Fear Strikes Out

By Peter Stoler

THE FEARFUL VOID

by GEOFFREY MOORHOUSE 288 pages. Lippincott. $10.

Perhaps because its sun-blasted emptiness is so different from their cozily crowded, fog-shrouded island, the trackless desert has always attracted Englishmen. A straight line leads from Sir Richard Burton crossing the Arabian desert in 1853 and Lawrence of Arabia down to Geoffrey Moorhouse. Burton had a simple thirst for the exotic. Lawrence was a complex mystic. Moorhouse, who left Nouakchott, Mauritania, in October of 1972 heading east into the Sahara, is a fortyish ex-journalist. In challenging the desert, he was intent on confronting his own fears and what he took to be personal cowardice.

He was, he says, afraid of "annihilation, of being surrounded by what is hostile, of loss and of being lost." The test that he devised for himself was formidable. Equipped with little more than a knife, a badly calibrated sextant and a crash course in Arabic, he planned to cross from the Atlantic to the Nile, a journey of 3,600 miles that had never been completed by a traveler alone.

In a matter-of-fact style, Moorhouse tells what it is like to cope with temperatures that soar past 130DEG by day and drop below freezing at night. He describes the stunning beauty of desert sunsets and the soporific, swaying movement of the camel. He can make a reader comfortably fixed with a Scotch in his hand share the blessed glee of finding brackish water dotted with camel dung that is worth more than gold or oil in a sea of sand.

The Fearful Void is a valuable addition to the literature of the desert, and a useful reference for anyone who may be considering a similar exercise in masochism. But it also chronicles a voyage of the spirit. With painful, plodding honesty, Moorhouse examines his insular intolerance of strange customs and his lack of confidence in his ability to evaluate his guides and companions along the way. He confronts the colossal reluctance he felt at having to haul himself into the saddle each morning for another day of pain. Thirst reduced him to almost incoherent terror. Every chance encounter -- whether with a lone sheepherder or a cold-eyed Tuareg tribesman -- knotted his insides with anxiety.

Exhausted by illness, Moorhouse abandoned the journey in Tamanrasset, Algeria, some 2,000 miles from his starting point. Was the trip necessary? Was it a success? For Moorhouse it was both. He did not conquer his fear -- but he appears to have faced himself, which is sometimes the same thing.

Peter Stoler

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