The Sahara Read online

  Seabrook was not embarrassed to admit that in his case much of the danger was caused by his own lack of preparedness. As he recalls:

  It was only when the sandstorm rose up from the Great Sahara, ripped us down out of the pretty sky, and taught us that it could make skeletons out of airplanes as easily as camels, that we really began to get acquainted with the desert, or to take it or ourselves seriously. In fact the whole adventure had been cooked up so casually, so suddenly, and had moved so quickly in time and space, that it had been impossible from the first, for me at least, to focus on its reality.

  Flying with primitive navigational equipment and weak radios, disaster stalked every flight, and success seemed little more than good luck.

  The most famous pioneer of trans-Saharan flight was Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Most famous today for The Little Prince, his fable for children and adults, Saint-Exupery was nonetheless a noted pilot, opening up aerial routes over the desert for the burgeoning international postal system. Saint-Exupery writes most movingly about the Sahara in Wind, Sand and Stars (in French, Terre des homes), particularly about his and his navigator Andre Prevot’s crash and near-death experience five days after Christmas Day 1935 during a long flight in bad weather.

  With a cash prize of 150,000 francs for the fastest flight time from Paris to Saigon it is scarcely surprising that they took risks. On crashing, Saint-Exupery and Prevot knew that, even if a search party were sent, they were not likely to be found and Saint-Exupery, thinking about what he had been taught about the desert, observes:

  In the Sahara humidity is a constant 40 per cent, but there it drops to 18 per cent. And life evaporates like a haze. Bedouin tribesmen, travellers and colonial officials all teach that a man can last for nineteen hours without water. After twenty hours his eyes flood with light, and it is the beginning of the end: thirst’s onslaught is devastating.

  With this grim knowledge in mind, the men decided to try to walk out of the desert. But here too they were faced with a troubling dilemma. Not knowing where they were, in which direction should they head? After four days a Bedouin found them and led them to safety: “The Arab simply looked at us. He placed his hands firmly on our shoulders, and we obeyed him. We lay down upon the sand. There are no races here, nor any languages, nor any discord ... There is this poor nomad who has placed his archangelic hands on our shoulders... All other pleasures seem trivial to those of us who have known the joy of a rescue in the Sahara.”

  The crash also features in The Little Prince. Translated into 180 languages, the book has sold more than eighty million copies worldwide, the best-selling French-language book of all time. With line drawings by Saint-Exupery, it tells the tale of a little prince who comes from asteroid number B216 which, he explains, is the size of a house. The tale’s narrator is an airman who has crashed in the desert where he meets the Little Prince.

  The novel brilliantly encapsulates Saint-Exupery’s experiences of the desert both before and after his rescue, with the airman worried about his impending death and the Little Prince focused rather on the joy of friendship. ‘“My friend the fox -’ the little prince said to me. ‘My dear little man, this is no longer a matter that has anything to do with the fox!’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because I am about to die of thirst...’ He did not follow my reasoning, and he answered me: ‘It is a good thing to have a friend, even if one is about to die. I, for instance, am very glad to have a fox as a friend.’”

  Despite a lucky escape from death in the desert, Saint-Exupery eventually died while flying. Flying reconnaissance missions for Free French Forces, on the evening of 31 July 1944, having taken off from Corsica on his final mission to collect intelligence on German troop movements in the Rhone Valley, Saint-Exupery failed to return to base. In spite of the mystery that surrounded his death, or perhaps in part because of it, his reputation in France was assured and his memory honoured with a memorial plaque in the Paris Pantheon. Tom Wolfe also acknowledges the place of the pioneering pilot, describing Saint-Exupery in The Right Stuff as “A saint in short, true to his name, flying up here at the right hand of God. The good Saint-Ex! And he was not the only one. He was merely the one who put it into words most beautifully and anointed himself before the altar of the right stuff”

  Saint-Exupéry

  There is a lonely memorial to Saint-Exupery in the desert outside the city of Tarfaya, formerly Cape Juby, near the border with Western Sahara. Saint-Exupery was the manager of the Cape Juby airfield, which marked a stopover for the Aeropostale flights plying the Toulouse-Dakar route. As he wrote in Wind, Sand, and Stars, “And yet we loved the desert... If at first it is merely emptiness and silence, that is because it does not open itself to transient lovers.” It was a remote spot, far from the sort of civilization of city-life he enjoyed when he had the opportunity, and Saint-Exupery came to appreciate the loneliness of his posting, as he said later: “But I know solitude. Three years in the desert have taught me its taste.”

  Literature by those who explored Saharan terra firma is plentiful and rich, perhaps because they felt the thrill of covering ground which for millennia had lain untouched. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Ralph Bagnold spent his free time driving in the desert. Although told by older desert-hands that it was impossible to drive there, especially in the dunes, Bagnold decided to find out if this was true for himself His education was a practical one, taking his Ford Model Ton ever-longer trips into the Sahara until he felt ready to tackle the seemingly impassable Great Sand Sea.

  As in many fields of endeavour, the more Bagnold learnt the more he knew he had to learn. Well aware of the size of the challenge he and his fellow travellers had set, Bagnold wrote in Libyan Sands: Travel in a Dead World, “the fact is that we were a little afraid of the desert... because it was so different from all experience... It lures the foolish onwards by its good firm surface, as several would-be sportsmen have found to their cost... It is most disconcerting, after one has set a course for some known feature on the map, to find, when the correct mileage thither shows up on the speedometer face, that the place one is aiming at is simply not there.”

  In the course of his driving experiments Bagnold devised a number of useful tools, including the sun compass. This car-mounted device allowed navigation by dead reckoning without a vehicle’s metal body interfering with bearings, as it would with a regular compass. Another Bagnold invention was the sand mat, used then as now under a car’s tyres to give it traction, thus freeing a vehicle stuck in sand. His most ingenious invention, though, was a closed-loop system linked to a car radiator, which captured escaping water vapour and sent it back into the radiator, greatly reducing the amount of water that had to be carried for the vehicle.

  Bagnold also worked out how to drive over soft sand, simply by letting out some of the air in a car’s tyres. In addition to his desert driving experiments, in the second year of the Second World War Bagnold published the specialist text, The Physics of Blown Sand, which remains the best single volume work describing in practical terms the formation and movement of sand dunes. Writing in the Geographical Journal, Major Bill Kennedy Shaw, one of Bagnold’s fellow explorers, explained: “Broadly speaking, desert sand may be divided into three types: (1) That in which no car will stick. (2) That through which it is often possible to force a way by keeping up speed and by intelligent use of the slopes of the ground. (3) That in which any tyre yet made will bog.” Most were of the opinion that the Great Sand Sea only contained the third type.

  Bagnold’s main foreign rival during the halcyon days of motorized desert exploration, was the Austro-Hungarian count Laszlo Almasy. Given the nickname Abu Ramla, Father of the Sand, by the Bedouin, Almasy was, like Bagnold, an explorer and innovator with a love of cars and the desert. One of his most famous expeditions saw Almasy and three British friends travel to the Gilf Kebir region in 1932. Using cars and an aeroplane, the team, which included Sir Robert Clayton, Patrick Clayton (no relation) an
d Commander Penderel, surveyed a large area of the desert, first scouting suitable locations from the air then exploring them on the ground. Michael Ondaatje gave a highly fictionalized account of Almasy in his 1992 novel The English Patient, yet fictional or otherwise, Ondaatje captures the camaraderie that existed among the desert dreamers, his Almasy explaining: “Just the Bedouin and us, crisscrossing the Forty Days’ Road. There were rivers of desert tribes, the most beautiful humans I’ve ever met in my life. We were German, English, Hungarian, African - all of us insignificant to them. Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nations.”

  When not simply testing cars or exploring for fun, serious work was also being carried out in the Sahara at this time, the most important tasks being to draw up national borders. The further one travelled from the coast and into the desert, the fewer clear borders would be found between the possessions recently claimed by European powers. In 1915 Frank Cana wrote in the Geographical Journal, “There remains the settlement of the boundaries of the Italian sphere, a settlement which affects French and British (Egyptian) interests. The exact frontiers of Libya (as the Italians style their North African possessions) is a matter of some importance, involving the control of the routes to the Central Sahara and then possession of the Kufra oases.”

  Once the Second World War started, control of desert paths and oases was crucial. As head of the Survey of Egypt, George Murray saw the problem in a professional capacity when he wrote, “Very little interest was taken in the Egyptian deserts before 1905, and by 1925 only 20 percent of the country had been mapped to the professional standards of the day.” The British-run Egyptian Survey department was thus put in charge of surveying and mapping the whole of Egypt and, after the Italian invasion of Libya, settle the otherwise ill-defined border between these countries. Murray noted: “Hastily, it was agreed that the frontier should start from Bir Ramla on the coast and follow various devious camel tracks in turn until Siwa Oasis had been left in Egypt and Jaghbub in Cyrenaica. These objectives achieved, nobody cared where it went. So the twenty-fifth meridian was chosen for it to follow until it got tired or reached the Sudan.” The border was not accurately marked until the late 1930s, just in time for Italian and British troops to start marching back and forth across it.

  In 1936, following a talk by a pioneer of motorized desert travel, Major WB. Kennedy Shaw, later of the Long Range Desert Group and Special Air Service, Hassanein Bey was invited to offer his thoughts, which neatly sum up the evolution of desert exploration between the wars. ‘‘All my journeys in the Libyan Desert,” Hassanein explained,

  were made by camel caravan, and I am pleased to hear that, modern methods of transport notwithstanding, the camel has still been of some use in dumping petrol for the expedition. I might add though that although there are bits of desert where the camel cannot go and the car can, there are a good many bits of desert where the camel can go and the car cannot show its face. There is also something to be said for the slow pace of the camel, three or four miles an hour, because it gives one leisure to look around and note the points of interest in one’s surroundings. Please do not think that I am making propaganda against the car, for although I do not like inanimate transport, I recognize that the exploration of the last nine years in the Libyan Desert could not possibly have been covered by camel carrier.

  Whether fans of the camel caravan, motor car or aeroplane, the men and women who spent their time exploring in the Sahara all did so because it held a special place in their heart. As Kennedy Shaw later noted in the preface to his history of the Long Range Desert Group, “There are no two ways about deserts - either you dislike intensely being in them or you find their attractions hard to resist.” Yet even while Hassanein Bey was extolling the virtues of the camel, the shadow of war was growing on the horizon which, when it came, rudely ended the age of civilized, multinational expeditions by desert-loving ladies and gentleman.

  The Second World War

  French Chadian soldier, 1942

  “The plain was littered with abandoned German equipment, destroyed vehicles, clothing, hats and shoes. I don’t believe I ever saw such a bleak, desolate land except for the Sahara. Little white crosses marking German and Italian dead dotted the sand. ‘God, what a place to have to die in,’ Keith said. He was right.”

  Don Whitehead, diary, 14 November 1942

  It is curious that wars, with all their destructive power, are so often the midwives of creativity, and in this regard, the Second World War was typical. Those who experienced the conflict in the Sahara produced a wealth of diverse material after their experiences, which tackled the futility, waste and boredom as well as the flashes of glory among otherwise ordinary men who lived through - and died in - extraordinary situations.

  Combat was largely limited to the northern parts of the desert. After 1940 and the fall of France, the eight-state federation of French West Africa, which included Mauritania, French Sudan (now Mali) and Niger, remained with Vichy France, as did French North African Morocco and Algeria. The French protectorate of Tunisia was occupied by Vichy-allied German and Italian troops. In contrast, French Equatorial Africa, including Chad, sided with General de Gaulle’s Free French government in exile. As a result, some 15,000 native Chadian troops fought during the course of the war, with other Free French units also fighting alongside British and Commonwealth units.

  One feature of the war in the desert, missing from a number of other theatres of combat, was the sense of the Sahara itself as an implacable enemy, against both sides. All soldiers suffer in adverse weather, but in the desert the ubiquitous sand and dust, extreme temperatures and ever-present fear of being without water gave enemies a certain sympathy for one another.

  The point is made in the closing lines of Christopher Landon’s 1957 novel, Ice Cold in Alex. A semi-autobiographical account of Landon’s war service, the story revolves around Captain Anson, a British officer and alcoholic, and Otto Lutz, a German spy posing as a South African officer. Retreating across the desert in the face of a German advance, Anson is accompanied by his sergeant and a couple of nurses who are left behind when their unit withdraws one night. The journey across the desert is dramatic. Travelling via the tiny oasis of al-Qara and the salt-pans of the Qatarra Depression, they make it safely to Alexandria after much drama. Once there, they enjoy the beer Anson promised to buy them to celebrate their deliverance. As Anson remembers his favourite bar, he muses, “They served it ice cold in Alex.”

  At the story’s close, when Military Police arrive to arrest Lutz, the German “walked to the door with the lieutenant, and then turned back to look at them once more. He said, ‘It has been something. All against one - against the greater enemy. I have learned a lot.’ Then he gave them that silly stiff bow again, the door flapped twice behind him and that was that.”

  Cecil Beaton recorded his thoughts on people confronting the desert in his wartime diaries, noting:

  Cairo demands too little of a man, and the desert too much. Existence in the desert is, in its way, as unnatural as that of Cairo, for a false reality prevails. The desert is an unnatural habitat for the average human being... Life here is primeval, and from this very simplicity seems to spring a new contentment. Often the men become so contented that they are said to be “sand happy”.

  Better known as a high-society photographer, Beaton was in the Western Desert to take photographs for the British Ministry of information. He observed at first hand the truism that life in the military involves a high degree of “Hurry up and wait”, with the lulls being longer and more numerous than any episodic action. He describes this inactivity in Self Portrait with Friends: “One of the worst aspects of desert life is the men’s lack of reading matter. However conscientious they are about their duties, much of their time necessarily must be spent ‘hanging about being bored’.”

  Beaton was also present at a time of movement, with both sides eng
aged in attacks, counter-attacks and retreats over hundreds of miles of flat desert. Remembering one such attack he writes, “Dudley Barker asked excitedly, ‘Do you want to take some action pictures?’ ‘Then it has started in the desert?’ ‘Yes, this morning.’ This was how I heard that Rommel had attacked. One of the Anglo-Egyptian secretaries squeaked up, ‘Oh, I can’t get a thrill out of the desert any longer. It’s always a case of someone going backwards or forwards.’”

  If the “going backwards or forwards” of the war had potential for farce, Spike Milligan articulated this and other more madcap aspects of the war. Milligan especially highlights the absurdity in the midst of what others would see rather as a time of historical import. Serving as a signaller with the Royal Artillery, Gunner Milligan took the most ridiculous elements of military life into his post-war comedic career, creating the Goon Show, the forebear to countless later absurdist comedians from Monty Python to Eddie Izzard.

  In a series of memoirs about his wartime service including “Rommel?” “Gunner Who?’:· A Confrontation in the Desert, Milligan displays an artist’s eye for detail as in the following passage:

  Twixt Tizi Ouzou and Beni Mansour we passed mountains each side of 8,000 feet, and numerous rock-hewn tunnels... ‘‘Attention! Rallientair!” signs appeared frequently. We saw camel trains all laden with goods. They followed ancient camel tracks two or three hundred feet above us, moving slowly with a dignity no civilization had managed to speed up. At sundown, the Arabs turned towards Mecca to carry out their devotions, a religious people, more than I could say for our lot, the only time they knelt was to pick up money.