Arabian Sands
1959
MARRAKECH IS ONE of the best-preserved Muslim cities not just in Morocco but anywhere in the world of Islam. Clarissa and I were spellbound by its appearance and its liveliness. In the middle of one night, however, I was woken up by a loud unfamiliar noise which I supposed had something to do with the boiler and hot water. Then I saw the cupboard trundling across the room. The sudden realization that this was an earthquake drove us, and apparently everybody else, hurrying and shouting out into the city’s open squares. A storks’ nest had been shaken off the ancient fortified wall and two storks were ceaselessly flying from the empty top down to the pile of twigs on the ground and then back up, evidently deciding whether to rebuild here or find some safer place. Later we were advised to give ourselves a treat by going to a French restaurant miles away in the High Atlas Mountains. The place proved nondescript except for a table at which sat two Englishmen. Instantly recognizable, Lord Auchinleck and Wilfred Thesiger looked their part as Field Marshal and explorer respectively. I introduced Clarissa and myself and so we had lunch next to these living legends.
Every spring, Thesiger brought his mother to Morocco and in this year 1979 they were staying in a small hotel in the Kasbah of Marrakech. Mrs. Astley was then nearing ninety. In 1910, already expecting Wilfred, she had made a three-week trek on a mule from a port on the Red Sea up to Addis Ababa, where her then husband, Wilfred’s father, was Minister. The British Legation was a mud hut and there were no wheeled vehicles in the whole country.
Arabian Sands is an Apologia Pro Vita Sua like no other, and a bravura passage in it conjures up memories from childhood in Ethiopia. “I had watched the priests dancing at Timkat before the Ark of the Covenant to the muffled throbbing of their silver drums; I had watched the hierarchy of the Ethiopian Church, magnificent in their many-coloured vestments, blessing the waters. I had seen the armies going forth to fight in the Great Rebellion of 1916.” The family photograph album has snapshots of corpses hanging from trees, of a man lying next to his arm and leg, severed in punishment. Thesiger was ten when his father died, and his mother settled with her four sons in Old Radnor, which consists of a few houses in a lonely part of Wales, country that he revisited to the end of his life.
In London, Thesiger was an attentive son who stayed with his mother. The product of Eton and Oxford (where he got a Blue for boxing), he was the personification of an English gentleman with a bowler hat and rolled umbrella. In the morning I would ring up, Mrs. Astley would mutter into the telephone and then I’d hear her bellowing in a very different tone, “Wilfred, cut along here, it’s for you.” I found it impossible to reconcile this conventional figure with the man who says of himself in Arabian Sands, “I wanted colour and savagery, hardship and adventure.” We were in his mother’s drawingroom one day when he fetched an envelope containing learned papers and listings of his travels and writings and out fell a passport photograph of a handsome Arab in traditional dress and keffiyeh, with Arab-style moustache and trimmed beard. This other self was unrecognizable, I told him and he gave me the photograph; I have it still. Whenever he came to dinner with us, I made a point of inviting admirers of his. Making no concessions, he spoke exclusively of his wars and travels. Women who had sat next to him used to complain afterwards that he never looked them in the eye. Most probably he was homosexual, but in that case he had repressed it so deeply that the least acknowledgement on his part was out of the question. I wonder how well he knew himself.
At the age of 25, Thesiger was one of the couple of hundred British members of the Sudan Civil Service who kept the peace for the many tribes long accustomed to internecine rivalry. In 1940 he was appointed Orde Wingate’s deputy in the campaign to liberate Ethiopia from Italian occupation. The Life of My Choice, Thesiger’s autobiography, offers contradictory opinions of Wingate. On the one hand he was “inspiring” and had “greatness,” while on the other he was “past the stage of rational behaviour.” Thesiger was shocked that Wingate summoned officers to his room, where he received them lying naked on his bed. Even worse, he could be seen lowering his trousers and cooling his bottom in waterholes from which others would have to drink.
For the first five years after the war, Thesiger explored Arabia, crossing the desert known as the Empty Quarter by camel. Motorized vehicles were available, but their use would have given the exploit a very different character, modern and out of keeping, whereas the primitive was noble. “All that is best in the Arabs has come to them from the desert” is a grandiose generalization in Arabian Sands. Thesiger does not spell out what the best is or was, but the Bedouin who accompanied him are shown practicing age-old virtues of courage and endurance and their exemplary conduct speaks for itself. Actually the crossing served no useful purpose, it was a test of hardship and adventure that he had imposed upon himself, much as someone might climb Mount Everest, say, or row alone across the Atlantic.
I first realized that Thesiger had transposed the myth of the Noble Savage into the Arab context when his brother Roderick told me about an incident in the Libyan desert during the war. Wilfred was with a Long Range Desert Group hundreds of miles behind enemy lines on a mission to sabotage a train bringing up reinforcements for the German army. As soon as the train was blown up and burning, Bedouin appeared from nowhere to loot what they could. Wilfred grabbed one of them, saying that British soldiers had killed those German soldiers because that was their duty, not so that scavengers could pick over the bones of the dead. He hit the man, broke his jaw, and the Bedouin scattered away into the sand dunes from which they had come. The punishment was pointless. The moment the British officers drove away, the Bedouin were free to return for the plundering. Their offense was to show Thesiger that he was romancing reality and what comes out of the desert is not necessarily the best.
An incident that quite unconsciously reveals how easily Thesiger persuaded himself that tribal brutality is heroic is written up in his Introduction to Bedouin Poetry from Sinai and the Negev (1991), the work of Clinton Bailey, an American-Israeli with a good claim to be the leading specialist of this academic subject. In the course of one of his travels, Thesiger had a meal with a local Emir and two men from the Yam tribe. One of the latter recounts an ordeal that Thesiger is passing on as evidence of the superiority of the Bedouin way of life. A party of Manahil tribesmen had attacked his encampment, killed his nephew and driven off the camels. He and others went in pursuit and shot dead four Manahil. Another Manahil, bin Duailan by name, remained behind to cover his companions as they escaped with the camels and he shot five of the pursuing party before his rifle jammed. This enabled the narrator to reach him and kill him with a dagger. “By God,” he continues, but now in praise of bin Duailan, “he was a man. I thought he would kill us all.” This was how he had gained a reputation for all to admire. Within a very short time, according to Thesiger, “bin Duailan’s exploit was being declaimed on the far side of Arabia.” The poetry may very well be beautiful and popular but it is celebrating lawlessness, raiding, robbery and casual murder.
Postscript. In her eighties, Mrs. Astley was run over by a taxi and her pelvis was only one of her broken bones. Roddy Thesiger told me that her injuries were so severe that the hospital staff agreed she would die in the night and treatment was pointless suffering. I want to see Wilfred, she kept repeating. He’s in Kenya, Roddy would answer, and he won’t be back for six months. Next morning, she was still asking for Wilfred, they set her broken bones, she lived for several more years and duly saw Wilfred.