Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer. Alexander Maitland

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

       NINE The Mountains of Arussi

      Haile Selassie’s coronation, and the shooting safari that followed, added glamour to Thesiger’s forbidding reputation as a boxer. Among strangers, without some coaxing, he still felt reluctant to talk about his experiences. Within his circle of family and close friends, however, he proved to be an excellent storyteller. He was also an attentive listener. While his stories were often amusing, he never told jokes. He said: ‘I don’t begin to understand this fascination by humour and, besides, I always think I’ve got none. Things people tell me make me laugh. When I see them written down I don’t find them so funny.’¹ Thesiger’s high-pitched, throaty cackle exposed his gums and his small, discoloured teeth. When he laughed, his whole face lit up, his eyes glittered, his bushy brown eyebrows arched expressively. Yet some people who met Thesiger for the first time found him bloodless and distant. One visitor described him as ‘rather blank, with penetrating eyes that look as though they haven’t seen much to laugh about’.² This impression was accurate, but it portrayed only one aspect of his personality.

      Meeting Robin Campbell at Oxford helped to bring Wilfred out of his shell. In this new, unfamiliar setting, Campbell, who was two years younger than him, filled a void in Thesiger’s emotional life. Thesiger told an interviewer: ‘He was one of the gilded youths of Oxford. He had the looks and the charm of Rupert Brooke. Everyone was trying to get hold of him and the fact that this most sought after person actually liked spending time with me, brought out my self-confidence. After that, I assumed, for the first time really, that people could like me.’³ In his seventies, Thesiger recalled his feelings in more detail: ‘It was love…I wanted to hold him in my arms…But I always feared any advances would spoil a very close friendship. My feelings for Robin were romantic feelings, whereas Val ffrench Blake was interesting to talk to.’ He added, somewhat unjustly, ‘Perhaps there was not much more to Robin Campbell than his looks.’⁴

      Furtive embraces and voyeuristic encounters set a pattern for Thesiger’s sexual life from then on. His photography expressed this very clearly. He viewed his male subjects as forbidden objects of desire, signalling his feelings for them by his choice of pose and his sensitive handling of light and shadow. The beauty of his images derived in part from the unconscious revelation of these suppressed feelings to the viewer, as much as from Thesiger’s skilful composition and his intuitive ability to capture and record what he called ‘the exact moment caught or lost forever’.⁵ When he wrote, ‘Sex has been of no great consequence to me, and the celibacy of desert life left me untroubled,’ he meant exactly that. He insisted that the concept of physical sex, with men or women, revolted him: ‘I should have liked to have children. It was what I needed to do in order to get children that put me off.’⁶

      Thesiger never explained, or may have been unable to explain, why he was revolted by the physical act of sex. He dismissed most attempts to analyse his motives and thought processes as ‘rubbish’ and saw no point in discussing or exploring the source of this revulsion. It may have originated in Lang’s abusive bathtime