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