The expedition
Barbara Toy's first five journeys had been made in Pollyanna, her 1950 Series I 80-inch, and then in the long-wheelbase Series II that the Rover Company made her take in its place for the 1959 crossing to Ethiopia. For the sixth she had a third Land Rover, more modern again: a 109-inch Series IIA with the three-door Dormobile conversion, registered 5751 WD — pop-up roof, roof rack and a sun sheet over the cab, but none of the Dormobile's interior furniture. It is the car that appears in the photographs of The Way of the Chariots, the first of her books to show it.
The journey, in 1961, ran from Timbuktu to Tripoli, and its object was archaeological. In 1933 a French officer had found hundreds of rock paintings in the Tassili n'Ajjer, the sandstone plateau of south-eastern Algeria above Djanet, and among the engravings were horse-drawn chariots. Toy wanted to see the paintings for herself and to look for evidence of the great highway, supposedly driven by chariots in prehistoric times, that some writers had traced from the Mediterranean coast across the Sahara to the Niger — the 'way of the chariots' of her title, which the book's subtitle spells out as Niger River – Sahara – Libya.
One independent glimpse of her on the road survives. David Hall, a Royal Engineers officer on secondment to the Ghana Army, spent some months of 1961 on a Sahara expedition of his own with a Ghanaian soldier and a Land Rover, and was camped at the Malian oasis of Tessalit, on the piste that runs down from Algeria to Gao, when a pair of headlights appeared far off under the Pole Star. The visitor was Barbara Toy, coming down the route from Algeria. Next morning Hall interpreted for her with the French commandant, and before she left she gave the two men two oranges, the first fruit they had tasted in a couple of months. Hall's memoir places her at Tessalit heading south towards the Niger; the book's route runs the other way, from Timbuktu north to Tripoli, so the Tessalit meeting belongs to the outward leg of her Sahara season.
John Murray published The Way of the Chariots: Niger River – Sahara – Libya in 1964. It was the last of her three Saharan books, after A Fool in the Desert (Libya, 1952) and In Search of Sheba (1959), and the Dormobile went on to her Arabian journey from Aden to Beirut for The Highway of the Three Kings. Toy was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, became vice-president of the Land Rover Register 1948–1953, and at 81 drove the original Pollyanna round the world a second time. The fate of 5751 WD is not given in the sources fetched.
