And if there’s one thing more scarce than a menu or a wine
list in the Sahara, it’s a hotel. All too frequently, the only accommodation
available was the humble tent. Not the Bedouin tent, half as wide as a ballroom,
but the individual, easy to carry, put it up yourself, polypropylene tent,
which a true Bedouin wouldn’t be seen dead in. Some people are natural campers,
scurrying in and out of their little cocoons like hamsters when the winter’s
coming on. Basil is not amongst them. He likes certain comforts when he’s
out on the road, and one of them is being able to stand upright. The air
was full of dark mutterings as he crawled in at night and crawled out in
the morning and crawled off in the hours in between to answer the call of
the wild.
The other thing that didn’t help him much was the amount of sand in the
Sahara. I tend to forget, as I sally forth in the morning, armed only with
notebook and Dictaphone, that taking photographs involves being weighed
down like a pack mule. Basil had eight cameras on the shoot, and at any
given time three of these would be hanging round his neck alongside an armoury
of fancy lenses, some the size of a small tree. Not only were they heavy,
they were also precision instruments. Now nature may abhor a vacuum but
she loves a precision instrument, and to show her affection she not only
provided a constant supply of grit and sand, but also arranged for a more
or less constant wind to blow it into any aperture, human or mechanical.
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