The Songlines

  Timbuktu

  The houses are built of grey mud. Many of the walls are covered with graffiti, written in chalk in the neatest of copybook hands:

  Les noms de ceux qui voyagent dans la nuit sont Sidi et Yéyé.

  Hélas! Les Anges de l’Enfer.

  Beauté . . . Beau . . .

  La poussière en Décembre . . .

  Useless to ask a wandering man

  Advice on the construction of a house.

  The work will never come to completion.

  After reading this text, from the Chinese Book of Odes, I realised the absurdity of trying to write a book on Nomads.

  Psychiatrists, politicians, tyrants are forever assuring us that the wandering life is an aberrant form of behaviour; a neurosis; a form of unfulfilled sexual longing; a sickness which, in the interests of civilisation, must be suppressed.

  Nazi propagandists claimed that gipsies and Jews – peoples with wandering in their genes – could find no place in a stable Reich.

  Yet, in the East, they still preserve the once universal concept: that wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.

  There is no happiness for the man who does not travel. Living in the society of men, the best man becomes a sinner. For Indra is the friend of the traveller. Therefore wander!

  Aitareya Brāhmana

  You cannot travel on the path before you have become the Path itself.

  Gautama Buddha

  Walk on!

  His last word to his disciples

  In Islam, and especially among the Sufi Orders, siyahat or ‘errance’ – the action or rhythm of walking – was used as a technique for dissolving the attachments of the world and allowing men to lose themselves in God.

  The aim of a dervish was to become a ‘dead man walking’: one whose body stays alive on the earth yet whose soul is already in Heaven. A Sufi manual, the Kashf-al-Mahjub, says that, towards the end of his journey, the dervish becomes the Way not the wayfarer, i.e. a place over which something is passing, not a traveller following his own free will.

  Arkady, to whom I mentioned this, said it was quite similar to an Aboriginal concept, ‘Many men afterwards become country, in that place, Ancestors.’

  By spending his whole life walking and singing his Ancestor’s Songline, a man eventually became the track, the Ancestor and the song.

  The Wayless Way, where the Sons of God lose themselves and, at the same time, find themselves.

  Meister Eckhart

  He is by nature led

  To peace so perfect that the young behold

  With envy, what the old man hardly feels.

  Wordsworth, ‘Old Man Travelling’

  A very brief life of Diogenes:

  He lived in a tub. He ate raw octopus and lupins. He said, ‘Kosmopolites eimi’. ‘I am a citizen of the world.’ He compared his wanderings through Greece to the migration of storks: north in summer, south to avoid the winter cold.’

  We Lapps have the same nature as the reindeer: in the springtime we long for the mountains; in winter we are drawn to the woods.

  Turi’s Book of Lappland

  In ancient India the monsoon made travel impossible. And since the Buddha did not want his followers to wade up to their necks in floodwater, He allowed them a ‘rain retreat’, the Vassa. During this time, the homeless pilgrims were to congregate on higher ground and live in huts of wattle and daub.

  It was from these sites that the great Buddhist monasteries arose.

  In the early Christian Church there were two kinds of pilgrimage: ‘to wander for God’ (ambulare pro Deo) in imitation of Christ or of Father Abraham who quit the city of Ur and went to live in a tent. The second was the ‘penitential pilgrimage’: in which criminals guilty of ‘enormous crimes’ (peccata enormia) were required, in accordance with a fixed set of tariffs, to assume the role of travelling beggar – with hat, purse, baton and badge – and work out their salvation on the road.

  The idea that walking dissolved crimes of violence goes back to the wanderings forced on Cain to atone for the murder of his brother.

  Walata, Mauritania

  The camel-men wore flaying knives instead of rosaries around their necks, and had served as auxiliaries with the Legion. At sunset, they took me to a house on the edge of town in order to hear the bhagi.

  The bhagi was a holy wanderer who would walk from oasis to oasis in the company of his toothless old father. His eyes were clouded blue almonds. He had been blind from birth and the father had to lead him everywhere.

  He knew the whole of the Koran by heart and, when we found him, he was crouched against the mud-brick wall, chanting the suras with an uplifted smile while the father turned the pages of the Book. The words came faster and faster until they tailed off into a continuous hammering rhythm, like a drum solo. The father flipped over the pages, and the people in the crowd began to sway with a ‘lost’ look, as though they were on the verge of trance.

  Suddenly, the bhagi stopped. There was a moment of absolute silence. The next verse he began to enunciate very, very slowly, twisting his tongue around the gutturals, flinging the words, one by one, at the audience, who caught them as messages from ‘out there’.

  The father rested his head against his son’s shoulder, and let out a deep sigh.

  Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it.

  Indian proverb

  On the spring migration, province of Fars

  Between Firuzabad and Shiraz, the Quashgai migration is in full swing: mile on mile of sheep and goats, like ant-trails if you watch them from the hillsides. Hardly a blade of grass: a dusting of green on the mountains but along the route only a white broom in flower, and a grey-leaved artemisia. The animals thin and weak, skin-covered bone but little more. Now and then one falls out of line, like a soldier fainting on parade, totters and falls, and then it’s a race between the vultures and the dogs.

  Slavering mastiffs! Red-headed vultures! But are their heads really red or red with blood? Both! They are both red and blooded. And when you look along the way we’ve come, there are spirals of vultures, wheeling.

  The Quashgai men were lean, hard-mouthed, weatherbeaten and wore cylindrical caps of white felt. The women were in all their finery: bright calico dresses bought especially for the springtime journey. Some rode horses and donkeys; some were on camels, along with the tents and tent poles. Their bodies ebbed and flowed to the pitching saddles. Their eyes were blinkered to the road ahead.

  A woman in saffron and green rode by on a black horse. Behind her, bundled up together on the saddle, a child was playing with a motherless lamb; copper pots were clanking, and there was a rooster tied on with a string.

  She was also suckling a baby. Her breasts were festooned with necklaces, of gold coins and amulets. Like most nomad women, she wore her wealth.

  What, then, are a nomad baby’s first impressions of this world? A swaying nipple and a shower of gold.

  The Huns burn with an insatiable lust for gold.

  Ammianus Marcellinus

  For they had golden earrings, because they were Ishmaelites.

  Judges 8:24

  A good horse is a member of the family.

  Quashgai saying

  Dasht-i-Arjan, near Shiraz

  The old man crouched beside his dying chestnut mare: on migration, the horses are the first to drop. He had found a patch of fresh grass. He had coaxed the mare on to it and was trying to ram a handful between her teeth. It was too late. She lay on her side, tongue out, with the glazed eyes of approaching death.

  The old man bit his lip and cried, sparingly, a drop or two down either cheek. Then he shouldered the saddle without a backward glance, and together we walked to the road.

  Along the road we were picked up by one of the khans in his Land-Rover.

  He was a straight-backed old gentleman, with a monocle and some knowledge of Europe. He owned a house and orchards in Shiraz: but every spring, h
e put himself on call to help his kin.

  He took me to a tent where his fellow khans were meeting to discuss their strategy. One was a very chic type in a padded yellow ski jacket. He had what I took to be a skier’s tan. I suspected him of coming straight from St Moritz, and he mistrusted me on sight.

  The khan they all deferred to was a wiry, hook-nosed man with a growth of grey stubble on his chin, who sat on a kelim, listening to the others’ arguments without moving a muscle. Then he reached for a scrap of paper and, on it, drew some wiggly lines in ball-point.

  This was the order of precedence in which the different clans were to move through the next stretch of country.

  The same scene is described in Genesis 13.9 when Abraham the bedouin sheikh becomes worried that his cowboys will start fighting with the cowboys of Lot, ‘Is not the whole land before thee? Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me: If thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou depart to the right hand, then I will go to the left.’

  Any nomad migration must be organised with the precision and flexibility of a military campaign. Behind, the grass is shrivelling. Ahead, the passes may be blocked with snow.

  Most nomads claim to ‘own’ their migration path (in Arabic Il-Rāh, ‘The Way’), but in practice they only lay claim to seasonal grazing rights. Time and space are thus dissolved around each other: a month and a stretch of road are synonymous.

  But a nomad’s migration – unlike that of a hunter – is not his own. It is, rather, a guided tour of animals whose instinctive sense of direction has been blunted by domestication. It calls for skill and risk-taking. A man, like Job, can be ruined in a single season: as were the nomads of the Sahel, or the Wyoming cattle companies in the Great White Winter of 1886–7.

  In a bad season, a nomad’s temptation to stray from his path is irresistible; but the army is waiting for him with sub-machine guns.

  ‘The Army’, said my friend, the old khan, ‘has now replaced the lion and the wolf.’

  Nomos is Greek for ‘pasture’, and ‘the Nomad’ is a chief or clan elder who presides over the allocation of pastures. Nomos thus came to mean ‘law’, ‘fair distribution’, ‘that which is allotted by custom’ – and so the basis of all Western law.

  The verb nemein – to ‘graze’, ‘to pasture’, ‘to range’ or ‘to spread’ – has a second sense as early as Homer: ‘to deal’, ‘to apportion’ or ‘to dispense’ – especially of land, honour, meat or drink. Nemesis is the ‘distribution of justice’ and so of ‘divine justice’. Nomisma means ‘current coin’: hence ‘numismatics’.

  The nomads known to Homer were the ‘mare-milking’ Scythians who roamed with their wagons across the south Russian steppe. They were a people who buried their chiefs under grave mounds, with horses and treasures of gold.

  But the origins of nomadism are very hard to assess.

  Bandiagara, Mali

  Madame Dieterlen, an old Africa hand, gave me coffee in her caravan on the edge of the Dogon cliff. I asked her what traces the Bororo Peul – cattle herders of the Sahel – would leave for an archaeologist once they had moved off a campsite.

  She thought for a moment, and answered, ‘They scatter the ashes of their fires. No. Your archaeologist would not find those. But the women do weave little chaplets from grass stems, and hang them from the branch of their shade tree.’

  Max Weber traces the origins of modern capitalism to certain Calvinists who, disregarding the parable of the camel and the eye of the needle, preached the doctrine of the just rewards of work. Yet the concept of shifting and increasing one’s ‘wealth on the hoof’ has a history as old as herding itself. Domesticated animals are ‘currency’, ‘things that run’, from the French courir. In fact, almost all our monetary expressions – capital, stock, pecuniary, chattel, sterling – perhaps even the idea of ‘growth’ itself – have their origins in the pastoral world.

  Is it not passing brave to be a King,

  And ride in triumph through Persepolis?

  Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1, 1,758

  Persepolis, Fars

  We were walking to Persepolis in the rain. The Quashgais were soaked and happy, and the animals were soaked; and when the rain let up, they shook the water from their coats and moved on, as though they were dancing. We passed an orchard with a mud wall around it. There was a smell of orange blossom, after rain.

  A boy was walking beside me. He and a girl exchanged a flashing glance. She was riding behind her mother on a camel, but the camel was moving faster.

  About three miles short of Persepolis we came to some huge domed tents under construction, to which the Shah-i-Shah had invited a riff-raff of royalty for his coronation in June. The tents were designed by the Paris firm of decorators, Jansen.

  Someone was yelling, in French.

  I tried to get the Quashgai boy to comment, or even to look at the tents. But he shrugged and looked the other way – and so we went on to Persepolis.

  Passing Persepolis I looked at the fluted columns, the porticoes, lions, bulls, griffins; the sleek metallic finish of the stone, and the line on line of megalomaniac inscription: ‘I . . . I . . . I . . . The King . . . The King . . . burned . . . slew . . . settled . . .’

  My sympathies were with Alexander for burning it.

  Again I tried to get the Quashgai boy to look. Again he shrugged. Persepolis might have been made of matchsticks for all he knew or cared – and so we went up to the mountains.

  Pyramids, arches, obelisks, were but the irregularities of vain-glory, and wild enormities of ancient magnanimity.

  Sir Thomas Browne, Urne Buriall

  London

  Franco S., returning from Iran for the first time since the fall of the Shah, says that, among the side effects of the Khomeini Revolution, the Quashgai have recovered their strength and their mobility.

  The tradition of the camp-fire faces that of the pyramid.

  Martin Buber, Moses

  Before addressing the crowds at the Nuremberg Rallies, the Führer would commune with himself in a subterranean chamber modelled on the tomb in the Great Pyramid.

  ‘Look! I’ve drawn a skull on the top of the Pyramid.’

  ‘Why did you do that, Sedig?’

  ‘I like drawing scary things.’

  ‘What’s the skull doing on the Pyramid?’

  ‘Because a giant’s buried in there, and his skull’s popping out.’

  ‘What do you think of that giant?’

  ‘Bad.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he eats people up.’

  Conversation with Sedig el Fadil el Mahdi, aged six

  Jahweh’s horror of hewn masonry, ‘And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it.’

  Exodus 20:25

  . . . but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.

  Deuteronomy 34:6

  In the last of the moonlight a dog howls and falls silent. The firelight flutters and the watchman yawns. A very old man walks silently past the tents, feeling his way with a stick to make sure he doesn’t trip on the tent ropes. He walks on. His people are moving to a greener country. Moses has an appointment with the jackals and vultures.

  Pompey in Jerusalem, after barging his way into the Temple, demanded to be shown the Holy of Holies, and was surprised to find himself in an empty room.

  Herodotus records the visit of some Greeks to Egypt, who, on seeing the man-made mountains of limestone, called them pyramides because their shape reminded them of little wheaten cakes that were sold on street stalls. He adds that the local inhabitants preserved a memory of their construction as a time of horror and were unable to pronounce the names of the builders, Cheops and Chephren, preferring to call them ‘Philitis’, after the name of a shepherd who had once pastured his flock in their shadow.

  Masonry, and is it man’s? . . . I shudder at the thought of the ancient Egyptians.
r />   Herman Melville, Journey up the Straits

  Djinguereber Mosque, Timbuktu

  Row on row of gloomy mudbrick arches. Bat guano. Wasps’ nests in the rafters. Shafts of sunlight falling on reed mats like the beams of a burning glass.

  The marabout interrupted his prayers to ask me a few questions.

  ‘There is a people call the Mericans?’ he asked.

  ‘There is.’

  ‘They say they have visited the Moon.’

  ‘They have.’

  ‘They are blasphemers.’

  A very short History of the Skyscraper:

  Everyone knows that the Tower of Babel was conceived as an attack on Heaven. The officials in charge of the construction were few. The work-force was innumerable: and in order that commands might not be misconstrued, every worker was required to speak the same language.

  Little by little, as the courses of masonry succeeded one another, the Highest Authority became anxious that the concept of a war against Heaven might be meaningless: worse, that God in His Heaven might not exist. At an emergency session of the Central Committee, it was decided to launch a probe into the sky. Salvoes of missiles were fired off, vertically; and when these returned to Earth, bloodstained, here was proof that God, after all, was mortal; and that work on the Tower should proceed.

  He, for His Part, resented being pricked in the backside. One morning, with a disdainful puff, He unsteadied the arm of a mason on one of the uppermost terraces, causing him to drop a brick on to the head of a fellow mason below. It was an accident. Everyone knew it was an accident, but the mason below began shouting threats and insults. His comrades tried to calm him, in vain. Everyone took sides in the quarrel without knowing what the quarrel was about. Everyone, in his righteous anger, refused to listen to what his neighbour was saying, and used language intended to confuse. The Central Committee was helpless: and the work gangs, each of whom now spoke a different language, took refuge from each other in remotest regions of the Earth.