A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  THE EXPEDITION moved in fits and starts, some days traveling for four hours, some days for ten. A camel driver’s greyhound ran down a hare one day, a gazelle the next, adding fresh meat to their meals of rice and grain. They met a slave caravan of thirty young girls headed to Tripoli from Ghat.

  In his solitary excursions Barth frequently came across signs of ancient Rome, including milestones used to mark this rarely used route. Barth admired the Romans’ fearless penetration into the desert and their attempt to impose order upon wild nomads and emptiness. He discovered a crumbling arched gate, covered with Berber graffiti, that once marked the outpost of a Roman horse squadron in the third century A.D. He came across two elaborate Roman sepulchers, one 48 feet tall, the other 25, both in the middle of nowhere. “Like a solitary beacon of civilization,” he wrote, “this monument rises over this sea-like level of desolation, which, stretching out to an immense distance south and west, appears not to have appalled the conquerors of the ancient world.”

  Everything he was seeing would be news in Europe. He measured and sketched, and sent a packet back to Tripoli, still only days away. His report quickly reached Europe, where it caused a small stir and raised hopes among scholars about future discoveries by this energetic and thorough young man. Overweg, meanwhile, discovered fossil oyster shells left behind after warm seas retreated from the Sahara. The genus was new to science, and was eventually named Exogyra overwegi.

  On April 12 the desert abruptly changed moods. A fierce south wind—called sirocco in Europe, ghibli in Libya—filled the air with dust and sand, blinding and choking both humans and animals. The caravan stalled. “Here was a foretaste of the desert, its hardships and terrors!” wrote Richardson with characteristic drama. Barth, apparently unable to extract data from the storm, didn’t even mention it. At least the wind had given them momentary peace from the flies that had plagued them since leaving Tripoli.

  “Nothing can be more overpowering,” wrote Captain Lyon about such a storm. “In addition to the excessive heat and dryness of these winds, they are so impregnated with sand, that the air is darkened by it, the sky appears of a dusky yellow, and the sun is barely perceptible. The eyes become red, swelled, and inflamed; the lips and skin parched and chapped; while severe pain in the chest is very generally felt, in consequence of the quantities of sand unavoidably inhaled.”

  Soon after the storm, the caravan reached the shelf leading up to the dreaded Hammada, “uninhabited and without wells.” This stony tableland guarded the northern Fezzan like a fortress. It marked their plunge into the real unknown; they would be the first modern Europeans known to cross it. “It is difficult to convey an idea of the solemn impressions with which one enters upon such a journey,” wrote Richardson. “Everything ahead is unknown and invested with perhaps exaggerated terrors by imagination and report.” He wanted to pause for a day and travel at night to avoid the sun, but Barth and Overweg needed light to gather information. The group agreed to separate once again and reunite somewhere on the plateau.

  The expedition was also being delayed by a violent quarrel among the camel drivers. Richardson blamed a young Tuareg named Ali, but Barth, always more perceptive and fair than his leader, noticed that Ali was justly fed up; the Fezzanee drivers had been taking advantage of him by burdening his camels with the heaviest loads. The real fault, Barth knew, lay with Richardson for not maintaining discipline.

  The next morning as the camel drivers renewed their threats to kill each other, Barth and Overweg started up toward the plateau. The baggage creaked as the camels strained, occasionally bending to tear off a mouthful of vegetation. At the top, Barth added a stone to the heap left by travelers coming from the north.

  At first the wasteland didn’t live up to its dire reputation. The camels could find bits of herbage. A small green bird entertained the travelers by picking vermin from the feet of passing camels. After “a moderate march of ten and a half hours,” they camped in a green hollow.

  That night a strong cold wind kicked up, bringing rain. Their tent, one of the light, high British ones, blew down. Richardson’s group stumbled into camp at five that morning, drenched and miserable after marching in the dark for eleven hours. Dawn lit up a flat wasteland of hard red dirt strewn with flints and stony rubble.

  Barth and Overweg broke camp and plodded south. En route they were delighted to find truffles, and that evening made a delicious soup, spiced for Barth by the knowledge that Ibn Battuta, “the greatest of Mohammedan travelers,” had enjoyed a similar meal during his journey across Africa in the fourteenth century. The night sky was hazy with windblown dust, refracting the moonlight into a spectacular halo. They slept on the ground and suffered from the cold. In the morning light, frost—frost in the desert!—glinted on the dreary plain.

  On the third day they came to a pile of stones that marked the plateau’s highest point, which they measured at 1,568 feet. Another storm blew up, so ferocious that the swallows that had been following them tried to take shelter inside the heaving tent. But the wind tore it down again, leaving the winged and the wingless miserable in the gale.

  On the fourth day they got to El Hamra, “the very dreariest part of the Hammada.” It was not only uninhabited and waterless, but barren of plants and animals. Richardson passed them during the night; they caught up with him the next day. Two days later they finally reached the southern edge of the plateau. The descent ran between cliffs completely blackened as if by fire, a constricted gloomy passageway that led to a valley heaped with massive black boulders shadowed by black cliffs. But there was also a good well, so they stopped. The drivers, too exhausted to unload the camels, shouted, “Farewell to the Hammada!” and collapsed into sleep.

  It had taken six days to travel 156 miles, by Barth’s measurement. Richardson wrote in his journal that in North Africa “there is no traverse of six days comparable in difficulty to that which we have just accomplished”—except, he added, a horrible desert between Ghat and Aïr—the route they would be taking.

  Despite the dreary setting and the ceaseless wind, and the complete absence of shade, fatigue kept them there the next day. “Scarcely any of our places of encampment on the whole journey seemed to me so bad and cheerless as this,” wrote Barth. He looked longingly at a cluster of date palms several miles away, imagining their shade. But getting there was impossible: “Our camels were too much distressed.”

  WHEN THE CARAVAN continued south, the terrain turned to sand, making travel more difficult, but at least there was a well every day. No markers indicated the route. “The road is not in the sand,” said the camel drivers, “but in our heads.” The days were long. On May 1 they walked for fourteen hours across heavy sand, scorched by a relentless hot wind that blew grit into eyes, mouths, clothing. Aside from the listless cries of the camel drivers, no one spoke, stupefied by heat and the rocking motion of the camels. Richardson wore a lady’s veil to shield his eyes from flies, grit, and hot wind. In the evening, crickets rasped in the burning sand.

  The mountains ahead seemed to retreat before them. As the light and the winds shifted, the color of the sand flickered between red, yellow, and blinding white. Mirages shimmered and vanished. One day a thermometer stuck into the sand at noon shot up to 122 degrees; a few days later, to more than 130 degrees.

  The next day Barth was excited to reach the oasis of Germa, a name that he suspected—correctly—had evolved from Garama, capital of an ancient Berber empire. Barth knew about Garama from his beloved old historians—Herodotus, Strabo, Lucan, Tacitus, Pliny the Elder. The Garamantes were famous in the ancient world as fierce warriors who ran down prey, whether four-legged or two-legged, in chariots drawn by four horses. By the third century B.C. they controlled the caravan routes through the central Sahara.

  Their isolated capital city boasted temples, baths, markets, and towers, all surrounded by a lofty wall. They irrigated their farms of wheat, olives, and dates with water from reservoirs shunted through underground channels. They alternate
ly raided the cities on the Mediterranean and traded with them. After the Romans finally won the Punic Wars in the middle of the second century B.C., the new conquerors eagerly traded with the desert kingdom for gold, horses, slaves, ivory, and wild animals to use in gladiatorial games. But the Garamantes’ chronic depredations eventually galled the Romans into mounting an expedition that defeated them in 19 B.C. To keep tabs on them the Romans established an outpost at Garama.

  Barth was moved by the monument he found there, adorned with Corinthian pilasters, “an object of special interest as the southernmost relic of Roman dominion.” It had been defaced long ago with Berber graffiti.

  The caravan plodded toward Murzuk. The pace of travel had irritated Barth from the first, and his frustration had worsened. In the mornings the caravan often started late because the drivers took so long to round up the camels, which roamed at night while grazing. Once underway, the drivers sometimes insisted on stopping after just a few miles or a few hours, citing good forage or water. On the frequent occasions when the caravan started late or ended early, Barth worked off his exasperation by dashing off on little excursions to climb a peak or explore a wadi. He wondered why Richardson put up with the drivers’ transparent rationales for laziness. He shook his head when Richardson didn’t object to their obvious ploy of taking a long detour, which cost days of delay, simply because it took the caravan past their home village in the Fezzan. Richardson had estimated the 500-mile journey from Tripoli to Murzuk at twenty-five days. It would take thirty-nine, even with the shortcut over the Hammada. Such things added to Barth’s doubts about Richardson’s ability to lead the expedition.

  Some of his criticisms were unfair. Barth was accustomed to traveling alone, at his own energetic pace, and had a hard time adjusting to the rhythms of caravan travel. Large caravans tended to move slowly and stop frequently, regardless of who led them. Pausing to take advantage of good water and forage could be prudent in harsh places where those essentials were scarce. Nor could Richardson be blamed for the ingrained Arab customs of letting camels graze as they walked and leaving them unfettered at night.

  On the other hand‚ Richardson was too acquiescent to his drivers’ demands, too easily persuaded to halt and rest. He also misread situations, made poor decisions, and failed to keep order and discipline among the caravaneers. Perhaps worst, he was too convinced of his own wisdom to consider adjustments.

  5

  Stalled in Murzuk

  THEY ARRIVED AT MURZUK ON MAY 6, 1850, A HOT BLUSTERY DAY, murky with blowing sand. The town’s clay walls glittered with saline crust from the nearby salt flats. Murzuk was an oasis and entrepôt of about 2,800 people who came from all over North and Central Africa. “The people vary greatly in colour,” noted Richardson. Traders from other places kept homes in Murzuk because it was a minor hub of commerce with spokes radiating to Bornu in the southeast, Tripoli in the north, Ghat and Ghadames in the southwest. The major goods passing through its bazaar from the interior were slaves, ivory, senna, animal skins, cotton cloth, and ostrich feathers. Goods heading into the interior included swords, knives, guns, paper, and other manufactured goods. The pasha of Murzuk maintained his palace by taxing the oasis’s gardens and cultivated fields, and by collecting levies on passing caravans.

  Murzuk was a long way from anywhere, hemmed in by desert, and in summer was doubly isolated by intense heat that deterred caravan travel. Its people entertained themselves with the usual vices of lonely places. Richardson, Hornemann, and Lyon all noted that the men tended to be genial drunkards (their beverage was fermented date juice). Murzuk’s women were infamous for their dancing, singing, and licentiousness. Venereal disease was prevalent. So were hemorrhoids, which Hornemann attributed to “the immoderate use of red pepper.” Murzuk was also notorious for a virulent strain of fever, which the natives treated by putting slips of paper inscribed with Qur’anic verses into amulets worn around the neck. The fever was especially deadly to foreigners. It had killed Dr. Ritchie, Lyon’s colleague, and had damaged the health of the current British vice-consul. Barth, Overweg, and the sailor Croft suffered bouts of it in Murzuk.

  The day after their arrival, the three explorers put on their best European clothes and paid a call on the pasha. He served them coffee, pipes, and orange sherbet. After the rigors of the journey Richardson seemed content to rest for a while in Murzuk’s relative comfort and Christian company. Despite the oasis’s isolation and unhealthy climate, a few Europeans lived there. On Richardson’s first visit in 1846, he wrote about a sumptuous dinner with a Greek doctor, an Albanian gunpowder-maker, and the British vice-consul of Murzuk, a native of Trieste. They ate roasted lamb and dried salmon and sardines, washed down with rum, bottled stout, and several kinds of wine. Richardson looked forward to more of the same while planning the next phase of the current journey.

  On his second day in Murzuk, the first sentence in his journal reads, “We are already busy with preparations for our start to the interior.” Barth’s entry on the same day begins, “Unfortunately, our stay in Murzuk seemed likely to become a very long one… .”

  This difference in perspective had several layers. Barth knew that Richardson intended to hire Tuaregs from the oasis of Ghat to escort the expedition across the 250 miles of desert between that place and Murzuk, followed by another 400 miles southwest into the mountains of Aïr. Barth agreed that the expedition would need strong protection to travel safely through Aïr, but he doubted that the Ghat Tuaregs could provide it. He said so to Richardson, without effect. “Though it might have been clear, to every one well acquainted with the state of things in the interior,” wrote Barth, “that their protection could not be the least guarantee for our favorable reception and success in the country of Aïr or Asben, inhabited and governed by an entirely different tribe.”

  He also considered it a strategic mistake to ask the Ghat Tuaregs to come all the way to Murzuk. The invitation would inflate their self-importance and their fee. As the news traveled through the desert grapevine, other tribes would be encouraged to charge exorbitant rates for protection. Richardson’s plan was also a political mistake, in Barth’s view, because it had insulted and enraged Muhammed Boro, a wealthy merchant with homes and contacts in Aïr and Sokoto, whose protection could be crucial. These misjudgments, wrote Barth, caused “some very bad consequences for us.”

  And lastly, Barth was dumbfounded that the letters summoning the Ghat Tuaregs to Murzuk had not gone out until that very morning. Worse, Richardson intended to stay in Murzuk until the Tuaregs arrived. That meant weeks of idleness while the letters made their way to Ghat and then onward to the chiefs in the desert.

  The explorers waited in Murzuk for six weeks—mired there, in Barth’s view, resting comfortably, in Richardson’s. In Travels and Discoveries, Barth never said anything directly harsh about Richardson, but the depth of his exasperation in Murzuk was clear in his crisp critique of Richardson’s plans and in his cursory treatment of Murzuk. He gave the place not quite six pages. Richardson devoted seventy, which are pleasantly diverting.

  He described his visits to the pasha, who served coffee and lemonade. He detailed another banquet at the home of the Greek doctor: “Besides two whole lambs, fowls, pigeons, there were at least twenty made dishes, with every variety of rich sweetmeat. Amongst the early fruits of the season we had figs and apples.” On May 24 the explorers celebrated Queen Victoria’s birthday at the vice-consul’s house by raising the Union Jack, firing fifty-one guns at noon, and eating a dinner of thirty or forty dishes with the pasha and his officers as guests. “The healths of her Majesty, the Sultan, and the King of Prussia, were drunk in champagne with enthusiasm,” wrote Richardson. The decorations included “a small portrait of her Majesty; an Ottoman blood-red flag, with its crescent and star; and a white flag with the Prussian black eagle. The effect was excellent, and quite astonished the natives. The Turks ate and drank famously, and for the most part got ‘elevated.’ ” Barth didn’t mention any of this. To him, it
all must have seemed beside the point.

  Not all of Richardson’s time in Murzuk was spent on entrées and lemonade. He also tended to some business. His nephew, the sailor Croft, was debilitated with Murzuk fever. Richardson wrote to Palmerston that Croft was also “terrified with the vastness of the desert and the uncertain dangers of the way.” He had to be sent back to Tripoli. Richardson asked Palmerston to consider sending two or three English shipbuilders from Malta to meet the expedition in Bornu. Their boats could be used to clear Lake Chad of pirates and to establish commerce with neighboring countries. This would create a “nucleus of British influence which striking downwards and spreading round, could not fail to establish firmly a paramount interest in favour of Great Britain in the heart of Africa.” Palmerston instructed his deputy to look into the idea.

  IN MURZUK, Richardson, Barth, and Overweg stayed in the spacious house of the British vice-consul, G. B. Gagliuffi. About fifty-five years old, Gagliuffi was one of those enigmatic expatriates who always pop up in chronicles of foreign adventure. Born in Trieste, he spent the 1830s and early 1840s as a trader in Tripoli. He spoke excellent English as well as Arabic, Turkish, Greek, and Italian. The British consul in Tripoli during those years, Hanmer Warrington, recommended Gagliuffi for the new post of vice-consul at Murzuk.

  He started in 1843. He built himself a large house and set about his business: looking after British interests without neglecting his own. For the British he monitored the slave trade, established good relations with the local authorities and desert chiefs, and kept tabs on the various conflicts and alliances in Central Africa. For himself he developed trading partnerships with merchants in several towns throughout the Sudan. One such partner was the vizier of Bornu, Beshir ben Tirab. The two wheeler-dealers met and hit it off in January 1844 when the vizier was on his way back from a haj to Mecca. The vizier would soon become vital to Barth and the expedition.