Revisiting “Arabian Sands”

I recently found myself at Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street, after a short visit to London Business School. An exchange student from the University of Hong Kong, brought me over, obviously knowing that my thinking is geographical and not by genre. If you have never been: the shop occupies an Edwardian building completed in 1912, originally the antiquarian bookseller Francis Edwards, and is said to be the first custom-built bookshop in the world. Long oak galleries, graceful skylights, William Morris prints. Under "Arabia" I picked up a copy of Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands. I owned it once before, but I lent it to somebody years ago and, as it goes with lent books, never saw it again. Books lent are books given; one should make peace with that. And with all that is happening in that region and in the world just now, it seemed the right time to read it again.

Arabian Sands, published by Longmans in 1959, is Thesiger's record of five years of travel in and around the Rub' al Khali - the Empty Quarter - between 1945 and 1950, including his two celebrated crossings of the largest sand desert on earth, some 650,000 square kilometres stretching across what is today Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates. The pretext for being there at all was, of all things, entomological. In 1945 the Middle East Anti-Locust Unit hired Thesiger to search for locust breeding grounds in southern Arabia. Locusts were the cover; the desert was the point. The first great crossing began in October 1946 from Salalah in Dhofar, over the Mughshin oasis and the terrifying dunes of the Uruq al Shaiba, to the Liwa oasis and Abu Dhabi, returning to Salalah in February 1947. The second, in the winter of 1947–’48, took the western sands from the well at Manwakh in Yemen northwards - a route that earned him a brief imprisonment at Sulayil, since Ibn Saud had explicitly not given permission for a European to wander through his kingdom. A telegram of apology got him released, and the party reached Abu Dhabi in March 1948, where Thesiger later spent weeks in the company of a young Sheikh Zayid bin Sultan, the future founding father of the UAE. Thesiger was not the first European across the Empty Quarter - Bertram Thomas had done it in 1930–31 and St John Philby in 1932 - but he was the last of the line, and he knew it. When the Imam of Oman refused him access to the Jebel Akhdar in 1950, the door to his Arabia closed for good.

What lifts the book far above the genre of heroic travel is that Thesiger himself insists the journeys did not matter. "For me, exploration was a personal venture," he writes. "I did not go to the Arabian desert to collect plants nor to make a map; such things were incidental." The real subject of Arabian Sands is the Bedu - above all his two young Rashid companions, Salim bin Kabina and Salim bin Ghabaisha, to whom the book is dedicated. Thesiger travelled as they travelled: by camel and on foot, often barefoot, on a pint of brackish water and a handful of dates a day, under the permanent threat of raiding parties and blood feuds. He was convinced that the desert distilled people to their essence - "the harder the life, the finer the person" was his creed - and his portrait of Bedu generosity, endurance and lighthearted gallantry is one of the most affectionate ever written by an outsider about another people. Fifty years after their travels, bin Ghabaisha still described him as "loyal, generous, and afraid of nothing." The prose itself is the opposite of romantic: terse, declarative, coolly observational, which is precisely why the emotional moments land so hard.

The man who wrote it was formed by an upbringing that no longer exists. Thesiger was born in 1910 in the British Legation in Addis Ababa, where his father was consul-general; his grand-uncle had been Viceroy of India. As a six-year-old he watched Ras Tafari's victorious army — swords, spears, lion's-mane headdresses — parade past the Legation, and he later said that day implanted "a craving for barbaric splendour, for savagery and colour" and a lifelong "distaste for the dull monotony of our modern world." Then the standard conveyor belt of his class: Eton, Magdalen College Oxford, a boxing Blue four years running and the captaincy of the Oxford team. At twenty-three he led an expedition through the murderous Danakil country of Abyssinia; afterwards came the Sudan Political Service in Darfur. The classically educated adventurer, in other words - a type the British system produced with strange reliability, and about which I have always been ambivalently fascinated. The education gave these men the frame; the empire gave them the map; character did the rest. Not to be misunderstood: I do not favor imperialism or colonialism in any form. But this time was the breeding ground for quite some gifted misfits.

Then came the war, and the desert acquired a different meaning. Thesiger's war record reads like a novelist's invention. He fought the Italians in Abyssinia under the eccentric Orde Wingate in Gideon Force, winning a DSO in 1941 for taking the fort of Agibar together with its garrison of 2,500 men. He served with SOE in Syria, where the enemy was Vichy France. And in 1942 David Stirling recruited him into the young Special Air Service, raiding German and Italian targets behind the lines in the Western Desert. So the trinity of enemies in his desert war - Germans, Italians, Vichy French - is accurate, though spread across three different units. It is worth pausing on the company he kept in that regiment. Its most lethal figure, Blair "Paddy" Mayne, was a Belfast-trained solicitor and Irish rugby player commanding the SAS was, in its way, another product of the same system that produced Thesiger - improvised, literate, and violent. That the fastidious, ascetic Thesiger and the tempestuous Mayne could serve under the same cap badge tells you something about how broad the church of the classically educated irregular really was.

The obvious comparison, which every reader of Arabian Sands makes and which Thesiger himself invited, is T. E. Lawrence. It was reading Lawrence's Revolt in the Desert - the 1927 abridgement of Seven Pillars of Wisdom — together with Bertram Thomas's Arabia Felix, that first turned Thesiger's imagination toward Arabia. The parallels are almost too neat: both Oxford-educated, both drawn to the Bedu as an ideal of unspoiled manhood, both awkward misfits in the drawing rooms of their own civilisation, both writers whose books outlived their deeds. But the contexts were entirely different, and so were the books. Lawrence was an instrument of policy: his desert war of 1916–18 was part of a grand strategy, and Seven Pillars is soaked in the guilt of a man who knew that the promises he carried to Faisal's Arabs were being traded away in the Sykes–Picot agreement even as he made them. His prose is grand, tortured, purple, endlessly introspective. Thesiger carried no promises and betrayed no one — or so he could tell himself. He had no political mission, no gold, no dynamite; his was a private quest, and his prose is correspondingly dry. Where Lawrence agonises, Thesiger simply records. And yet the quieter book contains, I think, the sharper self-indictment. Lawrence knew he was an agent of empire. Thesiger discovered, too late, that he was one anyway: "I realize that the maps I made helped others, with more material aims, to visit and corrupt a people whose spirit once lit the desert like a flame." The locust unit's wells and route surveys fed straight into the files of the oil companies — who, in the end, part-financed his travels in exchange for information. There is no innocent travel in a colonial age; there is only the choice of what to notice, and when.

The new Penguin Classics edition I bought carries an introduction by Rory Stewart, one of the few contemporary politicians I respect at all — chiefly because he is that rarest of things, a politician who knows the ground he talks about, having walked it. Stewart's own biography reads like a deliberate reenactment of the type: born in Hong Kong in 1973, where his mother, Sally Stewart, taught at the University of Hong Kong and his father was a senior intelligence officer; then the Dragon School, Eton, Balliol, the Black Watch, the Foreign Office. Between 2000 and 2002 he walked some six thousand miles across Iran, Pakistan, India, Nepal and — weeks after the fall of the Taliban — Afghanistan, staying in five hundred village houses, an experience that became The Places in Between. He then served as a deputy provincial governor in occupied Iraq, in the very marshlands Thesiger had made famous, before Westminster chewed him up: MP, minister, a doomed and honourable leadership run against Boris Johnson in 2019, expulsion, exit. He is well placed, in other words, to introduce Thesiger, and he does it without hagiography. Thesiger's writing, Stewart observes, "often echoed the reports of nineteenth-century British travellers on the North-west frontier: matter of fact, understated, replete with precise information, useful for Imperial projects." That is admiration with a blade in it, from a man who has thought harder than most about what Western engagement in these landscapes can and cannot achieve.

So what do I make of the book now, on second reading, with the Gulf transformed beyond anything even Thesiger's pessimism imagined? He would have hated what Abu Dhabi - a town of two thousand when he stayed there - has become; he said as much for the rest of his long life, which he spent mostly among the Samburu in northern Kenya before dying, knighted and famous, in a Surrey retirement home in 2003. And here one must be honest about the limits of the man. Thesiger's glorification of the past is not something that improves the world; it preserves, in amber, a way of life that only a few would enjoy and even fewer would survive. He enjoyed it - that is the crucial point, and the crucial privilege. He could choose hardship, and choose to leave it; bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha could not choose the oil economy that overtook them. Thesiger saw this himself, in the book's most clear-eyed passage: the tragedy of the Bedu was "not the hardship of their lives, but the boredom and frustration they would feel when they renounced it" - and that "the choice would not be theirs: economic forces beyond their control would eventually drive them into the towns to hang about street-corners as 'unskilled labour'." Strip away the camels and this is a rather general statement about structural change, one that applies with uncomfortable precision to deindustrialising regions much closer to home. I have seen the same sentence written, in different words, about coal miners in the Ruhr and assembly-line workers in Wolfsburg.

That, in the end, is why Arabian Sands is worth rereading rather than merely admiring. Not for the heroics, which Thesiger himself waves away, and not for the nostalgia, which one should handle with tongs. It endures because it is an unrepeatable field report from the exact moment a subsistence world tipped into the hydrocarbon age, written by a man who was - knowingly and unknowingly - both witness and instrument of the tipping. "I craved for the past, resented the present, and dreaded the future," Thesiger admits. One does not have to share the sentiment to recognise its honesty. And honesty, in a travel book as in a politician, is rare enough to be treasured. I intend to keep this copy. This time, I am not lending it to anybody.