Armchair travels in Sinai

Pierre Loti set out for Sinai on 22 February1894 and kept a diary of his remarkable journey on camel-back. From the comfort of her Nile-side armchair Jill Kamil joins him on his arduous trip
Accompanied by two companions, Léo Thémèz and the Duke of Talleyrand-Périgord, and 20 camels loaded with food, tents, Persian rugs, furniture and servants, Pierre Loti (the pseudonym of Julien Viaud) made a pilgrimage from Egypt to Jerusalem in 1894, to bolster his flagging faith; or so he hints in Le Désert, his record of that journey. Whether suffering from thirst, deprivation and the perils of the desert prepared his soul for an awakening or not, we never discover. But his account "of a slow journey, at the pace of swaying camels in the infinite of the pink desert" is so different from today's hectic desert- travellers', who kill kilometres on modern highways, that it makes an ideal read for an afternoon spent relaxing beneath a favourite tree at Maadi's Yacht Club.
Le Désert has gone through dozens of French editions, was translated into English by Jay Paul Minn and published in 1993. Loti had first to obtain a letter of safe-conduct for his journey through an area inhabited by "hostile tribes,' although he was, in fact, attacked only by the wind. "Our tents flap with the whooshing of canvas. In the dark you can feel cloths trembling overhead. My light cot is shaken, as if at sea in rough weather," he writes.
Loti's journey took him from Suez, by the traditional route of Exodus, along the Gulf. He skirted Ayn Musa (Moses' Spring), with its shady palms, passed through the dried out Wadi Gharandal to Abu Zeneima, and headed down Wadi Firan which runs astride the mountains of southern Sinai to the Monastery of Saint Catherine at the foot of Mount Moses. From there, Loti journeyed through the mountains in a north- easterly direction, first reaching Nuweiba by the Gulf of Aqaba, and then making for the port of Aqaba before heading for Jerusalem and rounding off his trip in Gaza. In Loti's time, large caravans made regular visits to the monastery. But there were no well-marked roads, and the pack- animals had to be loaded with the necessary comforts. In any case, a certain amount of discomfort was expected.
Loti's descriptive magic embraces splendid sunrises, when the camp awakens, and broiling noons when, for hours, "nothing sings, nothing flies, nothing moves...the enormous silence is pummelled into deeper silence by the incessant, monotonous clump-clump of our plodding camels..." He tells of a twilight where "the magic of sunset comes down over the desert for us (and) we make camp in a huge, gloomy, nameless area, composed completely of dirty gray clay and surrounded by a wall of enormous rock. No water here. But we have enough water from the Nile for two or three days more, and our guide, the sheikh, promises to have us camp at a spring tomorrow night." In fact the expedition travelled for five days after that promise before reaching water.
As I read, I follow the written trail of this rudderless man with talent and vision, retracing biblical trails in the wilderness in fin-de-siècle style. I read no more than a few pages before I join the ranks of those who regard his book as among the finest of its time. Loti's diary covers the journey itself, describes various sheikhs he met, and is enlivened with tales of hospitable monks. He explains the organisation of a caravan, and his descriptions of natural surroundings fill me with awe.
"When night has come, when the stars are aglow in the enormous sky, and when, as usual, our Bedouin have sat down around their fires of branches - black silhouettes against yellow sparks - a dozen of them break away and come to our tents, forming a circle around someone playing a small bagpipe, and they begin to sing together. In time with the slow tempo set by the musette player, they rock their heads as they sing. The tune is old and sad, no doubt much as it was when Moses was here. Sadder than silence is this Bedouin music, which rises suddenly to a roar and which seems to be lost in the air unused to noise, air as thirsty for sound as this sand is thirsty for dew...
"All morning long," he writes on February 27, "through endless monotonous valleys flanked with red granite, we climb by imperceptible degrees towards the great Sinai, where we will arrive tomorrow. Valleys widen and mountains rise. Everything becomes larger under shifting dark clouds. Through enormous stone gaps ahead of us, we can now see even higher peaks, covered with white snow, sparkling against the gloom of distance and sky...an icy headwind comes up from the foothills...we are soaked with driving rain, sleet and hail. Our camels cry out and shiver with cold. Our light clothing of white wool, our thin Arabian slippers, everything is quickly drenched with torrents of water - and we ourselves are shaking as if mortally wounded, with our teeth clenched and our frozen hands in pain...Our Bedouin start a fire of aromatic little branches, which smoke and flame mightily, and we sit down around it, everybody huddled close in the shared need to get warm and not to suffer any more...."
He wrote on March 1 how the caravan passed through fearsome gorges "lined with battlements ever higher, higher, and darker. We leave the area of gray animal shapes and enter the fierce and precipitous brown granite formations. The cold worsens, and the air is getting strangely resonant. At noon, during our rest time, when our Bedouin pass (a chilled lot in this icy gloom), their racket echoes and reverberates like the fugue of great organs in vast cathedrals. Far off there are tight black expanses, and at their centre the dead white of snow bursts forth here and there through mysterious streaks of clouds..."
A blizzard strikes. Conditions become impossible and Loti sends a messenger with a personal letter of recommendation, written by the Patriarch in Cairo, to the monks of the "convent" to let them know of the travellers' distress.
"The answer is soon brought to us by a young Father in black robes who speaks a bit of French...We accept the offer (to stay at the convent)...So, leaving everything behind, we hasten to go Indian file by lantern light...You have to hold on to your billowing burnous with two hands, and, in spite of sinking ankle deep in the white drifts, you climb, climb, climb in the murky night...For fifteen minutes we climb, with our feet bare, our slippers lost, sliding at every step in the snow...
"At last we come to a wall that seems gigantic and whose top disappears in the dark, and a little, very low door opens, entirely covered with metal at least a thousand years old. We go through. There are two more little doors like that one servicing a vaulted passageway as it winds through a rampart. The doors shut behind us, with a metal clang. We are in."
In those days, there was a hotel for pilgrims. The party stays in simple and primitive rooms, "all open onto the same long balcony and its rickety railings...Hospital monks, wearing black robes and hair as long as a woman's, hasten to comfort us with a little hot coffee and with glowing coals in copper vessels."
As Loti falls asleep on what he describes as "extremely hard couches" spread out with their sheets "as stiff as cardboard," he listens to the storm raging outside, thinks of the tents left behind, and of "our poor Bedouin...and camels," and is glad of the haven of retreat. "As I fall asleep," he writes, "I read inscriptions riddling the chalky walls: names of pilgrims who have come here from every corner of the world. Russian names, Greek names, Arab names - and a single French name: 'Prince of Beauvaux, 1866.'"
Pierre Loti has been described as libidinous, eccentric, decadent. His (bi)sexual excesses and experimentation reflect the decadence of his time. He indulged in the kinds of exploits that other great contemporary French writers, such as Rimbaud and Verlaine, also explored.
Loti was a Protestant in Catholic France and when he decided that his wife and one son did not provide a sturdy enough lineage for his family, he advertised through his lawyer for a young Basque woman willing to give up her family and home to live in Loti's neighbourbood and bear his children. He found such a woman and she bore him two sons whom he acknowledged as his own. But he appears to have abandoned her to the task of child-bearing while he travelled around the world, voyaging from Morocco to China. His novels, such as My Brother Ives, Madame Chrysanthemum and others, endeared him to an international public and made him rich, but it was his trip to Sinai that appealed most.
If, as Loti suggests, he had become an atheist attracted to Islam who was pondering conversion, it is interesting to note how liberally the Sinai trip diary is sprinkled with Biblical quotations. He gives exotic people religious status. A monk in Saint Catherine's monastery seems "Christ-like." The "dark wilderness of appalling size" provides a spiritual undercurrent. But then, who has visited the rugged mountains of southern Sinai and not experienced some spiritual awakening?
As I turn the last page of Loti's Desert, I marvel at those travellers of yesteryear for whom moving from place to place was an adventure. Sinai as Loti knew it, is lost forever. Today, paved highways join sites to cities, an airport brings hordes to Saint Catherine's, and hotels, camps and rest houses clutter the landscape. Even the sanctity of the desert fathers is violated. They are obliged to endure the calls of tourism even as they battle to preserve their way of life.
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