Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes. Citations refer to the admirable Dover edition of Travels in Arabia Deserta.
I was visiting a
friend in the lovely, spacious house on Cape Cod he and his siblings had
inherited. A summer place, it had little
changed over the decades. On its shelves
were a number of well-chosen books, many on literature, the arts, and history,
reflecting the taste of an educated middle-brow generation before my own. These included quite a few of the slip-cased
Heritage Press editions, more modest versions of the Limited Editions Club
volumes, yet aiming to enhance their classic contents with art and design. I took down an unfamiliar title -- Charles M.
Doughty’s 1888 Travels In Arabia Deserta. Having fancied I had done a bit of wandering
in Muslim lands myself, I opened it and saw at a glance that the author used a
peculiar archaic English, described in T. E. Lwrence’s introduction as “a style
which has apparently neither father nor son.”
His sentences followed patterns that seemed to be at times Elizabethan,
and at times simply idiosyncratic. I
began to read and realized at once that I had embarked on something of a
journey myself.
The book is a
monument, amounting to nearly fourteen hundred pages including an excellent
index and an essential glossary. Very
much a travel journal, of the heroic Victorian variety, the book meticulously
records Doughty’s experiences during two years of trekking in what is today
Saudi Arabia. The illiterate Bedouins
think he must be doing magic when he reads or writes, and they must have
thought him a dedicated wonder-worker as he set down the occurrences of daily
life in the desert, so commonplace to the nomads, so extraordinary to Doughty
and his readers.
He begins as part
of a grand haj procession (though as an admitted Christian, he cannot enter Mecca), a
vast and highly organized multi-ethnic pilgrimage which makes a dramatic
opening to his story. His second volume
ends unceremoniously with his reporting to the British Consulate in Jedda. Though several times detained in towns, he
spends most of the time between simply living in the desert with nomadic
people. He becomes progressively weaker
and sicker due to the rigors of his travels.
He makes a show of serving archaeological knowledge by copying old
inscriptions in obscure language which he could not himself read such as
Nabataean, but this pursuit seems an afterthought. He brings some medical supplies and gets a reputation
as a doctor among the locals, but this activity, too, seems more prudential
than benevolent. What he really wished
to do was to experience the life of the “Aarab,” as he calls the wandering
desert tribes.
These were no
caravans carrying merchandise across the sands, but rather subsistence
pastoralists who lived primarily on the milk of their camels (some has sheep
and goats as well) and on oasis dates.
They had an extremely frugal regime in which Doughty fully
participated. Often neither they nor
their beasts could eat through the course of a long day’s march, and sometimes the
evening meal was scant when it did arrive.
Though the region
was still largely unknown, a number of travelers’ accounts preceded Doughty’s [1]. Orientalism had enjoyed a vogue
since the eighteenth century and European interest in both real and fictional
Arabs was high. Doughty’s book, with its
grittiness and often pedestrian progress, has the highest verisimilitude. Every reader will feel that he is sketching
directly from life.
Life in the
desert was bare subsistence for even those Doughty calls the “sheykly”
class. They drink sometimes water “thick
and ill-smelling in the wet sand, and putrefying with rotten fibres of plants
and urea of the nomads’ cattle.” [2] Often
at day’s end the people would say, “’To-day we have not loosed the
spittle (their word for breaking the fast).”
[3] They are in “almost incessant
famine” [4]. “Languor of hunger, the
desert disease, was in all the tents. ‘Mâana lôn, We have nothing left,’ said
the people, one to another.” [5]
Often Doughty’s
surname seems a sprechende Name as, apart from the constant hazard of
armed raids, he is repeatedly threatened with a violent death simply because
he, unlike some earlier travelers, readily declares that he is a
Christian. Apart from the specific
danger, reiterated often enough to become annoying, but doubtless fresh in its
menace with every occurrence for the kafir.
Furthermore,
outside of towns little law existed apart from tradition and violent robberies
as well as organized raids or ghrazzus (of which the Arab nomads seem as
fond as the Sioux had been in the American plains). Such forays were so accepted in their society
that Doughty relates one case in which the adjudicating sheiks ruled that the
animals must be returned, with the exception of a share which the raiders could
retain so that “the turbulent young men” who had stolen them might “be
appeased, with somewhat for their pains, and that for an end of strife.” [9]
The Bedouins are
befuddled by Doughty’s presence. The
reader may share some of their wonder at his willful embrace of their arduous
life with its hunger, illness, and danger.
His own explanation that his “life might add something of lasting worth
to the European geography” [10] is insufficient to support the hardships he
endured and afterward the labor of composition.
Though much of what Doughty describes concerns the quotidian details of
the peoples’ lives, his prose is never pedestrian, but is rather lit from
within by a sense of wonder, a strange beauty.
His usage was eccentric, but not wholly
idiosyncratic. During his own time and
shortly after William Barnes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ezra Pound, and Basil
Bunting were among campaigners for a “purification” of the language, most
importantly by using words with Germanic roots. [11] His influence is evident in later admirers
such as the avant-gardist Laura Riding and the novelist Henry Green for whom he
is “a master of the language, the Genius Doughty,” though “he might be writing
in Latin.” [12] Long after he had left
Saudi Arabia, Doughty maintained his interest in tinkering with English.
His six-volume national epic The Dawn
in Britain (1906) strives to use a pre-Shakespearean vocabulary. His chamber drama The Cliff (1909)
which anticipates WWI by imagining a German attack on Britain features among
its dramatis personae a “divine shining One from heaven,” a company of
“light elves,” “a little deformed maiden,” and the ghosts of napoleon and Joan
of Arc. A sample of his verse might
suggest why the play was never performed.
I may not rest, as I wor wont of sleep;
So a wimble bores my brain, of busy thought:
Wherefore, what though ’t be chill for an old wight,
I’ve left them ruckling mother sheep; to pace
Awhile here to and forth, longs the sea-cliff.
Doughty’s own relish for verbal display is evident not only in his own mannered sentences, but also in his appreciation for the artful speeches of his hosts. He devotes several pages to conveying Abdullah’s loquacious reminiscences during coffee parties. [13] a lengthy dynastic history of the dynasty of Ibn Rashid which is surely drawn from oral accounts takes far longer. [14] He describes illiterate poets whose poetic rhetoric is nearly unintelligible to him yet who receive the “adulation” of listeners, though to him it is “stern and horrid” and notes that every shepherd boy could sing traditional songs. [15] Indeed, he says “the nomads, at leisure and lively minds, have little other than this study to be eloquent. Their utterance is short and with emphasis. There is a perspicuous propriety in their speech, with quick significance.” He catalogues the Arabs’ verbal conventions, noting that “Every tribe has a use, loghra, and neighbors are ever childers of their neighbours’ tongue.” [16]
Reactions to Doughty’s style, assuredly
not to everyone’s taste, are likely to be extreme. To some his language is merely affected,
while others are captivated. A few
examples of Doughty’s locutions will suffice – more are available on every
page. The reader is likely to long
recall, both for style and content, vignettes such as his description of a few
camp hangers-on. “Forlorn person’s will
join themselves to some sheyk’s menzil, and there was with u an aged widow, in
wretchedness, who played the mother to her dead daughter’s fatherless children,
a son so deformed that like a beast he crept upon the sand [ya Latif, oh happy
sight!’ said this most poor and desolate grandam, with religious irony, in her
patient sighing] – and an elf-haired girl wonderfully foul-looking. Boothless, they led their lives under the
skies of God, the boy was naked as he came into the desert world.” [17] A single line may sound proverbial. “The Arabian sky, seldom clear, weeps as the
weeping of hypocrites.” [18] At his best, Doughty achieves lyrical
sublimity. “The silent air burning about
us, we endure breathless till the assr: lingering day draws down to the
sun-setting; the herdsmen, 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 then to the cheerful song
and the cup of 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.” [19]
If the mighty tones of that rhetoric, so like
a church organ, occur only occasionally, it is likely because such moments are
likewise rare, and in that a part of their loveliness consists. Doughty never finds reason to slow his flow
of words. As even the passages quoted
above testify, he routinely uses a considerable lexicon of Arabic words, giving
the reader an enhanced illusion of participating in the life of the encampments. (Fortunately, he includes a useful combined
glossary and index of over a hundred pages for reference.) He includes lists of little possible
interest: tribes, colloquial expressions [20], horses names [21] or brands [22],
the ”thirty fendies [a kindred and natural division in a tribe] of ‘Ateyba” [23],
or a collection of inscriptions translated into French [24].
Just as for less
eccentric writers, though, the central motive for reading Doughty is to
understand his vision. He is repeatedly
asked by his hosts why he is there, in a demanding and dangerous environment,
and he has little to say in response. He has a good many of the prejudices of his
day, and he never hesitates to call the Bedouins ignorant and, if they are
Wahaby, fanatic. Indeed, he is willing
to refer even to ordinary Muslims as captured
by “the dreadful harpy of their religion [25]. Though he never conceals the fact that he is
a Christian, he remains prudent enough to confide only to his notebook that
Mohammed is “the barbaric prophet of Mecca” and his religion a “solemn fools’
paradise.” [26] He casually tosses off
remarks such as “these gracious
Orientals are always graceless short-comers at the last” [27] They have only “a barbarous, fox-like
understanding” [28]. Yet he chose to
live intimately among them for an extended period of time.
Somehow, in spite
of his Victorian patriotism, I imagine Doughty would have been very nearly
equally acerbic in his observation of his fellow Britons. The people of the desert had for him one
advantage, but that sufficed to motivate him (and his readers to follow). The Arabs are living in an environment so
harsh that they have always their eyes on the essentials. Undistracted by media, consuming only the
commodities they themselves wrest from a stingy land, their life has a purity
and grandeur rarely discernable in a modern city.
For all the
sameness of his days, some moments are epiphanies. When a sudden storm bursts over the sand, “I
said to Thaifullah,’God sends his blessing again upon the earth.’” “How good! seemed to me, how peaceable! this little plot of the nomad earth under the
dripping curtains of a worsted booth, in comparison of Hâyil town.” [29] “Bare of all things of which there is no
need, they days of our mortality are so easy and become a long quiescence! Such is the nomad life, a long holiday,
wedded to a divine simplicity, but with this often long tolerance of hunger in
the khála.” [30]
Surely, this is
why Doughty traveled Arabia and this is why those of us who are less willing to
undergo the rigors he apparently embraced can appreciate reading his account of
his experiences. For all his suffering,
he seems to have found a sort of Eden, not in a garden, but in the
wilderness.
1. Captain George
Forster Sadlier traversed the Arabian Peninsula in the early nineteenth
century, though his Diary of a Journey Across Arabia from El Khatif in the
Persian Gulf to Yanbu in the Red Sea, During the Year 1819 was not
published until 1866. Johann Ludwig
Burckhardt’s Travels in Arabia came out in 1829. Alexander William Kinglake’s Eothen
(1844) relates the author’s experiences in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, and in
1857 Richard Burton published his three-volume Narrative of a Pilgrimage to
Al-Madinah & Meccah including his visit to the holy cities while
disguised as a Muslim. (Though his story
made him something of a celebrity, Burton was not the first European to enter
Mecca, having been preceded by a good many others, including Ludovico di
Varthema whose Itinerario de Ludouico de Varthema Bolognese was
published in 1510.) In 1865 William
Gifford Palgrave’s Personal Narrative of a Year's Journey through Central
and Eastern Arabia (1862-1863) appeared.
Georg August Wallin wrote Notes Taken During a Journey Though Part of
Northern Arabia in 1848 (1851) and Narrative of a Journeys From Cairo to
Medina and Mecca by Suez, Arabia, Tawila, Al-Jauf, Jubbe, Hail and Nejd, in
1845 (1854).
2. I, 284.
3. “’To-day we have not loosed the spittle (their word for
breaking the fast).” (I, 489) They are in “almost incessant famine” “Languor of hunger, the desert disease, was
in all the tents. ‘Mâana lôn, We have nothing left,’ said the people, one to
another.”)
4. I, 500.
5. I, 520.
6. I, 197.
7. II, 182.
8. II,108
9. I, 396.
10. I, 469.
11. In this they
resembled the official policies of France, Iceland, and Israel.
12. “Apologia” in Surviving:
the Uncollected Writings of Henry Green “master of the language, Focus on
his style as an expression of personality
“his style is mannered, but he is too great a man to be hidden beneath
it.” In Rational Meaning: a New
Foundation for the Definition of Words and Supplementary Essays Riding and
Schuyler B. Jackson make much of Doughty’s style for reason, they say, “not
literary, but linguistic.”
13. II, 148.
14. II, 30ff.
15. I, 306.
16. I, 307.
17. I,263.
18. I, 351
19. I, 368.
20. I, 307.
21. II, 253.
22. I, 166.
23. II, 456.
24. I, 224-229.
25. I, 95.
26. I, 253.
27. I,125.
28. I, 142.
29. II, 83.
30. I, 490.
