Jo Tatchell on Desert Nations

Tell me about the Wilfred Thesiger book.

This was written in the 1950s after Thesiger returned from five years of Arabian travel. He was one of the few non-indigenous people to cross “the Empty Quarter”, the desert that occupies a huge part of what is now Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It’s almost a million square metres of billowing amber dunes – and more terrifying than an ocean. Usually, people travelled around the peninsula by sea, hugging the coast to get from town to town. A group travelling from Qatar to Mecca would make their way around the southern part of the peninsula. But there were ways of crossing it and, after World War II, Thesiger was offered a role mapping out the patters of locusts travelling across the desert. He jumped at the chance and joined the Rashid, a Bedu tribe, who lived in the old way, unsullied by the modernity that would soon accompany the arrival of oil prospectors. Thesiger relished the intimacy of the desert brotherhood. His passion for their simple way of life grew ever greater as he spent time with them. They cared for each other, knowing their lives depended upon it. And it had to be so; if one is cast out in the wilderness like that, it isn’t possible to survive alone. The camaraderie he describes is exclusively male; but he appreciated the regimen of the desert’s “barbaric splendour”. He valued the austerity of the lifestyle and the keen hardness of the people he declared most noble, pure in thought and deed.

In a later addition, after a return visit in the mid-70s, Thesiger writes of his horror at the changes. He found the people lazy and indulgent, their finest qualities replaced by cars and oil. A final visit in the 1990s brought acceptance – and a retraction of this bitter earlier response to progress. He could not expect other people to freeze themselves in time – why should they prefer a flea-ridden goat-hair tent to a house with modern amenities?

The Jan Morris book?

This is a lovely book, a hidden classic. It’s gently and honestly written. She was invited by the Sultan to accompany him in a “royal progress” from Salalah to Muscat in the early 50s. The charm of this book is in the wonderfully observed detail, and there are surreal twists because of being part of somebody else’s entourage and relinquishing control over proceedings. They made the crossing in cars and there are descriptions of the ragged and majestical terrain, of the makeshift encampments they rested in along the way. It was the first car journey ever made across the interior of Oman. The Sultan was making the journey to settle issues related to oil and there is a good deal of detail on the whispering and politicking that accompanied the ruler’s entourage and the run-ins with the locals in the sultanate’s neglected outposts. Morris describes this now forgotten world and the small, discombobulating glimpses of modernity that met them along the way. There is a description of Sheikh Shakhbut of Abu Dhabi, who rides to meet them in his yellow Cadillac. It’s a lovely glimpse of a very strange journey.

Tell me about The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles.

This is a novel about the parallel universe that opens up when you step out of urban civility into wild terrain. It centres on an American couple travelling to Morocco and opens with the crazy markets and tearooms, the hubble-bubble smoking in the towns, which are a vivid, almost frightening glimpse of another world. The travellers are enthusiastic but their ignorance makes them vulnerable; they have no way of being usefully watchful in this alien terrain. As they journey south the heat and disorientation intensifies and the towns grow further and further apart, with wilderness sucking them into a chain of events they cannot control. As everything disintegrates around them we see the truth behind the veneer of civility. In the emptiness they are faced with themselves and, as the marriage dissolves, the danger of travel becomes a nightmare – beyond the harsh terrain, disease and physical toll of desert travel, tragedy and madness wait.

In a way, all desert books are about travelling within yourself, and not being entirely in control. That surrender to the kindness of strangers is common to everything I’ve ever read about the desert, too. You surrender everything because the desert will take it from you anyway. And you have to learn a new kind of watchfulness.

This next book is about the adventurer, Gertrude Bell.

She is an important figure in British travel, both as a woman doing what she did, traversing the Middle East and breaking stereotypes, and for creating a role of lasting historical significance. It’s exciting to open a book and know that just by setting foot out of Britain Bell was making a huge stride. She was born in the 19th century and lived into the early 20th century.