Эндрю Тэйлор – God’s Fugitive (страница 20)

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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