A RETROSPECT

WILFRED THESIGER
Lecture delivered at the Societys Anniversary Meeting, 14 June 1990, with a record
attendance. Wilfred Thesiger, CBE, DSO, now eighty, is among the greatest living travellers
and explorers. His adventurous life is well described in books which have become classics
Arabian Sands, The Marsh Arabs and The Life of my Choice illustrated, like Desert,
Marsh and Mountain and Visions of a Nomad, with superb photographs. Among many
honours, he holds the Societys Lawrence of Arabia Medal. After the lecture his appointment
as an Honorary Vice-President was announced.

It is a great honour to be asked to give your Anniversary Lecture, and I just

hope I shant fall down on you. The President said I started my journeys while I was a
child in the Legation in Addis Ababa: indeed, I did do my first camel journey when I
was four.
My serious travels started in 1933 with the exploration of the Danakil country
of Abyssinia, and I used camels On that journey. Later, in the Sudan Political Service,
in Kutum District in Northern Darfur, we used camels the whole time the first time
I had ridden a camel. We had two cars in the District in 1935 the only two I am
glad to say, because I have always hated cars but we travelled most of the time by
camel. I was lucky: my District Commissioner, Guy Moore, had a sympathy with the
sort of life I wanted to lead. No other DC, I think, would have given his new Assistant
virtually a months leave, and said, Go off up into the Libyan Sands and learn how
you travel with camels in the real desert. That was one of the things which made me
fascinated by deserts together with being in Kutum, and meeting desert people for
the first time.
In 1938 the Sudan Government allowed me to travel to Tibesti in the Sahara. It
was summer; 1 took three months off and went. We were travelling very hard all the
time: we had a long way to go and I had to be back at the end of the three months.
That was my apprenticeship for what was to come later.
However, at that time the Sahara had been explored; the tribes were
administered; Ralph Bagnold was crossing the Libyan Desert with cars. There didnt
seem anywhere in Africa where I could go off and explore, and travel with
unadministered tribes. The Empty Quarter of Arabia was the one place that seemed to
be left, but I could see no hope of getting there: if I had asked to go there I should
certainly have been turned down.
The War followed, and in its closing stages the opportunity unexpectedly
arose. At dinner one evening in Addis Ababa, just before I left Abyssinia in 1945, I sat
next to a man called O. B. Lean, and he said he was looking for somebody who knew
about deserts and would be able to go into Southern Arabia not necessarily into the
Empty Quarter but round the edges and look for locusts. Before we had finished
our soup he had offered me the job and I had taken it.
So I am going to talk tonight about the Rashid, with whom I lived for five
years a Bedu tribe in and around the Empty Quarter. I will talk of them as they
were 45 years ago. It is all unutterably changed now: what with cars being introduced,
and people going in to look for oil, and everything else, the structure of their lives fell
to pieces. But this was so long ago, it may interest you to hear what they were like.
The Rashid were a small tribe, really only a few hundred, There was another
rather similar tribe, the Awamir; but I was with the Rashid. They differed in a way
from any other tribe in Arabia, in never having come under any form of
administration. All the big tribes in the north had been under the French or the Turks

or somebody; likewise the tribes further south, under the Yemen, or the Imam in
Oman, or Ibn Saud whose authority had spread across northern and central Arabia, or
under the British in the Hadhramaut. But the Rashid had never been administered by
anybody, never acknowledged anybody or any government as their superior.
The other thing was that they had never had any contact with the outside
world. If you think of the Ruwalla and other big tribes in the north, they used to go to
Damascus or Aleppo. Others further south would perhaps get to Kuwait, or Riyadh,
and so on. But the Rashid never did and Salala, from where I started in 1945, was
then no more than a village. They never went over to the Yemen: they were always at
daggers drawn with the Yemeni tribes. They did not go to the Hadhramaut: they went
once or twice when I was with them but it was the first time most of them had been
there, In Oman there were places like Ibri and Nazwa which they visited: but those
again were completely cut off from the rest of the world.
For all that, they travelled very widely. From Salala they might go right up to
the Trucial Coast: they would be on the borders of Oman and the next moment
somewhere near the Yemen always on the move. They led a desperately hard life.
In the area where they travelled, there was very very little water. You would typically
come across a single well with a few gallons of very brackish water: this was what we
had to drink all the time, some of it so brackish that even the camels would not drink
it. In an area the size of an English county you might find just one well. On one
occasion we were travelling for 14 days, on another for 16, from one well to the next;
but we were always or nearly always thirsty, and always hungry. I can say we
because I was with them.
Again, what made their lives so hard was that, once in the Empty Quarter, you
got those enormous dunes. When we were there, I reckoned that some were 700 feet
high very nearly what you would call a mountain in this country. Re-reading
Arabian Sands the other day, I thought I must have exaggerated that; but when I
talked to somebody who had been there doing investigations for an oil company, he
said he reckoned some of them were 1000 feet high, just wind-blown sand though
permanent, and each great dune had its name and might stretch for 100 miles. You try
getting camels over something like that.
Not only was there the lack of water in the desert: there was the shortage of
herbage. The essential thing for the Bedu was to find grazing for their camels. When
autumn was approaching they would send scouts far out into the desert to try to find
some. When it was located, the women and the small children would stay at the well
with the goats, while the men went off into the desert with the scouts to wherever they
had found the grazing. It was usually tribulus, heliotrope and sedge, and after rain it
would come up incredibly quickly even in an area which had not previously had any
rain for many years.
The men would move in, and there they might stay for the next six months
though they had no water to drink and nothing to eat. They would live entirely on
camels milk. Imagine that. Yet if they could see their camels fattening up they were
really extremely happy, and would not have wished to be elsewhere. It is an indication
of the incredible hardship in which they were living.
Out there, when the women had stayed behind at the wells with the goats,
there were no animals apart from camels, not even dogs. And one was in entirely male
society. I cannot tell you much about the life of the women since I seldom saw one.
But Bedu society did not segregate women: you cannot do that if you are sitting under
a tree and have no accommodation but a little tent.

On the odd occasion when there was a dispute, a woman was liable to go back
to her father and brothers, and to say she would not return to her husband. Then the
husband had shamefacedly to go along and try to persuade her to come back, perhaps
offering her a handsome present. It was quite different from the usual idea of
segregation, which could not apply under those conditions. When we were on the
march, if there was a Woman coming with us, always someone would get off his
camel, and put her up, and walk.
Another thing that made life so hard was that you lived all the time with your
rifle in your hand or within reach. There was raiding and fighting going on
continually. When I did my second crossing of the Empty Quarter in 1948, over to
Sulaiyil, the southern tribes from the Hadhramaut and round there had been raiding
deep into Ibn Sauds territory; as a result he had loosed his tribes upon them; which
really made it very dangerous. Then there were the Dahm who lived in the Yemen,
and they used to come raiding right across.
Without their camels the Bedu could not exist. The whole of their lives
depended on their camels. They called them Ata Allah, Gods gift, and were devoted
to them. You used to see them stroking and fondling them. Some of their camels
would come to their call. If we were travelling, and there was a dune 100 feet high,
and a man saw a bit of grazing on the top say zahra the tribulus plant he might
run all the way up that dune, collect it and come back and feed it to his camel.
Whereas in the Sudan they rode male camels, the Bedu rode nothing but
female camels. Once bin Ghabaisha bought a male, and whenever he arrived at an
encampment all the females were brought along to be served; I did wonder how much
longer it was going to last. When travelling, we had just the riding camel we were on,
and perhaps two or three camels for water. Our camels were our constant anxiety. In
the old days, in 1934, when I had crossed French Somaliland to the sea, only four of
the eighteen camels I had started with reached the coast: the rest had collapsed
through the hardship of the journey. And here in Arabia out camels might have to go
up to 16 days without watering. They were all right as long as they could get enough
to eat, fresh food If they could not, at the end they would not even eat that. If our
camels had collapsed on one of those giant dunes, like the Uruq al Shaiba, we would
have been finished: we could not have walked out. .
The thing the Bedu valued above everything else was their freedom. I
remember, being in Damascus during the War, when the Ruwalla were all camped
quite close I used to call on them sometimes, and they would say, Why on earth do
you come when we are here? Why dont you come to us when we are in the desert?
Then you would really know what freedom is.
In order to have their freedom the Bedu were prepared to put up with this
terribly hard life. Any of those people who were with me bin Kabina, bin Ghabaisha
or any of the others could have gone off and got a job in Salala, or the Hadhramaut,
and really ceased to be a Bedu and become I dont know a market-gardener or
something like that. But at that time they would all have scorned it as an easier life for
lesser men. Their proud boast, whenever faced by some particular challenge, or by the
cold or anything else, was, We are Bedu.
You have all heard of Bedu hospitality, and to me, it was quite astounding. Yet
I must say it could be damned irritating too. When I started on one of these trips,
having collected an amount of food which 1 thought sufficient to get us across the
Empty Quarter, other people heard we had all this food and, came and joined us:
being guests, they were fed every night till we could shake them off and get away.

Again, later when we were very short of water, other people would attach themselves
to us and we would have to give them our water.
The other thing was that if somebody was travelling with us and was attacked,
he was our travelling-companion even if we had never seen him before in our lives.
So we would have to be ready to die in his defence and I think this would apply even
if his attackers were from our own tribe.
As to Bedu hospitality, there were certainly two sides to it. I remember once
we had been travelling for a long time without seeing any sort of meat, till one
morning one of our party managed to knock over a hare and kill it, So we talked about
that for the rest of the day how we were going to eat it, and when we were going to
eat it. After we had halted for the evening, and bin Kabina was cooking it, I went to
him and said, Is it ready yet?
No, give it a little longer, he replied. Then he looked up and exclaimed Oh
God! Guests.
There, coming across the dune towards us were three Arabs. We stood up, we
welcomed them, we asked them the news. That is what you always did: the first thing
was, What is the news? You were always told the news was good, even if
somebody had just been shot. After you got through the responses, so to speak, you
sat down; you gave them coffee; you gave them some dates; only then did you really
hear everything.
Well, we did all this; then bin Kabina took the hare and gave it to them. Join
us, they said,
You are our guests, we replied at least, not I but all the others did. God
has brought you; for us this is an auspicious day; feed!
And they did. They ate it all. We had been living on sand-blown dates; that
evening we had some more.
Still, there was an opposite side. Once, when I was getting up towards the
Trucial Coast, my companions wanted at all costs to avoid anyone knowing I was
there. They made me ride a lot at that time, saying that if anyone saw my monstrous
footprints (I take size 12, a typical Bedu 5 or 6) we would be followed. We were
skirting wide of some tents, when a man got up and came running towards- us, not
having a clue who we were. Why do you avoid my tents? he called. I will give you
meat flesh and fat.
We said we were trying to get on, and were in a hurry; but he grabbed one of
our bridles, and took the divorce oath, declaring, I shall divorce my wife if you do
not come.
We could not inflict that on him, so we went over, and he killed a young camel
for us and we had a tremendous meal. Its being a camel and not a goat was a great
advantage: there was all that much more meat, and we were starving.
On another occasion we were going through the Wahiba Sands, and there
again the Imam of Muscat was after me because of vague ideas about a Christian
travelling in his land. I was dressed like my companions, who sometimes passed me
off as a Baluch (not an Arab, my Arabic was not good enough and I was too tall),
adding that I was buying slaves which luckily I never had to do. Anyway, suddenly
a small boy of about fourteen ran round a dune and stood in the midst of us and said,
You are forbidden to go on.
Oh, damn it, I thought. Are we going to be held up by a kid of this age?
Weve got to go on.
You cannot go on, he said. I forbid you. You have to come to my tent so
that I can feed you.

Eventually we did persuade him to let us go. Almost with tears in his eyes he
said, Ive done all I could.
Again, there was their generosity. You can say Arabs are avaricious: they are.
These people talked endlessly about money. On the march they would invent a story
of buying and selling each others camels and so on with no intention of
carrying it through but just for the fun of talking about it.
On the other hand, I remember once bin Kabina had walked over somewhere
to collect our camels, and when he came back he did not have his loincloth on we
used to wear a long shirt, and under it a loincloth. I said, Where is your loincloth?
and he replied, Oh, a man over there asked for it so I had to give it to him. How
many of us, if asked for our overcoat, would take it off and give it away? There were
several cases like that.
Another example was when we were going across to the Hadhramaut. We
were a crowd, about thirty of us, and I was sitting at one side with bin Kabina, when
suddenly a tattered-looking old man in rags appeared, and they all stood up and gave
him a tremendous welcome. I asked bin Kabina why they were paying the old man all
this attention,
Hes famous, replied bin Kabina.
Famous for what?
For his generosity.
He doesnt look as if he has anything to give anybody.
He hasnt now. Hes given it all away.
The Bedu always had this desire to excel. They wanted to be known as more
generous, or braver, or as more skilful guides, than anybody else. The guide who took
me across the Empty Quarter the first time, in 1946, was Muhammad al Auf, and he
was famous throughout Arabia. When he first said he would take me, I asked if he had
been that way himself, and he replied that he had come right across the year before,
the same way.
Who was with you? I asked.
1 was by myself, he replied.
Thinking we were misunderstanding each other, I asked, Who were your
companions?
God was my companion, he said. That man had done all by himself what
was to take us sixteen days to do together: later, we came across his camels
footprints. That sort of thing made him absolutely famous.
It could be carried to extremes. I remember Glubb telling me that one of the
Howaitat sheikhs was known as the diner of the wolves. Since he would have no
one call on him in vain for dinner, if he heard a wolf howl outside his camp he would
send out a goat for it to eat.
On top of their generosity and hospitality, they had intense pride in themselves
and their tribe; and other qualifies too, courage, endurance, patience. But the thing
that ensured that they would live up to all these qualifies was the fact of the news, the
news that travelled with them all over their area of Arabia.
Meeting a party on your travels you lined up; and they lined up opposite you;
and the senior of you asked, What is the news? and you got the answer. Then they
would sit down and talk with you. I remember, after crossing the Empty Quarter the
first time, we came back and rejoined the ones who hadnt come with me. Though we
had been away two months, I could have told them all about it in one long evening.
But they went on, and on; every single detail was discussed, and discussed again.
Eight days later they were still talking about it.

In consequence, if somebody had distinguished himself two hundred miles

away, what he had done would ultimately be known. Similarly, if somebody had
disgraced himself, the word would go round, and then they would use the expression,
God blacken the face of so-and-so!
Beyond the wish to excel, and the news factor, there was something else. A
head sheikh was no more than the first among equals: he had no retainers, no one to
impose his authority. The result was that if there were any sort of dispute they would
collect two or three elders, and they would talk it over and reach a judgement. Usually
it would be a question of having to go and swear on the tomb of some saint down in
the south; and which of them would have to take the oath. But as to enforcement, it
could only be enforced by the sanction that if a man were to make himself thoroughly
tiresome and refuse, they could virtually expel him from the tribe; they could say they
were no longer responsible for him, and that if he were killed there would be no blood
feud.
So he could not give trouble; he could not go off and live on his own; he had
to conform. This made for an interesting fact: that Bedu tribal law really only worked
under conditions of anarchy. Without that, a mans refusal to obey would have
involved getting hold of some authority, and it would have become a court case. As it
was, if you would not obey, you were out on your own.
I have touched on the matter of the blood feud, which again is something that
cuts both ways. Though the Bedu were ruthless in enforcing a blood feud if somebody
had killed whether in the tribe itself which was rare, or with an adjacent tribe or
with enemies it was all totted up. Some of it could be settled with blood money.
Nobody would willingly involve his family and himself in a blood feud. So the
system to some extent had the effect of lessening the amount of killing.
I saw the Bedu those many years ago, and had tremendous admiration for
them. I felt that, with exceptions, you could almost apply the word noble to the lot
of them the only society or people of whom I could feel that. (You could not walk
out into the street here and say you thought the people you met were noble and the
same would apply to almost everybody else.) I learnt a lot from my companions, such
as bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha.
These two had originally joined me at about sixteen; they and two others had
been with me all the time and risked their lives on my behalf. When we crossed the
Empty Quarter the second time, from the wells north of the Hadhramaut to Sulaiyil,
there was a lot of fighting going on, and the sheikh of the Saar forbade any of his
people to go with me. He said, You go to your certain death if you go across there.
Well, I badly underestimated this journey. Having already made one crossing of the
Sands, I thought the main obstacle since we had no guide would be the physical
difficulty of getting across to the right place, getting over the dunes, where the camels
might fail and there would be no sort of grazing for them. Anyway, I said to bin
Kabina, bin Ghabaisha, Muhammad and Amair, the four Rashid, What are we going
to do?
If you want to go, they said, we will go with you. And they did, knowing
far better than I the risks they were running.
By very good fortune, when we reached the other side, there were tracks of
hostile Bedu everywhere, but since there had been very heavy rain up north, they had
drifted away in that direction. I had wrongly thought that if we did meet Ibn Sauds
tribesmen they would merely arrest me since I was doing the journey in defiance of
his orders. The real danger to my party was much greater, and the people who went

with me knew it, but their loyalty to each other, and to me as their travellingcompanion, was absolute.
Speaking of learning from my companions, I must tell you this story of when I
first started with the Bedu. We would do half a days march, and then they would say
they had got grazing here, and must stop. I was thoroughly fed up, thinking in terms
of eight hours marching a day, which of course does not work there the essential
thing being to find grazing.
One day we had started out; we bad not had water for 24 hours and were
thirsty; and we had planned to reach a well easily by mid-afternoon. Then we came on
some grazing, and they all prepared to stop and let the camels feed. I groused about
this it was before I knew them and the sheikh said, Oh, come along with me.
So off we went, and got to the well, and unloaded, three of us myself and two
others. We sat down, but nobody went near the well.
What about a drink? I said to the sheikh.
Get Umbarak a drink, he said to the other man, who went and brought me a
bowl.
After you, uncle, I said to the sheikh.
No, he said, it would not be seemly for me to drink until my people arrive.
So my camel had not got any grazing, and of course under those circumstances 1
could not drink.
The five years I spent in Arabia are unquestionably the most important of my
life. I have travelled in other places, and had good and interesting times in the
Karakorams, the Hindu Kush, Afghanistan, Abyssinia and elsewhere; but what I might
call my chosen years were the ones with the Bedu. I was determined when I went to
join them that I wanted no concessions, that I wanted to meet the challenge of the
desert on equal terms with them; The only things I had which they had not were a
compass and my camera which 1 am glad I took.
I would have returned to Arabia indefinitely to travel and live with the Rashid;
but Ibn Saud and the Sultan of Muscat were both protesting about my unauthorised
journeys in their territories, and in the end 1 realised that the British authorities would
forbid my return. As I left Sharja by air in April 1950, I felt I was going into exile.
In 1977 I went back to Arabia to the Yemen, Oman and Abu Dhabi and
it was very disillusioning. Sultan Qabus of Oman welcomed me, and I went down to
Salala, which had been a village but now had traffic lights. The sultan laid on a
helicopter, and an accompanying television crew, to take me off to where bin Kabina
had gathered his tribe to give me a tremendous feast in the desert; instead of camels
there were the cars they were all using nowadays, drawn up round bin Kabinas tent.
It was of course immensely moving to meet these people again, Some of those I had
known had died, and I met sons of theirs, now thirty years old, who had not been born
when I was there before. As for bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha, they were greybearded grandfathers.
I have been asked how they have reacted to the transformation of their way of
life. I think they have accepted it. In a sense it has given them an easier existence. I
was glad to see that bin Kabina was still living away, in the Sands. But of course a
whole element had dropped out of his life. If he had gone some distance and been
short of water, instead of looking at his dripping goatskin and watching each drop run
out as from a wound which could not be stenched, he would have simply told his
brother, Run back with the car and fill it up. No, they have accepted it.
On this visit in 1977, though I was taken to bin Kabinas tent by air, and
shown round Oman by helicopter or landrover, I did insist on climbing the Jebel al

Akhadar on foot the mountain from which I had been seen off in 1950 by the
Imam. Yet what did we find at the top? A small airfield. Then I went on to Abu Dhabi,
where on my first visit in 1948 there had been absolutely nothing just a small fort
and a few coral houses on the waterfront. Now there was this great new modern city,
still half-built in places, and oil installations scattered round in the desert. After that I
wrote a new preface to Arabian Sands, describing my sense of disillusionment in
Oman and Arabian nightmare in Abu Dhabi.
I thought I would never be asked back again. However, this year the British
Council laid on an exhibition of 36 of my photographs, showing Abu Dhabi as it had
been. I was invited to attend, and the welcome I received was tumultuous, almost
embarrassing; apparently 1,500 people came on the first day, and in my speech I was
able to tell them that Arabian Sands, was being translated into Arabic, with a new
preface, and that I hoped the book would show young people what their fathers were
like.
I found that bin Kabina, bin Ghabaisha and bin al Kamam had all come across
to be with me, and I stayed twelve days. The visit was an experience I have never had
before; I felt like a pop star or minor royalty. However the profoundest difference
was that when I went there this time I had accepted that here was the new Arabia
and that the old one, sadly, had gone for good.
***
[The Editor is grateful to George Webb for having so conscientiously and skilfully
edited the taped text of this lecture.]