The Sahara (31 page)

Oriental Delights, Strange Worlds and Spy Stories

“Nothing of interest enlivened our journey by rail and caravan till we came to the duster of date-palms about the ancient well upon the rim of the Sahara.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs,
Pellucidar
(1915)

In spite of increased European contact with the Sahara following colonization, for many writers the desert remained shorthand for the unknown and the fantastic. Whether the setting for wholly imaginary tales of mystery or a half-invented land inhabited by white slavers, the Sahara of literature proved to be fertile for writers and readers alike.

Even before the Scramble for the Sahara, European writers had occasionally shown interest in the region. In the eighteenth century Charles Fieux de Mouhy, a friend of Voltaire and a popular author in his day, was responsible for numerous fantastic stories, one of the most famous being Lamekis, or
The Extraordinary Voyages of an Egyptian in the Inner Earth, With the Discovery of the Isle of Silphide, Enriched with Curious Notes
. His work has recently enjoyed something of a revival thanks to a reference in
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
, a series of graphic novels by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill.

Published in 1737, the novel has multiple, intertwined plots that begin in ancient Egypt, where Lamekis’ father is a high priest. From ancient Egypt, the action moves to a utopian world beneath the surface of the earth. Back on the planet’s surface, de Mouhy also invented the imaginary North African kingdoms of Abdalles and Amphicleocles. In these the author is happy to outline all sorts of customs and behaviour for his readers that would be most out of place in eighteenth-century France.

Like de Mouhy, Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of the Tarzan stories, also invented an imagined land that exists in our hollow earth. Called Pellucidar, this subterranean world that could be reached through the Sahara featured in seven novels and, in an interesting melding of fantasy tales, Burroughs used Pellucidar as the setting for one of his Tarzan stories
Tarzan at The Earth’s Core
(1929). In the second story in the series,
Pellucidar
(1915 ), the hero returns to the Sahara to reach the underground kingdom.

As the narrator explains:

Our trip through the earth’s crust was but a repetition of my two former journeys between the inner and the outer worlds. This time, however, I imagine that we must have maintained a more nearly perpendicular course, for we accomplished the journey in a few minutes’ less time than upon the occasion of my first journey through the five-hundred-mile crust. Just a trifle less than seventy-two hours after our departure into the sands of the Sahara, we broke through the surface of Pellucidar.

The French novelist Pierre Benoit (1886-1962) was based in North Africa while serving in the French Army, and he drew on this experience of the Sahara for his second novel,
Atlantida
. Set in 1896, the story involves two French officers drugged and kidnapped by Tuareg and taken to the kingdom of Queen Antinea, a descendant of the rulers of Atlantis, the poetic Atlantida of the title. Queen Antinea lives in a cave with 120 niches carved around its walls; each niche represents one of her lovers, each of whom “dies for love” when the queen tires of him. When all the niches are full, Antinea is supposed to rest for eternity. When the Frenchmen, Captains Morhange and Andre de Saint-Avit arrive, just over fifty niches have been filled, meaning that the queen has some way to go before she can rest. While in a trance-like state, captivated by the queen’s beauty, Saint-Avit kills Morhange. Eventually coming to his senses, Saint-Avit manages to escape, riding across the Sahara to a French army outpost where he relates his story. Not surprisingly, his tale of the Queen of Atlantis in the Sahara is not readily believed, in spite of his previously unblemished reputation. As his fate is being decided, colleagues rush to defend him: “‘He went alone to Bilma, to the Air, quite alone to those places where no one had ever been. He is a brave man.’ ‘He is a brave man, undoubtedly,’ I answered with great restraint. ‘But he murdered his companion, Captain Morhange, did he not?’ The old Sergeant trembled. ‘He is a brave man,’ he persisted.”

After the novel’s publication in 1919, Benoit was accused of plagiarism, one critic highlighting the similarities between this story and Rider Haggard’s
She
. Affronted, Benoit sued for libel but lost. Atlantida was said to have inspired the swashbuckling adventurer-cum-archaeologist Byron de Prorok to head into the Sahara in search of lost treasure. His cavalier approach to excavations did more damage than good to the objects he uncovered, for instance tearing apart mummies in his search for jewels. As a result, de Prorok today remains universally loathed by professional archaeologists, decades after his death.

A prolific author of short stories and children’s books, the English writer Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) is best known for his ghost and “weird” stories. Born in London, he became devoted to the teaching of Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, and his writing often drew on occult and psychic motifs. Often using Egypt and the desert as settings, Blackwood was drawn to the possibilities of magic in ancient Egyptian religion and the idea of spirits coming out of the Sahara.

In
Sand
, one of his best-known stories, the Sahara sand itself is at the centre of the tale, introduced as an almost anthropomorphic entity that draws people to it. The central human character is Felix Henriot, who travels to Egypt because the sand called him there: “For Henriot drew near to its great shifting altars in an attitude of worship. The wilderness made him kneel in heart. Its shining reaches led to the oldest Temple in the world, and every journey that he made was like a sacrament. For him the Desert was a consecrated place. It was sacred.” Without giving away the end of the story, suffice to say all does not end well.

One of the greatest exponents of tales of fantastic places was the pioneering author of science fiction, Jules Verne. Verne’s first published book (54 novels came out in his lifetime) takes place over and in the Sahara at a time when large portions of the continent were still unknown to Europeans.
Five Weeks in a Balloon
(1863) tells the story of a balloon trip across the desert from Zanzibar to Senegal via Agadez, the capital of the Air, and, naturally, Timbuktu. In part because of the great public interest in African exploration at that time, and because it is a good read, the book sold well and secured Verne’s reputation.

The last novel Verne completed, and which was with his publisher at the time of his death, also features a Saharan setting. In
The Invasion of the Sea
(1905) a team of Europeans is examining the possibility of flooding a low-lying region of the Sahara through a canal that would run through Tunisia into eastern Algeria. In planning the creation of a Saharan sea the Europeans, and local Arab traders, hope to reap the benefits of a new trading region in North Africa. In spite of the careful planning, a large volcano erupts unexpectedly, creating just such a sea without the need for human interference.

Sax Rohmer was the exotic-sounding pseudonym of Arthur Henry Ward, also known as Michael Furey, the English author and master of the gothic thriller, most famous for his Chinese criminal mastermind Dr. Fu Manchu. First appearing in 1912, the tales of Fu Manchu would eventually feature in thirteen of Rohmer’s more than fifty full-length novels. Head of the Si Fan, an international crime organization, Fu Manchu is described by his nemesis, the controller of the British Secret Service, Sir Denis Nayland Smith, thus: “Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a dose-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race... and you have a mental picture of Dr Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.”

Apart from the Si Fan network having its headquarters in the Sahara at one point, many other books by Rohmer, such as
Tales of Secret Egypt
and
Brood of the Witch Queen
(both 1918), involve spirits living in and coming out of the deserts of North Africa to terrify his characters and readers alike. Combining the theme of the Yellow Peril with visions of the Sahara,
Dope: A Story of Chinatown and the Drug Trade
- one of Rohmer’s best-known novels - features an opium-fuelled dream of the desert. Mrs. Sin, the madame of a drug den in Limehouse, London, is feeding a young woman, Rita Dresden, pipes of opium. As a result Rita’s hallucinations take her far away:

She and the parakeets were alone in the heart of the Great Sahara... She was dressed in a manner which Rita dreamily thought would have been inadequate in England, or even in Cuba, but which was appropriate in the Great Sahara. How exquisitely she carried herself, mused the dreamer; no doubt this fine carriage was due in part to her wearing golden shoes with heels like stilts, and in part to her having been trained to bear heavy burdens upon her head.

Like Algernon Blackwood, not to mention W B. Yeats and the occultist Aleister Crowley, Rohmer was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a popular cabbalistic society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from which he and Blackwood derived many of their mystically inspired plots. Ironically, considering the accusations of racism that bedevilled Rohmer because of his evil Chinese villain, the author died during a pandemic of the so-called Asian flu.

Dorothy Gilman, creator of the Mrs. Pollifax series of mysteries, makes use of a less fantastic but nonetheless exotic Saharan location, in the traditions of damsels in distress. Although
Caravan
(1992) deals with issues including murder and sex slavery, it is all rather sanitized and incomparably less sinister than the work of Rohmer and his occult peers.
Caravan
relates the misadventures of a sometime wife, widow, slave and sex object in the form of Caressa, Lady Teal, nee Bowman, nee Horvath. The plot is a common one: a young, innocent, attractive foreign woman alone in the big, bad world:

I had no knowledge then of what was happening in other parts of Africa, I knew nothing of the intrigues, assassinations, treaties and betrayals, battles, rivalries and ultimatums among the French, Turks, Italians, British and Belgians as each of them raced to swallow up as much of the continent as possible... After all, I had been travelling for a very long time in the only part of Africa that nobody wanted-the desert.

Tuareg tribesmen, the Blue Men, murder our impressionable heroine’s husband while he and she are on the way to Ghadames. Caressa is taken prisoner; concubinage and slavery follow. In a play on the usual idea of foreign men bad, white men good, the heroine suffers as much at the hands of western men as she does at those of locals, allowing all races to take part equally in Caressa’s victimhood. Framing the tale in the run up to the First World War allows Gilman to introduce historical titbits, to conjure up the more alien nature of the Sahara of a century ago. ‘“There’s news,’ he said. ‘Italy has invaded Tripoli - there’s fighting there... The desert tribes - led by the Senussi - have rallied to support the Tripoli natives.”‘ After three years in the Sahara Gilman allows Caressa to get back to Cairo and civilization in June 1914, just in time for the start of the Great War.

Tales of the Legion

As a balance to Saharan natives, the French Foreign Legion has long provided one of the most easily accessible motifs for western readers wishing to engage with the desert. Founded in 1831, the year after the invasion of “French Algeria”, the regiment was created after foreigners were banned from serving in the French army. One reason for growth of the legendary Legion was the fiction it inspired. The fact that the regiment accepted so many foreign recruits, Americans and British among them, also fed this trend, allowing as it did non-French readers to enjoy the vicarious pleasure of reading about military engagements fought under another’s flag. This theme is central to one of the first works to deal with a foreigner serving in a French regiment.

The best-known of all Legion novels is
Beau Geste
by P. C. Wren, who claimed to have served in the Legion himself, although evidence for this is vague. The film versions of the story ensured that the Legion and the Sahara remained popular cultural motifs long after the end of the colonial presence in North Africa. The continuing popularity of stories of legionnaires in the post-war period is clear from the fact that, in the 1950s, the British publisher John Spencer successfully brought out a series of 23 paperbacks about the Legion, written under a number of in-house pseudonyms.

Even cartoon strips have used the Legion as a suitable storyline. Charles Schulz, creator of the cartoon
Peanuts
, penned a long-running storyline in which Snoopy, Charlie Brown’s beagle, was dressed as a sergeant in the French Foreign Legion, leading Woodstock, his small yellow bird friend of indeterminate species, and fellow birds across the wastes of the Sahara, en route for Fort Zinderneuf, the fort featured in Beau Geste. In reality, these sandy wastes turn out to be a sand pit belonging to one of the children in the cartoon, or else a bunker on the local golf course.