LITMIR.BIZ

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a fortnight after leaving Dikil, six months after he had first entered the Danakil country, Thesiger and his caravan arrived on 20 May 1934 at Tajura. Thesiger had shown Umr how to use a camera, and three days before they reached Tajura Umr photographed him standing with a rifle across his shoulders, bearded and moustached, in a sheltering khaki topee. Thesiger had achieved his ambition, and accomplished ‘a thoroughly good piece of work in really dangerous country’.⁵³ He looked confident and defiant. Yet according to Colonel Sandford, the expedition had taught him ‘to be patient and diplomatic as well as to “thrust”’. Sandford had told Thesiger he was ‘winning golden opinions [perhaps ‘pinions’] – which remark never failed to goad him to fury’,⁵⁴ and confided to Kathleen: ‘Between ourselves Sir Sidney Barton told me when I last saw him that Wilfred had greatly impressed him – he thought he had developed a great deal since he was last out here.’⁵⁵ ‘I think Wilfred has shown himself to be thoroughly sensible in his dealings with the natives, and he is not likely to bring down trouble upon his head.’⁵⁶ As to the young man’s future, Sandford commented generously and perceptively: ‘I am not sure that his heart is really set on the Sudan Civil [i.e. Political Service] – but if they get him they will in my opinion get good value.’⁵⁷

      However much it went against the grain, Thesiger had learnt to balance determination with patience and tact, especially when dealing with his elders. He had at last begun to master his temper, although he never managed to suppress his sudden, violent rages. He acknowledged this weakness, and the much-needed assurance Umr Ibrahim’s ‘imperturbability’ had given him.⁵⁸ He felt proud and satisfied at having achieved the objectives of his journey: having traced the mysterious river to its end; having collected so many birds; having taken ‘hundreds’ of good photographs and gathered ‘enough information for an interesting book on the Dankalis’. Writing to Kathleen, however, he found it impossible to resist patronising David Haig-Thomas’s efforts at ornithology and photography. N.B. Kinnear observed in 1934 that whereas Haig-Thomas ‘had taken the trouble to make himself acquainted with the birds of the country’, Thesiger ‘readily admit[ted] that he did not know much about Abyssinian birds’.⁵⁹ Thesiger confirmed his scant knowledge, writing: ‘I have got…probably 350 different kinds [in reality the figure was 192]…[though] David [apparently over-cautious] told me that we should not get 50 different kinds of bird in the whole of this trip.’ As for photographs, he remarked: ‘I am so glad that my Arussi photos are good. It makes me hope that the hundreds I have taken on this trip will also come out. Poor David, he is unlucky. He took such a lot of trouble with his light meter etc. Probably he would have done better just to snap as I did. I wonder if any of the ones I took on the mountain at Chelalo came out. It was so cloudy that I took time-exposures by guess work.’⁶⁰

      A few days after arriving at Tajura, Thesiger sailed on an Arab dhow across the bay to Jibuti. During the expedition he had been reading French-language paperbacks by Henri de Monfreid, including Secrets de la Mer Rouge, Aventures de Mer, La Croiserie de l’Hashish and a controversial book, Vers les Terres Hostiles de l’Ethiopie, which ‘got him expelled from Abyssinia’.⁶¹ De Monfreid was a French Catalan from the Roussillon. His father Daniel de Monfreid, a painter and art dealer, had been Gauguin’s representative in Europe during the artist’s last years in Tahiti and the Marquesas. The younger de Monfreid grew up to be anti-establishment and anti-British. With his upper-middle-class origins and a foot in both camps, de Monfreid’s background paralleled Thesiger’s, just as his renegade lifestyle appealed to the determinedly conventional yet free-spirited Thesiger, who respected his family’s and his country’s traditions, yet empathised strongly with the Zulus after Isandhlwana, admired the Dervishes at Omdurman and followed anxiously, enthusiastically, the fortunes of the rebel Abdel Krim and his forces in Morocco.

      At Aseila, on the way to Dikil, Thesiger met Fara, who had been de Monfreid’s devoted cook. Thesiger wrote: ‘I had hoped when I got to Jibuti to meet de Monfreid. He had however gone on a visit, I think it was to France, but his dhow, the Altair, was anchored in the bay. I went on board her and met his crew. From his books I already knew their names. I heard he was selling the Altair. I thought fleetingly of buying her and leading a life resembling his, but reality took charge.’⁶² A paper enclosed in Thesiger’s original manuscript diary may have been written by de Monfreid. It gives a detailed breakdown of the running costs of the Altair for any prospective purchaser, suggesting that Thesiger had made serious enquiries about the vessel. But the eldest son of the former British Minister at Addis Ababa was never destined to live like de Monfreid, a social outcast ‘fishing for pearls off the Farsan isles and smuggling guns into Abyssinia through Tajura’.⁶³

      In February 1933, six months before Thesiger left for Addis Ababa, de Monfreid sailed round the ‘hallucinating landscape’⁶⁴ of Gubet Karah on the Red Sea with a party of prehistorians, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Dr Paul Wernert and the Abbé Henri Breuil. From there they trekked to Lake Assal. On the Harar plateau, Wernert examined prehistoric art in the Pore-Epic grotto; at Sourré, Breuil copied rock paintings of cattle, wild animals, herdsmen and hunters as he perched on scaffolding high above a ravine. In 1959, the year Thesiger’s first book, Arabian Sands, was published, the ageing de Monfreid set off to the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean (where Abdel Krim had once lived in exile), in search of treasure said to have been buried in 1730 by Olivier le Vasseur, an eighteenth-century pirate. Empty-handed, still driven by his insatiable craving for adventure, three years later de Monfreid returned to his old haunts in Ethiopia, the former Abyssinia.⁶⁵ In The Danakil Diary, Thesiger noted that de Monfreid, whom he hoped to meet at Jibuti in 1934, was not there.⁶⁶ Having chaperoned the prehistorians to the Red Sea coast and Harar, he had returned to France to be with his wife and young family.⁶⁷

      Saying goodbye to his men in the railway station at Jibuti ‘deepened [Thesiger’s] depression…All [the remaining twenty-two]…had proved utterly reliable, often under conditions of hardship and danger. None had ever questioned my decisions, however seemingly risky, and I had never doubted their loyalty.’ The following day he left Jibuti, travelling third-class aboard a Messageries Maritimes steamship en route from Indo-China to Marseilles. Umr was there to see him off. Reliving the moment in 1996, Thesiger wrote in his concluding chapter of The Danakil Diary: ‘As I watched him descend the gangway I was more conscious than ever how much of my success was due to him.’⁶⁸

      On 8 August 1934, Umr wrote Thesiger a flattering letter, giving his address merely as ‘Omar Ibrahim, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’:

      Dear Sir

      …since you left me and the other servants we have all been wondering about your safety and health. We are also very anxious – as per promised – to see the Photographs that you intended to produce as well as the several newspapers which may contain an account of your trip through Ethiopia. After your departure I was called by the Secretary to the British Minister [Sir Sidney Barton] who told me that he expected two gentlemen from England about two months hence, and I will be called upon to carry out the same duties as I did with you. I rather think, however, that the trek will not be as good with them as it was in your case. Please, Sir, send me some word of your plans as I am almost daily bothered by the other servants who are eager to get a word or two from you. I am also hoping that your entire collection of birds reached England quite safely. I, in common with the others, will always

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