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Desert Writing by Westrow Cooper. The Word Travels In Wind, Sand and Stars Antoine de Saint-Exupery, pioneering aviator and author of The Little Prince, writes: ‘Man discovers himself when he measures himself against the obstacle.’ The desert, and in particular the vast expanse of the Sahara in North Africa, is one of the great obstacles that, like its polar antitheses, has transfixed explorers, drawn to its searing heart by the sheer immensity of its annihilating emptiness - and the sensation of a rare freedom: ‘In the desert’ wrote one of the desert’s greatest explorers, Wilfred Thesiger, ‘I found a freedom unattainable in civilisation.’ The iron landscape Wind, Sand and Stars recounts Saint-Exupery's experiences of flying early postal routes in France, Spain and North Africa in the 1930s. He combines the sensibility of a poet with the mind of a philosopher. On one occasion he and his navigator crash-land in the Libyan desert; Saint-Exupery, or Saint-Ex as he was known to his flying colleagues, describes the extraordinary landscape through which they walked, a vast area of dunes covered with a single layer of shining black pebbles … as if we are walking on scales of metal, and all the domes around us shine like armour. We have fallen into a metallic world. We are locked in an iron landscape. And as they continue to walk, almost without hope of survival, he reflects that apart from the suffering of his companion, I have no regrets. All in all, it has been a good life. If I got free of this I should start right in again. A man cannot live a decent life in cities, and I need to feel myself live. I am not thinking of aviation. The aeroplane is a means, not an end. One doesn't risk one's life for a plane any more than a farmer ploughs for the sake of the plough. But the aeroplane is a means of getting away from towns and their book-keeping and coming to grips with reality. Forward, March! Before he had set foot in a desert, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud had written in Une Saison En Enfer – Enough! here’s the punishment. – Forward march! Ah! Lungs are burning, temples throbbing! darkness swirls in my eyes, under this sun! By the time he arrived in North Africa in the 1880s he had abandoned poetry. He was there as a trader, but continued to behave with characteristic abandon, becoming famous, locally, for never wearing a hat and for having ‘crossed an equatorial desert region with nothing on his head but a Turkish cap, and this was a region into which the Somali natives never venture because, they say, the brain boils, the skull explodes and all who go there never return.’ Though he may have actually walked where no European had ever walked before, Rimbaud had no interest in documenting the fact - in contrast to C. M. Doughty, the English poet and traveller who, in 1888 published an account of his journeys in the deserts of Arabia as Travels in Arabia Deserta. This is the first of the three colossi of desert literature. After Doughty came T E Lawrence, or Lawrence of Arabia as he became known, whose Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926) provides an epic account of the revolt in Arabia against the Turks in 1916-1918. In the introduction Lawrence famously distinguishes between those who dream by night and ‘dreamers of the day’ who ‘are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.’ Extremity of experience Covering nearly half a million square miles, the immense wilderness of the southern deserts of Saudi Arabia are known in Arabic as 'Rub al Khali' - 'the Empty Quarter'. For Wilfred Thesiger, born in a mud hut in Addis Ababa in 1910, the son of a British colonial official, and educated at Eton and Oxford, they represented ‘the final, unattainable challenge’. Nevertheless he succeeded in making two journeys across the empty quarter with the Bedouin tribesmen between 1945 and 1950, documented in Arabian Sands (1959) the third of the great classics of desert exploration: The valleys when I woke at dawn were filled with eddying mist, above which the silhouettes of the dunes ran eastwards, like fantastic mountains towards the rising sun ... the world was very still, held in a fragile bowl of silence. In spare, lucid prose and with unflinching vision he creates at once a rhapsodic evocation of the desert landscape, a hymn to a vanishing way of life, and an enquiry into the meaning of civilisation: I went there with a belief in my own racial superiority, but in their tents I felt like an uncouth, inarticulate barbarian, an intruder from a shoddy and materialistic world. Arabian Sands is written from the conviction that ‘even today there are experiences that do not need to be justified in terms of material profit.’ ‘The awful scale of the thing’ Geoffrey Moorhouse decided to attempt the first ‘crossing of the great Sahara desert, from west to east, by myself and by camel’ as a means of confronting his fear, to ‘examine the bases of my fear, to observe in the closest possible proximity how a human being copes with his most fundamental funk.’ The Fearful Void (1974) is the resulting account of his journey. Before setting out he consults Thesiger on his proposed route, but the great man ‘was full of doubts and what seemed to me spectacular pessimism.’ As it turns out, the older explorer’s misgivings prove all too justified. The Fearful Void provides a vivid account of a man reaching the limits of physical and mental endurance, expressing both the majesty and terror of the landscape into which he has ventured, even as illness and exhaustion force him to abandon his expedition: Next day dawned cold and clear, and a new world lay endlessly ahead. We were now confronted with a passage across what looked like an eternal plain … We were insects creeping forward to a rim of the world that might never be reached, across pure and unbounded space in which we had no hope at all of encountering anything else that lived and could offer comfort by its presence. It was appalling; but, at the same time, it was exciting, with a spellbinding quality that penetrated even the dulling of the senses that it imposed.
For over three months I had laboured across the Sahara, and there had been few moments when I had experienced the magnetism of the desert to which so many before me had succumbed. But now, in its utmost desolation, I began at last to understand its attraction. It was the awful scale of the thing, the suggestion of virginity, the fusion of pure elements from the heavens above and the earth beneath which were untrammelled and untouched by anything contrived by man. Band of Gold Ironically the ‘eureka!’ moment inspiring Martin Buckley’s journey in to the deserts of the world occurred in the bath: I was sitting in the bath one day, poring over a soggy map, when it hit me: binding this green planet were bands of gold. I saw that you could almost circumnavigate the earth without ever leaving the desert. Opting for local means of transport as opposed journeying on foot, Buckley manages to combine a deep and sensual appreciation of the desert landscape - 'You plunge your hand into a dune's skin through the surface tension and penetrate a universe of sand, a Big Bang of glittering grains of rock' – with hilarious incident and an inner spiritual journey. Towards the end of Grains of Sand (2001) he reflects that he has left behind in the desert 'a version of myself, someone focused, who seemed to know who and what he was'. This notion of change and escape is a thread that runs through desert writing. As Thesiger observes: No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can hope to match. The Outsider The mysterious, transformative spell of the desert (along with the boys and the drugs) drew a generation of creative writers and artists such as Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Jean Cocteau, Truman Capote, Francis Bacon and many others to Tangiers in the 1950s, where Bowles’s masterpiece The Sheltering Sky is set. The book recounts the story of a group of friends as they set out for a disastrous journey into the desert where they encounter ‘the earth’s sharp edge’. It is a journey into meaninglessness, into horror, from which some of the party do not return. Under the title of the final section, ‘The Sky’, Bowles quotes Kafka, ‘From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.’ – The limpid, burning sky each morning when she looked out the window from where she lay, repeated identically day after day, was part of an apparatus functioning without any relationship to her, a power that had gone on, leaving her far behind. One cloudy day, she felt, would allow her to catch up with time. But there was always the immaculate, vast clarity out there when she looked, unchanging and pitiless above the city. The desert is the earth’s final, untamed frontier. In Edward Abbey’s evocative description of the slickrock desert of Utah at the beginning of Desert Solitaire (1968): ‘the most beautiful place on earth … the red dust and the burnt cliffs and the lonely sky – all that which lies beyond the end of the roads’.
Desert writing shows us that in
the ancient, unchanging landscape of the desert there is the possibility of
holding ‘infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour’. At
its best, desert writing penetrates to the very heart of the human
condition, allowing us ‘To see a world in a grain of sand, / And a heaven in
a wild flower’ - even as it shows us ‘fear in a handful of dust’. A Desert Primer By no means a comprehensive list, but a beginning …
C.M.Doughty ‘Travels in
Arabia Deserta’ |