Glory in a Camel's Eye

Summary

Hailed by Bill Bryson and the New York Times Book Review as an emerging master of travel writing, Tayler penetrates one of the most forbidding regions on Earth. Journeying along routes little altered since the Middle Ages, he uses his linguistic and observational gifts to illuminate a venerable, enigmatic culture of nomads and mystics.Though no stranger to privation (having journeyed across Siberia and up the Congo for his earlier books), Tayler is unprepared for the physical challenges that await him in a Sahara dessicated by eight years of unprecedented drought. He travels across a landscape of nightmares - charred earth, blinding sky, choking gales, and what is fittingly called the Valley of the Dead. The last Westerner to attempt this trek left his skeleton in the sand, and even Tayler's camels wilt in the searing wastes.But his remarkable perseverance, as well as his fluency in classical and Moroccan Arabic, helps him find here a bracing purity. The Saharawi Bedouin among whom he journeys are ur-Arabs, untouched by the modernity or radicalism that festers elsewhere in the Arab world. By revealing their ingenuity, their wit, their unrivaled hospitality, and more, Tayler upends our notions of what is, and what is not, essentially Arab.

Author Biography

JEFFREY TAYLER is a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and a contributor to Condé Nast Traveler, Harper’s Magazine, and National Geographic. He is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including Facing the Congo, Angry Wind, and River of No Reprieve.

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Excerpts

1 Other Lives to Lead The Road to the Dra ValleyIn 1986, while in graduate school writing a masters thesis on famine in the Soviet Ukraine, I discovered two books that pointed me toward transformational peregrinations in the Arab world. The first was Wilfred Thesigers Arabian Sands, the great British explorers account of his postwar travels on foot and by camel with Bedouin tribesmen in the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula. Though hired by the Middle East Anti- Locust Unit to search out locust breeding grounds, Thesiger pursued a personal quest while in Arabia, a quest intimately related to the nomads with whom he lived: he hoped to "find the peace that comes with solitude, and among the [Bedouin], comradeship in a hostile world." The spirit of the Bedouin, he wrote, "lit the desert like a flame." Traversing much of Oman and Saudi Arabia in their company, he at first felt like "an uncouth and inarticulate barbarian, an intruder from a shoddy and materialistic world." So poor were the Bedouin that they wore only smocks, loincloths, and daggers, yet they never stole from him. Indeed, they proved themselves paragons of desert virtue, and, during the five years he spent roaming the sands as their guest, they became his closest friends. Thesiger emerged from the Empty Quarter hardened by heat, hunger, thirst, and tribal raids, and forever after felt himself a stranger in "civilized" company. He had, in sum, found what he was looking for among the Bedouin, and it had transformed him. When I read Sands, I was studying Arabic, having had an inkling that adventure - another life, even - awaited me in the Arab world. Sands introduced me to the Bedouin, who were masters of terrain in which one needed stamina and courage to survive. I read and reread the book, dreaming of journeys in the Empty Quarter, but Arabia had changed much since Thesigers day, as he himself had written. In the 1970s he had revisited his old haunts and found them an "Arabian nightmare" of oil money and skyscrapers, of Bedouin who had abandoned their camels for Land Rovers. Sands was really an elegy, a travelogue that would, he hoped, remain a "memorial to a vanished past, a tribute to a once magnificent people." Soon after finishing Sands, I came across the other book that fired me with passion for the Arab world: Philip K. Hittis History of the Arabs. Every word of History rang with the authors love of Arab civilization, the Islamic era of which began in the seventh century with the eruption of Arab armies, largely composed of Bedouin tribesmen, out of Arabia. In the name of Islam, the Arabs conquered all of North Africa; in Europe, they overran Spain and reached France; in Asia, they made it to China. "Around the name of the Arabs," Hitti wrote, "would gleam the halo that belongs to world-conquerors." To the Bedouin, "the Arabian nation is the noblest of all nations (afkhar alumam). The civilized man, from the Bedouins exalted point of view, is less happy and

Excerpted from Glory in a Camel's Eye: Trekking Through the Moroccan Sahara by Jeffrey Tayler
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