Survivor: The Autobiography (49 page)

If I lost my way, perhaps I would never again find the trail and then Kasim would be lost. I stopped at an impenetrable thicket of dry branches and brush, set fire to the whole thing, and enjoyed seeing the flames lick and scorch the nearest poplars. Kasim could not be far away; he was certain both to hear and to see the fire. But he did not come. I had no choice but to await the dawn. At the foot of a poplar, out of reach of the fire. I lay down and slept for some hours. The fire protected me against any prowling wild beasts.

When dawn came the night fire was still glowing, and a black column of smoke was rising above the forest. It was easy now to find my trail and the place where Kasim lay. He was still in the same position as the night before. Upon seeing me, he whispered: ‘I am dying!’ ‘Will you have some water?’ I asked, letting him hear the splashing sound. He sat up, dazed and staring. I handed him one of the boots. He lifted it to his lips and emptied it to the last drop. After a short pause he emptied the other one, too.

Never before had the great South Arabian desert of Rub ’al Khali been crossed by white man, and the ambition to be its pioneer seized me as it had seized every adventurous Englishman whose lot has been cast in Arabia. But before I tell of the manner of my camel crossing and of the things that befell, I must briefly introduce the reader who is uninitiated in matters Arabian to the lie of the land.

‘The World,’ said the medieval Moslem geographer, ‘is in shape like a ball, and it floats in the circumambient ocean like an egg in water, half in and half out. Of the exposed portion one half constitutes the Inhabited Quarter, while the remaining half is the Empty Quarter, the Rub ’al Khali placed in the barren wastes of Arabia.’

An extravagant estimate, this, of the place of our wanderings; yet it is no mean desert that approaches an area as big as England and France together. That it should have remained
terra incognita
till after the icy Polar regions, the tropic sources of the Amazon, and the vast interior spaces of Asia and Africa had been made to yield up their secrets to Western curiosity, is strange. An Arabian explanation was given to the traveller Charles Doughty, by his genial companion Zayed as Shaykhan, that worthy, with his finger upon a page of Arab script, declaring the matter in this wise: ‘God has given two of the four parts of the earth to the children of Adam, the third part He has given to Gog and Magog, the fourth is the Rub ’al Khali void of the breath of life.’

Lack of rain and merciless heat indeed make of this a place where the Persian poet would have us believe ‘the panting sinner receives a foretaste of his future destiny’. Certainly human life can be but spasmodically supported, and then mostly round the desert’s fringes, where, among semi-barbarous nomadic tribes, hunger and the raid are Nature’s pruning-hooks.

Native suspicion and an insular outlook combine with insecurity of life to keep the infidel intruder at arm’s length, and he who would travel hopefully and usefully requires some apprenticeship and acclimatisation: needs must he speak the tongue, know the mind, grow a beard, dress and act like his desert companions, betraying, for instance, no squeamishness over drinking water, pestiferous though it might be, drawn from unsampled waterholes come upon in the burning sands, and not improved by churning in strong-smelling animal-skins carried on the march. But to our story!

On the 5 October 1931, the SS
British Grenadier
, homeward bound from Persia, arrived off Muscat harbour at dawn, and there picked me up, by arrangement, from a small boat. Two nights later I was dropped, clothed in native dress, into an Arab dhow we sighted riding at anchor off the central-south Arabian shore. Landing, I made my way to the rendezvous where I had expected a trusted Arab chieftain who had served me on an earlier desert expedition, but I found neither him nor his promised string of riding camels.

Experience had taught me the need of not disclosing my plans to anyone in a land where secrecy of movement at the outset is imperative. My hopes of even making a start were thus dashed, and, sick at my bad luck, I turned up into the Qara Mountains to think and to scheme, while I explored and hunted their forested slopes. More than two impatient months passed before despair gave way to reviving hope.

It was the 10 December when at last I set out from Dhufar with a party of desert Arabs that included the famous Sheikh Salih, of the Rashid (Kathir) tribe, twenty-six warriors – nearly all of whom could show the scars of wounds, none of whom had I set eyes on before – and forty camels. The first day’s march was as usual cut short, some of the men returning to the booths to buy a trifling gimcrack with which to gladden the eyes of their beauties far away in the black tents, some for a final watering at the sweet well of the mosque, while skins in which we carried our water were oiled and made watertight, and crude, improvised sacks, which did for pack-saddles, were given a final look over.

Our northerly course, on the morrow, led upward through the dense jungles of the Qara escarpment, where I had reaped a bountiful harvest for the Museum – hyenas, wolves and coneys, snakes and lizards, chameleons, birds and butterflies; and at Qatan I looked back for a last glimpse of the blue Indian Ocean 3,000 feet below. Waving yellow meadows that crowned the uplands gave place to libaniferous shrubs as we wended our way down the far side, amid red and rugged rocks wherein were groves of the frankincense and myrrh trees that gave rise to the fame of the Arabia of antiquity, of which we gain echoes in the Bible. Never could campfires have been more luxuriantly fragrant.

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 Badu
¹⁰
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.