Across The Sahara

Charles Quant tells how he accompanied a group of soldiers, including several Merseysiders, who had volunteered to try a crossing of the Sahara in ordinary Army vehicles.

The Sahara Desert.
What vivid impressions spring to the mind in the use of that phrase; thoughts of slave trains, explorers, lost cities which flourished long before stories of fabulous treasures of metals and stones which the shifting dunes lay bare- and burn again without trace.
All that, and more, is the Sahara. Five million square miles of rock sand and gravel.
All that, and more, sprang into my mind therefore, when a little group of Merseyside soldiers and their friends, invited me to join their expedition across the Sahara. Now I am back home with my notes, my photographs and my memories.
I was fortunate in my expedition friends, all members of 42nd Regiment, Royal Artillery now stationed in Cyprus but recently on a training scheme in the Libyan Desert, the old Western Desert of wartime days.
Among them on the training scheme was Major Tim Reilly, of 13 Birchfield Road, Widnes, who spent much of his childhood in Egypt, and since the war has had a period of attachment to the Libyan Army.
“Major Tim” as everyone knows him, got permission to stage an adventure training expedition across the Sahara from the coast to the fringe of the Tibesti mountains in the Republic of Chad, formerly the old French colony of Chad. He called for volunteers, and among the little group who came forward were Lieutenant Derrick Farley, of Tir-nan-og, Brookfield, Castletown, Isle of Man, Bombardier Cornelius (“Sailor”) Kyle, of 28 Cumber Lane, Whiston, Preston, Gunner John Lorimer, of 75a Navigation Road, Broadheath, Altincham, Cheshire, Lance Bombardier Norman Livesey, of 15 University Road, Bootle, Gunner Alfred Bradford, of 3 Piggot Place, Latchford, warrington, Lance Corporal Joseph Firth of 104 St John Street, Lees, Oldham, Lancashire, and Gunner Alfred Danily, of 29 Ponsonby Street, Liverpoool 8.

Slave Trails
We, our water, petrol and food spares, breakdown gear and other kit for a fortnight in the desert, were carried in five Landover’s and three 3-ton Bedford’s. None of the vehicles was specially adapted to desert travel.
All stood up well. We had our breakdowns, of course Tyres split and blew up, and the ever-present sand got into everything.
But in that fortnight we travelled 2,170 miles and at the end of it all, roared back to base, men and vehicles still fit and well, including Old Faithful, the ten-years-old Bedford.
We had crossed sand seas through which we literally manhandled the trucks for miles on end; slid down perilous escarpments of weathered rock; picked our way through boulder fields, the craters of extinct volcanoes and over flint-strewn ridges, followed slave trails and trade routes through ridges and ranges which our maps did not show at all, so that future travellers might escape the perils of unchartered travel.

Lost a Stone
Part of our journey lay along the route which that great Frenchman, General Leclerc, had followed when he made his great march from Chad, bursting from Tibesti like a hot wind from hell upon the Italian and German garrisons at Montgomery swept them from the coast.
I lost about a stone in weight, and the skin of my face was sandblasted away by the broiling sun and bitter wind, which make the Sahara winter.
So to the start of our journey. Eight-thirty a.m. on a bright desert morning at Tarhuna.
The air is filled with the rumble of engines as the trucks warm up in the icy air for the voyage south to the desert, the old, timeless Sahara, where the only ships are the camels of tradition.
No, that is not quite right. Oil has brought other desert ships, huge multi-wheeled Lorries on giant balloon tyres, voyaging across the sand seas in search of oil.
They have found it, too, south of Benghazi, and I cannot help wondering what Rommel would have felt, had he known that under his feet where he ground to a standstill at Alamein for lack of fuel, there is a sea of oil.
That desert landmark, Marble Arch, is now the site of one huge oil terminal, and there is another at Mersa Brega. Twenty million pounds have been spent on the associated pipelines and terminals, and untold millions more on drilling far away in the desert.
But I am daydreaming while the drivers are climbing into their cabs. We are away!

Bare Hills
Sahara Diary, First Night:
Here I sit, with my back to the hub of a Landrover, under the black bowl of the desert night, dusted over with stars such as we never see at home in our murky air, it is easy to let imagination wander; to the Romans whose magnificent city of Leptis Magna we passed this morning, and whose culverts and cisterns once husbanded the meagre desert rainfall and made it the home of millions of people before unsophisticated nomads let the sand drift into the irrigation systems.
It has been a fast but wearying journey. We had good tracks to travel including a desert road, which would have made my old friends in the Eighth Army open their eyes in wonder.
From Tarhuna the road led over the bare brown hills. Endless regimental lines of olive trees bear witness to the industry of bygone generations, and it is said that some of the oldest and most gnarled trees were once sprigs from trees which in their young days were planted by the Romans. It is quite feasible. I gather that a thousand years to and olive tree is nothing.
The little convoy rushed on towards Cussabat, and anybody who has been in the army knows how that name comes up in soldiers’ talk. It is a grubby little village of no distinction, except for the pale green tiled wellhead in the middle of the village street, which is as clean and charming as the rest is dirty. I wonder who built it, and (more interesting still) why?
Cussabat fell behind, and Homs too, with its noble neighbour and predecessor, Leptis Magna, the great Roman city of golden stone and marble fronting the incomparable Mediterranean shore.

Comp Tea
We passed through Misurata, now the centre of flourishing carpet industry, and the almost endless groves of date palms where the villagers were gathering and sorting the brown and golden fruit.
Suddenly, the date palms and vegetable patches gave up the struggle, and we were driving over desert, with no green thing but the camel thorn with its three-inch spikes. The rest was stone and sand, where the cottages of the old Italian colonists stand empty and deserted, or tenanted by the sheep and goats of the Bedouin who themselves live in camel hair tents in what were once the gardens.
The desert is on the way back.
Noon came, and under the scant shade of the trucks we ate a hunk of bread and bully and frank compo tea. Tyres were checked; engines inspected; tanks refilled from our load of jerry cans; then we were back on board and the ribbon of the southern track would out before us again as far as Gheddahia, the junction of the coast track and the desert track.
We turned right, heading due south while the coast road went on another 500 miles to Benghazi.
The going was excellent, so good that when Major Tim held up his hand and signalled a wadi as the harbouring area for the night, every driver had been made careless by the previous good going, and sank his vehicle up to the axles in the sand, as the convoy swung off the track.
Now I am full of compo rations and feeling very comfortable. The signallers have put up their aerials and chat nonchalantly with base a couple of hundred miles away.

A Sputnik
Sahara Diary, second night.
It is 8.05 p.m. and I have just seen a brilliant sputnik go sailing overhead, it first came into view at about 7.30 and we saw it when looking for the Pole Star. In those desert latitudes, the Plough does not come above the horizon until well on in the night, and the Pole has to be found with other indications.
Here we are, 450 miles from Tarhuna, in real desert now. And what a day it has been.
By 7.45 the trucks were loaded. Then came the first fly in the ointment. The B.S.M. noticed a little weep from a radiator, and there was nothing for it but to strip it down, and luckily locate a loose clamp on the hose. But that gave us a warning that expeditions do not always have it their own way, and the convoy got off at 9.00 a.m. instead of 8.00 a.m.
Within a few score yards, the most heavily laden three-tonner lurched off the embanked track, and its offside wheels sank into the soft sand shoulder of the track, tilting the truck 45 degrees, within inches of overturning.
We lashed another three-tonner alongside to help keep the equilibrium of the poised vehicle right, and came out the sand channels, implements that we were to know very well before the expedition was over.
Long slabs of perforated steel sheets; they can be placed under the wheels in order to give more solid grip on the soft sand. But they have to be dug down into the sand before they are any use when the bogging is a bad case-like this one.
It took an hour, with one three-tonner helping alongside, and another pulling from behind, before that stranded truck was back on to the hard high ground.
Fortunately, this happened just out of sight of Bungem, a little oasis village round a bend. British dignity would have suffered a jolt if we had had the usual crowd of small boys to stand and watch…..
For the rest of the morning we toured steadily over the flat, featureless stone desert.
Towards mid-morning we began running alongside bare brown hills, dismal, eroded, desolate, their flanks scarred by immense wadis.
This was about the southerly limit of penetration of the Eight Army proper, though of course the Long range Desert Group sent patrols a thousand miles or more to the south, lying up in the oases, raiding to the west and north.
One of the oases was Uaddan, a large village that we struck midway through the afternoon.
Dominating the village of Uaddan was the Old Italian fort. The Italians built these forts all over their colonial territories to guard the caravan routes, keep the tribesmen under control, and assert Italian sovereignty. According to most accounts, however, the Italian writ did not run very far from the forts. Out in the open desert, the wild desert warriors fought to the end, and their survivors lived to see Libya given independence when the British forces had thrown out the Italians and Germans.
The palms and fort of the Uaddan soon fell behind as we pressed on to the south.
The greater part of the Sahara is stone, or rock or gravel, in rolling plains or mountain ranges or low hills.
The part which now faced us was real North West Frontier sort of country; foothills of bare black rock, burnt and blistered by centuries of searing sun.
Our next oasis was Hon, which we reached in the middle of the afternoon. It is a startling place, with unlimited water not very far underground and rich plantations of palms and thousands of tiny, irrigated plots of vegetables and animal fodder. Here, too the LRDG often laid up under cover, waiting for a chance to strike at the enemy in the north.
The third oasis in our days run was a poor place called Sokna, with decrepit houses patched with the old bits of tin and palm fronds.
The rest of the daylight saw us grinding through immense rock-strewn valleys. Yet, so unpredictable is the incidence of water in the Sahara that in the middle of that black vastness, there was a well surrounded by green bushes and grass. A Bedu shepherd was pasturing his flock some way up the valley, clearly relying on the well for water.
The modern track follows the old track, and up to we climbed, reaching an awesome plateau of yet more black rock. Another hour through this brought us to a flat, alluvial valley, where we turned off the track for the night and camped beside a cairn of stones marking some lonely Bedu grave.

Third Night
This has been a dad day. Sahara travel, for all the marked tracks and modern navigation aids, is still a tricky business. To night we are at Sebha, but only just.
Trouble with one landrover, which had lost half its exhaust, and another which had developed carburettor trouble, put us back a bit, but we were on the road by 8.30 ready to face the traverse of Serir el Gattrousa, the Wilderness of the She-Cat. Why this stony desolation possesses that name I do not know, except for the fact that big desert wildcats are sometimes seen in parts of the Sahara. They ate often the size of a retriever and can catch and pull down a gazelle but more often live on the little jerboa, the desert rat.
But it gave us a good thing for we raced across that wilderness at a steady 40m.p.h. all abreast, trailing plumes of dust.
After an hour of this chilly but good going, we struck bad. The ominous marching dunes of the Sahara decided to take a hand, invading the line of the track, overlapping everything with their great rolling shoulders and powdery flanks.
After another three miles of surging through the rolling dunes, the track disappeared, the dunes disappeared, many miles away and far below. We had come out, entirely without warning, on the very edge of an escarpment, from which we looked down on to the plain of sand and gravel many hundreds of feet below.
On either side, the escarpment was carved and sculptured by wind and sand, so that the cliffs stood folded and distorted into fantastic shapes. Outriders stood like sentinels in the distant plain; single hills with bulging tops tapering to narrow necks, like enormous bloated toadstools of red menacing rock. Round the feet of these weird pieces of nature’s sculpture the dunes lay in vast seas of folded sand.
Through this fantastic moon-landscape the track wound its perilous way down a narrow ledge carved out of the shoulders of one of the rock pinnacles jutting out from the escarpment.
I got out and walked. The trucks screamed in bottom gear and the smell of hot brake linings drifted up to me as I followed them down.
Yet it was not this perilous descent, but open desert going, which brought us to a long standstill. Stopping for a quick snack, we waited in vain for the tail of the convoy to catch up. We sent back a landrover to see what had happened and, in fact, it had got stuck as well with sand and dust in the fuel, just like the missing two vehicles, it had gone to search for. Fortunately, the fitter travelled in the last landrover and eventually he got them all in action again. But the long delay had cost us the early arrival in Sebha and left us with 50 miles of fearful corrugated track to follow before we reached the desert town.
At last the hilltop fort of Sebha rose out of the haze a sheer slope of rock, topped with a jagged, crenulated crown of fortification, one of the most famous and impregnable of the desert forts of this part of the Sahara.
Built by the Italians to over-awe the tribesmen , it survived all manner of attacks, end before the Libyans took over in 1951, and its last occupants were the French Foreign Legion. They were a tough lot. Mainly ex-Afrika Korps men and they took their time about handing over, until a British R.S.M. with the Libyan forces sent in a message that if they did not move sharpish, he would bring down 25-pounder fire on the fort from his guns hidden in groves of nearby palm trees.
We soon found a camp spot under the shadow of the fort, and I went off to the town to explore.
It shook me, for there, 500 miles from the coast, deep among the arid sands and rocks of the Sahara was a smart modern town, with cinema, shops, running water, fluorescent street lights, flush sanitation, and to crown it all, a hotel serving ice cold beer.
I wandered round the streets, where trees are being grown in the irrigation channels, hardly able to believe my eyes.
The clue to all this greenery is the underground water, sweet and pure, which is present a few yards below the surface, and which is pumped up to serve the needs of the 4,000 or so inhabitants. It’s like that in the Sahara; for all the sweltering heat, you come across spots where water lies only just bellow the surface, and never fails.
Sebha was chosen as the capital of Fezzan, the southernmost province of Libya, because of its abundant water, and the government of Libya is now engaged in creating a modern town round the ancient water point.
Guided by a friendly motorcycle policeman. I found the hotel, grandiloquently named The Palace- but I found it to be indeed a palace, and maintained by quite the most flamboyant and colourful character of my whole trip.
On the concrete step of the fine modern building, I was greeted by a vast, rotund figure of a man with a neatly trimmed beard and a welcoming smile.
“Come in, how are you, what’s news in the north? I am Morsi Zacchi call me Haj Morsi” he went on without a moments pause, and I followed his vast presence into a large, cool, well-appointed hall, from which the sound of ice tinkling in glasses could be heard in the middle distance. He led me into a bar stocked as I have rarely seen bars anywhere, with the most common and rare, the finest and most famous beverages.
There, deep in the Sahara, surrounded by the howling wilderness of sand and stone, which had reduced me to parched misery over the past three days, I tasted the superb nectar of ice-cold lager.
It was quite unbelievable and when the rest of the expedition arrived shortly afterwards, they could not believe if either- but that did not stop them ranging through Haj Morsi’s stock with a fine discrimination
He was a remarkable character. An Egyptian by birth, commanding half a dozen languages and claiming close acquaintance with kings and marshals, politicians, prelates and presidents (and backing up his claims with a wealth of supporting detail which was so circumstantial as to be beyond coincidence) Haj Morsi had been to Mecca like all good Muslims (as the title Haj indicated). He had hotelled in Egypt, France, Tunis and Libya as well as other Mediterranean countries, and he ran that place like a dream.

Fourth Night
To night we sleep on the fringe of the Sand Sea of Murzouk, and the toughest part of the journey lies just over the dune overlooking our camp. We did 80 miles to day, and the sand channels for the trucks came out for the first time, but to-morrow we will be very lucky to cover the 20 miles of sandy desolation, which we now face..
This morning, very early, we woke at Sebha in our camp beneath the frowning Foreign Legion fortress, and drew water from the fine deep wells to keep us going for the next 1,000 miles.
All morning we motored over the gravel plains of the Wilderness of the Shebcat, alternately driving at a swift 40 m.p.h. on the good going, and digging our trucks out of the equally treacherous bad going where the sand came up to the axles without warning.
But we had more good going than bad, and progressed tolerably well. The good going was marvellous, and the thrill of motoring over utter flatness was indescribable. The big three-tonners really came into their own, racing along with hardly a tremor.
They were certainly a good little fleet of vehicles and most remarkable of all was the ten-years old Bedford. It had survived goodness knows how many campaigns and exercises in Cyprus and the desert. It was battered and much patched-but it went like a bird, and we all took an affectionate interest in the doings of Old Faithful.

Fifth Night
We are through. The dreaded Sand Sea of Murzouk lies behind us, and it passed in such quick time, that we can still hardly believe our good luck.
To night we camp near the oasis of Gatrun, 70 miles south of the Sand Sea.
All the same, it was not a pleasant experience.
We were up long before dawn to day, for sand can best be crossed when the temperature is low, for then the sand “binds” better beneath the tyres. We had all spent a disturbed night, for the jackals howled all night long in the Wilderness of the She Cat.
The start was bitterly cold, and I huddled in two pullovers and a duffle coat on top of all the clothes I had with me.
It was a remarkable sight as we rode out of the camp. The whole eastern sky was banded with light; a pale, thin orange-yellow, no more than six fingers breadth above the horizon. Riding fourth in the convoy, I could see the tail lights of the preceding three vehicles shining like red will o’ wisps as the trucks manoeuvred and lurched among the dunes, their headlights swallowed up in the immensity of blackness all around us.
Inevitably we stuck, within a few score yards of camp. As if hauled back by some giant hand, the whole convoy came to a standstill, and we in the front seats lurched forward against the windscreens. Well drilled in advance, we all leapt out to shove, and the trucks got going again without recourse to sand channels-yet.
The convoy went on, and the light in the southeastern sky for brighter. The trucks, which had been no more than pairs of red winking lights in the blackness, became silhouettes against a imperceptibly lighter sky, and now we could see tiny running figures beside them as the crews leapt out, shoved, leapt aboard again, leapt out, shoved…. in a fantastic ballet for men and machinery.
It was a long uphill slope that brought us to our knees. In its powdery, shifting sand, that rose and drifted like smoke, so fine it was, at every step, the trucks bedded themselves well in. In fact, they practically drove into the slope with the sand piled up round the front axles and against the radiators.
For several miles we ran beside the trucks, digging holes beneath the wheels, inserting the steel channels, rushing back to recover the channels as the trucks lurched forward, running forward to throw them under the wheels in time to avert more digging, and so on and so on. It is about the most exhausting form of exercise I have ever encountered. Sometimes we managed to get the trucks going at more than jog-trot pace, but then we had to run behind carrying the heavy steel channels; to stop the trucks and put the channels aboard would have meant seeing the trucks sink to the axles again.
But for the most part, we did that sand sea on foot, at a steady jog trot, each carrying a five feet long, eighteen inches wide sheet of steel nearly a quarter of an inch thick.
This went on all morning as the sun came over the horizon and climbed up the sky, and duffle coats and pullovers came off one by one. We lost count of time, but toiled along beside the toiling trucks, and some of us wondered why in the name of sanity we had decided to go on this madcap expedition.
Then suddenly, and it seemed miraculously, a three-tonner got on top of the sand. It no longer dug great troughs with its wheels, but spread them like a camel’s pads, on top of the sand crust-and it ran ahead at a good 15 miles and more an hour. It was quite unbelievable. We all collapsed in the sand with our channels, and watched it steaming towards the horizon. We did not know whether to cheer the driver, who had achieved such a miracle, or yell for him to stop and pick us up, for that horizon was a good six miles away and each of us was burdened with 30 pounds of unwieldy sand channel.
With its engine screaming in bottom gear, the three-tonner disappeared into the haze-but fortunately, a Land Rover came up from behind and slowed sufficiently for us to hurl our sand channel aboard and jump onto the wings. There we perched, and the Rover kept going with an occasional shove. It was fortunate that it did come along, otherwise we would have had to do the rest of the journey on foot.
In double quick time, we were out of the sea, on the edge of the gravel again. Behind us lay the utter nothingness of the Sand Sea of Murzouk; a blistering blinding shimmering haze, with not a thing in sight. For half an hour we waited, but no more vehicles came through, so we turned a landrover round, emptied out all the heavy kit and set off back to help the rest. Half an hour back along our own tracks, we came on another three-tonner, labouring along on channels, with a sweating squad of helpers evidently determined to dig their way to the Tibesti.
Our own channels made an immediate difference. We were able to lay quite a track of them in front of the wheels, and very quickly the truck got on top, in the way we had found so rewarding, and it too disappeared into the haze. We followed in the Landrovers, accompanied by the third three-tonner, the veteran Old Faithful, which had got into better going just about the same time.
Half an hour later we were all out on the gravel beds, enjoying a late lunch, with the delight of knowing that the worst obstacle was behind us. It had taken us from 6a.m. to get through, but we had the consolation of knowing that a group of Royal Engineers who tried the same trip a few weeks ago took three days, an average of about seven miles a day.
So here we are, 70 miles south of the sand sea, with no more that 250 miles to the Tibesti. But we are not too well off for petrol. We have just enough. The heavy going in the sand sea used more that we had anticipated.
Drinkable water is getting low, but we hope to get some in the morning, from the oasis wells nearby which will for washing and radiators.

Sixth Night
A thrilling, and frustrating day.
Here we are, camped in a wilderness of rock and boulders, shut in from behind by precipices, with our maps badly out of true and to-morrow’s journey completely unpredictable.
We were up at dawn, ready for the long leg across the gravel to Tegerhi, another oasis from which we hoped to get a map and sun compass fix on Ras Tegerhi, a big isolated hill which would give us the right direction to move.
In no time at all, we found the map had let us down, for there was no Ras Tegerhi where the map showed it. Quite by chance, we found the oasis of Tegerhi. A villager pointed out Ras Tegerhi on quite a different bearing, some 20 miles from where the maps showed it.
The fort of Tegerhi was the first fort, which Leclerc hit when he came out of the desert with his Free French. I have never seen a sight of greater desolation. The old village, grouped round the fort, was deserted, and a new one built among the palms half a mile away- where the villagers gave us a friendly reception.
They put us on the right track for Ouigh, a huge depression we must cross and off we went top scale Ras Tegerhi, from which the track leads south.
The appalling rocks spit in quick succession two of our three-tonner tyres.
Travelling on across this great rocky upland, we came without warning to a precipice.
Before our feet the desert fell away in great leaping shoulders of rock. Hundreds of feet below us lay a plain of white mud, with ridges of red rock. Sprawling in the mud were thousands of strange shapes.
It took us two hours of searching and Recce to find a rock gulley half filled with drift sand, so that we could launch our trucks down in wild, uncontrollable skids.
Down on the bottom we began our journey across the white mud plain among the weird population of this moon landscape, Hillocks as big as a house, leaning figures like lions at the crouch protruded from the mud pan, and I was amazed to find that they were all made of hard mud.
As far as I know they have only been marked on the maps ever before by the Long Range Desert Group, who called this the Valley of the Clay Lions.
What a thrill must those wandering warriors of 20 years ago have felt when they became the first-ever white men to set foot among these crouching shapes of this petrified menagerie.
We also came across a tree trunk, 60 feet long, of petrified wood.
Did animals live in this fossil world of stone trees, and lions and mud whales? Did even man perhaps?

Seventh Night
To night we sleep in Chad.
We have left Libya behind, and we are in what was one part of France’s Equatorial African possession.
To-morrow we cannot travel beyond lunchtime. Work it out as we will. There is only just enough petrol to take us another 50 miles, and then we must turn back, if we are to have enough to get us back to Tarhuna.
Even the journey so far has been achieved only with the strictest discipline on petrol.
But we sleep in Chad. We have crossed the Sahara.
At one stage in to-day’s journey-on a lonely ridge in the depression of Ouigh El Kebie-I came across hundreds of scraps of thin flint. Most were split fragments, but among them were many that had clearly been partially sharpened by chipping the thin edges. Several had begun to assume the leaf-shape of primitive arrowheads, when presumably the workman had made a mistake and the flint had broken.
This was the workshop, I am sure, of some primitive Stone Age men.
Crossing another huge plateau of rock and stone, we found the ground littered with strange red-brown globules of rock, from the size of peas to oranges. Many were quite regular and round, and I picked up some that were like accurately made marbles. Several were mushroomed, as if these little spheres of rock had been hurled against a hard surface, and had squashed like a dum dum bullet.
I gather that some millions of years ago, a gigantic meteor landed in South Africa.
Millions of tons of the earth’s surface were hurled molten in the air. Most pieces solidified in the air, and came down all over North Africa, where even to day they can be found scattered about the desert.

Eight Night
To-day has seen the point of return, for we penetrated about 16 miles into Chad territory, where the foothills of the Tibesti Mountains began to rise from the wilderness of black rocks, so that we could feel we really had travelled in Chad. Then we turned round, and began our long journey back-to complete a round trip of 2,170 miles.