Back into the desert

On Friday I wrote that perhaps only Charles Doughty’s loving, detailed, ornate descriptions of the desert could convince me, a lifelong Midwesterner, of its charms and enchantments. But moments after I posted that, I remembered that I’d recently encountered another writer who had done nearly so well at that task: Dorothy Dunnett.

In Scales of Gold (1991), the fourth book of her House of Niccolo series, Nicholas and his friend, Umar, a former slave who is Nicholas’s great friend and has been his host during a journey to Africa, head north through the desert from Timbuktu towards Arawan with a caravan of some two hundred and fifty camels and three hundred or so people. They set out:

There are few wells in the Sahara, and the journey between them depends on navigation as exact and as strict as that employed by a captain at sea, venturing out of sight of his port, and into waters unknown. In time of clear skies, the Sahara caravan makes its way as the birds do, and the captains: by the sun and the stars, and by whatever landmarks the sand may have left. But the winds blow, and dunes shift, and the marks left by one caravan are obliterated before the next comes. And so men will wander, and perish.

The guide Umar had chosen for Nicholas was a Mesufa Tuareg, and blind. For two days, walking or riding, he turned the white jelly of his sightless eyes to the light and the wind, and opened his palpitating black nostrils to the report of the dead, scentless sand which was neither scentless nor dead, but by some fineness of aroma proclaimed its composition and place. At each mile’s end, he filled his hands with the stuff, and, rubbing, passed it through his brown fingers. Then he smiled and said, “Arawan.”

“Umar,” Nicholas said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Though Dunnett doesn’t underplay the risks that face the caravan--like any good adventure novelist, she takes full advantage of them--at the same time she portrays the quiet of the desert, with its cool nights and tapestry of stars, as a potential healing force, drawing Nicholas, for once, away from the constant plotting and battling that have engulfed his life:

To begin with, they spoke very little. With the rest, they walked through the first night and part of the day, halting rarely. Sleep was brief, and taken by day. During the worst of the heat, they lay with the camels under the white, shimmering sky, and ate, and rested. . . . On the long transit to Taghaza, walking under the Andalusian vaults of the stars, there was time to talk again now and then--and a need. The clarity of the desert demanded something as rare; demanded truth, vision, honesty of those who walked in it.

T. E. Lawrence, in his introduction to Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, which I quoted from on Friday, makes much the same (admittedly essentialist) point:

The desert inhibits considered judgments; its bareness and openness make its habitants frank. Men in it speak out their minds suddenly and unreservedly. Words in the desert are clear-cut.

I know that in my heart I’ll always prefere the decadent ease of an early autumn day in the northern forests over that harshness, but don’t they make it sound at least a bit tempting?

Finally, since I’ve been wandering the desert the past couple of days, I figure I might as well link to the commonplace book–style piece I put together for the New York Moon a couple of years ago on the topic, in case you haven’t seen it. The Moon’s editors got some great illustrators for it, and the result, I think, is a lot of fun. Pour yourself a tall, refreshing glass of iced tea and enjoy!

Put the book back on the shelf

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Having given up, for now, our plans to sell our condo and move to a house possessed of a garden, we spent last Friday night unpacking and reshelving our eighty-plus boxes of books. Friends helped--we owe @santheo and @joegermuska drink after drink after drink--and the work went well, a gradual unearthing of old familiars. For a year, we’d been reduced to one bookcase, a carefully selected group of the unread and the perennial, and I think we did reasonably well in our choices. In his strange and charming Anatomy of Bibliomania, Holbrook Jackson wrote of the sort of enforced paring we’d endured:

Many have speculated upon which are the best books, and it is no easy matter to come to a conclusion where there are so many claimants; especially it is difficult to decide upon what books, or book, were we confined to one, we would choose for an imprisonment, or if marooned on a desert island.

Andre Gide, he reveals, “as a youth made out such a list every quarter”--and never included a single novel.

But as book after book emerged, I realized that, while they’d not been forgotten, they had been relegated to a strange spot in the memory, a sort of vault of denial--remembered, yet locked away, inaccessible. So in the past week I’ve enjoyed diving back into old favorites. Tonight, it’s Charles M. Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888). The two-volume Dover edition I have, which, sadly, is out of print, features an introduction by T. E. Lawrence, in which, while praising Doughty, he classifies the adventuring sort of Englishman:

We export two chief kinds of Englishman, who in foreign parts divide themselves into two opposed classes. Some feel deeply the influence of the native people, and try to adjust themselves to its atmosphere and spirit. To fit themselves modestly into the picture they suppress all in them that would be discordant with local habits and colours. They imitate the native as far as possible, and so avoid friction in their daily life. However, they cannot avoid the consequences of imitation, a hollow, worthless thing. They are like the people but not of the people, and their half-perceptible differences give them a sham influence often greater than their merit. They urge the people among whom they live into strange, unnatural courses by imitating them so well that they are imitated back again. The other class of Englishman is the larger class. In the same circumstance of exile they reinforce their character by memories of the life they have left. In reaction against their foreign surroundings they take refuge in the England that was theirs. They assert their aloofness, their immunity, the more vividly for their loneliness and weakness. They impress the peoples among whom they live by reaction, by giving them an ensample of the complete Englishman, the foreigner intact.

Doughty, explains Lawrence, was a member of the second group:

His seeing is altogether English, yet at the same time his externals, his manners, his dress, and his speech were Arabic, and nomad Arab, of the desert. . . . His record ebbs and flows with his experience, and by reading not a part of the book but all of it you obtain a many-sided sympathetic vision, in the round, of his companions of these stormy and eventful years.

And on this quiet, cool, autumnal Friday night, it seems right to bid the summer adieu with a passage from Doughty:

The lingering day draws down to the sun-setting; the herdsman, weary of the sun, come again with the cattle, to taste in their menzils the first sweetness of mirth and repose.--The day is done, and there rises the nightly freshness of this purest mountain air: and there to the cheerful cup and the song at the common fire. The moon rises ruddy from that solemn obscurity of jebel like a mighty beacon:--and the morrow will be as this day, days deadly drowned in the sun of the summer wilderness.

I think it would be impossible for me to grow to love the desert; the upper Midwest is too deep in my bones. But if anyone could set that hook, it would be Doughty.

Oh, it's good to have these books back at hand.