Читать книгу Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer - Alexander Maitland - Страница 16

David Haig-Thomas must have been bitterly disappointed when his health prevented him from rejoining the expedition. Thesiger’s slightly ambivalent postscript to the Arussi journey and Haig-Thomas’s departure published in The Life of My Choice was reprinted afterwards in The Danakil Diary. As usual, he wrote exclusively from his personal viewpoint, and did not mention either Haig-Thomas’s disappointment or Kathleen’s alarm when she heard the news that Wilfred would have to continue his expedition without Haig-Thomas as a companion. To Thesiger’s dismay, Haig-Thomas arrived back in England before Kathleen received the letter Wilfred had written explaining David’s departure. He said: ‘When my mother learnt that David was back in England, she was absolutely horrified. He came down to The Milebrook and explained what had happened. My mother thought David hadn’t behaved very well and that he shouldn’t have left me, like that, on my own. I’m sure she was angry, and this was only to be expected. Anyhow, I felt rather relieved after he’d gone. In many ways he couldn’t have been nicer, but he was odd…I mean, he never brushed his teeth or took a bath. I don’t think he ever read a book and, after a few days, we had nothing left to talk about.’¹

Judging by his 1933 diary, Haig-Thomas had no idea how to spell, yet his descriptions were clear, sometimes vivid, and written in honest, unvarnished prose. Thesiger, it seems, made little or no effort to persuade him to rejoin the expedition after having his leg and throat treated at Addis Ababa. In his account of the journey published in Desert, Marsh and Mountain in 1979, Thesiger gave his view of Haig-Thomas very precisely: ‘when we reached the railway he decided to go back to England. I was glad to see him go, for though we had never quarrelled I found his presence an irritant and was happy now to be on my own. This was no fault of his, for he was good-natured and accommodating. Like many English travellers I find it difficult to live for long periods with my own kind.’²

Regardless of his feelings, Thesiger could not afford to remain camped at the Awash station until Haig-Thomas’s leg and throat were cured. ‘My immediate anxiety was that the authorities might forbid my journey, since the Asaimara of Bahdu had recently renounced their allegiance to the Government.’³ The Asaimara inhabited the Bahdu plain below Ayelu, one of the Danakils’ three sacred mountains. Of the two main Danakil (or Afar) groups, the Asaimara, or Red Men, of Bahdu were more ferocious than the Adoimara, or White Men, who inhabited the rest of the country. Possibly Thesiger had used Haig-Thomas’s afflictions as a convenient excuse to be rid of him. The two did not get on well enough to stand the strains of a difficult and dangerous journey; besides which, Thesiger would have been reluctant to share with Haig-Thomas, or anyone else, the ‘discovery’ of the Awash river’s end. He later distanced himself from his indispensable headman, Umr, writing:

even for Omar [sic] I had felt no authentic friendship, regarding him rather as a trusted subordinate. He in turn expected me to distance myself from my followers, which he accepted as proper for an Englishman. For instance, he would have been upset if I had shared a meal with the camelmen. As a child at the Legation I had never known the intimate relationship with ayahs and bearers which many children in India had experienced. I had grown up accepting our servants as subordinates, distinct in colour, custom and behaviour. I undoubtedly had a feeling of superiority, since my father was the British Minister and I was his son. This feeling, however, certainly did not include colour prejudice, which is something I have never felt. Aesthetically, I regard white as the least attractive colour for skin.⁴

While Thesiger paid a handsome tribute to Umr, ‘He and he alone had made possible my seemingly unattainable goal,’⁵ he added a proviso: ‘Umr carried out my instructions, kept my caravan together and negotiated with the Sultan in Aussa. But I had been the driving force behind the expedition.’⁶

At Bilen, during his hunting trip in 1930, the Adoimara Danakil had informed Thesiger that the Awash river ended in a lake near Mount Goumarri, in the legendary Sultanate of Aussa, a forbidden territory which remained until then unexplored. The Sultan or Amoita, Mohammed Yayu, was an all-powerful despot who, it was said, hated Europeans. In 1928 Ludovico Nesbitt, the author of Desert and Forest, met the Sultan, who refused him permission to enter Aussa. While the river’s end remained unexplored, Nesbitt confirmed that the Awash flowed into Aussa.

From the Awash station, Thesiger wrote to his mother on 26 November: ‘We arrived here rather late…but David, who has had some boils on his leg, rode on in front to get to Addis Ababa by the train and sent a telegram to you from me. I thought you might be getting anxious about our delay. We got hung up by a customs post in Bale, my fault for misreading my pass and entering a district not mentioned in it…I am buying more camels, and awaiting the arrival of 10 soldiers [in fact he was allocated fifteen] who are to go with us. This morning I gave out the rifles lent us by the Legation, and we are extremely well armed. Almost every man has a rifle and ammunition. David had returned from Addis Ababa and was waiting for us here when we arrived.’⁷ In contrast to his account in 1979, in which he described Haig-Thomas’s presence as an ‘irritant’, Thesiger added: ‘I am very glad to have got him back as he is an excellent companion on trek, taking everything very smoothly.’⁸ While this was doubtless intended to reassure his mother, Thesiger would write to his brother Brian two months later: ‘Have you seen David since he returned? It was rotten luck on him. He was a delightful companion with a temper which nothing could ruffle. I do hope he enjoyed the Arussi trip, though I feel he would have enjoyed this one even more. His absence handicaps me badly with the birds.’⁹

On 27 November Wilfred had written to Dermot: ‘Don’t let [mother] worry about me. It is the one thing that makes me unhappy, to think that she is probably worrying.’¹⁰ Yet he described a lion hunt to Kathleen as ‘exciting while it lasted’, the excitement of following fresh tracks, even without sighting any lion, and the thrill of anticipation as he ‘crawled along clutching the trusty .450 you gave me’.¹¹ Perhaps his feelings towards Haig-Thomas changed dramatically over the years; or perhaps, aware that his mother and his three brothers shared all the letters he wrote to them individually, he did not wish to upset Kathleen by suggesting there had been any ill-feeling between him and Haig-Thomas, still less appear to criticise her insistence upon him having an English companion. In this respect the contrast between Thesiger’s reaction to Haig-Thomas in 1933 and the way he documented their relationship years later is paralleled by his much-publicised rows with Gavin Maxwell in the Iraqi marshes in 1956.

The prelude in Arussi, Thesiger wrote, had been ‘a great and valuable experience to me, and very much increased my self-confidence…We are now camped just outside the Hawash Station and shall be off down the Hawash in 4 days I hope. I am pleased to be back among my beloved Danakils again. They are an attractive race.’¹² Reginald Astley had written him a long letter, full of news. Wilfred noted: ‘I am so pleased that the Weir House is sold and that question is settled, but I am sorry for Reggie.’ The sale, he felt, was ‘a cartload off [Kathleen’s] mind’.¹³ Perhaps Astley had suggested that the family give up their tenancy of The Milebrook and move to the Weir House. Selling the Weir House eliminated this possibility.

Before Haig-Thomas’s departure, Thesiger had assured Kathleen: ‘Darling mother, I cannot tell you how often I think of you, and how very much I wish you were with me. You are such a prop to the four of us, and you have given us what no other boys seem to get from their homes. Those who have never had a Milebrook can never know what it means, and by far the greater part of the world never has. I always feel sorry for David when the mail comes. In place of stacks of letters for me from you all he may perhaps have one odd one. I shall always value this close bond which unites the five of us above everything, and it must be the one thing which never gets broken.’ (He did not include his stepfather in this ‘close bond’. Instead of replying to it himself, he had asked his mother to thank Astley for his long letter, adding how much pleasure it had given him; but one suspects that he never counted Reginald Astley as part of the family.) ‘As long as we have each other we need nothing else. In the years to come even if separated by distance we must keep this priceless unity, and never slowly drift apart. You must always remember, mother dear, that it is you who have given it to us.’ On 27 November he added a significant postscript: ‘I am keeping a most detailed diary of every occurrence however trivial. If I write a book [about the Danakil expedition] it will be indispensable.’¹⁴

Thesiger’s revealing letter of 26-27 November makes it clear that he was keeping a journal of the Danakil expedition with the intention of writing a book about it, even though he later described his books and photographs as mere ‘by-products’ of his travels. In this respect his approach reminds us of Freya Stark, a prolific letter-writer whose vast correspondence served as her diaries. Unlike Freya, Thesiger didn’t keep carbon copies of letters he wrote, and unfortunately he preserved very few letters from his mother and his brothers, so his archive of fascinating travel letters gives only his side of their correspondence. Thesiger’s father had written a great many letters during his sojourns abroad, and these his parents had kept carefully. Kathleen took great care of Wilfred Gilbert’s correspondence, which was housed in specially made linen-covered boxes. She also kept all Wilfred’s juvenile essays and letters from 1917 until 1973, when she died. Besides his letters, Thesiger wrote diaries of all his journeys; and from 1930 onwards he took photographs, which in due course became his preferred method of recording his travels. As the postscript to his letter of 26-27 November 1933 suggests, though he never at any time travelled in order to write an article or a book, or wrote articles or books to pay for his journeys, he recorded his journeys with a view to publishing the diaries and letters he wrote about them, illustrated by the photographs he took. While The Danakil Diary was being edited in 1996, he recollected that he ‘had been asked to write a book’ about his exploration of the Awash river. He did not mention, and perhaps had forgotten, the book that he himself had planned to write. When he reviewed Nesbitt’s Desert and Forest in the RGS Journal in 1934, he praised the book’s ‘vivid and distinctive prose, and many passages…of great beauty’; but his criticism of the ‘vague’ zoology and ‘misgivings about the scientific exactitude of Mr Nesbitt’s observations’ clearly implied that he felt there was room for a more accurate and precise work describing the Danakil tribes and the previously unknown fate of their mysterious river.¹⁵

Thesiger’s hunting trip in 1930, and his journey to the end of the Awash river in 1933-34, set a pattern for most of his subsequent travels. From then on he travelled on foot with tribal companions and baggage animals, almost never accompanied by another European. All his important journeys were done in this ‘traditional’ manner. During his ‘lesser’ travels in the Sudan, Syria, Palestine, Morocco, southern Iraq, India, Jordan, Kenya, Tanzania and Ladakh, he was joined sometimes by other Englishmen. Despite his reservations, he enjoyed their company:

People like George [Webb], Frank [Steele] and John [Newbould] were all interesting to talk to. They were interested in their surroundings…interested in everything that went on. George spoke a number of African dialects and languages. He was very intelligent and very witty. He helped me get permission to travel in northern Kenya. In 1962 we climbed to the top of Mt Kilimanjaro. Frank had been a District Officer in Uganda, where he did quite a lot of elephant hunting and hunted other big game. After that he served as Vice-Consul at Basra. I met him there, in southern Iraq, when I was living among the Marsh Arabs. Frank used to join me for a few days in the marshes; and afterwards we travelled together in Jordan and Kenya. John wanted to come with me to Nuristan, but he couldn’t get a permit. Later on, while he was down at Ngorongoro, we did a fairly long journey together with mules, in the Serengeti, across the Masai steppe. Gavin Maxwell and Gavin Young both wrote books about their journeys with me in the Iraqi marshes. Gavin Maxwell wasn’t a bit like David [Haig-Thomas] and yet he was…He knew a lot about birds, and he could be fascinating to listen to; but, in the marshes, I found him exasperating…Gavin Young, on the other hand, was easy-going and very popular. Amara and my other canoemen, and their families, were always delighted to see him.¹⁶

Thesiger’s caravan set off from the Awash station on 1 December, and arrived in his old hunting grounds at Bilen on the fifth. He wrote from there telling his mother: ‘Everything is going splendidly and my camp is happy and contented. I left the Hawash as soon as the soldiers’ camels arrived and did a night march almost to Sade Malka. We then came on slowly from there, and I have now given the men and camels 3 days rest. I am anxious not to hurry as I don’t want to tire my camels.’ Of the habits of buffalo at Bilen, he wrote: ‘They are astonishingly wary as they are never persecuted. They never come out till after dark and are back again in the reedbed before dawn. I very nearly got two today, but they got my wind at the last moment, and plunged off making a great noise as they galloped [away].’ In a paper read to the RGS on 12 November 1934, Thesiger commented: ‘I marched down the river…stopping for several days at Bilen in order to try and obtain a specimen of the buffalo which inhabit the reedbed there…I failed to get a buffalo…They were astonishingly wary…I have never heard of one being shot, which makes their extreme shyness difficult to explain. From the tracks which I saw I think the herd consists of only ten individuals.’¹⁷

In his introduction to ‘Birds from Danakil, Abyssinia’, published in The Ibis in October 1935, Thesiger outlined his journey to the end of the Awash, whose object he described as following its course’in order to solve the problem of the river’s disappearance’:¹⁸ ‘The Awash rises in the mountains near Addis Ababa and enters Danakil in its south-western corner. Mr David Haig-Thomas[’s]…return to England…handicapped me severely, since I was now single-handed, and I had not myself studied the birds of this region before leaving England.’ Having described the purpose of the expedition and offered an apology for ‘a number of gaps in the collection’ of birds, he went on: ‘I left Awash Station on 1 December, 1933, but on reaching Bahdu was compelled to return to Afdam owing to trouble between the Abyssinian Government and the Danakil tribes. I arrived at Afdam on 22 December. Many weeks were wasted before I could obtain permission to start again on my journey. I left Afdam on 8 February, and this time I was successful in tracing the river to its end in Lake Abhebad. I then crossed the lava deserts of French Somaliland to Tajura, where I arrived on 20 May.’¹⁹

Writing to his mother, he described his camp at night, surrounded by hyenas – ‘No one can pretend they are musical but I am glad to hear them again’ – and the marvellous light at daybreak and dusk. A lyrical mood evoked memories of his father’s descriptions of misty ‘light and colour’²⁰ on the Somali coast: ‘I cannot tell you how lovely the dawns are here [at Bilen]. They are indescribably beautiful, and as I always try to get off early we see it every morning. It is more lovely than the sunset, though for some reason I prefer the evening stroll round to the morning one. I suppose this is because the day’s work is then over, and you come in to a hot bath and a large supper. In the evening the Mohamedans nearly always chant round their fire, and this sounds most attractive.’ He returned to more practical themes: ‘I try to practise my Arabic on them but most of them speak it worse than I do, using an indiscriminate mixture of Arabic, Somali, Amharic and Galla. Despite this I can usually make myself understood.’ More troublesome than the hyenas that ‘swarm everywhere’ were ‘swarms of Dankali [sic] round the camp, begging for flour’. He added as an afterthought: ‘I am afraid I shall not be able to get another letter back to you. We are on the edge of a tribal boundary [between the Adoimara and Asaimara Danakil], and the people here and in Asaimara are hereditary foes. They would certainly kill an Asaimara if I tried to send him back with a letter.’ A postscript – ‘Could you keep the Times, Foreign News Editor, informed of my movements’ – presaged articles he later wrote for that newspaper.²¹

The Adoimara at Bilen had assured Thesiger that his party ‘would certainly be massacred if [they] attempted to enter Badhu’. Having come safely through the ‘ill-famed’ pass of Mataka, they emerged onto a fertile plain, a mile wide, between the hills and the river, where cattle, sheep, goats, ponies and donkeys grazed on rich grass, and giant fig trees grew in clusters along the riverbank. At Beriforo, the caravan was confronted by ‘a large gathering of armed warriors [about two hundred of them]…and their reception…was far from friendly. They were inclined to force a quarrel, declaring that my Somalis were Essa, with whom they were then, as always, at war. But references to a non-existent machine-gun [contained in one of Thesiger’s rifle cases] helped us to reach an understanding.’²² In The Life of My Choice he wrote: ‘The tension, however, eased after Omar managed to get hold of some elders. Over many cups of tea, he succeeded in convincing some of them that I was an English traveller on my way to visit the Amoita in Aussa. He persuaded them that I was not employed by the Government, explaining that I was under the Emperor’s personal protection, which accounted for my escort of soldiers. Even so, I felt by no means certain that the elders would be able to prevent their refractory warriors from attacking us after dark. We spent an apprehensive night. At intervals I wandered round the camp, flashing my powerful torch into the darkness. I doubt if anyone slept.’²³

At a nearby village where they camped among the huts ‘in the centre of a most malarious bog’, a letter addressed to the headman of the armed escort arrived from the government. The letter had been passed along from village headman to village headman, and its contents by then were common knowledge. It ordered Thesiger to turn back, since the country ahead was too dangerous. Should he refuse, the soldiers were to return without him and inform the Danakil that the government was no longer responsible for Thesiger’s safety.

Thesiger wrote: ‘I very reluctantly decided that to continue after losing half my rifles, and when the Dankali knew that the Government had refused to be responsible for our lives, was to invite certain massacre for myself and for my men.’²⁴ He later recalled: ‘Our greatest risk was when we were in Bahdu that first night. That was when things hung in the balance…At Bahdu I wasn’t afraid. [What I felt] was excitement.’²⁵ By the time the government’s letter had arrived, Thesiger told his mother, ‘We were through the place where any trouble might have been expected, and I have not the least doubt that I should have reached the end of the river from where I was without difficulty.’²⁶

Thesiger ‘wasted’ six weeks at Addis Ababa until the Abyssinian government allowed him to continue his expedition from the Afdam station, where he had left Umr in charge of the caravan. Soon after he got to Addis Ababa he wrote to Kathleen, on 23 December, telling her: ‘Everything has crashed at the moment, but I hope to be able to pull things round…However nothing can be done for a day or two and I shall go out to the Sandfords for Christmas. I had hoped to spend it at the end of the river…Darling mother, I suppose it is good for the soul but it is bitterly disappointing to be baulked like this. It makes it more bitter when it is not your fault that you have failed, and you believe that except for this you could have done it. I have staked such a lot on this venture, not only money, though there is £1500 of that, but everything. However I shall fight desperately to get back there.’²⁷ At Addis Ababa Thesiger stayed with Frank de Halpert. He wrote asking Kathleen to buy a new or second-hand copy of Lydekker’s Game Animals of Africa from Rowland Ward’s, and send it to de Halpert as thanks. De Halpert had admired a well-used copy Thesiger had taken with him on the Awash expedition; Thesiger had used this book on safari in 1930, and kept it with him for reference in the Sudan between 1934 and 1939.

After some lengthy discussions with Sir Sidney Barton and Dr Martin, the Governor of Chercher province, Dr Martin allowed Thesiger to resume his expedition. In return for fifteen armed soldiers as escort, he wrote a letter to Dr Martin absolving the Abyssinian government of all responsibility for his safety. (Dr Martin’s officials lost the original letter soon afterwards, and Martin wrote to Thesiger in February 1934 asking him for a copy of it.)

Thesiger’s caravan already numbered forty men, most of whom had been armed with rifles. He wrote: ‘They have increased my escort somewhat. I deliberately prevented them doing so too much, however, as that only adds [to] instead of lessening the risk. If you went down to the Hawash with 100 soldiers you would certainly have fighting. Such a number would frighten the Dankalis who are a jumpy people, and they would probably attack you as a means of protecting themselves against the supposed danger of your presence. The number I have got, about 40 rifles, is just right. Too strong to be an irresistible temptation and yet too few for them to be made nervous.’²⁸

As Thesiger’s caravan was leaving Bahdu in December, Umr had brought over the adopted son and nephew of Miriam Muhammad, an important chief and hangadaala, or spiritual leader, of the Bahdu Danakil. Miriam Muhammad and his nephew, Ali Wali, had been imprisoned at Asba Tafari as hostages for the Asaimara Danakil’s good behaviour. When Miriam Muhammad refused to guarantee Thesiger’s safety among the Asaimara at Bahdu, Thesiger had been recalled to Addis Ababa. From Afdam in January, at Ali Wali’s suggestion, Thesiger telephoned Dr Martin and secured his uncle’s release. Ali Wali and another Danakil chief, Ahamado, were ordered to accompany the caravan as far as Aussa. Meanwhile Miriam Muhammad’s presence ensured the safety of Thesiger’s party when they returned to Bahdu.

Thesiger wrote to Kathleen: ‘I have also got permission from both the Abyssinians and the French to cross the frontier and go to Jibuti…it will be interesting going across that country, and will save my having to go back on my tracks which is always a pity…I expect to arrive at Jibuti at the very beginning of May. I might then…take a dhow from Jibuti to Port Sudan. It would be most interesting to see that coast from the sea, and also the Arabian barrier reefs. This was David’s idea and I have stolen it. I think it would be cheap and only take a short time. Have you read de Monfreid’s books? They are in French. They would make anyone anxious to see a bit of that coast.’²⁹

Though Umr was effectively responsible for the caravan, Thesiger not only shared, but took, decisions day by day. He devoted time to photographing the country and the people, mapped the course of the river, wrote a diary, recorded detailed descriptions of Danakil customs, shot meat to feed himself and his party, and collected specimens of birds, plants, animals and insects – tasks which absorbed and occupied him from daybreak until nightfall. He wrote: ‘I always fortify the camp with a defence made of flour sacks and chop boxes…We always refer to Olive’s gun case [and its gun lent by Lady Archer] as the machine-gun and wave it about when there is an opportunity. [The Danakil] certainly think it contains one. The search lights too give a great sense of security at night.’ Again he underlined his motive for this journey: ‘without a risk the game would lose its fascination, and it has an enormous fascination, nor would it be worth doing…It makes you do all in your power continuously. You cannot be slack and slovenly here, and there is a satisfaction in being pitted against a difficulty. How sententious!’³⁰ He acknowledged the danger to his caravan: ‘There unquestionably is a great risk for any of my men who straggle or get separated from camp, but I have warned them repeatedly about this, and we are careful always to march in a solid body. If a camel needs reloading we all stop, and I have elaborate advance guards and rear guards.’³¹

Collecting bird specimens proved fascinating, but very time-consuming, work. He wrote from Afdam on 5 February:

Yusuf the bird man bolted and left 2 months wages behind, rather than go down the Dankali country again. I always said he was a rotter, and should have parted with him long ago but for David’s entreaties. I have had a busy time trying to train someone to take his place. The cook’s boy and head camelman both show promise³²…I have got over 100 birds since I have been here, and there are about 50 different specimens [he presumably meant species], and I have nothing like got them all. This is arid desert without a drop of water except at the bottom of deep wells. You can imagine the numbers [of birds] in the forest along the river. It gives me a lot to do. I can only trust the men to skin, and have to sex, stuff, pack and label each specimen myself. But it is great fun and I have them all out in my spare moments to admire them. I now have four men who can skin, and so we can get through a lot in a day. But a large part of the day has to be spent collecting them especially when you already have the common ones. Some are very lovely.³³

Thesiger kept a running total of the birds in his expedition diary, which filled almost two large notebooks. By the end of the journey he had collected no fewer than 872 specimens, comprising 192 species or sub-species. Three new sub-species – an Aussa rock chat, a Danakil rock sparrow and a Danakil house bunting – had Thesiger’s and the ornithologist Mark Meynell’s names attached to them, acknowledging Thesiger, their ‘discoverer’, and Meynell, who worked out the collection in England.

Thesiger’s earliest photographs did little more than visually record the Danakil and their forbidding landscapes. He scribbled impatiently: ‘I am anxious to hear what my photos were like. I do hope there were some successes. [He had sent some of his exposed film to England with Haig-Thomas.] I am taking a lot here, and think that the light is easier. It varies very little. The big camera [his father’s Kodak] certainly is a lovely one to use.’³⁴

Apart from meeting the Sultan of Aussa, Thesiger’s most treasured memories of the Awash expedition included an encounter with a young Danakil named Hamdo Ouga, or Ahamdo Ugo, chief of the Badogale, son of the last Sheikh of Bahdu. Hamdo Ouga, who was related to the Sultan of Aussa, had ‘much power in the land’.³⁵ When Thesiger first met him he had returned from the Issa frontier, having killed three men. Hamdo Ouga was killed soon afterwards by raiding Adoimara. He was ‘a most attractive boy’, Thesiger recalled.³⁶ ‘He looked about eighteen, with a ready, friendly smile and considerable charm…He struck me as the Danakil equivalent of a nice, rather self-conscious Etonian who had just won his school colours for cricket.’³⁷ This description invariably amused and delighted audiences at the talks Thesiger gave in his later years at the Royal Geographical Society. The double-focus image of a teenage Danakil chief who had killed three men had a vulnerable charm that revived Thesiger’s idealised memories of Eton, and appealed widely to less critical admirers. Aged six, Wilfred had envied and identified with a boy soldier who fought at Sagale in Ras Tafari’s victorious army. At twenty-three, he again identified himself with a warrior role model, one from ‘a strange people’ whose ‘main object in life [was] to kill and mutilate someone else’. He wrote to George Gordon, the President of Magdalen College: ‘I met one youth of about 12 years old who had just killed, followed round by a crowd of admiring children. It is these enterprising young men who are a menace to our stragglers.’³⁸

In contrast to the ferocity of the Asaimara Danakil, the game in their ‘gaunt and desolate’³⁹ country seemed excessively tame. Thesiger wrote to Brian from Afdam: ‘I did not do very much shooting in the Danakil country partly as in places it is too risky, and also chiefly because the animals are so tame it is but little sport. I have seen oryx feeding with my mules 150 yards from my tent door, and you can often pass within 50 yards of them.’⁴⁰

Between Afdam and Aussa, the wild but hospitable Danakil gave Thesiger’s forty-strong caravan two hundred sheep and thirty oxen, besides ‘hundreds of skins of milk’. Six weeks later they reached Galifage, on the north-west border of Aussa, where they camped on the fringes of thick forest. ‘The tall trees were smothered in creepers; the grass was green and rank; little sunlight penetrated to my tent. It was a different world from the tawny plains, the thirsty thorn-scrub, the cracked and blackened rocks of the land through which we had passed.’⁴¹ In a letter, Thesiger described Aussa as

an extraordinary oasis shut in all round by sheer precipices of black rock. The Hawash flows round it on 3 sides seeking an exit…Coming here we have passed through a veritable land of death. Black volcanic rock tumbled and piled in every direction and not a sign of life or vegetation except on the very river’s edge. If my photos come out I shall have some good ones. Then suddenly the mountains open out and you find yourself on the edge of Aussa. This is roughly square in shape and the whole place is wonderfully luxuriant. Half of it is dense forest, with clearings where they graze their flocks and cultivate some durrah. The other half is extensive swamp. There are five lakes varying from 5 to 18 miles in length…There is one horror here and that is the tarantulas, large, hairy and 4" across. They scuttle round camp as soon as the sun sets. Last night we killed 12…In my dreams they assume the most nightmare proportions.⁴²

Thesiger’s meeting with the Sultan of Aussa in a moonlit forest clearing might have been an episode in a novel by John Buchan or Sir Henry Rider Haggard. The earliest version Thesiger wrote immediately afterwards in his Danakil diary; later versions, much abbreviated, were included in letters to his mother and to Sir Sidney Barton; after that came articles for The Times and a paper he read to the RGS in November 1934 with a fuller description of the encounter, which became the basis for more polished accounts in Arabian Sands, Desert, Marsh and Mountain and The Life of My Choice.

He told Barton and Kathleen that he had met the Sultan twice, ‘in itself rather a feat’. ‘We had a moonlight meeting in a big clearing surrounded by the silent forest…He has given me the silver baton without which it is impossible to move a step.’⁴³ Thesiger wrote to Sandford, telling him he had finally met the Sultan after ‘3 weeks getting into touch’.⁴⁴ To Kathleen he wrote: ‘I cannot hope to describe anything in a letter and am reluctant to spoil what I have to tell you by a bad description…It has been wonderful, in very truth a dream come true.’⁴⁵ The ‘silver baton’ was ‘a stout bamboo bound round with engraved silver bands which gives to the bearer the authority of the Sultan’. Thesiger received this some days before the meeting. At Gurumudli on 29 March,

we heard the sound of distant trumpets. The forest was sombre in the dusk, between the setting of the sun and the rising of the full moon. Later a messenger arrived and informed me that the Sultan was waiting to receive me. We followed him deeper into the forest, along twisting paths, until we came to a large clearing. About four hundred men were massed on the far side of it. They all carried rifles, their belts were filled with cartridges. They all wore daggers, and their loin-cloths were clean – vivid white in the moonlight. Not one of them spoke. Sitting a little in front of them on a stool was a small dark man, with a bearded oval face. He was dressed completely in white, in a long shirt with a shawl thrown round his shoulders. He had a silver-hilted dagger at his waist. As I greeted him in Arabic he rose, and then signed to me to be seated on another stool [a chair Umr ‘had had the forethought to bring for me’⁴⁶]. He waved his men away. They drew back to the forest’s edge and squatted there in silence.

On the way to Aussa, Thesiger wrote, ‘I had been faced with conditions of tribal anarchy, but now I was confronted by an autocrat whose word was law. If we died here it would be at the Sultan’s order, not through some chance meeting with tribesmen in the bush.’ Thesiger’s account in Arabian Sands is the best-written, even though some details, such as the family provenance of the Sultan’s silver dagger and a purring of nightjars that flew overhead, are excluded:

He spoke little and never smiled. There were long intervals of silence. His expression was sensitive, proud, and imperious, but not cruel. He mentioned that a European who worked for the government had been killed by tribesmen near the railway line. I learnt later that this was a German [named Beitz] who was working with the Ethiopian boundary commission. After about an hour he said he would meet me again in the morning. He had asked no questions about my plans. I returned to camp without an idea of what the future held for us. We met again next morning in the same place. By daylight it was simply a clearing in the forest with none of the menace of the previous night. The Sultan asked me where I wished to go and I told him that I wanted to follow the river to its end. He asked me what I sought, whether I worked for the government, and many other questions. It would have been difficult to explain my love of exploration to this suspicious tyrant, even without the added difficulties of interpretation [via Umr]. My headman was questioned, and also the Danakil who had accompanied me from Bahdu. Eventually the Sultan gave me permission to follow the river through Aussa to its end. Why he gave me this permission, which had never before been granted to a European, I do not know.⁴⁷

In this version, written in 1957, Thesiger made it clear that while the danger was very real, the atmosphere of menace was created by the moonlit gloom; even more, perhaps, by the silence, because African forests at dusk are seldom silent. Thesiger’s abrupt, rhetorical ending, ‘I do not know’, very effectively snapped the tension of this brief, enormously important description of the Sultan’s interviews, which it seems had been carefully planned and expertly stage-managed by the Sultan, Mohammed Yayu, and his advisers.

From the barren heights of Mount Kulzikuma, Thesiger saw, ‘far nearer than I had expected, set in a limitless waste of volcanic rock…a great expanse of water, sombre under threatening storm clouds. That was where the Awash ended. I had come far and risked much to see this desolate scene.’⁴⁸ The moment when he confirmed that this was the Awash’s end appeared, both in his diary and his books, as an anticlimax. On 27 April 1934 he wrote: ‘It was satisfactory to have established conclusively that the Awash did end in [Lake]Abhebad.’ That day he had tramped for six hours to the lake’s south-eastern extremity, where a chain of pinnacles, sinter formations, some of them thirty feet in height, ‘covered with the most delicate tracery’,⁴⁹ rose above the surface: ‘We passed through a country as dead as a lunar landscape; the heat was tremendous, making us sick and giddy. Throughout the hottest hours we crouched among the rocks, our heads swathed in cloths, wondering if we should have the strength left to return.’⁵⁰ Here the blinding sun was fiercer than Afdam, where Thesiger had never found the heat intolerable; far more intense than the Awash valley, where the dry breeze had for him ‘a very powerful call, and I felt at home when I first came down off the tableland and felt the unmistakable warm evening wind of the desert’.⁵¹

At the French fort in Dikil, Thesiger obtained permission to cross the desert north-east to Tajura, permission which had previously been refused. The long-awaited spring rains now broke, filling the watercourses and the waterholes ahead. Yet in this harsh wilderness they found nothing to feed the camels, except two acacia bushes in full leaf near Lake Assal which saved the lives of the stronger camels and enabled Thesiger’s party to reach the coast. Of his eighteen camels, fourteen died of starvation. Thesiger wrote: ‘It was heartbreaking, for I knew them all so well: little Farur, Elmi, Hawiya, and the great-hearted Negadras…It took us three days to pass round [Lake Assal]…and we dragged the dying camels by main force from one sharp-edged block of lava to the next.’⁵² At the Dafare waterhole they hired replacements for the dead camels from Aizamale tribesmen camped there.

Almost a fortnight after leaving Dikil, six months after he had first entered the Danakil country, Thesiger and his caravan arrived on 20 May 1934 at Tajura. Thesiger had shown Umr how to use a camera, and three days before they reached Tajura Umr photographed him standing with a rifle across his shoulders, bearded and moustached, in a sheltering khaki topee. Thesiger had achieved his ambition, and accomplished ‘a thoroughly good piece of work in really dangerous country’.⁵³ He looked confident and defiant. Yet according to Colonel Sandford, the expedition had taught him ‘to be patient and diplomatic as well as to “thrust”’. Sandford had told Thesiger he was ‘winning golden opinions [perhaps ‘pinions’] – which remark never failed to goad him to fury’,⁵⁴ and confided to Kathleen: ‘Between ourselves Sir Sidney Barton told me when I last saw him that Wilfred had greatly impressed him – he thought he had developed a great deal since he was last out here.’⁵⁵ ‘I think Wilfred has shown himself to be thoroughly sensible in his dealings with the natives, and he is not likely to bring down trouble upon his head.’⁵⁶ As to the young man’s future, Sandford commented generously and perceptively: ‘I am not sure that his heart is really set on the Sudan Civil [i.e. Political Service] – but if they get him they will in my opinion get good value.’⁵⁷

However much it went against the grain, Thesiger had learnt to balance determination with patience and tact, especially when dealing with his elders. He had at last begun to master his temper, although he never managed to suppress his sudden, violent rages. He acknowledged this weakness, and the much-needed assurance Umr Ibrahim’s ‘imperturbability’ had given him.⁵⁸ He felt proud and satisfied at having achieved the objectives of his journey: having traced the mysterious river to its end; having collected so many birds; having taken ‘hundreds’ of good photographs and gathered ‘enough information for an interesting book on the Dankalis’. Writing to Kathleen, however, he found it impossible to resist patronising David Haig-Thomas’s efforts at ornithology and photography. N.B. Kinnear observed in 1934 that whereas Haig-Thomas ‘had taken the trouble to make himself acquainted with the birds of the country’, Thesiger ‘readily admit[ted] that he did not know much about Abyssinian birds’.⁵⁹ Thesiger confirmed his scant knowledge, writing: ‘I have got…probably 350 different kinds [in reality the figure was 192]…[though] David [apparently over-cautious] told me that we should not get 50 different kinds of bird in the whole of this trip.’ As for photographs, he remarked: ‘I am so glad that my Arussi photos are good. It makes me hope that the hundreds I have taken on this trip will also come out. Poor David, he is unlucky. He took such a lot of trouble with his light meter etc. Probably he would have done better just to snap as I did. I wonder if any of the ones I took on the mountain at Chelalo came out. It was so cloudy that I took time-exposures by guess work.’⁶⁰

A few days after arriving at Tajura, Thesiger sailed on an Arab dhow across the bay to Jibuti. During the expedition he had been reading French-language paperbacks by Henri de Monfreid, including Secrets de la Mer Rouge, Aventures de Mer, La Croiserie de l’Hashish and a controversial book, Vers les Terres Hostiles de l’Ethiopie, which ‘got him expelled from Abyssinia’.⁶¹ De Monfreid was a French Catalan from the Roussillon. His father Daniel de Monfreid, a painter and art dealer, had been Gauguin’s representative in Europe during the artist’s last years in Tahiti and the Marquesas. The younger de Monfreid grew up to be anti-establishment and anti-British. With his upper-middle-class origins and a foot in both camps, de Monfreid’s background paralleled Thesiger’s, just as his renegade lifestyle appealed to the determinedly conventional yet free-spirited Thesiger, who respected his family’s and his country’s traditions, yet empathised strongly with the Zulus after Isandhlwana, admired the Dervishes at Omdurman and followed anxiously, enthusiastically, the fortunes of the rebel Abdel Krim and his forces in Morocco.

At Aseila, on the way to Dikil, Thesiger met Fara, who had been de Monfreid’s devoted cook. Thesiger wrote: ‘I had hoped when I got to Jibuti to meet de Monfreid. He had however gone on a visit, I think it was to France, but his dhow, the Altair, was anchored in the bay. I went on board her and met his crew. From his books I already knew their names. I heard he was selling the Altair. I thought fleetingly of buying her and leading a life resembling his, but reality took charge.’⁶² A paper enclosed in Thesiger’s original manuscript diary may have been written by de Monfreid. It gives a detailed breakdown of the running costs of the Altair for any prospective purchaser, suggesting that Thesiger had made serious enquiries about the vessel. But the eldest son of the former British Minister at Addis Ababa was never destined to live like de Monfreid, a social outcast ‘fishing for pearls off the Farsan isles and smuggling guns into Abyssinia through Tajura’.⁶³

In February 1933, six months before Thesiger left for Addis Ababa, de Monfreid sailed round the ‘hallucinating landscape’⁶⁴ of Gubet Karah on the Red Sea with a party of prehistorians, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Dr Paul Wernert and the Abbé Henri Breuil. From there they trekked to Lake Assal. On the Harar plateau, Wernert examined prehistoric art in the Pore-Epic grotto; at Sourré, Breuil copied rock paintings of cattle, wild animals, herdsmen and hunters as he perched on scaffolding high above a ravine. In 1959, the year Thesiger’s first book, Arabian Sands, was published, the ageing de Monfreid set off to the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean (where Abdel Krim had once lived in exile), in search of treasure said to have been buried in 1730 by Olivier le Vasseur, an eighteenth-century pirate. Empty-handed, still driven by his insatiable craving for adventure, three years later de Monfreid returned to his old haunts in Ethiopia, the former Abyssinia.⁶⁵ In The Danakil Diary, Thesiger noted that de Monfreid, whom he hoped to meet at Jibuti in 1934, was not there.⁶⁶ Having chaperoned the prehistorians to the Red Sea coast and Harar, he had returned to France to be with his wife and young family.⁶⁷

Saying goodbye to his men in the railway station at Jibuti ‘deepened [Thesiger’s] depression…All [the remaining twenty-two]…had proved utterly reliable, often under conditions of hardship and danger. None had ever questioned my decisions, however seemingly risky, and I had never doubted their loyalty.’ The following day he left Jibuti, travelling third-class aboard a Messageries Maritimes steamship en route from Indo-China to Marseilles. Umr was there to see him off. Reliving the moment in 1996, Thesiger wrote in his concluding chapter of The Danakil Diary: ‘As I watched him descend the gangway I was more conscious than ever how much of my success was due to him.’⁶⁸

On 8 August 1934, Umr wrote Thesiger a flattering letter, giving his address merely as ‘Omar Ibrahim, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’:

Dear Sir

…since you left me and the other servants we have all been wondering about your safety and health. We are also very anxious – as per promised – to see the Photographs that you intended to produce as well as the several newspapers which may contain an account of your trip through Ethiopia. After your departure I was called by the Secretary to the British Minister [Sir Sidney Barton] who told me that he expected two gentlemen from England about two months hence, and I will be called upon to carry out the same duties as I did with you. I rather think, however, that the trek will not be as good with them as it was in your case. Please, Sir, send me some word of your plans as I am almost daily bothered by the other servants who are eager to get a word or two from you. I am also hoping that your entire collection of birds reached England quite safely. I, in common with the others, will always be grateful to you for the innumerable acts of kindness that you had so frequently extended to us.

Obediently your servant, Omar Ibrahim.⁶⁹

Soon after he returned to England, Thesiger’s mother and stepfather gave a dinner party for him at Claridge’s, which John Buchan attended as guest of honour. On 12 November 1934 Thesiger read a paper entitled ‘The Awash River and the Aussa Sultanate’ to the Royal Geographical Society. Introducing him, the Society’s President, Major-General Sir Percy Cox, stated unequivocally that Thesiger’s ‘primary object’ had been to solve the mystery of the Awash river’s end: ‘A secondary object was the collection of natural history specimens, especially birds and mammals.’⁷⁰ Thesiger took up Cox’s theme early in his lecture: ‘Unfortunately Haig-Thomas fell ill…This handicapped me badly with the collecting, but I succeeded in my main objective, which was the thorough exploration of the river…I also collected 880 specimens of birds.’⁷¹ While this was true, he might have paid a warmer tribute to Haig-Thomas, who had contributed a substantial sum of money to the expedition, as well as shooting several specimens of blue-winged geese for the Natural History Museum. He could also have mentioned Haig-Thomas’s extensive preparations for the journey, notably his research into the country’s birds, which was acknowledged by N.B. Kinnear after Thesiger read his paper. Instead, Thesiger appeared to treat the consequences of Haig-Thomas’s illness as a testing challenge that he had faced alone, and had successfully overcome.

Perhaps Thesiger had felt more sympathy for Haig-Thomas than he showed outwardly, and realised how hard it must have been for him to abandon the expedition before it got properly under way. Haig-Thomas’s decision was surely no less traumatic than Thesiger’s brother Dermot’s decision to withdraw from a boxing match at Oxford knowing the odds were hopelessly against him, of which Thesiger approved: ‘I think Dermot was extremely sensible over the boxing. It takes a courage which few people possess to do what he did. It is far easier to enter and be smashed up entirely, than to face facts and not give a damn for other people’s remarks. I admire him more than ever for this.’⁷²

The mystery of the disappearing Awash had been solved. Closing his narrative in The Danakil Diary, Thesiger wrote: ‘I had come far, overcome many difficulties and risked much, but I had achieved what I had set out to do.’⁷³ Yet the ‘lure of the unknown’ remained an irresistible enticement to adventure. He declared: ‘I had no desire to go back to civilisation, and wish[ed] I was just starting out from the Awash station with the whole Awash river still before me to explore.’⁷⁴