Anatomy of Restlessness

Author:Bruce Chatwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2011-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

1970

IV

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ABEL THE NOMAD41

Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs are classics in line with Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta. Yet his new autobiographical sketch, Desert, Marsh and Mountain, though it borrows large chunks of the two earlier books, is more absorbing than either. The subtitle, ‘The World of a Nomad’, gives a clue about what he is up to. The nomad in question is Mr Thesiger himself, as he travels, by camel or on foot, in Africa or in Asia, among tribesmen who are – or were – for the most part nomadic. At first sight, the book appears to be a collection of short travel-pieces, illustrated with photographs by someone with an unerring sense of composition. A closer look reveals a declaration of faith that goes a long way towards explaining the ‘strange compulsion’ which drives men like Wilfred Thesiger to seek, and find, the consolation of the desert.

He was born to travel. His father was British Minister in Addis Ababa. His first memories were ‘of camels and of tents, of a river and men with spears’. His book was Jock of the Bushveld, that child’s bible of the British Empire. His friends were orderlies and grooms who took him out hunting or held his pony. He was always a stranger among his own – as remote from his schoolfellows as he was from the few of his countrymen, such as the late Gavin Maxwell, who had the stamina to follow him on his journeys. A photograph taken at Eton shows a face already set in the mould of the horizon-struck dreamer.

He went back to Ethiopia in 1930 for the coronation of Haile Selassie. Afterwards, he made a journey across the country of the Danakils, first cousins of Kipling’s ‘fuzzy-wuzzies’ and incredibly fierce. He found ‘even more than I had dreamed of as a boy poring over Jock of the Bushveld’, and, incidentally, crossed the tracks of Arthur Rimbaud, who had trekked up and down those ‘routes horribles’ forty years before. The Danakil journey set the pattern for a life that turned into a perpetual tramp through the wilderness: an officer in the Sudan Political Service; in the Empty Quarter; in the Marshes of Southern Iraq; on the spring migration of the Bakhtiari; with the Kurds of the Zagros or the Kaffirs of the Hindu Kush; watching Nasser’s planes bomb the Yemini Royalists; or living, as he now does, in a tent, shooting the odd buck for food, among the Samburu cattle-herdsmen of Northern Kenya.

Mr Thesiger makes no secret of his conviction that the heroic world of pastoral nomads is finer—morally and physically—than the life of settled civilisations: ‘All that is best in the Arabs came from the desert.’ (Indeed, the word arab means a ‘dweller in tents’, as opposed to hazar ‘a man who lives in a house’—with the original implication that the latter was rather less than human.) It is, therefore, nothing short of catastrophic for him to find his old Bedu friends driving about in cars and seduced by the ‘tawdriest and most trivial aspects of Western civilisation’.

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