THE DEATH OF EARTH
ADAPTATION AND
COUNTERADAPTATION IN
DESERTS OF SAND
The North American Southwest—Northern Peru—the Sahara—the Gobi—the Kalahari
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand. . . .
—T.S. ELIOT,The Hollow Men
It is a sin to suppose that Nature, endowed with perennial fertility by the creator of the universe, is affected with barrenness, as though with some disease; and it is unbecoming to a man of good judgement to believe that Earth, to whose lot was assigned a divine and everlasting youth, and who is called the common mother of all things and is destined to bring them forth continuously, has grown old in mortal fashion. And furthermore, I do not believe that such misfortunes come upon us as a result of the fury of the elements, but rather because of our own fault; for the matter of husbandry, which all the best of our ancestors had treated with the best of care, we have delivered over to all the worst of our slaves, as if to a hangman for punishment.
—COLUMELLA,De Agricultura,2–3
Learning from Hohokam: How to Build Civilization in the Desert
“There’s no greatness around here,” rails a character in a short story by Erica-Wagner.
Oh sure, there’s the desert, and there’s places like the Grand Canyon, but what do those do to people? Make them feel small. You stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon and think, well, just why bother, why bother with anything when there’s this thing, millions and millions of years old and bigger than anything I’ll ever be? People say it’s uplifting, but I think it gets folks down.1
I think he is right. The inhibiting effects of desert environments—whether of sand or ice—might have stopped civilization from ever happening in them. No materials, except the open sea, are more intractable than those the wastelands give you. You can carve ice, but it will weather back to a form sculpted by nature. You can pile up sand but the wind will scatter it. No radical refashioning of the landscape is easily imaginable where skin tents and igloos blend into the background. The awesome architecture of wastes and crevasses and towers of rock and ice seems insuperable.
Erica Wagner’s hero responds by trying to recapture, in a parking lot outside-Phoenix, Arizona, the spirit of Stonehenge. He sees a television program about “Mysteries of the Ancients,” which leaves him convinced, by way of an inspiration entirely his own, that the great monumental projects of antiquity were attempts to harness and generate energy—not necessarily by trapping astral forces or weaving geomantic spells or spawning mystic powers, but by galvanizing human ambition. His all-American form of practical common sense gets him working at an idea which, on the face of it, looks mad: building a henge of his own by half sinking beat-up old automobiles in a concrete paddy. It works. Everyone touched by the project works up enthusiasm or pride and puts something into the communal effort.
Yet, judged by the standards of the archaeologists of the future, it will seem completely useless: another “mystery of the Ancients.” “Wow, dad,” says his younger boy. The used-car henge has all the vices of the postmodern deserttown streets which the hero claims to dislike—“Restaurants shaped like giant hotdogs, like cowboy hats, all made out of shitty-looking plaster.”2In however debased a form, they represent the civilized tradition: the attempt to reshape nature and make it comformable to human use. Architectural theorists urge us to “learn from Las Vegas” precisely because the very tawdriness and jokiness of thedesert town represents the stamp of man on a previously uninhabitable frontier: the conquest of nature by kitsch.
By comparison with many genuinely ancient attempts to overhaul the desert, a lot of our present efforts look feeble. In the typical American desert town, where postmodern restaurant-culture has not yet penetrated, the highway speeds through the wasteland, in token of how little time most people want to spend there. Alongside it, inconspicuously colorless huts slink for short stretches—dun, gray, sandy taupe, flimsy, unassumingly low—as if ashamed or afraid to impose on the wild. Only their billboards intrude with something like ambition. Giant hoardings and signs stare square-on at the traffic with vivid eyes, defying the garish sky for brightness, flicking away the wind and dirt. Nothing looks permanent. The signs are built to be disposable, the buildings to fold in the wind or vanish in the dust.
Las Vegas plays at being daring but is disappointingly unadventurous—a desert bum-town writ large.3The material of its best architecture is the electric filament, which lights up at night when the desert dissolves in darkness. Then the acres of desolation are no longer there to outclass the town and make the punters feel puny. Once they switch off the wattage, little seems left: roads and car parks are like smears left by the darkness; the “wedding chapels” turn back into bungalows when their neon spires are extinguished. Most of the casinos, which swell with the noise of the night, are really just low-built shacks-ornes which sag back into the dead land by day. Their mighty signboards, which looked glamorous or at least glitzy a few hours before, seem half dressed in daylight: the struts and cables show, dangling or drooping, like unzipped flies and slack stockings. When Venturi made Las Vegas famous, you could go out into the desert to look back at the profile of the notorious “Strip,” and only the Dunes Hotel poked out of the wreckage of the darkness—and it hardly looked durable: less like a building, more like a corrugated cardboard box, upended by the wind. Today, a laughably self-conscious effort to impose a new image on the environment is made by the most famous casino, Caesar’s Palace; but all its “civilized” trappings are travesty. The imitation Venus de Milo has exaggeratedly big breasts. Because the proportions—in this building as in all the town—are innumerate, the columns that support the pediment look undernourished and knock-kneed. The guardian-centurions of Caesar’s Palace, who stare imperiously over the wastes of tarmac, support hoardings in the style of a suburban cinema. The new skyline is dominated by an electrified rip-off of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, a pimple itching at the civilized tradition—the most enduring image of human triumph in the sand. Culturally, Las Vegas has never really ceased to be desert.
Phoenix, however, where Erica Wagner’s hero lived, is different. The first settlers of the modern town arrived in the late 1860 s and were inspired to farm an apparently implacable scrub by the ruins of an ancient irrigation system.Hence the name. Suitably channeled, the Salt River had enough water to create “the garden of Arizona.” The new settlement flourished as a farming community and attracted more attempts to civilize patches of dust elsewhere in Arizona. Now Phoenix has some of the most expensive real estate in the world. It is America’s ninth-biggest city. Five generations ago no one in his right mind would have wanted to live there; now it smothers the desert so effectively, and for so far, that downtown you get no hint of the wider environment, except for the heat and the unblinking sky. The relentless grid of the streets repeats the orderly geometry which civilization has always tried to impose on nature: the reticulation in which wildness is netted.
Though some early builders in the city favored the Mission Style or mockadobe and some preferred Victorian Gothic, most of the monumental architecture repeats the grid pattern vertically, as if in an attempt to colonize the blank space of the sky. But the desert is never really far away, and a new environmental sensitivity has made suburban house-builders adjust their values in recent years. Frank Lloyd Wright made Phoenix his winter base from 1938. The style of house he evolved for prairie settings—yawningly, stretchingly horizontal—was even more chez soi in the desert. By the sixties, everyone wanted homes that clicked into nature, and most new construction since then, wherever there is a landscape to fit into, is designed to lurk inconspicuously among the scrub and rocks. The most representative architecture, by Edward B. Sawyer, Jr., tends to come sandblasted or desert-washed and decorated with tubing twisted into cactus shapes.4At different levels, Phoenix defies the desert and defers to it. The durability of civilization in hostile environments depends on getting the right balance between those strategies.
Not far from Phoenix, by American standards, along the San Pedro River, Erica Wagner’s character could have driven one of his cars to a memorial of an earlier effort to mark the desert with a gesture of human defiance. Casa Grande is an adobe structure, five stories high. When it was built, about six hundred years ago, it was surrounded by massive outer walls and clusters of small dwellings. It represented an outpost and the last phase of a long history of attempts to raise monumental architecture and concentrate dense populations in what is now desert land. The project, or series of projects, extended over parts of what are now Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico, in the uplands between the upper reaches of the San Juan and Gila Rivers.
In the great age of the builders, three or four centuries before Casa Grande, the land was probably not as barren and unyielding as it is today. Sometimes, the Salt River would flood—though not regularly enough to create alluvial soils. Rainfall levels are likely to have been higher than now, though irrigation was absolutely essential to help crops germinate in the virtually rainless summer months. If water could be delivered to the fields, cotton, maize, and beans would grow predictably, without danger from the sort of fluctuating tempatureswhich could threaten them at higher altitudes. Long irrigation canals did the job; but it is apparent that the progressive desiccation of the area from the twelfth century onwards put them under a constant strain. At first, the rulers responded by expanding into new zones, building more ambitiously, organizing labor more ferociously. But decline punctuated by crisis shows through a series of periodic contractions of the culture area and reorganizations of the settlements.
On the southwestern side of the watershed, in the Gila River Valley, in the culture area archaeologists call Hohokam, there were mound platforms and what look like ball courts, almost wherever the irrigation channels led. These are hallmarks of much older civilizations in less underprivileged environments: unmistakable signs of a culture influenced from Mexico and ruled by an elite with an elaborate ritual life. It is a current fashion among archaeologists of North America to resist the temptation to classify everything in terms of its degree of resemblance to Mexican precedents; but it makes perfect sense to imagine ideas traveling from the south up the Rio Grande, or along the trail through Casas Grandes in Chihuahua. There, Aztec trade goods (somewhat later in date than the desert cities) have been found; jewelry was manufactured for export in Casas Grandes, and macaws bred for the feathers valued in Mexico.
This was the route traveled by maize cultivation, cotton, and a number of cultivated seeds. The agronomy to which they belonged probably traveled with them; the political solutions they demanded—societies of collaboration, ruled to irrigate—are likely to have followed. Of course, particular political solutions and irrigation techniques may have developed independently in the Hohokam tradition, without eschewing all influence from the south. By analogy with the better-documented societies of Mexico, the Hohokam mounds can be seen as platforms for spectacles which bound people and rulers, the ball courts as arenas for an art of martial display. It is dangerous to generalize about the pre-Hispanic ball game: it had different rules and functions from place to place and numerous variants. Wherever it was played, however, it was an analogue of warfare.5It was never a “sport” designed to occupy the leisure of players or amuse spectators, but a rite of prowess which helped to define a warrior class—more like a tourney than a soccer match.
Neighboring the Hohokam area to the north was a culture even more impressive in some ways, with unmistakable signs of statehood embracing a politically unified area of impressive extent: over 150,000 square kilometers, from high in the drainage area of the San Juan in the north to beyond the Little Colorado River in the south, and from the Colorado to the Rio Grande. The evidence is in the extraordinary system of roadways, up to nine meters wide, which radiated from a cluster of sites around the great canyon near the source of the Chaco River. Only two needs can account for such an elaborate network: either some unknown ritual was being enacted, demanding and reinforcing close tiesbetween the places linked; or the roads were there for the movement of armies. The roads linked sites of great originality and costly finish. Typically, they were built around irregular plazas, surrounded by large round rooms and a honeycomb of small rectangular spaces, all enclosed by cyclopean outer walls. The main buildings were of dressed stone and faced with fine ashlar. Roofs were made of great timbers from pine forests in the nearest hills—a dazzling show of wealth and power in a treeless desert. Political unity was enforced or celebrated in mass executions which have left frightening piles of victims’ bones, crushed, split, and picked as if at a cannibal feast. But, like many excessively ambitious builders in deserts, the people of Chaco Canyon seem to have overreached themselves. Their building era came to an abrupt end around the middle of the twelfth century, when a protracted drought made life insupportable.6
The Chaco Canyon experiment collapsed; order became unenforceable and communities retreated up cliffsides to defensive aeries in the rocks, far from the fields. The Hohokam culture reorganized and struggled on for over a century more. But deserts have not always stifled civilization so easily. In the right setting, they can be made to bloom over and over again, even with preindustrial technology. G. P. Nabham, the ethnobotanist of one of the driest deserts in the world, found that Papago communities in the Sonoran desert, will drift in and out of an agrarian way of life as weather permits, using patches of surface water on fast-maturing varieties of beans.7From such experiments, the development can be imagined of sophisticated permanent agriculture, of the kind which has been tried repeatedly in the past and sometimes still surprises us in many other areas of bleak aridity.
Relics of one of the most startling examples can be found in the northern-Peruvian desert, which is narrow, facing the sea, with the Andes at its back. Except in unpredictable years, when El Niño unleashes deluges, there is almost no rain, save for a gritty, salty rain of sand which falls almost nightly. Little grows naturally except the cactus, such as was painted on ancient bits of ceramic ware which can still be dug out of the dust; but it is an odd desert in other respects. Though only five degrees south of the equator, it is cool—the mean temperature is only sixty degrees Fahrenheit—and dank with fogs from the ocean.
Modest rivers streak the flats and, in the early centuries of the Christian Era, offered the fishing peoples of the coast the opportunity to irrigate.
Archaeology has called these people, whose civilization flourished from about 100 to about 750 A.D., by a single name—the Moche culture—as if they shared a common sense of identity; but they were almost certainly divided among small polities. Their attentions and imaginations remained riveted on the sea, even when they became tillers and irrigators, focused on the rich huntingwaters created by the Humboldt Current and the cold upswell of the Pacific. Their lively painted pottery displays sea-lion hunts and bound captives and jars full of booty, frantically paddled in dry-reed boats.
The hinterland, as it appears in most of the surviving art, is also preagrarian:a place for dragging captives between cacti or hunting deer in the hills. Even the riverbanks were dead: no amount of water can wake the sand into life without other nutrients. The sea, however, provided the vital means of turning desert riversides into gardens: the guano mined offshore from pelagic breedinggrounds. Little artificial oases were created for housing domesticated turkeys and guinea pigs and for growing maize, squash, peppers, potatoes, manioc, tropical fruits, and the peanuts which the people liked so much that they modeled them in gold and silver.8
A glimpse of the political elite can be had by peering into their tombs. Under-adobe platforms, built as stages for royal rituals in the midst of the most fertile-fields, lie divine impersonators in gilded masks, amid evidence of vanished values: earspools decorated with deer, duck, and warriors—all objects of the hunt; scepters with scenes of human sacrifice; necklets with models of shrunken heads in gold or copper, with golden eyes; bells engraved with the severed heads of sacrifice victims and portraits of the sacrificer god, whose image adorns much of the art, wielding his knife of bone. At San Jose de Moro a woman was buried with limbs encased in plates of precious metals and a headdress of gilded silver tassels.9
The history of the Moche shows the limitations of the desert as well as its possibilities. Despite displays of wealth and power, the environment was capricious and the ecology fragile. Repeated droughts in the sixth century have been inferred from cores sampled in the Quelcayya ice cap, in the southern-Peruvian highlands, and Huascaran Col, farther north. Because of our hazy understanding of the symbolic language of the Moche, developments of the traditional iconography in the next century are impossible to interpret with confidence, but they suggest subtly new rituals and therefore, perhaps, new political responses to the waste of nature. If so, these expedients succeeded in prolonging the civilization for a while. After the mid-eighth century, no new mounds were built, fields laid, or pottery created in the old, dazzling manner. Instead, the dunes piled up on the south side of the Moche Valley, and the irrigable land shrank.
The effort to imprint civilization on the desert was renewed in the north of Peru by the builders of the great city of Chan Chan. Today, it looks like a series of hummocks and ripples in the sand, as if a vast sandcastle had crumbled away or collapsed with a sudden shrug. Its adobe bricks have been slushed into shapelessness by drenchings from El Niño. But the precise geometry of a civilized city is still instantly recognizable. At its height, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries A.D., it covered twenty square kilometers and housed fabulous wealth, which in turn provided patronage for the skills of smiths. They worked in gold which had to be imported on llama caravans, stabled near a central market place. Their products helped to make tombs so rich that Spaniards in colonial times spoke of “mining” them.
The life of the city was supported by a re-creation of Moche irrigation systemson a larger scale, backed by a strategy of stockpiling huge resources to see out drought or flood. Fish was now no more than an occasional treat in most of the city; herds of llamas were kept for meat, which accounted for most of the protein represented in archaeologists’ samples.10In bad years, El Niño washed away the canals, but stockpiling enabled recovery.11The state therefore had to be oppressive to survive. The lords of the city were obsessed by security. Their quarters were protected from their own people by high walls, barbicans, and dogleg corridors.
Expansion brought new subjects and new enemies. Chan Chan really was an imperial capital. The kingdom of Chimor, of which it was the center, united most of the coastal plain—a strip eight hundred miles long. The extent of the conquests is, paradoxically, a clue to the ultimately fatal weakness of the state. They were made at a time when the development of irrigation systems in the kingdom’s Moche Valley heartland had come to a halt; even the palace storerooms of Chan Chan seem to have shrunk during the final phase of conquest early in the fifteenth century. It therefore looks as if the rulers of Chimor were using conquest as a means of grabbing resources they lacked at home. This sort of strategy is hard to sustain indefinitely—the exploitative relationship makes subject peoples burn with resentment—yet punitive sanctions must be moderate or the yield of tribute may be damaged. The Chimu empire lasted about a century. When the Inca descended from the highlands to destroy it, they did not make the same mistake: they expelled and resettled the population and left Chan Chan to erode into oblivion.
Nevertheless, Chimor was a remarkable experiment in longevity by the standards of desert civilizations. Usually, they do not have to wait to be destroyed by conquerors. Nature can be relied on to do the job alone. The disaster which befell the Moche, for instance, seems to have overwhelmed another impressive attempt to defy the environment at the southern end of the same desert. With good reason, the Nazca—as the people concerned are called—are favorites of seekers after archaeological mysteries. They adapted valleys even more wretched and desiccated than those of the Moche and created a unique and baffling form of monumental art: bold, naturalistic designs, scratched at ground level on the face of the desert, and so vast—up to three hundred meters broad—that they are fully visible only from a height the artists could not attain. They are not just works of godlike creativity: they are means of keeping the imagination permanently aroused.
The accretion of a film of red and black oxides on the surface of pale, barren-rock provided a canvas for the art. The virtual absence of rain has preserved it intact. It depicts sinuous fish, hurtling hummingbirds, a cormorant spread for flight, a giant monkey, a startlingly realistic spider. There are also long, straight lines, apparently leading nowhere, and perplexing geometrical shapes, includingspirals, trapezoids, and triangles, all surveyed by their creators with fastidious exactness. They have been interpreted with varying degrees of indiscipline as geomantic devices, calendrical computers, and runways for the “chariots of the gods.”12
The Lakes of Worms:The Limits of Civilization in the Sahara
The irrigation systems of the Nazca had to be even more elaborate and inventive than those of the Moche, exploiting the water table by means of subterranean aqueducts. The only parallel, as far as I know, is to be found under what is today one of the most inhospitable regions of the Sahara. The Fezzan, deep in the Libyan interior, conceals nearly a thousand miles of irrigation galleries, rough-hewn out of limestone, to channel the flow from underground springs. These fed the fields of one of antiquity’s tantalizingly ill-documented civilizations, ruled by people known in Greek and Roman reports as Garamantes. Their cities in the Fezzan were bounded on all sides by desert. Theirs was not a conventional oasis settlement, for it relied on elaborate hydraulic engineering to tap the vast water table of the Sahara, which is a triple-decker desert: the sand lies on limestone, which covers the water, which drains from the surrounding mountains into a subterranean sea. Dates—the historic native staple of the desert—were not part of the basic diet in the region, to judge from Garamantine middens, nor even millet; instead, the Garamantes or their slaves or peasants grew wheat where water could be easily delivered, and barley (which they exported to Roman territory) on less favored ground.
The origins of the Garamantes are unknown, though more or less worthless theories abound. Nor can they necessarily be credited with devising the basis on which their civilization rested: the irrigation system may have been the creation of people they conquered. Though they lived in an area with its own ancient writing and were in contact for a thousand years with users of four or five alphabets, no records identifiable as Garamantine have survived—not even in lapidary form, which lasts well in the desert. When first reported by Herodotus, the Garamantes were a slave-trading elite—“hunting in four-horse chariots,” as Herodotus said,13for blacks. Roman depictions of them suggested the barbarously exotic: faces bearing ritual scars and tattoos, under ostrich-plumed helmets.
Yet the state was, by all accounts, populous and long-lived, the civilization rich and conspicuous. Allowance must be made for the exaggerations uttered by conquerors in self-praise, but in 19 B.C., when Rome lost patience with Garamantine raiders, Cornelius Balbus was said to have captured fourteen of theircities. He left in their capital a monument which stands amid abandoned ruins, where lone and level sands stretch far away.14There was still a king of the Garamantes to make peace with Byzantium in 569 and accept Christianity. There was such a king again in 668 —a sickly king, according to accounts written down much later, spitting blood when he submitted to the Muslim invaders and was dragged off in chains. Thereafter, the Garamantes retreat from our sources into the obscurity which has made them attractive to modern scholarship.
The scale of the Garamantine achievement is open to doubt; but their state lasted a surprisingly long time, while the desert got drier around them.
Civilization was not necessarily a suitable strategy for survival in these circumstances, and even the Garamantes were outlived by less ambitious communities in the Fezzan. In 1967 , James Wellard reported a visit in the region which the Garamantes formerly ruled. His destination was the country of the last few hundred surviving “worm-eaters,” the Dawada of the Sahara, who call themselves “the Forgotten of God.” Untold centuries ago, they found a sort of security from invaders and marauders in a remote oasis, too feeble and desiccated, with lakes for the most part too polluted by salts, to attract any other community. They lived chiefly off the fruit of their date palms. From their lakes—fed by underground streams in this rainless wilderness—they harvested marketable deposits of sodium carbonate and a unique species of salt-lake shrimp, much prized as an aphrodisiac in the Fezzan, but usually reported as slimy and smelly by Western samplers. In Wellard’s day, Tuareg visited them occasionally to trade cigarettes and oil in exchange for the “worms.”
Theirs is not country anyone can do much with, and the Dawada lived in utter submission to nature. They dwelt by lakes but did not navigate. Their only building materials were the palm fronds and blocks of natron, of which their mosque was made. They plaited ropes but did not weave, sew, or knit. They had no clay and so made no pots. Wellard saw no wheel in the villages. The harvesting of the shrimps was done by the women with rope bags on poles, with which they dredged the shallows. No attempt had been made to increase the yield by farming the mollusks.15
The Dawada seemed to be a people intimidated into inertia by a land without-hope. They did not conform to conventional pictures of desert life, because their method of adaptation was not nomadic. Still, they followed the nomads’ classic technique in one respect: stripping life down to bare essentials and not taking the ambitious risks which finally condemned the Moche and Nazca to extinction, or the Chimu or Garamantes to conquest. The Sahara inspires resignation. Even when it was fertile, forested, and crowded with game, the area now smothered by sand made men feel small and insignificant. The hunters depicted in rock paintings and engravings ten thousand years old squat timidly out of sight of huge, great-horned, sharp-toothed counterpredators—or lie dead at their feet.16
Desert is usually defined in terms of rainfall levels: typically, as a region where less than three hundred millimeters fall annually. The essence of desert, however, is the dearth of the means of life, which depends on other factors, too: soil quality, temperature, the incidence of wind and sun. Desert should be thought of as a type of environment naturally deficient in human food, where people are obliged to make radical adaptations to survive. Where the desert provides no means of irrigation, or no local larder such as the Dawada fed off, or where desert-dwellers have no taste for a sedentary life, the scattered, rare concentrations of food and water tug and drive. The natural way to adapt is that of the Bedouin: to rely on transhumance at the edges of deserts, where uplands and wild grazing at different levels provide pastoralists with seasonal pastures, or, in the midmost wastes, to resort to full-blooded nomadism.
The most committed nomads in the world today are surely the Tuareg of the Sahara. Every Westerner’s mental image of the desert-dweller is informed by the romantic tradition they have generated: they are arch-resisters, defined by their indomitability. They conform to nature and are unbiddable by man. Their culture is shot through with zealously cultivated peculiarities which set them apart from their neighbors: the heavily veiled men’s faces; the copious use of the cross as a badge or motif, unparalleled elsewhere in Islam; the unique status they give their womenfolk, who go unveiled, socialize freely, choose marriage partners, initiate divorce, own and bequeath their own property, and transmit status and rights in the female line.
Extraordinarily, by the standards of nomads, they have their own alphabet-—an almost unmodified version of the ancient Libyan writing system, which is known from epigraphy of the fourth century B.C. onwards. The Tuareg are highly selective about its use: knowledge of it is transmitted by women, and it is employed in love letters and in inscribing household objects with spells; the epics and ballads of the male fireside, outside the tents (which are the women’s domain), remain unwritten. Above all, the Tuareg are distinguished by their uncompromisingly aristocratic ethos. Except for women and hereditary holy men, war is the only noble occupation. Purity of lineage is enforced with fanatical rigidity. Prowess is valued above property. Only goods measurable in terms of booty, like cattle and highly movable trinkets, command esteem. The object of life is prestige, and derogation is the worst form of pollution.
A good case has been made out for identifying the Tuareg as heirs of the Garamantes.17There may be something in this, but the vital link in the Targui ecosystem is, by Garamantine standards, a very late arrival in the Sahara: the camel. Only camelry can engage in the warfare which is the basis of Targui selfdefinition. Among Targui camps and tribes, raids are ritual affairs, in which booty is circulated but lives are not taken: they are practice for the real business of life, which is levying tolls on merchant caravans, grabbing slaves, and terrorizing and sometimes ruling desert-edge emporia. These activities demand long,hard riding and swift retreat back to desert lairs. The chronology of the domestication and spread of the camel is a much-disputed subject. It is certain, however, that the camel is not an indigenous Saharan beast and that it was not widely used on the North African littoral, except for plowing, until the time of the late Roman empire—perhaps not until the fourth or fifth century.
The key to successful nomadism is having mixed flocks, because of seasonal variations in the milk yield of different species.18But without a big admixture of camels, communities of Tuareg would be confined to areas of desert too easily accessible to enemies and too exposed to competition with other groups. Part of Targui pride is refusal to be seen eating any but nomads’ foods. When Leo Africanus was entertained at a Targui camp in the early sixteenth century, he had a typical experience: he and his companions were served with millet bread but their hosts took only milk and meat, served roasted in slices with herbs
and a good quantity of spices from the land of the Blacks. . . . The prince, noticing our surprise, amiably explained by saying that he was born in the desert where no grain grows and that their people ate only what the land produced. He said that they acquired enough grain to honor passing strangers.19
Leo suspected, however, that this reticence was partly for show, and so have most scholars ever since. Nomads need to obtain grains, if they want them, by barter or raiding or tribute, or else they must gather them wild; to the Tuareg, whose value system does not permit them to do the gathering or grinding themselves, this means acquiring subjects or slaves from among the sedentary peoples beyond the desert edge. Thus, war is the essential economic activity which binds together their sustaining ecology.
Lands of Unrest: Desert Highways Between Civilizations
Deserts, it seems, demand submission to nature and stifle attempts at civilization. But they have a vital role in history as spaces—like seas and oceans—across which civilizations communicate with each other. The fortunes of the Tuareg formerly depended on trans-Saharan routes which linked the civilizations of the Mediterranean to those of the Sahel. Avenues across the Gobi and Takla Makan were part of the web of “silk roads” that linked the civilizations at either end of Eurasia. Even if deserts breed no civilizations of their own, they help to inseminate those around them. Islam reached the Sahel across the Sahara; Chinese science and technology were diffused across Eurasia partly by maritime routes but also, vitally, via the deserts which the silk roads crossed.20
The experience of a caravan-crossing in the most arid part of the Saharawas vividly recounted by Ibn Battuta, who made the journey when the Saharan gold trade was near its height, in the mid-fourteenth century; there was then no other way, before the opening of routes of navigation around the West African bulge, to get near the sources of the gold. It took fully two months to cross the desert between Sijilmassa, in Morocco, and Walata, on the frontier of the empire of Mali. There were no roads to be seen, “only sand blown about by the wind. You see mountains of sand in one place, then you see how they have moved to another.” Guides therefore commanded high prices: Ibn Battuta’s was hired for a thousand mithqals of gold. The blind were said to make the best guides: eyesight was delusive in the desert, where demons played with travelers and tricked them into losing their way. After twenty-five days, the route led through Taghaza, the flyblown salt-mining town that produced Mali’s most needed import. Here the houses were built of blocks of salt and the water was brackish but precious. For the next stage of the journey was normally of ten waterless days—except for what might be sucked out of the stomachs of the wild cattle that sometimes roamed the waste. The only other livestock was lice, the only other nutrient the desert truffle. The last well before Walata was nearly five hundred kilometers from the town in a land “haunted by demons,” where “there is no visible road or track . . . nothing but sand blown hither and thither by the wind.” Yet Ibn Battuta found the desert “luminous, radiant,” and characterbuilding—until the caravaners entered an even hotter zone a few days short of Walata. Here they had to march by night. On arrival, the writer, who came from a long line of intellectuals and sophisticates, found the land of the blacks disappointing. When he learned that their idea of lavish hospitality was a cup of curdled milk laced with a little honey, he decided that no good could be expected from them.21
Desert imagery monopolizes every account of the trans-Saharan route. The silk roads, however, were much longer and traversed many wild environments, which competed for coverage in travelers’ accounts. The desert portions had a comforting predictability about them, and narratives therefore tended to emphasize the problems of other natural barriers, which seasonal fluctuations made hazardous. “They were hard put to it to complete the journey in three and a half years,” Marco Polo reported at the start of his own account, “because of snow and rain and flooded rivers and violent storms in the countries through which they had to pass, and because they could not ride so well in winter as in summer.”22Yet this was misleading. Numerous dangers jostled for priority in his mind, but the desert was genuinely dominant. Though he never complained of robbers, official extortions, or bureaucratic delays, his anxieties were alarmed by the Takla Makan.
On the edge of this desert, caravans paused for a week’s refreshment and stocked up with a month’s provisions. The normal rule for caravans was: the bigger, the safer. But not much more than fifty men at a time, with their beasts,could hope to be sustained by the modest water-sources they could expect to find over the next thirty days—an occasional salt-marsh oasis or an unreliable river of shifting course, which might be literally frozen to ice by desert cold, among featureless dunes.23The worst danger was getting lost—“lured from the path by demon-spirits.” “Yes,” said Marco,
and even by daylight men hear these spirit voices and often you fancy you are listening to the strains of many instruments, especially drums, and the clash of arms. For this reason bands of travelers make a point of keeping very close together. Before they go to sleep they set up a sign pointing in the direction in which they have to travel. And round the necks of all their beasts they fasten little bells, so that by listening to the sound they may prevent them straying off the path.24
The demons were hardly noisier than the “scream of the spirit-eagle” described in Chinese sources, nor, presumably, could they outdo the dragons who, early in the present century, kept Chinese awake in these wastes when Aurel Stein was exploring the ruins of desert cities and discovering the lost scrolls, walled up at Tun-huang for nearly a thousand years.25As imagined by a fourteenth-century painter, the demons were black, athletic, and ruthless, waving the dismembered limbs of horses as they danced.26The Mongols recommended warding them off by smearing your horse’s neck with blood. Sandstorms were a demons’ device for the disorientation of travelers: the sky would go suddenly dark; the air was veiled with dust; the wind hurled up a rattle of pebbles and a clash of sizable rocks, which would collide in midair and dash down upon men and beasts.
A guide for China-bound Italian merchants included handy tips: “You must let your beard grow long and not shave.” At Tana, on the Sea of Azov, you should furnish yourself with a good guide, regardless of expense. “And if the merchant likes to take a woman with him from Tana, he can do so.” On departure from Tana, only twenty-five days’ supplies of flour and salt fish were needed—“other things you will find in sufficiency and especially meat.” It was important to be accompanied by a close relative; otherwise, in the unlikely event of the merchant dying on a road said to be “safe by day and night,” his property would be forfeit.27The route is described in detail in terms of days’ journeys between towns, under the protection of Mongol police. Rates of exchange are specified at each stop. Suitable conveyances are recommended for each stage: oxcart or horse-drawn wagon to Astrakhan, depending on how fast you want to go and how much you want to pay; camel train or pack mule thereafter, until you reach the river system of China. Silver is the currency of the road, but must be exchanged for paper money with the Chinese authorities on arrival.28
Passage was cheap, carriage costly. The costs of the journey out could bereckoned at only one-eightieth of the value of silver cash carried. To include all expenses and the costs of servants, however, the return journey would cost almost as much per pack animal as the entire outward trip. Though horses were favored as carriers of travelers, commercial transport relied on camels. As drawn by a late-fourteenth-century mapmaker, camels bound for Cathay are laden with bundles of assorted shapes: they carried four or five hundred pounds’ weight each, could keep going with less regular feeds than horses, and had hooves which did not sink into the sand.29
Because the route was so long and laborious, merchant caravans had to concentrate on small quantities of high-value goods, keeping to routes between the Tien Shan and Kunhun Shan mountain ranges, where there were settlements and oases or wells at which to renew supplies, and occasional pastures of sand onions, which “are considered better than grass . . . and . . . give a body and range to the ordinary stench of a camel that is phenomenal.”30The key to exploitation of the desert corridors was the distribution of water, which drains inland from the surrounding mountains and finds its way below the desert floor by underground channels. The only substantial exception—the only waterway which stays above ground in the midmost Gobi—is the Edsin Gol, which rises in the Nan Shan mountain range and terminates in marshy lakes. Here the city of Khara Khoto—Marco Polo’s Etsina—raised strong walls, seventy feet high and studded with at least seventy towers, to guard traders on their way; it almost certainly owed its existence to trade, for it was too big to be sustained by what agriculture the Edsin Gol could supply.31Nor is it unique: the desert stretches of the silk roads were scattered with way-station cities and with caves adapted for the comfort of travelers and resident monks throughout the Tang era. Gradually, they were located, excavated, and mapped in their surprising profusion, between 1878 , when Dr. A. Riegel stumbled on what he thought was a late-Roman city near Turfan, and the First World War.32
The most accomplished discoverer was Aurel Stein, archaeologist and adventurer—the Indiana Jones of the Edwardian age. He roamed the ruins of Central Asia, where abandoned forts and way stations were strewn over bleak steppes and sudden mountains. He went to Tun-huang seeking unconventional treasure. Here, in the millennium before ours, traders sheltered from extremes of heat and cold in chambers dug out of the caves. The merchants were long gone by the time Stein arrived; but monks remained, tending shrines among barren rocks and sands, where a swingeing wind worried the dust. As Stein approached,
a multitude of dark cavities, mostly small, was seen, . . . honeycombing the somber rock faces in irregular tiers from the foot of the cliff. . . . Here and there the flights of steps connecting the grottoes still showed on the cliff face . . . and at once I noticed that frescopaintings covered the walls of all the grottoes, or as much as was visible of them from the entrances. ‘The Caves of the Thousand Buddhas’ were indeed tenanted . . . by images of the Enlightened One himself.33
Inside, in a sealed chamber, was the treasure he wanted: a hoard of ancient paperwork—thousands of Buddhist scriptures and commercial contracts, which the monks regarded as too sacred to be read.
After long endeavors, Stein negotiated access with a more-or-less biddable priest, on a hot, cloudless afternoon, while the guards slept, “soothed by a good smoke of opium.” The priest
now summoned up courage to open before me the rough door . . . into the rock-carved recess. . . . The sight the small room disclosed was one to make my eyes open wide. Heaped up in layers, but without any order, there appeared in the dim light of the priest’s little lamp a solid mass of manuscript bundles. . . . The area left clear within the room was just sufficient for two people to stand in.34
The cave paintings of Tun-huang depicted the life of the caravan roads, the piety of the merchants, and even, in some cases, the faces and the families they left at home. The manuscripts were harder to interpret—unintelligible to Stein, who was not a good enough Sinologist to read them. Gradually, however, as they got deciphered, they established beyond question the caves’ wider importance in world history. They revealed Tun-huang as a great crossroads of the world, where the cultures of Eurasia met—“the place,” according to a poem inscribed in one of the grottoes, “where the nomads and the Han Chinese communicate with each other,” the “throat of Asia,” where the roads “to the western ocean” converged like veins in the neck.35The holes in the cliff face were sumptuous places of repose for travelers across thousands of miles, linking China, India, Central Asia, and what we call the Near East, feeding into other systems of communications, which reached Japan and Europe and crossed the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia, maritime Arabia, and East Africa.
The road which led there from China was the so-called Winding Road—the most inhospitable of all, for it led far from the mountain drainage-channels, through the middle of the desert, where all was dunes or stones, with “no people to see,” as caravan-masters used to say, “and bitter water to drink.”36In the seventeenth century, when China was expanding westwards and the Gobi became a highway for armies and caravans bound for the depths of Sinkiang, a corresponding northern route was developed. It started from Pai-ling Miao, which the Lang Shan mountain range separates from the great bend of the Yellow River,where “all the roads of Mongolia seem to part,”37and clung to the edges of the mountains to get the benefit of the wells fed by underground drainage from the eastern Altai Shan.
Travel was by stages between iam —military way stations at approximately two-day intervals, where horses could be changed and guests could sleep in goatskins with the wool turned inwards. The road between them could be followed by tracking the camel dung, which also served as fuel except where tamarisk brush grew. “Show me camel dung,” said one of Owen Lattimore’s companions on his Gobi crossing in 1926 , “and I will go anywhere.”38There was a totally desolate stretch, four days’ march wide, covered in black gravel, to the west of the Edsin Gol; this had to be traversed by forced marches on rationed water. Camels died here in large numbers, stumbling on the blistering tracks, which caused blood boils and swollen pads—Lattimore saw their corpses strewn almost end to end.39
Except in this so-called Black Gobi, food supplies could be supplemented even in the middle of the desert by buying lean sheep from Torgut herdsmen: the price would be high, for the desert fleeces were valuable trade goods. From the 1690 s to the 1770 s, the Gobi road was made even harder to negotiate because the Torgut, who traditionally policed and nurtured it, had been forced into exile on the distant Volga. The Chinese, however, realized that Sinkiang could only be effectively colonized and incorporated into the state if the desert was traversible. So they invited the Torgut back to their homeland after virtually wiping out the tribesmen’s ancestral enemies.40
After the deserts, the great obstacles were the mountains on their rims, the Tien Shan to the south or the Altai Shan on the more northerly route towards the Mongol heartlands. The Tien Shan, the “Celestial Mountains,” which screen the Takla Makan desert, are among the most formidable in the world: eighteen hundred miles long, up to three hundred miles wide, and rising to twenty-four thousand feet. The extraordinary environment they enclose is made odder still by the deep depressions which punctuate the mountains: that of Turfan drops to more than five hundred feet below sea level. Owen Lattimore’s attempt to cross by Dead Mongol Pass in 1926 was driven back by a “ghoulish” wind, “driving snow before it that rasped like sand,” while a thousand camels ground their teeth against the cold “with a shrieking that goes through one’s ears like a nail.”41“Before the days of the Mongols,” explained the bishop of Peking in 1341 , “nobody believed that the earth was habitable beyond these mountains . . . but the Mongols by God’s permission, and with wonderful exertion, did cross them, and . . . so did I.”42
Spirits of the Slippery Hills: Bushmen and Civilization
In the end, though civilizations communicate across deserts, and there are deserts which ingenuity can adapt to civilized life, the tyranny of nature remains greatest where the means of life are scarcest. A representative case—an archetype, in some students’ reckoning—of life on the margin of the possible is that of the Bushmen of the Kalahari: a people who, by repute, are so far from trying to adapt their environment that, on the contrary, it has caused a remarkable adaptation in them, unparalleled except in their Khoikhoi neighbors. The deposits of fat secreted in the buttocks and hips of their women seem designed by nature for famines and droughts.43
Partly because of such evidence of utter dependence on nature, and partly, perhaps, because of the way this peculiarity of physique recalls the steatopygous figurines prized by ancient sculptors and potters in so many parts of the world, the Bushmen invite classification as archetypal “primitives” and are often said to represent a rare case of survival of an aboriginal way of life, supposedly shared, in a bygone age of universal hunting and gathering, by the ancestors of all mankind. Like other supposedly archetypal primitives—the Fuegians who inspired Darwin, the Tasmanians whom early artists depicted as simian—they inhabited an “uttermost part of the earth”:44one of the isolating taper-tips on the map of the Southern Hemisphere. An American expedition which went in search of them in 1925 openly proclaimed a quest for the supposed “missing link” between monkey and man—and claimed to have found it.45At the same time, the imputed mystery of the Kalahari was deepened by rumors of lost cities. That unreliable explorer, “the Great” G. A. Farini, claimed to have found quarried and dressed stones “brought here at some remote period by human hands . . . awaiting the construction of some imposing public building.”46The effect was to enhance the Bushmen’s quaintness: they seemed irrationally primitive in an environment which might be thought capable of supporting civilization.
I call them “Bushmen,” though it may seem like a reversion to an outdated usage, because the currently fashionable term, “San,” is at least as objectionable: it was imposed from outside, means something like “forager,” and conveys, in the cultures in which the term is most familiar, pejorative connotations of scavenging, mendicancy, and a dependent way of life.47The Bushmen represent an astonishing revolution in the status of marginal “primitives” in our times: formerly reviled by their neighbors, so that even Khoikhoi pastoralists spat at the mention of their name,48they were hunted down by Bantu and Boer alike. Their indomitability made them unexploitable—except when they were enslaved as children, and even then stories multiplied of little runaways who would risk their lives repeatedly to try to get back to their tribes. This very trait, which made them despised as incorrigibly savage, appealed to the romanticizers ofBushman life, because of the nobility it symbolized—the unbiddability at the heart of freedom. When Laura Marshall began anthropological fieldwork in Bushman country in the early 1950 s, no one would believe her team was really interested in such useless sneakthieves and assumed she was really prospecting for diamonds.49
Laurens van der Post was the effective architect of the Bushmen’s revised image. He felt a mystical affinity with them, which was first communicated to him in childhood from the eyes of his mixed-race nurse. His “quest” for their habitat in the recesses of the desert was in part a commercial venture with a BBC television crew, and in part the fulfillment of a vow made while he was facing death in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. He believed the Bushmen were the “original” inhabitants of what, with his habitual tendency to dramatize himself, he always called “the land of my birth”; for him, they were, in a sense, its guardians, preserving their habitat unspoiled by the cruelties and corruptions of South Africa’s last few centuries. They practiced perfect natural morality, sharing every possession, caring for strangers, killing “innocently” only in order to live. When at last he found a real “wild Bushman” after months of searching in the desert, van der Post admired him with a frankly erotic intensity. The specimen had a “wonderful wild beauty about him. Even his smell was astringent with the essences of untamed earth and wild animal-being. It was a smell as archaic and provocative in its way as the Mona Lisa’s smile.”50
The writer took his role as an honorary Bushman beyond the limits of selfcaricature. A good instance occurred when he was disappointed in his hopes of filming a seasonal Bushman rendezvous at the sacred waters of the Tsodilo (or “Slippery”) Hills. When the film cameras failed to work, van der Post became convinced that the spirits of the hills were angry with him for having transgressed a taboo: his companions had shot a warthog on the road and so “came in blood.” It seems certain that the supposed taboo was inauthentic—an invention of a guide who knew how to work on his employer’s sensibilities— since the remains of Bushmen’s feasts of game were plainly visible in the vicinity. Nevertheless, van der Post insisted on embarrassing his fellow travelers by making them all sign a letter of apology to the spirits and burying it in a bottle under an ancient rock-painting of an eland, “which is such clear evidence of [the spirits’] power to make flesh and blood create beyond its immediate self.”51
The Bushmen’s present environment makes few concessions to civilized priorities. The most favored part of the Kalahari justifies its old name of “the Thirst Veld.”52Most of it is covered in a layer of sand between three and thirty meters thick. In a region of eleven thousand square kilometers of the central Kalahari, there are only nine permanent and four semipermanent water sources. At an average of eleven hundred meters above sea level, all the discomforts of a desert plateau are inflicted. Temperatures of thirty-five to forty-five degrees Celsius are common in summer; on winter nights, you experience near-freezing.The hills of the northern edge supply three underground rivers in the area known as Dobe-/Du/da after the names of two permanent water holes. Bushmen can tap underground sources by driving reeds deep into the ground and sucking on them, or gather water from short-lived pans in hollows or among the roots of trees.53In the central desert, where there are no permanent water holes and hollows are wet for only sixty days a year, the inhabitants rely on water-bearing melons, tubers, and a kind of aloe, or on moisture from the stomachs of rarely killed game.54Everywhere, people watch for the fall from isolated clouds: “Has it hit?” they ask. “. . . and we think of the rich fields of berries spreading as far as the eye can see and the mongongo nuts densely littered on the ground.”55
Wild food plants gathered from the extensive scrublands account for more than half the Bushmen’s diet. A valuable supplement comes from honey, gathered as van der Post learned how to do it in childhood, by drugging the bees with narcotic smoke. The rest comes from game. The Bushmen’s chief science is therefore botany, and their chemistry and technology are mainly concerned with equipment for the hunt. Van der Post, who, thanks to the rifle recommended to him by his wife, acquired a great reputation as a mighty hunter among the Bushmen, was well equipped to observe this side of life. He saw them spin wild sisal for bowstrings and snares56 and mix poisons for arrowheads from grubs, roots, and glands of reptiles: a different poison for each kind of creature, according to size and endurance.57He saw their arrows, made in three sections so that the head, if it found its mark, would remain embedded in the animal and the hunters would know, even if no blood was shed, that a hit had been scored. He studied their tracking methods, which were so fine-tuned that they could distinguish the spoor of particular beasts and follow them among the prints of an entire herd. He tracked the wounded quarry with them until the poison took effect and the killers closed in with spears. On one occasion he followed hunters who ran for twelve miles without pause in pursuit of their favorite quarry—a big eland, whose capture excited the camp to spontaneous song.58Such fare was a rare treat. The usual menu was confined to porcupine and springhare, and a series of taboos seems designed to give infants and the aged privileged access to meat.59
The romantic image of the Bushman in harmony with nature should not be mistaken for the whole truth. The Bushman is a competitor for scarce resources with other species in the ecosystem of which he forms part. Like everyone else, he looks to nature for what he can get out of her. But in the desert, where the environment gives him so little to live on, and keeps him wandering in search of it, his best strategy is collaboration. He blends into the bush, hiding from the creatures on whom he preys, or who might prey on him. His temporary dwellings resemble the desert scrub. He does build small refuges of dry stone where the materials are to hand: low circles, into which he climbs to sleep in relative security. But that is the nearest he comes to modifying the lie of the landor erecting formal constructions. His arts of music, song, and dance are borne away on the wind as soon as they are created. His sacred rites—pilgrimage to the permanent waters, exposure of the dead to feed the devourer god—leave no lasting mark behind them.
This is as near as you can get to life without civilization. But it is not without-virtue or learning or morals or love or little luxuries. And by the most critical-measure of success, it is better than civilization. The towns and roads of Hohokam and Chaco Canyon are ruins—hummocks and ruts. Dust drifts over Khara Khoto, under a sky sallow with clouds of dirt. The Moche and Chimu have vanished and have to be recalled uncertainly, from the squat, grimacing caricatures which they liked to model in ornaments or paint onto pots.
Civilizations erected in deserts have been magnificent endeavors but, until now, when Phoenix and Las Vegas and their like can be kept going by massive transfers of resources from elsewhere, they have always failed to survive. The Bushmen, despite the seductions of civilization, the encroachments of rivals, the massacres by enemies, and the sustained hostility of their environment, are still there.