"If our camels had collapsed, I and the five Bedu (bedouin) who traveled with me would have been dead. "Physically, these were the most difficult journeys I made," he said. Two Britons had crossed it in the early 1930s, but vast areas were still unexplored and it was surrounded by a no-man's-land of warring tribes. World War II broke out, and he fought in Ethiopia and the Western Desert in Egypt and Libya.Īfterward he undertook what was to be his most famous adventure, his two crossings of the Rub al Khali, the Empty Quarter in Saudi Arabia which covers almost a quarter of a million square miles and has sand dunes rising 1,000 feet or more.
In the years that followed, Thesiger explored remote regions of Sudan and the Tibesti mountains in the Sahara. "I don't suppose they were much interfered with by the Ethiopian government," he said. Thesiger has not been in Ethiopia for a long time, and doesn't know what became of the Danakil. Thesiger managed eventually to get permission of the Danakil chiefs to travel through their territory, and discovered the outlet for the Awash River in a remote lake. "If he had not succeeded, they would have killed the lot of us." "The whole thing hung in the balance but Omar, my Somali headman, managed to negotiate with them," he said. They soon became threatening, apparently planning an attack after dark. A large number of Danakil surrounded the camp he shared with his bearers. "We were very nearly wiped out in Bahdu on the first night," Thesiger recalled. So the son went off to Somaliland and killed four more men. The chief had killed 14 men but the son had killed only one, and even the women of the tribe would not accept him as his father's heir. Thesiger encountered the son of a Danakil chief. Killing was the mark of manhood for the Danakil, and they always castrated their victims. In 18 they had massacred two parties of Italian explorers, and in 1932, a year before Thesiger's journey, they wiped out some Greek traders who ventured into Bahdu, their stronghold. In 1875 the Danakil had exterminated an entire Egyptian army that tried to invade Ethiopia. "It was the most dangerous journey I ever did," he said. "I was sort of rejected at my prep school, and I longed the whole time to get back to Abyssinia."Īt the age of 23, after education at Eton and Oxford, he finally had the opportunity to explore the Danakil country as he had long dreamed of doing. "Back in England, nobody believed a word I said," he recalled of his student days in Britain. He once asked his father if there were hyenas in England.Īs an adolescent he would watch British troops fighting Turks in Aden and go on a tiger shoot in India. He thrilled to it all, and accepted it as his natural world. Until he was 8, he had never set eyes on another English boy.Īs a child, he watched the victorious armies of Ras Tafari, who would become Emperor Haile Selassie, return from battle, their prisoners in chains. His father was the British minister in Abyssinia, as Ethiopia was then known, and in 1910 Thesiger became the first English child born in that country. Thesiger attributes his love of adventure to the unique conditions of his boyhood. He does not merely write with fluency and grace he is a superb photographer, and has previously published two books of photographs he took in Arabia and Africa.
Now he is preparing another book, which probably will appear shortly before Christmas, a book of photographs he took in Afghanistan and other far-flung places. "I never tried to get it published because I couldn't imagine anyone would be interested," he said. "The Danakil Diary," which combines a narrative account of the trip with diary entries and letters to Thesiger's mother, has just been published in Britain. Curiously, Thesiger never wrote a full-fledged account of his Danakil adventure until now, although he discussed it at some length in his 1988 autobiography, "The Life of My Choice."īut recently his friend and "official" biographer, Alexander Maitland, persuaded him he must publish the diary he kept during that hazardous journey.
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