Читать книгу Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer - Alexander Maitland - Страница 14

Thesiger spent almost three months in France in 1929: from early May until the end of June he stayed with a French family at Fontainebleau to improve his French, studying with fifteen other boys under a tutor, Commandant Lettauré; and for most of July he was on holiday at Sable d’Or in Brittany, where he often accompanied an elderly Breton and his assistant or mousse, aged thirteen, fishing for lobsters, conger eels and mackerel. The old fisherman, Pierre, had been a pêcheur d’Islande, one of a hardy breed celebrated in Pierre Loti’s famous novel of that name. His stories of ‘the weeks at sea, the gales, the great hauls of fish’, gave Thesiger the idea of working aboard a Hull trawler off Iceland, in 1931, during his long summer vacation from Oxford.¹

Thesiger went up to Magdalen, ‘perhaps the most beautiful of Oxford colleges’, in the autumn of 1929. Compared with St Aubyn’s and Eton, his four years at Magdalen were fulfilled and happy. The ‘cold bleak English downs’ and the ‘bitterly cold and damp’ Thames Valley stood as wintry metaphors for the two schools, whereas in The Life of My Choice he wrote: ‘My memories of Oxford…are summer ones.’ A marvellous paragraph summarised these memories in a vivid collage of sensual imagery: ‘the tranquil beauty of the High Street in the early morning before the traffic; May morning and the choirboys singing on Magdalen Tower; reading in a punt on the river beneath overhanging willows; the water meadows beyond Parsons’ Pleasure, and the sound of corncrakes; sailing with Robin Campbell on Port Meadow and then tea together at the Trout Inn; dinner parties in my rooms, with evening light on the College buildings and the scent of wallflowers from the President’s garden’.²

At Oxford Thesiger read military history, although his chronic ‘inability to cope with Latin’ prevented him from taking the Crusades as his special subject. He admired and envied T.E. Lawrence’s ground-breaking research on the military architecture of the Middle East, and his thesis, Crusader Castles, published in 1936, a year after his death, a copy of which Thesiger eventually owned. To his regret they never met during Lawrence’s brief visits to John Buchan at Elsfield Manor, near Oxford, where Thesiger was sometimes invited to lunch or tea. Thesiger and Lawrence had much in common. Both had Anglo-Irish backgrounds, both studied history at Oxford and both became Fellows of Oxford colleges. Neither drank nor smoked, bothered about food or took an interest in women. Both needed to be liked and appreciated. Lawrence claimed he was ‘sexless’, while for Thesiger sex was ‘of no great consequence’.³ They held similar views about money and work, and the ‘separateness’ of friendships. While they were truthful, both tended (in varying degrees) to gloss over plain facts with a romantic veneer. Both practised self-discipline, yet were not averse to self-promotion in the sense of ‘backing into the limelight’. As for differences between the two, Thesiger was tactile, whereas Lawrence hated to be touched; and, of course, Lawrence revelled in speed – speedboats and powerful motorcycles – while Thesiger viewed the invention of the internal combustion engine as a catastrophe. Lawrence was the most famous British Arabist of his day; Thesiger was a great Arabist in the making. With John Buchan as a mutual friend and a catalyst, it is difficult to believe that they would not have got on well together. As for the other Lawrence, David Herbert, with whom Thesiger has never been compared, and whom he would almost certainly have disliked, they nevertheless shared strong views on ‘the close tie of male to male’⁴ and the mechanised materialism of Western nations, ‘ready for an outburst of insanity [throwing] us all into some purely machine-driven unity of lunatics’.⁵ In 1928, despite his professed loathing of cars, Thesiger had learnt to drive. He said: ‘At the Titley farmhouse and at The Milebrook, until my mother bought a car, we got about using a pony and trap. The small open car I got after I left Eton extended the range of my brothers’ and my social lives very considerably.’ Thesiger used to park this car outside Magdalen, a practice, he wrote, ‘people thought was rather undignified’.⁶

His history tutor, J.M. Thompson, gave tutorials which were diverse and ‘always stimulating’⁷ but, for Wilfred, lacked the real-life excitement of the wild victory parades at Addis Ababa in 1916, or of seeing the Zulu assegais and other trophies his grandfather had brought back from the Zulu War. Nothing Thesiger read at Oxford’s history school compared with the books he read about the Zulus, including Rider Haggard’s African novels, or about Abyssinia or Dervishes in the Sudan. In the same way, the buildings and people he saw in London or Paris had failed to stir his imagination like the colourful crowds, mosques and tombs he remembered in India as a boy.

Thesiger avoided Magdalen’s ‘communal life’ and organised sports: ‘I did not drink, and for such festivities as Bump Suppers celebrating success on the river by the College eight I had no taste.’⁸ In May 1931 he did attend a Boat Club supper, and that month someone pencilled on his college menu: ‘I’ve never seen you inebriated before, and I hope I never do again…!!!’ In fact Thesiger drank very little, and unlike his parents and his brothers, he never smoked. Out shooting in Wales or fishing off Brittany, he would drink cider. He enjoyed sweet liqueurs, and used to pour a generous measure of dark, sweet sherry into his favourite oxtail soup or minestrone. Beer and spirits he never touched.

For four consecutive years Thesiger boxed for Oxford, and captained the university in his final year. Three wins against Cambridge, he wrote modestly, ‘gave me a certain standing in the College’.⁹ Thesiger first learnt to box at Addis Ababa, encouraged by Count Arthur Bentinck, a member of his father’s staff. A First World War veteran who had been badly wounded in France, Bentinck was appointed Captain Thesiger’s Military Attaché in 1917. Thesiger wrote: ‘One day at the Legation he had produced boxing gloves, and instructed Brian and me to put them on. He always maintained that our later success was due to his initial coaching. He alarmed us as children – he had a gruff manner, a game leg and a pronounced cast in one eye. Later he became a close family friend.’¹⁰

At St Aubyn’s and Eton, boxing had won Thesiger respect but not friendship. In his male-orientated world, boxing equated with assertiveness, controlled aggression and strength of character. It was an exclusively male pursuit which signalled virility and courage. Boxing, even when the contestants fought tirelessly and hard, channelled and curbed aggression. However brutal they might appear, the matches were never brutish, and the rules and art of boxing maintained a proper division between the controlled aggressive spirit of the ring and an uncontrolled violence ‘improper in the affairs of men’.¹¹ In this sense the sport suited Thesiger’s ethos as well as big game hunting and bullfighting. In each of them, the appeal for Thesiger was the same: to master uncertainty, to win decisively, always facing the possibility of defeat (as a boxer) or of death (from a dangerous African animal such as a lion or a buffalo).

Thesiger said: ‘I had the heavy punch whereas Brian was stylish in the ring. Brian fought hard, right to the end. Of the two of us, he was probably the better boxer.’¹² During Thesiger’s year as Oxford captain his brother Dermot wrote in Isis, the university journal: ‘A kindly fortune favoured him with the means of practising and ripening his fistic ability. It entrusted him to the care of an Indian ayah, who devotedly assured him that there was no reason why he should do anything other than he pleased. Further, it produced a self-willed child of six with three brothers smaller than himself, thus mitigating the danger of an embryo boxer being sadly battered in the early stages of his career.’¹³

At Eton Thesiger had boxed as a flyweight in 1925, a bantamweight in 1926, a lightweight in 1927 and a welterweight in 1928.¹⁴ At Oxford, ‘Finding it difficult to get down to middleweight, I decided to fight as a light-heavy in the University trials.’¹⁵ For his height, almost six foot two inches, this weight – with an upper limit of twelve stone seven pounds – was not excessive. He was broad-chested and broad-shouldered, with sinewy arms, massive biceps and muscular legs which figured prominently in the photograph of him with his guard up, published originally in the Illustrated London News and later in Desert, Marsh and Mountain. He wrote: ‘Boxing was the only sport I was any good at, but I often wondered, sitting with gloves on waiting for the fight before mine to end, why on earth I did it. Yet, once I had started, I felt a savage satisfaction in fighting. I was never conscious of pain, even with a torn ear, a broken nose and split lips, but I do remember occasions of desperate tiredness, and of effort to keep my hands up or stay on my feet.’¹⁶

In his summer holiday in 1930, for the nominal wage of a shilling, Thesiger worked his passage as a fireman aboard the tramp steamer Sorrento, through the Mediterranean as far as Istanbul and Constanza in the Black Sea. When he returned home at the end of a ‘rewarding’ month, he found two letters waiting for him: an invitation from Ras Tafari to attend his coronation as the Emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa following the death of the Empress; and, from the Foreign Office, confirmation of his appointment as Honorary Attaché to HRH the Duke of Gloucester, who was to represent his father, King George V, at the ceremonies.

The Duke of Gloucester’s party left London by the boat train from Victoria on 16 October 1930. From Marseilles they sailed to Aden aboard the P&O liner Rampura.¹⁷ From Aden they crossed to Jibuti on HMS Effingham, and travelled by train from there to Addis Ababa. Apart from Thesiger, the Duke’s mission included the Earl of Airlie, Captain Brooke, Major ‘Titch’ Miles from Kenya, Mr Noble from the Foreign Office and Major Stanyforth. Aged twenty, obliged to wear a morning suit that contrasted dully with his companions’ dress uniforms and decorations, Thesiger felt conspicuous and ill at ease. The arrival of Sir John Maffey, who led the Sudan delegation that accompanied the mission, helped. Maffey had served as Frederic Chelmsford’s private secretary when Thesiger’s uncle was Viceroy of India; Wilfred and Brian had stayed in Scotland, near Loch Naver, with him and his family for ten days in 1929. Lord Airlie was also kind, ‘But,’ Thesiger wrote, ‘it was the natural kindness of the Duke of Gloucester himself which helped me most.’¹⁸ Seeing Maffey again reminded him of an encounter with one of his daughters in Sutherland the previous year. Thesiger said: ‘I felt tremendously attracted to her. But then I thought: I must stop this or it will wreck the rest of my life.’¹⁹ It is not known whether his feelings were reciprocated, although his way of telling the story implies that they were. The experience was probably unique. In 1933 Dermot Thesiger wrote definitively in his Isis article: ‘as to [Wilfred’s] normal pleasure, it would appear that women have no part therein’.²⁰

Wonderful as it was, the Emperor’s coronation meant less to Thesiger than the adventure of returning to Abyssinia. He jotted in his diary: ‘Felt thrilled to be back.’²¹ He stared, fascinated, from the train windows at the arid Danakil desert, empty save for tiny dik-dik antelope, baboons and lesser bustard. In a letter to his mother he described the ceremony quite briefly, with here and there amusing, observant touches that brought the occasion alive. ‘The actual coronation was held in a canvas building added onto St George’s Cathedral…The Emperor and Empress (who is to have a child in a month’s time and consequently has the European midwife as lady-in-waiting) had had an all-night vigil in St George’s…The Empress and Prince were also crowned, with rather awful European crowns…The Abyssinian diplomatic corps wore European clothes and cocked hats, which was a pity…Tafari [now Emperor] was to have left in his state carriage, but the horses were unmanageable…After the ceremony the Abyssinian air force flew over the building (they have crashed two planes [out of a total of six aircraft in working order] in the last fortnight)…I went to the reception afterwards. There was a tremendous selection of fireworks, but unfortunately an accident occurred and they all went off at once.’²² In The Life of My Choice Thesiger gave a more polished version, with only a brief mention of the prematurely exploding fireworks. Even this incident he managed to dignify, adding: ‘This must have been a bitter moment for Haile Selassie, but once again he gave no indication of his feelings. He stood for a while, watching the pyrotechnic chaos in the yard below, then moved slowly back into the banqueting hall.’²³

Thesiger wrote to Brian: ‘The Coronation was the most stirring and impressive show I have ever seen. You could easily imagine yourself back in the days of Sheba. I suppose there never will be such a scene again. It was held in a building added onto St George’s church. The robes were magnificent. The chiefs were present in their lions mane crowns and velvet cloaks and the priests in every coloured robe and crowned with glittering crowns. The main church was filled with the rest of the priests, and throughout the ceremony the thudding of their drums and the rise and fall of their chanting came faintly to our ears. I went in and saw them dance. A wonderful sight. The church was surrounded by the other Rases and chiefs in themselves a sight never to be forgotten…’ Lost for words, he signed off: ‘I have so much to tell you and you can’t even try to describe such scenes as I have seen in a letter.’²⁴

Two days after the ceremony, Thesiger had a private audience at the palace. The new Emperor was ‘extremely gracious’. Their conversation (as usual in French) was very like that Thesiger reported in London. In The Life of My Choice he wrote: ‘He received me with grave courtesy and enquired after my family. When I expressed my appreciation of the honour he had done me by inviting me to his coronation, he replied that as the eldest son of his trusted friend, to whom he owed so much, it was proper that I should be present. I told him how happy I was to be back in his country. “It is your country. You were born here. You have lived here for half of your life. I hope you will spend many more years with us,” was his answer. As he spoke I was very conscious of the smile which transformed his usually impassive face. It was twenty minutes before he terminated the interview. That evening I received two elephant tusks, a heavy, ornate gold cigarette case, a large, colourful carpet and the third class of the Star of Ethiopia.’²⁵ He wrote on 10 November telling Kathleen: ‘We were all decorated the other day and I got the Star of Ethiopia second class [sic].’²⁶ He added, as if to play down this honour: ‘A thing you hang round your neck.’ He noted: ‘If my father had lived, he and my mother would have met Tafari in London, during his State Visit, and they would have attended his coronation. Instead, I represented my father. Seeing the Legation again, where I was born and brought up, the old servants and their affection for my parents – all of this mattered desperately to me…If I hadn’t been invited like that, by Haile Selassie, none of it would have happened.’²⁷

Other letters give ample proof of Thesiger’s intense attachment to the Abyssinia of his childhood. In books he wrote from middle-age onwards he returned continually to the theme of his youth at Addis Ababa and its ‘crucial influence’ on his life. This was no mere literary device; yet childhood were memories perfected by a rose-tinted lens. In his letter in 1930 he described how he had climbed a hill behind the Legation which he frequented as a boy. He called this place ‘Shrine of my youth’. High places, giving wide and distant views, were important to him. The hill behind the Legation at Addis Ababa; Stowe Hill near The Milebrook, where he and his brothers went for walks or went shooting as teenagers; a sheer precipice near Maralal in northern Kenya – Malossa, which he referred to always as ‘The Viewpoint’. The mountain ‘shrines’ were quite personal, and were not to be confused with merely fine mountain views of Morocco, the Middle East and western Asia, where he travelled between 1937 and 1983. Thesiger invariably rejected attempts to explain the significance to him of hills and mountains, saying only that they had ‘always attracted’ him. Any analysis of his emotions he condemned as ‘rubbish’: ‘It’s been fashionable for years to analyse Lawrence, to denigrate him, to probe into his childhood, his friendship with Daoud. I hate all of that. The last thing I’d want is someone probing about in my life. But, after I’ve kicked the bucket, I suppose, they can do as they please.’²⁸

From Addis Ababa, Thesiger wrote: ‘I got a horse and went to the old ruined church behind the Legation…then on to the little wood and home through the plains. Great fun and I loved it.’ The church, originally built of mud and thatch, may have been the same building Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger described in the October 1913 issue of Man, the Royal Anthropological Society’s monthly record. Of his old home, Thesiger wrote: ‘The Legation is terribly the same and yet horribly different…It brings back the days we were here rather painfully.’²⁹ He met no fewer than ‘15 old servants and syces, including Hapta Wold, Ratta and Mahomet and they are very pleased to see me and bursting with enquiries about you all’.³⁰ The British Minister, Sir Sidney Barton, became very involved with Wilfred and his journeys in Abyssinia in 1930, and again during 1933 and 1934. Thesiger wrote discreetly of Barton and his family: ‘I have not yet formed an opinion of the Bartons. The whole place is overrun with daughters and wives…I don’t think they care about [the horses] though the daughter is keen. Lady B said “The Sowars were the raison d’être of the stables.” All terribly different.’³¹ Wilfred enjoyed the banquet given by Sir Sidney Barton in honour of the Emperor. Despatched from London in October, according to the Birmingham Post, a cake produced for the occasion, stood five feet five inches high, on a gold base twenty-two inches in diameter, and weighed more than one and a half hundredweight.³² Many years later, he acquired seven volumes of press cuttings reporting events in Abyssinia from 1929 to 1942. The collection had belonged to Sir Sidney Barton, and among other things it included very full coverage of Haile Selassie’s coronation.

Thesiger admitted that his view of history was ‘romantic’ rather than ‘objective’. He might have added ‘selective’. Whereas his description of the coronation in The Life of My Choice was dignified and sombre, his letters from Addis Ababa in 1930, though no less admiring, had a lighter touch. Of the Duke of Gloucester’s stay at the old palace, he wrote: ‘They are having an odd time at the Gibbi. About a score of courses for every meal, and most of the servants seem to have disappeared. HRH does not treat things seriously and sees the funny side of it.’ The Italians, he noted, were angry after being refused the gibbi as their quarters, since ‘the palace was engaged’.³³ Thesiger later dismissed such anecdotes as inappropriate for an autobiography dedicated to the Emperor’s memory. He felt annoyed and depressed by ‘intrusions’ from the West into the old Abyssinia he had known as a boy. ‘Already it was slightly tarnished round the edges…the bodyguard now wore khaki, some of the palace secretaries were in tailcoats and top hats. There were cars in the streets and brash, noisy journalists crowded round hotel bars competing for sensational stories to wire to their papers. On ceremonial occasions they thrust themselves forward with their cameras.’³⁴ He remembered being elbowed aside by someone shouting, ‘Make way for the eyes and ears of the world!’³⁵ Evelyn Waugh, reporting for the Graphic, joined Lady Ravensdale, a ‘hopelessly loquacious’ American, at the unveiling of a memorial statue to the Emperor Menelik. Waugh wrote: ‘One photographer, bolder than the rest, advanced out of the crowd and planted his camera within a few yards of the royal party; he wore a violet suit of plus-fours, a green shirt open at the neck, tartan stockings, and particoloured shoes.’³⁶ Thesiger, in turn, mocked Waugh’s grey suede shoes, his floppy bow tie and his fashionably wide trouser legs: ‘he struck me as flaccid and petulant and I disliked him on sight’.³⁷ During the ‘preposterous Alice in Wonderland fortnight’³⁸ at Addis Ababa, Waugh gathered enough material for two books: the satirical novel Black Mischief and Remote People, a prime specimen of his ‘impeccable’ acid-etched prose, which Thesiger praised, yet thought was wasted on descriptions of trivia such as the red flannel underclothes worn by Haile Selassie’s temperamental German housekeeper.³⁹ His dislike of Waugh was confirmed by Waugh’s disparaging references to the new Emperor in Remote People: ‘Haile Selassie (Power of the Trinity)…is the new name which the emperor has assumed among his other titles; a heavy fine is threatened to anyone overheard referring to him as Tafari. The words have become variously corrupted by the European visitors to “Highly Salacious” and “I love a lassie” – this last the inspiration of a RAC mechanic.’⁴⁰

Sir John Maffey discouraged Thesiger’s plan to hunt big game in the Sudan after the ceremonies were over. Thesiger wrote: ‘I talked it over with Sir John, and he said if there was a chance of a shoot here take it, as a Soudan shoot would be terribly expensive. A licence costs £50 and I could not have got round it.’ He declined Sir Sidney Barton’s proposal that he should join his and Lord Airlie’s hunting party in the Arussi Mountains, insisting that he needed to hunt by himself to gain confidence and experience for the future.⁴¹ Colonel Dan Sandford, who served under Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger in 1913 and had become a friend of the family, advised Wilfred to hunt in the Danakil country; owing to the Danakil tribes’ murderous reputation it was avoided by Abyssinians, and game was plentiful. Thesiger delighted in recounting Barton’s solemn warning: ‘He said: “Don’t go further down the Awash than Bilen. If you get yourself cut up by the Danakil, it would rather spoil the effect of the show [the coronation].”’⁴² Presaging his later style of travel and exploration, Thesiger wrote: ‘I am taking camels for transport as there are two longish marches over the desert.’⁴³ His godmother Mrs Backhouse, herself a keen hunter, lent him her .318 Westley Richards magazine rifle. From Colonel Sandford at Mullu he borrowed a double-barrelled .400 Jeffery, a more powerful weapon than the .318, in case he decided to hunt (or else encountered) buffalo in the extensive reedbeds at Bilen. Sandford also lent him one of his most trusted employees, a Somali named Ali Yaya who was ‘a first class headman’, together with ‘their 2nd cook and a boy’.⁴⁴ The Abyssinian government provided four armed askaris as an escort. Thesiger wrote: ‘I am naturally hopelessly excited at the idea. It is what I have always longed to do above all things, and the Hawash [sic] is the best shooting left in Abyssinia.’⁴⁵

Before he left Addis Ababa Thesiger met Major R.E. Cheesman, who had served as Consul at Dangila in north-west Abyssinia from 1925 to 1929. In 1926 Cheesman published a book of his travels, In Unknown Arabia. His account of Lake Tana and the Blue Nile followed ten years later. Cheesman remembered talking on the steps of the Legation to Thesiger, who said: ‘“I want to do some exploring. Is there anywhere I could go?” I told him he was rather late in the field; that areas round the North Pole and the South Pole were all that had been left. He said he was not interested in cold countries. I then reminded him that there was a nice hot spot down in the Danakil desert and that nobody had explored it to find out where the Awash river went to.’⁴⁶

On 15 November he wrote to Kathleen: ‘I am off tomorrow…The Government decided our activities were to be confined to 3 heads apiece. (The Minister [Sir Sidney Barton] and Airlie are also going on a safari). Abyssinian humour…’ Lord Airlie and Barton planned to hunt nyala in the Arussi mountains with the Duke of Gloucester, who also hunted in British Somaliland, long before popularised by Captain H.G.C. Swayne’s Seventeen Trips Through Somaliland (1895) and Two Dianas in Somaliland, written by Agnes Herbert in 1908.

From Sade Malka, roughly halfway to Bilen, Thesiger wrote: ‘Everything is going very well…So far I have shot one Soemering’s gazelle and one oryx with a good head, also a bush pig.’ He shot and wounded other game, but missed eight shots at a long-necked gerenuk antelope. Three attempts to shoot a buffalo in the reedbeds at Bilen also failed. At target practice with the .318 his shots went high, perhaps due to its brass cartridges being overheated by the sun, or the deceiving effect of strong sunlight when judging distances.

Thesiger’s much-scarred Danakil shikari, Moussa Hamma, wore an earring indicating he had killed ten men. This ‘most pernicious custom’ at first shocked Wilfred, yet it also excited him: ‘I accepted the fact that among the Danakil a man’s status depended on the number of other men he had killed. They castrated their victims, and this I also accepted. I’ve always believed…killing is natural to men.’⁴⁷ By killing and castrating other men, Danakil warriors demonstrated their maleness and superiority. Robbed of its symbolic virility, a castrated corpse was no longer the corpse of a ‘true man’. In Thesiger’s view, the Danakils’ savage ethos comprised nothing more or less than the survival of the fittest, and the triumph of will over adversity or weakness. He acknowledged that, judged by Western standards, the Danakil style of killing appeared cowardly and totally dishonourable. Warriors had no qualms about murdering an unsuspecting victim. They made no distinction between warriors they killed in a skirmish, and unarmed men they stalked like animals in the bush and shot in the back. Thesiger said: ‘It wasn’t up to me to judge them. What mattered to me was the danger; the excitement; the challenge. I sensed it at Bilen, where Itu Galla raiders had killed a man just before we arrived. Then there was the river…’⁴⁸ He wrote in The Danakil Diary: ‘At Bilen I had watched the Awash flowing northwards through the desert to its unknown destination. Ali, my headman, had constantly made enquiries on my behalf, and had told me that the local Danakil said that the Awash ended against a great mountain in Aussa, where there were many lakes and forests; this however was hearsay. I had felt then the lure of the unknown, the urge to go where no white man had been, and I was determined, as soon as I had taken my degree, to return to Abyssinia to follow the Awash to its end.’⁴⁹

Thesiger recalled in 1996: ‘Back at Oxford I thought incessantly about that month I had spent among the Danakil. I had gone down there to hunt, but this journey meant far more to me than just the excitement of hunting. The whole course of my life was to be permanently affected by that month. There had been the constant and exciting possibility of danger…with no possibility of our getting help if we needed it. The responsibility had been mine and, even though I was only twenty years old at the time, men’s lives had depended on my judgement. I had been among tribesmen who had never had any contact with a world other than their own.’⁵⁰ He often spoke of that ‘decisive’ month’s hunting on the Awash, yet it had been Cheesman’s suggestion that he should explore the river to its unmapped end that fired his imagination. But, to spare his mother needless anxiety, he refrained for the time being from mentioning in his letters his life-changing discussion with Cheesman. Thesiger realised how Kathleen missed his father; how, despite bringing up four sons and leading a busy social life at ‘The Little Mile’, she often felt lonely. He knew that if he were to die, the loss would break her heart. Yet he sensed that his mother would understand, ultimately, better than anyone, what the possibility of exploring the Awash river meant to him.

Despite ‘the constant and exciting possibility of danger’⁵¹ from wild animals and wild tribes, Thesiger’s safari to Bilen had involved a lesser risk than the exploration of the unmapped Awash. The trip to Bilen had been a necessary, ‘wonderful experience’.⁵² It was an all-important step that made the stuff of Thesiger’s boyhood dreams reality. Everything in his young life from the age of three, batting an empty cartridge case at birds in the garden,⁵³ to nineteen, stalking red deer in Sutherland, seemed like a preparation for the thrilling moments when he shot his first African animals (a jackal and a Soemering’s gazelle ‘with quite a good head’⁵⁴) on 17 November 1930, near the Awash station.

Thesiger’s safari ended on 11 December at Afdam, in the Galla country east of the Awash, on the railway line from Jibuti to Addis Ababa. Among the Galla he had ‘an unpleasant feeling…of being in a hostile country…constantly being watched from the hilltops’⁵⁵ by tribesmen who vanished as the safari approached. He spent most of 9 December hunting. In failing light he fired at what he thought was a greater kudu, screened by thick bush; instead he wounded a male lesser kudu that dashed away before dropping dead after a hundred yards. A greater kudu, with its impressive spiralled horns, would have made a perfect trophy, a perfect end to the adventure; the lesser kudu, though the best he had killed, seemed like an anticlimax.

He rounded off his month’s safari by visiting C.H.F. Plowman, the British Consul at Harar. ‘The Ploughmans [sic] have offered to send a horse to Dire Dawa for me to ride up to Harrer [sic] on the way home if I like. I should love to see Harrer.’⁵⁶ In The Danakil Diary, he wrote: ‘Rode round Harar in the evening…the town has a chocolate appearance. It is situated on a small hill…The Harari people are quite different from the surrounding Galla and are much lighter in colour…The women look very bright in their Harari clothes. Red, yellow and orange are the favourite colours.’⁵⁷ ‘It is incredible, however, the number [of people in Harar] that are blind in one eye.’⁵⁸