Warwick Cairns - In Praise of Savagery

Two weeks later I was at Thesiger’s flat, with the books and the sword, the paintings and the photographs, drinking too much sherry than was good for me and talking about travel. I didn’t mention the clinic experience, though. It didn’t seem the place to do so.

And he invited me out to Africa, and said he would show me the country round about, and I asked—I don’t think I mentioned this earlier—but I asked if he minded at all if I brought two companions along; my brother Frazer and my friend Andy. He replied, ‘Well, if they’re anything like you, it will be a pleasure to see them.’

‘They are,’ I said.

Although on what level Andy—black athlete with a Mohican haircut—may be thought to be ‘like me’ is, perhaps, a matter for debate; but he was a good travelling companion. He’d been with me in America, building trails in the mountains, and was blessed with an extraordinarily even temperament and an ability to take more or less anything in his stride. Like the clear, sunny day, for example, on top of a bare rocky ridge high above the treeline, when we were caught, quite suddenly, by a violent electrical storm that appeared out of nowhere, as they do in those parts. There was no shelter and nowhere to hide, and a steep drop on either side, and the lightning began to hit the ground around us, so close that we could smell the singed granite boulders just feet away from where we stood.

I was overwhelmed by fear and panic, and the sheer size and force of the storm, the power of it; and I screamed at Andy to take his pack off and get down on the ground. He considered my words carefully, rain hammering down on his head and lightning striking all around him, then removed first one arm and then the other from his rucksack, upon which hung a large aluminium cooking-pot. This done, he put it neatly down on the ground and crouched down beside it. He was like that.

He was keen on the idea of going to Africa when I told him about it.

‘Is it going to be tough going, do you think?’

‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but then again he is eighty, this Thesiger, so there’s probably a limit to how tough.’

I booked our flights with Aeroflot, on account of it being the very cheapest airline I could find, by about £5; and in the mistaken assumption that one airline is very much like any other.

The Awash Station was not an inspiring place to be at the best of times.

It was a low whitewashed bungalow, tin-roofed, built by the French and plonked down in the middle of nowhere on a wide, dusty plain, by the side of railway tracks that stretch off endlessly into the distance in either direction, linking Addis Ababa with what was then French Somaliland, and which is now called Djibouti.

Behind the station stood the optimistically named Buffet de la Gare, where lodging, of a kind, and food, of a kind, could be obtained by travellers who had no other choice.

For the fifteen Abyssinian soldiers who had been chosen by their superiors, on Government orders, to await the arrival of the Englishman, it was even less than inspiring.

It was to be these men’s duty to accompany him on his expedition to Aussa, to provide protection for his convoy—in much the same way, in fact, that the far larger party of Egyptian soldiers, with their two cannons, had provided protection for the Swiss Munzinger’s convoy in 1875—until, that is, they were all horribly murdered.

For the Danakil, it mattered little what a stranger did for his living, whether soldier, explorer or whatever: what mattered was the kill, and the all-important trophies to be obtained from them to increase a man’s status and his standing among his companions.

An earlier English traveller on the borders of their land recounted in his diary how one of his servants, accompanied by a Danakil guide, had gone down to the river to bathe. No sooner had this servant put down his rifle and stepped into the water than the guide picked the gun up, shot him dead, cut off his genitals with his dagger and went off back home with the trophy to celebrate his achievement. And his fellow-tribesmen had, no doubt, slapped him heartily on the back as he recounted his story, and roared with mirth at the details, exclaiming, ‘What larks!’ or its Danakil equivalent, and accounted him a mighty fine fellow for what he had done.

So when the Englishman did turn up, eventually, at the Awash Station, the soldiers made no secret of their lack of enthusiasm for him and his scheme; and they were altogether less than diligent, and altogether less than enthusiastic, in helping load up the camels and doing whatever else it was that he expected them to do.

Nor was the mood lightened in any way by the recent announcement by the inhabitants of Bahdu, one of the biggest Asaimara territories along the course of the Awash River, that they had renounced any semblance of allegiance to the Government, and that furthermore they would refuse to pay any tribute demanded of them. And if the Emperor didn’t like it, he could stick it in his pipe and smoke it. Or words to that effect.

Thesiger, meanwhile, was more concerned about the fact that in the circumstances someone in authority might take it into his head to cancel his expedition; and, sure enough, he soon received a telephone message from an official saying that there was now fierce fighting in the province, and that the expedition would need at least a hundred armed men to stand more than one chance in ten of survival; which, of course, was quite out of the question. In the circumstances, therefore, his fifteen soldiers would be recalled forthwith, and he would be best advised to go back to wherever it was he came from and forget all about it. To which Thesiger responded by pulling rank—reminding the official that the Emperor himself had authorised the journey—and then by bribing the Awash Station telephone operator to stay away from his office, so that no further communications would be able to get through.

And so it was, on this happy and optimistic note, that the party loaded up their camels and set off into the wilderness.

As a child, I once watched a sketch on a television comedy show— The Benny Hill Show, it was—about a man who wants to go on holiday. He goes to the travel-agent, and when he gets there he is offered the choice of two rival operators. I can’t remember the names of the companies now, but let’s say that they were called Bennytours and Cheapdeals, for the sake of argument. They both seemed to offer more or less the same thing—same destination, same flight, same hotel and so on and so forth, but with the difference that Cheapdeals (or whatever they were called) was ever-so-slightly cheaper. It was an infinitesimal difference; absolutely tiny—let’s say that the Bennytours holiday cost £40 and the Cheapdeals holiday cost £39 19s 6d, or thereabouts. It was a long time ago.

So our man bought the Cheapdeals ticket, as you would.

And then there followed one single joke, which was dragged out for about half an hour. The joke was this: the Cheapdeals holidaymakers were herded onto the plane with electric cattleprods by boot-faced Russian shotputter-types and served cold gruel and whatever as their in-flight meal, while the Bennytours people, up at the front of the same plane but tantalisingly visible beyond a flimsy curtain, got velvet chaises longues and champagne, and grapes individually peeled by beautiful air hostesses in barely covered underwear. And then you got endless variations on the same joke over and over again in the hotel, at the pool, at dinner, on the way home. At the age of eight I found it all hilarious.

But when I saw it on the television, back then, what I thought was that it was comedy, and I thought that it was something that someone, probably Benny Hill himself, had made up.