In Praise of Savagery
And then came the message from the Embassy.
The waiter came, to see if fresh tea was required. It was not.
The young man felt his watch-chain again, and half-pulled his watch from its pocket, but then pushed it back, and instead studied the scalloped pattern on the back of his teaspoon.
Time. How we measure it out. How it feels, the passing of it. How what was is transformed utterly into what is, and which even in the moment of perceiving has vanished into what is to come, and so on for ever and always. How the wood that made the table at which he sat had grown, for however many years, in some far-flung forest, and the ragged trailing creepers overhanging, and the piercing call of brightly plumed birds. This same thing.
His father. The presence of him, the fact of him, as solid and real as anything in this life, and now gone, long, long gone: dead and buried these what—thirteen years? One wonders how this can be so.
He became aware of low voices across the room, and of a cluster of men, and one stepped out from among them and gestured to the others to stay, and turned to look over to where Thesiger sat. He was a young man—little more than a boy, in fact—maybe sixteen or seventeen at a guess—and slight, light-boned, narrow-shouldered and black as your hat. He had prominent ears, big, heavy-lidded eyes, and he wore a formal black suit, tightly buttoned-up, with a high white collar, and highly-polished black shoes on his feet; and he carried a battered leather satchel, brass-buckled like a doctor’s bag.
Thesiger shot to his feet, recognising the boy at once.
The boy smiled, revealing white teeth, and crossed to where he stood.
‘Do sit down,’ he said, in perfect, educated English, ‘You don’t mind if I join you?’
‘You are more than welcome, sir,’ said Thesiger.
A waiter appeared and pulled out a chair so that His Highness Asfa Wossen Tafari, Crown Prince of Abyssinia, eldest son of the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings and Elect of God, and direct lineal descendant, it was said, of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, could sit down.
‘Jolly good sandwiches,’ said the boy, taking a bite, ‘Not so sure about the tea, though. A bit cool for my liking.’
He snapped his fingers and fresh tea was brought.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘down to business. The place you desire to go to: they are very bad people there, you know. Absolute savages. And you are determined to go among them?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘They will kill you, of course.’
‘I’m prepared to take my chances.’
‘I am sure that you are. Everything I have heard about you convinces me that this is, indeed, the case. But it is not as simple as that. Not by a long way, because if they kill you, it puts my father in a very difficult position.’
‘How so, sir?’
‘Aussa is part of Abyssinia. This is agreed. It is not in dispute. And in all of Abyssinia my father’s word is law. But the Sultan does not always see things in this way. And there have been … incidents in the past. Very unfortunate ones. We tend to keep our officials away from Aussa, to avoid too many of these … misunderstandings. Now, if you travel there, with my father’s authority and under his protection, and if anything were to happen to you, then he would be obliged to take the matter up with the Sultan, and it would all be rather awkward.’
‘I understand that, sir—which is why I am prepared to go there at my own risk, and without involving your father in any way, other than asking for his permission to proceed.’
‘Hmm …’ he said. ‘Just what we expected you to say. So you are absolutely determined to do this thing?’
‘I am, sir.’
‘And nothing we could say would make you think otherwise?’
‘No. Nothing.’
The young prince looked serious for a while, and then, quite suddenly, he smiled.
‘Well, in that case, my father has, after careful consideration, authorised me to offer you two things.’
He took a sip of his tea, savouring the flavour of it before continuing.
‘The first,’ he said, ‘is his permission.’
Thesiger moved as if to speak, but the prince raised a hand to silence him. ‘And the second,’ he continued, ‘is this.’
He pulled out his satchel from beneath the table and unfastened the buckles. From inside a faint, slightly sour odour arose, as of stale sweat.
Reaching in, the prince pulled out a bundle of yellowed cloth, which looked very much like someone’s used shirt, rolled up and knotted around something weighty; he passed it across the table.
‘You may open it.’
It was, indeed, an old shirt. But when Thesiger untied the knotted sleeves and unwrapped the bundle, he saw inside a heavy, ancient-looking gold chain upon which were strung rows of thick gold rings.
‘For your expenses,’ said the prince.
Don’t Tell Others
Sometimes there can be whole days, weeks, months and years that pass you by and it seems just like the blink of an eye.
Then there are other times where the actions of an instant seem to last for ever.
People who have been in car crashes or other near-fatal disasters often talk about time ‘slowing down’. It is said that they are able to recall all sorts of peripheral detail with astonishing accuracy, as if they had the time, in the half-second of their almost-death, to roam the scene with the camera of their mind’s eye, and to record for posterity not just the look of drunken horror on the other driver’s face but the missing second button on his shirt-front; the colour and style of the lead on the dog being walked by the man in the flat cap on the pavement; the words and the patterns on the half-torn circus poster on the wall behind him.
Scientists call this time dilation, and it signifies the feeling of the opening-out of a moment far beyond its normal or expected limits.
There is a reason that it feels like this.
At moments of intense significance and at moments of great physical risk, the brain pulls in all of its resources and processing-power, and crams more observations and more reactions into a fraction of a second than it would normally make use of in a duration many, many times longer. It does this the better to react quickly and effectively, and so to cope with whatever challenges or opportunities it faces.
The result of all of this is that we experience moments that, for good or ill, are more intensely lived, and in which time appears to slow down, or even, on occasion, to stop.
And just as this time dilation exists, so also, I believe, there exists its opposite, which you might, I suppose, call time diminution, if you were to use the same rules of construction. Time diminution, or what you will, is an experience in which large tracts and expanses of time just pass you by, just vanish away unmarked and unnoticed, except when you look back later and think, was that it?, or, where did it all go?
From the end of the talk in the house in the cul-de-sac in Harlow New Town to my next contact with the man, and the visit to his flat in Tite Street, was two years, more or less.
They were two years in which, in one sense, much happened, but in which, in another, the main thing that happened was the passing away of time.
When the meeting had ended, the people there gathered up their coats, and those who drove got out their car-keys, while for those who did not, minicabs and the cars of parents arrived outside. But when he had finished his talk, and when the evening had begun to break up, I went up to him and asked him more questions about his life and times, and we carried on talking even as others were leaving around us, until, at last, there were no other guests left, and the owner of the house was standing there, as if to say, well, haven’t you got a home to go to? The man took a scrap of paper from his pocket and wrote his address on it and handed it to me.
‘If you go on this trip,’ he said, ‘do write and let me know how you get on.’
And then it was outside into the night air.
I applied, but did not get a place.
I also applied for academic scholarships overseas, but did not get them, either.
In the meantime, there was banking to be done, and banking examinations, which I was required to study for.
Months passed in which I undertook two correspondence courses with something called the Rapid Results College. One was in Law Relating to Banking and the other in Economics. In Economics I learnt—the only thing I remember from it now—that if a bank lends money that doesn’t exist, and which hasn’t been minted or printed, or made or planned, it can actually cause that money to come into being, and so increase the money supply.
This is something of a paradox, on a number of levels, in the way that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is in physics. One of the main levels upon which it is a paradox is that it is, according to the experts, clearly and demonstrably true; and yet, at the exact same time, it has the ability to seem to me to be the most complete and utter nonsense.
At some point during that time I reapplied for the overseas scheme and this time was offered a place. It was to be a trip to America, involving trail-building in the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, and also drilling wells for water on a Sioux Indian reservation on the edge of the Badlands in South Dakota.
I still had the scrap of paper Wilfred Thesiger had given me.
I wrote and told him about it.
About a week later a cream-coloured envelope arrived on my doormat.
Inside was a cheque for £300, drawn on a London private bank; and with the cheque was a three-word letter, written in blue-black fountain-pen on embossed headed notepaper.
It said, ‘Don’t tell others.’
The Clinic
The doctor had my notes on the desk in front of him, in a buff card file.
‘You understand,’ he said, removing the stethoscope from around his neck and placing it on the desk beside the file, ‘that before I can give you the result of your test I am required to offer you counselling. This is our standard procedure. It doesn’t presuppose a positive result, or indeed a negative one.’
The clinic was in Charlotte Street, in the West End of London.
I had come to be there as the result of a conversation with a friend, who, as a student, had spent a year doing voluntary work for a telephone advice line.
‘You did what?’ he’d said, aghast, ‘With who? You want to get yourself checked out, mate. You could have anything, you know, absolutely anything.’
And then, over the next hour or so, he’d told me in great detail about the counselling work he’d done, and how, in particu lar, I should watch out for any swelling or discomfort in my armpits.
‘It always starts there, you know.’
And, indeed, now that he mentioned it, it did feel somewhat uncomfortable there. I’d put it down to it being a warm day and my wearing a slightly tight shirt with rough seams. But the more I thought about it, the more noticeable the feeling became.
‘Now,’ said the doctor, ‘a few questions for you. Are you an intravenous drug user?’
‘Do I look like one?’
‘You’d be surprised.’
‘I’ve never even been drunk.’
‘Fine. I’ll take that as a “no”, then. And have you ever had a blood transfusion?’
‘No.’
‘So tell me, in your own words, why you think you might have placed yourself at risk of contracting this virus.’
‘I was on an Indian reservation.’
‘Go on …’
‘In America, and they had this thing called the Sun Dance, and I got invited to it by the man whose land we were working on, and he said it was something of an honour, because they didn’t normally let white people go along.’
‘So. You went to a dance. With a man. And then …?’
‘Well, they hold it in a circle, the Sun Dance, and they have a big sort of maypole thing in the centre, with cords coming down from it. The dance goes on for three days, and when we arrived it was at the beginning of the third day, and the dancers looked not quite there, if you know what I mean. Stripped to the waist, and sort of swaying backwards and forwards, and their eyes not quite focused—or focused beyond what they were looking at. And there was this constant drumming, three men sitting side by side, beating these big drums for all they were worth, and singing these strange guttural songs, and then the dancers all smoked a pipe that had burning sage in it, and they went off into a sort of tent thing, which was a sweat-lodge, like a sauna, with hot coals inside—and it was well over a hundred degrees outside, too, so you could only imagine the heat inside.’
‘Did you go into the sauna with these men?’
‘No. I wasn’t allowed to. It was for the dancers only.’
‘But you would have liked to?’
‘Yes, I suppose I would. To know what it was like in there. But it wasn’t really an option. Anyway, they came back out after a while and they arranged themselves around the edge of the circle, and the drums and the singing got louder and they began swaying forwards and backwards; and then one of the dancers crossed over into the circle and lay down on his back at the feet of an older man, who was the medicine man. The medicine man had a knife in his hand and he bent down and made four cuts in the dancer’s chest, two above each nipple, and then he took two skewers made of eagle-bone from a pouch at his waist and pushed them through the holes he had made, and attached them to two cords coming down from the pole. The dancer got up and began to dance backwards until the cords pulled tight. And then another dancer lay down, and another and another until they were all strung up to the pole. And you could see that some of them had done it quite a few times before, because of the rows of scars on their chests. And then they danced backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards to the music. And meanwhile an old man went into the circle and knelt down, and the medicine man made cuts in his back and attached cords to them to which he tied a buffalo skull; and then a small child climbed onto the skull and the old man stood up and began to drag the skull, with the child still on it, around the outside of the circle.
‘And the music got louder and louder and the dancers danced more intensely, pulling back harder against the cords with each pass, until at length one danced right up almost to the foot of the pole and then ran backwards, arms outspread, pulling with all his weight and snapping the skewers in his chest. Then it was the turn of the next dancer.
‘Meanwhile, I became aware of a queue forming over to one side of the circle, a line of people, young and old, male and female, all baring their shoulders. Up at the head of the queue stood a medicine man and his assistant, and as each person approached, they did something to each arm in turn, and the person came away with blood running down them.
‘I asked my companion what was happening and he said that the people in the queue were friends and relatives of the dancers, and they were each giving what he described as an “offering”.
‘And it struck me then that it would be only polite, only good manners, for me to do the same.
‘When I got to the front of the queue the medicine man’s assistant took hold of my arm with one hand, and with the other he pushed a pin or needle into my skin and lifted it up towards the medicine man, who took a small, sharp knife and ran it smartly up the needle, nicking the top of the skin, and causing the blood to flow. Then they did the same on the other arm. And then, using the same knife and the same pin, they did the same to the next person, and the next and the next.
‘And that,’ I said, ‘was why I came to have a blood test.’
There was a slight pause, during which the doctor appeared to shake himself slightly, as if waking from some private reverie.
I was aware that I had been talking for quite some time.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s say between ourselves that this was your reason for coming here. But really, in this day and age, you know, it is perfectly acceptable to have issues with your … personal orientation. Absolutely fine. Just so long as you take the appropriate precautions. You’ll find details in the leaflets you’ll get on your way out. Oh, and your test result is negative. Congratulations.’
Preparations
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
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.
Aeroflot
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.