It is not just the thrill of the unknown that has enticed Wilfred Thesiger back to unspoilt, wild country throughout his life; it is a fascination by and love of the people themselves, particularly the Bedu, who live on the edge of the savage Empty Quarter, that desert-within-a-desert in southern Arabia. He loved the harsh emptiness of the slow-moving waves of the sand dunes and the black plains of sun-blasted salt flats, was challenged by the prospect of crossing regions where no white man had been before, not so much for scientific discovery or research but rather for the pure adventure. But having crossed it once, he came back to it again by another route, and then again and again, just to live and travel with the Bedu whose lifestyle he admired and enjoyed so much, finally, he was forced to leave southern Arabia by the rulers and also by their English advisers who feared he might upset an already delicate balance between the nomadic, sometimes warring, tribes.
Wilfred Thesiger is the archetypal English gentleman adventurer born, perhaps, a hundred years later than ideally he would have liked. In the Victorian era there were so many more unexplored, unspoilt empty spaces; he would have been with Speke and Burton or perhaps, like Sven Hedin, would have wandered across Central Asia. Though in some ways he was born into the way of life that he eventually pursued. Son of the British Minister to Abyssinia, his infancy and early childhood were spent in that wild and colourful upland country (now Ethiopia), the only one to retain complete independence in the face of colonial domination by the great European powers. He had vivid memories of plumed warriors, rich barbaric pomp, ragged mountains and deep gorges.
Through Eton and Oxford he dreamt of African adventures. His opportunity came in 1930, when he was invited, as his father’s eldest son, to attend Haile Selassie’s coronation as Emperor of Ethiopia. Then, as soon as the coronation was over, he took off to the wild and lawless Danakil country to the south of Addis Ababa.
‘I had everything I wanted, even more than I had dreamt of as a boy poring over Jock of the Bushveld. Here were herds of oryx and Soemering’s gazelle on the plains, waterbuck in the tamarisk along the river, lesser kudu and gerenuk in the thick bush and greater kudu, trophy of trophies, among the isolated mountains. Here were the camp fires and voices of the night, the voices of my Somalis, the brilliant African stars, the moonlight on the river, the chill wind of the dawn, the hot still noons, mirages transforming the parched plains into phantom lakes, dust devils spiralling through the bush, vultures circling over the camp, guinea fowl calling among the trees and the loading and unloading of the camels.’
There was risk as well. The Danakil tribesmen, who gathered round their campsite at night to view the white stranger with his valuable weapons and other gear, all wore large curved daggers from which hung leather thongs, one for each man they had killed and castrated. On the first trip he reached the edge only of the Danakil desert, but it was on this little expedition that his love of adventure and the open desert spaces was formed.
On his return to Oxford he spent much of his time dreaming of the Danakil and planning another expedition, once he had graduated. In 1933 he set out with a friend hoping to follow the river Awash, which flows into the Danakil desert but then vanishes, never reaching the sea. Three expeditions had ventured into this region at the end of the nineteenth century, but they had all disappeared without trace, presumably murdered by the Danakil tribesmen. Nesbitt, an English venturer, had managed to cross the desert from south to north in 1928, but his party also had been attacked and three of their retainers killed.
Thesiger’s companion was forced to drop out at an early stage in the expedition, but this in no way deterred Thesiger:
‘I was glad to see him go for, though we never quarrelled, I found his presence an irritant, and was happy now to be on my own. This was no fault of his, for he was good natured and accommodating. Like many English travellers, I find it difficult to live for long periods with my own kind. On later journeys I was to find comradeship among Arabs and Africans, the very difference between us binding me closely to them.’
This was to be the pattern of nearly all his future ventures; it was what gave him such a close understanding of the people among whom he lived. I have often been conscious of the barrier that we mountaineers inevitably erect between ourselves and the mountain people whose country we pass through, simply by being an expedition and carrying our own customs and interdependence within our own tiny, inlooking world, through Himalayan or Andean foothills.
Later, Thesiger realised that on that first trip to the Danakil, where he had penetrated country from which no European had ever returned alive, ‘I still had a sense of racial superiority, acquired in my childhood, which set me apart from the men who followed me. Even Omar, my Somali headman, on whom I was utterly dependent, was in no sense a companion.’
But this attitude was to change. After completing his journey down the Awash river, he made a leisurely return to Britain and the problems of following a career. He joined the Sudan Political Service, managed to get himself posted to the most isolated and undeveloped district in the Sudan, and settled down to the life of the dedicated outback colonial civil servant, using his periods of leave not to rush to the fleshpots of Europe, but to make long desert journeys into the Sahara. With the war came more ventures; involvement in the liberation of Ethiopia, frustration at the inevitable wastage and bureaucracy that accompanies the massive war machine and then a period in the Long Range Desert Group. At first glance, this seemed immensely adventurous and very risky as they operated in jeeps far behind the German lines, shooting up convoys, raiding supply dumps, but Thesiger found it strangely unsatisfying. ‘We carried food, water and fuel with us; we required nothing from our surroundings. I was in the desert, but insulated from it by the jeep in which I travelled.’
It was in the aftermath of war, by chance, as so often happens, that the opportunity arose which was to lead him to the Empty Quarter of Arabia and a way of life he has pursued ever since. He was in Addis Ababa, just having resigned from the post of political adviser to the Ethiopian Government, when he met O.B. Lean, a desert locust specialist. Lean wanted someone to venture into the Empty Quarter to look for locust outbreak centres. Thesiger knew nothing of entomology, but was immediately attracted by the venture and accepted on the spot.
Thesiger arrived in Dhofar on the southern coast of the Arabian peninsula in October 1945. Already he spoke Arabic and was accustomed to desert travel. He also knew what he wanted to do – to explore the Empty Quarter which had been penetrated by only two Europeans, Bertram Thomas in 1930–1931 when he had made a crossing from south to north, and by H. St John Philby who, in 1932, had ventured into its centre from the north and had escaped from it to the north-west. Thesiger was attracted to the ways of the desert Arab and sought to become one of them. But the barriers confronting him were formidable. In 1945 southern Arabia was still comparatively undeveloped; oilfields clung to the coast of the Persian Gulf while the desert tribes lived as they had always done, herding their goats and camels from one oasis to the next, warring and feuding with each other. Theirs was among the hardest livings in the world, comparable with that of the bushmen of the Kalahari, the aboriginals of the Australian desert, or the Eskimos.
Thesiger spent the end of 1945 and the early months of 1946 travelling on the southern edge of the Empty Quarter. He was getting to know the land and its people, finding the travelling companions for his ambitious, still secret plans. On arrival, he found that he had been apportioned a retinue of the Bait Kathir tribe, on the pretext that he would need a large party both for safety and also as a recognition of his importance. He soon realised that he was regarded as ‘the rich infidel milch cow’ to be milked to the very limit. Thesiger commented: ‘At first glance they seemed little better than savages, as primitive as the Danakil, but I was soon disconcerted to discover that, while they were prepared to tolerate me as a source of welcome revenue, they never doubted my inferiority.’
To the Bedu, he was an Infidel or Christian; the fact that he was English had no relevance. The world beyond their arid mountains and the sea that bounded them was of little importance. They had never been colonised or conquered, though the Aden levies had made the occasional and comparatively ineffective punitive expedition against inland tribes in the Hadhramaut. As far as they were concerned this represented the total might of the Infidel, and they were not impressed. Thesiger quickly realised that he would have to capture their respect and friendship if he wanted to get away from the beaten trails and venture into the Empty Quarter.
‘Anxious to prove their equal, I wanted no concessions and was irritated when pressed to ride while they still walked, or when they suggested I was thirsty and needed a drink. I wore their clothes – they would never have gone with me otherwise – and went barefooted as they did. In camp, especially when we had visitors, I sat in the formal way that Arabs sit, and found this unaccustomed position trying. I thought many of their formalities irksome and pointless. Sometimes we shot a gazelle or oryx and then fed well, but our usual fare was unleavened bread, brick hard or soggy, depending on how long it had lain in the embers of the fire. On the gravel plains the water from the infrequent wells tasted of camel’s urine, but it was even worse when we reached the Sands, where it resembled a strong dose of Epsom salts, fortunately without the same effect.’
At the end of this period he had earned the respect of his travelling companions and had begun to master the dialect of the Bait Kathir and other tribesmen of southern Arabia. He had also started to build up the strong friendships which were to play an important part in his travels later on. Particularly important was his meeting Salim bin Kabina, a younger member of the Rashid tribe, who lived on the edge of the Empty Quarter and were familiar with its sands.
‘He was to be my inseparable companion during the five years that I travelled in southern Arabia. He turned up when we were watering thirsty camels at a well that yielded only a few gallons of water an hour. For two days we worked day and night in relays. Conspicuous in a vivid red loin-cloth, he helped us in our task. On the second day he announced that he was coming with me. I told him to find himself a rifle and a camel. He grinned and said he would find both, and did. He was sixteen years old, about five foot five in height and lightly built. He was very poor, so the hardship of his life had already marked him. His hair was long and always falling into his eyes, especially when he was cooking, and he would sweep it back impatiently with a thin hand. He had very white teeth which showed constantly, for he was always talking and laughing. His father had died years before and it had fallen on bin Kabina to provide for his mother, young brother and infant sister. I had met him at a critical time in his life. Two months earlier he had gone down to the coast for a load of sardines, on the way back his old camel had collapsed and died. “I wept as I sat there in the dark beside the body of my old grey camel, the only one I had. That night death seemed very close to me and my family.” Then he grinned at me and said, “God brought you. Now I shall have everything.” Already I was fond of him. Attentive and cheerful, anticipating my w ants, he eased the inevitable strain under which I lived. In the still rather impersonal atmosphere of my desert life his comradeship provided the only personal note.’
Thesiger had to return to Britain to report his observations on the movement and habits of the locusts. Dr Uvarov, the head of the Locust Research Centre, wanted to know more about locust movement in Oman, at the south-east end of the Arabian peninsula, but the Sultan of Oman had already refused permission for Thesiger to enter his country. He immediately saw the chance of slipping illicitly into Oman by the backdoor and, at the same time, realising his ambition of crossing the Empty Quarter, and returned to Salala in October 1946, to find twenty-four of his former companions of the Bait Kathir waiting for him.
The problem, however, was that the Bait Kathir were not really suited to the Empty Quarter, for they rarely ventured into its vastness. The Rashid were much more at home in the desert and would have been ideal companions for Thesiger’s scheme, but somehow he had to get a message to them. It was no use asking the Bait Kathir to do this, for they were jealous of the Rashid and wanted him to themselves. He was shopping in the bazaar one day when he met a young Rashid who had travelled with him the previous year; he sent a message for bin Kabina to meet him at Shisur, on the edge of the Empty Quarter, though he had no way of knowing if it would be delivered. A few days later he set out with his party of the Bait Kathir.
Thesiger, in Arab dress, was an impressive sight. After a few weeks under the desert sun, he was nearly as bronzed as an Arab; his beard was dark and his curved, slightly fleshy nose had a Semitic look to it, but there the resemblance ended. His eyes are a pale, greyish blue and at six-foot-two inches he towered above his companions with a natural air of inbred authority.
With their camels they trekked through the foothills, at first through grazing downs, green jungles and shadowy gorges on the southern side and then, as they passed through the mountains, it changed to a lunar landscape of black rocks and yellow sands. The inhabitants were as hard and wild as the land itself. Government control barely reached beyond the bounds of the towns on the coastal strip. Here, in the desert, every man went armed; disagreements were settled with the gun and tribe fought tribe in an endless circle of feud and counter-feud.
They reached Shisur without incident and began watering the camels. It was a bleak, ominous spot. The ruins of an old fort, perched on a rocky mound, guarded the well which was at the back of a large cave that undercut the mound. It was the only permanent water to be found in the central steppes and consequently had been the scene of many a savage fight, when rival raiding parties had surprised each other. They left a sentry high on the mound while they went to work, under the blazing sun, watering the camels:
‘When we arrived at the well, the water was buried under drifted sand and had to be dug out. I offered to help but the others said I was too bulky for the job. Two hours later they shouted that they were ready and asked us to fetch the camels. In turn they scrambled up the slope out of the dark depths of the cave, the quaking water-skins heavy on their shoulders. Moisture ran down their bodies, plastering the loin-cloths to their slender limbs; their hair, thick with sand, fell about their strained faces. Lowering the water-skins to the ground, they loosed jets of water into leather buckets, which they offered to the crowding camels, while they sang the age-old watering songs. Showers of camel droppings pattered on to the ground and rolled down the slope into the water, and small avalanches of sand, encrusted with urine, slipped down to add more bitterness to water that was already bitter.’
The sentry, just above them, gazing over the shimmering plain, caught sight of distant, dark shapes moving across the sand, and called the alarm. No one could ever relax in the desert; the approaching riders could be a hostile raiding party or members of a tribe with an age-old blood feud. Quickly the camels were herded together and the Bait Kathir, rifles ready, crouched behind rocks around the well. The other party approached cautiously; there were seven riders. A couple of shots were fired over their heads; they came on steadily, waving their head cloths. Then someone called out, ‘They are Rashid – I can see bin Shuas’s camel’. Everyone relaxed, coming out into the open and forming a line to greet the newcomers. Thesiger’s message had reached bin Kabina and he had come with six other members of his tribe.
That evening he told bin Kabina of his ambition to cross the Empty Quarter, to which Kabina replied that he thought the Rashid would go with him and that Al Auf, who was one of their number, was the best guide in the tribe. It was an eight-day ride to Mughshin the last sizeable oasis before the sands of the Empty Quarter, and the journey went without incident until the day they arrived there; the camels suddenly bolted and Mahsin, one of the Rashid, was thrown to the ground. He already had a damaged leg and this was broken in the fall as it twisted under him. Fortunately, Thesiger carried with him a small first-aid kit, gave Mahsin an injection of morphine, straightened the leg and made a rough splint for it. They were close to the shelter of the few trees grouped around the well, so that they could at least take stock of the situation. Suddenly, Thesiger’s scheme was threatened. There was no question of Mahsin being able to go with them. The Rashid were equally unwilling to leave him because of the risk of hostile tribesmen hearing of his predicament and coming to finish him off. He had killed many men and made many enemies in the course of his life. The Rashid said they could not move Mahsin and they would have to wait there until he either recovered or died.
After a night’s sleep, however, they became more optimistic and agreed that Al Auf and bin Kabina should go with Thesiger, provided he loaned the others two of his modern service rifles to guard their friend. Thesiger was delighted, and promised to stay until Mahsin’s recovery was assured. He was quite glad at the reduction in the party. The fewer they were, the more unobtrusive they would be and small numbers give a greater feeling of adventure. It is perhaps a similar feeling to that of the climber who prefers to climb in a small compact party, which brings him that much closer to the mountains than he would be as a member of a massive expedition. Thesiger assumed that the Bait Kathir would not want to accompany him into the desert, but was immediately engulfed in protests. Whether it was pride or the thought of what wages they might miss, they did not want to be left out. After a lot of argument, spread over the next nine days while they waited by the well, it was decided that ten of the Bait Kathir should accompany the two Rashid and Thesiger across the Empty Quarter, while the remainder would head for the coast and meet them on their return.
At last, on 24 November, they set out from Mughshin to cross the eastern end of the Empty Quarter. They had 400 miles of trackless, unmapped desert before them. If they ran out of water, or if the camels collapsed and died, they also would almost certainly perish. And even if they succeeded in making the crossing and reaching the wells of Liwa on the other side, they might well be attacked and killed by the tribes who lived there, particularly as Thesiger was unmistakably an Infidel. The problem was compounded by the fact that the Bedu, improvident with their food as they always were, had eaten most of the rations for the crossing.
The Bait Kathir were now frightened at the prospect of venturing into the Empty Quarter and were looking for an excuse to withdraw. Four days’ march took them to Khaur bin Atarit, the last well they would encounter on the southern side of the Empty Quarter. There were no trees to give them shelter from the sun, and the well itself, little more than a depression in the sand, had been drifted over. Despite this, there was good grazing; it had rained there two years before and there was still a low ground covering of green plants providing some succulent forage for the camels. Because of this, a group of Bait Musan, a friendly tribe, were encamped nearby. That afternoon they dug out the well and watered the camels. The water was brackish, almost undrinkable, but this was something that Thesiger was now learning to accept.
The next morning he could see that something was wrong. The Bait Kathir had gathered into a circle, arguing and talking, for decisions among the Bedu were always reached democratically with everyone from the youngest lad to the oldest having his say. The leader of any group was informally recognised because of his experience and personality rather than by appointment or birth. In this case a Bedu called Sultan was the undoubted leader. He had served Thesiger well on their previous trips, was courageous and wise, but he was uncertain of himself in the empty expanses of the deep desert and told Thesiger that it would be lunacy to go on; their camels were not up to it; there was insufficient food and water.
Thesiger sympathised, understood his feelings and knew how to handle the delicate politics of this little group of tribesmen. He was still dependent on the Bait Kathir since they owned the camel he was riding, and anyway, even though Al Auf and bin Kabina had expressed their determination to take him across the Empty Quarter, he now realised they would be better off with a slightly larger group. Thesiger knew that Musallim, who owned the camel he was riding, was jealous of Sultan’s position in the group. He therefore asked Musallim if he would be prepared to go on with them. Musallim agreed and suggested that as Mabkhaut bin Arbain was his friend he should come too. And so the team was now down to the compact size that Thesiger had wanted at the very beginning. His role had been not so much that of leader as a catalyst whose presence and will kept the venture on its course, though it was the leadership and skill of Al Auf that would take them across the Empty Quarter.
They divided the food and water once again, keeping four of the best waterskins for the journey. They also bought a powerful bull camel from the Bait Musan, to help carry their supplies and act as a spare. The little party set out into the rolling dunes of the desert the following morning. They had not gone far before Al Auf suggested that they halt at the last vegetation to give their camels a final strengthening graze. That night they stopped with some camel herders of the Bait Imani tribe and benefited from the chivalrous hospitality of the desert. Their hosts had nothing but the milk of their camels, and little enough of that, but they insisted on Thesiger’s party having it all, going without themselves, for they were the hosts.
They would meet no one else until they reached the other side of the sands. The Bait Kathir had been full of stories of parties that had vanished, never to be seen again, but Al Auf was quietly optimistic. When asked by Thesiger how well he knew the sands, he simply replied, ‘I know them’. He had no map or compass, had only crossed the sands on two previous occasions, each time incredibly on his own, but in his mind was a sense of direction, a recognition of tiny landmarks that no one who had lived outside the sands could ever have. He knew where to find grazing for the camels, knew the whereabouts of the few waterholes on which their lives would depend.
The sands were like a petrified ocean of great waves that marched haphazardly from the one horizon to the next. There were stretches of calm, of flat level salt flats, and there were storm-wracked dunes that towered 600 feet into the sky, each one of them with a long even slope on one side leading up to the crest, which then dropped away steeply into the next trough. The little party was dwarfed by its gigantic scale, creeping so slowly across its vast expanse.
At night it was bitterly cold; on his first trip Thesiger had brought three blankets with him, but the Bedu share everything and, since his companions had only a few rags to wrap round them at night, he had ended up surrendering two of the blankets and shivering through the night with them. This time, therefore, he brought out a sleeping bag which he could keep to himself so that at least during the night he was warm and comfortable.
The party began to stir at the first glimmer of dawn, anxious to push on while it was still cold. The camels would sniff at the withered branches of the tribulus shrub which was their main forage and which grew in hollows of this seemingly dead land, nurtured by rains that might have fallen some years before. As the journey went on they would become too thirsty to eat and once this happened their strength would wane rapidly. The men had nothing to eat or drink, just crept from under tattered blankets, saddled the camels, fastened in place their few belongings, the fast-shrinking sacks of flour and the vital, life-preserving waterskins, and set out across the desert. At first it was bitterly cold; the sand chilled their bare feet, causing the soles to crack –a source of pain and irritation, particularly when the sun heated the sands to an almost unbearable heat. Pain and discomfort filled their bodies through the day, the blazing sun being a harsher tormentor than the cold of the dawn. Thesiger could see the dew-covered bags full of water – water that was being lost by condensation, as the bags heated in the sun. He longed for the one moment in the day that he could take a drink, tried to ignore the length of time that he would have to wait for the evening meal, as he plodded through the sands, leading his camel or, after a few hours’ walking, mounting it and swaying to the ungainly rhythm of its progress.
‘We went on, passing high, pale-coloured dunes, and others that were golden, and in the evening we wasted an hour skirting a great mountain of red sand, probably 650 feet in height. Beyond it we travelled along a salt flat, which formed a corridor through the sands. Looking back I fancied the great red dune was a door which was slowly, silently closing behind us. I watched the narrowing gap between it and the dune on the other side of the corridor and imagined that once it was shut we could never go back, whatever happened. The gap vanished and now I could see only a wall of sand. I turned back to the others and they were discussing the price of a coloured loin-cloth which Mabkhaut had bought in Salala before we started. Suddenly Al Auf pointed to a camel’s track and said, “Those were made by my camel when I came this way on my way to Ghanim”.’
To them it was commonplace. There was nothing strange about recognising one’s own camel track made two years before near the middle of this pathless wilderness. To them the price of a loin-cloth was much more interesting. They were obsessed by money, were immensely avaricious and yet incredibly generous. Their ways and values were so totally different from those to which Thesiger had always been exposed, that however much he admired and liked their way of life, the strain of becoming absorbed into it was considerable. He wrote:
‘I knew that for me the hardest test would be to live with them in harmony and not to let my impatience master me; neither to withdraw into myself, nor to become critical of standards and ways of life different from my own. I knew from experience that the conditions under which we lived would slowly wear me down, mentally if not physically, and that I should often be provoked and irritated by my companions. I also knew with equal certainty that when this happened the fault would be mine not theirs.’
And at last, at the end of the day, as the sun dropped below the crest of one of the dunes, they halted for their only drink and meal in twenty-four hours. They mixed a little sour milk with the brackish water in an effort to make it more drinkable, sipped it slowly and carefully, trying to prolong the sensation of moisture, though within minutes their mouths were as dry, their tongues felt as swollen as they had been before. The evening meal was no more satisfying than their drink, just four level mugfuls of flour – around three pounds – to be divided between five men. They mixed the flour with a little water and milk to bake unleavened bread, burnt on the outside, soggy in the middle, over the fire they had built. Wherever they went in the desert they were able to find wood, even if it meant digging up the roots of long-dead shrubs that might have been nurtured by a rainfall some thirty years before. They would finish the meal with a few drops of sharp, bitter coffee. They would not eat or drink again for another twenty-four hours.
The principal barrier was the Uruq al Shaiba, a range of sand dunes through which there were no defiles or easy ways round. Towards the end of their second day they reached a sand dune that stretched across their route like a huge mountain range:
‘Several of the summits seemed at least 700 feet above all the salt flats on which we stood. The face that confronted us, being on the lee side to the prevailing wind, was very steep. Al Auf told us to wait and went forward to reconnoitre. I watched him climb up a ridge like a mountaineer struggling upwards through soft snow, the only moving thing in all that empty landscape. I thought, “God, we will never get the camels over that.” Some of them had lain down, an ominous sign. Bin Kabina sat beside me, cleaning the bolt of his rifle. I asked him, “Will we ever get the camels over those dunes?” He pushed back his hair, looked at them and said, “Al Auf will find a way.” Al Auf came back and said, “Come on,” and led us forward. It was now that he showed his skill, choosing the slopes up which the camels could climb. Very slowly, a foot at a time, we coaxed the unwilling beasts upward. Above us the rising wind was blowing streamers of sand. At last we reached the top. To my relief I saw we were on the edge of rolling dunes. I thought triumphantly, “We have made it, we have crossed the Uruq al Shaiba.”
‘We went on, only stopping to feed at sunset. I said cheerfully to Al Auf, “Thank God we are across the Uruq al Shaiba”. He looked at me for a moment and answered, “If we go well tonight we shall reach them tomorrow”. At first I thought he was joking.’
They kept going through the night, hungry, tired and above all desperately thirsty. The camels had had nothing to drink for three days, were so thirsty that they would no longer eat the dried-up, desiccated foliage in the hollows of the dunes. If the camels collapsed and died, that would be the end. They stopped at midnight and Thesiger dropped into a troubled sleep, dreaming that the Uruq al Shaiba towered above them, as high and steep as the Himalaya.
Next morning they set out while it was still dark, and soon the line of sand dunes, even higher and more formidable than on the previous day, barred their route. Beyond the first wave ran another and yet another, each one higher and steeper than the last. The camels wallowed and slipped on the fine grains of sand, pulled and pushed, cajoled, but never shouted at or beaten, by the five men as they struggled up the seemingly endless, shifting slopes.
‘We went down into the valley, and somehow – I shall never know how the camels did it – we got up the other side. There, utterly exhausted, we collapsed. Al Auf gave us a little water, enough to wet our mouths. He said, “We need this if we are to go on”. The midday sun had drained the colour from the sands. Scattered banks of cumulus clouds threw shadows cross the dunes and salt flats, and added an illusion that we were high among alpine peaks, with frozen lakes of blue and green in the valley, far below. Half asleep I turned over, but the sand burnt through my shirt and woke me from my dreams.’
This time they really were over the Uruq al Shaiba; the dunes in front of them were just as high, but Al Auf knew the way through them. Winding sinuously through the valleys, they were now travelling with the grain of the country. It was just a question of plodding on, keeping going through the day and late into the night, to reach the nearest well before the camels collapsed. One day they caught a hare; divided between five, there was little more than a morsel each, but it tasted like a feast. Two days later, they were suddenly challenged by an Arab lying hidden behind a bush. Had he been a member of a hostile tribe he could have gunned them down before they could grab their rifles, but he recognised they were Rashid and therefore friends. They all sat down, made coffee and swapped news. He was out looking for a stray camel. He warned them, however, that raiding parties were on the rampage and that King Ibn Saud’s tax collectors were in Dhafara and the Rabadh, collecting tributes from the tribes. If they ventured into any of the settlements around the oases there was a good chance that Thesiger would be arrested, imprisoned at best, but he could well be killed.
They carried on through the desert towards the Liwa oases, but resolved to turn away just short of them to avoid any contact with other Arabs. The following day, fourteen days after leaving the last waterhole of Khaur bin Atarit, they stopped just short of the oasis of Dhafara; they had completed the first ever crossing by a European of the eastern, and by far the wildest part of the Empty Quarter.
‘To others my journey would have little importance. It would produce nothing except a rather inaccurate map which no one was every likely to use. It was a personal experience, and the reward had been a drink of clean, nearly tasteless water. I was content with that.’
Thesiger still had to get back to Oman – without being identified as an Infidel, arrested or killed. They picked their way surreptitiously through the eastern foothills of the mountains of Oman and then back down the coast of the Arabian Sea to meet up with the rest of the Bait Kathir at Bai. In subsequent years, Thesiger made another crossing, of the western part of the Empty Quarter, a venture in some ways even more dangerous than his first, not so much because of the difficulty of the terrain as the hostility of the tribesmen. But it is his first crossing that he remembers with the greatest affection, for this had all the exciting novelty of the unknown.
Thesiger travelled through the breadth of southern Arabia, living with the Arabs from 1945 to 1950, when the authorities, both Arabian and British, decided to put a stop to his journeys through this increasingly sensitive, oil-rich wilderness. As he was forced to leave the land and people whom he had come to love. Thesiger felt a deep sense of loss:
‘I had gone to Arabia just in time to know the spirit of the land and the greatness of the Arabs. Shortly afterwards the life that I had shared with the Bedu had irrevocably disappeared. There are no riding camels in Arabia today, only cars, lorries, aeroplanes and helicopters … For untold centuries the Bedu lived in the desert; they lived there from choice ... Even today there is no Arab, however sophisticated, who would not proudly claim Bedu lineage. I shall always remember how often I was 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.
‘Bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha accompanied me to Dubai, and there we parted. “Remain in the safe-keeping of God.” “Go in peace, Umbarak,” they replied. As the plane climbed over the town from the airport at Sharja and swung out to sea, I knew how it felt to go into exile.’