On 13 July Sandford wrote to Umr instructing him to buy eight riding mules, including three ‘good strong animals for the personal use of Mr Thesiger and the gentlemen with him’, and fifteen ‘first class baggage camels suitable for work in the valley of the Hawash’,48 complete with baggage saddles and other equipment, and a man to look after them. As protection against ‘the Hawash type of “malignant” malaria’, a Dr Lambie recommended Atebrin, Plasmocin and Plasmocin C, Emetin and Yatren for dysentery, and Neo-Salvarsan for tick or relapsing fever. Thesiger had enquired about free railway passes in Abyssinia, and the possibility of hunting along the Abyssinia-Sudan border. Sandford replied: ‘I don’t think you’ll get a free railway ticket, but I’ll enquire whether reductions are ever made to scientists!’ As for ‘trekking along the Sudan border in search of game’, he doubted that this would be worthwhile.49 By the end of August, Thesiger decided that he and Haig-Thomas would delay starting the expedition to avoid the Awash’s worst malarial season, and would spend two months hunting nyala and other game in the Arussi mountains.
The mountain nyala, a large antelope that resembled the greater kudu, was only found in the highlands of Arussi and Bale, where the hunter-naturalist Edward North Buxton had discovered it as recently as 1910. Since then, few had been shot by sportsmen. On 23 November 1933, David Haig-Thomas’s father Peter, who had himself hunted in the Arussi, wrote to Kathleen, who had sent him one of Wilfred’s letters from there: ‘Many thanks for letting me read such an interesting letter. They evidently went further South than I did in the Arussi Mts. I saw 73 female nyala but never a male.’ Such numerous sightings were evidently exceptional. Thesiger wrote in 1996: ‘few Europeans had ever seen a mountain nyala, so Haig-Thomas and I were naturally eager to secure one’.50
Aware of his obligations to the Natural History Museum, Thesiger wanted to shoot specimens of k’ebero (or cuberow), also known as the Abyssinian wolf, as well as the blue-winged geese needed to expand the museum’s collection, which at that time consisted of a single specimen brought back in 1868 after Napier’s Magdala expedition.
Having been awarded a third-class degree in modern history, Thesiger returned from Oxford to The Milebrook. In the third and final volume of his Milebrook diary, his last entry, dated 18 April 1933, describes a fine day’s birdwatching in the Elan Valley. He might have been describing a scene at Addis Ababa: ‘Saw two kites. Both came out of oak trees on hill side. Very good view. Can this be one of the old…ones and a new mate[?] Am certain there was only one there till now. Very exciting. Hunted round together. Ravens very demonstrative. A good afternoon.’51
On 24 August 1933 Thesiger and David Haig-Thomas travelled by train and ferry from London to Marseilles, and from there by the MM Chermonceaux, third class, to Jibuti. Apart from the £300 Sandford calculated they would need in Abyssinia, Thesiger had spent £389.3.11 equipping the expedition in England. The most expensive item had been foodstuffs, purchased in style at Fortnum & Mason at a cost of £208.8.10. Thesiger and Haig-Thomas each brought guns and miniature rifles (.22s firing lead bullets or dust-shot) for collecting birds, and big game rifles to shoot meat for their caravan, as well as trophies. Their large, comfortable tents were equipped with verandahs, and they would dine off folding tables laid with tablecloths, cutlery and glass, shaded from the sun by a parasol with fringes like an enormous lampshade. Thesiger commented: ‘I travelled then as my father had travelled in the past, like an Englishman in Africa.’52
They were met on 8 September at Addis Ababa by Sandford and Frank de Halpert, a banker who knew Thesiger and his family. Umr Wadai, ‘a tall, powerfully-built, middle-aged Somali’,53 was with Sandford. Umr was to be Thesiger’s loyal, trusted companion for the next nine months. The Sandfords provided Wilfred with an excellent cook, Habta Mariam, who was elderly, frail, yet very sturdy. The first supper Habta Mariam prepared, from ducks shot at Mojjo, ‘tasted delicious, a happy augury for future meals’.54
Guided by Umr, they engaged two Somalis, Abdullahi and Said Munge, as gunbearers, and, as head syce, and later assistant to Umr, a middle-aged Amhara named Kassimi. Goutama, Kassimi’s assistant, had worked as a young syce at the Legation when Thesiger was a boy. He was a devout Christian, of slave origin, and very dark-skinned. The camels Umr had already purchased, and their Somali camelmen, awaited Thesiger and his party at the Awash station.
After an audience with the Emperor at Addis Ababa on 22 September, Thesiger and Haig-Thomas spent a week with Dan and Christine Sandford in their charming, mud-walled, thatched farmhouse at Mullu. On the Mullu river they shot six fat blue-winged geese. In The Danakil Diary Thesiger noted: ‘we obtained several specimens for the museum’.55 According to his unpublished ‘Notes on the Blue Winged Goose’, however, between September and November they shot twenty adult geese – including the six at Mullu – and two goslings of this little-studied species, which, Thesiger observed, was ‘a very silent bird for a goose’.56
The Arussi trek had scarcely got under way when a brigand, or shifta, stole a rifle from one of their followers. Thesiger described the incident briefly in The Danakil Diary, but an unpublished version taken from Haig-Thomas’s diary is more detailed. To Thesiger the theft was of little consequence; to Haig-Thomas it had been an adventure: ‘I was behind the caravan collecting birds but grabbed a rifle and followed by Said and Joseph raced along towards the shouting…Having clubbed a Galla [the shifta] had seized his rifle and made off and was only a short way in front. WT being in front…fired over his head and he dived into thick bush. I soon came up, and we gave up thinking he would escape through the bush. [Thesiger stated that he ‘Followed him, very ticklish work as thick scrub and I thought he would fight.’] Umr and our syce kept him in view, got to close quarters and after firing close to his head he surrendered. He was bound all the time muttering “here you have me bound, if only I had some cartridges and was in the bush I could shoot you like rats”…He had been a shifta for 9 years and had shot several men.’
In his version, Thesiger discreetly omitted to mention that they found on the shifta letters to a Fituarari: as Haig-Thomas wrote, ‘a high personage in A[ddis] A[baba] saying “I am sorry I have not got you anything for so long and hope to get you something soon.” He told us he had friends not far, and that they had been spying on the caravan the night before.’ He added, maybe nervously: ‘It is possible they may try to raid the camp tonight for a hostage.’57 Later, at Chelalo, Haig-Thomas recorded graphically, they ‘saw a man hanging from a tree, far from fresh. The hyenas could reach his legs and had eaten them. Umr says he was a shifta. I wonder why nature usually so beautiful has not evolved a more pleasant method of ridding herself of unwanted boddies [sic]?’ He remained optimistic, however: ‘we may see nyala tomorrow?’58
In a large, steep-sided valley at Mount Chelalo, they heard two k’ebero calling to one another across the valley east of the mountain. The animals made ‘a most weird noise, faintly resembling a baboon’s bark’.59 On 6 October they shot a female k’ebero in heathland on the edge of a forest of causo trees. Haig-Thomas sighted two that were hunting for moles. The k’ebero were ‘unafraid and curious’, sometimes ‘passing leisurely by within 20 yards’. In these highlands, Thesiger noted, k’ebero were ‘quite tame’, and ‘evidently plentiful from the number of droppings seen’; the animals went about either singly or in pairs.60