, Geoffrey and Katherine Clifton. The name is a slight shift from “Clayton.” Almasy and Katherine fall in love; Geoffrey tries to kill his rival by crashing an airplane into him. Instead, Geoffrey is killed and Katherine mortally wounded. In his attempts to rescue her, Almasy is mistaken at one point for an Axis spy.
Within this fiction lies a seed of fact. Almasy’s most famous discovery was the Cave of the Swimmers, on the west side of Gilf Kebir.38 But he found the wall paintings in the autumn of 1933. By that time, Sir Robert Clayton had died—at the age of twenty-four, shortly after returning to England from his single expedition with Almasy. By one account, he came down with polio. In Almasy’s telling, he died of blood poisoning from the bite of a fly in the desert.39 Robert’s wife, Dorothy—curiously nicknamed Peter—did in fact reach Gilf Kebir, but soon after his death, on an expedition in search of Zerzura with the surveyor Pat Clayton. She did not want to go with Almasy, possibly because she shared with others in the small circle of desert explorers a fear of his recklessness and the distaste of their day for his homosexuality.40
Dorothy Clayton was indeed mortally wounded in an aviation accident—taking off in England in a small plane in 1933, a year after her husband’s death.41 Almasy went on exploring Gilf Kebir, convinced that he had found Zerzura in deep wadis fed by rare rainfall.42
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