WARWICK CAIRNS

In Praise of Savagery

For Susan

Tho’ it were ten thousand mile.

Yet they were a cheerful, happy people despite the incessant killing, and certainly not afflicted by the boredom which weighs so heavily today on our own young urban civilization.

Wilfred Thesiger, 1934

Contents

Title Page

A Man Between Two Worlds

Cheques and Balances

Sultan of Aussa

Harlow New Town

The Emperor’s Gift

Don’t Tell Others

The Clinic

Preparations

The Awash Station

Aeroflot

Raiders of the Dressing-up Box

You Can Run But You Can’t Hide

An Interrupted Journey

The River-Plain of Bahdu

A Letter

To the North

Kibiriti

Upon the Etiquette of Massacre

Preparations

The Worst Restaurant in the World

Addis Ababa

Chukana is Indisposed

The Water-Song and the Camel-Men

Upon Human Nature, and Goats

A Question of Responsibility

The Great Explorer

A Blessing

The Hangadaala Takes a Walk

Deep Water

In the Midday Sun

A Collective Decision

Built for Miserable Weather

The Wells at Intahe

Four Days at Gewani

Elsewhere

Incidents on the Slopes of Mount Kulal

Upon Sleep, Pleasure and Duty

Into Hostile Territory

Telling the Sheep from the Goats

The Silver Baton of Command

Playing British Bulldog for a Bride

The Sultan’s Vizier

A Magnificent Bearded Loon

A Fish Supper

The Still Point of the Turning World

A Surfeit of Shoes

The Giving and Receiving of Gifts

The Anticipation of Fruit

Through the Land of Aussa

The Oasis

Fulfilment’s Desolate Attic

Back to Maralal

Civilisation

The Years in Between

The Old Man, Up There

Life

To the Modern World

What Is Your Tribe?

Our Dead Through Whom We Live

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Warwick Cairns

Copyright

About the Publisher

A Man Between Two Worlds

This was a man, you’ll understand, who had killed—who had personally killed, as it were—so many people, over the years, that he’d lost count. Or rather, a man who’d killed so many people that he’d not even bothered to keep count in the first place. Not that he’d have been able to keep count, as it happens, even if he’d wanted to, what with the darkness, and the adrenaline-rush, and the pandemonium and the screaming, and the roar of the engines and all, and who could blame him for not keeping, for not being able to keep, an accurate tally?

Not me, I’m sure.

‘What we did, you see,’ he said, ‘what we did was to park the Jeep. Park it behind a sand-dune or under some trees or bushes or scrub, if we found some, and then we’d cover it up with branches. Camouflage it, you understand. And then we’d wait.’

He eyed up my glass.

I’d not drunk anything yet.

‘Cheers,’ I said.

There was a sword hanging on the wall.

It was a golden sword, a great curved thing, sheathed in heavy gold, all carved and tooled and etched about, and encrusted with rubies and sapphires, and it hung from an elaborately wrought chain beside the fireplace. It was a bit of a monster, if the truth be told; like something that you’d see the pot-bellied genie carrying in an over-the-top am-dram production of Ali Baba, tucked into the sash holding up his pantaloons. And it is, I suppose, possible—just possible—that it was simply that: a theatrical prop, all gilt and paste, something that he’d picked up from a fancy-dress-hire shop on a whim, perhaps, as an amusing quelque-chose. Somehow I doubt it, though. He really wasn’t the type.

I took a big sip from the glass.

‘Delicious,’ I said.

And, indeed, it would have been delicious, if I’d actually liked sherry in any shape or form. It would have been more than delicious, even, if I’d liked thick, dark ‘cooking sherry’ of the kind that your grandmother, perhaps, used to serve up to your parents at Christmas. But I didn’t, as it happens, and don’t, and never have.

It’s not just sherry, either, but alcohol generally.

I don’t know what it is about it, or about me, but I’ve never been able to get on with any of it. I just don’t like the taste of it, I suppose. Sweet drinks I can sort of take, in small doses, liqueurs and the like, and advocaat; but even then I find myself wishing I’d had a glass of Coke or something, after a few sips.

‘I’ve never been a great lover of Jeeps,’ he continued, ‘or any motor-car for that matter. The internal combustion engine has driven all of the silence out of the world.’

A clock ticked on the mantelpiece.

‘It has brought nothing but noise and misery and dissatisfaction,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t drive when I joined the Unit—did you know that? Couldn’t drive at all. Didn’t know where to put the key to start the engine. Didn’t even know which way to turn a spanner to unscrew a wheel-nut. That amused the others no end. Now, with an animal—with a horse, say, or with a camel—well, you know where you are with them; and at least when they go wrong you can always eat them, if all else fails. But motorcars, no—they’ve never been my thing. But in the desert, when we found a camp we’d park our car, and hide it, and we’d wait until it got dark. And then we’d watch the lights in the tents until they went out, and we’d give them time to get off to sleep properly. Then, when it was all quiet, we’d jump into the car—me in the back with the machine-gun, driver up front, and we’d drive right through the middle of their camp and I’d blast away at the tents on both sides, and we’d be off before they knew what hit them.’

Shelley Court, Tite Street, Chelsea. The London home of Major Sir Wilfred Patrick Thesiger, KBE, DSO, honorary fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and holder of the Star of Ethiopia (Third Class).

He was a mountain of a man, Thesiger, even then, for all his eighty years, in his antique tweed three-piece suit with his pocket-watch on a chain and his handmade shoes; and he was a man who, in his lifetime, had done and seen extraordinary things.

In the dying days of the age when there were still blank spaces on the world’s maps, and when there were still places from which no traveller had ever returned, he had set off into unexplored lands and crossed the territories of savage and murderous tribes, against all advice and in defiance of all reasonable expectation of survival, and yet he had lived to tell the tale.

In the years of war, he had led the small battalion that captured the Italian garrison of Agibar and all its 2,500 troops; and later, with the SAS in the Western Desert, when almost all of his unit had been captured or killed, he had gone in pursuit of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, tanks and all, and had narrowly escaped being captured by the Field-Marshal himself.

In the years after, when others went back to their lives and families, he had sought out wild and comfortless places, living and travelling with the Bedouin of Arabia, with whom he crossed the ‘uncrossable’ sands of the Rub’ al Khali, or Empty Quarter, hovering on the brink of death from lack of food and water.

And there was more besides.

Shelley Court lay at the end of a row of black iron railings, where four stone steps led me up from Tite Street to the heavy black-painted door of the red-brick mansion block, where I pressed a button and announced myself into the intercom, and heard, a few seconds later, the electric buzz as the lock clicked open.

Inside, I found myself in a small, bare hallway—little more than a stairwell, with a rattling wire-cage lift with a concertina-door running up the middle.

I took the stairs.

He was waiting at the top for me.

I tried not to look out of breath.

‘Mr Cairns?’

He gave me a crushing handshake.

‘So pleased to see you. Do come in.’

The flat was crammed with books. Books filled the shelves, were stacked on chairs and tables, stood in piles on the floor. And on the wall hung a painting of himself—himself as a much younger man. And although much had changed in the intervening sixty years, the deterioration that comes to us all, in time, it was still the same man looking out—still the same strong jaw, the same distinctive, misshapen nose, broken twice in the days when he boxed for Oxford, and the eyes—the same, same eyes.

He turned.

‘Did you go to Eton?’

‘No, sir, I didn’t.’

I didn’t, as it happens. And I didn’t think he would have been too familiar with the various comprehensive establishments of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, where I did go to school, so I didn’t elucidate further.

‘Do take a seat. You can move those books onto the table there.’

I did.

‘Now, can I get you a drink? A glass of sherry, perhaps?’

‘Yes, sir, a sherry would be perfect.’

He left the room, and came back into it holding a heavy brown bottle and a glass—a single, large glass—and he placed them on the small table between us, and sat down in his chair. He still had on his jacket, brown herringbone tweed with worn leather buttons, although it was warm indoors; he reached into his breastpocket and pulled out a blue-and-white spotted handkerchief, with which he wiped the dust from the sherry bottle before uncorking it. Then with a steady hand—surprisingly steady, given his age—he poured out the sherry, and kept on pouring, until the glass was more or less full to the brim. It was, as I say, a large glass, and it held about half a pint, or thereabouts, and he slid it across the table towards me.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’re very kind.’

He nodded.

‘I hope you don’t mind if I don’t join you,’ he said. ‘You see, I can’t bear the stuff.’

Nor could he ever.

Once, out hunting in the English countryside as a young man, he was handed a flask, from which he had his first taste of beer.

‘It was revolting,’ he said, ‘I spat it into a hedge.’

And that, pretty much, was that, as far as his relationship with drink went.

I remember little of the detail now of what followed, except for disjointed snatches of conversation and images of long ago and far away. A young man’s journey into a forbidden kingdom, on a quest to find the unknown destination of a distant river. A midnight meeting in a forest clearing with a savage potentate and his armed warriors, and the glint of curved daggers in the moon’s pale light. The burning heat of desert sands. Wave upon wave of armed and bloodied hosts screaming out their victorious deeds before an emperor’s throne. A great feast celebrating the killing of four unknown men—shot in the back and from a distance, for all anyone knew—and the young killer all shy and manful, he said, as praise was heaped upon him, like an athlete at Oxford being awarded his Blue for cricket.

Oh, and Salman Rushdie, and what an infernal bloody nuisance the man was, and the sooner the Iranians finished him off, the better it would be for all concerned.

I came out onto the street an hour later, leaving behind an empty glass, and with an invitation to call again. Whatever I had said, it must, I think, have found favour. This time the invitation was not to Tite Street but to his other home, where he spent the majority of his year. This home, the other home, was a mud hut, and it was in Africa.

From Tite Street I followed the crowds on the King’s Road, past the plate-glass shop-fronts, past the restaurants, past the antique dealers, the interior designers, the clothes designers, the cavalry barracks and the crocodiles of uniformed schoolchildren in their corduroy knickerbockers, and thence to Sloane Square underground station, where, down on the platform, a river flows above your head. I say a river, but it’s more of a stream, a brook or burn that flows in from the west, and which is called the Westbourne. You can’t actually see the water in it, or touch it, but you can hear it as it crosses above you, suspended, as it is, from the girders in a big old riveted cast-iron pipe, on its way out under the concrete and tarmac of the streets, on beneath the grounds of the Chelsea Hospital and then out from a Victorian outlet-pipe known as the Ranelagh Sewer into the Thames, the great brown river whose ancient name, like that of the Tame, the Teme and the Tamar, meaning, perhaps, ‘the dark one’, goes back far beyond recorded history.

But as for the Westbourne, there was a time, once, when it was a real stream, a stream with grassy banks and trees leaning over it, and when it crossed open land—fields and forests—as it flowed from its springs in the Bagshot sand in Hampstead down to the big river. The Saxons called it the Cy Bourne, or King’s Burn: over the years that became ‘Kilburn’; in other times it became the Serpentine, which it still is, briefly, in the short space where it comes to the surface as an ornamental lake in Regent’s Park. Mostly, though, it has been lost and forgotten, along with all the other lost and forgotten rivers with which London once teemed—the Tyburn, the Fleet, the Walbrook, the Effra, the Wandle, the Peck, the Ravensbourne … It lives on today only in the street-names and place-names of the areas through which it once passed.

Does drinking too much sherry when you’re unaccustomed to it make you think about things like this? ‘Maudlin’ is the word that comes to mind here, as I write these words: yes, maudlin—that’s it. I can’t say that I’m a great expert in these matters, but I thought, the world moves on and by and large we’re all the better for it. And yet …

I didn’t know what, precisely, but ‘and yet something’ was definitely a part of it, if you get my drift. There was a definite ‘and yet’ in there—still is, in fact.

Where I come from we have cars and things, and shopping, and we have computers and televisions and bars of chocolate—we have all sorts. No one starves here—which is good. And that was not always the case.

But sometimes you catch a glimpse of what things were once like, and you have intimations of what went before, and of the other lives and times of the ground beneath your feet. And it makes you think, and it makes you wonder what the cost has been, what the price paid, in getting to where we now are.

The economist Milton Friedman once said that there is no such thing as a free lunch. With civilisation, with the way we live now, with all of the things we have, what we have is not so much a lunch—free or otherwise—as a massive multi-course banquet of extraordinary proportions, a spread wholly unimaginable to previous generations.

Imagine what your great-grandfather would have thought, to be here now; imagine what he might have said, to see what you have and where you live, and what you do. Or imagine your great-great-grandfather, more to the point, or all the generations before, all the way back to the woad-painted wattle-and-daub-hut-dwellers we came from. Imagine if they could be lifted out of their time, just for the day, and set down in the middle of your life now.

There is a story that back in the 1940s the Soviet Union bought the film of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath to use as propaganda, to show how bad things were in the ‘free world’. Steinbeck’s story is, as stories go, a pretty miserable one, with the Joad family, including the daughter burdened with the ridiculous name of Rose of Sharon, like many others in that place at that time, losing everything when the rains fail and the rivers run dry and their lands turn to dust, and being forced to load up onto their battered old car what few worldly possessions they have and set off to try—spectacularly unsuccessfully—to find a better life elsewhere. Everywhere they turn they are shunned and insulted, and doors are slammed in their faces. And people die. It doesn’t get much worse than that, you might think. But when Soviet audiences saw the film, they didn’t see the same things that you or I might see, and they came out shaking their heads in wonder. They came out shaking their heads in wonder not so much at how bad things were in the USA, but at the fact that over there even the poor, even the lowest of the low, even peasants driven from their farms, that these people had their own motor-cars. Their own. The film was subsequently banned.

That’s what civilisation is like, these days. Even the poor people have motor-cars, now, and computer-game consoles, and new clothes, and more food than they need. Even the poor people are getting fat. A bit of starvation would probably do some of us quite a lot of good, you might think—and not just the poor, either, to look at our expanding waistlines.

But as you surfeit on the sumptuousness of it all, this life that civilisation has served up, and the feast that’s spread out for you, you might find your mind wandering, from time to time, to the issue of the bill, and to what extent you, personally, will be expected to pay.

You might begin to wonder what the damage is here, exactly. Or is there none? Do we genuinely have, this time, if not a completely free lunch, then at least a damn cheap and filling and tasty one? And Wilfred Thesiger, explorer, nomad, ex-Eton and Oxford and His Majesty’s Colonial Service, distinguished SAS officer and sometime military adviser to Haile Selassie, wanderer through the lost worlds of vanished tribes, current resident of Tite Street, Chelsea, and also of a mud hut in the middle of nowhere, was probably as good a person to ask as any.

I booked my ticket the next day.

Cheques and Balances

Go back a couple of years, and you will find me behind the counter in a provincial high-street bank, lending money to people. Go back further still and you’ll find me upstairs in that same bank, in what was known as the ‘machine room’, taking the elastic bands off bundles of cheques and then counting those cheques, sorting them into account-number order and walking up and down the great long tables that dominated the room and stacking the cheques onto the appropriate numbered sections, for some eight hours a day.

There were machines there, also: quite big ones, I seem to think, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was that they did. Perhaps I never knew.

You get faster at it, after a while, machine-room work. And you could go up to people who’d been there a long time, give them a block of cheques and say, ‘count those’, and they’d tap the block against the table once or twice to square the edges off, set it down, flex their fingers and then there’d be a blur of fingers and a whirring of paper, and half a second later, or whatever it was, it would be ‘a hundred and twenty-seven’. I am convinced that some of the tapping and the finger-flexing wasn’t strictly necessary, but was a vanity, an affectation, to impress, a little stylistic flourish to say, ‘Behold! Here is a master of the art.’

These skills, such as they were, and to the extent that I mastered them, did not transfer well to lending money to people. Lending money to people was something that I did worse than I did counting cheques.

People would come in with the most outrageous stories of why they needed money and, most times, so long as they managed to keep a straight look on their face and a credible tone to their voice, I would believe them.

‘I need,’ said one woman, ‘a completely new wardrobe.’

‘But you have no money. You have, in fact, less than no money. And this has been going on for … well, it looks like several years now, as far as I can see from your file. We need to talk about how you intend to pay some of it back, rather than how much more of it you need to borrow.’

‘Well, that’s why I need this money, you see. You see, what it is, is that I’ve just been offered a job. And it’s a good job, a proper job in an office—but the thing is, I don’t actually have any office clothes to wear, other than what I’ve got on, which is what I wore for the interview. So I need the clothes for the job, to earn the money to pay back what I owe.’

‘Oh, I see. Well, that sort of makes sense, I think. How much is it that you say you need, for these clothes …? I’m sorry, how much? Really? Well, that does seem a bit steep … No, I do know how important it is to create the right impression. And as you say, it will give you the ability to pay back what you owe. I’ll just get the paperwork sorted out. You’ll need to sign here … and here, too.’

She was glad that I understood these things, she said, as she signed. Not like her mother, who’d advised her to make do with what she had. Not, of course, that she actually had anything to make do with, as she’d already explained.

I never saw her again, or the money, either.

And all the while and all the day in my peripheral vision and hearing—and sometimes more directly—I could see, and hear, and feel the under-manager, who ran the day-to-day business of the bank, and the rising sense of stress and panic with which he started and finished every day of his working life. That deadlines should be met, that queues should not be too long, that people should not take much time over their tea-breaks, that people should arrive in the mornings precisely when they were meant to arrive (and on the dot of nine, the signing-in book was whisked away to the manager’s office, whence anyone whom arrived after should go to explain themselves), that procedures should be followed, that shoes should be shined and trousers pressed, that the books should balance. All these things concerned him greatly, and visibly and audibly. As each day wore on, the note of tension in his voice would grow more strangulated, the temper sharper and more hair-triggered, and for every fault or omission he spotted and corrected, others would arise, hydra-like, to take their place. Too many humans in the machine room of his bank; too much slackness, too much imperfection. Fraud and deception.

You would get the ones who planned it all in advance. People who’d open an account—sometimes in their own name, or sometimes, on some pretext, with a friend or colleague, with whom they’d sign the mandatory declaration of ‘joint and several liability’ making them both personally liable for all debts on the account, whoever caused them.

They’d keep the account ticking over, quietly and in credit, for a year or more, putting in requests for a new cheque-book every now and then, until they were good and ready, when, all of a sudden, there’d be twenty cheques issued in a single day, and more the next, and the next, and they’d be drawn out to off-licences and clothes shops and casinos, and the account would go tens, hundreds and thousands of pounds overdrawn in the space of a single week. You’d phone the account holder, send letters, but there would be no reply. And so you’d bounce the cheques, and brace yourself for the wave of angry phone calls from outraged creditors and even-more-outraged co-account holders.

There was a correct response to these calls, which was, ‘I’m very sorry sir/madam, but I am not at liberty to discuss this person’s account. Or their whereabouts, I’m afraid’, to which I’d add sometimes that the address I really, really wasn’t allowed to tell them was number 11, Ferndene; or that the phone number that I was not, unfortunately, at liberty to divulge, might have been 673562, if I’d been allowed to say so, but since I wasn’t, they’d have to look elsewhere to find it out. That tended to stir things up a bit, I found. Particularly if the voice at the end of the line sounded like someone who intended to take the matter somewhat further to recover their money.

‘Golf,’ said the under-manager.

‘I’m sorry?’

I think I must have drifted off somewhere, off into my thoughts. I had a tendency to do that. I have a tendency to do it still. I was, I think, sitting at the foreign exchange till at the time. It was a quiet afternoon, on a hot summer’s day, and there were no customers in that section, had been none for a while.

‘Golf,’ he said. ‘Do you play it?’

‘Er … no. Not exactly. It’s not something I’ve got round to doing yet.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Well, never mind. There are plenty of people who’ve managed to go quite a long way in banking without ever playing golf. Now, your suit …’

‘My suit?’

‘Ye-es. Your suit. What’s it made of?’

‘I’ll have to have a look.’

The label said 75 per cent cotton, 25 per cent linen. I’d bought it for the weather, for the summer.

‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘Disco suit. Don’t wear it again.’

In the backrooms there were fans on the desks, beige oscillating fans that swayed from side to side and caught the stray unweighted papers of the unsuspecting, lifting them up and sending them seesawing gently down to the worn brown carpet.

In the restroom where we took our morning and afternoon tea-breaks there were no fans, but there we were allowed to remove our jackets and to roll up our sleeves.

Brian, a middle-aged clerk with a close-cropped sandy beard, never rolled up his sleeves, no matter how hot or still the air in the restroom. He was a middle-ranking clerk, quite old for his position, and he had been at the same level for many years now, far longer than most. I was never quite sure whether it was for golf reasons or for the quality or fabric of his suitage or for some other cause that he had never progressed, but he had not done so, nor did it seem to bother him, particularly.

One day we were sitting together in the restroom sipping vending-machine coffee from plastic cups when I asked him about his sleeves and why he never rolled them up.

‘Do you really want to know?’ he said.

I said that I did; and with this he put down his cup and beckoned me to follow him outside, into the corridor. There, after checking in both directions, he undid both cuff-buttons; then, looking me in the eye, he pulled back first one sleeve and then the other.

‘There,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

His arms, both of them, right down to the wrist, were covered, with barely a patch of flesh to spare, in blue-green tattoos. Mostly they were of skulls and motorcycles, and skulls in Second World War-German-Army-style motorcycle helmets, and motorcyclists with fleshless skulls for heads. There were also the logos of the old British motorcycle manufacturers surmounted by skulls, or just in the general vicinity of skulls. And, on one arm, a naked lady wreathed in a large snake.

‘Gosh!’ I said, or words to that effect.

‘I’m a Hell’s Angel,’ he said.

And thereafter he would tell me, when we were alone together, about his weekends with the Chapter, and about motorcycles and how to customise them to make them just so, and why, when a big petrol tank meant that you could ride for longer and make fewer stops, it was a good thing to replace it with a smaller one, from the point of view of just looking hardcore.

All of which made sense to me then and seemed only right and natural.

I was twenty-three years old, or thereabouts. I saw the world of work, then, as what people had to go through, to pay for what they wanted to do in their ‘real’ time, the time that mattered. And all the business reports on the television talking about the FT-100 Share Index and whatnot, and the copies of the Financial Times in the newsagents, and in the bookshops the shelves upon shelves of books with titles like Odyssey: From Pepsi to Apple, The Ten Habits of Successful Business Leaders and The Corporate Warrior: Your Road Map to Success, I thought, then, that they were what people had to read because of their jobs, and what they had to put themselves through to earn their living. But that beyond these, I thought there were other things that meant more to them: I don’t know—golf, say, even, or motorcycles, or tennis or something. Now, I don’t know so much. Now, I’m not so sure. There are people, I have seen, who every day when lunchtime comes, stay at their desks. There are people who, every day when home-time comes, don’t go home, but instead stay on at work for hours. There are people who, though they have holiday allocation, don’t take it all, or even much more than a fraction of it; and who, when they do leave the office, take with them the concerns of their company, take them on as their own and carry their work around in their heads with them, and when they talk, they talk about work, or else they constantly check mobile electronic devices for messages to do with work. There are people who earn the most extraordinary sums of money working in offices, but who do not know what their own children like to eat. There are television programmes about work, too, game-shows in which the contestants vie to be the best shopkeeper or salesman or distributor or wholesaler, and for whom the prize, should they win, is a job in an office in a provincial retail park.

I shared a taxi, years later, with a businesswoman I had been working with, a senior executive with a multinational company who had lived, for a year or two at a time, in more countries than she could remember, who regularly attended breakfast meetings before work and evening functions with business colleagues and contacts after work, and who said goodnight to her children, most nights, by telephone as the nanny tucked them in; and as we drove, by way of conversation, I asked about her husband and what he did.

‘He’s an entrepreneur,’ she said.

And indeed he seemed to be a successful one, for between them they had an expensive house in a sought-after part of London and a second home elsewhere, and several expensive cars. They both had their clothes made for them by tailors, and had all of the things and did all of the things that successful people have and do.

‘And what are his hobbies?’ I asked.

It took her a moment or two to make sense of what I had said. It seemed to be not the sort of question that she was used to being asked by the kinds of people she habitually mixed with.

‘Business is his hobby,’ she replied, at length.

‘But outside business? I mean, does he have a sport he likes, or an interest or something?’

She thought again.

‘I asked him once. I said, what would you do if you couldn’t work? If you’d earned so much money you didn’t need to. And he said, “I’d start a new company”.’

For some people, work is the thing, the main thing in life. Work is what they choose to do and where they want to be. Work is life.

But then I did not believe this to be so.

Sultan of Aussa

To the east of Abyssinia there lies a desolate volcanic plain, strewn with ash and tumbled black rocks, almost entirely empty of life and swept constantly by a burning salt wind. What vegetation there is grows close to the banks of the slow-flowing, mud-red Awash River, which winds its way down from the mountains, down through deep gorges and into the barren desert, where live the people known as the Danakil, who were, at one time, a murderous tribe split into two great bands, the Adoimara, or White Men, and the Asaimara, or Red Men. Among these Danakil, both Adoimara and Asaimara, a man’s status was judged, entirely, by the number of men, women and children he had killed. This he might do by any means he pleased, no matter how treacherous. When they were not killing outsiders, or engaging in feuds with surrounding tribes, the two bands of the Danakil expended their time and their energies on killing each other.

The river flows on and on through the Danakil lands for mile after mile until there rises, in the distance, a line of purple hills known as the Magenta Mountains. There is a steep and narrow pass in these mountains, and the river flows through it, pouring down into an extraordinary oasis, shut in all round by sheer precipices of black rock. Some thirty miles square, it is a place of thick forest, deep swamp and huge lakes.

This is the land of Aussa, and it was, in the 1930s, the home of a great Danakil army who owed their absolute loyalty to the Sultan of that place, whose palace lay deep within the forest.

The Sultan, in those days, was a small, intense-eyed man called Muhammad Yuya. His father, the Sultan before him, had on his deathbed called for two slaves to be brought before him, one male and one female; and he had had them both slaughtered there, in the hope of seeing, in their death-agonies, some clue or portent that might help him escape his predicament. He could not. But no doubt it passed the time.

The river flows around Aussa on three sides, looking for a way out into the desert land beyond, where at some further point, before reaching the coast at Djibouti, it disappears. No one outside Aussa ever knew where it went.

There had been attempts to discover the river’s destination, over the years; and over the years there had been a number of expeditions to Aussa, but none had ever returned alive.

An expedition, in 1875, led by the Swiss explorer and mercenary Werner Munzinger, accompanied by his wife and children, were all murdered before reaching the borders of Aussa. In 1881, two Italians, Giuseppe Giulietti and Ettore Biglieri, had mounted an expedition to cross the country to the north of Aussa to establish a new trade route. Their bodies were found lying in the desert, horribly mutilated. Three years later, fourteen armed Italian sailors had tried to cross the same land from the opposite direction. They, likewise, were all killed. And in the 1920s, a party led by two Greek animal-collectors was hacked to death, although a third Greek managed to escape, crawling away on his hands and knees in the brief space between being left for dead and the corpse-mutilators getting down to their work.

In 1933, at the age of twenty-three and not long down from Oxford, Wilfred Thesiger made a decision.

‘I will bloody well go and do it myself,’ he said.

Harlow New Town

It was, as houses on the outskirts of Harlow New Town go, a fairly normal one.

It was semi-detached, and vaguely modern in style; or what would have been considered modern sometime in the mid-1960s, when it was built. It had large double-glazed picture windows with brown frames, and a bit of dark vertical wood-cladding in some parts and off-white render in others, and it sat in a row of houses that were identical—or that would have been identical at one time, before the replacement-window and flat-roof-extension salesmen came around. Also the stone-cladding salesmen, for one of the houses nearby had pinkish and yellowish crazy-paving up its walls, for reasons best known to its owner, and also to the owners of other similar houses I had passed on the way. It was in a cul-de-sac, the house, a cul-de-sac with only half a name. I say half a name, but it was a whole name—‘Winchester’ or ‘Gatefield’ or something—but it was a name without a description—it wasn’t Winchester Road or Gatefield Close or whatever—it was just what it was without the attachment. Things were like that, round that way, when they built Harlow New Town. It was a time when people knew better, you see.

The end of the Second World War—the cities bombed to smithereens, the population subsisting on powdered egg and dripping, the biggest and most powerful empire the world had ever known vanishing—poof!—just like that, gone in a puff of smoke, like a magician’s party-trick. It was plain that the old ways of doing things were worn out, and that they no longer applied in the modern age.

Road-names were part of it. For centuries, as long as roads had been around, they’d always been called Something Road, and Streets called Something Street, and so on and so forth; but no one, apparently, had ever thought to ask why. This, it was felt, would no longer do. There had been too much unnecessary adornment and frippery for far too long, the thinking went, and it was about time people started behaving rationally.

And so, in 1947, when the planners got down to work on Harlow New Town, roads called roads and streets called streets were to become things of the past. Henceforth, they would just have the functional part of the name, without the redundant descriptor (‘Yes, I can see that it’s a bloody road—you don’t have to tell me that!’).

And then there was the Town Centre itself, which was to be truly a Town Centre for the coming age. Because old-style town centres, in the pre-war world, had just happened—they’d grown up higgledy-piggledy over God knows how long, around lanes and alleyways, and were messy and crowded at the best of times; and when there were cars and delivery vans to add to the equation, they really just didn’t work any more.

It was now time to go back to the drawing-board and plan the whole thing properly, from scratch.

So Harlow New Town got an urban ring-road, for the traffic to go around, and it got the country’s first-ever pedestrian shopping precinct, all planned out by modern planners and designed by modern architects and built—well, probably still built by blokes in flat caps and donkey-jackets with packets of Woodbines in their pockets, but at least they did it using the latest reinforced concrete this time, and put raised walkways all over the place and flat roofs throughout. Which leaked, the roofs—but this was considered a small price to pay for what was manifestly a work of progress. In the words of the great American modernist Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘If the roof doesn’t leak, the architect hasn’t been creative enough.’ Or, as he put it, rather more bluntly, to clients who had the temerity to complain about their leaks, ‘That’s how you can tell it’s a roof.’

In 1951 Harlow got the country’s first-ever residential tower-block, The Lawn, as a taster of what was to come in the planned communities of the future. And as if all of that weren’t enough, to top it off they had sculptures in the parks and squares, so that Art would be for the many, not the few. Not just any sculptures, either—not long-dead generals in classic poses or things like that—but actual Henry Moores. Henry Moores are sort of roundy-shaped things, often with holes in them, and they were considered just the thing at that time—just the business for edifying the population. And the population, no doubt, after being thoroughly edified by the Henry Moores, would all go back up the stairwells of their modern high-rise flats stroking their chins thoughtfully, in order then to listen to a bit of atonal music on their Bakelite wirelesses while getting on with their basket-weaving and smoking their pipes.

It was to be a brave new world of communal solidarity and free dentures and spectacles on the National Health, a world that would see the gradual withering-away of class distinctions, private property, private schools, dirty drains and outdated traditions.

People believed in all that, then. There are still people who believe in it now.

It all depends, I think, on your view of the malleability and perfectibility of human nature: on the one hand, the degree to which we are as we are because, until now, we’d not had enough Progress and hadn’t learnt any better; and on the other hand the degree to which we are as we are because that’s just the way we are. Back then the balance of opinion among the people who knew best was definitely coming down on the malleability and perfectibility side.

Not just in Harlow, either, but all over the place.

In 1948—a year after Harlow got going—a professor by the name of B. F. Skinner, the most influential psychologist of his generation, published a book called Walden Two, a utopian volume which described the wonderful life lived by the inhabitants of the ultimate ‘planned community’, a perfect town of a thousand happy, productive and creative people governed by a handful of properly qualified managers and planners, acting on the impartial advice of a small number of scientists. It was a place in which people no longer ate meals at home with their families but dined, instead, in communal canteens, not least because the ratio of volume to surface area of a large cooking-pot is more energy-efficient than that of a smaller one. Clothes no longer denoted status, since status, like poverty and violence, no longer existed—although the people did dress attractively in items carefully and strategically chosen to be beyond the fast-changing vagaries of fashion, which is a bad thing because it ‘makes perfectly good clothes worthless’ long before they are worn out. And women in this ideal community most certainly did not fill up their wardrobes with party-dresses, since these things were quite clearly impractical. The world, Skinner suggested, could be this way, and people could be this way, with just a little effort from all of us and just a little expert guidance from the likes of him. We could all be this way.

To return to the house, though. I’d had a bit of trouble finding it.

This was because Winchester, or Gatefield, or whatever it was called, wasn’t an old-style linear road such as you’d find in an old-style town. It was more of an area, a zone, and it contained a tree-shaped collection of cul-de-sacs, in which all the branches had the same name. So you’d be in it, looking for the house-number, and there’d be other roads branching off to the right and the left, and they’d all have road-signs, and those road-signs would all say exactly the same thing. They were all the same place.

This was modern; confusing, but modern nevertheless.

I found it in the end. In the end, we all found it. There were, I’d say, about twenty of us who turned up there, all crammed into the living-room, sitting four or five to the three-seater sofa, plus one perched on either arm, and three to each armchair, and attempting to drink our tea and eat our Rich Tea biscuits and make conversation with our elbows comprehensively pinned into our sides in the crush, like the arms of Irish dancers.

It was to be a talk arranged by the local organiser of a charity that sent young men and women to far-flung places around the world, to do community work with the local people, and also to have adventures. The leaflet had said that they would be having a famous explorer there to give the talk, although I had not heard of the man before, and neither had the people on either side of me. But we were all up for a bit of adventure in exotic lands, though.

And in he came, tall and upright and dressed in his thick tweed suit and his stout brown shoes, and when he spoke, with his pre-war Etonian drawl, it silenced the room.

‘In the past fifty years,’ he said, ‘we have wiped out the inheritance of the previous 500.’

This was an odd way to start, but then again he had spent the day in Harlow New Town, so perhaps it was to be expected.

‘When I was about your age,’ he said, looking at us all sitting there before him, looking at the shelves of china and crystal knick-knacks by the faux-mahogany television cabinet, looking at the red plastic Trimphone on the round-edged laminated-teak sideboard, ‘when I was about your age, what I wanted, above everything else, was to be an explorer.’

The Emperor’s Gift

The top-hatted doorman stood to one side, allowing the young man in the tweed suit to pass through the double revolving doors of the new hotel into the hush of the marble hall, leaving behind all of the sounds of Park Lane, the motor-cars, the taxis, the electric trams, the midday crowds on the pavements.

At the far side of the hall was a great burr-mahogany desk, bound at the corners with beaten copper bands fastened with brass studs, and topped with polished slate, and behind it sat a tall bald man in a tailcoat and gold-braided waistcoat, dipping his pen-nib into a square cut-crystal inkwell as he wrote on the heavy cream-coloured pages of a green leather-covered ledger.

The young man glanced briefly back towards where he had come, and saw the taxi passing back out into the traffic. The square-faced clock between the doors said twenty to three. He was twenty minutes early; but then, everything was riding on this meeting. He crossed the hall, hearing the sound of his own footsteps on the polished floor.

The man at the desk looked up.

‘Mr Thesiger?’ he said. ‘You are expected. One moment.’

He picked up a small bell and shook it.

Instantly, a second man appeared by his side, as if from nowhere.

‘If you would be so kind as to follow me, sir,’ said the man.

He led the young man through the hotel, past the open doors through which could be seen the vast pillarless ballroom, and to a secluded table in the restaurant beyond, where two places had been laid and where two waiters stood, each with a starched napkin over his forearm.

They brought the young man tea, and a silver tiered stand of cucumber sandwiches and small pastries.

He took some tea, but did not touch the food. He took the fob-watch from his waistcoat pocket, and turned it over in his fingers, and then put it back again. The walls and coffered ceilings were white and gold, as were the fish-scale-patterned Egyptian pillars. The pale carpet was intricately woven in a chinoiserie style.

He consulted his watch again. Still almost twenty minutes left to wait.

He had, by now, made the decision to go.

He would, he had decided, cross the desert to Aussa, and he would enter the Sultan’s kingdom and pass through, and he would follow the river along all the length of its unmarked, unknown course until he came to the end and solved the mystery. On this he was determined.

He had made arrangements and plans, and had obtained the blessing and sponsorship of the Royal Geographical Society, and gained further funds for food and equipment, medicines and wages for his party from Magdalen College and from the Linnean Society.

But at this time the Sultanate of Aussa lay, nominally, within the borders of Abyssinia, and obtaining the permission of the Abyssinian Government was proving considerably more difficult than he had bargained for.

His initial requests had been met with a flat refusal; and although he was not without connections there, although his late father had been British Minister at the court of the former Emperor Menelik, although he himself had received a personal invitation to attend the coronation of Haile Selassie, these things seemed to have got him nowhere.

And then came the message from the Embassy.

The waiter came, to see if fresh tea was required. It was not.

The young man felt his watch-chain again, and half-pulled his watch from its pocket, but then pushed it back, and instead studied the scalloped pattern on the back of his teaspoon.

Time. How we measure it out. How it feels, the passing of it. How what was is transformed utterly into what is, and which even in the moment of perceiving has vanished into what is to come, and so on for ever and always. How the wood that made the table at which he sat had grown, for however many years, in some far-flung forest, and the ragged trailing creepers overhanging, and the piercing call of brightly plumed birds. This same thing.

His father. The presence of him, the fact of him, as solid and real as anything in this life, and now gone, long, long gone: dead and buried these what—thirteen years? One wonders how this can be so.

He became aware of low voices across the room, and of a cluster of men, and one stepped out from among them and gestured to the others to stay, and turned to look over to where Thesiger sat. He was a young man—little more than a boy, in fact—maybe sixteen or seventeen at a guess—and slight, light-boned, narrow-shouldered and black as your hat. He had prominent ears, big, heavy-lidded eyes, and he wore a formal black suit, tightly buttoned-up, with a high white collar, and highly-polished black shoes on his feet; and he carried a battered leather satchel, brass-buckled like a doctor’s bag.

Thesiger shot to his feet, recognising the boy at once.

The boy smiled, revealing white teeth, and crossed to where he stood.

‘Do sit down,’ he said, in perfect, educated English, ‘You don’t mind if I join you?’

‘You are more than welcome, sir,’ said Thesiger.

A waiter appeared and pulled out a chair so that His Highness Asfa Wossen Tafari, Crown Prince of Abyssinia, eldest son of the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings and Elect of God, and direct lineal descendant, it was said, of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, could sit down.

‘Jolly good sandwiches,’ said the boy, taking a bite, ‘Not so sure about the tea, though. A bit cool for my liking.’

He snapped his fingers and fresh tea was brought.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘down to business. The place you desire to go to: they are very bad people there, you know. Absolute savages. And you are determined to go among them?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘They will kill you, of course.’

‘I’m prepared to take my chances.’

‘I am sure that you are. Everything I have heard about you convinces me that this is, indeed, the case. But it is not as simple as that. Not by a long way, because if they kill you, it puts my father in a very difficult position.’

‘How so, sir?’

‘Aussa is part of Abyssinia. This is agreed. It is not in dispute. And in all of Abyssinia my father’s word is law. But the Sultan does not always see things in this way. And there have been … incidents in the past. Very unfortunate ones. We tend to keep our officials away from Aussa, to avoid too many of these … misunderstandings. Now, if you travel there, with my father’s authority and under his protection, and if anything were to happen to you, then he would be obliged to take the matter up with the Sultan, and it would all be rather awkward.’

‘I understand that, sir—which is why I am prepared to go there at my own risk, and without involving your father in any way, other than asking for his permission to proceed.’

‘Hmm …’ he said. ‘Just what we expected you to say. So you are absolutely determined to do this thing?’

‘I am, sir.’

‘And nothing we could say would make you think otherwise?’

‘No. Nothing.’

The young prince looked serious for a while, and then, quite suddenly, he smiled.

‘Well, in that case, my father has, after careful consideration, authorised me to offer you two things.’

He took a sip of his tea, savouring the flavour of it before continuing.

‘The first,’ he said, ‘is his permission.’

Thesiger moved as if to speak, but the prince raised a hand to silence him. ‘And the second,’ he continued, ‘is this.’

He pulled out his satchel from beneath the table and unfastened the buckles. From inside a faint, slightly sour odour arose, as of stale sweat.

Reaching in, the prince pulled out a bundle of yellowed cloth, which looked very much like someone’s used shirt, rolled up and knotted around something weighty; he passed it across the table.

‘You may open it.’

It was, indeed, an old shirt. But when Thesiger untied the knotted sleeves and unwrapped the bundle, he saw inside a heavy, ancient-looking gold chain upon which were strung rows of thick gold rings.

‘For your expenses,’ said the prince.

Don’t Tell Others

Sometimes there can be whole days, weeks, months and years that pass you by and it seems just like the blink of an eye.

Then there are other times where the actions of an instant seem to last for ever.

People who have been in car crashes or other near-fatal disasters often talk about time ‘slowing down’. It is said that they are able to recall all sorts of peripheral detail with astonishing accuracy, as if they had the time, in the half-second of their almost-death, to roam the scene with the camera of their mind’s eye, and to record for posterity not just the look of drunken horror on the other driver’s face but the missing second button on his shirt-front; the colour and style of the lead on the dog being walked by the man in the flat cap on the pavement; the words and the patterns on the half-torn circus poster on the wall behind him.

Scientists call this time dilation, and it signifies the feeling of the opening-out of a moment far beyond its normal or expected limits.

There is a reason that it feels like this.

At moments of intense significance and at moments of great physical risk, the brain pulls in all of its resources and processing-power, and crams more observations and more reactions into a fraction of a second than it would normally make use of in a duration many, many times longer. It does this the better to react quickly and effectively, and so to cope with whatever challenges or opportunities it faces.

The result of all of this is that we experience moments that, for good or ill, are more intensely lived, and in which time appears to slow down, or even, on occasion, to stop.

And just as this time dilation exists, so also, I believe, there exists its opposite, which you might, I suppose, call time diminution, if you were to use the same rules of construction. Time diminution, or what you will, is an experience in which large tracts and expanses of time just pass you by, just vanish away unmarked and unnoticed, except when you look back later and think, was that it?, or, where did it all go?

From the end of the talk in the house in the cul-de-sac in Harlow New Town to my next contact with the man, and the visit to his flat in Tite Street, was two years, more or less.

They were two years in which, in one sense, much happened, but in which, in another, the main thing that happened was the passing away of time.

When the meeting had ended, the people there gathered up their coats, and those who drove got out their car-keys, while for those who did not, minicabs and the cars of parents arrived outside. But when he had finished his talk, and when the evening had begun to break up, I went up to him and asked him more questions about his life and times, and we carried on talking even as others were leaving around us, until, at last, there were no other guests left, and the owner of the house was standing there, as if to say, well, haven’t you got a home to go to? The man took a scrap of paper from his pocket and wrote his address on it and handed it to me.

‘If you go on this trip,’ he said, ‘do write and let me know how you get on.’

And then it was outside into the night air.

I applied, but did not get a place.

I also applied for academic scholarships overseas, but did not get them, either.

In the meantime, there was banking to be done, and banking examinations, which I was required to study for.

Months passed in which I undertook two correspondence courses with something called the Rapid Results College. One was in Law Relating to Banking and the other in Economics. In Economics I learnt—the only thing I remember from it now—that if a bank lends money that doesn’t exist, and which hasn’t been minted or printed, or made or planned, it can actually cause that money to come into being, and so increase the money supply.

This is something of a paradox, on a number of levels, in the way that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is in physics. One of the main levels upon which it is a paradox is that it is, according to the experts, clearly and demonstrably true; and yet, at the exact same time, it has the ability to seem to me to be the most complete and utter nonsense.

At some point during that time I reapplied for the overseas scheme and this time was offered a place. It was to be a trip to America, involving trail-building in the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, and also drilling wells for water on a Sioux Indian reservation on the edge of the Badlands in South Dakota.

I still had the scrap of paper Wilfred Thesiger had given me.

I wrote and told him about it.

About a week later a cream-coloured envelope arrived on my doormat.

Inside was a cheque for £300, drawn on a London private bank; and with the cheque was a three-word letter, written in blue-black fountain-pen on embossed headed notepaper.

It said, ‘Don’t tell others.’

The Clinic

The doctor had my notes on the desk in front of him, in a buff card file.

‘You understand,’ he said, removing the stethoscope from around his neck and placing it on the desk beside the file, ‘that before I can give you the result of your test I am required to offer you counselling. This is our standard procedure. It doesn’t presuppose a positive result, or indeed a negative one.’

The clinic was in Charlotte Street, in the West End of London.

I had come to be there as the result of a conversation with a friend, who, as a student, had spent a year doing voluntary work for a telephone advice line.

‘You did what?’ he’d said, aghast, ‘With who? You want to get yourself checked out, mate. You could have anything, you know, absolutely anything.’

And then, over the next hour or so, he’d told me in great detail about the counselling work he’d done, and how, in particu lar, I should watch out for any swelling or discomfort in my armpits.

‘It always starts there, you know.’

And, indeed, now that he mentioned it, it did feel somewhat uncomfortable there. I’d put it down to it being a warm day and my wearing a slightly tight shirt with rough seams. But the more I thought about it, the more noticeable the feeling became.

‘Now,’ said the doctor, ‘a few questions for you. Are you an intravenous drug user?’

‘Do I look like one?’

‘You’d be surprised.’

‘I’ve never even been drunk.’

‘Fine. I’ll take that as a “no”, then. And have you ever had a blood transfusion?’

‘No.’

‘So tell me, in your own words, why you think you might have placed yourself at risk of contracting this virus.’

‘I was on an Indian reservation.’

‘Go on …’

‘In America, and they had this thing called the Sun Dance, and I got invited to it by the man whose land we were working on, and he said it was something of an honour, because they didn’t normally let white people go along.’

‘So. You went to a dance. With a man. And then …?’

‘Well, they hold it in a circle, the Sun Dance, and they have a big sort of maypole thing in the centre, with cords coming down from it. The dance goes on for three days, and when we arrived it was at the beginning of the third day, and the dancers looked not quite there, if you know what I mean. Stripped to the waist, and sort of swaying backwards and forwards, and their eyes not quite focused—or focused beyond what they were looking at. And there was this constant drumming, three men sitting side by side, beating these big drums for all they were worth, and singing these strange guttural songs, and then the dancers all smoked a pipe that had burning sage in it, and they went off into a sort of tent thing, which was a sweat-lodge, like a sauna, with hot coals inside—and it was well over a hundred degrees outside, too, so you could only imagine the heat inside.’

‘Did you go into the sauna with these men?’

‘No. I wasn’t allowed to. It was for the dancers only.’

‘But you would have liked to?’

‘Yes, I suppose I would. To know what it was like in there. But it wasn’t really an option. Anyway, they came back out after a while and they arranged themselves around the edge of the circle, and the drums and the singing got louder and they began swaying forwards and backwards; and then one of the dancers crossed over into the circle and lay down on his back at the feet of an older man, who was the medicine man. The medicine man had a knife in his hand and he bent down and made four cuts in the dancer’s chest, two above each nipple, and then he took two skewers made of eagle-bone from a pouch at his waist and pushed them through the holes he had made, and attached them to two cords coming down from the pole. The dancer got up and began to dance backwards until the cords pulled tight. And then another dancer lay down, and another and another until they were all strung up to the pole. And you could see that some of them had done it quite a few times before, because of the rows of scars on their chests. And then they danced backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards to the music. And meanwhile an old man went into the circle and knelt down, and the medicine man made cuts in his back and attached cords to them to which he tied a buffalo skull; and then a small child climbed onto the skull and the old man stood up and began to drag the skull, with the child still on it, around the outside of the circle.

‘And the music got louder and louder and the dancers danced more intensely, pulling back harder against the cords with each pass, until at length one danced right up almost to the foot of the pole and then ran backwards, arms outspread, pulling with all his weight and snapping the skewers in his chest. Then it was the turn of the next dancer.

‘Meanwhile, I became aware of a queue forming over to one side of the circle, a line of people, young and old, male and female, all baring their shoulders. Up at the head of the queue stood a medicine man and his assistant, and as each person approached, they did something to each arm in turn, and the person came away with blood running down them.

‘I asked my companion what was happening and he said that the people in the queue were friends and relatives of the dancers, and they were each giving what he described as an “offering”.

‘And it struck me then that it would be only polite, only good manners, for me to do the same.

‘When I got to the front of the queue the medicine man’s assistant took hold of my arm with one hand, and with the other he pushed a pin or needle into my skin and lifted it up towards the medicine man, who took a small, sharp knife and ran it smartly up the needle, nicking the top of the skin, and causing the blood to flow. Then they did the same on the other arm. And then, using the same knife and the same pin, they did the same to the next person, and the next and the next.

‘And that,’ I said, ‘was why I came to have a blood test.’

There was a slight pause, during which the doctor appeared to shake himself slightly, as if waking from some private reverie.

I was aware that I had been talking for quite some time.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s say between ourselves that this was your reason for coming here. But really, in this day and age, you know, it is perfectly acceptable to have issues with your … personal orientation. Absolutely fine. Just so long as you take the appropriate precautions. You’ll find details in the leaflets you’ll get on your way out. Oh, and your test result is negative. Congratulations.’

Preparations

Two weeks later I was at Thesiger’s flat, with the books and the sword, the paintings and the photographs, drinking too much sherry than was good for me and talking about travel. I didn’t mention the clinic experience, though. It didn’t seem the place to do so.

And he invited me out to Africa, and said he would show me the country round about, and I asked—I don’t think I mentioned this earlier—but I asked if he minded at all if I brought two companions along; my brother Frazer and my friend Andy. He replied, ‘Well, if they’re anything like you, it will be a pleasure to see them.’

‘They are,’ I said.

Although on what level Andy—black athlete with a Mohican haircut—may be thought to be ‘like me’ is, perhaps, a matter for debate; but he was a good travelling companion. He’d been with me in America, building trails in the mountains, and was blessed with an extraordinarily even temperament and an ability to take more or less anything in his stride. Like the clear, sunny day, for example, on top of a bare rocky ridge high above the treeline, when we were caught, quite suddenly, by a violent electrical storm that appeared out of nowhere, as they do in those parts. There was no shelter and nowhere to hide, and a steep drop on either side, and the lightning began to hit the ground around us, so close that we could smell the singed granite boulders just feet away from where we stood.

I was overwhelmed by fear and panic, and the sheer size and force of the storm, the power of it; and I screamed at Andy to take his pack off and get down on the ground. He considered my words carefully, rain hammering down on his head and lightning striking all around him, then removed first one arm and then the other from his rucksack, upon which hung a large aluminium cooking-pot. This done, he put it neatly down on the ground and crouched down beside it. He was like that.

He was keen on the idea of going to Africa when I told him about it.

‘Is it going to be tough going, do you think?’

‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but then again he is eighty, this Thesiger, so there’s probably a limit to how tough.’

I booked our flights with Aeroflot, on account of it being the very cheapest airline I could find, by about £5; and in the mistaken assumption that one airline is very much like any other.

The Awash Station

The Awash Station was not an inspiring place to be at the best of times.

It was a low whitewashed bungalow, tin-roofed, built by the French and plonked down in the middle of nowhere on a wide, dusty plain, by the side of railway tracks that stretch off endlessly into the distance in either direction, linking Addis Ababa with what was then French Somaliland, and which is now called Djibouti.

Behind the station stood the optimistically named Buffet de la Gare, where lodging, of a kind, and food, of a kind, could be obtained by travellers who had no other choice.

For the fifteen Abyssinian soldiers who had been chosen by their superiors, on Government orders, to await the arrival of the Englishman, it was even less than inspiring.

It was to be these men’s duty to accompany him on his expedition to Aussa, to provide protection for his convoy—in much the same way, in fact, that the far larger party of Egyptian soldiers, with their two cannons, had provided protection for the Swiss Munzinger’s convoy in 1875—until, that is, they were all horribly murdered.

For the Danakil, it mattered little what a stranger did for his living, whether soldier, explorer or whatever: what mattered was the kill, and the all-important trophies to be obtained from them to increase a man’s status and his standing among his companions.

An earlier English traveller on the borders of their land recounted in his diary how one of his servants, accompanied by a Danakil guide, had gone down to the river to bathe. No sooner had this servant put down his rifle and stepped into the water than the guide picked the gun up, shot him dead, cut off his genitals with his dagger and went off back home with the trophy to celebrate his achievement. And his fellow-tribesmen had, no doubt, slapped him heartily on the back as he recounted his story, and roared with mirth at the details, exclaiming, ‘What larks!’ or its Danakil equivalent, and accounted him a mighty fine fellow for what he had done.

So when the Englishman did turn up, eventually, at the Awash Station, the soldiers made no secret of their lack of enthusiasm for him and his scheme; and they were altogether less than diligent, and altogether less than enthusiastic, in helping load up the camels and doing whatever else it was that he expected them to do.

Nor was the mood lightened in any way by the recent announcement by the inhabitants of Bahdu, one of the biggest Asaimara territories along the course of the Awash River, that they had renounced any semblance of allegiance to the Government, and that furthermore they would refuse to pay any tribute demanded of them. And if the Emperor didn’t like it, he could stick it in his pipe and smoke it. Or words to that effect.

Thesiger, meanwhile, was more concerned about the fact that in the circumstances someone in authority might take it into his head to cancel his expedition; and, sure enough, he soon received a telephone message from an official saying that there was now fierce fighting in the province, and that the expedition would need at least a hundred armed men to stand more than one chance in ten of survival; which, of course, was quite out of the question. In the circumstances, therefore, his fifteen soldiers would be recalled forthwith, and he would be best advised to go back to wherever it was he came from and forget all about it. To which Thesiger responded by pulling rank—reminding the official that the Emperor himself had authorised the journey—and then by bribing the Awash Station telephone operator to stay away from his office, so that no further communications would be able to get through.

And so it was, on this happy and optimistic note, that the party loaded up their camels and set off into the wilderness.

Aeroflot

As a child, I once watched a sketch on a television comedy show—The Benny Hill Show, it was—about a man who wants to go on holiday. He goes to the travel-agent, and when he gets there he is offered the choice of two rival operators. I can’t remember the names of the companies now, but let’s say that they were called Bennytours and Cheapdeals, for the sake of argument. They both seemed to offer more or less the same thing—same destination, same flight, same hotel and so on and so forth, but with the difference that Cheapdeals (or whatever they were called) was ever-so-slightly cheaper. It was an infinitesimal difference; absolutely tiny—let’s say that the Bennytours holiday cost £40 and the Cheapdeals holiday cost £39 19s 6d, or thereabouts. It was a long time ago.

So our man bought the Cheapdeals ticket, as you would.

And then there followed one single joke, which was dragged out for about half an hour. The joke was this: the Cheapdeals holidaymakers were herded onto the plane with electric cattleprods by boot-faced Russian shotputter-types and served cold gruel and whatever as their in-flight meal, while the Bennytours people, up at the front of the same plane but tantalisingly visible beyond a flimsy curtain, got velvet chaises longues and champagne, and grapes individually peeled by beautiful air hostesses in barely covered underwear. And then you got endless variations on the same joke over and over again in the hotel, at the pool, at dinner, on the way home. At the age of eight I found it all hilarious.

But when I saw it on the television, back then, what I thought was that it was comedy, and I thought that it was something that someone, probably Benny Hill himself, had made up.

It wasn’t until I chose an Aeroflot flight to Nairobi in preference to one with Saudi Air—for the sake of saving £5—that I realised it was actually a closely observed documentary. Except that with Aeroflot the experience lasted for eighteen hours each way, and the joke, if ever there was one, wore thin considerably sooner.

It was not so much the length of the flight, although it was, all in all, more than twice as long as you might have expected, given the distance. This was down to all the stops—stops which included several hours in Larnaka airport; followed by eight very long hours sitting on the floor in Moscow airport, there not being enough chairs there for all who wanted them; followed then by several hours in the sweltering airport in Aden, in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, which at that time had rows of bullet-holes in the windows from the recent coup attempt.

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