Infidel in the Wilderness

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE LAST NOMAD by Wilfred Thesiger; Dutton; 304 pages; $24.95

Readers inclined toward traveling heroes may recall the passage in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop where Correspondent William Boot outfits himself for assignment in barbarous Ishmaelia: his kit included a "rather overfurnished tent, three months' rations, a collapsible canoe, a jointed flagstaff and Union Jack, a hand pump and sterilizing plant, an astrolabe, six suits of tropical linen and a sou'wester, a camp operating table and set of surgical instruments, a portable humidor, guaranteed to preserve cigars in condition in the Red Sea, and a Christmas hamper complete with Santa Claus costume and a tripod mistletoe stand, and a cane for whacking snakes."

Waugh's satire would not be lost on Wilfred Thesiger, who wandered through some of the world's most hostile wastes for nearly 50 years with little more than the native garb on his back, some medicines, a few books, a camera and a rifle. Thesiger, now almost 70 and based in Kenya, is the last of the exotic British adventurer-writers whose exclusive number included Sir Richard Burton and T.E. Lawrence. These chameleons assumed the language, dress and habits of their tribal hosts for deeply emotional as well as practical reasons. "Like many English travelers," Thesiger confesses, "I find it difficult to live for long periods with my own kind."

There have been many explanations for this familiar complaint, among them the stifling class lines and Victorian morality that caused some of the Queen's subjects to seek freedom in the backwaters of the Empire. This was not entirely the case with Thesiger. Born in Addis Ababa, eldest son of Britain's Minister to Ethiopia, his formative memories were of camels, tents, festooned warriors and "sitting beside my father in the twilight above a gorge, hoping he would get a shot at a leopard." At age seven, Thesiger accompanied his father to Somaliland, where the British were fighting dervishes under the command of the Mad Mullah. A few weeks later the boy was watching shells burst over the Turkish lines in the Yemen.

The next ten years were spent in exile in England. At a Sussex boarding school he was taunted for his social lapses and called a liar by classmates who refused to believe his tales of Africa and the Middle East. All through Eton and Oxford, Thesiger dreamed of returning to the scenes of his childhood. A break came in 1930 when Emperor Haile Selassie invited him to attend his coronation in Addis Ababa. After ten days of festivities, the impatient guest slipped off on his first caravan. It took him through the unadministered territory of the Danakil, "Slender figures in short loincloths, their mops of hair dressed with melted butter, they had open, attractive faces, but each of them wore across his stomach a large, curved dagger from which hung leather thongs, one for each man that he had killed and castrated."

Danger and hardship are the hallmarks of a successful Thesiger trek. A near starvation diet, meager sips of water tasting of camel urine, and lots of silence were all he seemed to need. Time and again he sought remote areas of the Muslim world where "it is as meritorious to kill a Christian as to go on the pilgrimage." He traveled under various auspices: in the Sudan Political Service, and as a locust-control officer and a soldier during World War II serving in Ethiopia, Syria, Egypt and Palestine.

From 1945 to 1950, Thesiger lived for long periods among the Bedu (Bedouins) of the Arabian Peninsula. "I was," he writes, "humbled by my illiterate companions, who possessed in so much greater measure generosity, courage, endurance, patience, good temper and light-hearted gallantry. Among no other people have I felt the same sense of personal inferiority." He also shared the soggy life of the Madan, Shia Muslims who inhabit the reedy swamps of southeastern Iraq. His two books about these experiences have become contemporary classics: Arabian Sands (1959) and The Marsh Arabs (1964).

The Last Nomad recaps these earlier works in text and photos, and then pushes on into Persia, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, the mountains of the Hindu Kush and the rocky heights of the Yemen. After 20 years, Thesiger's words and photographs maintain a clarity and freshness rarely found in books of this type. Everything is confronted directly and, though there is sameness, there are no cliches. There is even an occasional touch of Kipling in his prose: "Above the village the scant ruins of a castle sat on a fang of rock, accessible only by a precarious path above a 200 foot drop. From this seemingly impregnable strong hold Hassan-i-Sabbah, the 'Old Man of the Mountains,' had ruled . . . and his successors had sat like spiders at the center of their web, for 170 years until Hulagu and his Mongols stormed over the pass."

The sand has run out for these lost worlds. In Yemen during the late '60s, Thesiger watches as the medieval mountain fortresses of royalist chieftains are turned into rubble by Nasser's air force. In 1977 he returns to Arabia to find desert life transformed by oil. There are cities where tents once stood, motorcycle tracks instead of the hoofprints of camels, Arab schoolboys in flared trousers, and Bedu complaining that they are not getting enough government handouts. Thesiger is angered and dispirited by this seduction. His own independence and asceticism appear intact, and the only wear and tear he admits to is in his knees. "Apparently I had worn them out," he says, noting that the cartilages were removed some years ago. There were a lot of rough and remarkable miles on that single pair of shocks.

--R.Z. Sheppard

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