The Waterless Sea by Christopher Pinney

Author:Christopher Pinney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

34 Mirage in the Desert, c. 1885, chromo lith o graph. This wonderful realization of the ‘water of the desert’ was one of many illustrations in the famous German encyclopedia Meyers Grosses Konversations-Lexikon.

The two deceptions – desert mirage and Burton’s own disguise – are triangulated in his narrative with the Kaaba in Mecca. There is a fascinating symmetry between Burton’s own presence and that of mirage. Burton would famously assume the identity of ‘Shaykh Abdullah’, a wandering ‘Darwaysh’ (dervish), since ‘No character in the Moslem world is so proper for disguise as that of the Darwaysh.’7 The image of Burton in disguise was used as the frontispiece to his account of the journey and became a leitmotif of what we might think of as the interception of deception, by deception. The question of disguise was sufficiently contentious for Burton to address it at some length in the Preface to the third edition of the Personal Narrative in 1879. Burton focuses on a number of what he describes as ‘truculent attacks’ that demonstrate the ways in which reliability of vision, transparency and identity were clearly topics that aroused great passion. Burton discusses the ‘foul blow’ to the reputation of Johan Ludwig Burckhardt (himself a great eulogist of mirage) and the ‘invidious remarks’ directed at Ludovico di Varthema (who had disguised himself as a Mameluke), who had been condemned as ‘renegade’ for his ‘deliberate and voluntary denial of what a man holds to be truth’.8 Burton then engages in a fascinating onslaught by the Jesuit Arabist William Gifford Palgrave, who had travelled throughout the Middle East as a Christian in the 1860s. Palgrave thought that ‘passing oneself off for a wandering Darweesh’ was a ‘very bad plan’ and went on to critique the feigning of ‘a religion which the adventurer himself does not believe, to perform with scrupulous exactitude, as of the highest and holiest import, practices which he inwardly ridicules, and which he intends on his return to hold up to the ridicule of others’.9

Palgrave, however, was no better than ‘Satan preaching against sin’, Burton declaimed, for he was himself the master of deceptive disguise (born a Protestant, of ‘Jewish descent’, a convert to Catholicism, reverted to Protestantism; English by birth but living under French protection; travelling in the garb of a ‘native [Syrian] quack’ and so on). If true, this perhaps explains Palgrave’s own fierce preoccupation with the familiar trope of the duplicity of mirage. He writes, in ways that will now be familiar, of ‘lakes of mirage mocking the eye with their clear and deceptive outline’ and, later, of ‘deceptive pools of the mirage’.10

Burton’s defensiveness about his disguise may provide one way of situating the ‘complete’ deception that is mirage in his account. We have seen how, although ‘accustomed as I have been to mirage’, a vision in the vicinity of Al-Hijriyah ‘completely deceived me’. On the horizon he sees ‘fort-like masses of rock which I mistook for buildings’, only discovering his mistake through the ‘crunching sound of the camel’s feet upon large curling flakes of nitrous salt overlying caked mud’.

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