Читать книгу South from Barbary: Along the Slave Routes of the Libyan Sahara - Justin Marozzi - Страница 8

Libya is – as the others show, and indeed as Cnaeus Piso, who was once the prefect of that country, told me – like a leopard’s skin; for it is spotted with inhabited places that are surrounded by waterless and desert land. The Egyptians call such inhabited places ‘auases’.

STRABO, THE GEOGRAPHY

The details of the [slave] traffic are really curious. A slave is heard of one day, talked about the next, reflections next day, price fixed next, goods offered next, squabblings next, bargain upset next, new disputes next, goods assorted next, final arrangement next, goods delivered and exchanged next, etc., etc., and the whole of this melancholy exhibition of a wrangling cupidity over the sale of human beings is wound up by the present of a few parched peas, a few Barbary almonds, and a little tobacco being given to the Soudanese merchants, the parties separating with as much self-complacency, as if they had arranged the mercantile affairs of all Africa.

JAMES RICHARDSON, TRAVELS IN THE GREAT DESERT OF SAHARA IN THE YEARS OF 1845 AND 1846

Outside Tripoli, we got out of our taxi and stopped in a roadside restaurant for a hasty supper. The news bulletin was just beginning. Until recently, the opening sequence had showed Libya and the Arab world as a solitary block of green in a black world. In the heavens hung a copy of The Green Book, growing steadily brighter as a ray of light beamed up towards it from Tripoli. Then, like a satellite sending out signals, the book started zapping countries one by one until the whole world had succumbed to Gaddafi’s malevolent genius and turned green itself. All this was until 1998, when invitations were sent to Arab leaders to join the celebrations in Tripoli for the 29th anniversary of the revolution. Not one turned up. Several premiers, including Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, had arrived several days earlier and made a discreet exit before the ceremonies began. Foreign heads of state were limited to a handful of African leaders. Stung by this snub from his Arab brethren, the man who had spent three decades in power campaigning for a single Arab nation, declared that henceforth Libya was an African, not an Arab, nation. The news no longer showed the outline of the Arab nations. Libya beamed out green light to the black continent of Africa instead.

The main item tonight was the meeting in Libya between the All African Students Union, an African president and Gaddafi. The African leader sat in impressively colourful costume, nodding off periodically during a long ranting speech from his host. Flanking the Libyan head of state was Louis Farrakhan, the American Muslim firebrand, who had probably been given a handsome stipend to lend revolutionary Islamic chic to an otherwise tedious function. Dutifully, he praised his Libyan host. ‘We admire your great moral stature in international affairs and your fight against the imperialist policies of colonialism,’ he droned on sycophantically. ‘You are one of Islam’s great revolutionary leaders. We salute you for your work around the world in support of our Muslim brothers.’ The next item reported claims made by the renegade MI5 officer David Shayler that Britain had plotted to assassinate Gaddafi. ‘It was a pity they didn’t kill him,’ muttered a driver on the neighbouring table.

We sank into the seats of our Peugeot taxi and sped through flat, barren country, listening to French rap, soft Arab rock and All Saints. All that broke the emptiness of the evening landscape were occasional car scrapyards, unsightly heaps of abandoned Peugeot hulks next to squat Portakabins, and thick bands of rubbish on the roadside, mostly car tyres, food packets, and empty tins and bottles. And then darkness fell. At three in the morning, we nosed into the black mass of Ghadames and drove to the house of Othman al Hashashe, where I had stayed the last time I was here. Othman, a gangling twenty-six-year-old accountant and devoted Manchester United fan resplendent in Nike leisure suit, rubbed the sleep from his eyes wonderingly, recognized me and let us in. It was a bitterly cold night inside the house, a harbinger of things to come.

Richardson reached this oasis on 24 August 1845, after an uncomfortable two weeks on camel. He had been preceded by a letter announcing him somewhat disingenuously as the ‘English Consul of Ghadames’. Initially, he was ecstatic. By his own account he was only the second European ever to set foot in this holy trading city. Another Briton, Major Alexander Gordon Laing, had passed through twenty years before en route to becoming the first European to reach Timbuctoo, but had been murdered shortly afterwards. Back in 1818, Ritchie and Lyon had intended to travel to this far-flung town but had been discouraged by Yousef Karamanli ‘on account of the alledged dangers of the road’.

‘I now fancied I had discovered a new world, or had seen Timbuctoo, or followed the whole course of the Niger, or had done something very extraordinary,’ Richardson gushed. ‘But the illusion soon vanished, as vanish all the vain hopes and foolish aspirations of man. I found afterwards that I had only made one step, or laid one stone, in raising for myself a monument of fame in the annals of African discovery!’ For the time being, the great mission to investigate and help eradicate the slave trade had been forgotten. Richardson’s personal ambitions as an African explorer were proving more immediately compelling.

I awoke next morning to a familiar booming voice. Mohammed Ali, who had acted as guide and interpreter for me during my last visit, was breakfasting with Othman. I joined them and was instantly bombarded with a barrage of greetings from Mohammed.

‘Mr Justin, kaif halek (how are you)? Fine? Really, I have missed you, believe me. I thought maybe you were not coming to Libya. How are you? Fine? How is your family? Now I am happy to see you, alhamdulillah (praise God). Believe me, I am too shocked now you come to Ghadames. Alleye berrik feik (God bless you). How is your father? How are you? Fine?’ The exchange of greetings lasted some time. Libyans are an exceedingly courteous people. It reminded me of Lyon’s first impressions of Tripolines in 1818, when he observed:

Very intimate acquaintances mutually lift their joined right hand, repeating with the greatest rapidity, ‘How are you? Well, how are you? Thank God, how are you? God bless you, how are you?’ which compliments in a well bred man never last less than ten minutes; and whatever may be the occasion afterwards, it is a mark of great good breeding occasionally to interrupt it, bowing solemnly and asking, ‘How are you?’ though an answer to the question is by no means considered necessary, as he who asks it is perhaps looking another way, and thinking of something else.

Mohammed was small and stodgily built, bordering on the portly, with a hurrying ramshackle gait and a baritone laugh. A man of constant good humour, he had a lazy right eye, so it was often difficult to know if he was addressing you or someone else. On the basis of my brief time in Ghadames the previous September I was now considered an old friend. Throughout our stay in Libya, Mohammed would behave like an old friend too – unstintingly helpful and loyal. Without our asking for assistance, he had taken today off from his job as one of Ghadames’s three air traffic controllers to show us the Old City and help us look for camels. With an average of one incoming flight every month or so, it was not a demanding job. Before the 1992 embargo, there had been three flights a week to Tripoli and two to Sebha, the capital of Fezzan. Mohammed owed his staccato command of English to a nine-month course at the Anglo-Continental Educational Group of Bournemouth. This was our first experience of the Libyan Dorset connection that would resurface bizarrely during our time in the Sahara. Trained at Herne airport in Dorset in 1978, Mohammed was an ardent Anglophile, though this probably owed more to his extracurricular activities than to any great love of air charts. He spoke fondly of his time in Badger’s and Tiffany’s nightclubs, where he had spent many happy hours slow dancing (‘Oh, my God, really very slowly, believe me’) with the belles of Bournemouth and a girlfriend called Anne.

‘Now we go to Taher’s office,’ he said reassuringly. ‘Believe me, soon you will have camels and then you will leave Ghadames.’ Ned and I exchanged glances – would it be so easy? – and followed Mohammed to the office, a whitewashed hole in the wall run by Taher’s younger brother Ibrahim. He could hardly have looked less like his brother in Tripoli. Where Taher was slim, well-dressed, alert and enjoyed handsome, aquiline features, Ibrahim was a dozy mountain of a man, shambolically clad in a voluminous jalabiya which hung off him like a tent. Overweight and unhurried, he contemplated his surroundings with a lazy air of equanimity. Everything about him took place in slow motion. He was as laid-back as you needed to be in the sleepy town of Ghadames, where nothing much happened these days. If it had been a mistake to count on Taher to get things done, the prospect of definite assistance from Ibrahim seemed infinitely remote.

We discussed the first leg of our journey from Ghadames with him and asked if he could find a guide to take us to Idri, a little less than 300 miles south-east of Ghadames. Ned and I had already agreed that it would be better to look for the camels ourselves, rather than go through a middleman who would doubtless receive some sort of commission and force up the price. Ibrahim considered our request for a couple of minutes, talking intermittently to Mohammed Ali as he did so, and then turned back to us.

‘I find you good guide,’ he said slowly. He knew someone suitable to escort us to Idri and would talk to him later that afternoon. ‘No problem,’ he continued, ‘I arrange everything for you.’

Perhaps we looked unconvinced. Mohammed, as unswerving in his optimism as Hajer in Tripoli, was quick to reassure us all would be well.

‘Believe me,’ he confided sotto voce, ‘Ibrahim is very good man. My God, he will help you. Really, he will do everything for you. Don’t worry about a thing. Mohammed is also praying for you.’

We left Ibrahim to it and set off with Mohammed to explore the old city of Ghadames, one of the most evocative oases in the Sahara. From the searing noon heat and light that bleached everything in sight a painful white we stepped into the deep shade and delicious cool of its covered streets. The contrast was intense. We plunged into a labyrinth of streets and zinqas (alleys), through gloom penetrated every few metres by strong shafts of sunlight shining through the openings between houses. In and out of the light we walked, sometimes emerging into the open air alongside gardens of date palms and vegetables. We climbed up on to one of the roofs and looked down on the tattered maze of paths running between walls of dried mud that sliced through this lush growth. To the south the mosque of Sidi Bedri loomed above the shadowy streets.

The columns and capitals of its interior are thought to have been removed from the Byzantine basilica that stood here during the time of Justinian, the sixth-century Roman emperor, when Ghadames was an episcopal see. A deathlike stillness lingered over the place, broken occasionally by the bleating of sheep and goats and the hum of a few small farmers tending their plots of land. Against the drab beige desert that pressed in on all sides, Ghadames was a bright emerald splash of life.

Until recently, these whitewashed rooftops had been the entire world of the women of Ghadames. Only on three occasions in the year – including the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed – were they allowed to descend to the streets and make their way to one of the town’s seven squares to celebrate their return to earth. The rest of their lives they led in airy seclusion on the interconnected roof terraces of the town, surrounded by date palms, passing from one housetop to another to gossip, exchange presents or buy goods such as scarves, silk sandals, brooches and coloured leather slippers from their neighbours.

‘It is a very old city – 2,000 years old or 5,000 or 12,000,’ Mohammed said definitely, as we surveyed Ghadames from this lofty vantage point. Ten thousand years seemed to be a wide enough range to cover all the options. ‘I have been on government tourist course,’ he went on. ‘This is what they told us to tell the tourists – 2,000, 5,000 or 12,000 years – but believe me, it is very old city.’ And, then, as an afterthought, he added: ‘There are only six guides in Ghadames but only Mohammed Ali can speak English.’

Richardson met with little more success in his attempts to establish the exact age of Ghadames when he visited the town in the mid-nineteenth century. Rais Mustapha, the Turkish governor, told him then it was 4,000 years old. ‘The people of the town, I suppose, have told him so,’ the Englishman wrote sceptically, ‘but where is their authority?’

We know from Pliny the town is at least 2,000 years old. In 19 BC, with war breaking out along Rome’s southern frontier, Cornelius Balbus, the Cadiz-born Proconsul of Africa, set out to conquer the Garamantes, the trouble-making confederation of tribes which then held sway over much of the Sahara. He marched first from the coast to Cydamus (as Romans knew Ghadames), one of their most vital trading centres, and made it an allied city. Two centuries later, it was garrisoned by a detachment of the Legio III Augusta, the celebrated force that for 400 years was the sole Roman legion permanently garrisoned in north-west Africa. From Ghadames, Balbus marched his soldiers almost 350 miles south-east to Garama (now Germa), his enemy’s capital in the Wadi al Ajal. The rout did not stop there. According to Pliny, apart from Ghadames and Garama, Balbus went on to subdue an area containing a further twenty-five tribes, villages, mountains and rivers. It is likely these military successes were exaggerated to emphasize the Roman triumph, but Balbus’ achievements in moving his army across such vast distances in the desert and imposing the pax Romana on a powerful enemy were prodigious. The Garamantes, who had previously enjoyed a trading monopoly far and wide through the Sahara, were soon reduced to the ignominious role of escorting Roman caravans. Balbus was given citizen rights and a triumph, ‘the only foreigner ever so honoured,’ says Pliny.

When the French traveller Henri Duveyrier visited Ghadames in 1862 he came across a bas-relief that he judged could only be ancient Egyptian in style. Ghadamsis told him then that the town dated back to the time of Abraham. Duveyrier concluded Ghadames was a sister community to the early settlements on the Nile.

The town’s precise age may never be known, but Ghadamsis tell a popular tale of how it was founded. Long ago, a group of travellers heading south stopped in the area for lunch one day before continuing their journey. One of them forgot to take his iron plate with him when he left, the loss of which he only discovered the following morning. Returning to the spot, he wandered about searching until he found it. As he did, his horse kicked the ground and out burst a fountain of water. And so the town took its name from the place where the travellers had eaten lunch (gheda) yesterday (ams).

Another legend has it that Oqba bin Naf’a, the seventh-century Arabian conqueror who wiped out the last vestiges of the Garamantes’ empire in Fezzan, arrived in Ghadames after a gruelling journey. He searched in vain for water to quench his burning thirst. Like the travellers before him, his mare then stamped her hoof, and a spring was found. It was named ‘Ain el Fars (Mare’s Spring) and, until recently, was the city’s main water supply.

Water, the most valuable resource deep in the desert, had always been measured and distributed with the greatest care in Ghadames. After collecting in the large rectangular basin at ‘Ain el Fars on the fringes of the medina, it passed beneath ground level to a vaulted grotto in which sat the gaddas, the man responsible for measuring the quantity of water passing through the canal into the town’s gardens via a network of narrow channels. The gauge was a small copper bucket with a hole in the bottom, through which the water flowed in a certain number of minutes. For each bucket emptied the gaddas tied a knot in a cord of palm leaves, before refilling the bucket and continuing his thankless job. There were three such men in charge of the water supply, employed day and night on rota. They were not paid for their pains but received a ration of barley, fruit and dates from the town.

Mohammed took us into Mulberry Square, formerly the market for male slaves. Women were purchased in nearby Little Mulberry Square. Traces of its miserable past were still evident when an English traveller visited Ghadames in pre-war Libya. ‘Where once human flesh was exposed for sale the walls are slimy and foul: the thousands of slaves have left their mark,’ he wrote. Today, there are no such signs and the square was empty. The last time I had been here, I met two refugees from Sierra Leone whitewashing the walls in preparation for the annual tourist festival.

We padded along empty alleys, kicking up veils of dust that glittered in the stabbing sunlight, past stone benches built out from the walls of houses where the town’s old men had once sat and gossiped together, past abandoned house after abandoned house, their massive doors made of date palm trunks tightly closed to the world. Some were still decorated with scraps of coloured rags that showed the owner of the house had performed the haj (pilgrimage) to Mecca. The old Turkish school, built in 1835 and later used by the Italians, burnt uselessly under the sun, its roof caved in, its stairs falling ruinously apart.

This was the sad silence of decline and fall. For centuries Ghadames had been a great trading city whose fame and influence stretched thousands of miles across the Sahara. From Bornu to Timbuctoo, Ghadamsis had held sway commercially and had their own affluent quarters in far-flung southern cities like Jenne and Kano, now northern Nigeria. The Ghadamsi quarter of Timbuctoo was the most flourishing of the entire city, a visitor noted in 1591. Not so long ago, the streets of Ghadames had been filled with the hubbub of commerce, the cries of slaves and slave-buyers, children reciting their lessons in school and the muaddin’s mellifluous call to prayer. Now, all that had gone. The houses were empty. No-one lived here anymore, and the city sat in the heavy stupor of the desert.

Of the half dozen historic trade routes running from the Mediterranean coast across the Sahara, three were in what is now Libya, and Ghadames had sat astride the richest. Caravans from Tripoli, southern Tunis and Algeria assembled here before taking their goods farther south in three separate directions. Some went south-west via Tuat to Timbuctoo, others south to Ghat and Kano, and a third group travelled south-east through Murzuk to Bornu. For hundreds of years, until the mid-nineteenth century at least, the caravan trade was the bedrock of the town’s economy and most of the trading enterprises, bankers and wholesalers operating in the interior were headquartered here.

In the twelfth century, Venetians were bringing arms, textiles, glassware and exotic products like Arabian spices, Indian gems and Chinese silks to Tripoli, carried off by local merchants into the desert. By Leo Africanus’s time, four centuries later, European cloth was still a staple of the Saharan caravan trade. Together with clothes, brass vessels, horses and books, it was exchanged for gold, slaves and zebed (civet). This olfactory delight was procured from civet cats, which were kept in cages and periodically harangued and taunted until through intense perspiration they secreted a perfume from glands beneath the tail. They were then secured, the goo was scraped from their nether regions, preserved in small boxes of hide and sold at great expense as a scent-fixer for perfumes (did Victorian women know what they were dabbing onto their necks?). ‘A savage old cat will produce ten or twelve dollars’ worth in three heats,’ noted Lyon in 1819 (at the ripe age of twenty-two and without consulting anyone he had promoted himself from lieutenant to ensure a more respectful reception from the natives). ‘Their price is enormous, some being sold for three or four slaves.’

Lyon provided one of the most comprehensive accounts of the goods traded along Libya’s second trade route running south from Tripoli to Murzuk, Bilma and Kukawa, west of Lake Chad. It gives an idea of what the caravans were trading with Ghadames at the same time. From the coast came horses, beads, coral, needles (‘four of which purchase a fine fowl’), silks, copper pots and kettles, looking-glasses, swords (‘very long, straight and double edged; bought greedily by the Tuarick’), guns, carpets from Tripoli, Venetian glass, muslins and woollen cloaks. Among goods brought up from the south, slaves still predominated, accompanied by civet, cottons, gold in dust and small bars or rings, leather, ostrich skins and feathers, ornamental sandals, gerbas (water skins made of goats’ hides), honey, pepper, elephants’ teeth and gooroo nuts, a luxury that went at the rate of four to the Spanish dollar. ‘It is said, that in certain years when the nut has been scarce, people in Soudan have given a slave for one of them,’ the indefatigable Lyon reported. Ghadamsi merchants meanwhile brought swords, guns, powder, flints, lead, ironware and clothing to Murzuk for the annual spring market.

By the time Richardson arrived, Ghadames had passed its apogee. Turkish rule, with its capricious system of extortion, was hurting. During the Karamanli dynasty, the city had paid an annual tribute of 850 mahboubs to Tripoli. Richardson learnt that when the Turks took control of the city after their reconquest of Tripoli in 1835, they had demanded a forced contribution of 50,000 mahboubs, stripped women of their gold and silver, ransacked houses, and instituted an annual tribute of 10,000 mahboubs from the city. To make matters worse, Tripoli had just demanded an extraordinary levy of 3,200 mahboubs, which the beleaguered merchants said they were unable to pay. Richardson, who was soon on friendly terms with the Turkish governor, listened to him explaining the essence of Ottoman colonial policy in the territory. ‘You know Arabs to be very devils,’ he told the Englishman.

There are two ways to consider Arabs, but whichever way they are robbers and assassins. When they are famished, they plunder in order to eat; when their bellies are full, they plunder because they kick and are insolent. Now we (Turks) keep them upon a low diet in The Mountains; they have little, and always a little food. This is the Sultan’s tareek (government) to manage them. Their spirits are kept down and they are submissive.

Having mulled over his own ambitions as an explorer, Richardson now rediscovered his ‘humane mission on the behalf of unhappy weak Africans, doomed by men calling themselves Christians, to the curse of slavery’, and set about his investigation of the trade. It did not take him long to realize the scale of the challenge facing the abolitionists: ‘Slave-dealing is so completely engendered in the minds of the Ghadamsee merchants, that they cannot conceive how it can be wrong. They are greatly astonished that slavery is not permitted among us.’

One day, he watched a caravan of forty slaves arrive from Bornu. ‘They were as much like merchandize as they could be, or human beings could be made to resemble it,’ he recorded. ‘They were entirely naked, with the exception of a strip of tanned skin tied round the loins. All were nearly alike, as so many goods packed up of the same quality. They were very thin, and almost skeletons, about the age of from ten to fifteen years, with the round Bornouse features strongly marked upon their countenances.’ As the Turks had taxed Ghadamsis with such ferocity, there were few merchants in the town who could afford to purchase the slaves, and Richardson had to fend off repeated attempts by the Touareg and Tubbu slave owners to get him to buy these hapless creatures himself. The merchants had hoped to sell them for forty to fifty Spanish dollars a head, but were reduced to disposing of them for twenty, of which half went to the government in duty.

Later, he encountered another slave caravan and was deeply moved by the misery of these

poor little children – child-slaves – crawling over the ground, scarcely able to move. Oh, what a curse is slavery! How full of hard-heartedness and cruelty! As soon as the poor slaves arrived, they set to work and made a fire. Some of them were laden with wood when they came up. The fire was their only protection from the cold, the raw bitter cold of the night, for they were nearly naked. I require as much as three ordinary greatcoats, besides the usual clothing of the day, to keep me warm in the night; these poor things, the chilly children of the tropics, have only a rag to cover them, and a bit of fire to warm them. I shall never forget the sparkling eyes of delight of one of the poor little boys, as he sat down and looked into the crackling glaring fire of desert scrub.

Since the slave drivers were paid per capita to deliver their charges to their destination, they saved expenses by giving them as little food as possible. As a result, they were kept on survival rations consisting of barley meal mixed with water. Richardson’s attendant, he noted, ate more for dinner than a slave’s entire daily ration. By the time they got to their destination, they would be no more than ‘living-skeletons’.

Richardson stayed in Ghadames for three months, spending much of his time dispensing medicine to treat the most common illnesses – ophthalmia (inflammation of the eye), diarrhoea, dropsy, smallpox and syphilis – telling his unsuspecting patients it came from the Queen of England, ‘which, I have observed, heightens its value in their eyes’. He was something of a chameleon, at one moment the impassioned liberal, the next a Christian bigot, sometimes a patriotic British imperialist, at others the vitriolic anti-slave trade campaigner. But whatever his mood, he was a consistently – perhaps unintentionally – entertaining observer of his surroundings. The discovery that some men wore kohl to blacken their eyelids, for instance, completely threw him. ‘I confessed I was surprised at this monstrous effeminacy,’ he fumed.

More importantly, his investigations led him to conclude that two merchants under British protection were providing credit to slave-traders. He promptly wrote a letter to that effect to Colonel Warrington in Tripoli, asking him not to publicize this information until he himself was safely out of the desert, for fear of reprisals. The correspondence must have made Warrington squirm:

We may expect one of these days to see some American President coming forward in the Congress of the United States, as the late Mr Slaveholder Tigler, or some French Deputy in the Chamber with a statement to the following effect: ‘that whilst the British Consuls of Barbary, and the agents of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society are labouring for the suppression of the Slave Trade in Northern and Central Africa, the traffic in Slaves between Soudan and Tripoli is principally carried on by the means of British capital’.

Worse still was the news that Richardson had tactlessly conveyed his allegation (‘I do not believe one word of it,’ Warrington wrote London) to the Anti-Slavery Society in England, thereby undermining the British Consul’s own position. The diplomat’s response was equally direct. A public notice was put up announcing ‘the strictest inquiry’ into the affair and threatening a tribunal. Richardson, meanwhile, was pressed by Warrington to provide evidence to support his controversial claims, ‘or I apprehend you will be subject to an action’. Furious with the British Consul for revealing his allegation and jeopardizing his safety in Ghadames, and unable, he claimed, to procure hard evidence, Richardson retreated to his journal and vented his spleen there instead.

The whole affair, which was still occupying Warrington seven months later when Richardson returned to the coast, caused a great scandal both in Tripoli and Ghadames and was illustrative of the changing climate. From the mid-nineteenth century, the combination of the official prohibition of slave-dealing and mounting international opposition made life increasingly difficult for the illegal traffickers in human flesh. By the turn of the century, new economic realities had added to the slavers’ troubles. Transportation costs from Black Africa to Europe had been reduced with the advent of a train link from Kano to Lagos and the introduction of steamers from the African coast to Liverpool. It cost £3 to transport one ton of goods from Liverpool to Kano in 1905 and more than double that just to send the same consignment from Tripoli to Kano. The Saharan caravan trade was under threat as never before.

For Ghadames, the accelerating demise of the slave trade, on whose back the city had grown so prosperous, was the first calamitous setback. With fewer and fewer slaves available to irrigate the gardens and keep back the ever-encroaching sands, the city started shrinking, and emigration started apace. After the middle of the nineteenth century, the decline proved irreversible, but Ghadames lived on, propped up by the Italian Fascists in the early twentieth century through improvements to the water supply. It was in 1986, however, that Gaddafi’s government dealt the age-old medina a potentially fatal blow. All the inhabitants were ordered to vacate the Old City and move into newly constructed houses outside the city walls, equipped with the usual modern conveniences. These houses, unimaginative squares of cheap concrete, are already deteriorating fast. Those inside the medina, though they did not have such luxuries as running hot water, had lasted hundreds of years. Since this forced relocation, the Old City, quite unlike anything else the length and breadth of the Sahara, has been crumbling away steadily. If its oldest houses remain empty, Ghadames’s days are surely numbered.

We still needed camels. That afternoon, we mounted Mohammed’s battered Peugeot 404 pick-up, a clattering veteran of eighteen years of erratic driving, and drove off to see Haj Jiblani, an elderly Touareg who several months before had taken me for an introductory ten-mile camel ride. We sat on the ground and chatted above a depression in which his two white Mehari camels were being fed. Next to the old man, two young boys amused themselves by piling large stones on a tiny helpless puppy. They were toying with the animal as though it was the most normal recreation in the world.

In 1995, at the age of seventy, Jiblani had performed his haj by camel, from Soloum – on the Libyan border with Egypt – to Mecca. We asked if he was interested in selling us his camels and accompanying us as guide on the first leg to Idri. He replied softly, from beneath the shroud of white cloth that covered most of his head and face, that these camels were all he had so he could not part with them. As for guiding us, he would have liked to but could not leave Ghadames because he had a sick relative in the hospital. We should find someone younger and fitter. I had already spoken to another local Touareg called Okra, a man whose main claim to fame was that he had played Sophia Loren’s youthful lover in a film shot around Ghadames many years ago. He had said he was not fit enough for the journey. We did not seem to be making much progress. Even Mohammed, the most optimistic of our trio, seemed to agree.

‘Really we are in bad condition,’ he lamented. A selfless man, he was entering whole-heartedly into the spirit of our quest for camels and guide. ‘You will be the first to do this trip for 1,000 years,’ he enthused with a questionable degree of historical accuracy. ‘Really, we are not used to this. Everyone in Ghadames is surprised by you.’

For most of Gaddafi’s three decades at the helm tourism has not fitted comfortably within the regime’s broadly anti-imperialist mindset and a foreign policy that has led inexorably to isolation. It was only in the early nineties that a faltering programme of encouraging tourists to the country began and tourist visas were issued in greater earnest. For many Libyans we met, the whole notion of a long camel trek by foreign travellers was simply incomprehensible.

Mohammed suggested what was beginning to appear inevitable: ‘I think you must go to the Mehari Club of Ghadames.’ This was an organization that owned several riding camels and hired them out for special occasions.

‘If we do, it’s not going to be cheap,’ I said to Ned.

Abu Amama, its head, had previously offered to sell me five camels at a rate that seemed murderously excessive. We were a captive market in a nine-camel town. The collapse of the slave trade, followed decades later by the arrival of the motor car, meant that the town, through which countless caravans had passed over the centuries, now struggled to equip a tiny party like our own with five camels. Bracing ourselves for a financial showdown, we arranged through Mohammed to have an inspection of the animals the next day.

‘We must look as though we know what we’re doing,’ said Ned firmly when we were both back in Othman’s house. He was in serious mode now. Most of the time he was not, so it was sometimes difficult to adjust.

‘We haven’t got a clue,’ I replied.

‘Yes, but you mustn’t let them see that.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, but I can’t see us pulling it off for long,’ I said doubtfully. Somehow I could not see us fooling the assorted officers of the camel club that we were anything but neophytes as far as camels were concerned.

The next morning, taking another day off from monitoring Ghadames’s untroubled airspace, Mohammed collected us from Othman’s house. We squeezed into the front seat of his pick-up and he tried unsuccessfully to hotwire the ignition. ‘Really, this car is in bad condition,’ he boomed blithely, bustling about beneath the bonnet and tinkering with the engine. This was an understatement. Most of the basic components of a vehicle – such as seats, windows and dashboard – had disappeared long ago and if you looked down between your feet, there was more road than car. It said much both for Peugeot engineering and Ghadamsi mechanics that the car was still, albeit precariously, on the road. After several more attempts, it rattled reluctantly to life and we howled off several kilometres out of town to see the animals, clutching our paper by Michael Asher on how to choose camels.

‘Judging a camel’s age and condition takes experience and a novice will need the help of a local,’ it warned,

However, certain facts can be ascertained by examining the animal closely. First, make the camel kneel and inspect its back and withers. Any open galls or wounds immediately rule it out as a mount: on a long desert trek it can mean death. Let the animal stand again and look for obvious defects like crooked legs, in-growing nails, a hobbling pace, excessive fat on the legs. Check the inside of the front legs where they meet the chest: if you find evidence of rubbing there, the camel will be weak and slow. Generally, look for an animal that is well covered: no ribs showing, a fairly robust hump, bright eyes, well formed long legs and an erect carriage of the head. Finally, have someone saddle and ride the camel: note whether it snaps, bolts or roars at its handler; lead it around and see that it walks freely; make it kneel and stand up several times.

We thought we could manage that. Abd an Nibbi, who was deputizing for Abu Amama during the latter’s absence in the southern town of Ghat, welcomed us to a makeshift camel enclosure on a patch of wasteland. He looked faintly amused, and at the same time – was it our imagination? – crafty. There were seven Mehari camels inside, of which it took no expertise to see that two were clearly unsuitable for a long journey. They were puny youngsters, half the size of the others. It did not leave much room for choice. We needed five.

At close quarters, they looked terrifying. Huge hulks of beasts with mighty, towering legs, together they formed a striking picture of grace and power. The first Mehari camel Richardson had seen walking into the medina of Ghadames had had a similar effect on him. ‘It amazed me by its stupendous height. A person of average size might have walked under its belly.’ An Arab philologist suggested to him the word Mehari derived from Mahra, the Arabian province on the south-east coast adjoining Oman, from where the animal was supposed to have originated. ‘This remarkable camel, which is like the greyhound amongst dogs for swiftness and agility, and even shape, they train for war and riding like the horse,’ he wrote. The Touareg warriors of Ghadames sitting astride their Meharis looked ‘splendid and savage’ to him.

Massive, disdainful and apparently in no mood to be paraded around for our convenience, these Meharis roared terribly, jerked from one side to another and lashed out at the handlers with their legs to show their displeasure. Not a man to be cowed by mere animals, Abd an Nibbi entered the fray. Masterfully he subdued them, throwing a rope around their heads, pulling down their necks and grabbing their nose-rings with supreme assurance. Once he had hold of the nose-rings he tugged at them vigorously until the camels were completely cowed. Within seconds they had been transformed from proud, dangerous-looking beasts into the meekest creatures conceivable. Abd an Nibbi shot us a knowing look, as if to make sure we had witnessed this demonstration of camel skills. I remembered Ned’s advice of the night before and thought ruefully of what amateurs we were. There was no going back now. We had to look convincing. One by one, Abd an Nibbi brought the five camels in front of us.

I looked across at Ned, who had begun to scribble notes with what I imagined was the practised calm of a professional camelbuyer. He looked every bit the part. It was time to join the act. Together, we walked slowly around each one, trying to look as though it was the most normal thing in the world. We bought camels all the time, of course. We nodded sagely, conferred and shook our heads regretfully (we did not want to look over-eager), checked their legs (all of which to our untrained eyes looked crooked), stared into their eyes, slapped their flanks with what we hoped was the air of connoisseurs, and pondered carefully. Ned continued to take notes throughout the inspection. Mohammed Ali pottered about here and there, pausing occasionally to admire a particular animal. ‘Ohhh, really, these are good camels, Mr Justin. They are in good condition.’

At this initial viewing, three of the camels appeared particularly impressive. Cream in colour, they exuded a definite aristocratic hauteur and swaggered about with the greatest nonchalance. They paid us little attention beyond a certain sneering look before continuing their perambulations. Another, a barrel-chested brown, did not seem to be on good terms with the whites, but looked a robust mount. A handsome and effeminate beige, slighter than the others but with the demeanour of a lively thoroughbred, completed the party.

Ned looked up from his notes for a second. ‘Get them to trot,’ he said to me, as though addressing his camel boy. All that training on horseback in the Andes had not been for nothing. He was warming to the task. I looked at the tall beast beside me and wondered how I could get it to do anything, let alone trot. Then I remembered it was essential to show no fear in front of a camel. Grabbing the rope that was attached to its nose-ring, I ran off with the first. Disturbed from an otherwise peaceful afternoon munching hay, the camel appeared to think this was the greatest impudence but within seconds broke into a light trot behind me. At last. I was in control.

‘That’s good,’ said Ned, with the same air of authority. ‘Keep going.’

We took it in turns to take them trotting and got them to kneel down and stand up again repeatedly. Whether we presented a convincing picture to the Ghadamsis around us was a moot point. Judging by his face, Abd an Nibbi was struggling hard not to laugh.

Undaunted, Ned continued taking notes. I saw them several days later. They went something like this:

(1) 13 years old. Wound on front left leg. Slightly knock-kneed.

(2) 12 years old.

(3) White. Bobbles on nose.

(4) ‘V’ on neck. Good temperament.

(5) Brown.

All were for sale, Abd an Nibbi told us with a confident expression that indicated he knew something we did not. We started discussing prices, at which point he pulled out his own paperwork. It consisted of a letter from Abu Amama saying on no account were the camels to be sold for a dinar less than the figure he had quoted me on my last trip. In other words, they were going for £800 each. We could take it or leave it. There was to be no haggling.

We returned to Othman’s house to think it over.

‘What do you think?’ asked Ned.

‘It’s a lot of money,’ I replied, ‘and I don’t like the way there’s no haggling.’

It was too much money, certainly. Our problem was that Abu Amama was not even particularly keen on selling the camels. He would have preferred to hire them to us, he had said before, since if he sold them he would then have to make a long journey south to Niger to replace them. Meharis were relatively rare in Libya, he had explained, freely admitting that this was why they were so expensive. More importantly, if we were determined, as we were, to buy our camels here, we had little alternative, and everyone in Ghadames knew it.

‘What do you think are our options?’ Ned went on.

Short of having a look for camels down in Ghat or, less practically, Kufra (a little under 900 miles away as the crow flies, much more by road), there appeared to be no alternative. Besides, we would lose valuable time leaving Ghadames and would still have to pay the transportation costs to bring the camels back to our starting-point. I didn’t think there was much we could do but pay the exorbitant sum demanded.

‘You know what Anthony Cazalet would say in this sort of situation?’ Ned said.

‘Something about being bloody cold no doubt.’

‘No, he’d say it’s time to throw money at the problem.’

It was. There seemed nothing else for it. We returned to our lodgings and, after holding off an attempt by Abd an Nibbi to dispute the black market exchange rate, handed over several thousand dollars. Everyone was smiles. The transaction was complete. The camels were ours. Now we needed a guide. The next morning Mohammed Ali arrived with a message from Ibrahim saying one had been found. ‘You see, Mr Justin, really we are in good condition. I tell you Ibrahim help with everything, alhamdulillah.’

Things were looking up. We trooped back into the hole in the wall to find a fat man with two lazy eyes waiting for us. With him and Mohammed Ali in one room, it was almost impossible to know who was speaking to whom. He shook hands without warmth and was introduced to us as Mohammed Ramadan from Awbari. There was something unpleasant about his manner. He did not seem at all interested in getting to know the people with whom he was volunteering to travel several hundred miles across the Sahara. This was a simple business transaction, no more, no less. In a bullying tone, he told us he knew the area between Ghadames and Idri intimately and was ready to go with us. We started to discuss the route in more detail and asked him how he travelled in the desert. Things went rapidly downhill from there and his manner became ever more aggressive and confrontational. He would only travel by camel if we had a car as back-up, he insisted. It would carry food and water supplies for us and the camels. Each day his sidekick would drive ahead of us for thirty miles or so and in the evening we would rejoin the car for dinner. Mohammed Ali looked embarrassed. He knew this was not what we wanted to do.

Having talked over the route together and ascertained there were several wells en route to Idri, we asked Mohammed Ramadan why he needed a car. We were happy to go without one. It seemed an unnecessary, profoundly unromantic and expensive means of travel. He took this as an attack on his desert skills and pounded his fist on the table.

‘The journey is very difficult and dangerous,’ he insisted. ‘There is no food or water for the camels for many days.’

‘But you’ve just said there are several wells along the route, so how can it be so dangerous?’ I asked.

‘I go with a car or I don’t go at all,’ he spluttered aggressively. He banged the table with his fist again and his pudgy face wobbled with the impact.

I thought of Michael Asher’s notes again.

Choosing a guide or companion is very much more difficult than choosing a camel. As the Arabs say, ‘you cannot know a man until you have been in the desert with him’ … Many who present themselves as desert guides may have only a rudimentary knowledge of camels. Even those who are official desert guides may have become so used to travelling in motor vehicles that they have grown lax. Do not fall for the ‘Wise old Arab’ syndrome.

A heated exchange followed between Ibrahim and Mohammed Ramadan about taking the car. The latter repeated his conditions, pounding the table at intervals to drive home his point. The meeting was over. This was not the man we wanted to travel in the desert with and it appeared the feeling was mutual.

‘So much for that,’ I said to Ned as we returned in low spirits to Othman’s house.

‘Look on the bright side. He was too fat for the job,’ came the phlegmatic reply. Never one to moan about our bad luck, Ned was adept at making light of such failures.

Mohammed, too, had his own style. ‘Really, I am sorry for you,’ he mourned sympathetically. ‘Now we are in bad condition. I am embarrassed about this, really I feel shy.’

I asked him if he knew anyone else in Ghadames who might agree to come with us.

‘Really, I don’t know, Mr Justin, because you are the first to do this,’ he replied sombrely. ‘Oh my God, you like camels too much. Other people go by car. But I am also wanting you to go by camel now. Maybe tomorrow we will find good guide for you, inshallah (God willing).’ From the tone of his voice, it was clear he thought our chances of success extremely limited. And then, in a gesture that took both Ned and me by surprise, he suddenly raised his hands to the heavens in the most theatrical supplication to the Almighty. ‘Please God, help us so they can do the journey without a car!’ he implored. Would He listen?

The next day, Ibrahim confessed he no longer held out great hopes of finding another guide prepared to travel from Ghadames to Idri by camel. He had lost the urge, never very great in the first place, to look for one. Mohammed Ali, a more enterprising character altogether, said he would talk to some of the people from the Mehari Club. Buying camels in one of the ancient centres of the caravan trade had been difficult but manageable. We now wondered whether finding a guide prepared to exchange the comforts of travel by Toyota Landcruiser for the hardships of a camel trek would prove too much in late-twentieth-century Ghadames.

While we waited to hear the results of Mohammed’s efforts, we visited the museum, a very basic series of rooms in the old fort containing traditional Ghadamsi costumes, utensils, folkloric medicines, a Touareg tent and the usual Gaddafi propaganda. In one room lay a few stones with barely legible Roman inscriptions. In another was a rope above a sign saying ‘It used for climbing tree’ and a photograph of a man delicately balanced with a rope tied around his waist and the date palm, resting his feet on the trunk. Mohammed Ali’s uncle had fallen to his death several years ago while collecting dates from a tree. The museum did not do justice to Ghadames’ past, but after those of Tripoli, Leptis and Sabratha there was something to be said for brevity. A tour took about ten minutes.

Outside Ibrahim’s office, an elderly Land Rover with two gerbas (waterskins) attached to the wings had arrived. Two languid Frenchmen came to say hello. They were looking for another vehicle with which to make a convoy down to Ghat. We said we could not help, but there seemed to be a fair amount of tourist traffic heading that way if they waited around. Moments later, a monstrous Mercedes Unimog desert vehicle pulled in. Emblazoned on the sides in lurid colours was a romanticized desert scene and the hideous caption ETHNOGRAPHISCHE EXPEDITIONEN. Its German occupants spilled out. They too were en route to Ghat. ‘Ja, ve make documentary about ze Touareg und little bit about ze Sahara,’ they told us. Ned and I retired to one side. The Frenchmen, whose faces had fallen when they saw this brute of a vehicle arrive, approached the Germans reluctantly. It was obvious they would rather not have gone with them but had no alternative. We British sat apart from the Continental throng. ‘A microcosm of Europe,’ said Ned.

Mohammed reappeared later that afternoon in a state of excitement. ‘Now really we are in good condition!’ he bellowed. ‘I have found someone who will go with you. His name is Abd al Wahab and he is very good guide.’ He had spent several hours talking to the Touareg of the Mehari Club. ‘Now you can go without car, inshallah. Believe me, this will be good for you. I know you are liking the camels!’ He would bring the man to see us in the evening.

Ruminating over this apparent change in our fortunes, we were interrupted by the unannounced arrival of Taher Ibrahim, an oleaginous Ghadamsi travel agent I had bumped into on my last visit. He spoke fluent English with a Cockney accent, unexpected in someone whose contact with England had been limited to two years in Colchester.

‘You speak excellent English,’ said Ned.

‘Yes, I know, best in Ghadames,’ he replied smugly. He started prying. How much were we paying for the camels? How much was the guide going to cost? Where were we going? How long would we be in Ghadames? To the last we replied shortly: ‘As long as it takes.’ This expression reminded him of an encounter with a prostitute on London’s Gloucester Road. Captivated – as he seemed to think we were too – by the recollections of his sexual triumph, he launched into an account of the episode.

‘I asked her how much. She said £20 or something like that. How long do I get with you, I asked? As long as it takes, she said.’ He burst into laughter.

We met Abd al Wahab for the first time that evening. A handsome Touareg possessed of the silent gravitas of the desert nomad, he had a dignified bearing, benevolent eyes that peered out from his clean white tagilmus (the veil worn by all Touareg men), and a large slug of a moustache that crawled greedily across his upper lip and would have reached the bottom of his sideburns if he had worn any. He was smartly dressed in a black woollen burnous and his manner was calm and retiring, a welcome contrast to the aggressive hectoring tone of Mohammed Ramadan. When he spoke – and he did so rarely – it was in a soft assured voice. We discussed the journey and his terms for accompanying us around a dinner table on a dais in Othman’s house. I repeated to Abd al Wahab what Mohammed Ramadan had told us about the great dangers of the route. He shook his head.

‘It is not so dangerous,’ he replied quietly. We would reach our first well after three days, the second after another three and thereafter they would appear regularly, so we need not be concerned about water for the camels. ‘Also, it is winter now, and the camels can go longer than that without water,’ he went on. ‘Of course, we do not need to take a car.’ Everything about him inspired confidence.

This was our man. We shook hands with him, delighted at having overcome our first serious difficulty, and arranged to go the next day but one. Leaving, he did not look where he was going, stepped down from the dais onto a bed below and was promptly trampolined into the air, before returning to the floor in a confused heap of white cotton and black wool. He laughed at himself good-humouredly, if somewhat sheepishly, and excused himself. He looked as though he would be far happier in the desert than surrounded by these trappings of modern civilization.

The next morning was a flurry of shopping. We descended on the town’s market to buy ten- and twenty-litre plastic water bidouns, cooking pots, buckets, a tarpaulin and blankets to cover the riding saddles that we were buying from the club. Neither of us had ever provisioned for a journey of two weeks, so it was a hit-and-miss affair. Mohammed Ali totted up our bill while we both raided the shop shelves. We thought it best to err on the side of generosity, and tin after tin of tuna fish duly flew into cardboard boxes, joining a plethora of pasta, tomato puree, tea, coffee, sugar, bread, biscuits, tinned fruit, olive oil, garlic, onions and oranges. These complemented our scanty supplies from England. I had brought packet soups, packet sauces and a pot of Marmite. Ned, more of a minimalist, had half a dozen bottles of Encona West Indian Hot Pepper Sauce to enliven the pasta. Having heard that arguments with guides over food were notorious in the desert, we took pains to ensure Abd al Wahab liked everything we were buying. Ned picked up a tin of beans. Here was a chance to practise the Arabic he had been learning on his Linguaphone course.

‘Are you a fasulya bean?’ he asked him, in flawless classical Arabic.

Abd al Wahab smiled and nodded.

The last things we needed from the market were some suitable clothes for the desert. I suggested to Ned we buy a couple of cotton jalabiyas, the free-flowing garment worn throughout the Arab world, as well as a shish, a five-metre length of cotton to protect our heads from the desert sun. As Michael Asher had written,

it seems to me that the West has devised no better dress for travelling than that worn by desert people. The long, loose-fitting shirt allows a layer of cool insulating air to circulate beneath it. The baggy trousers or loin-cloths worn by most desert tribes are extremely comfortable for riding. The turban or headcloth, with its many layers not only keeps the head cool but can also be used in a number of other ways, including veiling the face in a sand storm.

Ned, resolutely English, was initially unconvinced and took some persuading of the advantages of going native. While he hesitated I bought the last large cotton jalabiya in the shop. All that was left in his size was one in diarrhoea-coloured polyester.

Hearing of our imminent departure, Othman had kindly arranged an interview for us with his uncle, Abd as Salam, the chief government official of Ghadames. Minders showed us into his office where he welcomed us graciously. He sat behind a desk sporting a pair of glasses with lenses so thick they distorted his eyes into a demonic grimace. Despite the daytime heat, he wore a heavy beige cardigan, two jumpers, a shirt and thermal vest. This was midwinter for Ghadamsis.

The town dated back to 895 BC, he told us, and had long been an important transit point for goods going north and south across the desert. ‘I tell you something else you do not know,’ he said, with an air of mystery. ‘Ghadames was first city in world to have passports, post office, free market and water gauge.’ ‘Passports’ had once been necessary, he explained, to cross from one half of Ghadames into the other. The system of gates dividing the town into two sections – one each for the predominant but mutually hostile Bani Walid and Bani Wazit tribes – dated back more than 2,000 years. When a man from one tribe wanted to visit someone from the other, he had to have a certain paper, like a passport, that enabled him to pass through the gateway into the neighbouring quarter. Richardson called these two long-feuding tribes ‘the Whigs and Tories of Ghadames’. On asking his guide about the history of their conflict he was told: ‘The Ben Weleed and the Ben Wezeet are people of Ghadames, who have quarrelled from time immemorial: it was the will of God they should be divided, and who shall resist his will?’ These strict tribal divisions no longer existed and intermarrying was increasingly common, Abd as Salam informed us.

The postal service consisted of a small box, into which people would place letters to various destinations across the Sahara. Anyone setting out by caravan to Tripoli, for example, first had to see if there were any letters bound for that area. ‘If he do not look in box before he go, he make big mistake,’ Abd as Salam said. ‘He will be in big trouble with the people.’ The world’s first free market consisted of a square with mosques on two sides. Both the Bani Walid and Bani Wazit were at liberty to meet here and conduct business.

Abd as Salam told us the removal of the town’s population from the Old City had started in 1972, when Gaddafi authorized the construction of new houses. We asked him about the solitary inhabitant of the ancient medina. One old lady, whose house we had seen, had refused to move. ‘She is still in love with her husband,’ he replied. ‘He died several years ago. She does not want to leave because it was his house and she has memories of him there.’ What of the rest of the medina, we wondered? ‘There will be big programme to increase tourists,’ he replied optimistically. ‘We will have fairs and festivals, new hotels, cafés, and handicraft shops. We will not forget Old Ghadames.’

That evening, we revisited the camels, tried out the saddles, and packed up the bags ready for a morning start. At last we were ready to set off into the desert. ‘Really, I am happy now because you are leaving,’ boomed Mohammed, staring up at the evening sky with his lazy eye. ‘Believe me, before we had too much problems. Now you have camels, you have Abd al Wahab and you can go into the desert and we are all in good condition, alhamdulillah.’

We returned to Othman’s house, made final preparations for the journey, and retired to sleep after thanking our host for all his kindness and hospitality. He had been good natured throughout our stay, despite the constant invasions of his house by parties of unknown Touareg men and daily interruptions from the high-spirited Mohammed Ali.

This was our last night in civilization, and it was another freezing one, but neither Ned nor I really noticed it. Submerged under heavy blankets, my mind was racing, already dreaming of the desert and its open spaces, of unbroken horizons and long nights beneath the stars with our small caravan of five camels and Abd al Wahab. Tomorrow it would all begin.