It was instantly terrifying. One moment we were driving quietly down the final stretch of the airport road into the southern Libyan oasis town of Ghadames, then suddenly, out of the darkness, armed men rushed into the road and surrounded our car. A band of Touareg — immediately recognisable from the cotton tagilmus veils wrapped around their heads — ordered us to stop. “Stop the car! They’re going to shoot!” I shouted, as the car slowed. I was convinced we were not going to stop in time and they were going to fire straight through the windscreen. We would be dead in seconds. “Get out of the car!” they screamed. Whichever way I looked, I was staring down the barrel of an AK-47 into the adrenaline-charged face of a man who looked as though he was going to pull the trigger. The windless calm of a desert night became a maelstrom of panic. In the driver’s seat my friend Taher, whom I have known since 1998, was shouting not to shoot. Sitting on his lap, his two-year-old son Mohammed started crying. A shrill note of distress came from Taher’s wife, shrouded from head to toe in black, in the back seat. Before I had time to think, the Touareg were pulling me roughly out of the car on the passenger side, pointing rifles in my face and ordering me to lie down. Taher and his family were hauled out on the other side. I held up my hands in surrender, fearing summary execution. More screaming and jabbing of rifle barrels. Unseen hands grabbed me and threw me to the ground on my stomach. My arms were pulled up painfully behind my back and tied tightly. I could no longer see what was happening to Taher and his family. Then my head was raised, a blindfold was pulled around my head and all was darkness and noise. Hauled into the back of a pick-up, I was rammed down flat onto a thin mat while my legs scraped uncomfortably against metal. Kalashnikovs, hands and feet shoved me into the required position. I felt completely powerless. They had prepared me for a roadside shooting and there was nothing I could do about it. “Please,” I began feebly in Arabic. “No please,” came a curt reply. I kept silent for the next 30-40 minutes as we tore off into the desert, rearranged like luggage every few minutes. No one would know where we were. My wife in London and a couple of friends in Tripoli would not be expecting to hear from me for another 24-48 hours. I prayed the four of us would be spared. I WONDERED how it had all happened on this, the eve of the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Years earlier, I had researched the history of the Touareg and written a book on Libya. Now I was heading to Ghadames to look up old friends and investigate suggestions that bad things had been happening in this far-flung oasis. Historically uneasy relations between the town’s Arab-Berber population and the Touareg had apparently fractured into all-out conflict in the wake of the revolution that had ousted Colonel Muammar Gadaffi. For the past six months Gadaffi had been using a Touareg militia as his enforcers. They had suppressed the initial uprising of February 20 with the regime’s customary brutality, rounding up, imprisoning and beating numerous Ghadamsis. On August 28 the town had risen up and thrown them out. A friend spoke of reprisals. Touareg homes had been torched and bulldozed. I had driven straight into an unreported front line. For centuries, the Touareg, an ancient desert people, earned their living by escorting caravans through the Sahara. Merchants were “encouraged” to retain armed guards for the journey through areas under Touareg control. Those caravans that eschewed the protection racket were frequently plundered by the same men who had offered their services. James Richardson, the British explorer and anti-slave trade campaigner who travelled across the Libyan Sahara in 1845, was among the first Europeans to come into contact with the “Touarick”. They showed “an excessive arrogance”, he reported, and treated Ghadamsis with “great disdain, considering them as so many sheep which they are to protect from the wolves of the Sahara”. Sitting astride their magnificent white mehari camels, they looked “splendid and savage”. My Touareg kidnappers, the Toyota Land Cruiser generation, certainly looked savage. The ragged wardrobe of T-shirts, filthy jalabiya robes, camouflage trousers and unkempt tagilmuses was anything but splendid. Around this time, blindfolded face down in the back of a pick-up with hands tied and heart pumping, I began the sliding descent into fatalism that must be a common reaction to this sort of situation. After about 40 minutes, the engine stopped. Hands hauled me to my feet. For some reason I imagined I was about to be thrown off a cliff and felt ridiculous going to my end so meekly. Instead I found myself on the ground. My hands were untied, the blindfold was kept on and arms guided me into the cabin of the pick-up where I was ordered to keep both hands on a handrail. For another 90 minutes I clung on with clammy hands as we drove deeper into the Sahara. We stopped several times. At regular intervals came the disconcerting metallic click of men loading Kalashnikovs. Questions began. What was I doing going to Ghadames? Was I a spy? Why was I travelling when there was a war on? Was I working for Nato? What did I know about the Touareg? We stopped several times as different drivers took turns to ask me the same questions. I explained I was a historian and journalist who had travelled in the Libyan Sahara with Touareg guides who had become good friends — perhaps they knew Abd al Wahab Behi? I loved Libya and admired the Touareg and their eastern counterparts of the desert, the Tabu. I had written a book about my expedition across the Sahara and wanted to find out more about the current situation. Finally we stopped, I was pulled out and the blindfold was removed. It was an unforgettable sight. We were not quite at the bottom of a slight basin surrounded on three sides by dunes curving softly in black silhouettes. One side ran out into an unfathomable plain lit by an almost full moon. Above, the overwhelming dome of an indigo sky tapered gently into a pale blue halo ringing the horizon. The stars, already brilliantly clear, grew brighter by the minute. I couldn’t help thinking it would be hard to imagine a more beautiful place in which to meet one’s maker. Behind me, halfway up the slope, was a cluster of silent Touareg. In front of me were three pick-ups and the beginnings of an overnight camp. I counted 16 men, all with Kalashnikovs. A Touareg handed me a damp quilt and ordered me to lie down away from the main group. There was no sign of Taher and his family but I was told they were with us. I wrapped myself in the quilt and tried to sleep, as the Touareg made a fire. A clear mind would be more use than one fuzzy with exhaustion. Much later, a man approached and offered food. I declined and asked for some water, regretting the chance to establish a rapport with my kidnappers but utterly without hunger. Around the campfire, the twentysomething Touaregs gossiped into the early hours. Before dawn broke, one of the group hustled me awake and we were off. With huge relief I glimpsed Taher and his family 100 yards away, but was told not to look. On we drove. Eventually, we spilt out of the pick-up, and I was handed some water, a plastic carton of olives, three tiny tins of tuna, half a pack of La vache qui rit cheese and an armful of half-stale bread and motioned to join Taher’s group. “If they want to kill us, there’s nothing we can do about it,” I said. “It’s up to Allah.” Taher nodded at this statement of the obvious. “Of course, our lives are in the hands of Allah.” Looking at Taher, I remembered the passage in Ahmed Hassanein Bey’s extraordinary book The Lost Oases, published in 1925, when he described how the Bedouin, when lost in the desert with exhausted camels and dwindling supplies of water, having received no answer to his prayers, would finally sink down upon the sands and await “with astounding equanimity the decreed death. This is the faith in which the journey across the desert must be made”. This was an altogether different, entirely involuntary journey, but I understood this very Muslim and ultimately liberating reaction, at the heart of which lies the understanding that one’s life is in the hands of a higher, irresistible force. “They told me if the Touareg prisoners in Ghadames are not released by 12 o’clock, they will kill all of us,” Taher said. This tested my newfound fatalism rather more keenly than I had expected. The sun rose and poured down the paralysing heat of a late Saharan summer. Our tiny patch of shade grew smaller and smaller. We squashed together to keep Taher’s wife and brave little child as cool as possible. Three of our captors kept watch on the highest dune far above us. We fell in and out of sleep. As the deadline neared, I heard a pick-up approach and out jumped a couple of Touareg with their AK-47s and a spade. One started digging and my stomach tightened. This was it. He was digging our graves. A bullet in the head and a desert burial. Instead, he pulled out a thin strip of cloth and a couple of bamboo poles and erected a Heath Robinson shade. Another reprieve. Around the hottest part of the day I was taken off separately. More questioning. An Algerian translator ran through the usual Nato-spy-infidel stuff. I repeated the desert-loving, Touareg-admiring lines and mentioned that only recently I had been talking to the head of the United Nations in Libya about the difficulties in the south and the problems of the Touareg. I might be able to help, I hinted. One of the kidnappers stepped forward. “We want you to tell the world what has happened in Ghadames,” he said. “For 800 years we have lived together. The desert came before the city, the Touareg before the Arabs. All Libya is desert. But the Ghadamsis say no, we cannot live in the city any more. They have burnt and bulldozed our houses, killed our camels, sheep and goats, stolen our money and gold.” I asked if I could take notes and scribbled furiously in my notebook, hastening the transformation from hapless hostage to working journalist. Slightly irritated by the constant kuffar (infidel) remarks, I told them that as a Christian I was one of the Ahl al-Kitab, or people of the book, a Koranic reference to the Christian, Jewish and Sabian religions. Encouragingly, they started calling me modeer, or director. Then it was back into the pick-up and a long afternoon twisting and turning through an astonishingly beautiful sand sea, moving from the dazzling blandness of the desert into postcard scenes of wilting palms, dollops of green scrub and an ancient fort in what I later found was the tiny oasis of Mougazem. In the late afternoon we stopped for the obligatory tea, a ritual as beloved by the Touareg as the British. One of my captors drew a finger across his throat and said the Touareg were honourable people. They would not kill me. Night came, the stars swung up into the sky, and I was put into another pick-up with a blindfolded old man and Taher’s wife and child. Taher was being held until the Touareg prisoners were released, they said. They would take us towards Dirj, the next town north of Ghadames. A couple of hundred yards away from the desert road the Toyota stopped. My mobile phone was thrust into my hands, there was a brief farewell handshake and the pick-up disappeared behind a blur of sand. It was over. AT the time of writing, Taher is still being held in the desert. For the Touareg kidnappers, desperate remnants of Gadaffi’s forces, it is a dangerous and ill-advised move. It has widened the existing fractures within Ghadames. Even before the kidnap, many of the Touareg, whom the local council says number 1,800 of the population of 12,000, had fled, intimidated by the reprisals. “The Touareg can never come back,” says one Ghadamsi. “Not after this.” Abubakr Haroun, a member of the local interim council, strikes an almost solitary note of reconciliation. “People are very angry now, but the Touareg are a part of Ghadames,” he says. “Of course, of course, of course they’ll come back and they’ll be represented on the council when we have elections.” In this isolated oasis is a microcosm of the many challenges facing the new Libya. Ghadames needs the urgent attention of Tripoli and its international partners. Reconciliation here, as across Libya, must be the order of the day.

Who didn’t experience a frisson of excitement at the news on Wednesday that a French military expedition had achieved what none before had managed – a crossing of the Darwin Cordillera, the famously inhospitable mountain range in southern Chile? Notwithstanding the soupçon of disappointment that this stirring feat of exploration was French rather than British, it was one of those moments that bound us together in a celebration of what humans can, and invariably must, do. As a species, we are born to explore. It is no criticism of the French expedition to observe that it is unlikely to have elicited discoveries of scientific value. That was not its point. Adventurous, death-defying missions like this serve a different purpose, inspiring a new generation of explorers and scientists to take to the field, driven by curiosity and the desire to feel snow, rain, wind, sand and sun on their faces. For the Frenchmen, it was a case of ducking into the blinding snow and roaring winds of the Furious Fifties while avoiding falling seracs, avalanches and hidden crevasses, all of this while pulling 165lb loads on sleds. Contrary to popular belief, there is no shortage of terra incognita for Homo sapiens to explore, study and understand. All the digital mapping in the universe, all the most brilliant techniques of geospatial information systems will never remove the need for inquisitive men and women to take to the field and make discoveries that are critical to our survival, and that of untold species and environments threatened by our activities. As Jamie Buchanan-Dunlop, director of Digital Explorer, an educational programme that brings expeditions into the classroom, puts it: “The notion that there’s no longer a need to go out into the field and explore because of modern marvels like Google Earth is a misapprehension. We have wonderful images of swaths of rainforest canopy, but we still need people to find out what’s underneath. We have satellite images of the great expanses of ocean ice, but we still send explorers out there with old-fashioned technologies like ice-core samplers. And in terms of the rapid changes occurring to habitats across the world, you simply can’t investigate what’s going on from outer space.” The oceans, which cover more than 70 per cent of the planet, still contain innumerable mysteries. The American explorer Bob Ballard, better known for finding the Titanic, argues that his greatest achievement was the discovery in 1977 of hydrothermal vents off the Galapagos Islands. Deep in these dark waters, more than 2,000 metres beneath the surface, lived previously unknown chemosynthetic animals, part of the first major ecosystem that did not live off solar energy but the energy of the earth. It challenged the received wisdom about the potential for life on other planets. Confronted by climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, biodiversity, desertification, growing populations, poor water supply, the forced migration of species and a host of other unknowns, we still have a huge amount to learn about our planet. According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, estimates of the number of species on Earth range from five million to 30 million. Of these, only 1.75 million have been formally described. The same study found that more than 60 per cent of the ecosystem services examined, including fresh water and fisheries, were being degraded or used unsustainably, resulting in “a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth”. We are only just starting to understand some of the innermost secrets of the world’s rainforests. Of the insects recovered from the canopy, inaccessible until recent years, an estimated 80 per cent are unknown to science. Andrew Mitchell, founder and director of the Global Canopy Programme, says this is the “richest, least known, most threatened habitat on Earth”. Satellites supplement, rather than substitute for, the work of explorers and scientists on the ground. Thus in 2009, aided by the latest in infrared recording, the BBC Natural History Unit discovered a new species of giant rat 1,000 metres up in the remote jungle of Papua New Guinea. “Understanding and managing our changing planet requires continual and massive scientific scrutiny,” says Nigel Winser, executive director of Earthwatch Institute, the international environmental charity. “At one end we are all explorers now – app in hand, recording change from ‘bud-break’ to ‘climate-watch’. At the other end, the complexity of climate change, our ecosystems and how they serve the seven billion of us, water security – and of course the enormity of coastal ecosystems, all require global programmes, led locally and harnessing the best information systems and software.” Responding to these challenges, the Royal Geographical Society will soon be returning to the field with its own research and scientific expeditions. The august body that sent Scott to the South Pole, Livingstone to Africa and Hillary to Mount Everest plans to launch five partnership projects over the next 10 years. We should salute the doughty French climbers for this latest achievement in the annals of exploration. The “white hell” they battled against in the Chilean mountains is a reminder of the lines from James Elroy Flecker’s The Golden Journey to Samarkand (a poem beloved by the SAS): … we shall go Always a little further: it may be Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow, Across that angry or that glimmering sea… This is the spirit that has always driven, and will always drive, the discoveries in our tiny corner of the universe. And it is a story that is still incomplete. Justin Marozzi is a councillor of the Royal Geographical Society; www.justinmarozzi.com

When I compiled a list of the top dozen travel writers of the past century for an American magazine the other day, it required some effort not to come up with an entirely British cast. Freya Stark, Norman Lewis, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Jan Morris were musts. So too were V. S. Naipaul and Colin Thubron, still writing up a storm, and the Ibn-Battutah-mad Tim Mackintosh-Smith for a younger generation. Although there was no space for Byron, Bell, Thesiger or Chatwin, no great legerdemain was needed to squeeze in the brilliant Dutchman Cees Nooteboom, Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish master of literary reportage, the Irishwoman Dervla Murphy and Martha Gellhorn from across the Atlantic. That left one space. In the end, it had to go to the American author of this fascinating little distillation of travel wisdom from around the world. Paul Theroux is a master of the genre who gave the then endangered travel-writing scene a fresh lease of life with the publication in 1975 of The Great Railway Bazaar, a high-spirited, four-month railway romp across Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Now 70, he sets out to arrange his thoughts on travel and those of many others into ‘a guidebook, a how-to, a miscellany, a vade mecum, a reading list, a reminiscence’. Anecdotes, vignettes and bons mots are so densely clustered that readers may well find themselves forever dipping in and out, lured from one entertaining diversion to another. In the ‘Perverse Pleasures of the Inhospitable’, Theroux rightly observes that unwelcoming places have always been a gift to the travel writer, from a friendless Ibn Battutah arriving in Tunis in 1325 (he ‘wept bitterly’) to Apsley Cherry- Garrard’s fearsome Antarctica and Stanley’s savage, cannibal-ridden Congo. There is nothing more tedious than a blissful vacation. In ‘English Travellers on Escaping England’, he sums up the history of English travel as ‘the history of people in search of sunshine’. Our beloved Prince Philip pops up in ‘Everything is Edible Somewhere’ with his line on indiscriminate, insatiable Chinese appetites: ‘If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an airplane, or swims and is not a sub- marine, the Cantonese will eat it.’ Armchair travellers will particularly enjoy the section on ‘The Things That They Carried’. Interspersed between these miscellanies are a number of mini-chapters dispensing ‘travel wisdom’ from assorted literary luminaries, from Henry Fielding to Paul Bowles. Here is Dervla Murphy advising travellers to mug up on their history before heading off, and to consult guidebooks to identify those areas most frequented by foreigners ‘and then go in the opposite direction’. Then we have Robert Louis Stevenson who expressed one of the traveller’s age-old impulses in Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879): ‘I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move’. In When the Going Was Good (1947), Evelyn Waugh made the sort of prediction that has hovered over travel literature for years, forecasting its imminent demise. You may as well anticipate the end of travel. Theroux is exercised by whether the traveller travelled alone or secretly accompanied by spouse or lover. ‘Go alone’ is the second in his list of ten prescriptions. While there is a lot to be said for the solo expedition and the cultural immersion and necessary solitude it engenders, from a literary point of view the advantage is by no means conclusive. Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, a classic of the genre, relies heavily on the hilarious relationship between the author and Hugh Carless, his companion. Chatwin, as Theroux insists, was ‘compulsively gregarious’ during his wanderings, Paddy Leigh Fermor travelled both with friends and alone, and Rebecca West was accompanied by her husband in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, nothing short of a masterpiece. So although the purist traveller may prefer to go it alone, this has no automatic bearing on the quality of the literary fruits to come. Nineteenth-century travellers, Burton not least among them, would have been surprised not to find a recommendation in Theroux’s essential checklist to learn the relevant language or languages before setting off. ‘Although ignorance of the local language thwarts exchanges of ideas, it’s unimportant on a practical level,’ he writes. In Burton’s case, of course, it saved his life. Hours of pleasure await the hardened and armchair traveller alike in these pages.Theroux has done us all a great service with this handsome, amusing and impressively researched volume. I intend to plunder from it ruthlessly for years to come.