I had never lived in the middle of a desert until I went to Baghdad. There, you are always reminded of it, by the sands that the khamsin brings in from the desert, by the desert people – the beduin – who wander through the city’s streets in their tribal robes looking lost, and by their camels and goats tethered near the souk. You always have the thought that if you want to leave Baghdad for anywhere else you must pass through or over the desert, a wilderness of sand, rock, or gravel where you too will soon look lost. It surrounds you completely, for hundreds of miles in every direction. You see it as an emptiness, a vacuum, a nothingness. Stretching away from the tarmac road the desert seems to have no character apart from that which the road and its cars and lorries give it. It is the place that our so-called civilisation has not yet reached. But if you go further away from the town, away from those burnt out, abandoned vehicles which cling despairingly to the road, you make discoveries which you cannot even imagine from the road. You see seas, small or great, filling the spaces between the dunes, waves shimmering in the harsh sunlight; you see mounds, the remains of former habitations, camels, and groves of palm-trees floating along above the far horizons, sailing through the sky as your eye searches for recognisable landmarks. Things are not what they seem : these mirages are illusions caused by the heavy heat haze, the “luminous vapours” of which Dr Johnson spoke, but they have a life of their own and bring the desert to life.
The desert became important for us living in Baghdad in the years following the 14 July 1958 revolution. We became a suspect race, and our Iraqi friends went to ground, understandably enough. We were thrown into the company of other expatriates in a way we had not been before the revolution.
Our association with a mixed bag of foreign diplomats began with a tentative shared interest in archaeological sites, and developed into a love of the desert. Iraq, and especially that part of it known as Mesopotamia – the land between the rivers - has, ever since man’s earliest history, been a centre for civilisations. The Sumerians were there nearly five thousand years ago in their cities of Ur, Eridu and Warka, then came Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians , then Seleucids (Greek) and Sassanids (Persian) with their mighty palace in the desert at Ukhaidir and their lovely arch at Ctesiphon outside Baghdad. And many hundreds more. The deserts of Iraq are littered with the remains of ancient cities.
We would set out in a convoy of cars for the chosen site, often not very much more than a collection of mounds in the desert, navigating gingerly in those areas where the track had disappeared, far from any human habitation. When we arrived at our objective the archaeologists among us would get out their spades and begin digging in those places where trenches made by real archaeologists, or by tomb-robbers, already existed. The rest would wander around looking at the remains that still stood, poking around for chance potsherds, opening bottles or amusing their children. A few Arabs would come, some of them with artefacts of their own, usually fakes, to sell to us. Sometimes we would light fires and spend the night, before going off next day to explore the area.
We learned much from these expeditions, not only about ancient civilisations, but also about the desert itself. Biblical passages came to life as we gazed on the remains of Ur of the Chaldees, and other cities of the desert now abandoned and destroyed, Nimrud and Nineveh, or the ziggurat of Samarra or the Tower of Babel. History became a seamless robe, an uninterrupted succession of events in which our little revolution had its place: we had all contributed and were part of the endless history of Mesopotamia.>
On these outings, aware that visits to local police or army posts could eat up hours of the precious weekend, we generally kept away from towns, but if we were intending to camp at a site we sometimes informed the mutasarrif, head of the local administration.
We found that these authorities were usually opposed to our camping, on the grounds, they said, of our own safety.since the desert at night was full of unknown dangers. We had to argue patiently to convince them that we would be all right, but none the less they often stationed a landrover full of armed men fifty yards from our encampment of tents, barbecues, cooking pots and bottles.
I was reminded of the Arab fear of the desert at night when returning from leave in England some months later. I had driven down from Istanbul to Aleppo and planned to go on by the direct desert road from Damascus to Baghdad (the route used by the Nairn bus which first opened the route) instead of taking the metalled pipeline road. The problem was that the desert road had been used very little since the revolution, when diplomatic relations between Syria and Iraq were suspended, and was reported to be impassable. At the army post outside Damascus they confirmed that the road was not too good and recommended that I should take a guide, indicating a feckless-looking youth squatting in the corner . I said no thank you, and settled down to wait. Very soon a bus came along, laden with tribesmen, their families, goats, chickens and impedimenta, and off we went in convoy.
We had hardly left the tarmac road when the bus broke down. The driver waved me on, shouting that he would soon catch up , and urged me to keep to the markers erected every mile or so – usually a pile of stones or a couple of tyres. The going was not easy, with frequent sand drifts, which I could only get through by taking them at speed with tyres deflated. This was all very well , but since the heat forced me to keep the windows open the sand from my bow-wave was filling the car. I went on until it was quite dark, then stopped by one of the markers for food and sleep.
I was woken several hours later by the arrival of the bus that I had last seen outside Damascus. The tribesmen and their families poured out in an unruly mob, running over to where I had put up my camp bed.. “You cannot sleep here”, they shouted in chorus. “The wolves will get you”. I explained that there were no wolves in the desert, but they would not have this. I recalled that the Arabian traveller Charles Doughty spoke of a “monster of the desert” called a ghrol which was reputed to attack travellers, but decided it would be wiser not to tell them about it. So I got out of my bed, placed the bed on the flat roof of the car, climbed up and lay down to sleep again as they all watched in silence. This did not deter them for long : one humorist mimed wolves leaping up to the roof of the car to tear off my leg , which got him a round of applause, but their warnings were now uttered with a dying fall, and a short time later they sloped wearily back to the bus. With a few regretful shouts of farewell, they departed on the road to Baghdad, leaving the desert to me and the wolves.
The wolves did not come, and next night I too arrived in Baghdad.
Christopher Herdon
July 2006
