How to walk a world conquered by cars? Webbed by asphalt? Hemmed in by highway guardrails and throttled by the inhuman demands of the internal combustion engine? How to use maps constrained by the physics of four rubber wheels spinning at 1,000 revolutions per minute?
One solution: Seek out the byways of pre-industrial travel.
In Saudi Arabia, this means walking the long-disused pilgrim roads that radiated from Mecca, Islam’s spiritual epicenter, to the faraway capitals of a Muslim Caliphate that once sprawled across the Middle East.
The ancient darb al hajj — pilgrim highways — are beautiful linear artifacts that unspool, mostly forgotten and eroding, across many thousands of miles of Arabian desert. Their borders are lined with curbs of rock that can date back 1,400 years or more. Their surfaces are smoothed by the passage of thousands of ghostly caravans. They roll sinuously across the land, accommodating themselves to the anatomy of living muscle: the legs of camels, donkeys, people. Their gradients are gentle. They seek out shade. They are pocked at the primordial interval of one walking day — about 20 miles — by old wells ringed with stone. The lips of these wells are deeply grooved by ropes that once hauled up buckets of water.
Saudi Arabia is taking a renewed interest in preserving its fading hajj road system. But these archaeological treasures merit far more attention than they currently enjoy. They deserve UNESCO World Heritage Site status.
Our tiny caravan is probably the first to travel parts of the Arabian hajj trail system in a century. The photos above may be the first ever taken of those particular stretches of the network.
The challenge ahead: Rediscover similar pre-car roadways in other regions of the world crossed by the Out of Eden Walk. Abraham’s path in the Middle East. The Via Maris along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. The southern Silk Road through China. Medieval tracks through the Siberian forest. We welcome all suggestions from you, our readers. So please: Glance at the walk’s general route across the continents. Let us know where to find the enduring highways of memory.
