the introduction of steamers from the African coast to Liverpool. It cost £3 to transport one ton of goods from Liverpool to Kano in 1905 and more than double that just to send the same consignment from Tripoli to Kano. The Saharan caravan trade was under threat as never before.
For Ghadames, the accelerating demise of the slave trade, on whose back the city had grown so prosperous, was the first calamitous setback. With fewer and fewer slaves available to irrigate the gardens and keep back the ever-encroaching sands, the city started shrinking, and emigration started apace. After the middle of the nineteenth century, the decline proved irreversible, but Ghadames lived on, propped up by the Italian Fascists in the early twentieth century through improvements to the water supply. It was in 1986, however, that Gaddafi’s government dealt the age-old medina a potentially fatal blow. All the inhabitants were ordered to vacate the Old City and move into newly constructed houses outside the city walls, equipped with the usual modern conveniences. These houses, unimaginative squares of cheap concrete, are already deteriorating fast. Those inside the medina, though they did not have such luxuries as running hot water, had lasted hundreds of years. Since this forced relocation, the Old City, quite unlike anything else the length and breadth of the Sahara, has been crumbling away steadily. If its oldest houses remain empty, Ghadames’s days are surely numbered.
We still needed camels. That afternoon, we mounted Mohammed’s battered Peugeot 404 pick-up, a clattering veteran of eighteen years of erratic driving, and drove off to see Haj Jiblani, an elderly Touareg who several months before had taken me for an introductory ten-mile camel ride. We sat on the ground and chatted above a depression in which his two white Mehari camels were being fed. Next to the old man, two young boys amused themselves by piling large stones on a tiny helpless puppy. They were toying with the animal as though it was the most normal recreation in the world.
In 1995, at the age of seventy, Jiblani had performed his haj by camel, from Soloum – on the Libyan border with Egypt – to Mecca. We asked if he was interested in selling us his camels and accompanying us as guide on the first leg to Idri. He replied softly, from beneath the shroud of white cloth that covered most of his head and face, that these camels were all he had so he could not part with them. As for guiding us, he would have liked to but could not leave Ghadames because he had a sick relative in the hospital. We should find someone younger and fitter. I had already spoken to another local Touareg called Okra, a man whose main claim to fame was that he had played Sophia Loren’s youthful lover in a film shot around Ghadames many years ago. He had said he was not fit enough for the journey. We did not seem to be making much progress. Even Mohammed, the most optimistic of our trio, seemed to agree.
‘Really we are in bad condition,’ he lamented. A selfless man, he was entering whole-heartedly into the spirit of our quest for camels and guide. ‘You will be the first to do this trip for 1,000 years,’ he enthused with a questionable degree of historical accuracy. ‘Really, we are not used to this. Everyone in Ghadames is surprised by you.’
For most of Gaddafi’s three decades at the helm tourism has not fitted comfortably within the regime’s broadly anti-imperialist mindset and a foreign policy that has led inexorably to isolation. It was only in the early nineties that a faltering programme of encouraging tourists to the country began and tourist visas were issued in greater earnest. For many Libyans we met, the whole notion of a long camel trek by foreign travellers was simply incomprehensible.
Mohammed suggested what was beginning to appear inevitable: ‘I think you must go to the Mehari Club of Ghadames.’ This was an organization that owned several riding camels and hired them out for special occasions.
‘If we do, it’s not going to be cheap,’ I said to Ned.
Abu Amama, its head, had previously offered to sell me five camels at a rate that seemed murderously excessive. We were a captive market in a nine-camel town. The collapse of the slave trade, followed decades later by the arrival of the motor car, meant that the town, through which countless caravans had passed over the centuries, now struggled to equip a tiny party like our own with five camels. Bracing ourselves for a financial showdown, we arranged through Mohammed to have an inspection of the animals the next day.
‘We must look as though we know what we’re doing,’ said Ned firmly when we were both back in Othman’s house. He was in serious mode now. Most of the time he was not, so it was sometimes difficult to adjust.
‘We haven’t got a clue,’ I replied.
‘Yes, but you mustn’t let them see that.’
‘I’m sure you’re right, but I can’t see us pulling it off for long,’ I said doubtfully. Somehow I could not see us fooling the assorted officers of the camel club that we were anything but neophytes as far as camels were concerned.
The next morning, taking another day off from monitoring Ghadames’s untroubled airspace, Mohammed collected us from Othman’s house. We squeezed into the front seat of his pick-up and he tried unsuccessfully to hotwire the ignition. ‘Really, this car is in bad condition,’ he boomed blithely, bustling about beneath the bonnet and tinkering with the engine. This was an understatement. Most of the basic components of a vehicle – such as seats, windows and dashboard – had disappeared long ago and if you looked down between your feet, there was more road than car. It said much both for Peugeot engineering and Ghadamsi mechanics that the car was still, albeit precariously, on the road. After several more attempts, it rattled reluctantly to life and we howled off several kilometres out of town to see the animals, clutching our paper by Michael Asher on how to choose camels.
‘Judging a camel’s age and condition takes experience and a novice will need the help of a local,’ it warned,
However, certain facts can be ascertained by examining the animal closely. First, make the camel kneel and inspect its back and withers. Any open galls or wounds immediately rule it out as a mount: on a long desert trek it can mean death. Let the animal stand again and look for obvious defects like crooked legs, in-growing nails, a hobbling pace, excessive fat on the legs. Check the inside of the front legs where they meet the chest: if you find evidence of rubbing there, the camel will be weak and slow. Generally, look for an animal that is well covered: no ribs showing, a fairly robust hump, bright eyes, well formed long legs and an erect carriage of the head. Finally, have someone saddle and ride the camel: note whether it snaps, bolts or roars at its handler; lead it around and see that it walks freely; make it kneel and stand up several times.
We thought we could manage that. Abd an Nibbi, who was deputizing for Abu Amama during the latter’s absence in the southern town of Ghat, welcomed us to a makeshift camel enclosure on a patch of wasteland. He looked faintly amused, and at the same time – was it our imagination? – crafty. There were seven Mehari camels inside, of which it took no expertise to see that two were clearly unsuitable for a long journey. They were puny youngsters, half the size of the others. It did not leave much room for choice. We needed five.
At close quarters, they looked terrifying. Huge hulks of beasts with mighty, towering legs, together they formed a striking picture of grace and power. The first Mehari camel Richardson had seen walking into the medina of Ghadames had had a similar effect on him. ‘It amazed me by its stupendous height. A person of average size might have walked under its belly.’ An Arab philologist suggested to him the word Mehari derived from Mahra, the Arabian province on the south-east coast adjoining Oman, from where the animal was supposed to have originated. ‘This remarkable camel, which is like the greyhound amongst dogs for swiftness and agility, and even shape, they train for war and riding like the horse,’ he wrote. The Touareg warriors of Ghadames sitting astride their Meharis looked ‘splendid and savage’ to him.
Massive, disdainful and apparently in no mood to be paraded around for our convenience, these Meharis roared terribly, jerked from one side to another and lashed out at the handlers with their legs to show their displeasure. Not a man to be cowed by mere animals, Abd an Nibbi entered the fray. Masterfully he subdued them, throwing a rope around their heads, pulling down their necks and grabbing their nose-rings with supreme assurance. Once he had hold of the nose-rings he tugged at them vigorously until the camels were completely cowed. Within seconds they had been transformed from proud, dangerous-looking beasts into the meekest