The end of adventure

The death of Wilfred Thesiger marks the passing of an era of explorers who journeyed into the unknown armed only with their wits and plenty of pluck. In these extracts from his recent autobiography, he explains what drove him on
My Life and Travels by Wilfred Thesiger
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I was born in 1910, the eldest of four brothers, in one of the mud buildings that initially housed the legation at Addis Ababa where my father was a British minister. Indistinct recollections of camels and of tents, of a river and men with spears, and one vivid picture of my father shooting an oryx when I was three - these are among my earliest memories. But these early memories of desert travel are almost gone, overlaid by later ones of the Abyssinian highlands, for it was there I lived till I was nearly nine.

The golden broom in the garden; iridescent sunbirds among the flowers; the juniper bushes and red gullies behind the house; our syce waiting with the ponies; a camp by a waterfall, the dipping flight of green and chestnut bee-eaters, and the crimson flash of a touraco's wings among the trees - these are a few pictures that spring to mind from scores of others.

I remember sitting beside my father in the twilight above a gorge, hoping he would get a shot at a leopard; I remember looking for bloodstains and cartridge cases near a small bridge where there had been a fight; listening to my father as he read to me of big game hunting and ox wagons and Zulus, from Jock of the Bushveld, as the sun went down behind Wochercher; watching in shocked disbelief the lance head come out through the shoulder of our favourite sowar when he had an accident getting on his horse, his grey face and closed eyes as I sat miserably beside him after my brother Brian had galloped off for help. He had dismounted to show us a bird's nest. I can see again the white-robed priests dancing in line before the Ark of the Covenant to the beat of silver drums, surrounded by other priests in richly-coloured robes, holding silver crosses in their hands.

Above all I can remember some of the events during the rebellion of 1916 when Lij Yasu was deposed: watching the armies going forth to fight, a seemingly chaotic flood of warriors, mounted and on foot; jostling women driving mules inexorably northward; overhearing the news that Ras Lul Seged's army had been wiped out and that Negus Michael, Lij Yasul's father and king of the north, was advancing on Addis Ababa; seeing Ras Tafari, later to become Haile Selassie, walk up the legation steps when he brought his infant son to my father for safekeeping, before he went north to give final battle; hearing the mass rifle-fire in the town, celebrating the news of overwhelming victory.

Two days later the army came in. Throughout the day they poured past the Royal Pavilion to the thunder of war drums and the blare of trumpets. They were still frenzied with the excitement of that desperate battle, when 60,000 men fought hand-to-hand on the plains around Sagale. The blood on the clothes they had stripped from the dead was barely dry. All of them carried shields and brandished rifles, spears or naked swords. Most of them were in white, but the chiefs were in full panoply of war, lion-mane head-dresses, velvet cloaks of many colours, long silken shirts; their shields were embossed with silver or gilt as were the scabbards of their swords. Above this endless tide of men the banners dipped and danced, red, gold and green, the colours of the empire. Wave after wave, horsemen and men on foot, mixed in seeming confusion, they surged past throughout the day, thrusting close to the steps of the pavilion to boast of their prowess, while the court chamberlains beat them back with wands.

Negus Michael was led past with a stone on his shoulder in token of submission, an old man in a black burnous with a white cloth wrapped about his head. Ras Lul Sege's young son came past at the head of a few hundred men, all that were left of the 5,000 who had fought beside his father at Ankober. I remember the excited face of a boy, seemingly little older than myself, who was carried past in triumph. He had killed two men. At last it was over - a small English boy had watched a sight as barbaric and enthralling as was ever seen in Africa.

Looking back, I realise that my exciting and happy childhood in Abyssinia, far removed from direct contact with the western world, implanted in me a life-long craving for adventure among untamed tribes in unknown lands.

One year after my exploration of the Danakil desert in 1934, the Italians invaded Abyssinia, and in the course of their operations occupied Aussa. In 1939, the very year after my journey to the mountains of Tibesti, across deserts where no car had ever penetrated, war was declared; in the course of it, motorised Free French forces were assembled there, at Faya, to drive north into Tripolitania. Then, in 1950, even as I was leaving Arabia after exploring the empty quarter for five years with my Bedu companions, the oil companies were already negotiating to prospect the hinterland of Oman; there, as elsewhere in Arabia, their industrial activities destroyed for ever the immemorial life of the desert Arab. In 1977, when I briefly returned to Oman and Abu Dhabi, I saw at once that present-day Arabia, with its prodigious wealth, had nothing whatever left to offer me.

Much of the world, including many of the countries where I have spent years of my life, is now in chaos. The Sudan has been torn apart by chronic civil war between north and south, and is now devastated by drought in the western area, where the Zaghawa, Maidob, Bani Husain and other tribes, among whom I lived and served so happily, are dying in thousands of starvation. Over in Tibesti the Tedda, now equipped with automatic weapons and supported by Gadafy's Libyan troops, are engaged in yet another civil war. Meanwhile, Iraqi and Iranian armies are fighting desperately in the marshes of Iraq; while in the mountains of Nuristan, as elsewhere in Afghanistan, the tribesmen, who abominate their communist puppet government and are courageously resisting it, are being mercilessly attacked by Russian troops and helicopter gunships. For me, however, the crowning tragedy is the fate of Abyssinia.

In July 1969, I happened to be in Kenya, on the shore of Lake Rudolf, when I heard with incredulity from a naked Turkana fisherman that the "Wazungu" - as he called Europeans, including Americans - had landed on the moon. He had heard the news at a distant mission station. To him this achievement, being incomprehensible, was without significance; it filled me, however, with a sense of desecration, and of despair at the deadly technical ingenuity of modern man.

Even as a boy I recognised that motor transport and aeroplanes must increasingly shrink the world and irrevocably destroy its fascinating diversity. My forebodings have been amply fulfilled. Package tours now invade the privacy of the remotest villages; the transistor, blaring pop music, has usurped the place of the tribal bard. While I was in the desert with the Rashid, they would light a fire by striking a dagger blade against a piece of flint: now they hear the world's news on their radio, or watch it on their television set. Twenty-five years ago, their concern was on account of tribal raiding: now, it is on account of superpower dissension over arms control, and "Star Wars" of the future. The Rashid today, like the rest of us, know they face the possibility of nuclear annihilation.

In any case, if we survive, the future of serious geographical exploration must be in outer space or in the ocean depths. Moreover, the means to carry it forward can only be attained by modern technology, and at enormous expense; the participants in each venture will inevitably be limited to the selected few. The surface of the globe, having now - thanks to the internal combustion engine - been thoroughly explored, no longer affords scope for the adventurous individual in search of the unknown.

Journeying at walking pace under conditions of some hardship, I was perhaps the last explorer in the tradition of the past. I was happiest when I had no communication with the outside world, when I was utterly dependent on my tribal companions. My achievement was to win their confidence. Among my many rewards was, in Abyssinia, to have been the first European to explore the Sultanate of Aussa; in Arabia, to have reached the oasis of Liwa, and to have found the fabled quicksands of Umm al Sammim; and, in so many of my travels, to have been there just in time.

· Extracted From My Life and Travels, an Anthology, by Wilfred Thesiger.