Arabian Sands Read online

  ARABIAN SANDS

  WILFRED THESIGER was born in Addis Ababa in 1910 and educated at Eton and Oxford where he got his blue for boxing. In 1935 he joined the Sudan Political Service and, at the outbreak of the Second World War, was seconded to the Sudan Defence Force. He later served in Abyssinia, Syria and with the SAS in the Western Desert, and was awarded the DSO. After the war he travelled in Arabia, Kurdistan, the Marshes of Iraq, the Hindu Kush, the Karakorams, Morocco, Abyssinia, Kenya and Tanganyika, always on foot or with animal transport. In recognition of his journeys he received the Founder’s Gold Medal from the Royal Geographical Society, the Lawrence of Arabia Medal from the Royal Central Asian Society, the Livingstone Gold Medal from the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and the Burton Memorial Medal from the Royal Asiatic Society. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy. In 1968 he received the CBE, and a knighthood in 1995.

  In his two greatest books, Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs, he gives a vivid account of a way of life which, until recently, had continued for thousands of years. The Marsh Arabs, which won the 1964 W. H. Heinemann Award, is also published in Penguin Classics. Wilfred Thesiger’s other books include Desert, Marsh and Mountain: The World of a Nomad, his autobiography, The Life of My Choice, and Visions of a Nomad. An accomplished photographer, he donated his extensive collection of negatives to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Wilfred Thesiger died in 2003.

  RORY STEWART was born in Hong Kong and educated at Eton and Oxford. He served briefly as an infantry Officer in the Black Watch before joining the Foreign Office and serving in Indonesia and then as British Representative in Montenegro. Between 2000 and 2002 he walked 6,000 miles across Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal and Afghanistan. In 2003 he was appointed as the Coalition Deputy Governor of Maysan and Dhi Qar in the Marsh regions of southern Iraq. He is the author of The Places in Between and Occupational Hazards. He now lives in Kabul where he runs the Turquoise Mountain Foundation. He was awarded the OBE in 2004.

  WILFRED THESIGER

  Arabian Sands

  With an introduction by RORY STEWART

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  First published in Great Britain by Longmans, Green 1959

  First published in the United States of America by E. P. Dutton 1959

  Published in Penguin Books 1964; reprinted with a new preface 1984; reprinted with a

  second preface 1991

  Published with a new introduction in Penguin Classics 2007

  1

  Copyright © The Estate of Wilfred Thesiger, 1959, 1984, 1991

  Introduction copyright © Rory Stewart, 2007

  All rights reserved

  The publishers are indebted to Messrs J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd for permission to quote

  a prayer from the Rodwell translation of The Koran in the Everyman Library edition.

  The moral right of the authors has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90442–9

  Contents

  Introduction by Rory Stewart

  List of Maps

  Preface

  Preface to the 1991 Reprint

  Foreword

  Prologue

  1 Abyssinia and the Sudan

  2 Prelude in Dhaufar

  3 The Sands of Ghanim

  4 Secret Preparations at Salala

  5 The Approach to the Empty Quarter

  6 On the Edge of the Empty Quarter

  7 The First Crossing of the Empty Quarter

  8 Return to Salala

  9 From Salala to Mukalla

  10 Preparations for a Second Crossing

  11 The Second Crossing of the Empty Quarter

  12 From Sulaiyil to Abu Dhabi

  13 The Trucial Coast

  14 A Holiday in Buraimi

  15 The Quicksands of Umm al Samim

  16 The Wahiba Sands

  17 The Closing Door

  Arabic and Botanical Names of Plants Mentioned

  in the Book

  A List of the Chief Characters on the Various Journeys

  Index

  Introduction

  ‘Sir Wilfred, how did it feel when you first killed a man?’

  ‘Killed a man? I’ve never killed a man.’

  ‘But in your book…’

  ‘Oh, I see – well of course I’ve killed men from long distance with a rifle…’

  ‘Sir Wilfred,’ another student asked, ‘what did it feel like to go alone into the terrifying Danikil country and meet the young ruler who was celebrating by hanging the testicles of his dead enemies around his neck?’

  ‘He seemed very pleased.’ Thesiger paused, apparently searching for an analogy. ‘As though he had just been awarded his First Field Colours.’

  This was my first meeting with Wilfred Thesiger. He was six foot two, broad-shouldered, with a deeply lined face, a large nose broken three times in a boxing ring, and he was as tough as he looked. In 1932 he was the first European to make it alive through the country of the notoriously violent Danikil in Ethiopia, recording in the process the direction of a major river system. He travelled astonishing distances through the Sahara and in the Sudan, he hunted lions, standing his ground as they charged – one got close enough to knock him over before he killed it. He developed a reputation for courage while serving with Wingate’s Gideon Force in Ethiopia and won the DSO for capturing a fort together with 2,500 Italian soldiers. He was then recruited into two of the most famous wartime units: first SOE, where he was trained to be a secret agent in Cairo, and then the SAS, with whom he fought behind enemy lines in the desert.

  When I first met him, however, he was wearing a three-piece tweed suit and lecturing to students in an old-fashioned upper-class growl. Many in the audience who had apparently come expecting to meet a deeply sensitive mystic, a second Lawrence of Arabia, were shocked by his apparent pomposity. One whispered to me disapprovingly that he ‘was a product of his age and class’, as though an English gentleman born in 1910 was predestined to be an aristocratic fop or a colonial nabob. In fact, of course, the modernist revolutions in art, science and politics were underway before his birth. Picasso, Proust, Einstein, James Joyce and Mao were all old
enough to be his father. While Thesiger was lion-hunting in the Sudan, his fellow Etonian George Orwell was fighting in the Spanish Civil War. When Thesiger was living with the Marsh Arabs, another fellow Etonian, Aldous Huxley, was experimenting with gurus and LSD in California.

  If Thesiger seemed old fashioned this was in part his conscious choice. His answers to the students were deliberately camp and provocative. He was aware that most of the audience had no idea what First Field Colours were (they are awarded to the best performers in the Field Game – a sport played only at Eton). These comments, like his clothes, were part humorous, part nervous, part pompous, and sat awkwardly alongside his real achievements. They have always filtered our impressions of him. It is impossible, however, to doubt his physical courage.

  As Arabian Sands records, between 1946 and 1948, while the world struggled with genocide, colonialism, revolution and modernity, Wilfred Thesiger crossed and recrossed the 250,000 square miles of the Empty Quarter, the largest sand desert in the world, in the area of modern Yemen, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Oman. The routes he chose were threatened by warring tribes and so desolate that many Arabs refused to accompany him. He was in his late thirties and had worn shoes all his life but he walked barefoot so that every step in the desert burned or cut his soles. On one part of this journey, he travelled 2,000 miles over seven months, rationing himself and his companions to only two pints of water a day and eight pounds of flour a month, about a third of a normal diet. They were thirsty and hungry almost all the time and they were pursued by raiding parties determined to kill them.

  Thesiger called the Empty Quarter ‘the final and greatest prize of Arabian exploration’. It had been crossed twice before him: first by Bertram Thomas in 1931, and then by Harry St John Philby in 1932, on a physically more taxing journey that involved one leg of 400 miles between water supplies. Thesiger’s journeys of 1947 and 1948 opened two new and even tougher routes, the first from Mughshin to Liwa across the eastern sands, and the second across the western sands from Manwakh, via Laila, to Abu Dhabi.

  Arabian Sands describes these and six other journeys undertaken in five successive years with twenty-eight different companions in four different countries. The landscape is largely barren, there are no monuments to admire, the days are repetitive, his Arabic is not entirely fluent and his illiterate companions frequently have little of interest to say. Yet, Thesiger turns this confusing and potentially alienating journey into a unified and compelling narrative. It is engaging without being over-simplified, exciting without being over-dramatic and strikingly truthful.

  Thesiger’s talents as a writer are a surprise. Arabian Sands was his first book and he finished it when he was almost fifty. He had little interest in serious literature, got a poor degree as the Oxford University boxing champion and did not enjoy writing. As Alexander Maitland’s excellent biography makes clear, it took him ten years to get round to writing Arabian Sands at all, and the process left him ‘bored stiff’. But the result was an immediate success.

  His previous writing had been directed at audiences he knew well: warm and sentimental letters to his mother, and confident understated lectures to fellow explorers. In these contexts he had learned to be a chronicler of specific events, a keen observer of men’s clothes (he was dressy himself) and of how they were greeted by other men. He wrote naturally in short sentences with few metaphors. He revealed little about why he undertook these extraordinary journeys and he rarely drew historical or literary parallels. His writing, therefore, often echoed the reports of nineteenth-century British travellers on the North-west frontier: matter of fact, understated, replete with precise information, useful for Imperial projects.

  When Arabian Sands was published, however, travel-writing was dominated by writers in the tradition of Robert Byron. Such writers rarely spoke local languages or spent extended times in rural areas or engaged in dangerous journeys. They presented themselves either as libraries of historic allusion or as figures of fun. Their books were filled with comic dialogue, ornate descriptions and exotic incidents typically involving public-school maharajahs, colourful crowded bus rides and reveries on ancient monuments.

  One of the leading exponents of the new style was Eric Newby, whose book A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush was published in the same year as Arabian Sands. Newby was a decorated Special Forces veteran, who had escaped from a prisoner of war camp, spent eighteen months doing backbreaking work while hiding on an Apennine farm, and had just attempted a very difficult mountain ascent when he met Thesiger in Afghanistan in 1956. Newby chose to present himself for comic effect as a timid incompetent dilettante with a background in the London fashion industry, and Thesiger as ‘a great, long-striding crag of a man, with an outcrop for a nose and bushy eyebrows, forty-five years old and hard as nails, in an old tweed jacket of the sort worn by Eton boys, a pair of thin grey cotton trousers, rope-soled Persian slippers and a woollen cap-comforter’. Thesiger returned the compliment, calling Newby and his companion ‘a couple of pansies’.

  Thesiger hated most contemporary travel-writing, saying of James Morris’s book on the Oman that ‘if people want that sort of chatty rubbish, I hope they will never get it from me’. He was equally dismissive of the journeys of Freya Stark, who he said, with a characteristically old-fashioned reference, had ‘done nothing which could not be done by a second secretary from a legation on home leave’.

  Thesiger by contrast is not a comic writer. Nor is he an erudite guide. He has little interest in archaeology (‘meaningless holes and trenches’), or architecture (‘bloody buildings’) or even history and politics. He says very little about his reactions to events. He rarely embroiders an anecdote to make it more appealing. He acknowledges the frequent boredom and repetition of travel. He shows that he himself is often confused or uncertain about what is happening.

  This reticence partly reflected Thesiger’s experience of travel. Unlike many other contemporary British travellers, who had barely left Britain until they were adults, Thesiger was born and lived the first years of his life in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. This made him both more comfortable abroad and less liable to be impressed by the superficially exotic. He had spent more time than his contemporaries living alongside tribal peoples. He was painfully aware of how different they were, how difficult to understand and how often exoticised or misrepresented. He was convinced that they (and not his own personality, erudition or prose) should be the centre of the story.

  Thesiger’s writing, like his photographs, can be precise, artful and elegant. His careful descriptions of how hundreds of different individuals dress or greet each other allow the reader cautiously to judge the subtle differences between men. We share in Thesiger’s efforts, as a stranger, to judge the virtue of those he meets. This concern with moral character and reputation makes his encounters into parables:

  Two days later an old man came into our camp. He was limping, and even by Bedu standards he looked poor. He wore a torn loincloth, thin and grey with age, and carried an ancient rifle… In his belt were two full and six empty cartridge cases, and a dagger in a broken sheath. The Rashid pressed forward to greet him: ‘Welcome Bakhit. Long life to you, uncle. Welcome – welcome a hundred times.’ I wondered at the warmth of their greetings. The old man lowered himself upon the rug they had spread for him, and ate the dates they set before him, while they hurried to blow up a fire and to make coffee… I thought, ‘He looks a proper old beggar. I bet he asks for something.’ Later in the evening he did and I gave him five riyals, but by then I had changed my opinion. Bin Kabina said to me: ‘… Once he was one of the richest men in the tribe, now he has nothing except a few goats.’ I asked: ‘What happened to his camels? Did raiders take them, or did they die of disease?’ and bin Kabina answered, ‘No. His generosity ruined him. No one ever came to his tents but he killed a camel to feed them. By God, he is generous!’ I could hear the envy in his voice.

  Thesiger’s reticence as a writer also partly reflects his own controlled personality. He
chose to bind himself by the conventions of a British ruling class, which had largely disappeared even at the time of his birth. He was much more repressed personally and intellectually than his hero, T. E. Lawrence, who was over twenty years his senior. Thesiger, for instance, reduced even his sexuality to his ideas of gentlemanly behaviour, claiming that ‘I might have been homosexual if I was born in a different age but as it was I remained asexual.’ His literary agent observed that he was ‘far too frightened of letting himself go’, far too frightened that people might say ‘this man is shooting a line’, ‘is overemphasising the dangers of the trip’.

  Thesiger, however, was not the only anomaly: he embodies a quite separate tradition of British writing. He measured himself against British colonial officials who were immersed in local culture and regularly undertook journeys that were dangerous and physically demanding. His first hero of this type had been his first boss, Guy Moore, who like almost all the men Thesiger referred to obsessively had served in Iraq during the First World War.

  When Thesiger died in 2003, I was working as a British Administrator in the Marshes region of southern Iraq. I sent the condolences of the local sheikhs, who remembered him fondly, to his memorial service. Yet he was not the only name still recalled in the area. My predecessor in Amara in 1916 had been Harry St John Philby, the second man to cross the Empty Quarter. I was then posted to Dhi Qar, whose two political officers in 1920 had been Bertram Thomas, the first man to cross the Empty Quarter, and Harold Dickson, who teased Thomas by pretending to cross the Empty Quarter before him. These were competitive men. Thesiger often quoted Thomas’s reply to Dixon: ‘I have every intention of being the first man to cross the Empty Quarter and to live the rest of my life on the proceeds.’ St John Philby was ‘bitterly disappointed’ to be beaten. Thesiger not only followed these men across the Empty Quarter, but then followed them further by moving to the Marshes of southern Iraq. By that time, Dickson was the de facto prime minister of modern Kuwait, Thomas of Oman, and Philby of Saudi Arabia. Thesiger thought for one moment that he would be offered the chance to succeed Thomas as the chief advisor to the Sultan of Oman. Thesiger, however, was never quite one of these men and he was never offered the job.