God’s Fugitive. Andrew Taylor

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       Chapter Three

      In what so land thou comest,

      Observe their customs and that people’s laws …

      Mansoul, p. 72

      Doughty must have been well aware as his ferry sailed serenely into Cartagena that Spain was being torn apart by civil war. When he was travelling in North Africa, part of the country at least was firmly under the control of the French troops; here, there was no unchallenged power to enforce order.

      When Doughty arrived, the Italian nobleman who had finally been prevailed upon to accept the crown as King Amadeus had been on the throne for three years, in the place of Queen Isabella, who had been driven out in the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ of September 1868. But there was barely a pause in the political chaos, with republicans and royalist Carlists savaging each other in a whole series of confrontations, reverses and political about-turns.

      Only a year later Amadeus himself would be dethroned in his turn. It was a time of ferment; and yet, except for the occasional petulant complaint of trains held up by gangs of armed men, Doughty let it pass him by, just as he had the aftermath of the convulsions in France. He had a straightforward, unimaginative physical courage: he was apparently undaunted – and indeed uninterested – by the very real dangers posed by the wandering bands of partisans and militias.

      Traces of the Arab world he had left behind on the other side of the Mediterranean were still all about him: the cultures of Christianity and Islam, of Europe and North Africa, the Spanish and the Arabs, had touched each other in Spain over the centuries, and left their mark. There was the architecture left behind by the Moors, and a whole range of Spanish customs and words that were clearly derived from the Arabic. Local peasants wore a kerchief wound around their heads, he noticed – a hakis, virtually the same word as the Arab harki. The villages, with their walls built of baked mud bricks, their houses furnished only with mats spread upon the floor, could have been plucked from the North African landscape of the Maghreb; many of the names of the people could equally well be Arabic as Spanish.

      This mingling of the two civilizations, he found later, was a source of continual fascination to the educated townsmen of Arabia. Following their arrival in Gibraltar in 711 the Arabs played a leading role in the life and culture of southern Spain for over 700 years, and although it was nearly four centuries since they had finally been expelled, the legends and tales of Muslim Spain were still current in the coffee houses of the oasis towns.

      In Arabia such knowledge would prove an effective way for Doughty to establish friendly relations with the people he met. Here in Spain, it seemed to tie together his interest in language with the great scientific movements of the day. If biological species had evolved gradually over the centuries, if geology and landscape were the products of imperceptible change, so too were language and the day-to-day culture of common men. It was the sort of living archaeology that he loved, laying bare the ancient roots of words and habits alike – even if the final similarity between the two cultures which he jotted down wryly in his notebook, remembering his long hours in the Arab caravan of North Africa, was the ‘drawling, insupportable singing’!

      His grasp of the political turmoil of the present remained rudimentary; but, with his books still safely in storage, Doughty the observer was waking up to his surroundings, responding more enthusiastically to the people he met.

      On his way to Gibraltar, for instance, he paused in Málaga – ‘a large, uncheerful seatown, without any good streets’. There, he took an interest in the civil strife only when he met a republican gran carabinero who gripped him with his description of the conflict that had engulfed the town just a few weeks before. Forty-five people had been killed in the street-fighting between republicans and Carlists – reason enough, perhaps, in Málaga as in Paris, to wipe any cheerful smile off the face of the town.

      The soldier had four or five musket balls still lodged in his body, and he was on the way for treatment in the relative peace of Gibraltar. The excitement is almost audible as Doughty hurriedly jots down what his expansive new friend has told him.

      He said that if he had the opportunity, he would cut the king in pieces with his knife! That the Italians were a people of fiddlers, and that the king was chosen by 150 men only. That all Andalucia was Republican, that all the paysants were méchants, and that in time of any trouble, they would sally from their houses, and kill any person they might find of the opposite party.

      The gran carabinero, all moustache-twirling braggadocio, may sound like a character from an opera, with his loud-mouthed and one-dimensional political analysis – but Doughty does at least take a lively interest in what he has to say about the troubles.

      Earlier in his travels, the people he met seem often to have drifted through his diaries half-noticed, like extras on a film-set; now, as he gets more deeply involved in his journeying, the characters come increasingly alive under his more focused gaze.

      Over the next few weeks he travelled to and fro across southern Spain, peering slightly wistfully, as a would-be naval officer, at the big artillery pieces which loomed threateningly from the fortified galleries СКАЧАТЬ