GOD’S FUGITIVE

The Life of Charles Montagu Doughty

Andrew Taylor

DEDICATION

Looking in one direction,

this book is dedicated to

HARRY TAYLOR

and in the other

to

SAM, ABIGAIL AND REBECCA

EPIGRAPH

The traveller must be himself in men’s eyes, a man worthy to live under the bent of God’s heaven, and were it without a religion; he is such who has a clean human heart and longsuffering under his bare shirt: it is enough, and though the way be full of harms, he may travel to the ends of the world.

Travels in Arabia Deserta, i, p. 56

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Foreword

Map

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Afterword

Keep Reading

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Notes

Author’s Note

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

FOREWORD

Charles Montagu Doughty was the foremost Arabian explorer of his or any other age. His two years of wandering with the bedu through the oasis towns and deserts started a tradition of British exploration and discovery by travellers who acknowledged him as their master, and he returned to England to write one of the greatest and most original travel books.

He was that unlikely adventurer for his day, a man who would not kill – and yet he had strength and passion, and could face the threat of his own death without flinching. As a writer, he believed in his writing and in his vision when nobody else did; turning his back on exploration, he dedicated his life to poetry and struggled singlehandedly to change the direction of English literature. He lived through the greatest revolution in thought the world had ever seen, and spent a lifetime wrestling with his conscience over its consequences.

Among his admirers as an artist were George Bernard Shaw, who found Arabia Deserta inexhaustible. ‘You can open it and dip into it anywhere all the rest of your life,’ he declared.¹ There were F. R. Leavis, Edwin Muir, Wyndham Lewis and, most ardent of all, T. E. Lawrence. Seven Pillars of Wisdom is, in its way, Lawrence’s own homage to Doughty.

And now he is virtually forgotten, his dense and idiosyncratic works valued by antiquarian booksellers and lovers of Arabia, but practically unknown to the readers of a simpler, less painstaking age. The achievement of his travels on foot and by camel seems overshadowed in the days of four-wheel-drive vehicles, helicopters, satellite navigation systems, supply-drops and commercial sponsorship. The great desert journeys are now all in the past. The tradition of Arabian exploration can never be recovered: it is as much a part of history today as the crossing of the Atlantic, or the search for the source of the Nile.

It was Wilfred Thesiger, another great Arabian explorer, who observed that there could never again be a camel-crossing of the desert like his own in the 1940s, or those of the explorers who went before him. ‘I was the last of the Arabian explorers, because afterwards, there were the cars,’ he said. ‘When I made my journeys in Arabia, there was no possibility of travelling in any other way than the way I went. If you could go in a car, it would turn the whole journey into a stunt.’²

Thesiger was the last of a line that included Harry St John Philby, father of the Russian spy and the dedicated servant of Ibn Saud, King of Arabia; there was Bertram Thomas, the civil servant who saved up his holidays for his desert expeditions, and became the first European to cross the Empty Quarter; and Gertrude Bell, who travelled to Arabia in the shadow of a disastrous love affair,³ and demanded that the rulers of Hail treat her like the lady she was and cash her a cheque for £200.

There were the Blunts, Wilfrid and Lady Anne, searching for a romantic Orient which never existed outside the salons of London and Paris; and of course, T. E. Lawrence himself, Lawrence of Arabia, who united the warring tribes just long enough to drive out the Turks and change the face of the Middle East for ever. All of them were passionate, even obsessive, about the desert – and above and before them all stood Charles Montagu Doughty.

The tradition had lasted less than seventy years. Before, there had been adventurers, explorers like Sir Richard Burton or William Gifford Palgrave, who disguised themselves and slipped through Arabia like thieves or spies; after Doughty, with his proud refusal to dissemble, things were never the same again.

Doughty came to Arabia almost by accident, at the end of six years’ wandering through Europe and the Middle East. Initially, he intended to investigate reports of a lost city like Petra, close by the pilgrim road to Mecca; but by the time he sailed away from Jedda two years later, he had dug more deeply into Arabia, lived more closely with the wandering bedu, than any explorer before or since. Thesiger was to collect photographs, Philby tiptoed after tiny birds, reptiles and mammals like some ghastly Angel of Death adding to his collection, and all of them gathered fossils, rocks and ‘specimens’ for the museums at home – but Doughty’s vision embraced an entire civilization.

Everything he did was on a grand scale, and the book he eventually wrote about his travels, which appeared some nine years later, covered nearly 1,200 pages. It was written in a style that mingled Elizabethan and Arabian, the rhythms of the Bible with the precision of a scientific text. And apart from being a staggering work of literary ambition, Travels in Arabia Deserta was, for many of the explorers who followed him, a first introduction to the Arab world.

‘We were in totally different parts of Arabia, so he couldn’t give me any information about the country itself, but he could give me a feel for the bedu and their way of life,’ said Thesiger, whose own book, Arabian Sands, is itself considered a classic.⁴ ‘It was a massive undertaking. Thomas’s books I don’t think are worth reading; Philby’s are too technical, and I don’t find them readable, but there is more in Doughty about the Arabs and their way of life than anywhere else.’

Doughty claimed later that his travelling was no more than a brief distraction in a life dedicated to poetry. But Arabia stayed with him until the day he died – as indeed it did with all the explorers. His obsessions, though, were bigger, more ambitious, than theirs – his book delving at the same time into the soul of a civilization and into the soul of a single tortured human being.

He was born into the maelstrom of the most wide-ranging revolution in the entire history of western thought, and he shared fully in an intellectual upheaval that still reverberates. Scientific disputes are usually remote, abstruse – the bitter argument centuries before, over whether the sun or the earth was at the centre of the universe, had been carried on largely among a small group of committed experts. The vast mass of the people were as unaffected as they were uncomprehending. But the twin shocks of the revolution which hit the mid nineteenth century were to shake the confident world-view of virtually every single thinking person in the western world for decades to come.

Through the early years of the century generations of comfortable certainty were being chipped away by the questing hammers of the new geologists. Not only was the world vastly older than the theologians suggested, the scientists claimed, but the natural forces that had shaped it were still at work. Two books took the argument forward – first Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, and then Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

Each was the synthesis of a dispute which had been simmering for decades, but they shifted the ground of the debate irreversibly. First the earth, and now mankind itself, was toppled from its position as the unchanging Creation of a loving God. The reassuring vision of man in the image of his Maker was altered for ever. It was by going to study the work of wind, rain, volcanoes and glaciers, peering through microscopes rather than poring over religious books, that knowledge could be won.

Doughty followed both courses. He was born into a family which, through its generations of conservative Anglican religious ministry and its respect for history and tradition, was likely to be shaken to the core by the revolution. Many people in a similar position struggled to maintain their equanimity by ignoring the scientific arguments, others by relinquishing their religious faith. Doughty, picking over fossils in the Suffolk clay, travelling to Cambridge University to study the dangerous new discipline of Natural Science, struggling with his ice-axe and notebooks over the glaciers of Norway, yet still maintaining his passionate religious sense, was caught in a lifelong dilemma.

After Cambridge, he abandoned science to turn to poetry, abandoned the new fascination with field-study to return to the library. Once again, he was delving back into the past, into the foundations and origins this time of language and literature, a self-taught philologist, linguist and anthropologist. When he set off on his travels, his copies of Chaucer, Spenser and other early English writers in his bags, it was with a closely drawn and wide-ranging intellectual map which could guide his researches in geography, geology, biology, history, anthropology and language.

But he had, too, the deeply introspective determination of a writer and a poet. His wanderings, as far as we can tell, seem to have been largely serendipitous: Doughty was blown by whatever wind took him, first around Europe, then through the Middle East and Sinai, and finally south with the Hadj caravan towards Mecca.

When he returned, it was to a life of unremitting study and contemplation as he embarked first on the story of his travels, and then on a series of epic poems that drew on his experiences, his researches and his uncompromising belief in the corruption and decadence of the English language. He saw himself as a patriot, trying to turn back the clock to a time when language and literature were fresh and pure. He failed, as people who reach back into history always do; but the attempt dominated his life, and the poetry that it created does not deserve merely to be forgotten.

In many ways, he was a man of his times: he felt a Victorian’s distaste for industrialization; he joined in the brutal, blustering patriotism of the First World War years; even his fascination with language, with the words and expressions of another age, was shared by other scholars and poets of the period. But, a sort of intellectual Howard Hughes, he read nothing of their work, and virtually nothing of other contemporary writing: the names of the leading poets and writers of his day were completely foreign to him, and he shied nervously away from the onrush of the twentieth century.

He was indeed, in the phrase he was to use many years later, ‘God’s Fugitive’.

MAP

Chapter One

There is nothing in the nature of a biography; nor could there, that I can see, be any utility in it. I was born in ’43 and left an orphan when a little child. I am now rather an invalid …

Letter to S. C. Cockerell, Christmas Day 1918

The solid, square flint tower of St Mary’s Church, Martlesham, is almost hidden among the Suffolk trees. It stands a couple of miles away from the modern village – easy to miss for the casual visitor.

Inside are the haphazard treasures of thousands of English country churches: a fifteenth-century wall painting of St Christopher, lovingly preserved; an ancient family pew recessed into a wall of the chancel, and now used to store cleaning materials; a stone font from the fifteenth century and a carved oak pulpit from the seventeenth; an ancient chest, and a few pieces of medieval stained glass gathered into a single panel. And along the walls, the carved memorials that say everything and nothing about the long-dead members of a local family – in this case, the Doughtys.

There are George Doughty, died 1798, and his wife Ann; their son Chester, who died in 1802; Major Ernest Christie Doughty, DSO, of the Suffolk Regiment, who died in 1928; his grandfather, Frederic Ernest, Rector of Martlesham for nearly thirty years. Outside, more Doughtys are at rest in the graveyard: Rear-Admiral Frederick Proby Doughty, who died in 1892, and his wife, the former Mary Arnold, with their child Beatrice May, lie there among their relatives.

Of Charles Montagu Doughty, for whom as a child Martlesham was closer to being a home than anywhere else, there is nothing: his memorial is far away, in a London crematorium. And yet the atmosphere of the simple little church, its unimpeachable, unassuming Englishness and its dignified reserve, reflect one facet of his character. As in churches all over the country, it is the list as a whole, rather than the individual names, which tells the story; of specific characters, particular lives, the memorials are all but silent. There are names, dates, an occasional mention of a life’s work, but it is the tradition, the history, not the individual, which counts.

And that, without the slightest doubt, is what Charles Doughty would have thought the proper attitude.

He always backed away from curiosity about his biography or his early life – and indeed, many Victorian children must have shared his experience of childhood as time spent in a foreign and not particularly friendly country. Even for the offspring of a family with lands, traditions and inheritances on each side going back for generations, it could be an unpredictable and precarious existence.

Doughty was born into a world of privilege and high expectations. His father, also Charles Montagu, was a clergyman, the squire of Theberton in Suffolk, and owner of family estates and properties all over the county – but it was only a few months after his birth on 19 August 1843 that the young Charles Doughty suffered the first of a series of devastating blows. His mother, Frederica, never recovered from the strain of childbirth and, at less than a year old, Doughty was motherless. He himself had not been expected to survive. ‘It is a long time since I came into the world, and so obviously a dying infant life, that I was christened by my own father almost immediately,’ he said later.¹

But it was the mother, and not the child, who died, and for the rest of his life, the few people who talked to Doughty about his childhood commented on his abiding sense of bereavement. Within a year of his own marriage forty-three years later came a mirror-image of the tragedy, with his own stillborn first child carried off to the churchyard while his invalid wife lay and struggled back to health. Small wonder that later, as he gathered together in his painstaking fashion thousands of word-associations and jottings for use in his writing, among the first under the Latin heading ‘Mater’ would be ‘mother’s yearning’, ‘longing’, ‘smiling tears’ and ‘yearning love’.²

One of the first and most lasting lessons for the young Charles Doughty was that love was something that was brutally wrenched away – an ache, not a consolation.

At the end of his life, then, his writing drew not just on six decades of dedicated study, not just on the travels through Arabia which had been his formative experience, but also, crucially, upon the sense of loss which had surrounded his earliest memories. The theme repeatedly comes back to haunt him – in his last poem, Mansoul, for instance, he describes how he faced his own ‘private grief’ on his journey around the underworld. ‘Death cannot dim thy vision,’ he declares at his mother’s grave.

Long cold be those dead lips, that word ne’er spake

Unworth, unsooth; those dying lips, that kissed,

Once kisst (thy nature’s painful travail past)

This last new-born on thy dear breast, alas! …

Mother of my life’s breath, I living lift

O’er thee, these prayer-knit hands … ³

And the grief runs deeper than that simple, almost formalized Victorian sentimentality. In The Dawn in Britain, the story is told of the baby Cusmon, who was abandoned by his mother, the immortal nymph Agygia, but watched over by her throughout his life. Eventually, after his hundredth birthday, they are reunited at his death.

She stooped, and dearly kissed

That bowed down, aged man, and long embraced … ⁴

When he wrote that, Doughty himself was in his seventies. He is a child again, his lost mother restored, and a lifelong sense of bereavement finds its devoutly longed-for but hollow and insubstantial resolution in an old man’s dream. It is significant that he angrily denied suggestions in reviews that this was his own version of an ancient tale: ‘There is no such myth, and there is no such version,’ he declared. ‘The original is that in The Dawn in Britain itself.’⁵ The story clearly remained important to him: he could mourn the loss of his mother, but emotionally, he could never quite accept it.

Materially, though, both Doughty and his elder brother Henry were well provided for, their place in society apparently fixed by generations of affluence and family tradition. On both sides, the family were well-to-do, landowning gentry: the census return for Theberton for 1841, just two years before Charles’s birth and Frederica’s death, shows the Doughtys with the three-month-old Henry and five adult servants. It was a comfortable life in the sheltered and undemanding tradition of the prosperous Church of England.

The Doughtys of Suffolk had built up extensive lands over the centuries, and occupied a succession of livings; Frederica’s relatives, the Hothams of East Yorkshire, had produced six admirals, three generals, a bishop, a judge and a colonial governor. It was a family that drank in unquestioning patriotism and the peculiarly restrained devotion of the Established Church with its mother’s milk – the sort of family on which the empire had relied for generations.

But it seems, too, to have been a family where the idea of pride and duty replaced any open show of affection. Doughty’s cousin, the Rear-Admiral Frederick Proby Doughty who now lies in Martlesham churchyard, wrote a journal in which he recorded his memories of the various members of his family – and on the Doughtys’ side at least, there does not seem to have been much obvious emotional closeness. ‘We were badly off as children in the matter of relatives – no grandfathers or grandmothers, or relatives that were disposed to do the correct and orthodox “uncle and aunt” business.’⁶ The family would perhaps have been scandalized not to be considered ‘correct and orthodox’, but the message is clear. Of his uncle, the late father of young Charles and Henry, he reminisced: ‘I do not recall much connected with him, except on one occasion when walking with my father at Martlesham. I suppose I was rather busy with my tongue – he said to my father, “Why do you allow that boy to go on chattering? Box his ears …!”’

And there was more for the young Charles Doughty to contend with than the occasional bad temper of a crusty old Victorian clergy man. For all his wealth, Doughty’s father was stretching himself financially, with an ambitious programme of ostentatious building works at Theberton Hall. It seems to have been something of a family failing – only a few years later, after a similar programme of grandiose ‘improvements’, Doughty’s uncle, Frederick Goodwin Doughty, was forced to put his own home of Martlesham Hall, a few miles away, up for sale.

The boys, no doubt, were too young to be aware of the growing problems, but the atmosphere at Theberton Hall cannot have been a happy one. Their father seems to have been shattered by the untimely death of his ‘late dear wife’, who was only thirty-five when she died. No doubt the young Charles was not the only one to feel a sense of loss and bereavement: his father’s own health was not strong, and on 6 April 1850 he put his affairs in order, writing a new will, with an instruction that he should be buried next to Frederica in Theberton Church. Less than three weeks later he was dead, at the age of fifty-two, the doctors giving the cause of death as ‘Exhausted nature following a severe bilious attack’. The two boys were now orphans.

Childhood, it must have seemed, was little more than a harsh preparation for a life of loneliness. Theberton Hall was shut up, and within a few weeks the auctioneers moved in. At 11 a.m. on 28 August they started their sale with Lot 1 – two brown bread pans, a strainer and three baking pans – and over the next four days sold off the entire contents of the house. The Reverend Doughty’s fine wine cellar and his extensive library were split up and put under the hammer; so were his ‘town-built chariot’ and his single-horse phaeton. Even more distressing for the two boys, everything in their nursery was sold – brass mounted fender, fire-irons and pictures off the wall. It was a common practice in the mid nineteenth century to sell off the belongings of the dead – but that made it no less heart-rending for the young boys, who had to see what had once been their home broken up and carried off by strangers.

But if the seeds of Doughty’s later emotional detachment and determined self-sufficiency can be seen in these bleak years of bereavement, there were other members of his immediate family with a brisker, no-nonsense attitude to death. Frederick Proby Doughty’s detached account of his uncle’s financial problems and death seems brutal today, but it probably reflects the severely practical attitude of the family at large.

He had commenced great alterations to Theberton Hall, building enormous stablings, altering the entrance, building a picture gallery, and other expensive undertakings far beyond his means, and out of character with such an estate. Luckily he died, leaving his sons Henry and Charles … a long minority before them to recover and pull through the expenses and debts their father had incurred.

In fact, if his will is anything to go by, Charles Doughty senior still had plenty to leave his two sons. For Henry, there were several houses and estates spread over various parishes in Suffolk – among them Theberton Hall itself.

Charles, as the younger son, was less generously provided for, but he still inherited three farms, all his father’s government funds and securities, and an unspecified amount of cash, annuities and other investments which derived originally from the Hotham family. His guardian was to be his uncle, Frederick Doughty of Martlesham, father of the journal-keeping Frederick Proby Doughty – but the journal gives little cause to suggest that the move to Martlesham brought any fresh lightheartedness or fun into the little boy’s life. The elderly admiral recalled later: ‘I never remember a guest staying in the house, and but one or two dinner parties; and visiting friends were few and far distant.’ Of his mother – the woman who was to share the job of bringing up the young Charles Doughty – he wrote: ‘I fancy she was very delicate – lived mostly when at home stretched out on a sofa. I don’t remember her ever entering into any games or sports with us …’ She had a good education and spoke several languages, but she wasn’t known for her friendliness. ‘Extreme amiability’, her son noted carefully, ‘was never one of my mother’s vices or virtues.’

Neither Frederick Doughty nor his wife was going to waste much time or affection on their new charge. Within months of his father’s death young Charles was packed off to school at Laleham, on the Thames, to come home only for those parts of the holidays for which they could not find another willing relative or friend to take on the burden of his keep.

For Doughty’s new guardian was going through his own financial problems, and for much the same reasons that his dead brother had done. He had been pouring money into the rebuilding of Martlesham Hall for nearly ten years when his nephew arrived – perhaps the two brothers were competing in the splendour of their ambitions. If so, they paid a heavy price: only death prevented Charles from crippling himself and his two small sons with debt, while Frederick was eventually forced to sell the Hall which was his pride and joy. ‘It was a terrible wrench to all his feelings: the building of the Hall in the Elizabethan style had been the pleasure and the hobby of his life. For years after the sale, the place was never named, or mention made of it,’ Frederick’s son dutifully recorded. By the time Martlesham was sold, Charles Doughty would have been some ten years old – old enough to sense and recognize the fresh misery that the family was going through. Perhaps there is even a hint in his cousin’s journal that the young Charles might have been made to feel some responsibility for the disaster, despite the fact that his father’s will had carefully provided for his upkeep and maintenance.

The sale of the Hall and the estate around it I fancy became inevitable in spite of a hard struggle on the part of my father to make ends meet. The growing up of children and the increasing expense of education in addition to the above sealed its fate … The sale was, I have heard on all sides, a terrible blow to my father.

Laleham, with swimming in the river Thames and cricket in a nearby meadow, seemed initially to be an ideal choice of school for a boy who was used to life in the country, and who was already, not surprisingly, showing signs of being shy and withdrawn. The Revd John Buckland had made his career as headmaster there – he had come to Laleham thirty years before with Dr Thomas Arnold, and the two young schoolmasters had set up their own establishments, Arnold preparing older boys for university, and Buckland building up one of the country’s first preparatory schools.

Arnold, of course, had moved on to greater things at Rugby School after ten years, but Buckland stayed behind. By the time he retired, three years after Charles Doughty arrived, The Times commented that he was running ‘a large and flourishing private school’. The connection with Arnold was still close, and a letter from his son, the poet Matthew Arnold, about a visit in 1848 to the man he still called Uncle Buckland gives an idyllic picture of the establishment as it then was. ‘In the afternoon I went to Penton Hook with Uncle Buckland, Fan, and Martha, and all the school following behind, as I used to follow along the same river bank eighteen years ago. It changes less than any place I ever go to.’⁷

But the memories of a man in his mid twenties, however little the place itself seemed to have changed, were more pleasant than the day-to-day reality for the thirty or so small boys at the school. Even Arnold, in a less lyrical mood, described it as ‘a really bad and injurious school’, and grumbled about ‘that detestable gravel playground’,⁸ while ‘Uncle Buckland’ gloried in a reputation for strict discipline that was anything but avuncular.

One former pupil – who went on to become a bishop in New Zealand⁹ – recalled how he was summoned from breakfast by Buckland to be asked what religion he was. ‘Christian’, apparently, was not a good enough answer, and when the boy stammered nervously that he did not know ‘what sort of Christian’ he was, he was sent off to spend the day locked in the cellar. Eight hours later ‘Uncle Buckland’ unlocked the door, and asked him again – and still the panic-stricken boy had no reply for him. ‘The headmaster replied at last, “Sir, you are a Protestant,” and knocked him down. Hardly a method to encourage Protestantism, the bishop thought, looking back …’

And not one either to encourage a happy atmosphere of learning and scholarship. Doughty was experiencing early the violent religious bigotry that he would meet again in the deserts of Arabia: it is hardly surprising, even though the victim of that attack made his career in the Church, that many of Buckland’s pupils, like Doughty, adopted an ambiguous attitude to the established religion as they grew up.

But Buckland’s no-nonsense attitude would have raised few eyebrows in the mid nineteenth century. The only complaint about the school that Doughty himself made as he grew older was a much less serious one, his wife wrote in a letter, years afterwards. ‘He was six years old, and much resented being made to get out of bed to show visitors what a tall boy he was.’¹⁰

His guardians positively welcomed the strictness of the regime, and around the time that Buckland retired they moved their young charge away from Laleham and off to the nearby school at Elstree. It was a move from one strict disciplinarian to another, even more overbearing one.

Once again, it was a quiet, country establishment, in a seventeenth-century mansion at the top of a hill, with a Spanish chestnut tree said to be over a thousand years old outside the front door – the tree, its huge, contorted branches now severely pruned, still stands outside what is now a nursing home. The curriculum was mainly classics, with a few periods a week of mathematics, occasional science lessons, and desultory French from a visiting Frenchman. There was a gravel yard with a fives court, football from time to time, and cricket on the field in front of the house.

Doughty had a slight stammer, which was to stay with him throughout his youth. He was tall for his age, but slim and unassuming, although his contemporaries were already finding out that his apparent frailty concealed a deceptive strength and determination. Two of them who met his wife shortly before her marriage told her that, thin and delicate as he was, he had fought and beaten all of them.¹¹ In another incident, presumably during one of the cricket sessions across the road from the School House, he was hit in the face by the ball. His wife told the story after he died: ‘No notice was taken at the time, and he said nothing (so like him!) but the cheekbone was smashed, which showed all his life.’¹²

On another occasion, he had told her about competing with a group of boys to see who could stand longest on one leg. He was left standing there when they all went off to church – and he was still there on one leg when they came back.

It is probably as well that the Revd Leopold Bernays knew nothing about one of his young charges spending his time in such fruitless vanity when he should have been at prayer. Letters about the headmaster ‘do not give the impression of a genial or popular man’, notes the Elstree School history coyly – and, judging from the sermons that he published during his life, he must have been an awe-inspiring, even terrifying, figure for a young boy. ‘Nothing can make life sweet and happy but a constant preparation for death,’ was one of his more jovial bons mots;¹³ in another sermon he stormed at the wide-eyed ranks of small boys before him: ‘If we could see the very jaws of hell open to receive us, and ourselves hastening madly down the road, with nothing to arrest our career – how we should pray!’ Again, he pondered on how ‘one week passed amongst you pains me, with its long catalogue of idleness and carelessness, of disobedience and wilfulness, of harsh and profligate words …’¹⁴

Most of these idle, disobedient and wilful pupils were destined for Harrow School, but Doughty’s ambition, even at his young age, was to follow the tradition of his mother’s family and enter the navy. His brother Henry had already been at sea for two years, and Charles wanted nothing more than to follow in his footsteps. Some time around 1856, a boy of around thirteen, he was uprooted from school and friends for a second time, and bundled off to Portsmouth, where he was to be prepared for his navy examination at a school called Beach House.

Henry was to leave the navy later for a career as a lawyer. But his future was mapped out for him, as the future squire of Theberton; as the younger son, Charles would have to fend for himself. Life as a naval officer must have seemed to combine excitement with the sense of patriotic duty that had been bred in the young boy’s bones – and, too, with the severely practical need for a career.

It was not only the example of his mother’s family that had inspired the two Doughty boys with the idea of serving in the navy – for all their seniority, the much-boasted six Hotham admirals would have seemed remote to a small boy, an inspiration to duty rather than passion. But there were other family stories to whet their appetites – most particularly, those of their cousin, the journal-writing Frederick Proby Doughty of Martlesham.

He was only a few years older than they were and had already sailed to Canada, South America, Easter Island and even off to the Baltic to fight against the Russians. Here was a hero with whom they could identify. Though they saw him rarely because he had been away at sea since passing his exams some ten years before, they must have been well aware of his stories and adventures. They did, after all, spend at least some of their holidays with his father, their guardian, Frederick Doughty.

Much of the time, though, the boys were farmed out to a succession of relatives. Theberton Hall, the house where they had been born, and one of the few constant elements in a life that had so far been a series of uprootings and removals, remained locked up. A caretaker and his family lived there, among the gloomy, half-finished building works that were their father’s memorial, to look after it until Henry should come of age to take over his inheritance.

Sometimes they stayed with the Newsons, a family who had farmed on the estate for generations, sometimes with their father’s sister Harriet Betts and her family, who lived nearby in Suffolk – ‘a thoroughly scheming, worldly person’, if Frederick Proby Doughty is to be believed – and sometimes, too, with their mother’s relatives, the Hothams, who also lived in Suffolk.

Certainly there were happy memories among all the travelling between relatives’ houses: in his old age Doughty recalled fondly ‘the noble castle ruins and proud church monuments’ of Framlingham. ‘It is to me one of the memories of childhood, when my mother’s father was Rector of Dennington, two miles further on,’ he wrote.¹⁵

Frederick Proby Doughty has left details of one family holiday which he spent with his parents and his cousin and future wife Mary Arnold – with the fourteen-year-old ‘Charlie’ Doughty acting as unofficial chaperon for the undeclared lovers. Young Charlie at that time was at Beach House and his cousin – who had been at home for several months since his latest voyage – was deputed to collect him from Portsmouth and escort him to North Wales. The long coach journey through Bath and Bristol to Llangollen gave plenty of time for the young man’s tales of life at sea – and his teenage cousin would have been an avid listener.

For the two young lovers, it was an ideal family party. The older Doughtys left them to their own devices – they, after all, wanted a quiet, dignified time in a respectable hotel, rather than long walks in the country. And even when their young cousin tagged along, he had better things to do than interfere. ‘Charlie was ever alive to the chance of catching a trout … Better elements for leaving Mary and myself to our own devices could not have been collected together,’ says the journal gleefully.

The young people spent most of their time rambling over the hills – again, little sign of Doughty’s supposed frailness. ‘Charlie and myself did Beddgelert, and passed over the top down to the pass of Llanberis, and so back to Beddgelert – a walk of over thirty miles. We had been rewarded by a good view from the top of Snowdon.’ But if the days were long and energetic, the journal also gives a telling glimpse of what must have seemed to the young people to be equally lengthy but tedious evenings. ‘As a family, we are not a festive lot, and, left to ourselves, the sun might travel from its rising to its setting without one observation being made … The more genial spirit of my father, as I remember him, seemed by the habitual staidness of his life to have almost died out.’

Frederick’s innocent suggestion of a quiet game of cards caused an outburst from his mother: it showed a vicious spirit, and a tendency towards gambling, she stormed. It’s a hint of what life at Martlesham must have been like for much of the time – these, after all, were the people who thought the Revd Leopold Bernays a suitable moral guide for their young charge.

As a whole, though, the month in Wales passed happily – the best times, even at this young age, were spent away from wherever happened to be ‘home’ at the moment. Frederick Doughty recalled it years later as ‘a very jolly cruise’, and ‘Charlie’ clearly enjoyed spending time with a cousin who seemed, at twenty-two, to have such a wide and enviable experience of the naval life on which he was himself about to embark.

From Llangollen, at the end of the holiday, he returned to Beach House, and his preparation for his naval examinations – and to a shock and disappointment that was to remain with him all his life. When he was finally entered for the medical test that formed part of the entrance requirement, he was turned down by the examiners, either because of his slight speech impediment, or because his general health was thought not to be strong enough for the rigours of life at sea. More than sixty years later the memory still hurt him. ‘My career was to have been in the navy, had I not been regarded at the Medical Examination as not sufficiently robust for the service. My object in life since, as a private person, has been to serve my country so far as my opportunities might enable me.’¹⁶

His rejection seems to have shocked the staff at Beach House as well. During the following year his maternal aunt, Miss Amelia Hotham of Tunbridge Wells, was assured that he was ‘the very best boy that we have met with’. Even allowing for a degree of tact in dealing with pupils’ close relatives, it is a verdict that suggests that Doughty’s teachers, at least, believed that the navy had missed a good candidate.

Their sympathy, however, must have been of very little consolation to a boy who had seen his ambition snatched away from him, whose elder brother had by now started a career at sea, and who was still all too conscious of his cousin’s steady progress in the service. It must have been hard, too, to be surrounded by his contemporaries, who would have been looking forward to their own careers as naval officers. A few months after the examination board’s decision he was taken out of the school, and started a course of study with a private tutor.

Clearly, he and his family had decided that if he could not follow one family tradition by joining the navy, he should follow another by going up to his father’s old college at Cambridge, Gonville and Caius. Preparation for that involved a degree of formal, structured study, and the records of King’s College, London, show the young Doughty lodging in a suitably respectable boarding house in Notting Hill,¹⁷ while he followed a mathematics evening course at the college.

But Doughty remained the prosperous son of a prosperous family, and much of the time between Beach House and Cambridge, his widow said later, was passed in travelling with his tutor through France and Belgium. They were travels that not only gave him his first taste of foreign languages outside the classroom, but also established the connection in his mind between study and the wandering life. Perhaps it was on the roads of northern France that much of the character of the scholar gypsy was formed.

More crucially, though, he returned to the chalk countryside of his home in Suffolk. During his school holidays at his uncle’s home in Martlesham or on the Newsons’ farm in Theberton, he had amused himself by digging for fossils and stone artefacts – a very fashionable pastime as the revelations of Charles Darwin about evolution were echoing around the world. Now Doughty started geological and archaeological studies in earnest around the village of Hoxne – ‘working a good deal with the microscope’, he told a correspondent later.¹⁸ In 1862, while still only nineteen years old, he submitted a paper to the Cambridge meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science on Flint Implements from Hoxne.

It was an ideal place to start. More than sixty years earlier the little Suffolk village, recognized today as one of the most important archaeological sites in Europe, had seen the discovery of some of the first stone axes found in Britain; in 1860 those discoveries were being linked with others made in France, to revolutionize the accepted view of prehistory. Humanity, the researchers demonstrated, had a much longer pedigree than anyone had believed.¹⁹

It was a controversial, even revolutionary subject, and the decision Doughty made now reflected the self-reliance that had been forced on him by a bleak and lonely childhood, the toughness that the disappointment at Beach House had given him, and the straightforward determination that was already a part of his character. Practically everyone who came into contact with Doughty throughout his life commented on his diffidence – his friends were later to refer to him dismissively as a ‘shy dreamer’²⁰ – but his arrival at Cambridge University showed that his reserved manner hid a rocky determination.

The Admissions Book in the archives of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, shows ‘Carolus Montagu Doughty’ accepted as a new member of the college on 30 September 1861. It was the college that his father and his grandfather had attended before him, but Doughty was determined not simply to follow in their footsteps. It was only two years since Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species had outraged the certainties of the Established Church with which Doughty had such close family links, and the study of science was still considered barely respectable in the university – and yet it was on the newfangled Natural Science tripos that he decided to concentrate.

His expeditions and diggings in Suffolk had already made him a dedicated geologist and collector of fossils, and he was determined to develop this interest from the start of his Cambridge career. It cannot have been a welcome ambition in a family as steeped as his in the reassuring traditions of Church and countryside.

It is Darwin who is chiefly remembered today as the man who shivered the comfortable theology of the Church of England to its foundations, but more than twenty-five years before On the Origin of Species appeared, Charles Lyell had dealt another blow with his Principles of Geology. It is hard to overstate the impact of the new science on the intellectual life of the time: Lyell’s contention that the earth was still changing and developing after hundreds of thousands of years had broken upon a world where eminent churchmen referred to ancient texts and confidently named 23 October 4004 BC as the precise date of Creation, while Darwin’s challenge to the story of Adam and Eve seemed to strike at the very basis of Christianity.

People struggled to hold onto their faith, and John Ruskin spoke for many of them when he declared, ‘If only the geologists would let me alone, I could do very well – but those dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses!’²¹ And the geologists themselves felt the draught of their studies upon their own beliefs. In a letter to Darwin, written in the mid 1860s, Lyell said wistfully: ‘I had been forced to give up my old faith without thoroughly seeing my way to a new one.’²² It was a common dilemma, and one which struck particularly hard at a young man like Doughty, passionate in his sense of tradition, yet unswerving in his search for truth.

Doughty had grown up with the rhythms of the Authorized Version echoing in his mind, and his whole instinct was to look back, not forward, for reassurance – but it was in that dreadful clink of the geologist’s hammer that he found inspiration. The whole discipline of geology, and the study of natural science itself, was unsettling, revolutionary, and frequently in direct conflict with the teaching of the Church – but it fascinated Doughty.

As a child, he had been gripped by the idea of the navy and his family tradition of military service. Later, it would be Arabia, and then the story of the Roman conquest of Britain. Doughty would continue to focus his attention upon some particular subject and, over a period of years, would immerse himself in it, teasing out every last detail, before passing on, his attitude to life altered and enriched by the experience, to some new study. Time was not significant – the writing alone of The Dawn in Britain took almost ten years of his life, and the research beforehand at least as long again – but while the fascination was upon him, his obsession would be virtually total.

The shy and diffident young Doughty seems to have made little impression in his early days at Cambridge. He found it hard to make friends with his fellow students – and at the same time he showed no sign of incipient brilliance as a scholar. The Caius examination records show him stumbling uneasily through his first examinations – 27th out of 32 in Classics, 19th of 34 in Theology and, despite his efforts at King’s College, London, 30th of 35 in Mathematics. But from the very start there was no doubt where his greatest interest lay.²³

He clearly enjoyed passing on his geological passion: he dragged one of the junior fellows of the college, Henry Thomas Francis, off to inspect the Kimmeridge clay at Ely and the gravel pits in Barnwell (‘When’, Francis recalled wryly later, ‘I caught a severe cold …’). Another friendship was with the future Professor John Buckley Bradbury, with whom he shared a staircase in Caius overlooking Trinity Street – Doughty’s old room, which has since been redeveloped, was above the college library where, decades later, the main collection of his private books and papers was held. The two men used to take long walks into the country, visiting the chalk pits and coprolite diggings just outside Cambridge.

Another contemporary at Cambridge, Edwin Ray Lankester, later to become a Fellow of the Royal Society and one of the country’s leading zoologists, also recalled Doughty’s application and enthusiasm. For a time Doughty had rooms opposite his, and Lankester remembered him, three years his senior, as ‘rather shy and quiet, but very kind and anxious to help me’.²⁴ The unassertive, awkward young man still spent much of his time and money digging at Hoxne. ‘Doughty did not take part in such things as rowing, but was always reading geology and philosophy,’ he said.

But before he could specialize in his chosen subject. Doughty had to pass the Cambridge first-year examination, the so-called Littlego. The Greek and Latin which had to be dealt with he treated with a certain amount of disdain, doing the work that was necessary without, apparently, much enthusiasm. Sixty years later his colleague of the gravel pits and the Kimmeridge clay, Henry Thomas Francis, remembered teaching him Classics.

Doughty as an undergraduate was shy, nervous, and very polite. He had no sense of humour, and I cannot remember that he had any literary tastes or leanings whatever. He read Classics with me for his Littlego. He knew very little Greek. When he came up, he was devoted to Natural Science generally. He had made a large collection of Suffolk fossils, and was rather combative in favour of the new studies. He did not like attending lectures.²⁵

Francis also recalled a visit from another undergraduate who announced that he was no longer going to take lessons in Classics from him.

I said, ‘Very well, but what are you going to do?’ and after a little hesitation he replied, ‘The fact is, my friend Doughty tells me you bother one with grammar and all that sort of thing, and that it is far easier to get up the whole business by heart.’ My answer was, ‘Then we are right to part, for I can’t teach Latin or Greek on those conditions.’

The young Doughty simply had no time for literature, and certainly no time for the detailed study of language: those passions would come later. For now, with his characteristic singleminded determination, he wanted to concentrate only on his scientific studies.

He had no time, either, for the religious requirements of his college. Even at Caius, which was not among the most dogmatic or conservative of Cambridge institutions, there was a strict rule demanding daily appearances at religious services, and the college’s Chapel Attendance Book shows the young Doughty cautioned twice, and punished once, for his irregular appearances. Maybe unsurprisingly, for a young man who as a boy had been forced to sit through the Revd Bernays’s thunderous sermons, he was less than enthusiastic all his life about organized worship: after his death, his widow observed in a letter, ‘He never (or hardly ever) entered a church during service, but he loved to sit in any church or cathedral for hours. He was truly religious, in spite of never going to church in the orthodox way …’²⁶

But Doughty’s studies in geology were already chipping away at the foundations of his own belief in much the same way as similar research had done for Lyell. His Christianity was too closely bound up with his sense of family, of tradition, and of Englishness for him ever to disavow it; but there can be little question that poring over the fossils gathered from the Suffolk chalkland must have sown the first seeds of religious doubt in his mind.

Failing to turn up for chapel was not a grave offence, and not likely to have incurred a serious penalty – probably a small fine or a period restricted to the college grounds – but, for a young man as careful of his dignity as Doughty, any punishment would have been a humiliating experience. It was almost certainly one reason for his decision to ‘migrate’ from Caius to Downing in 1863, two years after coming up to the university – years later, The Times said that the move came ‘after a difference with the head of his original college’²⁷ – but there were others.

Cambridge University as a whole was gaining a growing reputation in botany and geology – although it would be several years before anything as dangerous or innovative as a scientific laboratory would be opened – and the relatively new Downing College, anxious to improve its academic standing in the university, was offering a number of Foundation Scholarships in Natural Sciences. Doughty’s friend Bradbury had already been accepted for one of these, and although Doughty did not need the £50 a year the scholarship offered, he would have relished the academic standing it would confer.

He was disappointed, because he entered Downing without a scholarship. But simply making the transition from the quiet, enclosed courts of Caius to the wide open spaces of Downing was significant: apart from the lack of enthusiasm at Caius for the newfangled study of science, there was the rigid insistence on the need to attend not only chapel, but also lectures. Doughty wanted to study on his own, and the more easygoing atmosphere at Downing attracted him. His own explanation was straightforward: ‘They bothered me so much at Caius with lectures and chapels and things, and I knew that at Downing I could do just as I liked …’²⁸ Certainly, Bradbury boasted later that he never attended a single lecture as an undergraduate at Downing – and, as an additional incentive, the college buildings did not yet boast a chapel.

There was no lasting rift with his former college – on the contrary, Doughty remained on cordial terms with Caius, took his Master of Arts there, presented the college with gifts and paintings, and even used it as a forwarding address later in his life. But for someone who felt less than enthusiastic about the entire ambience of the university, Downing was a more congenial place to live than the more staid and ancient Caius. It was a new college, a college for the modern age, and one which seemed to delight in being almost semi-detached from the university as a whole. Doughty walked away from the college where his father and his grandfather had studied without a backward glance. The young man who was to prove himself in so many ways obsessed by tradition and antiquity was showing in his choice of college, as he had in his choice of subject, that he had a strong and determined mind of his own.

There is no doubting the seriousness with which he approached his chosen field of study at Downing – but it was to be several months before he could resume his formal studies.

Throughout his life Doughty complained of weak health – and throughout his life, when it let him down, he would set off at a tangent to ‘convalesce’ in some extravagantly physical and energetic enterprise which would have taxed an athlete in the peak of condition. So it was as he started his first term at Downing: he was granted leave to postpone his final exams, and announced his intention of spending some eight or nine months surveying the fiords and glaciers of Norway.

The declared aim of his journey was the observation of the ice-flows of the Jostedal-Brae glacier field, and he fulfilled it completely enough to produce his second paper for the British Association when he returned. But those studies took only a couple of months, and much of the rest of his time was spent wandering more or less at random, in much the same way as he did later through Europe and Arabia. Before he travelled north-west to the Jostedal-Brae, he had spent some time at the university in Christiana, as Oslo was then called. The earnest young Englishman, diligently jotting down words and phrases of Danish as he struggled to build up a working vocabulary, must have been an unusual sight in the small university, which had only been founded fifty years before. Norway was a poor country: it was more customary for their students to travel abroad than for foreigners to come there.

Doughty’s priorities remained scientific, but his interests extended far beyond the university. This was not the quiet, studious life he had enjoyed at Cambridge: instead, he set off into the hills, lodging with farmers and gamekeepers, sometimes sleeping rough in log huts, and trekking for days at a time on shooting expeditions that took him and his guides miles into the remote mountain slopes.

It was a time that he remembered in Arabia years later when, near the end of his travels, he struggled from the interior towards Mecca ‘in a stony valley-bed betwixt black plutonic mountains, and half a mile wide: it is a vast seyl-bottom of grit and rolling stones, with a few acacia trees. This landscape brought the Scandinavian fjelde, earlier well-known to me, to my remembrance.’²⁹

That description gives some idea of the Norwegian countryside to which he had travelled, supposedly for the sake of his frail health, and when, in mid 1864, he arrived at the sixty-mile-long ridge of the Jostedal-Brae, it was to find an environment and a lifestyle that were certainly no easier. ‘Here is an arctic climate, and we found the lakes covered with ice in the middle of August, still thick enough to bear some wild reindeer, which we disturbed. We slept under a stone, while it froze outside, according to a minimum thermometer.’³⁰

Five separate glaciers descended from the ridge into a gorge below, which was so deep and sheer that the sun hardly reached it during the winter months. It was remote, unfriendly country, with just a few scattered farms and a rough bridle path between the rounded boulders which the glaciers had brought inching down with them from the mountains.

But it was a magical land as well, and it was not just Doughty the geologist scrambling with his guide over the rocks, ice and broken ground. As he wrote his report later, his descriptive enthusiasm struggled against a determined scientific detachment. The Nigaard glacier, he wrote,

seems to flow down in elegant curves; though in reality this is due to the tossing up of the surface by some submerged knees of the mountains, and it passes through nearly a straight channel. No stones or earth soil its glittering surface, which appears capping the cliffs and creeping down every depression and pouring out its water in picturesque threads down the rocks.³¹

At the foot of Lodal’s glacier, meanwhile, water came gushing out from an arched cavern in the ice some thirty feet high. The name of the lake, Styggevaten, meant ‘horrid-water’, he jotted carefully in his notebook – names and their meanings would carry a fascination for him throughout his travels, landscape and language inextricably linked in his mind. Between the detached response and the imaginative, he saw little distinction: at times, the Jostedal-Brae sounds almost like the setting for a mystical scene from Ibsen: ‘Loud peals are heard booming among the heights when some new ice-shoot takes place and seems to smoke in the distance,’ he wrote.

It was also a landscape that encouraged thoughts about the continuity between the present and the far past – the ice offering the imaginative possibility of a direct link with the most distant history. That was the sort of speculation that appealed instinctively to Doughty, and he noted that the glaciers were continually engulfing plants and animals, preserving them virtually for eternity. Humans, too, he said, must occasionally be entombed. ‘Very early traces of the human race may some day be dug out from the deposits of the later glacial period, if man was then in existence and inhabited those parts of the globe …’

But his primary task was the more prosaic one of measuring the speed of the glaciers’ movement. He had been loaned a theodolite by the Royal Geographical Association to help him with the detailed surveying – his first contact with that august body, later relations with which were to prove volatile. For the rest, he had a rope, an iron-tipped stick, a set of metal spikes to help him stand on the ice, and the aid of a local guide, one Rasmus Rasmussen.

With this rudimentary equipment, by driving stakes into the ice of the glacier as markers, and building matching stone cairns off to one side, he produced a series of tables for the different glaciers to show the varying speed of the flow. They were, he noted with pardonable pride, the first measurements ever obtained of the seasonal motions of Scandinavian ice streams.

It was a subject of some current scientific interest. Geologists were arguing about exactly what caused glaciers to flow, and Lyell himself was enquiring into the subject for the new edition of his Principles. But though there can be no doubting the enthusiasm and determination of the twenty-one-year-old Doughty, his figures leave something to be desired. The distances between his markers, he admits, were little more than estimates; on one glacier, presumably having forgotten to use his theodolite, he has guessed the gradient; and one complete set of figures, setting out the lengths of the different glaciers, he has simply lost, replacing them with estimates.

Later, he was to claim that, in preparing the last edition of his Principles of Geology, Lyell called on the young undergraduate to ask for details of his observations.³² It is certainly likely that Doughty made the great man’s acquaintance: the first thing he did when he returned from Norway was prepare a paper for the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science on his observations. Lyell, then president of the association, was speaking about glaciation in his inaugural address: what more natural than that he should exchange a few words with the shy, gangling youth who had just returned from Norway? That, though, is as far as it went: the Principles includes little about Norwegian glaciers, nothing at all about the Jostedal-Brae, and certainly no acknowledgement of assistance from Charles M. Doughty and his lackadaisical measurements.

But the expedition had given him at least the beginnings of a scientific career. He had become a life member of the British Association earlier that year; now, the misspelled name of C. Montague Doughty was printed in the list of members – albeit with his address, too, wrongly listed as Dallus College, Cambridge. While the paper he had produced after his diggings at Hoxne had been only briefly noted by its title in the annual report, the account of this latest one, which was presented to the association’s Bath meeting, ran to 350 words. He had also, though still an undergraduate, been making the social contacts necessary for a career in science. He had cultivated not just the acquaintance of Sir Charles Lyell himself, but also that of several other worthies of the British Association and the Royal Geographical Society. And, most important of all, if he had been disappointed not to be given a scholarship by Downing, he was still confidently expected to gain a first-class degree.

But in December 1865 those expectations were dashed. Doughty found himself near the top of the second class in the Cambridge Tripos examinations – although it seems that his examiners were at least as disappointed as he was with the result. More than fifty years later Professor Thomas George Bonney, then Professor of Geology at London University, said of his distinguished pupil: ‘I was very sorry not to be able to give him a First, as he had such a dishevelled mind. If you asked him for a collar, he upset his whole wardrobe at your feet.’³³ It would not be the last time in his life that Doughty would be criticized for hurling facts at his readers by the handful.

But while such an examination result would have been a setback, it would not necessarily have prevented him from following a career as a scientist, particularly as he still enjoyed the financial support of his father’s legacy. Doughty, though, seems to have changed his priorities during that final year at Cambridge: although he prepared his report on Jostedal-Brae for its full publication, he had abandoned any thought of making his name through science.

A letter written to him shortly before his final examinations by the Revd Henry Hardinge, the rector of Theberton, seems to confirm that he still had grandiose plans – the adolescent boy who had been turned down by the navy clearly still thought in the same patriotic terms of serving his country. Hardinge refers to Doughty’s ‘researches and noble ambition as regards this earth’, and goes on to praise his determination to ‘soar above the vanities of this world and take a place among the worthies who have lived for its adornment and the real glory of God’.³⁴ But the researches and noble ambition would be directed at literature: though science and geology would remain among his interests, his life, he had decided, would be devoted to writing. He left the university with his second-class degree, no firm plans for a career, and a brief formal note of introduction from Bonney.

Doughty, after all, could afford high-flown ambition: there was no pressing need to find a way of earning his living. His education had not been designed to fit him for a career, unless perhaps, like his father, as a parson in one of the Suffolk livings. His inheritance should have enabled him to live a life of comfortable scholarship. For fifteen years his financial affairs had been cautiously managed, with his father’s old friend, Henry Southwell of Saxmundham, and his own uncle and guardian, Frederick Goodwin Doughty, acting as trustees. Now, with his studies behind him, he could take up the rights that had passed to him on his twenty-first birthday. He had both the power and the leisure to handle his wealth himself.

What he does not seem to have had was luck or shrewdness: over the next three or four years his inheritance simply withered away. He was never to show the remotest financial acumen, and it is significant that the collapse of his financial affairs should have come just after he took over the active management of his investments from his father’s trustees.

Neither Doughty nor anyone else in his family would ever say exactly what happened. Fifty years later the memory of the collapse clearly still hurt: asked about stories of his past involvement in the printing industry, he replied shortly, ‘Printing I conceived of in my early inexperience as an adjunct to literature, but I was deceived in that matter, and was somewhat of a victim. Therefore it would not be kind to mention it.’³⁵

His widow would only speak generally of ‘depreciation of investments’ – but the overall effect was that the rest of Doughty’s life was passed in a state of genteel poverty. Years after his death she turned down the offer of financial help for herself and her daughters from her husband’s friends: ‘Really we are much better off than a good many people … I think Rubber will recover in time; I have put up half the grounds for sale; if a small bungalow is built it won’t hurt us, but so far, I’ve had no success there. I sold 5 dozen spoons and forks for £17 …’³⁶ Her husband’s books, respected as they were, made little money: financially, he simply never recovered from the crushing blow of his early twenties.

Doughty’s response at the time was to bury himself in his books. The letter of recommendation he had taken with him from Cambridge had been addressed to the Library of Winchester College, probably because of some personal connection of Bonney’s; but he used it, and his standing as a graduate, to gain entrance to the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

His name first appears in the Bodleian’s records on 1 December 1868; and for the next fourteen months he was an assiduous reader there. He was, he said later, a solitary man, and entirely dependent now on his own resources to direct his studies – but a glance down the list of books he was reading at the time demonstrates that he had already established where his primary interests lay. There is nothing of modern science – and precious little as late as the seventeenth century.

There is Gavin Douglas’s translation of The Aeneid, published in 1553; several books of medieval songs and ballads; a number of Anglo-Saxon grammars and dictionaries; commentaries on the Bible, catechisms and sermons. Doughty was immersing himself in the distant past. Above all, he was reading Spenser and Chaucer, the two poets he believed all his life had reached the uncontested summit of English literature. It was they, he told an interviewer not long before he died,³⁷ who finally decided him upon a life dedicated to poetry.

When, at the end of his life, he completed Mansoul, which he firmly believed to be his greatest work, he declared: ‘I have not borrowed from any former writer; save I hope something of the breath of my beloved, Master Edmund Spenser, with a reverend glance backward to good old Dan Chaucer …’³⁸ It was at the Bodleian, as he threw himself wholeheartedly into the new life of a poor scholar, that he first made their acquaintance.

But there is one book among the volumes of ancient history and literature which seems slightly out of place. Of the works of the seventeenth-century writer George Sandys Doughty chose neither his translations of Ovid, nor his poems based on the Psalms and the Passion, but his travel writing, A Relation of His Journey to the Levant.³⁹

Possibly he was struck by the similarities between his own position and that of his Jacobean predecessor, who came, like him, from a background of well-connected country gentlefolk with naval antecedents. Sandys, too, had been a literary man and an academic – and in 1610, at the age of thirty-two, he had set off on a journey that took him through Europe and into the Middle East.

The two years of wanderings described in Sandys’s book took him through France, Italy, Egypt, the Middle East and Malta. He gazed with a slightly bilious eye on the ancient wonders of the pyramids and of the city of Troy; he was robbed and manhandled by angry Muslims in the towns of Palestine and as he journeyed by caravan across the desert; he was fascinated by the habits and beliefs of the common people who were his companions.

There were moral and religious lessons to be drawn from his travels. The naturally rich lands of the Middle East, he wrote, were now waste, overgrown with bushes, and full of wild beasts, thieves and murderers. It was a country in which Christianity – ‘true religion’ – was discountenanced and oppressed: ‘Which calamities of theirs, so greatly deserved, are to the rest of the world as threatening instructions … thence to draw a right image of the frailty of man, and the mutability of whatever is worldly.’ The thought, and its expression, could almost have come from the pages of Travels in Arabia Deserta two and a half centuries later.

Doughty still hoped to achieve some great literary success, but in the meantime, he could no longer afford the leisured scholastic career he had anticipated: he would have to find some way of supporting himself on his greatly reduced means. Travel, and the life of a wandering scholar, might offer one solution.

Chapter Two

The next year, out of a reverence for the memory of Erasmus, Jos. Scaliger, etc., I passed in Holland learning Hollandish … I spent some months also at Louvain and the winter at Mentone (I had always rather poor health). I travelled then in Italy and passed the next winter in Spain, and most of the next year at Athens; and that winter went forward to the Bible lands …

Letter to D. G. Hogarth, August 1913

The Charles Doughty who left England for the continent in 1870 was a man who had been emotionally battered almost to submission – shy, retiring, and without a shred of emotional self-confidence. At twenty-seven, he was a Master of Arts, a scholar widely read in medieval literature and with some knowledge of geology and science, a man filled with literary and academic ambition, but without any obvious means of earning a living. His studies provided one safe retreat from the daunting world of human relationships; the lonely life of a solitary wanderer would be another.

There was no need to reach back to the sixteenth century for explanations for his decision to travel. The idea of paying homage to Scaliger¹ and Erasmus,² the one looking back from his own time to ancient history, the other rejecting the calling of a churchman and then leaving Cambridge to wander Europe as a peripatetic scholar, was appealing to his intellectual self-esteem, but it did little to explain his real motives.

One manifestation of his chronic lack of confidence was his constant wittering concern about his health. It had already led him to abandon his studies at Cambridge for a year, and he would claim later in his life³ that his hard work in the Bodleian had left him weak, ill, and in need of a change of climate. It was a common predilection: the hotels and sanatoria of Menton and the other Mediterranean resorts were full of sickly Englishmen taking the air, although few of them would have undertaken travels as extensive or as energetic as Doughty himself was embarking upon.

Like some of them, he had a pressing financial motive for leaving Britain. He had neither possessions nor prospects to keep him in England, and contemporary guidebooks estimated that something under ten shillings a day⁴ should be sufficient for walking tours in remote areas of Europe. Life could be lived much more cheaply travelling the streets of the continent than at home; the future would have to look after itself.

So to save his money and to preserve his health, he decided to go abroad. But the letter to Hogarth more than forty years later puts his supposed weak constitution into context: the hardships and discomforts he was to endure over the next eight years would have killed a less hardy individual. He was a man dedicated to living his life through his books and scholarship – and yet, at this time of personal crisis, Doughty the diffident intellectual was determinedly pitting himself against a series of physical challenges. It would not be the last time.

It was not exactly a Grand Tour that he undertook: Europe was in ferment, with either open fighting or sullen, smouldering peace in France, North Africa, Spain and the Balkans. Doughty faced the prospect not just with courage but with all the insouciance of an English gentleman as he picked his way from troublespot to troublespot, peering superciliously past the shattered landscapes and the weary people to jot down his reflections about the ancient ruins he had come to see.

For his first few months out of England, though – ‘a long year’, he called it later⁵ – he stayed in Leiden and the nearby Dutch towns, following his lonely studies and applying himself to learning the language.

He had a vague idea of investigating the historical background of the English civilization which fascinated him – but when he left Holland, he had, like Sandys before him, no plan for where his travels or his studies would lead him. The opportunity to observe the life of the travelling Arabs at first hand – the opportunity which was to provide him with the raw material for his greatest literary work – came to him by chance rather than by intent. One of his greatest talents was in allowing his life to be taken over by such chances and in seizing the benefit of them.

The next two years are the first period of Doughty’s life for which his own detailed and contemporary records exist. His diary, painstakingly written in his neat, precise hand, with its occasional pen and ink or pencil diagrams and sketches of landscapes, archaeological remains, or whatever else caught his attention, is far from exhaustive: some vital moments are casually skipped, there are occasional long gaps with no entries at all, and the whole account ends in March 1873, with Doughty still in Italy. His later travels around Greece, Egypt, Sinai and the Middle East can only be pieced together from letters, later memories and other patchy records. Even more frustrating, for much of the time as he wandered around Europe, his imagination seemed infuriatingly disengaged. But the hardback notebook which is now kept in the library of Caius College, Cambridge, faded and battered at the edges, gives an intimate picture of his intellectual and emotional development over a crucial spell of his young adulthood.

It starts as he leaves Leiden for Louvain, with a distaste for his surroundings which was to become familiar over the next few months: Doughty’s impressions of northern Europe were less than enthusiastic. In Louvain – a ‘very filthy and unwholesome’ town – he noted ‘the obscene manners of the people who piddle openly in every place’, although the observation was carefully crossed out in the diary. Presumably it was a little too crude even for a personal notebook. It remains legible, though, behind Doughty’s pencil scribble, as his fastidious indictment of the Belgian people.

He presents much the same litany of dissatisfaction that any middle-class traveller from Britain at that time might have recited. The people, being foreign, were grubby, unhealthy and – worst of all – Catholic.

As he toured the small towns of Holland and Belgium, Doughty displayed an almost comically fastidious obsession with cleanliness: the details that do excite his imagination are those that arouse his distaste – the people of Louvain piddling in the street, or the ‘slack, ill complexions’ of the Belgian women. But what is noticeable throughout the young Doughty’s notes of his travels in Europe is how conventional, dismissive and simply unobservant they generally are. For the most part, the man who would later tease out the most intimate, most significant details of life among the Arabs appeared to take only the most cursory interest in the places and people he met. It was the primitiveness and frequent brutality of Arabia which would excite his imagination; travel in Europe was often little more than inconvenient, uncomfortable, and not notably relieved, for him at least, by any architectural beauty.

His courage is already evident; but though there is no note of fear or nervousness as he describes his journey through northern France, there is no sense of personal involvement either. His interest was never engaged by politics, even though he was travelling through a Europe that was in political turmoil. Only a few months before, Bismarck had swept aside the French army and the government of Napoleon III: France was buzzing with ideas and arguments, alive with revolutionary and anarchist institutions. While Doughty was in Louvain, observing with distaste the ill-manners and grubby habits of the Belgians, some 25,000 people were being massacred in Paris as the French troops of the government of Adolphe Thiers crushed the Commune⁶ – but his only response, as he reached the frontier town of Tourcoing a few weeks later, was to note the inconvenience that such political activity caused the independent traveller. ‘Stayed there that night having no passport, as I had not heard it was become necessary. Thiers elected President the day before …’

Paris itself, a city which had in the last few months experienced defeat at the hands of the Prussian forces, which had seen tens of thousands of its citizens flee as the revolutionary Commune was established, and thousands more killed or arrested as it was put down, he described as ‘brown, cold, humid, deserted, uncheerful looking’.

After such a political cataclysm any city could perhaps be excused for being slightly less than cheerful. Doughty’s undoubted patriotism and sense of civic pride took little account of what he perhaps saw as the mere passing fads of a moment, like revolutions; his mind was set on a longer, greater timescale. And anyway, he might have thought, this was not England.

But he was not staying in Paris. It was now early autumn and, planning to take lodgings for the winter in one of the small towns dotted along the Mediterranean coast, he set off hopefully in the late summer sun, trudging from settlement to settlement.

For a man who complained frequently of his frail physical condition and his lack of robustness, a journey by foot of over 150 miles eastwards from Marseilles, through Cassis, Cannes and Nice, must have been a painful struggle anyway – and one after another they fell short of his exacting standards of comfort and cleanliness. There would be many more times in Doughty’s life when he would complain of his weakness and demonstrate his hardihood.

But at length he arrived in the town of Menton, where he seems to have felt at once that he could happily pass the winter. His room at the Pension Trenca, Beau Rivage, looked south over the sea, the mountains towering behind, and here he stayed for several months. For the first time a note of real enthusiasm comes into Doughty’s writing as he describes

happy long family voyages and hungry, beautiful, and aromatic wanderings in the mountains … The vineyards, the orchards of oranges and odoriferous lemons, everywhere open to be traversed by a thousand paths; the hundred happy and sheltered valleys, smiling with every gift of nature …

He was still complaining querulously of his ill-health and his weak constitution, but according to his diary, he was also deep in his studies throughout the winter. When he left his books, he would tramp along the mountain paths to see the tiny villages, the meadow flowers, the tumbling rivers and, most of all, ‘the antique caverns and relics of human habitation’. Doughty already had in mind the outline of the epic poem he saw as his greatest work, which would deal in part with the struggle of the ancient Gauls for conquest in northern Italy.⁷

In his wanderings during his five months in Menton Doughty built up such an affection for the region that, twenty years later, he would return to live just a few miles up the coast. But once the winter was over, he set out on foot again through the mountains.

It was a solitary time: the occasional references to family outings from Menton, to some ‘agreeable Germans’ he met later in Pisa, or to the ‘many excellent and agreeable persons, the librarian Dr Snellaert and others’ he remembered from Ghent, only serve to emphasize how lonely his travelling generally was. Solitude, after all, was what he was searching for.

Doughty pressed on with his hard and energetic journey: thirty miles or so up into the Piedmontese uplands one day, another forty miles the next, a brief day’s rest in the cool of the mountain valleys, and then another thirty miles down a river valley to the coastal town of Ventimiglia. It was the country plantations, the flowers and the oranges, the twisting mountain paths overlooking the sea, that caught his imagination; when he reached the cities of Genoa, Livorno, Pisa and Florence, the treasures of the Italian Renaissance were jotted down in his diary with more of a sense of duty than of enjoyment.

But when Doughty arrived in Naples sometime in April, it was to witness a more terrifying example of the forces of nature than he had ever seen before. The nearby Mount Vesuvius had already been rumbling ominously for several months, with occasional minor explosions of rocks and stones, and trickling rivulets of lava bubbling from its crater. It was not at first a cause for great consternation in the surrounding countryside – the last time lava streams had run down the mountainside, four years earlier, joyful local villagers had celebrated the onrush of visitors they confidently expected in their restaurants, cafés and boarding houses.

But this time was different. On the night of 26 April Professor Paride Palmieri, a scientist who had made a career out of observing Vesuvius, was settled in his observatory near the summit. Shortly after midnight he observed a small group of curious tourists passing by with an inexperienced guide on their way up the mountainside – and then, some three hours later, the summit of Vesuvius exploded. A cloud of smoke and a hail of flaming rocks and stones enveloped the unfortunate tourists, who were close to the lava torrent. Some were engulfed in it, and disappeared for ever; two dead bodies were found later, but at least eight people, and probably more, are known to have died.

Doughty, though, was even closer than Professor Palmieri, although it was another fifteen years before he was to write down his description.⁸

In the year 1872 I was a witness of the great eruption of Vesuvius. Standing that day from the morning alone upon the top of the mountain, that day in which the great outbreak began, I waded ankle deep in flour of sulphur upon a burning hollow soil of lava … I approached the dreadful ferment, and watched that fiery pool heaving in the sides and welling over, and swimming in the midst as a fount of metal – and marked how there was cooled at the air a film, like that floating web on hot milk, a soft drossy scum, which endured but for a moment, – in the next, with terrific blast as of a steam gun, by the furious breaking in wind of the pent vapours rising from the infernal magma beneath, this pan was shot up sheetwise in the air, where, whirling as it rose with rushing sound, the slaggy sheet parted diversely, and I saw it slung out into many greater and lesser shreds …

It is the writing of a man spellbound by both the beauty and the mechanics of what he sees – but Doughty was clearly also aware of the danger.

Upon some unhappy persons who approached there fell a spattered fiery shower of volcanic powder, which in that fearful moment burned through their clothing and, scorched to death, they lived hardly an hour after. A young man was circumvented and swallowed up in torments by the pursuing foot of lava, whose current was very soon as large as the Thames at London Bridge …

The account is an impressive tour de force – the more so as it came so long after the event. Doughty’s vivid, awestruck description, with its everyday similes and references, such as the skin on boiling milk, the shredded sheet, or the width of the river Thames, could almost have been written as he watched the eruption.

His fascination is clear: it overcomes any attempt at scientific detachment. And yet there is something disquieting about the writing – something beyond either his infectious enthusiasm or his undoubted physical courage. For all the perfunctory sympathy of his expressions, there is a gloating quality about the way he dwells on the ‘spattered fiery shower’ and its terrible effects; his attitude towards the suffering and dying tourists seems disturbingly cold, almost like a biologist focusing his microscope on the death-throes of a beetle. Not for the first time or the last, the need of the shy, retiring man to keep his distance had left his emotional responses seeming suspect, his human sympathy oddly lacking.

The eruption continued through the day, with the whole region plunged into darkness by the clouds of smoke and ashes that were hurled some four or five thousand feet into the air. By now, any gleeful anticipation of a minor tourist boom in the surrounding towns was forgotten. The prospect of further eruptions had brought panic to the local people, and on the volcano itself the scene was even more frightening. ‘It seemed completely perforated, and the lava oozed, as it were, through its whole surface. I cannot better express this phenomenon than by saying that Vesuvius sweated fire,’ wrote Professor Palmieri.⁹

That Doughty’s diaries, for all the detail of his later description, make no mention of the eruption might lead cynics to doubt whether he had ever been on the mountain at all. But among the collection of Doughty memorabilia at Caius College, Cambridge, is a small sealed glass phial containing a few grams of a light grey powder. A carefully written label on the side reveals the contents to be ‘Vesuvius Ashes – Ashes which fell on us in descending 28 April 1872, 3 a.m.’. If his own account is to be believed – and there is no reason why it should not be – he had spent the best part of twenty-four hours on the slopes of a volcano as it erupted beneath him.

His diary is silent, too, about the scenes of devastation which he must have witnessed over the next few days. The worst of the eruptions ended on 1 May, the day Doughty set off for Castagneto, but the lava flows had by then engulfed several settlements on the western slopes of the mountain. Fields, gardens and houses were buried under a flood of molten rock, and whole villages laid waste. If human disaster on this scale troubled or even interested him, he said nothing.

Fifty years later, as he worked on a new edition of Mansoul, the memory of the eruption was still fresh. In the poem it is Mount Etna that explodes in smoke and flame, but the experience is clearly that on the slopes of Vesuvius.

Flowed down an horrid molten-footed flood –

Inevitable creeping lava-tide,

That licketh all up, before his withering course.

Nor builded work, nor rampire cast in haste

Of thousand men’s hands might, and they were helped

Of unborn Angels, suffice to hold back

That devastating, soulless, impious march

Of molten dross … ¹⁰

As an old man, he can look back, too, on the suffering of the local people, leaping in a panic from ‘tottering bedsteads’ to watch the eruption.

Men gaze on, with cold and fainting hearts,

Folding their hands, with trembling lips, to Heaven;

Not few lament their toilful years undone –

Those fields o’erwhelmed, wherein their livelihood.

Others inquire, if this were that last fire

Divine, whose wrath, is writ, should end the world?¹¹

A couple of years from the end of his life, he looked back in horror and awe at what he had seen; for now, though, he was silent.

As a geologist, Doughty must have found the eruption fascinating – fascinating enough to risk his life clambering up the trembling mountainside to observe it – and yet, in the record of his journey, it is completely ignored. Four months later, indeed, he inspected the nearby ruins of Pompeii, scene of an earlier and even more disastrous eruption, and then made a second expedition up the now dormant volcano. This time he climbed during the day, taking his leisure to study and make notes on the crater – ‘immense and terrific gulf, horridly rent’ – and also on the smaller vents left behind by another eruption four years earlier. ‘These have the appearance of antiquity, though of but few years,’ notes Doughty the geologist and scientific observer – and he then adds, with a calm and chilling detachment: ‘Found there a quantity of wild figs and refreshed myself with them. On foot to the Torre del Greco, and returned by railway to Pompeii.’

Clearly, Doughty’s preoccupations were not those of an ordinary traveller: his diary treats the eruption of Vesuvius with the same lack of interest as it does the political cataclysm in France. Indeed, it is hard to find anything in the countries through which he passed in these early months of his travels that truly awakened his enthusiasm. With him, though, he had several cases of books and, on the roads of southern Europe as much as in the calmer atmosphere of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, it was his studies that preoccupied him.

When the diary resumes on 1 May, after its eventful break, it is to record that Doughty is moving on from Naples to the nearby resort of Castagneto, and another small guesthouse. ‘A worthy family – good entertainment,’ he notes – and, more importantly, a place where he could be alone with his books.

In his manner, he was still the archetypal crusty English gentleman abroad, complaining in his diary and no doubt to his host about the water, the weather and the scenery – but it was agreeable enough for him to spend some four months there, concentrating on his books and enjoying the home comforts of the lodging house. He left a case and a portmanteau of books with his landlord, Signor Cavalieri, and his family, to be picked up on his way home – which, he now suggested for the first time, might be after another two or three years.

It marks a significant change in his travelling: Castagneto is the last place at which the diary mentions either books or studies until Doughty embarked on his Arabic lessons in Damascus three years later. Whatever his plans had been when he left England, from now on he devoted more time to the places he was visiting, and to the various languages with which he came into contact. The focus of his attention had shifted. For the rest of his travels he is more gypsy – his own word – than travelling scholar, more an observer of the world around him than a student poring over his books.

From Castagneto he returned to Vesuvius, presumably to see the after-effects of the eruption, and then, after a couple of days’ wanderings among the ruins of Pompeii, he took the ferry to Sicily. It was an evening journey, the sea calm, ‘the night starry but vaporous, the eye looking … into a depth or thickness of stars …’ Alone on the deck, as the ferry left its luminous trail across the dark sea, he could relax.

It was, predictably, not the people of Sicily who had attracted him – ‘the lower sort dull, unintelligent, and half savage manners’ – but the volcano. After his experiences on Vesuvius, Doughty wanted to see Etna, which was also rumbling ominously.

It was a starry, moonlit night, with a chill wind blowing clouds of smoke down from the volcano upon Doughty and his guide as they struggled up towards the crater, their breath catching with the reek of sulphur. For someone who had already witnessed the flaming rocks and molten lava of Vesuvius, it must have been a terrifying experience. There were occasional muffled explosions deep within the mountain, and sudden belches of smoke and gas from the summit, while a layer of new-fallen sand which covered everything around the crater seemed to suggest that a new eruption was imminent – but the same detachment which left Doughty immune to the beauty of many of the places through which he passed quashed any fear for his own safety, leaving him as calm and aloof as if he had been in a laboratory, rather than on the summit of a rumbling volcano.

Edge of crater a soft, moist mould, wet with sulphurous vapours which rise everywhere. Saw no yellow colour, or gathering of sulphur, but everywhere the like brown mould; the walls of the crater of the same – no ribs of rocks, nor horrible rendings as at present in Vesuvius, but terraced and easy to be descended into on a cord …

The last temptation, that of being lowered into the smoking crater of a rumbling volcano, he resisted – but he set off down the mountainside calmly and at his own pace. On the way, indeed, he stopped to admire the dawn, sketching the edge of the sun and its ‘deep ruddy and heavenly hues’ as it peeped above the horizon out at sea – and, as the sun rose, so another Doughty, a sensitive, appreciative observer, took over.

Many miles of thick white clouds, much like some Arctic sea with towering icebergs – a strange spectacle … Opposite the arising sun, the immense shadow of the mountain, as it were another Etna raised into the air in a perfect sharpened pyramid, presently with the increasing light seemed to spread along the ground,

he wrote, finishing his sketch. That image of the volcano’s shadow stayed with him for over fifty years, until, in the revised edition of Mansoul, he described ‘a summer night of stars’, and a journey up the mountainside. The plan, he says, was to

reach, ere day, his cragged utmost crest,

And from those horrid cliffs, surview far out

Trinacria, and great Italia’s mighty foot,

And Etna’s immense shadow on the Dawn-mist

That sunrising should cast … ¹²

The journey downhill took him some four hours, including stops to inspect an old smoking fissure in the mountainside near the foot of the cone, and then the Roman ruins of the Torre del Filosofo.

The circular foundations remain – the bottom of a pillar, or stonework cemented in the midst of the passage of so many centuries – not buried under falling sand, but remains as at the first!!! Desert of black sand and water – 4 or 5 poor plants. The way all a waste of sand and lavas – with many wild craters on either hand …

Like the rest of the notebook, they are, of course, merely rough jottings. But, especially when compared with the bland, conventional judgements Doughty makes about towns and architecture, it is impossible to miss the enthusiasm with which he turns to the immensity either of time or of open spaces – the huge shadow of Etna or the centuries of history of the stone foundations. As a writer and as a traveller, his mental horizons are vast, his sense of time almost geological in its scope. It is the sight of human creativity and endeavour set against a background of desolation which suddenly brings his imagination to life.

His enthusiasm is sparked by ruins and remains, by the thought that buildings – or, for that matter, languages or peoples – may still bear some relation to the way they were hundreds of years ago. It is a conventional enough romantic response – half a century before, Shelley had described how ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert’ – all that remained of the magnificent statue of the proud King Ozymandias. Had Doughty been the ‘traveller from an antique land’ in Shelley’s poem, his description of the statue might have stressed the same sense of hubris in the dead king, and the same all-pervading bleakness in the landscape. But there is nothing to suggest that Doughty had ever paid any attention to Shelley or any other romantic writers; this is his own emotional response. Conventional as it may be, it is one of the first signs of genuine interest or involvement in his travelling.

In his observation of the people whom he met, his broader judgements and generalizations are often almost comical in their smug dismissiveness. But occasionally, his notes pick out the minutiae of habits or behaviour with a precision that can bring individuals to life like the detail of a Brueghel painting. ‘The countryman’s salutation “Benedici”, their feet in sandals or unshod. The Sicilian curiously daubed carts, with saints and Bible stories. The Sicilians ride on a pack saddle without stirrups (staffe).’ The eye roves over the peasants as they go by, registering specific points apparently at random, seeming to note their friendliness and devout Christianity almost in passing. But each individual item is significant – the religious greeting, the biblical paintings on their wagons, their humble way of travelling around. And while Doughty determinedly remains an outsider – the carts are ‘curiously’ daubed – the pedantic little Italian translation shows how his appreciation of the people will grow through his observations, and also through an understanding of their language. It was the same painstaking, word-by-word linguistic technique which had led him to pore over Latin and Anglo-Saxon grammars in the Bodleian, and which would later see him quizzing his Arab companions about the exact distinctions between different Arabic expressions.

By now the winter was drawing in, the weather ‘rough and uncertain’, and Doughty was giving up hope of finding suitable accommodation on the island to see him through the winter. His initial plan had been to take a passage to Spain, but, failing to find a direct service, he decided to explore Malta instead, travelling by boat to Syracuse, where he would join the ferry for Valetta. For a gentleman traveller, the winter storms were a nuisance; for the impoverished local fishermen, they could be disastrous. ‘Took up two fishermen and a boy whose boat was overturned after a storm of rain and wind one hour before. They were sitting in their boat which was full of water ten miles from the shore. Syracuse at 3.30 p.m.…’

Once again, the casual telling of the story seems disturbingly uninvolved. It is Doughty at his most detached, as apparently uncaring about the plight of the fishermen as he had been about the villagers on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. In the descriptions he wrote of Vesuvius, he had at least the excuse that he was looking back from a distance of several years on the disaster; here, his notes written down almost as the three bedraggled sailors were taken aboard show merely the curiosity of a tourist looking at a picture. There is not a spark of human sympathy. It is almost as if Doughty feels he has mentally set off for the next stage of his travels, and wants nothing more to do with Sicily or its people: ‘Rowed on board at 10 p.m. in a storm of rain and lightning. Thick weather. Steamed out of harbour towards midnight …’

Presumably there was still no passage to be had to Spain, because what Doughty found in Malta was a ferry to North Africa, a small Glasgow steamship that would take him to the Tunisian port of Goletta. His initial impressions here were as bad as those of Valetta had been encouraging. ‘A large filthy village’ was his brisk summary of Goletta itself, while Sidi bu Said, where the nearby site of ancient Carthage might have been more to his taste, was dealt with even more contemptuously. ‘A confused, rank, open, unprofitable, uncultivated and miserable territorium, scarcely credible ever to have been any good site, or that ever any great city was built there – much less Carthage …’

There is a surprising casualness about Doughty’s dismissal of the scene of one of the great cities of the ancient world – though the Romans, of course, had left little of Carthage standing for future archaeologists. But in a sense, this is a fitting farewell to the culture of Europe and the Mediterranean: he had left Europe, at least for a short while, and here in North Africa he was to find not only his introduction to the Arab world, but also the real impetus to his imagination.

It was in the French colonial town of Constantine, a four-and-a-half-hour train journey from the coast, that Doughty had his first direct encounter with the Muslim religion. It was Ramadan, but there seems to have been no difficulty in gaining entrance to the main mosque – and no sign, either, of the antipathy Doughty would show later for Islam and all its works.

A basilica with 4 or 5 rows of pillars, roof flat, floor covered with Brussels carpets … Lighted with candles in handsome chandeliers, with worshippers sitting against the columns reading the prayers and service on certain leaves of parchment. Others prostrated themselves on the earth, with their foreheads touching the ground.

For a traveller leaving Europe for the first time, even for one as determinedly unimpressed as Doughty, it was an irresistibly exotic tableau – but it was also an image of a native Arab culture that was, in Algeria in the year 1872, struggling to survive. For several years the fellahin had faced a succession of natural disasters – epidemics, crop failures and infestations of locusts – but in 1871, heartened by the defeat of the French armies in Europe, some 800,000 of them had joined a holy war aimed at driving out the colonists who ruled them. It had been a savage but hopeless fight, with farms and villages laid waste by rebels and French soldiers in turn. The end was never in doubt. The leaders of the insurrection were killed or captured, and many of them put on trial as criminals before juries packed with French immigrants.

Elsewhere in the Middle East French, English and Russians nurtured their own ambitions as the moribund Ottoman empire faltered, And in another sense, too, North Africa, Arabia and the Islamic world were under attack.¹³ Whatever the ambitions of the politicians, Europe’s writers, poets and artists had effectively colonized the Orient for themselves already, and the scene Doughty saw in the Constantine mosque would have been familiar to Victorian England from the paintings and writings about the East that had been fashionable for years. There had been a flood of poems, paintings, novels and fantasies set in a self-consciously Middle Eastern and desert world. By mid century travellers to Arabia were visiting a land and a culture that was fascinatingly strange and different from their own – but one that must at least have seemed, to anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with contemporary thought, reassuringly familiar.

And yet the Orient of the imagination, the Orient of Flaubert, of Edward Fitzgerald, of Shelley, Byron, and of Beckford, was to a great extent a glorious construction of the artistic community itself – an exuberant celebration of ignorance. The day-to-day contemporary reality of Arabia and the rest of the Middle East was of less importance to the writers and artists than the European tradition of the mystic Orient, of the simple nobility of the desert peoples, the romantic despotism of the sheikhs and rulers, the sexual frisson of the harem. It was that tradition, fitting in perfectly with the romantic imagination to create a deliriously frightening picture of the Arab world, that made Arabia superficially familiar to the travellers.

But alongside this romantic vision of the East was a vast and rapidly growing body of scholarly knowledge about the languages, the civilizations and the history of the Orient. The first part of the century saw an explosion of learned societies, of university professorships and periodicals all concentrating on the new and fascinating field of oriental studies. But even that supposedly dispassionate academic work was often based on literature rather than direct observation, and seems to a modern eye to be suspiciously supportive of the imperial and economic objectives of the western powers. Even Sir Richard Burton, not the most reliable of friends of the British political establishment, commented in his account of his travels in Arabia: ‘Egypt is a treasure to be won … the most tempting prize which the east holds out to the ambition of Europe.’¹⁴

If anyone could have remained uncorrupted by both romantic myth and imperial dream, it would have been the twenty-nine-year-old Charles Montagu Doughty, with his cantankerous disregard for anything even remotely modern. He avoided both camps: he had no contact with the seductive world of literary orientalism, and precious little with that of the scholastic Arabists,¹⁵ and as a result, his observations were essentially his own. If he later seemed prickly, that was because his view of Arabia had been forced into no literary or scholastic preconceptions. He found among the Arabs an ancient world which was foreign to anything he had seen elsewhere – one which appeared to mirror his own sense of antiquity.

The fighting in Algeria had finished barely five months before Doughty’s arrival, leaving behind a bitterness and unrest that even Doughty, temperamentally blind as he was to political upheaval, could not avoid. The trials and the rounding up of suspected militants were going on around him as he travelled slowly south into the heartland of the revolt.

As he pushed inland on a stagecoach drawn by seven horses towards the oasis town of Biskra, the romantic potential of the shadowy scene in the mosque left him unmoved. Instead, as the coach rocked on through the moonlight, he was still concentrating on the landscape – ‘stony, arid, and even all bare and naked … Icy chillness devouring. Crests of the mountains powdered with snow.’

The first stage of the journey took them thirteen hours, rattling over the stony ground in the moonlight, and they pulled into the oasis of Batna at eight in the morning. Even though the reason for travelling through the night had been to avoid the desert sun, noon found Doughty setting off on a four-hour excursion to view the remains of a nearby Roman colony. If his interest had often been lukewarm in Europe, here in Africa it was passionate. He was clearly not sparing himself – and at four o’clock the next morning, as the moon sank low over the Atlas Mountains to the west, he was on his way again.

Doughty was wide awake throughout the long, hot journey, noticing the landscapes, the occasional caravans and the few local people along the road – a knot of French soldiers surveying the route, Arab women with looped earrings of wire, a farmer ploughing the ‘dry dead country’. And then, almost like a lingering shot from a film, came his first authentic image of the harshness, the implacability he would come to know of Arabia. ‘Passed on the way an Arab dead, wrapped in his burnous, bound upon poles, and laid across an ass or mule. No distinct road, but only the wheelruts’ traces across the country …’

It is a vivid sketch, like his earlier one of the Sicilian peasants. Here, though, Doughty focuses upon the movement of the dead man, not that of the living Arabs who were presumably taking him for burial. But where Shelley saw only the ‘boundless and bare’ sands of the desert, Doughty saw the wheel-tracks threading their way towards the horizon. With the scene there before him, he transcends the conventional response; while Shelley had no imaginative answer to the overwhelming power of the desert, Doughty sees the continuing, ageless struggle for survival of the Arabs. Looking around him, he was struck by the awesome barrenness of the sands, white with an efflorescence of salt, and the surrounding bare mountains. But life struggled on imperturbably, with a blank serenity which matched his own matter-of-fact approach. In that contrast, between the vulnerability of human achievement and the permanence of human endeavour, Doughty was to find a lifelong inspiration, which he maintained with a religious force and passion.

It is a breadth of vision, a sense of history, which gradually comes to accommodate not only his unemotional response to the sufferings of others, such as the shipwrecked fishermen of Giardini or the hapless tourists on Vesuvius, but also the dogged courage with which he faces his own dangers.

The little party crossed over an ancient bridge built by the Romans, who had struggled to colonize this harsh country – ‘still strong and good after so many centuries’, Doughty noted approvingly – but for the most part, what signs of man remained were desolate and all but smothered in the blown sand of the desert. He had left far behind him the well-trodden roads and pathways of Victorian Europe, and with them, the ancient and reassuringly familiar civilization they represented. But in the North African desert, with the stolid march of a small group of Arabs along a route marked only by wheel-tracks in the sand, he was discovering a different but equally ancient stability.

It was 22 November when they finally set out from the desert settlement of Biskra, a caravan of ten men with mules and asses loaded with dates, threading their way through the mountains to the west on their way to the oasis of Bou Saida. Perhaps some of the French garrison had warned Doughty of the danger he might be running in such lonely and unsettled country, so soon after a major insurrection; perhaps he instinctively felt the uncertainty of his new position – but an unaccustomed note of caution enters his diary as he leaves on his trek across the mountains. For the first time he was carrying a weapon – a revolver he had borrowed, presumably from one of the soldiers.

He should not approach the Arabs’ tents pitched near their own camp, he was told that evening, in case they were hostile to a travelling European. This, he was warned, was dangerous country. In the circumstances, perhaps it is not surprising that he slept little. ‘We lay upon the ground; the night cold and still … Light cloud covered the ground, foreboding rain. Howling of dogs all the night long.’

It took four more days’ hard travelling before they reached the oasis of Bou Saida, deep in the heartland of the revolt. They were lonely days and hard nights, with the travellers seeking what shelter they could from the driving rain by piling up their baggage and huddling around a smoky fire that guttered in the wind. And yet Doughty, the same man who had grumbled his way across Europe, complaining about the weather, the foreigners, the food and his own health, had clearly enjoyed the hundred-mile trek.

Some of the villages they passed had been friendly, and Doughty had even experienced his first taste of Arab hospitality with a group of wandering bedu – hot griddle cakes, boiled eggs and dates, and a night’s shelter, side by side with a score of newborn kids and lambs in the nomads’ tent. He had, like most Victorian travellers, squirrelled away a collection of notes and ‘specimens’ – plants, a few snail shells and jottings about the birds he had seen and about the landscape and the occasional stone cairns he had passed.

Where his comments about his European travels had frequently been dismissive and critical, the diary of his five-day trek to Bou Saida trembles with the excitement of the unfamiliar. In Europe there was practically nowhere clean or comfortable enough for him; here in the desert, after a night spent on the hard earth with a mattress of dried sods, kept awake by the bleating of farm animals, the barking of dogs and the pounding of rain upon the rough black sacking of the tent, he was content. ‘I had the happiness to pass the Sunday day of rest in cheerfulness and in some hospitality and quiet … There I lay in security, and put away my pistol.’

Notable, too, was his first impression of the Arabs with whom he had come into contact. They had reassured him that they thought the English better at least than the French – faint praise, perhaps, in the aftermath of the revolt. And for his part, despite the earlier fears which had left him quaking by the camp fire and clutching his revolver through the night, he could only note now the continual cheerfulness which they showed despite their hard and unforgiving life – that and their ‘quavered, drawling songs’.

For those of his own party he had nothing but praise. ‘I have taken no hurt, thank God, nor am any the weaker. With the friendly complaisance, gentleness, and hearty kindness of my party of Arabs (three men and a boy) I was very pleased and contented,’ he wrote.

But he set off almost immediately for the coast – a three-day trek out of the mountains, to the first public stagecoach that would take him to Algiers. It was an ironic return to civilization. ‘We were tossed and tumbled enough to break the last bone in our body,’ he wrote after he had disembarked from the diligence. ‘5 p.m., at Algiers. We have made in 21 hours 50 miles, or a little above!’ From there, as there was no ferry for Spain, Doughty took the train to the port of Oran and a steamer to Cartagena. His first Arabian adventure was over.

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 of Gibraltar, searching for Phoenician ruins in Cadiz, jotting down revolutionary slogans from the walls of Seville, and muttering tetchily all the while about his personal discomfort: gnats and crudely executed religious oil paintings in Seville, and another ‘night of purgatory in the diligence’ on the roads through the mountains of the Santa Morena – everything, it seemed, was designed for his irritation.

He arrived in Lisbon on 19 March after another fifteen-hour train journey. The life of a poor wanderer was beginning to pall, and he planned to spend some time in the Portuguese capital gathering his strength and throwing himself with more enthusiasm, at least for a while, into the role of middle-class traveller. He spent sixteen days there, staying at the English-run Barnards Hotel, drawing more funds from home, and meeting fellow travellers and a few compatriots who lived in the city. ‘The banker introduced me to the Gremio, an admirable club … which was immediately opposite,’ he noted. This, perhaps, was more the sort of life that his relatives in Suffolk would have envisaged – although there is still no suggestion that he might resume the studies which had enjoyed such all-consuming importance only a few months before.

He needed the rest because his health was failing – just as the travelling was about to get even more wearing. ‘Two long nights and a day’ in a stagecoach took him to Toledo, and on to Madrid, where he rested for another week. ‘Thence by the night mail 16 hours to Valencia – a journey almost too great for me, being now full of weakness and with a terrible bronchitis, but I trust nearly the last.’

This, perhaps, was the moment he was referring to years later, when he confessed he had been tempted to end his travelling and return home; or maybe he was looking forward to a longer rest in Italy. In any case, there were more hardships to come before he left Spain.

He set off early in the morning for Barcelona, where he hoped to find a ferry out of Spain. But the civil wars were still raging around him, sometimes dangerously close, with the counter-revolutionary Carlist movement mounting a running guerrilla campaign against the liberal and republican forces. For all their Catholicism and dislike of foreigners, and however exciting a character he had found his gran carabinero republican, Doughty might have been expected to feel some sympathy for the arch-traditionalists of the Carlist movement; what troubled him, though, was the disruption of his travel plans rather than the politics or the physical danger. The whole region was ‘infested by assassins, Carlists’, but personal safety never seems to have been a great concern of Doughty’s – not on the slopes of Vesuvius, not in North Africa, not in his later travels in Arabia, and not here either. ‘At Tarragona, we were compelled to halt. Half the distance from there to Barcelona, they occupy the way, having fired upon the train the previous evening, and threatening the lives of the engine drivers if they conducted trains. For this, the traffic is at a stand.’

And, with Barcelona now completely cut off from the landward side, at a stand it continued for three days. Doughty was stuck in the port of Tarragona. The only way past the surrounding Carlists was by sea, and late on the Sunday evening he embarked on a little schooner for the brief run down the coast.

In Barcelona a ship was in port, about to set out for France, and in less than twenty-four hours he was on board. Two nights in Marseilles were spent sleeping under the stars before he found a passage on to Naples, from where he had now decided – his health apparently no longer giving him trouble – to travel on to Greece. ‘The morning of the second day, we cast anchor in the Bay of Naples, a good passage and a fair wind.’

There are four brief lines in his diary noting that he spent some time in the Pension Guidotti, that he climbed Vesuvius again, that he visited the ruins at Herculaneum, and that he spent two or three days on the nearby island of Ischia; but there, abruptly, his own account ends.

With all its infuriating gaps, and with all the obvious limitations of notes scribbled briefly in a traveller’s spare moments, the diary is practically the only clue there is to how the bland, conventional twenty-seven-year-old young man who had left for Holland three years before could develop into the acute observer who would later write the Travels in Arabia Deserta. Although we know from occasional mentions in the diary that he wrote lengthy and descriptive letters home – he refers, for example, to accounts of Madrid and a great bullfight he witnessed there – hardly any of them survive.

That is not an accident: Doughty had throughout his life a passionate sense of his own privacy, and was never a friend to biography. Personal enquiries were answered tersely, if more or less accurately. Almost all his letters home were burned, according to his wife – and after his death she herself carefully destroyed those he had written later to her,¹ while Doughty himself replied with horror to an apparently harmless request for a picture of himself for a book on Arabian travel. ‘I have not such a photograph in the world. I may be allowed to say it would be rather contrary to my perhaps now old-fashioned ideas to see a portrait of myself, a private person, in a published book.’²

It is another dimension of his loneliness, the desire for privacy stretching beyond his immediate surroundings. For all its shortcomings, and often despite Doughty himself, the diary offers a rare first-hand, contemporaneous account of three formative years of the life of this determinedly ‘private person’.

It is often little more than a collection of jottings, much like the notebooks he later filled as he wandered through the Arabian desert, with words repeated, sentences unfinished, and judgements half-formed – and yet it still shows the first stirrings of his own writing style, with its incisive, familiar images, its occasional pomposities, and its striving for a proper, judicious scientific detachment.

For the next three and a half years, following his travels is a matter of picking up snippets from letters which were often written years afterwards, references in his later works, grudging notes of his memories in old age. Not until he sets off into the Arabian desert with the Hadj caravan and begins once again to keep a detailed notebook will there be so precise a record of the growth of the writer’s mind.

In the spring and summer of 1873 he based himself in Athens, ‘gypsying’ around the countryside, as he put it – staying at lodging houses or occasionally sleeping under the stars.

A few memories from those days surfaced later as vivid markers in his writings. In The Dawn in Britain, for example, he would describe how the Gauls, in their ill-fated assault on Delphi, were led through the mountains above the Oracle by Thracian guides until they reached the

… parting of two ways, from the cliff-steeps,

Where, of some antique hero, shines white tomb.³

The aching cold of the lonely mountain wanderer is remembered in Doughty’s description of the Gauls encamped on the inhospitable Greek hillside as the snow begins to fall.

Brennus and few lords with him, founden hath

Uncertain shelter, the wild eaves of craigs;

Whereunder, hunger-starved, when fallen this night,

And without fire, they daze, with stiffened joints … ⁴

He was alone, travelling light, and still without most of his books. The passionate devotion to his ‘studies’ was now firmly behind him; his priority the ruins on the ground rather than the words on the page.

On the other side of the Bosphorus the archaeologist J. T. Wood showed him how those ruins could be brought to life. At the ancient Greek site of Ephesus, Wood was painstakingly revealing the remains of the Temple of Artemis. Doughty was spellbound: the history of Ephesus itself formed an imaginative bridge between his own various interests. The temple linked it with the sites of ancient 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’ to work out how many ruins there were, but in two days’ riding near the town of Kerak he claimed to have visited about forty separate sites. There were disappointments, of course – sites with carvings and inscriptions that he was unable to find, and others that he decided were not worth the visit – but it was among these ruins that he began to form his views of the Semitic culture and the Semitic people.

These travels also helped, incidentally, in forming his estimate of the value of oral evidence: some stories, like some sites, were worth more than others. At the Roman site of Jerash, he was told, there was the grave of the Islamic prophet Hud – who, he added tartly, ‘lies buried in more places in Arabia’. There was the now-sanctified Alexander the Great, whose body was to be found – ‘if you will believe them’ – under a heap of stones at Rabbath Moab; and at Kerak he was shown the sepulchre of Noah – ‘who is, notwithstanding buried, at great length, in other places’. Later, as he travelled through Arabia, he was to hear stories of the miracles he was supposed to have performed himself, lifting huge boulders with a single touch of his fingers – ‘and yet at such times I was sleeping, encamped with the Aarab,* nearly half a mile distant …’¹²

But it was not only old wives’ tales about famous graves that aroused Doughty’s scepticism. Travelling around the Holy Land was further undermining the foundations of his belief, which had already been so dangerously chipped away by his scientific studies. Everywhere, he saw the impossibility of accepting much that he had read for years in his Bible.

He liked to use the Bible as a historical guide, and he was not afraid to test its assertions against science and logic. His own slow progress across the desert set him thinking about the exodus of the Jews from Egypt – two and a half million people, six million camels and seven million cattle. When he asked whether even the whole of Sinai, the worst pasture in the world, could have kept them alive, it was no more than the sort of question that scientists had already started asking of the Scriptures – but Doughty’s presence there in the desert lent it a new point and strength. On all sides, his religion was under attack.

He saw, too, the frequent gulf between faith and human kindness, and the way that religious fanaticism could actually shrivel up ordinary, decent humanity. The man whose faith had already been shaken by his studies in libraries and laboratories was now seeing it put under further strain by his own experience in the world.

There was little enough emotional support from the Greek Christians who lived among the Arabs – a ‘lickdish peasant priest’ at Kerak and his congregation, for instance, among whom Doughty found no evidence of sanctity or a Christian life. ‘To the stronger Muslims I would sooner resort, who are of frank mind and, more than the other, fortified with the Arabian virtues,’ he commented.¹³ It was a telling condemnation from a man who was later to be criticized for his unbending attitude towards the faith of his Muslim hosts.

But he had no illusions about the generosity and humanity of the devout Muslims either. Later, when he set off with the Hadj, he would see a dying beggar by the wayside, ignored by the passing pilgrims, but then picked up and helped by one of Doughty’s own servants, ‘a valiant outlaw, no holy-tongue man, but of human deeds’.¹⁴ In another bitter moment, he exploded: ‘Religion is a promise of good things to come, to poor folk, and many among them are half-destitute persons. Oh what contempt in religions of the human reason!’¹⁵

In both comments he was speaking specifically about Islam, ‘the dreadful-faced harpy of their religion’ – but his choice of words is significant. It was not only Islam, but religion as a whole, that seemed to have failed.

His quarrel, in fact, was with neither Islam nor Christianity, but with the rigidity of both; his respect, then as always, for the relation between the individual and God. The Hadj might be, as he suggested, a cruel deception practised on the guileless pilgrims; perhaps there was nothing but contempt due to the more ostentatiously devout among them and their ‘loathsome washings’. But their patience, their determination, their religious stamina, could only impress him. ‘There are very few who faint: the Semitic nature, weak and quick metal, is also of a wonderful temper and longsuffering in God,’ he wrote.¹⁶

For the first time in his travels his interests started to encompass the welfare and the day-to-day life of the people among whom he was living. Where before he showed no interest in the politics of the countries through which he was travelling, he now noticed indignantly the debilitating effect of the incompetence, inefficiency and corruption of the tottering Ottoman empire. ‘The name of the Sultan’s government is a band of robbers,’ he wrote.¹⁷

At least some of the barren land, he suggested, could be reclaimed for crops, much as the Arabs ploughed the soil around their villages to eke out a scanty living. Towns and villages, deserted for centuries, might easily be reoccupied: in the ruined city of Umm Jemal he walked through narrow streets and courts choked with giant weeds, his sandals soft on the basalt slabs underfoot. The stone-built houses still had their roofs and walls intact; only the people were missing. ‘The “old desolate places” are not heaps and ruins, but carcases which might return to be inhabited under a better government: perhaps thus outlying, they were forsaken in the Mohammedan decay of Syria, for the fear of the Beduins,’ he wrote, with a touching faith in the power of strong government.¹⁸ It was, he said, only the lack of such strength and determination that stood in the way: the impoverished Ottoman empire was unable even to pay the wages of its soldiers, or to repair the roads and bridges which were falling into ruin.

The European powers, of course, were only too anxious to make what profit they could from the Ottoman empire. For several decades would-be entrepreneurs had cast a greedy eye on the underdeveloped Ottoman wastes: the historian Sir Edward Creasy was only one voice among many when he predicted, ‘With improved internal government, European capital will be poured into Turkey, and will enrich the land where it is employed … the busy hum of European industry will increase and find innumerable echoes …’¹⁹ That was the optimistic prediction of the 1850s; what had happened in fact was that heavy borrowing and spending in European markets had bankrupted the empire by the mid 1870s.

But while Doughty was a fervent patriot and a dedicated nationalist, he was never an imperialist. He had little interest in the growth of empire for its own sake, and none of the exaggerated estimation of many empire-builders of the abilities of his countrymen. He for one saw little prospect of wealth for either side in talk of western settlers taking over the land. There was, he said, no reason to suppose that the first generation of European settlers would be any more successful than the Arabs in tilling the desert, while succeeding generations would be moulded by the environment in which they lived. ‘Were not the sending of such colonists to Syria, as the giving of poor men beds to lie on, in which others had died of the pestilence?’²⁰

As word of his wandering spread, Doughty was becoming something of a legend among the Arabs: a European Christian traveller, with an unaccountable interest in unregarded ruins and old carvings, and an insatiable appetite for anything fellow-travellers, villagers or wanderers on the road could tell him about their life. The Arabs with whom he travelled told him that the region had hardly been seen by Europeans, despite its moderate climate and plentiful water; if he encountered occasional suspicion and hostility, he appears to have been treated much of the time with a sort of amused acceptance. Mohammed Aly, later to be his unpredictable host at Medain Salih, was one of a number of people whom he met during this period; so too was Mohammed Said, the Kurdish pasha who was in charge of the Hadj caravan which Doughty eventually joined. The latter, Doughty boasted, had ‘known me a traveller in the lands beyond Jordan, and took me for a well-affected man that did nothing covertly’.²¹ It was to prove a useful, as well as a creditable, reputation.

In Sinai he found a naked country, its rocky mountains camouflaged by neither vegetation nor soil, and the memory stayed with him through his life, to surface in his last years, in the poem Mansoul.

An austere soil is that …

Whose bald, sun-bleached, gaunt untrod mountain rocks

Stand, like some bone-work of a former earth … ²²

The memory is geological in its scale, and there is also a sense of a lost, disappeared world – a sense that is reinforced by the few mysterious traces of human life.

Doughty was on a lonely track south of Suez, heading for an old Greek Christian monastery, when he saw what seemed to be a strange stone cottage, its doorway blocked up with rocks and brushwood. An ageing Arab camel-driver barred his way. ‘I would have removed some sticks to look in, but the old Beduin cameleer made signs with the hand … that men lay therein, stark upon their backs with closed eyes, and with the other, he stopped his nostrils …’²³

His curiosity had taken him to the doorway of a bedu burial chamber, one of dozens of round, stone-built huts he found huddled together in little groups in the most barren and secluded parts of the region.

Later he described them as ‘mosquito huts’, supposedly built by the former inhabitants of Sinai for protection through the night from swarms of insects. In reality, neither he nor the Arabs who were travelling with him had any idea of their original purpose, their age, or who had built them, but they caught his imagination as unchanged remnants of a distant past. ‘They could easily have been in existence for just a few years, or even a few centuries. I have a conjecture they could have been the huts of immigrants who had spread out across the entire Egyptian stretches of desert since the time of Antonius …’²⁴ As the bones of the landscape were naked to the eye, so too were the rare marks of man – not buried or ruined, not needing reconstruction like the buildings at Ephesus, but simply left behind on a barren landscape, among the

Inhuman silent solitude of sharp dust;

Wind-burnished stones and rocks.²⁵

And the feeling that nothing changed was reflected, too, in the few people who scratched a meagre living in Sinai. They lived along the Red Sea coast as they had done for centuries. Neither the lush imaginations of the Victorian orientalists nor even the poverty he had seen himself in North Africa can have prepared Doughty for this glimpse of timeless Arab hardship. ‘These people had neither clothing nor a roof for protection: in the main they live miserably from the food which they can fish or gather from along the shore. The Arabs rightly put down their dark skin colour to their perpetual hunger and nakedness.’²⁶

Even in the grim hierarchy of suffering that Arab life represented. these nomadic fishermen must have been near the bottom. Later, as he travelled with the bedu tribesmen, Doughty would focus upon the life and the culture that could lie behind hardship; here, no doubt still feeling himself to be the detached European traveller studying a strange and savage people, he saw no further than their grinding poverty.

It was here in Sinai that his search for the roots of humanity really began. The landscape, the mysterious buildings, even the people themselves, showed little sign of having been changed by the centuries: here for the first time he could see the perspective that his travels would offer of the origins of human life. The search for the distant history of Arabia, he believed, would help to supply an answer to the question which Isaiah had posed in the Bible, and which rang in his mind: ‘What was that old human kindred which inhabited the land so long before the Semitic race? Does not the word of Isaiah come to our hearts concerning them? … “What was the rock whence ye were hewn, and the hole of the pit whence ye were digged?’”²⁷

Most of his notes from Sinai deal with the geology and the structure of the region: to an even greater extent than elsewhere on his travels, this was a land where history could be read in the rocks and stones, and picked up from the occasional ruins of human habitation. But that history was clear, the links between past and present undisguised. Within this bare, forgotten and cruel land could be found not only the ancient soul of Arabia, but also the first clues to the origins of human civilization.

In the spring of 1875 Doughty left Sinai, apparently without much regret, making his way north through the complex system of wadis and granite cliffs towards Aqaba and on through the biblical land of Edom to Damascus. With him were an Egyptian and a bedu guide, fellow-travellers on a journey where every encounter with the tribesmen could mean either mortal danger, or the warmest of welcomes.

The town of Maan,²⁸ which was their first destination, lay at the edge of a desolate plain, covered with flints and stones, with no shelter from the wind or the beating sun. Here, in a dip in the ground, they waited nervously until nightfall before setting out across the open country to the town. His two companions, more alive to the dangers of the route than Doughty was, warned that any passing group of nomads might now be a threat: their only safety lay in hiding until dusk. It was midnight before they arrived at the town. ‘The place lay all silent in the night. We rode in at the ruinous open gateway and passed the inner gate, likewise open, to the suk: there we found benches of clay and spread our carpets upon them, to lodge in the street.’²⁹ Doughty’s plan now was to travel on to Petra, the Nabataean city which had been made famous by the young Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt³⁰ more than sixty years before. This, surely, would be the climax of his painstaking studies of ruined settlements and inscriptions. ‘I had then no other intention than to see Petra. I could speak very little Arabic, not having before studied the history of those countries,’ he wrote later.³¹

The ancient rock city was only five hours’ ride away, and he set off eagerly, past another ruined site, long stripped of its white marble pavements by the rich traders of Damascus, and on through the outlying cornfields of Maan – fields where the desert met the sown, in Gertrude Bell’s later phrase, and where the farmers had no choice but to offer half their crops to the bedu as a bribe for an untroubled life.

How would the local Arabs react to the arrival of this mysterious red-bearded European, riding a mule and wearing an Ottoman-style red tarboosh, who demanded to see the ancient sites that they still treated with a degree of near-religious respect? At first the tribesmen at the village of Eljy demanded money to let him through to the ruins; then he was treated with suspicion as a possible spy, and finally entertained to a meal of mutton boiled in buttermilk. The meal, as Doughty was to discover later, was significant: once he had been entertained to food and drink by the tribesmen, once he had shared their ‘bread and salt’, he was protected by the laws of hospitality.

The track down to the monuments, he noted with an English country gentleman’s fine sense of bathos, ran though ‘limestone downs and coombs … like the country about Bath’; but from there, among the red sandstone cliffs, he could make out the palatial columns and cornices of the Nabataean city. Burckhardt must have been faced with the same intriguing panorama when he scrambled over the track years before.

At closer quarters it was a world of contradictions: grandiose two-storey facades which fronted nothing but plain, uncarved caves, hacked out of the rock face; a town where the houses had vanished and only the empty tombs in the rock remained.

It was initially courage, resourcefulness and good luck that had brought Burckhardt there; then learning and intelligence that made him realize that the ruins were indeed those of the fabled city of Petra. He had been alerted to their existence in the Wadi Mousa by the casual talk of local people, as he travelled south towards Maan and, disguised as a Muslim traveller from India, he had decided to risk his life by trying to see them for himself. It was much the same decision as Doughty would have taken – except that Burckhardt had his disguise and a story he had concocted about a vow to sacrifice a goat at the nearby Tomb of Aaron to explain his presence. Doughty made no pretences: he simply told the curious, occasionally hostile villagers that he wanted to see the ruins.

Perhaps it was the red tarboosh that persuaded the Arabs to let him through: despite its crumbling power, the Ottoman empire still wielded considerable influence in the region, and the hat may have reinforced Doughty’s own claim to have powerful friends. However vehemently the villagers protested their independence, they would have been unwilling to try to outface the authority of the Dowla, the Ottoman government. But, after a night spent in caves in the rocky face on the outskirts of Petra, there were still other locals to stand in the way: one group of four with a gun grabbed the bridle of Doughty’s mule, and refused to let him through unless they were given money; another goatherd, looking after his flocks with his wife, warned him to keep off the mountain slopes, for fear of attack. Fifty armed men, the Arab warned, would not be enough to protect him against the angry villagers if he tried to climb out of the valley.

In the valley-bottom, though, they found the long, deep cleft through the rocks known as the Siq, a natural passage-way through groves of wild olives to the carvings – and at the end of it, the Khasneh, the so-called Treasure House of the Pharaoh, the most perfect of the monuments. It was no disappointment: its ‘sculptured columns and cornices are pure lines of a crystalline beauty without blemish, whereupon the golden sun looks from above, and Nature has painted that sand-rock ruddy with iron-rust’.³²

Ignoring the villagers’ warnings, they climbed out of the valley to the cold mountainside, and found a place to stay for the night in a bedu encampment, where they were entertained with music and singing (enough, said Doughty ungratefully, to ‘move our yawning or laughter’) before spending another day at the monuments. Leaving his mule at the Treasure House, Doughty set off with another local guide to explore the carvings and inscriptions until, as the sun set, the anxious young Arab urged him to leave. It was not clear whether he was more afraid of the marauding bedu or of the angry spirits of Petra. His plan was to spend the night back at his own village, where Doughty had been entertained three nights before – but when the villagers there heard the sound of the mule’s hoofs on the rocky track, they poured out of their houses to drive them away. No unbeliever should enter the place, they shouted – and the man who had tried to bring him was reviled as ‘Abu Nasrany’, father of Christians. They were forced back up into the hills, back to the bedu encampment they had left earlier.

Doughty did not seem to care what happened to his guide. For him, the attack by the villagers was little more than an exciting interlude, an introduction to the unpredictable hostility of the tribesmen. But the visit to Petra had given a fresh dimension to his travels. While the mosquito huts of Sinai spoke of a primitive people struggling to survive, these grandiose carvings – reduced now to ‘night-stalls of the nomads’ flocks and blackened with the herdsmen’s fires’³³ – were the remnants of a long-vanished prosperous race of builders, traders and merchants. It was there, in the shadows of ‘that wild abysmal place which is desolate Petra’,³⁴ that Doughty’s dreams of discovering another civilization were born.

During the long nights on the mountainside above Petra the villagers had let slip details of just such another civilization. There were, they said, similar sites further south down the Hadj road, on the way to Mecca. It was the first mention Doughty had heard of a second Petra – and it had come to him in much the same casual way as had Burckhardt’s initial information about the first one. At first the villagers were unwilling to talk about the sites, particularly to a curious European Christian, but they assumed that Doughty had arrived from the south, and must already know about them.

There were several separate sites, known as Medain Salih – the cities of Salih, a Muslim prophet, who was said to have destroyed them and their inhabitants because of their wickedness. Each one was hewn from the solid rock like Petra. Doughty’s immediate thought was that he might be the first European to document those remains.

And in Maan there was more to be learned: a secretary named Mahmud – ‘a literate person who had been there oftentimes’ – told him about the inscriptions and the carved birds on the massive stone facades. ‘With those words, Mahmud was the father of my painful travels in Arabia,’ he noted later.³⁵

The cities were well within the reach of a determined traveller – some ten days’ travel, according to the people whom Doughty asked. He wanted to set off south at once to see whether the stories he had heard were accurate – attracted, initially at least, by the possibility that the ruined cities might be connected with the stories of the Old Testament. ‘I mused at that time it would be some wonder of Moses’ Beduish nation [of] Midian,’ he wrote some years later. ‘For those inscriptions which might yield fruit to our Biblical studies, I thought it not too much to adventure my life.’³⁶

Other stories of the Arabian hinterland that may well have been intended to warn him off simply increased his fascination – stories of a cruel and powerful prince, who ruled over his desert kingdom as both tyrant and lawgiver. ‘All the next land of wilderness was ruled by one Ibn Rashid, a mighty prince of Beduin blood, who lorded it over the tribes … I thought I had as lief see his Beduin court, and visit some new David or Robin Hood, as come threading these months past all the horrid mountain mass of Sinai,’ he said later.³⁷ Here, surely, there would be more to fire his imagination than he had found in Europe.

But his first attempts to join the pilgrimage that might start his journey there were rebuffed: the Ottoman governor of Maan, well aware that he might be held responsible if anything were to happen to this headstrong European in the harsh country of the desert bedu, forbade townsmen and travellers alike to help him find a way down the Pilgrim Road.

The only way of reaching Medain Salih, the governor said, would be to accompany the Hadj caravan from Damascus – a suggestion which was clearly a way of fobbing off this importunate Christian.

The governor’s caution was understandable: from his point of view, it was the worst possible time to have a European Christian who claimed the highest political connections setting out on such a dangerous and unpredictable venture. Within the past few months tension had been growing throughout the Ottomans’ Balkan possessions, and both the Russian Tsar and the western powers were making threatening noises about the need to protect the Sultan’s non-Muslim subjects from the excesses of their masters.

In Constantinople Sultan Abdul Aziz was clinging to power by anxiously playing off Russians against Europeans. Allowing Doughty to wander through the wilder corners of the empire would risk demonstrating how feeble was the Sultan’s grasp on the extremities of his dominions – and if he were to come to harm, it might provoke an anti-Ottoman cause célèbre in the West. Any provincial governor who caused such a diplomatic disaster merely to oblige an eccentric traveller with a penchant for ancient inscriptions would surely attract the unwelcome attentions of the Sultan’s stranglers.

So Doughty spent twenty frustrating days in Maan, becoming well known in the streets and coffee houses, as he tried to glean more information about the monuments of Medain Salih. He also took to wandering through the flint beds just outside the tumbledown clay wall around the town, where he found traces of still earlier inhabitants than those of Petra. Lying near the surface, to his astonishment, were seven flint tools, chipped to a sharp edge. It was a tribute to Doughty’s own powers of observation, sharpened at the archaeological site of Hoxne all those years before, that he recognized them. They were another imaginative link with people from centuries before. ‘We must suppose them of rational, that is an human labour. But what was that old human kindred which inhabited the land so long before the Semitic race?’³⁸

They were, indeed, from long before the Semitic race, some of them dating back to Lower Palaeolithic times, hundreds of thousands of years before the appearance of modern man. Forty years later Doughty presented the axes, amongst other trophies, to Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum – and along with them, incidentally, his own clumsy effort to copy the craftsmen of prehistory.

Today they shine dully in shades of green, brown, and grey, still fitting snugly into the palm of the hand, still sharp along the chipped edges, but each one now carrying a precise little note, in Doughty’s schoolmasterly hand, to say where it was found.

‘They were certainly a significant find – they wouldn’t have seen many pieces like this in Britain in 1915,’ says Alison Roberts, the collections manager in the museum’s Department of Antiquities. ‘Not much was known about the Palaeolithic era in Syria or the Near East at that time, and most European archaeologists would have been as excited as Doughty himself to see them. The writing on them is interesting too – it shows Doughty was a very careful, conscientious collector. A lot of people weren’t, in those days.’

When he found them, though, Doughty’s attention was fixed on Medain Salih. Everything he heard simply whetted his appetite more keenly: the cities lay close together near the pilgrim trail, about halfway between Maan and Medina, their rock chambers like those he had already seen at Petra, but bigger – and every doorway had an inscription and the figure of a falcon or an eagle, wings outspread, carved over it. However close the links with Petra, he believed there was every chance that he might find the remains of a previously unknown desert civilization.

He used all his powers of persuasion with the governor. Although the journey would be difficult and dangerous, he argued, it would not take him into the area of the two Holy Cities which were forbidden to non-Muslims on pain of death. But it was useless: the governor had clearly decided not to take the responsibility of allowing him to make the journey. He would have to travel north to Damascus and try to find more powerful backing.

So, after failing to get permission in Maan, he set off for Damascus. Eager as he was, he does not seem to have hurried on his journey.³⁹ He spent several months wandering through the countryside, adding to his collection of inscriptions and stories of the region’s biblical past. It was hard travelling, often with nothing more than a night under the stars in the shelter of a few rocks at the end of the day – but it took Doughty deep into the history of the ancient land. He found a chain of old watch-towers and fortresses stretching a hundred miles or so into the desert, each one with its own story – one was ‘a kasr of the old Yehud’, a castle of the ancient Jews; another was reported to be a palace, and a third, scattered with broken columns, and with a massive marble stairway leading from the deserted entrance hall, now no more than the den of some wild beast.

There were silent piles of stones still standing where they had been painstakingly gathered in long-abandoned fields; entire towns and villages, ruined and deserted, which seemed to date back hundreds of years.

The ruins … are built without mortar, with the uncanny natural blocks of flintstone and limestone. There are even, in several of the remains of the regular buildings, foundation walls, vaults, and round arches made of square carved stones which on appearance might have been made by Roman hands – column pieces, marble fragments, etc …⁴⁰

The villages that were still inhabited bore a striking resemblance to the ruins in their design and construction: in the past, Doughty’s guides told him, this had been a thriving farming region, which had been laid waste years before by a bedu sheikh. Myth, history, or a combination of the two, the awestruck stories told by the Arab farmers bore witness to the dread they still felt of the half-savage nomadic tribes who could descend upon them so suddenly and so brutally. Fear, too, could survive almost unchanged down the generations.

Sometimes, Doughty paid an Arab guide to accompany him on his way; where he had to, he travelled alone, trusting to his luck and his ability to talk his way out of trouble. But whenever possible he fell in with other travellers going on the same track: there were stories to be heard along the way, and some safety to be found in numbers. As he left Maan, for instance, he joined the military captain of the Hadj road and twenty or so of his peasant soldiers, on their way to Nablus. They were well enough armed to frighten off any casual groups of bedu tribesmen they might meet – but he still had to rely on his own wits rather than on the loyalty of his companions. On one occasion, threatened by a group of nomads, he resorted to a straightforward bluff, and shouted orders to the men to arrest them, as if he were a military commander. The soldiers, of course, who had anyway not been paid for nearly a year and a half, were even less likely to obey him than their own captain – but the Arabs didn’t know that, and they rode off in panic from the scruffy little troop and their guns.

It was now June, and the countryside was blooming. Doughty had reflected as he left Maan on how the land must indeed have seemed to flow with milk to the Israelites as they trekked wearily out of the wastes of Sinai. Now he found rose-laurel and rushes growing in profusion around the cattle pools, swollen with the spring rain; the grass was a yard high, and the corn growing fat. The bedu he met were turning their cattle loose on some of the richest pasture of the year, and, unpredictable as ever, they were happy to slaughter a sheep for dinner in honour of their guest.

He paused briefly in the town of Kerak, a rough settlement with a bloody history of wars and conquests, which had the air of a frontier town, where criminals and murderers could seek refuge from the stern justice of the Ottoman empire. The countryside round about was dotted with ruined forts, towers and villages, but he did not linger. It was still June when he was a good hundred miles further north, wading up to his waist in the tepid waters of Wadi Zerka, as they tumbled towards the river Jordan.

The biblical land of Gilead, through which he passed on the way to Jerash and Damascus, sounds like a paradise, ‘full of the balm-smelling pines, and the tree laurel sounding with the sobbing sweetness and the amorous wings of doves! In all paths are blissful fountains; the valley heads flow down healing to the eyes with veins of purest water’.⁴¹ For all that, though, it remained outside the law. The people, ‘uncivil and brutish, not subject to any government’, slashed and burned the woodland as if they were living in some remote rainforest: it was a grim and primitive land.

All the time, he was becoming more familiar with the Arab way St Mary’s Church, Martlesham, Suffolk: ‘The atmosphere of the simple little church, its unimpeachable, unassuming Englishness and its dignified reserve, reflect one facet of his character.’ of life and culture, even though he had yet to learn more than a smattering of the language. The wild bedu, still largely unknown and untrusted, seemed to people an uncivilized world in which they made their own law, while on the desert fringes the hard-working farmers and traders eked out a living that seemed to have been unchanged for centuries. ‘These desert men lean to the civil life, and are such yeomen perhaps as Esau was. Other of their tribesmen I have seen, which are settled in tents, earing* the desert sand near Gaza; their plough is a sharpened stake, shod with iron, and one plough-camel draught …’⁴²

But these industrious farmers, too, could turn on him in a moment. They distrusted foreigners and particularly those who, prying into ancient ruins, might prove to be spies. A European and a Christian in a strange land, either alone or with few companions, he was an easy target either for religious bigotry or simple banditry by farmers and nomads alike – the more so when he steadfastly refused to adopt a disguise or make up stories to justify his presence.

There had been his brush with the villagers around Petra; and there had been another incident south of Wadi Zerka when Doughty, sick and weak with his long travelling, was abandoned by his guide at a bedu encampment. At first he was well enough treated: the Arabs made at least a pretence of trying to find the guide who had deserted him, and gave him food and shelter. But they were moving on, they said, and after one night they delivered him to a second encampment.

There, Doughty found only women – and when the men returned later in the day, it was to threaten him, and demand a ransom in return for letting him go. It was a gross abuse of the laws of hospitality – but Doughty was becoming more skilled in the ways of handling the nomad tribesmen. First he protested that he had been given milk to drink by the women of the tribe, and should therefore be treated as a guest; and when that failed, he suggested that the leader of the group, Sheikh Faiz, should give him his horse in return for the ransom – one gift for another.

When Faiz’s mare was brought forward, though, he looked at it in disgust, and told the sheikh it was not even good enough to accept as a present. Faiz, presumably, was not particularly popular among the tribesmen; at any rate, they took Doughty’s side, and laughed at their leader’s discomfiture. Winning support with a pointed joke and a pained expression remained one of his favourite survival techniques.

He arrived in Damascus weary and sore. His six months in the deserts, the mountains and the wadis had been a completely different experience from anything that had gone before. Physically, it had been an exhausting and draining ordeal, struggling by camel and mule over some of the most inhospitable country in the world – but, more than that, he had been more alone, more exposed, than at any time in his life.

As well as his excitement at the prospect of finding the ruins of Medain Salih, he was finding aspects of daily life and culture among the Arabs that inspired his deep and lasting respect; but, for all his occasional sense of kinship with travellers who had gone before him, it was knowledge won against a background of remoteness and fear. In Europe, after all, he had been surrounded on his travels by the comforts and reassurances of a familiar way of life: even when he slept under the stars, it was within reach of people who shared his standards and values, people with whom he might enjoy a mutual understanding. When he trekked out into the desert of North Africa, it had been a brief excursion into a foreign land – and an excursion made still under a recognizable framework of European colonial law and authority.

Doughty may have lived as a poor traveller before, but it had been in a sympathetic world. His poverty, too, had been at least partly assumed – there had been times, as in Lisbon, where he could briefly drop back into the comfortable lifestyle of an Englishman of a certain class.

Here in the Bible lands he was isolated under the arbitrary and uncertain law of a cruel and largely hostile country, and travelling always on the fringes of what appeared to be a wasteland of lawless savagery. The familiarity which his biblical knowledge might have brought to the terrain often served simply to emphasize the gulf between the magnificence of the past and the squalid meanness of the reality. Physically and emotionally, Doughty remained a man alone.

There were, of course, occasions when he had been welcomed into the Arab tents, fed and entertained. The sheikhs who had killed sheep for him to eat and brought milk for him to drink might seem approachable, even welcoming. In the desert, though, and occasionally crossing his path threateningly, were the wandering bedu. He would learn more about them later – but for now they seemed to represent the very heart of darkness.

But if Doughty’s travels had revealed how terrifying life could become without the reassurance of the rule of law, Damascus showed how frustrating the rules and restrictions of officialdom could be. Doughty had been told in Maan that the Hadj caravan might lead him to Medain Salih; but in Damascus, when he asked the Wali, the Ottoman governor of Syria, for permission to accompany the pilgrims, he was fobbed off. The Wali asked the British consul, a career diplomat and Middle East specialist named Thomas Sampson Jago, for his advice, but the consul wanted nothing to do with Doughty or his impetuous plans. ‘He had as much regard of me, would I take such dangerous ways, as of his old hat. He … told me it was his duty to take no cognisance of my Arabian journey, lest he might hear any word of blame, if I miscarried.’⁴³

The governor in Maan had refused to take responsibility; the Wali in Damascus had refused to take responsibility; and now the British consul was refusing to take responsibility. They hoped that this foolish and importunate Englishman would go away and forget his dangerous obsession with Medain Salih, but Doughty kept on pestering them. In what was no doubt another effort to brush him aside, the Wali told him that only an official firman or permit from the Sultan himself would gain him acceptance with the pilgrim train.

But the British consulate, through which he would normally have applied for such a document, had washed its hands of him: Doughty would have to find another mediator and, with barely two months to go before the pilgrims would be gathering to depart, there was no time to be lost.

He had already written to the British Association seeking support; now he would approach the Royal Geographical Society to make representations on his behalf. There were also pressing reasons to leave Damascus for a while – there had been an outbreak of cholera in the city, and the troubles of the Ottoman empire had led to rumblings of anti-Christian feeling among the Muslim population. In addition, Doughty had given his brother Henry an address in Vienna where a letter might be left for him to collect. By travelling back into Europe, he might at the same time gather welcome news from home, speed his own message to London on its way, and also avoid a disease-ridden and unfriendly city. Tired as he was, he set off through the north gate of the city, turning his back at least for a while on the Arab world.

It was another hard journey, and Doughty gives a full account of it in one of the few letters from him that have survived. Writing to his brother from the Hotel Wandl after he arrived in Vienna, he described the inhumanity shown by the Turks in the Balkans. ‘I saw all their tithes of corn rotting in the fields – the barbarous paschas will have money, and the poor wretches have none to give, and offer them in kind as usual,’ he wrote. Hundreds of miles of good land were unfilled: ‘The Bulgarians are a people of cultivators; but they have not dared hitherto to occupy the land, afraid of the ferocity of the old Turks.’⁴⁴

What he saw awakened Doughty’s passionate interest in the social and political situation around him, both now and when he returned to Damascus. The Ottoman empire, the ‘disorderly Turkish domination’, was dying on its feet around him, with what he dismissed contemptuously as ‘a handful of degenerate Turks’ uneasily maintaining their rule over some five million Slavs. There was a tense, suspicious mood, with the poverty-stricken Muslims being forcibly conscripted to put down a revolt by Slav peasants in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Doughty himself, wandering through the countryside alone and on foot, was almost picked up as a suspected spy.

Instead of the camel and mule he had relied on to travel in Sinai and up the Jordan valley, he now enjoyed the relative luxury of steamships and, at least as far as the end of the line in Bulgaria, the railway. Elsewhere, rustic horse-drawn carts without springs kept up a brisk eighty miles a day, but offered little comfort over the bumpy roads: ‘The bridges only were bad, and often broken through in more than one or two places, but it was rough work … Sometimes I thought I should have vomited my heart as we dashed at some terrible stone. I stayed at the towns to recover a little,’ he wrote to Henry, far away in the remembered comforts of Theberton Hall.

But he was back in Europe, and there was a clear sense of relief. Restless and threatening as the atmosphere might be, it was still recognizably more like home than the foreign lands he had been travelling through. ‘The aspect of the country is wholly European – it is green and northern. The houses are built a la Franca with pitched roofs and chimneys, the populations mostly Christian,’ he wrote. And when he arrived in the then Hungarian capital of Pest on the Danube, he marvelled at the palatial buildings, the wide streets and the tramways. ‘I was surprised and astonished and pleased at such a new and advanced world,’ he said: eighteen months away had clearly sharpened his appetite for the more relaxed, familiar culture of the west.

They had also sharpened his memories of Theberton. There are few signs of homesickness in his journals, but the letter from home that was waiting for him at the post office in Vienna left him thinking wistfully of the life he had left behind. The renovations had apparently restarted in Theberton Hall, and Henry told him of a garden party and ball he was planning to hold there on 13 September – the very day that his brother collected the letter on the other side of Europe. ‘I calculated the hour an hundred times to think what you ought to be then doing. How could you have got on in the old Pict. Gallery, with a floor of earth and mortar! Finally I am settled here, my limbs ache, I am so weary, and my head also,’ Doughty wrote as he sat alone in his room at the Wandl. In a man who usually appeared so dignified and controlled, it is an appealing human moment of excited nostalgia.

But 13 September 1875 was too busy a day for him to spend much time moping over Theberton and the familiar social excitements of village life. In the same post as his letter home to Theberton he sent off a more formal message to the Royal Geographical Society in London, asking not only for the society’s help in obtaining an official pass from the Ottoman authorities, but also for a grant towards the cost of the expedition. Eight years later he would sit before the members of the society to hear its president, Sir Henry Rawlinson, describe him as being ‘in the front ranks of Asiatic travellers’ after his ‘adventurous and perilous journey’;⁴⁵ however, as he hurried hopefully to the Vienna post office, he was no more than an unknown supplicant, using every means he could think of to attract Sir Henry’s favourable attention.

He detailed the journey he had already made through Sinai and north to Damascus: already, he said, ‘without resources and with great fatigue’, he had established that the Sinai peninsula had been only recently raised from the sea; he had found more than 300 ruined cities and villages scattered across the region between Maan and Kerak; and he had personally gathered several specimens of ancient flint tools on the gravel plains to the east of Petra. Doughty, a continent away from London, had no way of finding out what were the special interests of the members of the society’s council: he was at pains to cast his net as widely as he could in order to catch at least somebody’s attention.

Most urgently of all, he told them what he had heard so far of Medain Salih, and what he could hope to find there.

Here are the traces of an unknown people, of inscriptions unknown. Of what interest they are, I think it is manifest. I wish shortly to go down with the pilgrims – they are jealous of that country, where they say no Frank has set foot. I have trusted to the R Geogr Society to obtain the firman necessary … My desire is to return immediately to go with the pilgrims to the discovery of these unknown cities and inscriptions.⁴⁶

He had, he said, worked with the society’s cooperation before, and he described his expedition to Norway.

I borrowed from the Socy. at the instance of Sir Rod. Murchison, President, a theodolite with which I measured the daily motions of several Norwegian glaciers, at which time I made other observations of interest to geologists that Sir Chas. Lyell, then preparing the last ed of his Principles, spontaneously visited me to make a number of enquiries and used my assistance largely in that part of his labours …

The word ‘largely’ is something of an exaggeration: whatever help the young graduate was to the eminent Lyell in his ground-breaking study was at best peripheral. But Doughty’s anxiety to impress and his desperation are clear in every hurried line and every dropped name. At last he had found a focus for his study which might win him recognition: as he travelled to Vienna from Damascus, he must have gone over and over the tempting prospect of Medain Salih in his mind. The hardships and the threat of disease he could cope with, but to get permission to set out at all he needed help – and he believed that he deserved it.

If the society could be persuaded to act quickly, a letter of recommendation might be obtained through the embassy at Constantinople within three weeks or so – thus neatly avoiding the unenthusiastic Mr Jago in Damascus. But after five years on the road Doughty was seeking more concrete help.

The cost of the expedition is too much for a man of slender income. I have hitherto lived as a traveller with the Arabs at a small expenditure, but the results are always less than they might have been with sufficient means, added to fatigues which might have been spared in that penetrating climate, a country now ravaged by cholera …

He had, he said, already asked the British Association for a contribution of £100, but his letter might have gone astray; would the Royal Geographical Society support him with one of its grants?

He signed the letter as formally, and as graciously, as he could – ‘I am Sir, hoping at some future time I may have the pleasure to know you, your obedt. servant, Charles M. Doughty, MA, Cambridge, of Theberton Hall, Suffolk.’ After his gruelling time as a despised, homeless wanderer, it was clearly time to play once again the part of a country gentleman of standing.

He submitted a report on his wanderings in Sinai, and on his hopes from Medain Salih, for the Viennese Geographical Society.⁴⁷ He wrote knowledgeably of the topography and geology of the region: the whole peninsula, he believed, had only recently been thrust up out of the sea, a parched land that had been formed by the buffeting and erosion of long-dried-up torrents of water and retreating tides.

But his real interest was in the mysterious ‘mosquito huts’, the ruins scattered through the mountains of Edom, and, best of all, the stories he had heard of the lost cave cities of Medain Salih. Doughty described with enthusiasm the discoveries he had already made about them at second-hand, through the tales of the Arabs he had met, and was frank about the urgency with which he wanted to set off to see them for himself. ‘I don’t doubt the existence of such towns; I’ve heard about them from about a hundred people, who … all report in the same fashion. They resemble the former cliff town Petra, and are of the same ilk, as if they had been built by the same master builders …’⁴⁸

He had been continuing his investigations into the lost settlements since he left Maan. In Damascus itself, and in the towns and villages along the way, he had heard the same stories – some fifteen or sixteen towns, some in the mountains and others hidden nearby in the desert, known only to the wandering Arabs.

He had, he claimed, ‘certain evidence’ – though it can have been little more than the hearsay of other travellers – that the carvings to be found there would prove to be ancient inscriptions, similar to those he had already sketched at Petra.

Doughty must have known that his chances of getting permission in time to join that year’s pilgrimage were slim. Even if the Royal Geographical Society had replied at once, with all the influence such an august body could muster, there would barely be time for the Ottoman functionaries in Constantinople to go through the formalities – and he had already discovered in Damascus how the official talent for prevarication could eat into the days and weeks.

But neither the Royal Geographical Society nor the British Association was interested in sponsoring his journey. Much of the area he was travelling had already been studied, and the rest was due to be surveyed during the next couple of years, they noted. And there was no urgency about their deliberations: Doughty never heard from the British Association at all, and by the time the RGS considered his letter in November, he was on his way back to Damascus.

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