Эндрю Тэйлор – God’s Fugitive (страница 14)
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
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
… 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
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
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.