In the country of the camel
Simon Courtauld
THE LAST OF THE BEDU by Michael Asher Viking, £20, pp. 298 THE DANAKIL DIARY by Wilfred Thesiger HarperCollins, £18, pp. 214 The first problem with the Bedu is how to refer to them. Apparently we should not call them Bedouin, because that is a double plural (the Encyclopaedia Britannica goes one better, opting for 'Bedouins'). Michael Asher generally follows the accepted col- lective usage of Bedu — the singular is Bedui — though he starts confusingly on page 1 by introducing 'a Bedouin called Selmi'. More importantly, one wants to know (which is the central theme of this . book) who should be entitled to call them- selves Bedu.
From the Arabic, Ahl Bedu, they are `dwellers in the open land'; to Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who crossed the Empty Quarter twice in the late 1940s, and of whom Asher has written an absorbing biography, they are 'the nomadic camel-breeding tribes of the Arabian desert', the purest strain, Arab al Araba, having originated in the Yemen. It is Thesiger's view that the old ways of the Bedu are finished; today they use camels only for racing (a sport they can watch on television), preferring to move around the desert in Land Cruisers. Asher argues that the Bedu — a term which he uses to include the desert tribes of Africa — have been adapting since palaeolithic times, when conditions in the Sahara were very different, and that they have survived because they have adapted. The coming of the motor vehicle to the desert is merely the latest stage in Bedu evolution. Of the Wahiba tribe of eastern Oman, the author is told: 'They are very famous for their driving in the desert,' as famous as they were for driving camels. A tribesman of the steppes between the Hadhramaut and the Empty Quarter said to Asher: 'Our chil- dren learn to drive cars as soon as they can touch the pedals. We are Bedu, after all.'
Bedu may go to school these days, and have medical treatment. In the Dhofar hills a Bedui named Musallim was herding his camels, having recently gained a degree in mechanical engineering at Leeds Universi- ty. The tribesmen of the Bayt Kathir, who
accompanied Thesiger in the Empty Quar- ter, today herd more goats and cattle than camels, but no one disputes that they are `true' Bedu.
To prove his point, Asher spends a lot of time travelling round Syria and the Hadhramaut in taxis, also visiting the `tourist' Bedu in Jordan. But there is no denying that the ancient, biblical way of Bedu life experienced in Arabia, and often romanticised, by Thomas, Doughty, Philby and Thesiger, has all but disappeared. Asher's book is at its best when he finds a little bit of that life remaining in Egypt the last group of Bedu who still use camels to transport rock-salt across the desert and describes his 1,000-mile trek with one of them, through the Great Sand Sea of the Western Desert.
It is an alien, lifeless place, said to be more treacherous than the Empty Quarter. With camels suffering from sleeping- sickness, Asher and his Bedu companion struggle on through a labyrinth of high dunes, so disoriented by them and by sand- storms that they have little confidence in finding the next oasis. Asher may have spent much of the book trying to convince us, and himself, that the Bedu are not diminished by having adapted to a more settled existence; but there is no mistaking the real thing when he finds it in the Egyptian desert.
Asher has been called 'one of Britain's
two greatest living desert explorers'. The other one has now produced his Danakil Diary, a record of his travels in eastern Abyssinia in the 1930s. Students of Thesiger will have already read, in his auto- biography, The Life of My Choice, the account of his explorations among the Danakil tribesmen and his search for the mouth of the Awash river. The diary, which was originally written in fountain pen, in a small, neat hand, is accompanied by two of his own excellent maps. (Irritatingly, Ash- er's book is entirely without maps.) The young Thesiger — he was 23, leading a 45- man expedition, himself the only white man — travelled in uncharted territory for much of the time, which he relished. When he entered the remote Aussa Sultanate, he wrote:
The knowledge that somewhere in this neigh- bourhood three previous expeditions had been exterminated, that we were far beyond hope of any assistance, that even our where- abouts were unknown, I found wholly satisfy- ing.
Danakil warriors would judge one another by the number of men they had killed and castrated. But Thesiger was unperturbed, writing to his mother, 'I have had a completely wonderful time, and no trouble of any sort,' while telling her of the number of crocodiles, 12-foot pythons and tarantulas he had killed. Thesiger began his Abyssinian journeys shortly after the
coronation of Haile Selassie, which he was invited to attend (his father had been British Minister in Addis Ababa). 'It would rather spoil the effect of the coronation if you get yourself cut up by the Danakil,' Thesiger was told before he went off for a month's hunting at the end of 1930. (Evelyn Waugh had asked to go with him, but Thesiger found him 'flaccid and petulant and I disliked him on sight. Had he come, I suspect only one of us would have returned.') On his own, with a caravan of about 15 Abyssinians and four camels, he set out on the sort of trek which was to inspire and guide his life, with few inter- ruptions, for the next 50 years.
Michael Asher has followed, almost liter- ally, in Thesiger's footsteps; he has jour- neyed 16,000 miles by camel and lived for three years with a Bedu tribe (Kababish) in the Sudan. How much more rewarding have been the lives of explorers such as Thesiger and Asher than the pointless solo slog now being undertaken across the Antarctic by the 52-year-old Sir Ranulph Fiennes.
To order a copy of The Last of the Bedu at the special discount price of £16 or The Danakil Diary at £15, call The Spectator Bookshop on 0181 324 5500.
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