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Treetops
EAST AFRICA, 1967

W
HEN I WENT TO
East Africa for the first time in 1967 I took with me
Hints to Travellers
, published by the Royal Geographical Society in 1937, which was full of useful information, such as:

In the Ruwenzori it was customary to give the porters a Cerebos salt tin full of
bulo
flour, besides salt and blankets. This corresponds to a native measure, a
kiraba.
Loads are made up to 45 lbs, rather less than the weights of loads carried on safari in the plains … Cutters who make a way in advance of the porters often go off at right angles to the direction indicated, either because the path is easier or for some reason known only to themselves.

Things had changed a bit in Africa since this was written. No one walked more than a few feet on the modern, motorized, packaged safaris; no African carried a minimal 45 lbs of your belongings on his noddle; no one gave anyone a
kiraba
of
bulo
any more; and instead of employing wood cutters to clear a way to the extraordinary Ruwenzori mountains you could contemplate them from the neighbourhood of the Mountains of the Moon Hotel at Fort Portal in Uganda – telegram address ‘Romance’. ‘Cracking log fires. Nine-hole golf course. Pygmy village. Hot springs in which an egg is perfectly boiled by nature.’ (Did you whisper ‘four minutes please’ as you dropped it in and hope for a piece of African magic?)

It is one’s first encounter with wild animals, other than animals in cages, that really sticks in the mind, however
banal the circumstances. In my case, in Africa, my first exposure to them took place after Sunday curry at the Outspan Hotel at Nyeri, a morning’s drive north of Nairobi in the lands of the, until fairly recently, not all that friendly Kikuyu tribe. We piled into Land Rovers – not really necessary for such a trip but they gave an atmosphere – and set off for Treetops, the lodge at the foot of the Aberdare Range. After crossing a six-foot-deep ditch dug to keep the elephant out of the surrounding farm land, we walked the few hundred yards to the lodge, accompanied by an ex-Indian Army colonel, armed with a rifle. There was a strong feral smell in the air.

‘Keep together,’ he said. ‘There are elephant about.’ The Japanese in the party, who were loaded with a multiplicity of cameras and lenses, had what was surely a dangerous tendency to lag behind and point 500-mm lenses at little flowers. Sure enough, there on the track were four large dollops of what looked like Old Auntie Mary’s rich Dundee cake still steaming from the oven, the new-laid droppings of an elephant. Everyone was impressed and one of the Japanese photographed them in colour. The rest of us scuttled after the colonel.

The new Treetops, unlike the old one in which Princess Elizabeth became Queen and which was burned down in the time of the Mau Mau, was not really in a tree at all, although branches writhed unexpectedly in the corridors. It stood on piles above a large pool and salt lick, the edge of which was so trodden by animals that from the upper floors of the lodge it looked like an aerial view of Passchendaele.

Treetops was all right. Had it not been to our liking it would have been just too bad, because we were locked up in it until the next morning.

On the far side of the pool, warthogs and their young were zooming round in circles; a huge, rare, black, giant forest hog was looking at a battered tree as if deciding whether to
demolish it or not; and up on the sun deck of the lodge there were baboons, with inflamed faces and even more alarming effects at their other ends, careering about, knocking over loaded Pentaxes, pinching the sandwiches laid out for afternoon tea, and disappearing rudely between ladies’ legs. In addition, black-headed orioles in the Cape chestnut trees made fruity noises, and thousands of weaver birds were seething away in a bed of reeds in the middle of the pool. The noise was terrible. We were told to keep quiet so as not to frighten the animals. It seemed a superfluous warning, like telling children at a cocktail party to pipe down.

But that was nothing to the bedlam which broke loose when night fell, and the baboons and their young had departed, and the weaver birds had taken to their swinging nests in the reeds. There had been rain in the bamboo forests high in the Aberdares, and to escape it the animals had come down in force. At any one time throughout the night there were fifty elephant outside the lodge under the floodlights, all taking up trunk-loads of mud packed with health-giving mineral salts; black buffalo wallowed in it so deep that only the huge black handlebars that were their horns showed; rhinos wallowed less deeply – all were the uniform saffron colour of the mud. All species, including the various sorts of buck, observed a wary apartheid. As in the world of men there was a lot of confrontation and a lot of backing down – everything feared the buffalo. Only the rhino really faced up to one another, and when one of them slipped his opponent a length of allegedly aphrodisiac horn, it went lumbering off into the forest, groaning.

It is the noises they all made that I remember: gaseous noises; sounds like heavy furniture which has lost its castors being moved across a room; the sounds of the last water going down the plug hole; even more weird gurglings and the sound you produce when you blow into a funnel.

Treetops was perhaps the one hotel in the world where, if
you could only get to sleep, you could share a double room (you had to whether you liked it or not) and snore to your heart’s content; but sleep by night was impossible and a waste of valuable viewing time. When the swift African dawn came around six thirty, the animals were still there, stuck in the mud, and I was hooked on East Africa.

Deep in the Heart of Arabia
JORDAN, 1968

O
F ALL THE RUINED
cities I have ever wanted to see there were few which excited my imagination more than Petra. To me its inaccessibility had always been one of its principal attractions, but by 1968 it was possible to reach the place in four hours from Amman and it was obvious that I would now no longer be able to experience the unique pleasure that all real travellers feel when they finally arrive at their destination after a difficult journey. Until quite recently a visit to Petra from Amman or Jerusalem had been a ten-day journey there and back on horseback, not taking into account the time spent in the city itself.

Everything was strange about Petra. Even the circumstances of its rediscovery after six hundred years of oblivion by the Anglo-Swiss explorer, John Ludwig Burckhardt, who came upon it more or less by accident while on a journey from Damascus to Cairo in 1812. For Burckhardt its ruins were not only wonderful but tantalizing, because, having reached the capital of the Nabateans, whose city it had been, at dusk, he was forced to leave the following morning because of the hostility of the tribesmen who inhabited the place and who were its self-appointed guardians. He never had the opportunity to return.

As the driver had predicted, four hours after leaving Amman we reached the Wadi Musa, the Valley of Moses, on the outskirts of Petra, which for many Muslims has the same significance as the surroundings of Mount Sinai have for some others. Here, in this rocky valley, where the first outlying Nabatean tombs could be seen, there was a hotel built and
run by the Tourism Authority, itself built in the mouth of one of the tombs, which in its turn formed the hotel dining room. There was something peculiarly distasteful and insolent about the location of this hotel which not even the amenities it offered failed to dispel. Originally, the exterior of the building had been painted a repulsive and incongruous shade of blue which clashed violently with the colour of the surrounding rocks, which were an unattractive salmon pink in the heat of the day; but there had been such an outcry that it had been scraped off and the hotel now skulked against the cliff in its original concrete colour, doing its best to be invisible.

‘A rose-red city – half as old as Time!’ according to the Reverend John Burgon’s Newdigate Prize poem. But before we had even set eyes on Petra, what with innumerable references to it in guide books, tourist handouts and on signposts, we had all had quite enough of that rose-red fragment.

Outside the hotel a large car park had been constructed. A plan was also under consideration whereby those visitors who did not fancy riding a horse, and were either too lazy or too infirm to walk into the city, would be driven into it in imitation Roman chariots. According to our guide, a prototype vehicle had already been produced. It was obvious that with such ideas on the go the days of the inhabitants’ monopoly of Wadi Musa and Petra were numbered. For generations, until the recent introduction of mass tourism, they had gained a livelihood by extorting large sums from travellers in exchange for the hire of their horses, and their services as guides, intimidating those who failed to make use of these facilities with threats. At this rate, in another few years, they would be out of a job, reduced to selling inflatable plastic camels and the quote from The Poem in poker-work. The best they could hope for was to be employed as wage-earning chariot drivers. The future of the rose-red city looked almost equally black.

Small Arab boys whipped up the horses which the guide books quite truthfully described as ‘docile’, and they began to
trot down the narrow wadi to the mouth of the Siq, the defile which is the principal entrance to Petra. On either side there were golden and pale yellow sandstone hills as full of tombs, where they ran down to the floor of the valley, as a gruyère with holes, to which, indeed, the landscape bore a certain resemblance. But it was the carvings in this sandstone landscape, rather than the holes in it, that were so extraordinary. There were large box-like objects, fine, free-standing obelisks and strange, truncated pylons. It was a landscape by Piranesi, or Dali.

To the right of the entrance to the Siq the Nabateans had driven a tunnel more than three hundred yards long through the rock at an angle to the defile. The Siq had been nothing more than a river gorge in Wadi Musa, and they dug the tunnel in order to carry off the flood water that would otherwise have poured through it into the city. In spite of this it had still continued to do so from time to time. The last occasion had been in 1963 when an Abbé and twenty-three Frenchmen had been caught in a storm in the Siq and washed away. Now a dam had been built across the entrance to prevent the same thing happening again.

We entered the Siq. For anyone with an inclination to claustrophobia it must be a nightmare. Originally, it had been much narrower in many places, not more than ten feet wide; but it had been widened by cutting away the foot of the cliffs which rose a hundred and sixty feet above it and which closed in so tightly overhead that, even at midday at the height of summer with the sun pouring down on to it, its rays only penetrated to the bottom here and there. From its walls fig trees and oleanders sprouted, and along one of them the Nabateans had scooped out a conduit which had carried water down into the city from a spring of delicious water at the head of Wadi Musa. This spring – another, rival source is at the foot of Mount Sinai more than a hundred miles away across the Gulf of Aqaba – is the one that Moses produced by striking the rock
with his rod. Further down the gorge the Romans had replaced the conduit with pipes, fragments of which still adhered to the rock. Underfoot, the bed of the Siq, that had once been paved and which might soon resound to the thunder of the wheels of chariots carrying blue-rinsed matrons into the rose-red city, was covered with gravel. There was a strong smell of dung and horses. The only sounds were those made by their hooves on the stones, the swish of whips, the oaths of urchins and the chattering overhead of innumerable rock sparrows. In fact it was extremely noisy; but at least the noises were outlandish ones. The Siq went on and on, down and down, a journey that I wished could be prolonged indefinitely. Merely to go through it was worth the journey from Amman.

Soon we came to a huge cleft in the mountains at right angles to the Siq. Facing it (the Siq), and partially framed by it, was what promises to become one of the most photographed sights on earth, one that I had already seen as a small boy back in 1927 in
The Children’s Colour Book of Lands and Peoples
and one like Corfe Castle in Dorset taken from the village street, or the Houses of Parliament from Lambeth Embankment, that even the most feeble photographer would find difficulty in ruining – the two-storied temple of a Nabatean king, itself set in a frame of rock, ninety feet high, now, with the sun past its zenith, in deep shadow, a lowering red. On its façade six Corinthian columns supported a pointed pediment, and on either side niches contained what was left of statues of men and horses, now ruined by the weather and the guns of the iconoclastic nomads. On one of these horses there was a snake and it was carved in the act of striking the man who rode it in the heart. Above the pediment, at the second storey, there was a drum-shaped pavilion with a conical roof, supported by more columns and crowned with an urn that the Bedouin believed contained the treasure of a Pharoah, and at which they had taken pot-shots with their muzzle loaders in
the hope of breaking it open. It was for this reason that they named the temple El Khazna Faraoun, The Treasure of Pharoah.

Under the roof of this pavilion there was a bas-relief of the goddess Isis, holding a horn of plenty, and on either side, in recesses, were what remained of a pair of Amazonian figures. In front of them on either side were more columns supporting broken pediments, more mutilated figures in niches, this time of winged Victories. Inside the temple there were some dark, echoing chambers cut out of the sandstone, the principal one immensely high, their walls and ceilings blackened by herdsmens’ fires.

The Siq continued its downward path past an enormous and sinister Roman theatre, large enough to accommodate three thousand spectators, cut from the sandstone with a backdrop of black and gaping tombs. In it one could imagine only the performance of dire tragedies or the enactment of cruel spectacles. In its shadow men crouched selling bottles of dubious cola and tea in grubby glasses, which they had brewed over little fires, and as we went down past them they offered them to us, but half-heartedly as if no one ever stopped.

Now the Siq opened out into an immense valley hemmed in by cliffs that glowed as if they were red hot, and over them birds of prey circled in a sky that was like polished brass. The cliffs were honeycombed with temples and tombs, and those that were not just excavations, but stood out from them carved in high relief, were all variants of El Khazna, their interiors, too, all blackened by fires. What a sight the city must have been, with the fires of the Bedouin burning in these robbers’ caves, as red as the rock itself. And between these opposing cliffs on the valley floor was the evidence of the Romans’ occupation of Petra to whom the Nabateans became utterly subjected before their kingdom was incorporated in the Empire in AD 105 or AD 106 by Trajan: the ruins of temples, a
bath, a paved triumphal way, spanned by a triple arch, a solitary standing column, all that had survived earthquakes and sackings.

From this great open space, broken staircases led to sacrificial platforms on the heights above. It was from the cliffs of Petra, then called Sela, both words meaning rock, that the Edomites, the defeated sons of Esau, were cast down in their thousands by the Hebrews long before the Nabateans came. It was in such a place, Szetouh Haroun, Aaron’s Terrace, at the foot of the mountain upon which Aaron’s tomb is supposed to be situated, that Burckhardt, disguised as a Syrian Muslim, sacrificed the goat which he had brought with him for this purpose, a hundred and fifty-six years previously.

Looking at these frightening and to me, with the exception of El Khazna Faraoun, utterly heartless façades of the ruling and priestly castes, in spite of the Greek influences that had partly inspired them, each with its own set of blackened and empty rooms, one could have no idea how the ordinary Nabateans lived, during their brief period of glory. Originally, they had been nomads from north-western Arabia. At Petra they had become more sedentary, although perhaps they still continued to pitch their tents in the shadow of the temples and the tombs, taking refuge in the excavations in the cliffs in times of trouble. Rich and poor they were a mysterious people; but they made beautiful thin pottery and little oil lamps after the Roman fashion and these could still be found among the rubbish dumps within the City.

It was impossible to see the whole of Petra with only a short time at one’s disposal, and in the heat of August it was senseless to attempt to do so. Hidden behind the cliffs in clefts and valleys and on distant peaks there are further labyrinths of ruins; but whatever one sees, if one is to believe the evidence of other travellers who were not short of time, temples, tombs or obelisks, nothing can compare with that first vision of El Khazna, seen as one emerges from the darkness of the Siq; so
after drinking the now welcome and what proved to be delicious tea flavoured with mint from the distinctly grubby glasses offered by the men sitting in the shade near the theatre, we went away.

BOOK: What the Traveller Saw
12.88Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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