The journey across the mountains took twenty-nine days, including a brief official visit paid by Captain Thesiger to the legendary walled city of Harar. To her lifelong regret Kathleen felt too exhausted by the two-thousand-foot climb from Dire Dawa to the Harar plateau to accompany him. Harar seemed unchanged since the Victorian traveller Richard Francis Burton saw it in 1855 and described it in his book First Footsteps in East Africa. When the younger Wilfred Thesiger visited Harar in December 1930, he imagined that even then, ‘except for a few corrugated iron roofs, it still looked the same as when [Burton] had been there’.5
Neither Thesiger nor his father mentioned Harar’s links with the French poet, and gun-runner, Arthur Rimbaud, who lived at Harar and was photographed in 1883 in the garden of its first Egyptian Governor, Raouf Pasha’s, residence. Thesiger said: ‘I knew who Rimbaud was, I suppose, but I knew nothing of his poetry or what he did in Abyssinia. The one that interested me was [the French traveller Henri] de Monfreid. When I was twenty-three I read his book about pearl-diving in the Red Sea and, for a while, I longed for the same sort of adventurous life.’6
Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger’s visit to Harar had been officially requested by the Governor, Dedjazmatch Balcha. A favourite of Menelik, Balcha ‘had a well-merited reputation for ruthlessness, brutality and avarice, and was hated and feared by his subjects’.7 Thesiger’s father was met by Balcha and some hundreds of soldiers with green, yellow and red banners and chiefs in silver-gilt crowns, red and blue robes and lion- and leopard-skin capes, armed with rifles, spears and shields. Wilfred Gilbert wrote: ‘It was very picturesque, the brown rough stones of the town and crumbling loopholed gateway and…narrow streets where only two mules could walk abreast…The palace was a whitewashed building, European of a bad style with quaint lions in plaster on the roof…Afterwards I walked round the bazaars and narrow street market, thronged with wild, white-clothed Abyssinians, Gallas and Somalis…The only thing one could compare it with are descriptions of the old Aztecs. Gorgeous barbarity such as one could nowadays meet with nowhere but here.’8
Describing their marches from Harar along the top of the Chercher mountains, Wilfred Gilbert wrote: ‘We are having a splendid journey and Kathleen is better than I have ever seen her.’9 He thought she looked ‘very smart and neat in her khaki astride costume and helmet’, and the scenery ‘beautiful’ with ‘thick forests of enormous juniper and wild olive trees full of mountain clematis, jessamine, briar roses and other unknown flowers…and looking for all the world like Switzerland or Norway’.10 Kathleen observed impatiently: ‘I do not think we needed to spend so long on the journey but we were accompanied by the Legation doctor [Wakeman]…a half-caste Indian [who]…liked to take life leisurely.’11
They reached the outskirts of Addis Ababa on 10 December, where they were met by the retiring Consul, Lord Herbert Hervey, with an escort of Indian sowars, troopers, in full dress uniform, an Abyssinian Ras and various ministers of state. Later, in an undated memoir, Kathleen described her first impressions of the British Legation, her home for the next nine years:
The Legation lies on a hillside outside the town with vast and beautiful views of the surrounding mountains. I was told that the Legation compound is the same size as St James’s Park. In 1909 the large and imposing stone building in which we later lived in such comfort did not exist and we arrived to a settlement of thatched huts or ‘tukuls’. Each room was a separate round mud hut joined to the next one by a ‘mud’ passage and the whole built round a grassed courtyard with a covered way down the middle. [This accommodation had been planned by Wilfred Gilbert’s predecessor, Captain (later Sir) John Harrington, and was being constructed when the writer Herbert Vivian arrived at Addis Ababa in 1901.]
The servants’ quarters – kitchens etc., stood at the back. The sowars’ quarters and the stables stood higher up on the hillside and the native ‘village’ where the Abyssinian servants lived lay in a hollow beneath them. ‘Mud hut’ is not really at all descriptive of those charming round thatched rooms; always cool in summer and warm in winter. They were wonderfully spacious and most comfortable to live in, although at that time our furniture was very primitive. The [ceiling] was not boarded over, but rose with thatch to a point in the centre and the supporting laths of wood were inter-wound with many gay colours. The effect was enchanting…I shall never forget our first meal that evening. Roast wild duck I most particularly remember! Our head servants were Indians and we had an excellent Goanese cook…12
In the first draft of her memoir Kathleen recalled that the furniture ‘was mostly made from packing-cases but we had some very handsome “pieces” and a few comfortable beds’.13 Wilfred Gilbert wrote to his mother: ‘Kathleen is making cushion covers and tablecloths…the effect of a circular room is rather good only one does miss the corners.’14 He eulogised the Legation’s compound, with its
masses of glorious big rose bushes smothered in blossom [and] a bed of scarlet geraniums…rather tangled and wild, but very pretty. Tall Eucalyptus trees make an inner boundary and our compound is a square about a quarter of a mile each way. A big field serves for grazing and hay making and will allow a little steeple chase course all round. There is a good tennis court [and] a regular village of little stone circular houses for the servants…All round are highish hills broken and covered with scrub and to the East a big plain with mountains all round…the evening lights are very beautiful…15
During the week before Christmas 1909, Captain Thesiger had his first formal audience with Menelik’s grandson, Lij Yasu (or ‘Child Jesus’), who was attended by the corrupt Regent, Ras Tasamma. Thousands of Abyssinian soldiers riding horses or mules escorted Thesiger’s parents to the Emperor’s palace, the gibbi, which crowned the largest hill at Addis Ababa. ‘At that first meeting,’ Thesiger wrote, ‘my father can have had no idea of the troubles this boy would bring on his country.’16 The previous year Menelik had appointed Lij Yasu, then aged thirteen, as his heir. By 1911, when Lij Yasu seized power, the government of Abyssinia had begun to crumble. Five years later, Captain Thesiger would report to the Foreign Office that ‘Lij Yasu…has succeeded in destroying every semblance of central government and is dragging down the prestige of individual ministers so that there is no authority to whom the Legation can appeal.’17
The Thesigers, meanwhile, each recorded impressions of that first audience: ‘a big affair and a wonderful sight’,18 wrote Wilfred Gilbert, while Kathleen found it ‘magnificent beyond my wildest dreams’.19 Wilfred Gilbert continued:
As at Harar the big men wore their crowns with fringes of lions’ mane standing up all round and the skins of leopards and lions over their gold embroidered silk and velvet mantles, an escort of Galla horsemen in the same dresses, each with two long spears rode on either side on fiery little horses and added immensely to all the movement…We circled the walls of the palace to the far gate and here there was