‘Only in the desert could a man find freedom,’ wrote Wilfred Thesiger. It was the observation of someone not fully at ease with modernity: an outsider, a disillusioned former Etonian and captain of the Oxford University boxing team who took away with him from England a third class history degree and a distaste for the comforts of the privileged classes.
Thesiger was a natural outsider. He entered this world in 1910, born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to a British diplomat and his wife and raised amid the brutal splendour of the imperial court. As a child, he witnessed the Emperor’s army returning in 1917 following one of the last great pitched battles between African warriors. After such sights, it seemed the grey convenience of European modernity simply couldn’t compare.
Lying starving in the desert of the Empty Quarter in 1946, tortured by images of vehicles coming to collect him, he wrote that, ‘I would rather be here, starving as I was, than sitting in a chair, replete with food, listening to the wireless and dependent on cars to take me through Arabia.’
Following an unhappy spell at university, Thesiger returned to Africa in 1933 to chart the Awash river and Aussa sultanate (notable at the time for its indigenous people’s tendency to kill intruders and take their testicles as trophies). A distinguished stint serving in North Africa during World War II followed, but it was only after the war’s end that a job with the UN afforded him the chance to continue his passion for exploration, and he embarked upon his most famous journey on the sands of Arabia’s Empty Quarter from 1945 to 1950, the subject of his most famous book, Arabian Sands.
Thesiger crossed the desert twice with his two Bedu companions, Salim bin Ghabisha and Salim bin Kabina of the Rawashid tribe. It is a journey now remembered as the last great expedition across Arabia.
Salim bin Ghabaisha is no longer the 16-year-old boy he was when he first met Thesiger in 1945, henna now hiding the grey of his beard behind a fierce orange, but he recalls the journey with pride: ‘It was a very dangerous and long trek, and we faced lots of fears. We walked for three months non-stop. It was very dangerous and that’s why people still remember it. I believe that all over the world nobody did the same.’
Thesiger wore the clothes of the Bedouin and spoke their language; they called him Sheikh M’barak from the North, because rival tribes would have killed him if they found out he was English. Salim remembers him as ‘tough, strong and a very good man’, but above all recalls his prowess with a gun – ‘he was a clever shot,’ he growls, the translator struggling with his dialect. Being able to shoot was important given that the three spent their time dodging raiders, avoiding intertribal wars and narrowly escaped beheading by Ibn Saud in Saudi Arabia, where Mubarak bin London (as Thesiger came to be known) endured 20 days in jail for crossing the border without permission.
The admiration and affection in Thesiger’s writing for his companions is inescapable. United against that ‘bitter and desiccated land’, he writes of ‘the peace that comes with solitude, and among the Bedu, comradeship in a hostile world.’ Poignant and poetic descriptions of life in the desert abound, such as when he describes the break in a rain shower: ‘a gleam of sunlight flooded across the wet plain, like slow, sad music. Then it started to rain again’.
But just as moving are the pictures, which Thesiger, a keen photographer, took to document the journey. Many of these can now be seen at a new permanent exhibition on the writer/explorer at Al Ain’s Al Jahili fort, which reopened to the public recently. They tell a tale of an inescapably harsh but noble land, before petrochemical dollars slicked their way across its deserts, leaving a trail of skyscrapers in their wake.
For all Thesiger describes his great journey as ‘the five happiest years of my life’, listening to Salim bin Ghabaisha recall the ‘fear and tiredness’ which dogged every step – the travellers urging their camels on or else they would surely perish – it is a stark reminder of just how brutal the experience was.
But history will remember their trek across the Western sands from the Hadhramaut to Abu Dhabi as the last and perhaps greatest Arabian journey. And before tribal warfare drove Wilfred Thesiger north to document the Marsh Arabs of Iraq, it was clear that in the sands of Abu Dhabi he found something which the modern world simply couldn’t offer: peace.
The Wilfred Thesiger Exhibition is now open at Al Jahili fort, Al Ain. Arabian Sands is available from Magrudy’s for Dhs95
