To listen to the UN security officer’s briefing in Nairobi prior to visiting Somalia, you would think Mogadishu was Armageddon on steroids. Each and every Somali would be extremely hostile, he warned, snipers around the presidential compound of Villa Somalia would pick me off if I stepped out onto a balcony, and the seaport would be raining bombs and mortars. The weather was harsh, the mosquitoes unbearable and the African Express flight was relatively secure only because the terrorist group Al Shebab used it so were unlikely to blow it up. He shook his head at this latest lamb heading off to the slaughter. “You’ll be lucky to remain safe,” he said. At least the swimming in the Indian Ocean was sensational, I ventured. “Good luck,” he shot back. “You will be welcomed by sharks.”

From the manicured lawns of Nairobi, Somalia is indeed a dark and fearful place. For two decades the country has known little but war. As a result of this relentless fighting, the statistics are surreally ghastly. An estimated 3.2 million Somalis, or 42 per cent of the population, require humanitarian assistance. There are 1.2 million internally displaced people fleeing from the conflict. While acute malnutrition among the under-fives stands at 20 per cent, one in 22 children is severely malnourished and at nine times greater risk of death than properly nourished children. Life expectancy, depending on who you believe, ranges from 47 to the mid-fifties. GDP per capita stands at an estimated $600 – most statistics are estimated in Somalia – placing the country 224^th out of 228 countries. The seaport, the country’s main commercial link to the outside world, generates $11m a year. In 2002, urban unemployment was 65 per cent. “It can be assumed that the situation in Mogadishu has deteriorated since then,” says a UNDP report.

Conflict has a changing face in Somalia. What has been constant since 1991, when the military dictator General Mohammed Siad Barre was deposed by warring clans after 21 years at the helm, is bloodshed and instability. Clan warfare evolved into warlordism – epitomised by the anarchic savagery of “Black Hawk Down” in October 1993 – which in turn metamorphosed into religiously inspired conflict. This was only brought to an end when the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) captured Mogadishu in 2006, ushering in what some Somalis call “the six months of paradise”. The US-supported Ethiopian invasion in late 2006 quickly defeated the ICU, but it also had the unintended consequence of uniting Somalis of all political and religious hues against their old enemy. Fresh instability followed the subsequent Ethiopian departure.

Today the conflict pits the fledgling transitional federal government (TFG) of onetime ICU leader President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, supported by the African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom) against Al Shabab – literally ‘The Youth’ – an unsavoury alliance of local Islamists, foreign Al Qaeda fighters and the great unwashed, brainwashed and unemployed.

The fighting in Somalia can no longer be dismissed as an obscure domestic struggle in an unimportant country of no wider relevance to the world. The crackle of machinegun fire in Mogadishu, the regular thwump of mortars, the ground-shaking shelling by Amisom tanks and the sporadic suicide attacks by delusional youths represent the frontline in the international fight against Al Qaeda. “The instability in Somalia is a threat not only to its neighbours but more widely,” says Robert Macaire, British High Commissioner in Nairobi. “The terrorist threat is very real. We’re concerned about the risk of extremists travelling to Somalia and returning to the UK to conduct attacks.” The Somali diaspora has also been well represented in terrorist attacks inside the country.

On 1 February Al Shabab announced it was making common cause with Al Qaeda in an effort to establish an Islamic state in Somalia and fight for Muslims across the Horn of Africa. Islamists gravitate towards failed states as water finds its own level. In fact, the UN recently upgraded Somalia from “failed” to “fragile” state, but the point is the same. The level of insecurity and lack of centralised law and order provide ripe conditions for repressive Islamists to flourish.

Major Ba-Hoku Barigye, Amisom’s spokesman in Mogadishu, has daily contact with Al Shabab. His phone beeps and rings every few seconds, day in, day out, as hundreds of texts and calls come in. Although they attempt to be blood-curdling, including repeated (and unfulfilled) threats to kill him, most are moronic, some unintentionally hilarious. “You are infidels and hypocrites the doomsday you are and your friend allah will punish as hell amisom i,m muslim and my religon is the best religon?” reads one.

Al Shabab controls much of southern Somalia and a good deal of Mogadishu. As an example of its concern for the wellbeing of ordinary Somalis, it recently forced the World Food Programme to suspend its activities in most parts of the south and said foreign humanitarian organisations were no longer welcome. Forty-seven aid workers, most of them Somali, were killed in 2009 and many were abducted. Al Shebab doesn’t really go in for human rights, much less women’s rights. According to Amnesty International’s 2009 report on Somalia, “Aisha Ibrahim Duholow, aged 13, was publicly stoned to death on 27 October [2008] by some 50 men in Kismayo. She was convicted of ‘adultery’ by a Sharia court without legal defence after she reported to local authorities that she had been raped by three men. The men were not prosecuted.” Al Shebab justice often comes at the end of a blade. The most serious transgressors are beheaded, other miscreants have their limbs hacked off. Some are simply shot.

Going out into Mogadishu with Amisom’s Ugandan troops in an armoured personnel carrier reveals the scale of the challenge they, the fledgling government and Somalia face. With azure skies, a streaming breeze and foam-flecked seas beneath a fiery sun, Mogadishu could be a preternaturally beautiful place. Instead, the decades of fighting have reduced homes, streets and buildings to rubble. Kabul has nothing on Mogadishu in terms of being razed to ground zero. Bombed-out and shot-out shells rise from potholed roads and mud tracks. Cattle and goats saunter along past old men in white skullcaps and veiled women in a blaze of bright colours. There is no electricity except from generators. Government services are virtually non-existent. Squalor is the norm.

The night before the first anniversary celebration of President Sharif’s administration

the ground shakes for four hours during fierce fighting between Amisom and government troops and Al Shebab. The BBC reports at least eleven killed. The next morning we drive across town to Villa Somalia, the presidential enclave on a modest bluff overlooking an astonishingly green city. Somali poets, singers and comedians take to the stage to entertain the president, prime minster, cabinet and assorted MPs. The joyful mood is suddenly shattered as mortars explode only metres away, killing one Ugandan and one Somali and injuring several more. An Amisom tank responds with gusto and then there are no more mortars. The show goes on. “The opposition has no programme but killing,” President Sharif says later in an interview.

A couple of days later, I speak to Ismail Mahmoud, 21, a former member of Al Shabab. He was injured in an attack against an Amisom position late last year. Two men fighting alongside him were killed. He was taken to the Amisom hospital and had his left leg amputated. There is nothing menacing about Mahmoud. He is a pitiful young man with a worn-out, hunted expression and an uncertain, unenviable future. Like so many Somalis his age, he has had no proper education. Now that his jihad is over, I ask whether he will find work and get on with his life. “When I had two legs, I was not able to find a job,” he replies. “How will I be able to when I only have one?”

Although Somali society is fantastically complicated by clan histories, loyalties, divisions and strife, this latest conflict is simple at the most basic level. What it boils down to is this. Al Qaeda and its supporters are providing Al Shebab with men and materiel. According to Major-General Nathan Mugisha, Amisom’s Force Commander, they are well resourced and becoming more battle-hardened and resilient by the day. Expertise is mobile and comes from the battlefields of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East. “With time Al Shebab is becoming a credible force,” he says. “We don’t need to give them this time.”

The international community, by contrast, is dawdling on the sidelines. “At the moment it’s only paying lip service to Somalia,” argues Jibril Mohammed, a Somali businessman. The UN’s position is clear. On 30 January, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said it would not deploy until the fighting stops, employing the old adage that peacekeepers need a peace to keep.

That leaves a desperately under-strength, under-financed African Union force of 5,300 Ugandans and Burundians manning the barricades in one of the world’s most fragile states. According to Amisom’s Major Barigye in February, its soldiers had not been paid since August. Whatever their promises of assistance, in practice African troop-contributing countries are deterred from providing manpower by the low levels of payment they receive compared with supporting other missions, such as the much better resourced joint UN-African Union force in Darfur. It may seem an unimportant bureaucratic quirk but on such questions of finance key decisions turn in the developing world.

The future necessarily lies with the TFG, but it too will need to be properly funded to kick-start a government that is able to provide the most basic service of all: a modicum of law, order and security. There is a long way to go. “Take out Amisom and the TFG would collapse in 30 minutes,” says one analyst. Again, the signs suggest the international community understands neither the urgency nor the gravity of the situation. In the latest UN report on Somalia, issued on 31 December last year, it was reported that of the $58m pledged to the TFG by foreign donors in Brussels last April, the government had received $5.6m. It is difficult to build an army from that. “If the TFG can get a small, capable and loyal force going, this could make a significant difference on the ground,” says Ernst Jan Hogendoorn, Horn of Africa project director for the International Crisis Group in Nairobi.

The most terrifying thing I encountered in Mogadishu had nothing to do with the UN security officer’s apocalyptic warnings, not even the cluster of mortars that dropped on us in Villa Somalia. Instead it was a story about a Somali child who came back from school in Mogadishu one afternoon to find his father listening to pop music. “Dad, you’re an infidel,” the child said. The father decided then and there it was time to leave Somalia and took his family to Kenya.

Another generation may soon be lost to the toxic delusions of Islamic fundamentalism if the international community fails to respond urgently to what is happening in Somalia. “I don’t think the West understands the magnitude of the spread of Islamic fundamentalism and its influence in the Horn of Africa,” says Abdusalam Omer, a government advisor. “There’s not a three-year-old in Somalia, Djibouti or Yemen who isn’t affected. At the moment Al Shebab is in the ascendant, opening schools in many cities. Yet if a reasonably modest investment is made in TFG they can defeat Al Shebab and Al Qaeda for the first time in any country.”

I couldn’t help it. I whooped uncontrollably into my Jordans Country Crisp with strawberries when I heard the news last week, startling my wife and spilling milk and crispy clusters onto a bemused but grateful dog. An Italian team of archaeologists had made what looked like a hugely important discovery in Egypt’s Western Desert, apparently unearthing remains of the lost army of Cambyses which, according to Herodotus, was swallowed up by a ferocious sandstorm 2,500 years ago. Had they laid to rest one of the world’s greatest archaeological mysteries?

Alfredo Castiglioni, director of the Eastern Desert Research Centre in Varese, who led the expedition with his twin brother Angelo, certainly thinks so. The team discovered a bronze dagger, a clutch of arrowheads, a silver bracelet and earring, and fragments of a necklace. ‘These objects certainly date to the Achaemenid period and so far these are the only Persian objects found in the western Egyptian desert on the border with Libya where Cambyses is said to have sent 50,000 men to conquer Siwa,’ Alfredo told Discovery News. Nearby they also found hundreds of sun-bleached bones, together with a horse bit and more blades and arrowheads — tantalising evidence of the lost army sent by the Persian Great King to sack the Oracle of Ammon in what is now the Egyptian oasis of Siwa in 525 bc.

The reason for my cereal-spluttering glee was simple. If true — and the internet is abuzz with conflicting claims, some of which cast doubt on the findings and the professional standing of the Castiglioni brothers — the discovery was another feather in the cap for Herodotus, the fifth-century bc historian rightly acknowledged by Cicero as the Father of History. In the first century ad a mean-spirited Plutarch derided him as the ‘Father of Lies’, since when history has been rather unkind to the man who invented it. Since I have spent much of the past five years travelling in his footsteps and slipstream, the Castiglioni brothers’ findings were welcome news.

All we know about the lost army of Cambyses comes from Herodotus’ Histories. The Persian force began its fateful march across the burning desert from Thebes (Luxor) on the Nile, he tells us, and got as far as the oasis of Kharga. After that, nothing more was ever heard of it. Herodotus goes on:

So much for the most catastrophic lunch in the annals of desert picnicking. The lines have prompted generations of archaeologists and Egyptologists, not to mention the television producers who prod me from time to time to have a look in the sands, to hunt for the lost army. One of the most enigmatic among them was the Hungarian aristocrat Count László de Almásy, aviator, explorer, soldier and sometime spy, inspiration for the Herodotus-loving protagonist of Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient, played by a brooding Ralph Fiennes in the eponymous film.

The controversial discoveries in the Western Desert are only the latest suggestion that Herodotus is more reliable as an historian than has generally been recognised. In 2007, a series of studies by geneticists, which looked at mitochondrial DNA from Tuscan residents and cattle, lent weight to Herodotus’ controversial claim that the ancient Etruscans originally hailed from Lydia (in today’s Turkish region of Anatolia) and later migrated to Italy, a suggestion that has often caused offence to Italians and a good deal of scoffing in Chiantishire.

Tall stories abound in the Histories, though on further examination some of the most notorious are a good deal less fanciful. Take the ‘snakes with wings’ Herodotus writes about. Today these are thought to refer either to locusts or, simpler still, the pictures of snakes with wings our itinerant historian would have encountered on Egyptian monuments. As for the fabulous ‘gold-digging ants’ in the easternmost provinces of the Persian empire, the French anthropologist Michel Peissel believes these are Himalayan marmots, a species that inhabits the Deosai plateau of Pakistani Kashmir and from whose burrows local tribes gather excavated gold dust.

What today’s historians often forget when they assess Herodotus is that he was operating in a largely oral culture in which he had to solicit information from people rather than books. Mistakes were inevitable. He couldn’t have been an armchair historian because there were no earlier works to consult. He was the first. Also, he knew a lot of the information he gleaned was hearsay, rumour and legend, some of it complete nonsense. He was quite clear about this. ‘I am obliged to record the things I am told, but I am certainly not required to believe them,’ he writes, playing a memorable get-out-of-jail-free card. ‘This remark may be taken to apply to the whole of my account.’ When you’re giving live performances of your oeuvre to austere audiences you need to give them something to keep them on the edge of their marble seats, whether it is life-saving dolphins, multiple testicle-slicers, otherworldly animals, women having sex with goats or beard-growing priestesses.

Ultimately, however, the strongest defence for Herodotus as the Father of History is made by today’s historians, whether they realise it or not. Survey the field of history across the 2,500 years since Herodotus lived and at almost any point during that time, the answer to the age-old question, and title of E.H. Carr’s classic monograph, What Is History?, was straightforward. History was the exclusive pageant of kings, battles, empires, statesmen and laws, what we call political and constitutional history. The rest of the human race, the seething mass of men and women who weren’t monarchs, statesmen or generals, simply weren’t invited. In a word, it was Thucydidean.

It was this uniquely political model, emphatically not that of Herodotus, which historians followed right into the 20th century. Only with the birth of social history did the freewheeling spirit of Herodotean inquiry return. History, ever since, has rolled back the barriers. The historian’s proper field of inquiry has expanded dizzyingly across miles and miles of uncharted terrain. It is perhaps the greatest posthumous tribute to Herodotus.

There is economic history, women’s history, demographic history, intellectual history, feminist history, gender history (herstory?), sexual history, black history, oral history, cultural history, psychohistory, history of history, and so it goes on. A good deal of this may be pseudo-academic rubbish, of course, and some of it is unquestionably boring, but the point is that the very best historians today write across a wide range of subjects with verve and to popular acclaim, prizing the art of storytelling which was one of Herodotus’ greatest gifts.

The final word should be left to Professor Paul Cartledge, Herodotus guru and A.G. Leventis, Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University. ‘Herodotus the Father of Lies?’ he says. ‘Surely not. Dead men like those 6th-century Persians mouldering in the Egyptian desert tell no false tales.’ Like it or not, and even allowing for some Castiglioni legerdemain, we are all Herodoteans now.

This is the most classical expression of the Muscat grape,” says Yiannis, my host from the Union of Wine-Making Cooperatives of Samos – a northern Greek island – and he is probably right.

My mind, though, is elsewhere. I’m thinking about one of the finest drinking sequences in English literature.

In Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (1958), his masterpiece about Greece, Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor tracked down a fisherman in Kardamyli called Evstratios Mourtzinos, whose family name suggested possible descent from the last Byzantine dynasty. The fisherman welcomed the Englishman with a brimming glass of ouzo, and Leigh Fermor embarked on a once-upon-a-time daydream that saw the Turks returning the Byzantine empire to the Greeks. Suddenly there was a vacancy on the emperor’s throne and the search for an heir began.

Unaware of his English guest’s wild imaginings, Mourtzinos wittered on about grey mullets while his wife chopped up an octopus tentacle. Leigh Fermor, swept along by a third ouzo, saw doubtful claimants to the Byzantine throne rejected one by one: the Cantacuzeni, the Stephanopoli de Comnene of Corsica, the Melissino-Comnenes of Athens…

I am welcomed, after the acclimatising vin doux, with a brimming tumbler of the Grand Cru. “You’ll find this less sweet,” says Yiannis. “We send it to the Vatican.” Bright topaz glows before me, then disappears in a warm haze.

“Now you must try the Anthemis,” Yiannis says firmly to me, pouring another tumbler of chestnut blonde wine aged in oak barrels for five years. “This is our champion wine.” And so it tastes.

More ouzo, meanwhile, for Leigh Fermor. After his fourth glass, everything was clear. The humble fisherman from Kardamyli was the rightful claimant to the throne. Preparations were made for his coronation, simple clothes were exchanged for cloth-of-gold dalmatics, diamond-studded girdles and purple cloaks.

“The fifth ouzo carried us, in a ruffle of white foam, across the Aegean archipelago and at every island a score of vessels joined the convoy.” But Leigh Fermor, reeling after a sixth ouzo, was oblivious to the fisherman’s stories of storm-tossed seas. “Loud with bells and gongs, with cannon flashing from the walls and a cloud-borne fleet firing long crimson radii of Greek-fire, the entire visionary city, turning in faster and faster spirals, sailed to a blinding and unconjecturable zenith.”

The ouzo bottle was empty. The briefly crowned emperor was a storm-stranded fisherman again. The impromptu drinking bout, and with it the dream, was over. “We stepped out into the sobering glare of noon,” wrote Leigh Fermor.

I later stumble out of the Union of Wine-Making Cooperatives, squinting in similarly chastening sunlight, struggling to put a hard morning’s work behind me.

What a wonderful island is Samos, far from the sun-seeking hordes of the Cyclades, the Sporades and the Dodecanese. How clever of Zeus and Hera, Antony and Cleopatra to seek out this quiet corner of the Aegean – a temperate, mountainous island of pines, vines and olives – for their romantic dalliances.

Ahead of me on this wine-soaked itinerary lie the silent ruins of the Temple of Hera on Samos, a sole upright column – all that is left standing of what was once the finest temple in the Aegean. To the east and underground is one of the more remarkable and least celebrated monuments of ancient Greece, the Eupalinos Tunnel, designed to bring water from the Ayades spring to the walled city.

After the wine-tasting, I feel I have earned a few days of sybaritic laziness in Marnei Mare, a destination of luxurious secrecy on the west coast of the island. Samos has not yet been overrun by tourists, with the partial exception of the resort towns of Pythagorio and Kokkari, but you would be hard-pressed to find more agreeable seclusion, down to your own magnificently wild, private beach.

You can fly to and from Samos, but what’s the rush? Boats ply these gentle waters as they have done for millennia. Why blaze across the sky when you can slide smoothly through the sea? I am bound for the north. So slowly, in fact, that it takes the best part of 24 hours, surrounded by chain-smoking Greek passengers, staff and skipper, to reach the amphitheatrical port town of Kavala.

Until fairly recently, few visitors to Greece would bother venturing this far north. Athens, the islands and the Peloponnese are all well-trodden ground to the undeserved neglect of the northern mainland. Macedonia and Thrace tend to be left to scholars, archaeologists and only the most ardent ruin-hunters.

Over the years I have had my fill of fallen piles of stone in Athens, Samos and the Peloponnese, not to mention the obligatory diversions to Delphi and Thessaloniki. But, leaving Samos, there is still time for a pilgrimage to a place in Kavala that will satisfy historians as happily as it does hotel connoisseurs.

Imaret is as much a monument and museum as a grand hotel. Built in 1817 by Mohammed Ali, founder of the modern Egyptian state, who was born in Kavala, it was once a school, hammam, offices, prayer hall and soup kitchen. Today it is the only hotel in Greece operating inside a historical building, the madrassah students’ cells exquisitely restored into rooms of unspeakable refinement in courtyards lined with orange trees. A few years ago, it was rotting on the hillside of Panagia, bleakly overlooking the sea and a rugged congregation of hills.

Then along came Anna Missirian, a woman with deep pockets and a passion for Egypt. Seven million euros later, and one of the finest restorations you are ever likely to see has transformed the place beyond recognition. Come here for a weekend and you’ll be tempted to stay a week.

In between endless volleys of cigarettes, the elegant Missirian, bristling with diamonds the size of pearls, keeps a beady eye on her guests. Tales abound of plutocratic visitors sent packing for failing to show due reverence.

“The Imaret isn’t a hotel,” she says. “It’s a monument. And everyone who comes here has got to remember that and treat it with respect.”

I’m in no position to argue. Now Samos is a distant memory but the drinks, once again, are flowing fast. “We have the finest selection of malt whiskies in Greece,” Missirian purrs, pushing one my way. This country has honed hospitality into a fine art. The candlelight flashes upon brilliant crystal, diamonds sparkle, glasses clink and I settle in for a long night.

…………………………………..

Details

Marnei Mare, Samos, tel: +30 2273 030830 www.marneimare.gr, info@marneimare.gr

Imaret, Kavala, tel: +30 2510 620151 www.imaret.gr, info@imaret.gr

Samos wines: www.samoswine.gr

…………………………………..

Strangers in paradise

If you’ve never heard the word philoxenia before going to Greece, by the time you return home, you’ll know what it means. Not so much because there are any number of hotels, restaurants and travel agencies that rather unimaginatively use the name, but because Greek hospitality hits you from the moment you enter the country.

“Known as filoxenia (literally love of the stranger or guest)”, writes Sofka Zinovieff in Eurydice Street, her lovely memoir of relocating her family to Greece, “hospitality is still considered a national characteristic of the Greeks”, one that can be traced back several millennia to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

In the Middle East, one almost comes to expect it: the constantly humbling invitations to break bread with a family that can barely afford to feed itself. In Europe, you might think such kindness to strangers had, in the 21st century, gone out of fashion. As a rule it has, yet Greece remains the delightful exception.

Roaming around the country for a month, I had to fight to pay for drinks, dinners or lunches. After one particularly riotous dinner in Athens, where the retsina flowed with abandon over several hours, I remonstrated with my companions – a group of bibulous students and academics – to pay my share. “Xenos!” came the emphatic reply. The foreigner was not allowed to pay. And as for inviting someone to dinner, forget it. You may as well tell a Greek the Elgin Marbles belong in London.

Justin Marozzi opens his diary

I’m researching a new history of Baghdad. What strikes you most about this unfortunate part of the world is how extreme violence and bloodshed have been endemic to the city from its foundation by the Abbasid Caliph Mansur in ad 762 to the present day. Baghdad may have been christened the City of Peace but, as Richard Coke wrote in the last history of the Iraqi capital in English, published in 1927, a year after Gertrude Bell’s death, ‘The story of the City of Peace is largely the story of continuous war.’ Hardline Sunnis were impaling and burning alive ‘heretic’ Shia 1,000 years ago. Jews and Christians occasionally got it in the neck, too, and caliphs were always on the lookout for mo re ingenious methods of inflicting pain. An Iraqi colleague is translating a seven-volume Abbasid treatise on torture for me. They have been lopping off heads here for ever. The caliph Hadi (785-786) once interrupted a banquet to rush off and personally behead two of his slave girls who had been caught having an illicit lesbian affair. His companions were horrified to see his eunuch bring the bloodied, bejewelled heads to the table on a platter. A dear Iraqi friend calls from Baghdad. He has already lost several family members in the violence since 2003; four more of his relatives were badly wounded in the huge bombing outside the foreign ministry, some of them blinded by the blast. ‘Perhaps it is our destiny to live like this,’ he says.

***

The highlight of a hellishly hot visit to Baghdad was a down-the-line interview with Sandi Toksvig for her excellent programme Excess Baggage. We discussed some of Herodotus’s observations on the curious sexual customs of foreign peoples. The Greek historian was much taken by the unique post-coital habits of the Babylonians, who used to fumigate their genitals with incense after a bout of lovemaking. Sadly our chat about necrophilia in Ancient Egypt was edited out. Herodotus, who was always up for a story to titillate his audience, related how when a particularly beautiful woman died, her family would only deliver the body to the embalmers after three or four days, when it really=2 0started to pong. This was, he tells us, ‘a precautionary measure’ to prevent lusty embalmers from interfering with the corpse.

***

A colleague in Baghdad, a retired senior army officer, says he’s going to buy property in Amman. ‘Jordan has everything you want in a country,’ he says. ‘First of all, a monarchy. Second, there are no speed limits. Third, no smoking ban, so you can light up wherever you like. And best of all,’ he adds with a steely look, ‘it has the death penalty.’

***

The kerfuffle surrounding the release of the convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi reminds me of when I interviewed Gaddafi Junior a few years ago for this magazine. Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi, son of the Islamic-socialist-cum-pan-Arabist-cum-pan-Africanist-cum-pan-lunatic leader, was staying in the royal suite of Claridge’s at the outset of his campaign to improve Libya’s image in the West. He spoke a lot of nonsense about Libya becoming an ‘oasis of democracy’. Although he said it was ‘unthinkable’ that he would be the next leader, I suspect his passion for democracy will not stop him indulging in a bit of dynastic succession in Tripoli when Daddy’s had enough (40 years and counting on 1 September, incidentally). The then editor of The Spectator, horrified to see Gaddafi swanning around London and being feted by society, made some mischievous changes to my piece and headlined the article ‘Son of Mad Dog’. The Libyans, like most Arabs not known for their love of dogs, went ballistic. I haven’t been back to the country since. A question relating to al-Megrahi’s release from prison occurs. Whose version of events would you be more inclined to believe, that of Mandelson or Gaddafi? It’s an unsavoury choice but my money would be on the Libyan.

***

Thoughts on cricket and ancient history: Thucydides is to Herodotus as Boycott is to Gower. One is rigorous application and puffed-up pomposity, the other easy grace and self-deprecating charm. Both essential in their own way, but be honest. Who would you rather read and watch?

***

A summer in north Norfolk drifts to a close: eating masses of samphire, sailing in Burnham Overy Staithe, swimming in Stiffkey and Wells amid wide skies and stretching sands. A Handel and Scarlatti concert at Salle, a spectacular 15th-century church with extraordinary acoustics. Dancing to Aretha Franklin in Walsingham Abbey. And the Ashes, the Ashes. Long days drunk on cricket, walking from room to room clutching a radio permanently tuned to 198 Long Wave, alternately cursing, fearing, celebrating and occasionally whooping. Panesar and Anderson hanging in there at Cardiff, Blowers and Tuffers discussing lobst er dinners, batting collapses, magnificent Strauss, Broad evolving from boy to man, another hot-to-Trott South African saviour, Freddie bowing out with the electric run-out of Ponting, the fabulous drama of Test cricket against the old enemy. What better way to celebrate the delirium of victory at the Oval than by dashing off to Holkham, the most glorious beach in the country, for a late evening swim. Isn’t it good to have the Ashes back?

Justin Marozzi will be speaking about The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus, published in paperback this month, at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Saturday 29 August at 8.30 p.m. at Peppers Theatre.

Patrick Hennessey was one of the British army’s self-proclaimed Bright Young Things, an Oxford graduate with a lust for combat and a literary bent. Born in 1982, he belongs to a generation of uniformed men and women who would, as he puts it, ‘do more and see more in five years than our fathers and uncles had packed into twenty-two on manoeuvres in Germany and rioting in Ulster’. Hard on the older generation, perhaps, but such have been the opportunities afforded by the War on Terror.

The Junior Officers’ Reading Club charts Hennessey’s four-year journey from the square-bashing of Sandhurst to front-line duty in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Grenadier Guards Platoon Commander and Operations Officer, and his subsequent departure from the army. If the journey itself is unremarkable — the usual suspects of barking Non-Commissioned Officers, a general disdain for Rear Echelon Motherfuckers or REMFs, high-octane thrills of men with guns and the camaraderie forged under fire are all present and correct — what impresses is the sheer candour and immediacy of his reporting. A literary soldier, especially one still in his twenties rather than a bewhiskered sixtysomething general penning his memoirs, is something to be treasured.

We can therefore excuse the gung-ho tone of much of the book. This is a young man fortunate enough, unlike so many soldiers of a previous generation who missed out on a good war, to be doing just what he has always dreamed of. During one particularly intense fight with ‘Terence’ Taliban in Afghanistan, he says he wants to sit down with the Major who has come along for the ride and try to understand the adrenaline and euphoria of it all and ask what could possibly compare.

‘…the winning goal scoring punch, the first kiss, the triumphant knicker-peeling moment? Nowhere else sells bliss like this, surely? Not in freefall jumps or crisp blue waves, not on dance floors in pills or white lines — I want to discuss with him whether it’s sexually charged because it’s the ultimate affirmation of being alive…’

The answer is very little or nothing can compare because war is uniquely different. It confers an experience that those who have not donned uniform can ever quite understand. As the Company Sergeant Major puts it in a dash of graffiti at the Sangin District Centre when the tour comes to an end, ‘for those who have fought for it, life will always have a flavour the sheltered cannot taste’.
Hennessey’s generation is naturally the most media-savvy there has ever been. The Inkerman Company’s exploits are scrupulously and tirelessly recorded on camera so the officers and men can make video montages to impress friends and girlfriends back home.

‘We went into battle in bandanas and shades with Penguin Classics in our webbing, sketch pads in our daysacks and iPods on the radio, thinking we knew better than what had gone before,’ he writes. Hennessey is driven by the glamour of it all, from Sandhurst to Iraq and into deployment in Afghanistan. After the tedium of all that drill, the relentless boredom of waiting and hoping for action which is the soldier’s lot, killing the enemy is ‘fun’, never mind the rights and wrongs of the conflict,
which are not discussed.

There is an inevitability about the reality-check which comes of seeing comrades killed and grotesquely injured. Casualties become shockingly regular. We don’t know whether Hennessey’s virtual reading club included Herodotus, history’s first war reporter, but the irrepressible Greek put his finger on it in lines that ring as true today as when he wrote them 2,500 years ago: ‘No one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace — in peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons.’

As Hennessey contemplates the carnage around him, the tone becomes darker, more measured and reflective, a welcome and sensitive contrast to the flippant banter, dripping with irony, that has come before. These passages are some of the most important and affecting in what ultimately proves to be a very fine book, a powerful despatch from the front line and required reading for the families of those in the armed forces. Let us hope his move into conflict and international humanitarian law will provide material for future books because he would be an amusing, probably caustic, observer of the field.

A final note. When I called the Panorama producer Hennessey accuses of being a little yellow under fire in Afghanistan to check the author’s version of events, he disputed them with a chuckle. He also described Hennessey as the bravest man he had ever met.

What is the Royal Geographical Society for — exploration or ‘post-socialist urban identities’?

Time was when most educated people knew, more or less, what geography meant. Putting aside its Greek etymology (“earth description”), for people of a certain age it instantly evokes images of oxbow lakes, valley-scouring glaciers, mountains, volcanoes, alluvial fans, cloud formation and perhaps a bearded teacher.

Physical geography is the venerable descendant of the early investigative forays made by the ancient Greeks who took the first steps in this formal examination of our planet — men like Anaximander of Miletus, the sixth-century BC polymath credited with introducing the gnomon, an early sundial that helped determine solstices and equinoxes, to Greece.

With considerable input from Chinese and, later, Arab civilisations, geography emerged as a curious hybrid of cartography, geometry, astronomy, philosophy and literature. Perhaps no one expressed the emerging discipline with quite as much chutzpah as Herodotus, the fifth-century BC Greek whose traditional “Father of History” moniker belied his position as an early and itinerant — if madcap and unreliable — geographer. In Egypt, he set up his vast open-air laboratory and studied its mysteries, the source of the Nile, its seasonal flooding and alluvial deposits, its flora and fauna. He understood, as many physical geographers do today, the compelling need to take to the field for his research and conduct the ancient world equivalent of empirical observation. No armchair geographer he.

In the 19th century, when the Royal Geographical Society was a byword for international exploration and scientific discovery, the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt helped lay the foundations for modern geography with his magnum opus Kosmos, a prodigious, five-volume attempt to unify the various strands of geographical science. Charles Darwin considered Humboldt “the greatest scientific traveller who ever lived”.

For many geographers today, this sort of physical geography is deeply unfashionable and downright irrelevant. Human geographers, by definition, are more interested in people than in places. They are interested, among other things, in gender, culture, health, development, urban environments, behaviour, politics, transportation and tourism. Many physical geographers feel increasingly alienated by their colleagues’ distrust of empirical science, a scepticism informed largely by the post-modernist assault on geography in recent years.

The tensions within geographical science have come to an acrimonious head at the RGS. A high-profile initiative, named The Beagle Campaign in honour of Darwin’s ground-breaking, RGS-assisted expedition to South America in 1831-1836 and launched on the 150th anniversary of his On the Origin of Species, aims to restore balance to the Society’s activities by getting it to mount its own field research projects again. The Society has failed to mount a single expedition in a decade. On 18 May, Fellows voted 61 per cent to 38 per cent against the initiative, an extraordinary show of support for the underdogs. The campaign, with which this writer is closely involved, has uncovered deep fissures within an organisation that for almost two centuries has been a broad church of interests and experiences at the forefront of geographical discovery (www.thebeaglecampaign.com).

The stakes remain high. Although the debate has largely been confined to 10,500 Fellows, given the status and historical significance of the RGS, its ramifications for geography are likely to be felt far more widely worldwide. The contention revolves around the Society’s failure to mount even one large multidisciplinary research project — as expeditions are now known — in a decade. As astonishing as it may sound, the RGS no longer conducts any of its own research, a serious indictment of its loss of vision and purpose. It is no exaggeration to say that through its major field projects of the 19th and 20th centuries, which went to the ends of the earth, the RGS (with the Institute of British Geographers, to give it its full title) has contributed much to our knowledge and understanding of the world. Names like Scott, Shackleton, Livingstone, Speke, Stanley, Burton, Doughty and Everest all convey a humbling thrill when visitors step inside the Society’s magnificent Ondaatje Theatre.

The Society’s response to this debate provides a sobering snapshot of what it is, or what it can be, to be a geographer today. Among six projects that the RGS says demonstrate its commitment to support (other people’s) research, are two fairly eyebrow-raising studies. One, conducted by Dr Craig Young and colleagues from Manchester Metropolitan University, is entitled “Global change and post-socialist urban identities”. Another, led by Dr Heaven Crawley and colleagues from Swansea University, is “Children and global change: Experiencing migration, negotiating identities”. Professor Ian Swingland, founder of the Durrell Institute for Conservation and Ecology, is unimpressed. “My scientific and international experience strongly suggests to me that neither of these projects is academically robust, likely to change anything on the ground, improve the status of the environment or the social woes of the world, and they are frankly to a large degree incomprehensible,” he wrote in an open letter to Sir Gordon Conway, the RGS president. “They will make no difference to anything other than those prosecuting the work. What are ‘post-socialist urban identities’ exactly? What are ‘children’s reflexive negotiations of their identities’ precisely? And does it matter? And will this work educate the future ways we can help the world?”

What such research appears to demonstrate is the tragic introversion and irrelevance of swathes of contemporary academe, academics writing for academics, leaving the rest of the world none the wiser — or better off. In an era when environmental woes and challenges press in on us, the RGS’s failure to provide high-profile leadership on vital issues such as climate change, global warming, biodiversity, the forced migration of species, deforestation, desertification and a host of other scientific unknowns is deeply regrettable. What can one say of post-structuralist cultural studies other than they provide careers for a certain breed of academic geographer?

The internal RGS debate has nothing to do with romance, nostalgia or pith helmets, as critics of The Beagle Campaign have rather lazily argued. It is all about science and real-world, empirical observation and exploration at a critical time for humankind and its interaction with the planet. Often there is simply no substitute for getting out into the field.

As the environmental scientist James Lovelock warns in his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, “Observation in the real world and small-scale experiments on the Earth now take second place to expensive and ever-expanding theoretical models” of questionable reliability. “Our tank is near empty of data and we are running on theoretical vapour.” Herodotus, Humboldt and Darwin would have understood this in a flash.

Worlds Apart
June 2009

What is the Royal Geographical Society for — exploration or ‘post-socialist urban identities’?

Time was when most educated people knew, more or less, what geography meant. Putting aside its Greek etymology (“earth description”), for people of a certain age it instantly evokes images of oxbow lakes, valley-scouring glaciers, mountains, volcanoes, alluvial fans, cloud formation and perhaps a bearded teacher.

Physical geography is the venerable descendant of the early investigative forays made by the ancient Greeks who took the first steps in this formal examination of our planet — men like Anaximander of Miletus, the sixth-century BC polymath credited with introducing the gnomon, an early sundial that helped determine solstices and equinoxes, to Greece.

I’m not going up that!” Our eyes rise towards the glistening rock of Striding Edge, the most famous – and infamous – ridge walk in Britain. Admittedly, it looks pretty fearful from down here, two-thirds up Helvellyn, the third-highest mountain in England at 3,118ft. Helvellyn is one of the most popular climbs in the Lake District for walkers of all ages. Above us, black fangs sink their teeth into a lifeless sky, dark jaws plunging sharply thousands of feet into the abyss. To call it vertiginous scarcely does it justice. And my wife suffers from vertigo.

Having been married several years, I have learnt that remarks such as, “I’m not going up that!” really mean, “I am going up that but only after kicking up a huge fuss about it.” It was like this the day before on Helm Crag (1,299ft), our diminutive debut climb on this outing to the Lakes.

Clementine, 12, galvanised by the sight of a ridge I had been hyping relentlessly for the past fortnight, speeds ahead. This is her first time in the Lake District and she can’t wait. A few minutes later, Striding Edge announces itself in a tableau of rock with nothing but sudden sky all around. I have been playing down this stretch of the walk to my wife as assiduously as I have been exaggerating it to our daughter. I read out the words of legendary Cumbrian walking guru Alfred Wainwright to calm her fears, glossing over the preamble about how “early writers regarded Striding Edge as a place of terror,” in favour of, “contemporary writers … are inclined to dismiss it as of little account. In fact, Striding Edge is the finest ridge there is in Lakeland for walkers … always an exhilarating adventure … can be made easy or difficult according to choice.”

Now the drama of the place is immediate and inescapable. With lowering cloud, we appear to be stepping into nothingness, not so much striding as teetering. Not ideal, I have to admit, for someone with vertigo. “I’m not going across that!” my wife gasps.

The next 900ft are a touch-and-go scrape. Yelps, tears, threatened U-turns. We are overtaken by seven-year-olds and by neatly trotting Labradors. Generous-spirited walkers help us along in tight spots. At last, in a flurry of vertical drops, the knife-edged arête comes to a close and from there it is a hop, skip and slog to the summit, a perennially freezing, wind-whipped vastness. It is too cold – despite the shivering summiteers munching away on Kendal mint cake – to stop for lunch. The classic descent to Patter-dale via Swirral Edge elicits a few more heart-stopping moments, not to mention knee-throbbing jolts and a volley of complaints (“I’m not going down that! You never said there would be another ridge like that …”).

Clementine reverently records her first big climb in the log at the back of our much-thumbed Wainwright. “Mummy was brave on my favourite bit, Striding Edge. Scary but very exciting.” Her understatement of “a bit of a climb in places”, to describe a walk that was steep enough to shred my lungs, warms the cockles of my heart.

Just as welcome is the sight of our temporary home. The Masons Arms, tucked away in the lonely Winster Valley east of Windermere, is a superb place to put up for a few days. Log fires, flagstone floor and a menu designed for famished walkers with monstrous portions of hearty fare. Beef and Hawkshead ale cobbler with horseradish dumplings becomes a staple over the week, with occasional forays into lamb Cartmel, half a beast submerged in rosemary-infused gravy. All the calories so painfully burned off during the day are replaced quicker than you can say, “A pint of Hawkshead, please.”

After the drama of Striding Edge and Helvellyn, we pencil in an easy walk for the following day. We are bound for Catbells, 1,481ft, which Wainwright records, unpromisingly for altitude fetishists, as “a family fell where grandmothers and infants can climb the heights together”. As short walks go, it is a great success. The sky is cornflower blue. From the domed summit the view extends beyond the mirrored calm of Derwentwater north towards the smooth slopes of Skiddaw, England’s fourth-highest mountain (3,053ft). The lovely Borrowdale valley rolls away far beneath us and somewhere down there, I can’t help thinking, must be a pub or an inn.

The Langstrath Country Inn in Stonethwaite fits the bill perfectly. After our meagre exertions, a bowl of spicy parsnip soup is enough for lunch. A plaque on the outside of the inn – “In loving memory of a sunny day in Borrowdale” – reminds us we have been lucky with the weather, always a likely bugbear on a walking holiday in the Lakes.

As a trio we are starting to get into our stride now. Aches and stiffness have been banished. Fell walking has become a daily fix, at least for the adults. We need another hit. After outings to Helm Crag, Helvellyn and Catbells, thoughts turn to Haystacks (1,958ft), another all-time Wainwright favourite, the mountain he loved so much he asked for his ashes to be scattered near the summit.

“I thought we were having a day off,” says Clementine irritably. A shopping expedition to Windermere and a visit to Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage in Grasmere have been mooted and just as quickly dismissed. We are Coleridge fans. “Get your boots on.” The years of total parental control are fast running out. We must enjoy them while we can.

Haystacks is a treat. Under another cloudless sky we hike past tracts of burnt-tobacco ferns and subdued heather to the head of Warnscale Bottom, then sharply up towards a time-shattered slate quarry, the view behind us opening up magnificently with every step we take away from the valley floor.

Dwarfed by its neighbours, Haystacks somehow manages to eclipse the lot of them with its ragged twists and turns, its scruffy charm and a series of tors and tarns that continue right up to the summit. You would be hard pushed to find a more exquisite place to down your rucksack and stop for a picnic lunch, overlooked by mighty Great Gable, Pillar and a clutch of other sombre peaks. Striking a rare note of consensus over pork pies, sandwiches, chocolate and tea, we judge it our favourite climb.

Only a day to go. It has to be High Street (2,718ft) to finish with heft and a flourish of historical interest. The route was once marched along by Roman cohorts travelling between their garrisons at Ambleside and Brougham. Shepherds and farmers once flocked to the vast flat summit for annual summer fairs and horse races until well into the 19th century. Clementine is unimpressed.

“You said we were having a day off,” she says in a fit of pre-teen pique.

“Come on, it’s our last day and our last walk. We won’t be coming back for ages.”

“I’m not coming.”

“In the car.”

Rising above oily-black Haweswater reservoir, as sinister a body of water as you’ll find in the Lakes, High Street is all savage splendour, culminating in the ancient remnants of the Roman road on the wind-chilled, wide-skirted summit that Clementine, recovering from an initial sulk, is the first to reach.

On the way back to London, while we are gridlocked in stop-start traffic, a voice from the back seat pipes up.

“Can we come to the Lakes every year?”

Justin Marozzi’s ‘The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus’ is published by John Murray

………………………………………………………

Details

The Masons Arms, tel: +44 (0)1539 568 486; www.masonsarmsstrawberrybank.co.uk
The Langstrath Country Inn, tel: +44 (0)1768 777 239;
www.thelangstrath.com

The Royal Geographical Society is housed in a red-brick building just south of Hyde Park, at a junction of Kensington Gore and Exhibition Road that London cab drivers call “hot and cold corner”. Its façades are decorated, respectively, with statues of the most famous explorer of Africa, David Livingstone, and the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, hero of perhaps the greatest survival story of all time.

In 1998 when I was 27 and had just left the Financial Times after two years in the Philippines I was planning an ambitious 1,200-mile exploration by camel across the old slave routes of the little-travelled Libyan Sahara. Among my first ports of call was the RGS. I wanted to consult its unrivalled store of maps and charts of the world’s least hospitable places. Inside, it fairly hummed with potential expeditions, a stopping-off point for people about to set off to the remotest parts of the world. The walls of the society’s wonderful auditorium carry the names of great RGS-backed explorers of the past, including Sir Richard Burton, the great Victorian who, with John Speke, made two journeys into central Africa to locate the source of the Nile. And, of course, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, whose second expedition to the South Pole in 1912 ended in his death. Through their often heroic efforts the society advanced our understanding of the world.

On that first day I was there to study in the fusty grandeur of the panelled Map Room. I would politely ask the supervisor for what I needed and he would disappear, locate each map of the interminable desert wastes, and bring it to my desk. He might, I thought, have been there since Scott of the Antarctic set off across other, icier, wastelands.

Originally founded as a gentlemen’s dining club in 1830, within 30 years the RGS had established itself as the heart of what is now often described as the “heroic” age of expedition. As I explained what I was planning in Libya, an expedition to the historical centres of the Saharan slave trade, the RGS’s in-house expedition advisory centre put me in touch with some of the most notable desert explorers. They included Sir Wilfred Thesiger, then 88, and the charming octogenarian Rupert Harding-Newman, veteran of the Long Range Desert Group in the second world war. The latter was invaluable in helping me to learn the essentials of desert navigation.

Without this first encounter with the RGS, my Libyan journey (which I later wrote about in my first book, South From Barbary) might never have happened and I would probably never have become a fellow of the society. There are 10,500 fellows, all of whom have been nominated and approved for fellowship, and then have the right to vote on RGS resolutions.

That year – 1998 – was the last time that the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers, to give it its full title) organised, paid for, and launched one of its own expeditions, an extensive study of the marine environment in the south-west Indian Ocean, involving 200 scientists from 21 countries. The team generated huge quantities of scientific data and trained hundreds of local officials in marine education and management. Since 1998, the RGS has given money to many expeditions, but it hasn’t launched a major expedition in its own right.

Perhaps this is unsurprising. By 1998 the age of heroic exploration was long over – possibly the last great “expedition” was the RGS-assisted trans-Arctic expedition of 1967-69, described by then British prime minister Harold Wilson “as a feat of endurance and courage which ranks with any in polar history”. Three men and 40 dogs, carrying 32 tonnes of food and equipment, took more than 15 months to cross 3,800 miles of frozen wilderness. It was the longest sustained polar journey in history and almost certainly the first surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean.

The Earth has now been almost entirely charted (though we know little about its oceans). Yet there is still a world to be discovered by teams of geographers and scientists working together to improve our understanding of the fragile balance of life on our planet. As the distinguished environmental scientist James Lovelock laments in his book The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning: “Observation in the real world and small-scale experiments on the Earth now take second place to expensive and ever-expanding theoretical models” of questionable reliability. “Our tank is near empty of data and we are running on theoretical vapour,” he argues. There is a compelling need for “more tiresome and prosaic confirmation by experiment and observation”.

The RGS has a record of mounting data-collecting expeditions of world-class importance. In 1987, for example, John Hemming, then its director, led a 200-strong expedition to the Maracá rain forest project in Brazilian Amazonia. At the invitation of the Brazilian government and in collaboration with the National Amazon Research Institute, researchers surveyed the rich forests of the riverine island of Maracá, together with four related programmes on forest regeneration, soils and hydrology, medical entomology and land development. The success of the project led to an accord between British and Brazilian scientists for long-term research in Amazonia. It represents, I believe, the RGS at its finest.

Yet the past decade has seen the society shift its focus towards academic geography, and away from exploration and field research. In 2006, for instance, the expedition advisory centre was re-branded “geography outdoors”. It was a move widely seen by fellows as a downgrading of expeditions and exploration within the society. It was, said the veteran explorer Robin Hanbury-Tenison, when I interviewed him for a newspaper, “mealy-mouthed”.

In May 2006 Alistair Carr, a Suffolk-based travel writer and desert explorer, went to the RGS archives and called up a copy of the society’s original, hand-written Royal Charter. He was looking for something that might back his hunch that the direction of the RGS had, in recent years, veered too far from exploration. Poring over the hard-to-read text, he found this: “The Royal Geographical Society, for the advancement of Geographical Science … has since its establishment sedulously pursued such its proposed object … by carrying out, at its own expense, various important Expeditions in every quarter of the Globe, and by assisting other Expeditions with grants of money and otherwise … ”

Carr realised that this could be a chance to change things. “I started talking to people all over the country – scientists, zoologists, entomologists, marine biologists, the British Antarctic Survey, the Natural History Museum and so on,” he says. “The more I spoke to these people, the more I realised there was this crying need for these multidisciplinary expeditions and that the society was losing this wonderful opportunity. With all those unknowns out there, in the oceans, rainforests, mountains and deserts, there’s so much more to be done. I felt the RGS should be leading the way.”

Over the next few months, he assembled a group of six like-minded RGS fellows, including myself, all in their thirties. Carr already knew Tim Bosworth, an environmental scientist, and the others were all keen to meet – so in April 2007 Carr, Bosworth, and I met up in London with Jo Vestey, an award-winning photographer, explorer and broadcaster Oliver Steeds and James Aldred, a rainforest veteran and specialist wildlife cameraman.

Over the past two years, we have exchanged numerous letters with the RGS leadership. We have sat down with the director and president and members of its council. Our request was that the RGS should return to launching its own multi-disciplinary scientific research projects and expeditions. The RGS itself says that over the past four years it has supported more than 250 projects involving 1,250 people in 118 countries with more than £600,000 in funding.

Our small group talked and the RGS listened. But, while we believe the society’s recent emphasis on geography and education is commendable, we feel that this must not come at the expense of its important core activity – running its own expeditions. So this month, our campaign, which we are calling the Beagle Campaign in honour of Charles Darwin’s 1831-1836 expedition – assisted by the RGS – to South America, went public.

Two days ago, a parcel was delivered to Lowther Lodge, the society’s home. It contained a special resolution, instigated by Carr and his five original signatories, calling for a return to the society’s own expeditions. The resolution calls on the RGS to honour its obligations as set out in its Royal Charter of 1859: in a word, to explore.

For a special resolution to be taken to a vote by the RGS, it has to be signed by six fellows and supported by at least 40 more. Our resolution has been co-signed by 80 of the most distinguished figures in the fields of exploration, geography, science, literature and travel. They include Sir Ranulph Fiennes; George Band, who was at 23 the youngest climber to scale Everest for the first time in 1953, along with his equally distinguished successors Sir Chris Bonington and Doug Scott; and the modern polar explorers Pen Hadow, who is currently in the Arctic, and Tom Avery, the youngest Briton to reach both poles.

Other supporters include Ian Swingland, a world expert on conservation and biodiversity, Andrew Mitchell, an authority on forest canopies and climate change, anthropologist Dr Audrey Colson and cave specialist Andrew Eavis.

The next step for the RGS would be to call a special general meeting and send out ballots to its 10,500 fellows. The wording of our resolution modifies its charter’s requirement for the RGS to fund expeditions “at its own expense”. It calls, instead, for a return to sponsored expeditions. (Major RGS expeditions from 1977-1998 include an impressive list of corporate backers: Shell, Cathay Pacific, British Airways, Wimpey, Honda, Land Rover.)

In response to receiving the resolution this week, the society’s initial statement said: “The RGS-IBG would like to make it clear that the society’s objective, as set out in the royal charter of 1859, is the ‘advancement of geographical science’. The ways in which the society does this is a matter for the trustees at any particular time. The society continues to support exploration constantly.”

If it’s no longer mountain summits or poles we seek, so much as greater knowledge about climate change, growing urban populations, poor water supply, forced migrations and a host of other unknowns, our knowledge of species on the planet still has an enormous way to go. Marine biologists estimate that there may be up to 50m new species within the largely unexplored oceans, and up to 10m new species of insects, many of them in the world’s endangered tropical rainforests.

For a model of the sort of expedition that we hope will once again set out from South Kensington, look at Hadow’s latest Arctic expedition, an international venture funded by sponsors, including the insurance group Catlin, and bringing science and exploration together in an effort to answer one of the most critical environmental questions of our time: how long will the Arctic Ocean’s sea ice cover remain a permanent feature of our planet?

In 1980, the RGS celebrated its 150th anniversary with the publication of To the Farthest Ends of the Earth, a history of the society by Ian Cameron. In a foreword, RGS fellow Sir David Attenborough said the next 150 years would witness different sorts of RGS expeditions, “But the stimulus that sends its members on arduous journeys to remote places will surely remain the same; and the society, thankfully, will continue to serve them.”

The Beagle Campaign offers thousands of fellows and members – together with the public – the chance to make our voices heard. We welcome all support from anyone interested in this cause. If successful it will help ensure that the society, in addition to supporting research projects, starts to field its own major expeditions once again. The future of the planet deserves nothing less.

www.thebeaglecampaign.com

FROM ONE MARVEL OF THE ANCIENT WORLD TO ANOTHER, HE CAME, HE SAW, HE CHRONICLED. IT’S NO WONDER THAT HERODOTUS ENDURES

I never thought traveling with a dead man could be so much fun. Certainly not for the best part of five years mooning about the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Aegean and the Middle East.

True, there were some pragmatic, perhaps selfish, attractions about a journey with Herodotus, the 5th-century-B.C. Greek who is generally considered the Father of History (or Father of Lies, if you prefer Plutarch’s acid put-down). There would never be any arguments, none of the tedious irritations that come from spending too much time on the road with one person. I wouldn’t come to blows with him for pinching the aisle seat on a cramped bus in Greece. His ham-fisted attempts to speak Arabic, or perhaps his linguistic brilliance, couldn’t annoy me. I wouldn’t have to lend him money, he wouldn’t keep the lights on after I wanted to go to sleep and he would never embarrass me in front of a pretty girl.

All that was a given. Yet I didn’t expect to become such good friends with someone who died almost 2,500 years ago. It didn’t seem possible or plausible. The thing is, Herodotus is a tremendously engaging companion, even from beyond the grave. He’s not only a historian. He’s an anthropologist, a foreign correspondent and investigative reporter, an explorer and traveler and the consummate travel writer. Above all, he’s an irrepressible, effervescent storyteller, and who doesn’t like a good story?

“The Histories,” his only book, would have to be my guide. Ostensibly it tells the story of the cataclysmic Persian Wars with the Greeks, the decisive encounter between fledgling East and West, from the early battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. through the adrenaline-charged heroics of King Leonidas’s Spartans at Thermopylae (think Zack Snyder’s violent film “300”) to the tumultuous finale at Plataea in 479 B.C., when the Greeks emerged triumphant. But “The Histories” is much more than that. It is one of the most digressive, wide-ranging books in Western literature.

Traveling through much of the then-known world in a spirit of roving wonder, Herodotus writes about the weird and the wonderful. He tells us of gold-digging ants and dog-headed men, the flying snakes of Arabia and self-immolating cats in Egypt. This is a world in which a dolphin can rescue a shipwrecked musician. Mad about monuments, as we shall see, he notes the architectural heritage of the places he visits, from the temples of Greece to the pyramids of Egypt. He has an eye for sex, too, recording the exotic customs of the Babylonians (husbands and wives fumigate their genitals after lovemaking), examples of necrophilia and bestiality in Egypt, and the predatory promiscuity of the Massagetae tribe of the Caspian Sea region (“If a man wants a woman, all he does is to hang up his quiver in front of her wagon and then enjoy her without misgiving”).

Plenty to go on, in other words. A journey in the spirit and slipstream of the man who invented history. We kick off the Herodotean itinerary, appropriately enough, in his hometown on Turkey’s Aegean coast, the vulgar-chic resort of Bodrum that was the Halicarnassus of old.

Bodrum is a curious place. Somehow it just about manages to play host simultaneously to high-end tourism (expensive frolicking on the water in sleek yachts called gulets) and the bottom end of the market (shaven-headed, beer- and sex-seeking Brits) without inconveniencing either group.

Although nothing survives from Herodotus’s time — a constant refrain for the next five years of our trip — Bodrum still does a nice line in history. It is home to the tumbledown ruins of the Mausoleum, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, a monument so hubristically horizon-dominating in its time that its royal sponsor, King Mausolus, gave his name ever after to this grandest form of funerary architecture. Bodrum also has the splendid, 16th-century Castle of St. Peter, which protrudes into the harbor, a reminder of the old fault line that runs through these waters and divides Muslim East from Christian West in the form of ever-squabbling Turkey and Greece. (My Turkish guide in Bodrum: “Everyone thinks Herodotus was a Greek. He wasn’t.” A Greek in Athens: “He was Greek, of course, but they [the Turks] can never admit that.”) This coastline is riddled with history. The ancient sites of Ephesus, Priene and Miletus are close at hand for those history buffs who quickly tire of the turquoise waters.

From Turkey, we head south to Egypt, the country that most impressed our itinerant Greek. In fact, to say he was impressed is a gross understatement. He was positively wowed by it. In his own (translated) words: “About Egypt I shall have a great deal more to relate because of the number of remarkable things which the country contains, and because of the fact that more monuments which beggar description are to be found there than anywhere else in the world.” He got so carried away by the place that he ended up devoting a whole third of “The Histories” to it: a masterful survey of the country’s history, geography, religion, politics, culture and customs, flora and fauna, architecture, agriculture, burial and sacrificial rituals, diet, mummification and, inevitably because this is Herodotus we’re talking about, sex. Breezy as it was, the store of information he brought back about Egypt was unsurpassed until the 19th century.

When he came to the country’s most magical monuments, the pyramids, he couldn’t resist another tall story. The pharaoh Cheops (or Khufu, as he’s also known) ran out of money during the Great Pyramid’s construction, he reported. To replenish the royal coffers, Cheops sent his daughter to a brothel and put her to work. The unfortunate woman decided to do some business on the side to raise her own pyramid, charging each satisfied customer a 2.5-ton block of limestone. Entertaining nonsense, you might think, but be careful about mentioning the story to Egyptians. They consider it blasphemous.

One afternoon in Cairo, having returned from trips to Memphis and Luxor and a foray into the Western Desert to visit the ancient oasis of Siwa, whose Oracle of Ammon was consulted by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C., my guide and I drive to the pyramids to search for our own tall stories. These days the most improbable tend to have a ring of truth about them. And it is the Egyptian guides, rather than foreign tourists, who tell them with a sense of wonder bordering on disbelief. One of them is about how sun-worshiping New Agers descend on Giza once a year, dressed in white, holding hands in a circle and praying before slipping into the Great Pyramid at midnight (thanks to some baksheesh) to make their pilgrimage through the granite darkness of the Great Gallery to the millennial stillness of the King’s Chamber for a bout of soul-searching and exploration of their consciousness.

Suddenly, as I’m standing there listening, the atmosphere turns poisonous. One moment, the tourist touts have been offering me rides on camels and horses, “rare” (mass-produced) papyri, undiscovered royal tombs, forgotten treasures and prostitutes; the next they are struck with fear and suspicion, which turns suddenly to outright hostility. The sight of my notebook has proved fatal.

“Don’t talk to him,” one of them warns a younger man approaching us. “He’s recording us.” Moments later my guide and I are engulfed in a scrum of glinting-eyed Giza mafiosi. I am a spy, a foreign investigator compiling evidence of guides behaving badly, I’m going to report them to the police, get him out of here. I’m persona non grata at the pyramids. A tourist policeman on a threadbare camel trots over to find out what’s going on. Voices are raised. Some pushing around. A scuffle. My guide is becoming frightened. The men pressing around us in an intimidating circle are making nasty threats. The blood-red sky darkens. It’s time to leave.

The journey with Herodotus must end in his homeland of Greece, which offers a bewildering number of places and possibilities. We don’t know exactly where he went, or lived, or traveled, but he writes so much about this sun-kissed mainland and archipelago that the opportunities are endless.

From the pages of my atlas rise the splintering backbone of the Taygetus mountains in the southern Peloponnese, jaded Sparta, faded Olympia, the fallen columns of Corinth, divine Delphi and dreamlike Athens. To the east, across the tepid Aegean, lie the ancient city of Samos (now called Pythagorio) and the trio of architectural treasures — more precisely, engineering feats — that caught Herodotus’s eye: the Tunnel of Eupalinos, an aqueduct that was dug out of a mountain from both ends simultaneously; the breakwater; and the Temple of Hera, the largest known temple in Herodotus’s time, only one column of which remains.

After a conference in Athens on cross-cultural encounters between ancient Persians and Greeks (insufficiently cross-cultural to include a glass of wine during evening refreshments) and the obligatory pilgrimage to the Parthenon, timeworn symbol of the birth of democracy, I sail off to the whale-shaped island of Samos, as much to investigate its world-famous wine as to see the monuments Herodotus found on it.

“Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!” said the epicurean poet Byron, so I do. Or at least so does Yiannis, my host from the Union of Wine-Making Co-operatives of Samos. It’s a generous glass of vin doux, an entry-level dessert wine to limber up the palate. It glimmers seductively in my glass. And then, whoosh, down it goes. A perfect start to the morning.

“This is the most classical expression of the muscat grape,” Yiannis explains. I am welcomed, after the acclimatizing vin doux, with a brimming tumbler of the grand cru. “You’ll find this less sweet,” says Yiannis. “We send it to the Vatican.” Bright topaz glows before me, then disappears in a warm haze.

Next up is Phyllas, an organic dessert wine, yellow-tinged and without the treacly dreaminess of vin doux. I’m not sure whether this is one of Yiannis’s favorites, though it seems to me he is pouring deliciously, irresponsibly large glasses of the stuff. “Dash down yon cup of Samian wine!” Byron commanded, so I drain another glass.

“Now you must try the Anthemis,” says Yiannis firmly, pouring another tumbler of chestnut blond wine aged in oak barrels for five years. “This is our champion wine.” And so it tastes.

I am ready to leave, but Yiannis won’t hear of it. “You must try our most magnificent sweet wine,” he says grandly. “Nectar.” It is, a powerfully condensed elixir with a dark, raisiny finish. I am feeling fairly finished, too. I stumble out of the tasting room, squinting in a chastening blaze of sunlight, struggling to put a hard morning’s work behind me.

After the teetotal rigors of a month in Egypt (not to mention an alcohol-free year in Iraq, partly on the Herodotus trail to Babylon), a wine-soaked itinerary in Greece is the perfect tonic. Amid the scattered columns and pedestals of Delphi, I discuss Herodotus with Antigoni, an argumentative academic friend, over a bottle of agreeably pine-tinged retsina. There is more retsina over a memorable lunch in the Peloponnese fishing village of Kardmayli with Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, life-enhancing war hero and travel writer without equal.

Later, in the northern port town of Kavala, I stay at the fabulous Imaret, more of a monument than a hotel, an inspired conversion of a 19th-century madrassa (religious school) complex built by Mohammed Ali Pasha, founder of the modern Egyptian state and a Kavala native. My hostess, Anna, mastermind of the renovation, welcomes me with repeated large glasses of fine malt whiskey that shoot to my head like tracer bullets.

Anna is a formidable woman who tells me she once threw out a vastly rich Russian who made repeated complaints about the service and then compounded his errors by opening his door naked, much to the shock, if not the awe, of the chambermaid. He was ejected in ignominy minutes later (a Herodotean tale of hubris leading to nemesis, you could say).

“Ohhh, I looove Herodotus!” she purrs, clinking our crystal glasses. “He’s the world’s first cosmopolitan.”

I am beginning to think I have had my fill of Herodotus for the day, primarily because I have had my fill of whiskey and Virginia tobacco. The elegant bar of the Imaret is swaying before me, in time with Anna’s talismanic diamond earrings and the alternately rising and dipping, dripping cut-glass chandeliers.

I seem to have been surveying this scene through the bottom of a crystal tumbler all evening, but it is quickening now. Curtains billow around the windows like phantoms. The Oriental rugs on the wooden floor are taking on a life of their own, rolling up, up and away, borne off on a magic-carpet zephyr that picks up my floating head and carries it off into the swimming night. My limbs are alternately weightless, skimming across this star-filled sky, and drowsily heavy inside the revolving bar.

The crackling fire is spitting sparks and Anna is talking away a dime to the dozen, but I can’t make out any of it now. She’s spinning away into a spiral of Egypt and Turkey, candlelight and the English poet Cafavy, golden Greece, Orphean mysteries, Alexandria and diamonds, and somewhere out there, lost in this seething maelstrom, Herodotus is telling me it is time to go to bed.

Justin Marozzi is the author of “The Way of Herodotus: Travels With the Man Who Invented History,” published this month by Da Capo Press.