`To see a world in a grain of sand", wrote William Blake. Martin Buckley, a travel journalist on the brink of his fortieth year, felt he might see in countless billions of grains of sand a glimpse of his innermost self.
Explaining the inspiration of this ambitious account of his circumnavigation of the globe through its deserts, he writes: "I think we all live with a sense that somewhere inside us there is a wilderness, an area of unexplored anxieties, hatreds, desires - but also of spaciousness and calm. Everyone has his own desert."
At a time when publishers generally demand that travel books should have an original unifying theme, Buckley's proposal has a certain mystical grandeur. However, his style is as unpretentious as an honest diary, appropriately serious and unserious by turns, as he tells of his "arduous journey" across some of the poorest yet most richly enlightening regions on earth.
He was a bachelor when he set out from London on the first of his loosely-connected expeditions, a slow, zig-zag transit of what he calls "the quintessential desert", the Sahara. Long before the end of his two-year world survey, he was married. From the start, there had been a vague intention to marry in Africa. The fiancee he left in England took five months to make the plan specific. "Penny had deluged the British consulates of West Africa for information on matrimonial mores. Morocco, she discovered, forbids Christian marriage . . . Mali was an option, but too far from the sea. We opted for Dakar."
After a civil ceremony in the Senegalese capital, the religious service was conducted, in French, in the sixteenth-century Church of St Charles on the small island of Goree, a UNESCO World Heritage site just off the coast. It was from Goree, Buckley notes, that "millions of slaves" were exported to the Americas. But now "it has the somnolent atmosphere of a Mediterranean village, with peeling pale ochre and raw sienna-washed houses draped with billowing bougainvillaea". He was asked whether he wished for a monogamous or polygamous marriage with a legal maximum of four wives. "I caught something sharp in Penelope's eye, and blurted `Monogamous!' not a moment too soon."
There are no signs that he was short of money: he flew in commercial aircraft between desert and desert; there were periods of recuperation in England; Penny flew out for a couple of reunions; and they concluded the enterprise with some first-class cruising in the Mediterranean, aboard Swan Hellenic's Minerva. But the romance of most of the book is much more austere.
Maps enable one to follow him from the Sahara to the deserts of Chile and Peru, Mexico and the United States, Australia, China, Pakistan and Oman. On the long treks over sand and rock, he chose to travel with local people as they travelled, in all sorts of vehicles and even on camels, in extremes of heat and cold. There were many mechanical difficulties. He was often acutely uncomfortable and ill-fed, and once threatened with death, when he took a photograph without permission. He met a lot of interesting people and some colossal bores. The dialogue is convincing.
He gained sympathetic insights into the deprivations suffered by traditional tribal societies, such as the Tuaregs of the Agadez region, the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert and the Aborigines of the Northern Territory of Australia, economically marginalised and culturally oppressed by the American-initiated, world-wide "delirious consumerist carnival". Martin Buckley is informative and colourfully entertaining and readers are lucky that on these trips he served as their surrogate.
Patrick Skene Catling is a writer and critic