God’s Fugitive. Andrew Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ Greece he had just been visiting; there was the Christian foundation of St Paul to involve his sense of religious history, and the story of the destruction of the city by the Goths in the third century to excite his interest as a student of the tribes of northern Europe.

      Stone by stone, the temple was emerging from the ground. Wood, standing with his wife in the middle of the excavation, and sketching out on a sheet of The Times possible designs and elevations of the way it might once have looked, readily rebuilt it in his imagination for his fascinated guest.

      Doughty’s earlier experiences at Hoxne had hardly prepared him for anything like this. The diggings had been going on for ten years already, and he had never seen work on such a scale before. It was a foretaste of the imposing ruins he would see over the next few months and years.

      Having reached Ephesus, on the Asian side of the Aegean, his taste for archaeology fired by Wood, he must have thought it would be as easy to go on towards the Holy Land as to go back towards Europe. After all, England held few attractions for a thirty-one-year-old scholar of uncertain expectations – no home, no close family ties, no career, and only the uninviting prospect of a slightly shabby and threadbare life of genteel poverty.

      He described himself later as ‘interested in all that pertains to Biblical research’,⁵ and it would have been very like Doughty to want to be able to place the books of the Old and New Testaments in a physical context for himself. But he was still not planning any extensive journeys among the Arabs: his taste of Islamic culture in North Africa and Spain remained just another element in the general experience of his travelling.

      On he went, towards the Promised Land. Years later, he sketched out an itinerary for his wife – Latakia, Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon, Tyre and Acre, the route of scores of tramp steamers carrying freight and passengers from port to port. At Sidon and Tyre he collected some Roman mosaic tiles, later presented to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford – but it seems likely that Doughty abandoned his ‘gypsying’ at least for a while to travel by sea. From Acre, though, he told his wife that he set out on foot again, on the slow journey to Jerusalem. Now he was travelling along roads he had read about and been told about since his infancy, through a landscape where the place-names rang with the sounds and rhythms of the Authorized Version.

      But the only brief glimpses of Doughty coming face to face with the realities of the traditions he had drunk in so avidly come through occasional references written down years later in Travels in Arabia Deserta. As he set out with the Hadj the following year on his way south to Medain Salih, for instance, his attention was drawn to the devout Persian pilgrims just starting their journey.

      These men, often red-bearded and red dye-beards, of a gentle behaviour, much resemble, in another religion, the Muscovite Easter pilgrims to Jerusalem. And these likewise lay up devoutly of their slender thrift for many years before, that they may once weary their lives in this great religious voyage … ⁶

      It is easy to picture the tall, retiring Doughty, red-bearded himself, watching intently from a distance as the Russian Christians arrived in the narrow streets of Jerusalem, amazed at their fanaticism and yet admiring their devoutness. Their great voyage was over; his was yet to begin.

      Doughty’s travels during the next two and a half years took him through Gaza to Egypt, from where he struck out into the Sinai peninsula on a three-month expedition, before making his way back north towards Damascus.

      With Bedouin guides, I wandered on through most of that vast mountainous labyrinthine solitude of rainless valleys, with their sand-wind burnished rocks and stones, and in some of them, often strangely-scribbled Nabataean cliff inscriptions – the names, the saws, the salutations of ancient wayfarers.⁷

      In Europe he had been a man alone, travelling through a landscape and a cultural environment that were often well-known, but which did not engage his imagination. Here, paradoxically, the strangeness and unfamiliarity of the desert brought him a new sense of fellowship. The man who found human society so hard to deal with felt himself one with a small and select band of travellers, their ‘names, saws, and salutations’ passed down to him over the centuries.

      It was a crucial time, bringing together his studies of geology, of language, and of the people of the region. The formation of the landscape, the development of words, the derivation of names and the roots of a popular culture could all be seen more starkly and clearly in this unchanging world than had been the case in Europe.

      While Doughty notes occasional Roman remains in Jerash and Amman, and finds echoes of Greek tradition in the Nabataean carvings,⁸ he is moving all the time deeper into an unknown world, a culture whose roots were neither Greek nor Roman. But there was one ever-present link. The Bible, which he carried with him both in his pack and in his head, provided him with a constant reference point, a textbook of how the region had been centuries before. There is clear delight in the Travels whenever he manages to relate the ruins or the landscapes he found to the stories of the Old Testament, like the carved stone water-tanks he saw around Hebron and the Dead Sea – where King Uzziah was said to have ‘built towers in the desert and digged many wells’ for his cattle.⁹

      Sometimes, the bland censoriousness of the young man who had left Belgium shows through: he can show the petulance of any traveller disappointed by what he sees, with a bad-tempered and contemptuous belief that the world and the people have degenerated, that the buildings he finds are monuments to a long-past golden age beyond the reach of ‘these squalid Arabs’. There was often a wry contrast between the lush poetic beauty of the ancient verses and the everyday reality of the present. In Hesban, for instance, he came upon the ruins of the biblical city of Heshbon – the same place that the poet of the Song of Solomon had seen before him. There … is a torrent-bed and pits, no more those fish-pools as the eyes of love, cisterns of the doves of Heshbon, but cattle-ponds of noisome standing water.’¹⁰

      The poetry, evidently, had seeped away over the centuries. Now, his imagination was fired by the links between past and present – the continuity imposed by the lives of the people on ruins which seemed to speak only of mortality.

      The thread was often personal, like the carvings of Sinai which seemed to be addressed to him as one of a small band of desert travellers. Or it could be linguistic – he wondered, for instance, whether the ruins of Lejun, ‘a four-square limestone-built walled town’ in the desert, could be all that was left of an outlying Roman military station, with its name a corruption of the Latin legio. But there is, crucially, an introduction for Doughty to the unchanging nature of nomad life, a sense that while buildings may crumble, human life goes on: at the same broken-down walls and arches of Lejun, he saw a small Arab encampment.

      Beduin booths were pitched in the waste outside the walls; the sun was setting and the camels wandered in of themselves over the desert, the housewives of the tents milked their small cattle. By the ruins of a city of stone they received me, in the eternity of the poor nomad tents, with a kind hospitality.¹¹

      It is the tents, not the stone walls, that achieve immortality. One of the first things he notices later, when he reaches the ruins of Medain Salih, is the way that the stones lining the well, still used by the travelling Arabs, are scored by the ropes of generations of beduin, hauling up their water. ‘Who’, he asks, ‘may look upon the like without emotion?’

      His search for ancient remains was almost obsessive: the Arabs, he said impatiently, were ‘too supine and rude’ СКАЧАТЬ