The cover of this fine, detailed and perhaps slightly overlong biography depicts a barefoot Bedouin and his sparsely laden camel standing alone in the middle of sandy nothingness. It is only by peering closely that one can make out the beaky nose and English features of Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003), whose “Arabian Sands” (1959) is widely regarded as one of the greatest travel books of modern times. T.H. White — the revered author of “The Sword in the Stone” — once called it, with forgivable exaggeration, “the best book I have ever read.” Illustrated with Thesiger’s haunting black-and-white photographs and characterized by a terse lyricism, this desert classic records two grueling camel journeys, undertaken in the late 1940s, across the forbiddingly desolate Empty Quarter of Arabia.
Oddly enough, Thesiger waited a decade to write up his Arabian adventures, which included climbing and crossing sand dunes 700 feet high, murderous threats from warring Arab tribes, and near-constant hunger and thirst — and then did so while cozily ensconced in a hotel in Copenhagen. He composed his other famous book, “The Marsh Arabs” (1964), while residing in a pensione in Florence. As Alexander Maitland reminds us, this great wanderer through Arabia, Persia (as he called Iran), Central Asia and Africa was emphatically a man of contradictions.
(The Overlook Press) - "Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer" by Alexander Maitland
When Thesiger was in the desert, he dressed as his Arab companions did, honoring the nomad’s principle that “everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance.” But back in London, he would don a bowler hat, sport a dark three-piece suit and carry a rolled umbrella, the very picture of conservative English traditionalism. One friend said that he was “the sort of man who will happily walk barefoot for months across a waterless desert, subsisting on a handful of dates and occasional sip of camel’s piss, but who, back in civilization, cannot endure the most trivial discomfort. He becomes frantic even if his egg isn’t boiled right for breakfast.”
Born in what was then Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), Thesiger counted himself as much a citizen of that country as of England. The eldest of a colonial administrator’s four sons, he wrote that his childhood in Abyssinia, and especially the memory of its spear-carrying warriors, implanted in his soul “a lifelong craving for barbaric splendour, for savagery and colour and the throb of drums, and it gave me a lasting veneration for long-established custom and ritual, from which would derive later a deep-seated resentment of Western innovations in other lands, and a distaste for the drab uniformity of the modern world.”
As a scion of an upper-class family, Thesiger attended Eton and Oxford, but he spent his summer vacations roaming around northern Africa, hunting and exploring. He loved reading the adventure fiction of John Buchan, Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad, and regarded T.E. Lawrence as a role model. At Oxford, he squeaked through with a third-class degree in modern history but distinguished himself as a champion boxer.
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