The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje [50]
The desert could not be claimed or owned – it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East. Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape. Fire and sand. We left the harbours of oasis. The places water came to and touched … Ain, Bir, Wadi, Foggara, Khottara, Shaduf. I didn’t want my name against such beautiful names. Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert.
Still, some wanted their mark there. On that dry watercourse, on this shingled knoll. Small vanities in this plot of land northwest of the Sudan, south of Cyrenaica. Fenelon-Barnes wanted the fossil trees he discovered to bear his name. He even wanted a tribe to take his name, and spent a year on the negotiations. Then Bauchan outdid him, having a type of sand dune named after him. But I wanted to erase my name and the place I had come from. By the time war arrived, after ten years in the desert, it was easy for me to slip across borders, not to belong to anyone, to any nation.
1933 or 1934. I forget the year. Madox, Casparius, Bermann, myself, two Sudanese drivers and a cook. By now we travel in A-type Ford cars with box bodies and are using for the first time large balloon tyres known as air wheels. They ride better on sand, but the gamble is whether they will stand up to stone fields and splinter rocks.
We leave Kharga on March 22. Bermann and I have theorized that three wadis written about by Williamson in 1838 make up Zerzura.
Southwest of the Gilf Kebir are three isolated granite massifs rising out of the plain – Gebel Arkanu, Gebel Uweinat, and Gebel Kissu. The three are fifteen miles apart from each other. Good water in several of the ravines, though the wells at Gebel Arkanu are bitter, not drinkable except in an emergency. Williamson said three wadis formed Zerzura, but he never located them and this is considered fable. Yet even one rain oasis in these crater-shaped hills would solve the riddle of how Cambyses and his army could attempt to cross such a desert, of the Senussi raids during the Great War, when the black giant raiders crossed a desert which supposedly has no water or pasture. This was a world that had been civilised for centuries, had a thousand paths and roads.
We find jars at Abu Ballas with the classic Greek amphora shape. Herodotus speaks of such jars.
Bermann and I talk to a snakelike mysterious old man in the fortress of El Jof – in the stone hall that once had been the library of the great Senussi sheik. An old Tebu, a caravan guide by profession, speaking accented Arabic. Later Bermann says ‘like the screeching of bats,’ quoting Herodotus. We talk to him all day, all night, and he gives nothing away. The Senussi creed, their foremost doctrine, is still not to reveal the secrets of the desert to strangers.
At Wadi el Melik we see birds of an unknown species.
On May 5, I climb a stone cliff and approach the Uweinat plateau from a new direction. I find myself in a broad wadi full of acacia trees.
There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own. Someone seen bathing in a desert caravan, holding up muslin with one arm in front of her. Some old Arab poet’s woman, whose white-dove