Between Afdam and Aussa, the wild but hospitable Danakil gave Thesiger’s forty-strong caravan two hundred sheep and thirty oxen, besides ‘hundreds of skins of milk’. Six weeks later they reached Galifage, on the north-west border of Aussa, where they camped on the fringes of thick forest. ‘The tall trees were smothered in creepers; the grass was green and rank; little sunlight penetrated to my tent. It was a different world from the tawny plains, the thirsty thorn-scrub, the cracked and blackened rocks of the land through which we had passed.’41 In a letter, Thesiger described Aussa as
an extraordinary oasis shut in all round by sheer precipices of black rock. The Hawash flows round it on 3 sides seeking an exit…Coming here we have passed through a veritable land of death. Black volcanic rock tumbled and piled in every direction and not a sign of life or vegetation except on the very river’s edge. If my photos come out I shall have some good ones. Then suddenly the mountains open out and you find yourself on the edge of Aussa. This is roughly square in shape and the whole place is wonderfully luxuriant. Half of it is dense forest, with clearings where they graze their flocks and cultivate some durrah. The other half is extensive swamp. There are five lakes varying from 5 to 18 miles in length…There is one horror here and that is the tarantulas, large, hairy and 4" across. They scuttle round camp as soon as the sun sets. Last night we killed 12…In my dreams they assume the most nightmare proportions.42
Thesiger’s meeting with the Sultan of Aussa in a moonlit forest clearing might have been an episode in a novel by John Buchan or Sir Henry Rider Haggard. The earliest version Thesiger wrote immediately afterwards in his Danakil diary; later versions, much abbreviated, were included in letters to his mother and to Sir Sidney Barton; after that came articles for The Times and a paper he read to the RGS in November 1934 with a fuller description of the encounter, which became the basis for more polished accounts in Arabian Sands, Desert, Marsh and Mountain and The Life of My Choice.
He told Barton and Kathleen that he had met the Sultan twice, ‘in itself rather a feat’. ‘We had a moonlight meeting in a big clearing surrounded by the silent forest…He has given me the silver baton without which it is impossible to move a step.’43 Thesiger wrote to Sandford, telling him he had finally met the Sultan after ‘3 weeks getting into touch’.44 To Kathleen he wrote: ‘I cannot hope to describe anything in a letter and am reluctant to spoil what I have to tell you by a bad description…It has been wonderful, in very truth a dream come true.’45 The ‘silver baton’ was ‘a stout bamboo bound round with engraved silver bands which gives to the bearer the authority of the Sultan’. Thesiger received this some days before the meeting. At Gurumudli on 29 March,
we heard the sound of distant trumpets. The forest was sombre in the dusk, between the setting of the sun and the rising of the full moon. Later a messenger arrived and informed me that the Sultan was waiting to receive me. We followed him deeper into the forest, along twisting paths, until we came to a large clearing. About four hundred men were massed on the far side of it. They all carried rifles, their belts were filled with cartridges. They all wore daggers, and their loin-cloths were clean – vivid white in the moonlight. Not one of them spoke. Sitting a little in front of them on a stool was a small dark man, with a bearded oval face. He was dressed completely in white, in a long shirt with a shawl thrown round his shoulders. He had a silver-hilted dagger at his waist. As I greeted him in Arabic he rose, and then signed to me to be seated on another stool [a chair Umr ‘had had the forethought to bring for me’46]. He waved his men away. They drew back to the forest’s edge and squatted there in silence.
On the way to Aussa, Thesiger wrote, ‘I had been faced with conditions of tribal anarchy, but now I was confronted by an autocrat whose word was law. If we died here it would be at the Sultan’s order, not through some chance meeting with tribesmen in the bush.’ Thesiger’s account in Arabian Sands is the best-written, even though some details, such as the family provenance of the Sultan’s silver dagger and a purring of nightjars that flew overhead, are excluded:
He spoke little and never smiled. There were long intervals of silence. His expression was sensitive, proud, and imperious, but not cruel. He mentioned that a European who worked for the government had been killed by tribesmen near the railway line. I learnt later that this was a German [named Beitz] who was working with the Ethiopian boundary commission. After about an hour he said he would meet me again in the morning. He had asked no questions about my plans. I returned to camp without an idea of what the future held for us. We met again next morning in the same place. By daylight it was simply a clearing in the forest with none of the menace of the previous night. The Sultan asked me where I wished to go and I told him that I wanted to follow the river to its end. He asked me what I sought, whether I worked for the government, and many other questions. It would have been difficult to explain my love of exploration to this suspicious tyrant, even without the added difficulties of interpretation [via Umr]. My headman was questioned, and also the Danakil who had accompanied me from Bahdu. Eventually the Sultan gave me permission to follow the river through Aussa to its end. Why he gave me this permission, which had never before been granted to a European, I do not know.47
In this version, written in 1957, Thesiger made it clear that while the danger was very real, the atmosphere of menace was created by the moonlit gloom; even more, perhaps, by the silence, because African forests at dusk are seldom silent. Thesiger’s abrupt, rhetorical ending, ‘I do not know’, very effectively snapped the tension of this brief, enormously important description of the Sultan’s interviews, which it seems had been carefully planned and expertly stage-managed by the Sultan, Mohammed Yayu, and his advisers.
From the barren heights of Mount Kulzikuma, Thesiger saw, ‘far nearer than I had expected, set in a limitless waste of volcanic rock…a great expanse of water, sombre under threatening storm clouds. That was where the Awash ended. I had come far and risked much to see this desolate scene.’48 The moment when he confirmed that this was the Awash’s end appeared, both in his diary and his books, as an anticlimax. On 27 April 1934 he wrote: ‘It was satisfactory to have established conclusively that the Awash did end in [Lake]Abhebad.’ That day he had tramped for six hours to the lake’s south-eastern extremity, where a chain of pinnacles, sinter formations, some of them thirty feet in height, ‘covered with the most delicate tracery’,49 rose above the surface: ‘We passed through a country as dead as a lunar landscape; the heat was tremendous, making us sick and giddy. Throughout the hottest hours we crouched among the rocks, our heads swathed in cloths, wondering if we should have the strength left to return.’50 Here the blinding sun was fiercer than Afdam, where Thesiger had never found the heat intolerable; far more intense than the Awash valley, where the dry breeze had for him ‘a very powerful call, and I felt at home when I first came down off the tableland and felt the unmistakable warm evening wind of the desert’.51
At the French fort in Dikil, Thesiger obtained permission to cross the desert north-east to Tajura, permission which had previously been refused. The long-awaited spring rains now broke, filling the watercourses and the waterholes ahead. Yet in this harsh wilderness they found nothing to feed the camels, except two acacia bushes in full leaf near Lake Assal which saved the lives of the stronger camels and enabled Thesiger’s party to reach the coast. Of his eighteen camels, fourteen died of starvation. Thesiger wrote: ‘It was heartbreaking, for I knew them all so well: little Farur, Elmi, Hawiya, and the great-hearted Negadras…It took us three days to pass round [Lake Assal]…and we dragged the dying camels by main force from one sharp-edged block of lava to the next.’52