Читать книгу Wilfred Thesiger in Africa - Alexander Maitland, Chris Morton - Страница 9

To escape the humid, oppressive, summer heat of the Iraqi marshes, Thesiger travelled between 1952 and 1956 over the mountains and high passes of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nuristan. In 1955, when a journey in Nuristan had to be postponed, he spent two months in Morocco trekking and climbing in the High Atlas Mountains.

Hajj Thami al Glawi, whom Thesiger and his mother had met at Telouet in 1937, gave him permission to travel from one kasbah to another across his territory. At Taddert, Thesiger encountered an Oxford University expedition, whose members had come to southern Morocco to study life in Ait Arbaa, a remote Berber village. Thesiger helped them find the twenty baggage mules they needed, and agreed that one of their party could join him on his long walk across the High Atlas. A guide whom Thesiger hired at Telouet proved nervous and uncooperative, certain that he would be murdered if he strayed too far from his own country. Another guide, who replaced him, refused to go further than Zaouia Ahansal. Thesiger judged, probably correctly, that his guides did not want to get caught up in the conflict between Moroccan nationalists and the French. When Thesiger returned to Marrakech in September he found the city under curfew and heard that insurgents had killed several of the soldiers in a French military outpost at Ahermoumou, near Fez.

Writing years earlier in The Times,in 1937, Thesiger had described ‘the resentment felt by the Moors for the French, who were competing with them on all levels, even as drivers of horse-drawn cabs in towns.’⁷⁵ He had not forgotten the desperation of tribesmen starving in the slums of Casablanca, or the rising tide of nationalism powered by Morocco’s ‘frustrated intelligentsia’.

Thesiger photographed the kasbahs at Ghasat and Ait Hamed. He was impressed by Ghasat, where he arrived on 4 August 1955, with small fruit trees and a deep well in a courtyard with guest rooms, attached to an outer wall of the main building. From here he had a ‘very attractive view of the mountains and of the village and orchards’.⁷⁶ At Ait Hamed, Khalifa Haji Umr’s kasbah stood on a low hill overlooking an orchard enclosed by a stone wall. The great kasbahs at Ghasat and Ait Hamed, and Tabir Ait Zaghar’s kasbah with fine, incised decorations on its walls, were among 750 photographs which Thesiger took before he returned to Casablanca in October. Even as late as 1955, he would still have been in time to meet the French painter Jacques Majorelle (1886–1962), who lived and worked in southern Morocco, which he had first visited as a convalescent in 1917. Majorelle’s house at Marrakech and its beautiful garden became tourist attractions, with tiled steps and walls of Majorelle blue–a pigment used by the Berbers and named by Europeans after him. Majorelle’s figure studies were painted in a distinctive fin de siècleOrientalist style, which was at once original and recherché.

Thesiger’s photography and his travel writing also reflected an Orientalist attraction to danger, mystery, romance, exotic settings and sensual freedom. His superb photographs of the kasbahs would have appealed strongly to Jacques Majorelle, who painted many of them and in 1930 published Les kasbahs de l’Atlas,a portfolio containing thirty magnificent reproductions.

Thesiger’s photographs of kasbahs, villages, landscapes and towns in Morocco were the product of a ‘great picture-taker’⁷⁷ whose magical effects were created using the camera instead of brushes, paints and canvas. Thesiger’s atmospheric photograph from 1965 of a street in Marrakech reminds us instantly of any bazaar or street scene in Cairo painted by John Frederick Lewis or David Roberts, only Thesiger has used black and white film, leaving the colours to our imagination. While it is true that the later Orientalists used cameras to record pose, lighting and detail, Majorelle would have found it ironic that Thesiger, who had a strong empathy with Orientalism, identified himself with photography, since it was the camera’s increasing precision and popularity that accelerated the decline of the Orientalist movement.

John Newbould, a botany student at Merton College, who had been Thesiger’s first choice as a companion, had fallen off a cliff and fractured an arm the day after Thesiger arrived at Taddert. Instead, he took with him the Oxford expedition’s zoologist, whom he criticized as dirty, unkempt and opinionated, yet who proved capable and enduring, and would later become a world authority on bird flight. The High Atlas Mountains were remote and wild, but, Thesiger felt, already spoiled by innovations, such as cars and telephone lines linking kasbahs with the towns. The mountain views were magnificent. In the villages Thesiger was welcomed, and fed on bread, honey and meat stew washed down by cups of coffee and refreshing mint tea. At Aioui, he climbed for eleven hours on high sheer cliffs made slippery by rain and abseiled part of the way down them. In the Taria gorge a raging flash-flood of muddy yellow water filled it to a depth of fifteen feet and threatened to sweep Thesiger’s party to their deaths. He had warned them just in time of the danger and noted with obvious relief in his diary, ‘it was well we got out when we did’.⁷⁸

In September, after John Newbould had recovered, he and Thesiger climbed to the 13,671-foot summit of Jebel Toubkal, the highest of the Atlas Mountains. On the way, Newbould collected a large number of flowers and plants, including a new variety of carnation. Fit as he was, he found the last thousand feet hard going, whereas Thesiger, who had walked, since 1952, hundreds of miles over the high valleys and mountain passes of Chitral, Hunza and Afghanistan, ‘felt … no effects of altitude at all’.⁷⁹

They enjoyed themselves so much that Thesiger asked Newbould to come with him to Nuristan the following year. For various reasons this plan did not come to fruition. Meanwhile they kept in touch by letter. They met briefly in Nairobi when Thesiger first arrived there, in November 1960. From April to May 1961 they trekked for a month round the Ngorongoro Crater. From June until September 1963, Thesiger and Newbould travelled in northern Tanzania, where they walked, with donkeys, for eleven weeks, across the Maasai plains.