Эндрю Тэйлор – God’s Fugitive (страница 13)
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.
In what so land thou comest,
Observe their customs and that people’s laws …
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
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
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
The
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