On 8 October, by mistake David Haig-Thomas tracked and shot two nyala. Thesiger wrote in The Danakil Diary: ‘He jumped one in thick bush and saw it hide soon after in another patch of thick heather. Stalked it and shot at it, when it apparently bolted. Fired four more shots and killed it. Found the head very much smaller than he had thought. When Umar arrived with the mule, he found another one – the original one – lying dead where first shot at. A great nuisance as David only paid for one on his licence.’62 Haig-Thomas observed ruefully: ‘[Umr] had arrived and found a nyala dead where I had first shot…They must have been lying side by side and I should think the first nyala must have fallen on the second?’63
A few days later Thesiger saw through binoculars an ‘extremely fine’ bull nyala lying in the open, four hundred yards away. After an hour, the bull got up and started to graze. Thesiger made a careful stalk, on all fours, to within a hundred yards of the nyala, which now faced him. The moment it turned side on, he fired. The bull staggered, then recovered. Two more shots killed it. The nyala’s horns measured forty-nine inches, ‘an unofficial record’. For Haig-Thomas, this was a defining moment; a ‘real triumph’ for Thesiger, who noted with relief in his diary, ‘I am so glad I did not take another indifferent head.’64
Travelling through the Arussi mountains gave Thesiger the opportunity to assess his followers and make any necessary changes before the Danakil expedition started. It also gave him and Haig-Thomas a chance to find out how they would fare as travelling companions, even though the hardships and stresses of their Arussi journey were slight compared with the dangers they would face in the Danakil. The high plateau felt bitterly cold. Thesiger’s pony grew listless and died. The baggage mules sickened, due to fever or to bad grazing, and their stomachs distended. One had to be shot. Thesiger wrote: ‘As long as they are kept on the move they keep alive, but die as soon as they are allowed to lie down.’65
By mid-November, David Haig-Thomas had developed painful ulcers on one leg and an abscess in his throat. Prickly grass seeds picked up in his socks caused Thesiger’s right foot to itch and swell. Haig-Thomas’s ulcers got worse. A doctor he met on a coffee plantation lanced the abscess, but soon afterwards he developed tonsillitis in both tonsils. Thesiger wrote: ‘Four days after we had left the Daro [river] he decided to push on ahead with Kassimi, on our two best mules, in order to catch a train from the Awash Station to Addis Ababa for medical treatment.’66 He continued: ‘We reached the Awash Station on 25 November. Haig-Thomas was at the railway rest house. He had returned from Addis Ababa two days before, apparently cured, but his throat had now flared up again.’67 Unable to speak, hardly able to walk, Haig-Thomas returned once more by train from the Awash station to Addis Ababa on 28 November. The following day he sent Thesiger a telegram: ‘Cannot come.’68
Thesiger wrote in The Danakil Diary: ‘I was content to be on my own, glad that I should have no need to accommodate myself to a fellow-countryman, that any decisions in the days ahead would be entirely mine. Haig-Thomas had been cheerful and good natured, and never once had we quarrelled. No one, indeed, could have been more easy-going; but we never got on close terms or found much in common during the four months we had been together since leaving England. I did not feel I should miss his company, and the fact that I should have no fellow-countryman with me to take charge if I fell sick or was wounded did not worry me, since I had every confidence in Umar.’69
In July 1934 David Haig-Thomas left England to spend a winter in the Arctic, as the ornithologist attached to the Oxford University Ellesmere Land Expedition led by Dr Noel Humphreys.70
TEN Across the Sultanate of Aussa
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