Soon we were to bid farewell to this pleasant countryside of rippling brooks and gay bird life, the decorative stork by day and the eerie sound of the tree-bat by night. The pebbly gorge of Dauka, by which we descended, grew shallower as we went, and became but a sandy, serpentine depression in the arid wilderness beyond. In such ancient dried-up riverbeds as this is the secret of life, for the night dews that here collect give rise to an arterial way of desert flora across the barren plain and the route of the caravan.
The foothills of the southern mountains soon sank below our horizon in rear, and the vast clean spaces of a flint-strewn steppe stretched northward before us. Sand-devils, slender columns of whirling sand, sometimes swept hither and thither; sometimes the skyline danced before us in a hot, shimmering mirage, distorting a faraway bush into an expansive copse, an antelope into some monstrous creature, and generally playing tricks with lakes of illusory water.
For the next two months the stars were my only roof, for I travelled, like my companions, without a tent; and as the thermometer almost immediately fell to 45° Fahrenheit at night, one felt bitterly cold after the hot days in the saddle, wearing the same clothes day and night. The luxury of a tent had to be eschewed, in order to keep camel-loads at a minimum, for there were certain indispensable things to carry – rations of rice, sugar, native fat and dates; mapping instruments: a compass, sextant, artificial horizon, chronometers, barometers and hydrometer; natural-history skinning instruments, killing-bottles and preserving chests; a rifle, for none goes unarmed in these parts, it being held neither safe nor respectable; and to pay my way, gunnybags stuffed with 3,000 Maria Theresa dollars, which I kept under my saddle by day and my pillow by night.
I had to be careful to conceal my sextant and keep my star observations unobserved, lest I be suspected of magic or worse, and to this end I always contrived to sleep some thirty or forty yards away from the camp and wait till my companions had settled down for the night. This they did after prayers and hobbling their camels over the best pastures available, lying sprawling around the flickering campfires with their rifle as their only bedding.
A few days’ march northward across the gently declining steppe brought us to the waterhole of Shisur, where we dallied for two days to rest our camels preparatory to a nine-days’ water-less and hungry stretch westward. This was to be the most dangerous part of my journey, for it is a no-man’s-land with a bloody reputation for raiding and counter-raiding between the various tribes of these southern borderlands; and as I was moving with Rashidi tribesmen, I was particularly apprehensive of a collision with a party of the Sa’ar tribe, their hereditary enemies, for whom, moreover, the money I carried would doubtless have acted as a magnet.
Yellow sand dunes rose tier upon tier, backing the western reaches of Umm al Hait, the mighty, dried-up river system I had discovered and mapped on an earlier journey; and hummocky summits were crowned with tamarisk, which in these hungry marches brought our camels running up at the glad sight. It is impossible to carry fodder over these long trails, and camels have to fend for themselves, or rather, a small, well-mounted reconnaissance party goes off to discover the best pastures in the neighbourhood before a general move.
Hence the route taken by the desert traveller cannot with certainty be determined; his course will most likely not be the straightest and shortest one between two points, as with an aeroplane in the air or a ship at sea. And thus it came about that although my plan was to cross the sands northward from sea to sea, I here found myself travelling from east to west along the southern bulwark of the sands.
The full force of the tropical afternoon sun in our faces made me appreciate the Bedouin headdress, the long kerchief which can be wound round the face being merciful indeed as a protection from the sun’s burning rays, though my lips and nostrils rarely escaped. Glare glasses I never used, for the reason of possible queer effects on my companions’ unaccustomed minds.
‘Look, sahib!’ said the Arabs riding at my side, one afternoon, and pointing to the ground. ‘There is the road to Ubar. Ubar was a great city that our fathers have told us existed in olden times; a city that possessed much treasure and had date gardens and a fort of red silver (gold); it now lies buried beneath the sands, men say in the Rumlait Shu’ait, maybe a few days to the north.’
I had heard of Ubar, an ancient Atlantis of the sands, as it were, from Arab companions of an earlier expedition in the eastern desert, but none could tell of its location. Where my notice was now directed there were deep impressions as of ancient caravan tracks in the hard steppe surface, leading away only to be lost under a wall of sand.
Desiccation of climate through the ages and the extension of the sands, ever encroaching southward, could have brought about its disuse, for it can have led to nowhere worth leading to in historic times, and is now good for nothing. If this local tradition is well founded, Ubar may preserve a memory of the famed land of Ophir, long since lost in the mists of antiquity.
Our course, now trending more to the south, past the dunes of Yibaila and Yadila, was interesting for large, silvery patches in the hollows suggesting a dried-up sea, but which turned out to be sheets of gypsum; though, curiously enough, all along this borderland between sand and steppe, 1,000 feet and more above sea level and today more than 100 miles from the coast, the surface was strewn with oyster and other shell fossils, suggesting that this desert was once an ocean bed.
Beyond Yadila I was next to experience what is extremely rare even for an Arabian explorer, and that was singing sands. As we were floundering along through heavy dune country, the silence was suddenly broken and I was startled for a moment, not knowing what the interruption was or whence it came. ‘Listen to that ridge bellowing,’ said a Badu10 at my side, and looking to where he pointed I saw away on our right hand a steepish sand-cliff about a hundred feet high.
I was too deeply absorbed in the sound to talk, and there was nothing unusual to the eye. The hour was 4.15, and a slight northerly wind blew from the rear of the cliff. I must often have observed similar conditions, but never before heard any accompanying bellowing, only the spectacle of a film of sand smoking over the sand ridges to build up a shape recalling a centurion’s helmet. But here the leeward side of the cliff, facing us, was a fairly steep sloping wall, and maybe the surface sands were sliding; certainly some mysterious friction was in progress on a vast scale to produce such starrling loud booming. The noise was comparable to a deep pedal-note of an organ, or the siren of a ship heard, say, from a couple of cables distant. It continued for about two minutes and then ended as abruptly as it had begun.
The term ‘singing sands’ seems hardly the most satisfactory one to describe a loud and single note, but it is too firmly established to cavil over, for singing sands are mentioned by quite early Chinese writers, and Marco Polo, who crossed the Great Gobi Desert in the thirteenth century, wrote: ‘Sometimes you shall hear the sound of musical instruments and still more commonly the sound of drums.’
We bade adieu to hungry and shivering steppe borderlands, and, turning northward, struck into the body of the sands. The scene before us was magnificent. The sands became almost Alpine in architectural structure, towering mountainously above us, and from the summits we were rewarded with the most glorious panoramas of purest rose-red colour. This Uruq region of the central south must surely be the loftiest throughout all the great ocean of sands.
Our camels climbed arduously the soft slopes, and, slithering knee-deep, made slow progress. No one remained mounted. Indeed, there were places where we had to dig footholds in the sands to enable our animals to climb, other places where we turned back to find an easier way. No horse could have negotiated these southern sands, even if brought here, and the waterless marches behind us, with many consecutive days of ten hours in the saddle, would have made the bringing impossible. A motorcar, too, would surely have charged these slopes in vain.
‘The gift of God’ – that is the illuminating name by which the Arab nomad knows the
camel; and how great is his consideration for her! Time and time again I found myself the only member of our party in the saddle, the Arabs preferring to walk and so spare their mounts, running hither and thither to collect a juicy tuft of camelthorn with which to feed the hungry brutes as we marched along. In the deserts, halts are called, not in accordance with a European watch, but where Nature has, for the nonce, blessed the site with camel pastures. The great ungainly beasts, which you start by despising and learn greatly to admire, are the only means by which you move forward to success or back and out to safety. If camels perish in the remoter waterless wastes, their masters must perish with them.
Christmas Eve was to be a night of excitement and false alarm. We had arrived late in camp, camels had been hobbled and shooed off to the scant bushes, from behind some of which came the brisk noises of merry campfire parties. There was a sudden scream. To me it was like the hooting of an owl or the whining of some wild beast.
‘Gom! Gom! – Raiders! Raiders!’ shouted the excitable Bedouin, leaping to their feet, their rifles at the ready; and my Arab servant came running across to me with my Winchester and ammunition. Our rabias (safe-escorts) of the Awamir and Karab tribes rushed out in different directions into the night, shouting – ‘We are alert! We are alert! We are So-and-so (giving their names) of such-and-such tribes. These are our party and are under our protection.’11
The object of this was to save us from raiders of their own particular tribes, if such they were, for these would then stay their hand. The cry, I gathered, is never abused: certainly in 1928 I had owed my life, during a journey through the south-eastern borderlands, to my Harsusi rabia, who saved us from ambush by members of his own tribe after these had already opened fire at short range.
Our camels were now played out. Their humps, plump and large at the outset, told a story; for the hump is the barometer of the camel’s condition, and ours had fallen miserably away. To move onwards involved raising fresh camels, a contingency that had been foreseen, and Shaikh Salih sent ahead to search the Rashidi habitat. He and I had at the outset counted on the need of four relays, but in the event three proved sufficient.
Propitious rains (over great areas rain does not fall throughout the year) of last season in the sands of Dakaka had given rise to superior pastures, and to that area, therefore, the herds had this year gravitated. At the waterhole of Khor Dhahiyah we acquired a new caravan and pushed leisurely westward towards where our third caravan for the final northward dash across the sands was to assemble.
My companions scanned the sands for sign of friend or foe.
‘Look, sahib! that’s So-and-so,’ my men said, pointing to a camel’s foot impression that looked, to me, like any other. ‘See! she is gone with calf: look how deep are the impressions of her tracks!’ And so, following these in the sands, we came up with the object of our quest.
The accuracy of their divination was fascinating. Reading sand-imprints recalled fingerprint identifying in the West, except that it is far less laborious and slow, and not at all the technical job of a highly trained specialist. In fact, every Badu bred in these sands reads the sand-imprints with the readiest facility, for all creation goes unshod, except on an occasion when a Badu wears socks against extreme heat or cold – this being rare, because it is considered effeminate.
The sands are thus an open diary, and he who runs may read. Every one of my companions not only knew at a glance the foot impression of every man and every camel in my caravan, but claimed to know every one of his tribe and not a few of his enemies. No bird may alight, no wild beast or insect pass but needs must leave its history in the sands, and the record lasts until the next wind rises and obliterates it. To tell-tale sand-tracks a sand-fox and many snakes, hares, and lizards, which I added to my collection, owed their undoing, for their hiding-places were in vain.
Whenever, in future, we halted for the night, generally just before sunset, Hamad, my Murra rabia, would slink back over our tracks for a few miles with my telescope to ensure that we were not being tracked by an enemy, and return just after nightfall with the good news that campfires could now be safely lighted.
I picked up fragments of ostrich eggs, often in a semi-petrified condition, and members of my party had shot ostriches hereabouts in their youth, though these birds appear now to be extinct. So also the rim or white gazelle is becoming rare, though I saw horns lying about, while the common red gazelle and the larger edible lizards are inhabitants of the bordering steppe rather than of the sands, as is the antelope, specimens of which I shot, besides bringing home a young live one.
It is the antelope whose long, straight horns occasionally appear to be a single spear when she runs across your front, thus giving rise, as some suppose, to the ancient myth of the unicorn. This legendary guardian of chastity allowed none but virtuous maidens to approach it, when its anger turned to joy; and, singularly, today in these southern marches the only musical instrument known is a pipe made of antelope horn, which the Arab maiden plays on the joyful occasions of marriage and circumcision.
Of animal life in the sands, a small sand-coloured wolf is said to be met with in parts where subsoil water, however brackish, can be reached by pawing; a sand-coloured fox and a lynx – relatively non-drinking varieties – are commoner; and the hare, the most widespread mammal, is hunted by the Bedouin’s salugi12 dog. Of birds I saw very few – bustards, sand-larks, sand-grouse, owls, and the most common, a black raven, while old eggs in a gigantic nest show that the Abyssinian tawny eagle comes on important visits.
The full moon before the fast month of Ramadhan found us at the waterhole of Shanna, where my third, last, and much-reduced caravan (13 men and 5 pack animals) was to rendezvous. One of our old camels was ailing, and there is only one way with a worn-out camel in the desert – namely, to kill and eat it. The law of Leviticus is also the law of Islam: flesh not lawfully slaughtered is sinful to eat; wherefore the hats went round, and 56 dollars, plus her earnings due from me, satisfied the owner of the almost blind 40-year-old Fatira. The beast was slaughtered, jointed, and divided into heaps after the Arabs had all had a good swig at the contents of her bladder – they had done the same to the antelope’s bladder – and for the joints the Bedouin now cast lots.
In the steppe, where stones availed, they would have grilled the carcass on a heap of heated stones with a fire beneath – the Stone Age manner, surely! Here as much as sufficed for a meal was boiled in brackish water, and the rest they allowed to remain uncooked, and so carried it exposed on their saddles, where all the cooking that it received was drying from the heat of the sun. These saddle-dainties the Bedouin were to nibble with great relish in the marches ahead, and to declare to be very good. My own view, I confess, was one to be concealed!
The zero hour for the dash northward had arrived. Star sights and traverse-plotting showed my position on the 10 January, 1932, to be lat. 19° N, long. 50° 45’ E. My objective, Qatar, on the Persian Gulf, was thus bearing slightly to the east of north, about 330 miles in a straight line across the mysterious sands. Two only of my thirteen Bedouin – the Murras – claimed to have been over this line of desert before. I had rations left for but twenty-five days.
Clearly, no one could afford to fall ill. A hold-up for ten days, an insufficient rate of progress, a meeting with a party of raiders outnumbering us – any of these might spell disaster. Throughout my journey I was screened from any Arab encampments, that, for all I knew, might have been just over the skyline, the single exception being a tiny encampment of Murra, kinsmen of my guide, where an old man lay dying.
It was made up of one or two miserably small tents, roughly spun – doubtless by the womenfolk – of brown and white camel’s hair; tent-pegs that once had been the horns of an antelope; a hammer and a leathern bucket or two – these perhaps typical of the belongings of poor nomadic folk, among whom wealth is counted, primarily, in the noble possessions of camel herds and firearms.
Marching north, the character of the desert
sands changed; from the sweeping red landscapes of Dakaka we passed through the region of Suwahib, of lighter hue and characteristic parallel ridges in echelon formation; then the white ocean calms of the central sands, succeeded by a rolling swell of redder colour; and with these changing belts the desert flora changed too, the height above sea level falling progressively.
Contrary to expectation, the great central sand ocean was found to be not waterless. We dug down to water at quite shallow depths – a fathom and a half or so; but it was so brackish as to be almost undrinkable – not unlike Epsom salts both in taste and in its effect on man and beast. There are places where even the camel cannot drink the water, though normally when pastures bring nomads to these parts their camels play the part of distillers, for they drink the water and their masters drink their milk.
The shallow waterholes of the southern sands are sometimes filled in, after water, to hinder a possible pursuer, but in the low, shallowing sands of the north, where patches of hard floor made their first appearance, the waterholes were regular wells, sometimes seventeen fathoms and more deep. They are rare and precious, too, apart from their sweeter contents, for great labour and skill have gone to their making. Both making and cleaning out, which must be done periodically, exact a toll of life, for the soft sides are prone to slip in and entomb the miners, and all that avails for revetment is the branches of dwarf sand-bushes.
Onwards through these great silent wastes my little party moved ever northwards, and my bones no longer ached at the daily demand of eight hours in the saddle. On setting out in the morning the Badu with his first foot forward would mumble some pious invocation – a constant reminder of the great uncertainty and insecurity which shadows him:
In the name of God the Merciful, the Compassionate,
Reliance is upon Thee.
There is none other and none equal to Thee.
In the name of God the Merciful.
Deliverance from the slinking devil;
Survivor: The Autobiography Page 37
