Thesiger

Michael Asher's meticulous biography of the last great romantic adventurer-explorer in the nineteenth century tradition, Wilfred Thesiger, does justice to author and subject alike. Much of the detail of Thesiger's epic journeys was drawn from extended conversations with the explorer himself while he was living in retirement among the Samburu tribe in Kenya, as well as from some of those who accompanied him on his majestic desert treks. Asher also made pilgrimages to the wilderness areas crossed by Thesiger and his small bands of local companions to try and understand and to convey the motivations behind this most complex, contradictory and anachronistic of twentieth century men. For the uninitiated, Wilfred Thesiger was (he died recently) an autocratic and patrician English traditionalist born in a diplomatic mission in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) and nurtured on the playing fields of Eton and the cloisters of Oxford University. As a young man he was the first European to explore Abyssinia's Danakil region inhabited by the murderous Afar tribesman. Later, as an administrator in the Sudan Political service in Darfur Province he took the opportunity to hunt big game, his greatest passion, and to explore the region of the Nuer in the south of that country, the Tibesti Mountains in the Sahara, and Syria, before war broke out. This was the opportunity to kick the Italians out of Abyssinia that he had been dying for. He then went on to fight in the western desert with the SAS. After the war he became one of the first Europeans to cross Arabia's Empty Quarter on camel and by foot with a small band of young Bedu tribesman. This was his greatest achievement and out of this expedition came `Arabian Sands', maybe the definitive twentieth century travel book. He endeared himself to his companions by living, sleeping and eating as they did and proved their equal in endurance and bravery. His acceptance by them and what he saw as the unrivalled generosity of spirit, courage, chivalry and nobility of the Bedu represented all that he believed in, and admired, about human beings. Eschewing all worldly goods and technological aids, and often close to starvation as they travelled, these ascetic values were the link between Arab tribesman and the harsh, Spartan regimes of the English public school. His experience in Arabia was to encapsulate his whole being and he seemed to spend the rest of his life bemoaning technological progress and advancement and the deleterious effect that he believed that they were having on traditional cultures. An arch-conservative product of Empire he believed profoundly in ancient traditions and their perceived (by him) immutability, and harboured a vitriolic hatred of democracy, mass education, equal opportunities and human rights. America to him was truly the Great Satan imposing its egalitarian philosophy and culture on those who would be (in his mind) better off without it. Of course, the ironies, paradoxes and contradictions in Thesig