Travel must he adventurous. ‘The great affair is to move,’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in Travels with a Donkey, ‘to feel the needs and hitches of life more nearly; to come down off this feather bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot, and strewn with cutting flints.’ The bumps are vital. They keep the adrenalin pumping round.
We all have adrenalin. We cannot drain it from our systems or pray it will evaporate. Deprived of danger we invent artificial enemies, psychosomatic illnesses, tax-collectors, and, worst of all, ourselves, if we are left alone in the single room. Adrenalin is our travel allowance. We might just as well use it up in a harmless way. Air travel is livening up in this respect but as a species we are terrestrial. Man walked and swam long before he rode or flew. Our human possibilities are best fulfilled on land or sea. Poor Icarus crashed.
The best thing is to walk. We should follow the Chinese poet Li Po in ‘the hardships of travel and the many branchings of the way’. For life is a journey through a wilderness. This concept, universal to the point of banality, could not have survived unless it were biologically true. None of our revolutionary heroes is worth a thing until he has been on a good walk. Ché Guevara spoke of the ‘nomadic phase’ of the Cuban Revolution. Look what the Long March did for Mao Tse-Tung, or Exodus for Moses.
Movement is the best cure for melancholy, as Robert Burton (the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy) understood. ‘The heavens themselves run continually round, the sun riseth and sets, stars and planets keep their constant motions, the air is still tossed by the winds, the waters ebb and flow ... to teach us that we should ever be in motion.’ All birds and animals have biological time clocks regulated by the passage of celestial bodies. They are used as chronometers and navigation aids. Geese migrate by the stars, and some behavioural scientists have at last woken up to the fact that man is a seasonal animal. A tramp I once met best described this involuntary compulsion to wander. ‘It’s as though the tides was pulling you along the high road. I’m like the Arctic Tern. That’s a beautiful white bird, you know, what flies from the North Pole to the South Pole and back again.’
The word ‘revolution’, so offensive to the persecutors of Galileo, was originally used to denote the cyclical passage of celestial bodies. When the geographical movements of people are tampered with, they attach themselves to political movements. When a revolutionary hijacker says, ‘I’m married to the Revolution,’ he means it. For Revolution is a liberating god, the Dionysus of our age. It is a cure for melancholy. Revolution is the Way to Freedom, even if the end result is greater servitude.
Each spring the nomadic tribes of Asia shrug off the inertia of winter, and return with the regularity of swallows returning to their summer pastures. The women put on fresh flowered calico dresses, and literally ‘wear the spring’. They sway to the rhythm of their pitching saddles, and mark time to the insistent beat of the camel bell. They look neither right nor left. Their eyes are glued to the way ahead – over the horizon. The spring migration is a ritual. It fulfils all their spiritual requirements, and the nomads are notoriously irreligious. The way up to the mountains is the path of their salvation.
The great religious teachers, Buddha in the Punjab, Christ, and Mohammed in the Near East, came among peoples whose patterns of migration had been disrupted by settlement. Islam germinated not among the tribesmen of the desert, but in the caravan cities, in the world of high finance. But ‘Nobody’, Mohammed said, ‘becomes a prophet who was not first a shepherd.’ The Hadj, Apostolic Life and the Pilgrimage to a religious centre were institutions to compensate for lack of migrations, and led to the extreme imitators of John the Baptist, ‘wandering about in the desert with the wild beasts as if they themselves were animals’.
Ever since, settled people have returned to Arcadian idylls, or have sought adventure in the ‘interests’ of their country, misguidedly imposing on others the settlement they could not endure at home. Wanderers line the roads from here to Katmandu, but those who complain should remember the incurable student restlessness of Mediaeval Europe. The University of Paris was lucky to get through an academic year without closing. ‘The students were carrying weapons,’ complained one provost. ‘When I came back home in the summer, from school,’ said a student, ‘my father hardly knew me. I was so blackened from tramping in the sun.’
All roads led to Rome, and St Bernard complained that there was not a single town in France or Italy without its quota of English whores, the pioneers of a great tradition. The Church finally became exasperated by its novices going about naked in public, sleeping in baking ovens and singing Goliardic verses with titles like ‘The Oracle of the Holy Bottle’. A new order went out: ‘SIT IN THY CELL and walk round the cloister only when asked to do so.’ It was no use.
The Sufis spoke of themselves as ‘travellers on the way’ and used the same expression as the nomads used for their migration route. They also wore the nomads’ woollen clothing. The ideal of a Sufi was to walk as a beggar or dance himself into a state of permanent ecstasy, ‘to become a dead man walking’, ‘one who has died before his time’. ‘The dervish’, says one text, ‘is a place over which something is passing, not a wayfarer following his own free will.’ This sentiment is close to Walt Whitman’s ‘O Public Road, you express me better than I express myself ...’ The dances of the whirling dervishes imitated the movements of the sun, moon, planets and stars. ‘He who knows the Dance knows God,’ says Rumi.
Dervishes in ecstasy believed that they flew. Their dancing costumes were adorned with symbolic wings. Sometimes their clothes were deliberately shredded and patched. This denoted that the wearer had ripped them to bits in the fury of the dance. A fashion for patchwork has a habit of returning with ecstatic dance movements. To dance is to go on pilgrimage, and people dance more in periods of distress. During the French Revolution Paris went on one of the greatest dancing sprees in history.
Agonistic games are also pilgrimages. The word for chess player in Sanskrit is the same for pilgrim, ‘he who reaches the opposite shore’. Footballers are little aware that they too are pilgrims. The ball they boot symbolises a migrant bird.
All our activities are linked to the idea of journeys. And I like to think that our brains have an information system giving us our orders for the road, and that here lie the mainsprings of our restlessness. At an early stage man found he could spill out all this information in one go, by tampering with the chemistry of the brain. He could fly off on an illusory journey or an imaginary ascent. Consequently settlers naively identified God with the vine, hashish or a hallucinatory mushroom, but true wanderers rarely fell prey to this illusion. Drugs are vehicles for people who have forgotten how to walk.
Actual journeys are more effective, economic and instructive than faked ones. We should tread the steps of Hesiod up Mount Helicon and hear the Muses. They are certain to appear if we listen carefully. We should follow the Taoist sages, Han Shan up Cold Mountain in his little hut, watching the seasons go by, or the great Li Po – ‘You asked me what is my reason for lodging in the grey hills: I smiled but made no reply for my thoughts were idling on their own; like the flowers of the peach tree, they had sauntered off to other climes, to other lands that are not of the world of men.’
1970
IV
REVIEWS
ABEL THE NOMAD41
Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs are classics in line with Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta. Yet his new autobiographical sketch, Desert, Marsh and Mountain, though it borrows large chunks of the two earlier books, is more absorbing than either. The subtitle, ‘The World of a Nomad’, gives a clue about what he is up to. The nomad in question is Mr Thesiger himself, as he travels, by camel or on foot, in Africa or in Asia, among tribesmen who are – or were – for the most part nomadic. At first sight, the book appears to be a collection of short travel-pieces, illustrated with photographs by someone with an unerring sense of composition. A closer look reveals a declaration of fa
ith that goes a long way towards explaining the ‘strange compulsion’ which drives men like Wilfred Thesiger to seek, and find, the consolation of the desert.
He was born to travel. His father was British Minister in Addis Ababa. His first memories were ‘of camels and of tents, of a river and men with spears’. His book was Jock of the Bushveld, that child’s bible of the British Empire. His friends were orderlies and grooms who took him out hunting or held his pony. He was always a stranger among his own – as remote from his schoolfellows as he was from the few of his countrymen, such as the late Gavin Maxwell, who had the stamina to follow him on his journeys. A photograph taken at Eton shows a face already set in the mould of the horizon-struck dreamer.
He went back to Ethiopia in 1930 for the coronation of Haile Selassie. Afterwards, he made a journey across the country of the Danakils, first cousins of Kipling’s ‘fuzzy-wuzzies’ and incredibly fierce. He found ‘even more than I had dreamed of as a boy poring over Jock of the Bushveld’, and, incidentally, crossed the tracks of Arthur Rimbaud, who had trekked up and down those ‘routes horribles’ forty years before. The Danakil journey set the pattern for a life that turned into a perpetual tramp through the wilderness: an officer in the Sudan Political Service; in the Empty Quarter; in the Marshes of Southern Iraq; on the spring migration of the Bakhtiari; with the Kurds of the Zagros or the Kaffirs of the Hindu Kush; watching Nasser’s planes bomb the Yemini Royalists; or living, as he now does, in a tent, shooting the odd buck for food, among the Samburu cattle-herdsmen of Northern Kenya.
Mr Thesiger makes no secret of his conviction that the heroic world of pastoral nomads is finer—morally and physically—than the life of settled civilisations: ‘All that is best in the Arabs came from the desert.’ (Indeed, the word arab means a ‘dweller in tents’, as opposed to hazar ‘a man who lives in a house’—with the original implication that the latter was rather less than human.) It is, therefore, nothing short of catastrophic for him to find his old Bedu friends driving about in cars and seduced by the ‘tawdriest and most trivial aspects of Western civilisation’. Of the Rashid tribe, his companions in the Empty Quarter, he writes: ‘They wore their clothes with distinction, even if they were in rags. They were small deft men, alert and watchful, tempered in the furnace of the desert and trained to unbelievable endurance ... They were fine-drawn and highly strung as thoroughbreds.’
These are not the reveries of an armchair anthropologist: Mr Thesiger knows what he is talking about. Time and again, he gives examples of Bedu courage, loyalty, generosity, open-mindedness; and he contrasts these qualities with the narrow, close-fisted fanaticism of the oases-dwellers. It is the test of his stature as a writer that he can describe without a trace of embarrassment or sentimentality the rewards of winning the friendship of his two young guides, bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha. He is not the confessional type. Yet when another friend, Falih bin Majid, gets killed in a shooting accident in the Marshes, he manages to inject, into a few terse lines, a pain made even more harrowing by his own inability to cry. The description of Falih’s mourning father is equally fine: ‘Majid, grey and unshaven, his great stomach bulging out in front of him, looked very tired, an old broken man filled with bitterness. “Why did it have to be Falih? Why Falih?” he burst out. “God, now I have no one left.’”
Mr Thesiger has so absorbed the temper of the heroic world that his descriptions of raids, blood-feuds and reconciliations give his prose the character of an ancient epic or saga. Even plodding passages, full of what E. M. Forster called ‘those dreadful Oriental names’, will suddenly break into images of great beauty that suggest far more than they state: ‘The sun was on the desert rim, a red ball without heat’; ‘The wind blew cold off dark water and I heard waves lapping on an unseen shore.’ For its internal rhythms and the cadence of its repetitions, this description of an Eden in the Western Hejaz should perhaps be read aloud:We climbed steep passes where baboons barked at us from the cliffs and lammergeyer sailed over the misty depths, and we rested beside cold streams in forests of juniper and wild olive. There were wild flowers here, jasmine and honeysuckle, roses, pinks and primulas. Sometimes we spent the night in a castle with an amir, sometimes in a mud cabin with a slave, and everywhere we were well received. We fed well and slept in comfort, but I could not forget the desert and the challenge of the Sands.
An ‘ache’ to return to the desert is the constant theme of the book. It is easy to mock Mr Thesiger, as some have done, as an old-fashioned English eccentric who has wilfully romanticised the desert creed, or to complain that nomads have added nothing to art, to architecture, or the general glories of civilisation. But the origins of civilisation are not all that respectable. Pharaoh built the pyramid with slave-labour. Moses took his people back into the clean air of the desert and lived in a black tent, and when he died, he walked out of the camp and the vultures got him in a valley in Beth-Peor – ‘and no man knoweth his tomb’. Mr Thesiger’s beliefs are not eccentric. They are consistent with principles laid down, at one time or other since the beginning of civilisation, by historians, philosophers, poets, teachers and mystics. One strain of the Old Testament, particularly strong among the later prophets, harps on the theme that, by settling the Land instead of migrating through it, the Children of Israel have ‘waxed fat and gone a – whoring’ and will find favour with their God only when they go back to the black tents: ‘And again I will make you live in tents as in the days of old’ (Hosea, 12). Desert, Marsh and Mountain can, in fact, be read as a sustained lament for Abel the nomad, murdered by Cain, the planter and builder of the First City, whose sacrifice was unacceptable to the Lord, yet who would have dominion over his brother.
The most concise statement ever made on the nomad question comes from no less a historian than Ibn Khaldun: ‘Nomads are closer to the created world of God and removed from the blameworthy customs that have infected the hearts of settlers.’ Only they would avoid the cycles of decadence that have ruined every known civilisation—and, indeed, the nomad world has not changed since Abraham the Bedu sheikh went on journeys ‘from the south even unto Bethel, unto the place where his tent had been at the beginning’.
There is a case for supposing that all the transcendental religions are stratagems for peoples whose lives were wrecked by settlement. But it is the paradox of Islam that, though the Hadj or Sacred Pilgrimage to Mecca reproduces for townspeople the automatic asceticism of desert life, and though the Fast of Ramadan was originally ‘the month of burning’, the real Bedu often have only the vaguest notions of religion and are shamelessly materialistic. As a Bedu told Palgrave in the last century, ‘we will go up to God and salute him, and if he proves hospitable, we will stay with him: if otherwise, we will mount our horses and ride off.’
Nomads may be closer to the created world of God, but they are not a part of it. A nomad proper is a herdsman who moves his property through a sequence of pastures. He is tied to a most rigorous time-table and committed to the increase of his herds and his sons. It is no accident that such words as ‘stock’, ‘capital’, ‘pecuniary’ and even ‘sterling’ come from the pastoral world. And it is the nomad’s fatal yearning for increase that causes the endless round of raid and feud, and finally tempts him to succumb to settlement.
By these standards, Mr Thesiger is not a nomad but a traveller, in whom the old sense of travel as ‘travail’ has been revived: at one point he writes that the cartilages in his knee wore out and he had to have them removed. There are no metaphysical overtones in his book: he is always the English gentleman explorer. Yet the form of asceticism he has practised over fifty years puts him in the class of other travellers—the Desert Fathers, the Irish Pilgrims, the fakirs, the Holy Wanderers of India, or marvellous intellects like the poet Li Po who travelled to discover the ‘great calm’ that is perhaps the same as the Peace of God.
It was said of the Buddha that he ‘found the Ancient Way and followed it’, and that his last words to his disciples were: ‘Walk on!’ It is not
unreasonable to suppose that the first men walked long journeys through the wilderness of thorns and cutting grasses south of the Sahara: Mr Thesiger, it seems, has returned to the centre.
1979
THE ANARCHISTS OF PATAGONIA42
In 1920 an anarchist revolution, called in the names of Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Malatesta, broke over the British-run sheep farms of Southern Patagonia. Its instigator was a lanky Gallician of twenty-three called Antonio Soto. He had chestnut hair and a thrilling voice and was slightly wall-eyed; he had been piously brought up by maiden aunts at El Ferrol, where he was a contemporary of Francisco Franco. At seventeen he read Tolstoy’s condemnation of military service, skipped to Argentina to avoid his own, and drifted into the theatre and the fringes of the anarchist movement.
Employed as a scene shifter in a travelling Spanish theatre company, Soto ended up in Rio Gallegos, a dismal seaport near the Straits of Magellan. Here a compatriot told him of the plight of the migrant farm workers, mostly mestizo Indians from the green but over-populated island of Chiloe. The situation appealed to Soto’s messianic impulses. He switched from the theatre into politics, got himself elected secretary-general of the local workers’ union and, with a crew of amateur revolutionaries, led his followers to loot and burn, and finally left them to the firing squads.