Back in 2003, whilst on a cruise of the Black Sea, we dined each night with an elderly couple, Evan and Vivien Davies, who turned out to be charming and interesting company. They were clearly well-connected and rather posh, and Evan in particular had lived what sounded like a pretty adventurous life back in the day: British Commando during the war; member of Special Branch’s anti-terrorist unit, responsible for protecting Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin (1945–50); and Assistant Superintendent of Police, British Malaya (1950–52). We got on tremendously well despite an age difference of some four decades and I’ll never forget Evan, responding to being gently nudged by Vivien to calm down at one point, stating to the table: “I do apologise – I do tend to get giddy when in good company”! To cap it all, Vivien mentioned that she had recently attended the funeral of Sir Wilfred Thesiger…
Wilfred Thesiger! I knew that name…one of the greats of British exploration, perhaps the last great British explorer. Between 1945 and 1950 Thesiger criss-crossed the Empty Quarter of the Arabian peninsula, with the help of the Bedu people with whom he acquired a lifelong bond, and with whom he endured hardships and real-and-present dangers on an almost daily basis. Carrying basic supplies and water stored in goatskins (to be refilled at waterholes perhaps hundreds of miles distant), Thesiger set out with his Bedu companions on camelback across hundreds of miles of arid, sun-bleached dunes and gravel plains. In certain areas where there were tribal tensions and they could be violently robbed of their camels, they had to be constantly on their guard and prepared to defend themselves, whilst in other areas Thesiger had to be passed off as a fellow Arab otherwise he could easily have been shot for being an infidel Christian.
Pestered by a friend to write about his experiences, he eventually wrote Arabian Sands, which was published in 1959 and is now considered a classic of travel literature. I have just got round to reading it and indeed it is a remarkable memoir. The insights into the lives of the Bedu are profound, and I was certainly taken with a couple of the characters in particular – bin Kalima and bin Ghabaisha — who became hard and fast friends with the man they called Umbarak. This paragraph sums up the sense of satisfaction that Thesiger derived from his experiences:
In the desert I had found a freedom unattainable in civilisation; a life unhampered by possessions, since everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance. I had found, too, a comradeship that was inherent in the circumstances, and the belief that tranquillity was to be found there. I had learnt the satisfaction that comes with hardship and the pleasure which springs from abstinence: the contentment of a full belly; the richness of meat; the taste of clean water; the ecstasy of surrender when the craving for sleep becomes a torment; the warmth of a fire in the chill of dawn.
This also informs the sense of loss that Thesiger expresses elsewhere when he bemoans the inevitable erosion of traditional Bedouin ways by the march of modernity and the large-scale development beginning to be brought to the region by the American oil companies. How he would have been astonished and dismayed by modern-day Dubai and Abu Dhabi!
