In Praise of Savagery (17 page)

They had not been there for long when they saw a party of warriors, some thirty strong, advancing towards them from a distance. The warriors were all clad in spotless white loincloths and
shammas
, or togas, and all carrying rifles, and at their head rode a white-clad elder on a mule, while boys followed behind, driving a number of animals.

This was clearly an important party, and Thesiger quickly chivvied his soldiers to smarten up and look alert. They, also, sensing the importance of the imminent arrivals, put on a good show of it, so that in a matter of moments they had formed a guard of honour, ready to receive whoever might arrive.

They visitors halted at the edge of the camp, and two men stepped forward and helped the elder down from his mule. The
warriors’ front teeth, Thesiger noticed, were all filed down into points.

The elder, it transpired, was the Sultan’s vizier, Kenyazmatch Yaio, the second-most important man in Aussa.

Thesiger greeted him with tea, and the vizier responded by signalling to the boys, who led out three magnificent bulls and six sheep.

‘A gift from my master, the Sultan,’ he said.

Thesiger and Ali inspected the beasts and commented on how fine they were, and thanked the vizier profusely; and he, having taken his tea and accepted their gratitude, informed them that the Sultan would shortly make his will known, and then departed with his retinue to a nearby village to spend the night.

That night, for some reason, the camp was surrounded by large numbers of hyenas, which howled and cackled without cease.

Some among the party considered it to be an omen.

That there should be sultans in the world; that there should be viziers and silver batons of command; that there should be Hangadaalas and men destined from birth to be the hereditary bearers of the various specified legs of Hangadaalas’ chairs: these things say something about human nature, I think. And also that there should be people in the world who think it all so much stuff and nonsense and wish it all swept away.

You’re either on one side or t’other here, I find, and the side you’re on says much about the sort of person that you are, in all sorts of ways.

In the country where I come from there was a big to-do, a while back, about the House of Lords.

The government of the day was one that liked to think of itself as a rather modern, progressive sort of government, composed of the sorts of people who, if they’d ever had a silver baton of command, wouldn’t have, because they’d have done away with it. They’d have melted it down, or else sold it off and used the money for some worthy project or other, with the aim of reducing social exclusion, in a very real sense, among the socially excluded, or some such stuff.

At this time, Britain was alone in the industrialised world in
having one of its two Houses of Parliament composed largely of hereditary noblemen and noblewomen.

This wasn’t thought to be a very modern or progressive thing at all.

Consequently, it was decided to turf as many of them out as was possible. Originally it was going to be the whole lot, but to smooth the process of the bill through Parliament it was proposed, in the end, that 700 of them should go, while the remaining ninety-two would be allowed to stay on for the time being.

This was agreed by the House of Commons.

But for the bill to become law, it also had to be agreed by the Lords themselves; many of whom, as you can imagine, were rather less than thrilled at the prospect.

Nevertheless, by a combination of political pressure and an alliance of appointed, or ‘life’, peers, the government managed to get the bill into a position where it was sure to be passed.

This was in 1999; and at the time of the vote, which took place in the October of that year, the chamber of the Lords was packed, both by the peers themselves and also by their eldest sons, who, as tradition dictated, were allowed to sit at the edge of the chamber on the steps to the throne, though not, under any circumstances, to take part in the debate. Passions, however, were running high.

So it happened that in the middle of the debate, and before the vote, one of these eldest sons stepped forward.

He was a striking figure, a magnificent bearded loon by the name of Charles Francis Topham de Vere Beauclerk, Earl of Burford and heir apparent to the Duke of St Albans, the Hereditary Grand Falconer of all England. Hitherto, Burford had been known only as the vigorous sponsor of the somewhat unconventional theory that the works of William Shakespeare were not, in fact, written by William Shakespeare, but by his own ancestor, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Yo u might have thought that the
name ‘William Shakespeare’ printed on the title-pages of the plays and poems might have given a sharp-eyed literary scholar a bit of a clue to the author’s identity, but that’s all by the bye here, for this Earl of Burford rushed out onto the floor of the chamber, forcing the Lords’ Deputy Speaker, Lord Boston of Faversham, to jump out of his way, and he climbed up onto the Woolsack, which is a large red cushion on the floor of the house that symbolises the source of England’s wealth in the Middle Ages.

‘My lords!’ he shouted, waving his order-paper. ‘This bill, drafted in Brussels, is treason!’

The Serjeant at Arms, General Sir Edward Jones, also known as Black Rod, moved to pull Burford down, but he resisted and continued to yell.

‘What we are witnessing,’ he shouted, ‘is the abolition of Britain! Before us lies the wasteland, no Queen, no culture, no sovereignty, no freedom. Stand up for your Queen and country—vote this treason down.’

It was, it must be said, faintly ridiculous.

Some might say that it was more than faintly so: that it was wholly and utterly ridiculous. The newspapers certainly seemed to think it so.

And yet it was, at the exact same time, desperately sad.

Or maybe it’s just me.

We spent the whole of the next day in Loyangalani while the camels were thoroughly fed and watered.

We swam again, and explored the small grove of palm-trees by the town. It had a distinctive smell, this grove. This was because there was, in the midst of the trees, a clearing, and in this clearing the ground was dotted with the results of people using the place as a public lavatory.

We found a milestone on the edge of the dirt track leading off down the lakeside; it said ‘South Horr 77km’, which is about fifty miles, by which we calculated that we could reach the place, the oasis which was our final destination, in maybe two days, if we made good speed, and if the going was on packed dirt roads all the way.

In the evening we took down from the tree the bag in which we had hung our remaining fish. Part of the reason we had hung it there was to keep the insects off, but we had reckoned without the ingenuity of ants: a colony of them had found it out somehow, and a big army of them had spent the best part of the day making their way up the trunk, along the branch and down into the bag. By the time we discovered this, the fish was swarming with them. More than this, it had been affected by the heat, and had swollen up to the extent that its eyes had popped out.

We were, however, hungry.

I was still losing weight, and my ribs were beginning to stick out.

So what we did was to boil it for a bit longer than the previous day’s fish.

It tasted vile, I remember, like eating a bar of soap.

We ate it anyway.

Andy had seconds.

There is, in this life, only one destination. We all get there, sooner or later.

I am stepping out of time here, for a moment, and jumping ahead of myself; but there came a time, some days later, when we were in a car, with Kibiriti driving, and Thesiger in the passenger seat, and we were going fast, far too fast, and Thesiger said, ‘Kibiriti, what are you going to do with the time you’ve saved, when you get there?’

And when you get there, in the end, then there is nothing more to be done, and you either don’t have what you want, or else, if you have, then it goes away again.

It is not, I think, in the destination where life is, but rather it is in the journey itself.

To step back, once more, into the flow of the narrative, and into fate of the small party of men and beasts making their way along the course of the Awash, all that time ago, then to this journey there was a destination, to be sure, and as they made camp at a place known as Gerumudli, on the edge of the forest that lay by a bend in the river in the shadow of the Magenta Mountains, they knew that their destination lay somewhere beyond, somewhere in the untracked deserts on the other side, past the furthest
borders of the land of Aussa. But that night all of life, and all of time, were soon to become manifest then and there in the hush of a forest clearing lit by the moon’s pale shine.

A messenger came first into the camp late in the afternoon, alone and on foot, saying that the Sultan himself was on his way, and that they should prepare themselves to greet him. This they did, and the camp was laid out as they would wish it to be seen, and boots and buckles polished, and the ground swept, and the soldiers lined up to greet their honoured guest.

Just before sunset the messenger came again.

Unfortunately, he said, there had been a change of plan.

The Sultan, regrettably, had with him far too many men to fit comfortably into the travellers’ camp, and instead he had asked that they should come out to meet him where he was, which was in the forest close by.

So it was that they set off, dressed in their best clothes and carrying their rifles, and with the soldiers leading the way, into the dense forest, along narrow paths overgrown with creepers and through clearings covered ankle-deep with a bean-like clover that gave off a strange heavy smell when they walked upon it, while on all sides, through the foliage, they could see the watching eyes of warriors beyond number and the glint of spears and rifle-barrels, and they could hear the constant footsteps of runners arriving and departing.

Deeper and deeper they went, and still the woods around them were alive with watchers, until they came at last to a wide open clearing, encircled on all sides by tall trees. Before them, at the far side, stood some 400 warriors arranged into two great lines, all dressed in white and with filed teeth, and all carrying rifles and full belts of cartridges, and with long curved knives strapped across their stomachs.

And in the centre of these two lines, in a heavy carved wooden throne, sat the Sultan, surprisingly small in physical stature but
grave and bearded in countenance, fine-boned and oval-faced, and dressed in finely woven robes of pure white, and wearing an ancient silver-hilted dagger. His hand rested on the handle of a silver-topped black stick, and behind his throne stood a band of slaves, all carrying rifles in red silk covers.

The Sultan rose, and with a wave of his hand he dismissed all his men except for an interpreter. Thesiger did the same, stepping forward across the clearing towards the throne and taking only Omar with him.

The moon had risen in the sky by this time, climbing high above the treetops and illuminating the scene below with the cold light reflected through space from its empty mountains and valleys.

This was it, and all in all.

‘As I looked around the clearing,’ wrote Thesiger,

At the ranks of squatting warriors and the small isolated group of my own men, I knew that this moonlight meeting in unknown Africa with a savage potentate who hated Europeans was the realisation of my boyhood dreams. I had come here in search of adventure: the mapping, the collecting of animals and birds were all incidental. The knowledge that somewhere in this neighbourhood three previous expeditions had been exterminated, that we were far beyond any hope of assistance, that even our whereabouts were unknown, I found wholly satisfying.

‘You may begin,’ said the Sultan, ‘by telling me of your travels so far.’

It was a good day for walking, and a long day, consequently: the weather slightly overcast, though the hot wind still blew across the land.

We followed the road at first along the shores of Lake Turkana, and at one point we stopped and all went into the lake.

Our two Rendille, who could not swim, splashed and played at the edge, washing themselves and laughing, and the elder of them lay down and pushed himself along with his hands, pretending to swim.

The lake was the most beautiful green in colour, dark, deep green, and somewhat choppy with the wind.

As we swam, three Turkana women passing by stopped to watch us for a while. They were dressed in beaded loincloths, with long skin cloaks over their shoulders and backs, fastened around their necks with beaded straps, and their lower lips were pierced through with brass strips.

Thesiger had come this way, once, some thirty years before, when the area was known as the Northern Frontier District, and when it was still largely closed to outsiders, and he had worn a pair of fine, stout, handmade shoes. I do not remember which make they were now: Lobb, say, or from some such bespoke
London shoemaker: the sort of place where they carve a wooden last of your foot and keep it in store for when you come back for your next pair. His companion at the time had urged him to take a spare pair of shoes, in case those wore out. ‘Nonsense,’ he had said, ‘absolute nonsense. I have had these shoes for thirty years’—or however long it was
–
‘and they haven’t failed me yet! Look to your own shoes.’ But fail him they did, and one of the soles came right away, and flapped constantly as he walked.

This, now, happened to me. Although my own shoes were considerably less fine and exclusive, and neither had any lasts, wooden or otherwise, or been made for my feet, yet still they were, supposedly, tough. They were expensive American deck-shoes with thick leather uppers and the stitching they used to hold the uppers to the rubber soles was, they said, unbreakable. This stitching now broke and my right shoe came apart, right back to the middle of the foot. I do not know whether it was because of the heat or the rocky, volcanic soil or what the reason, but it flapped madly, and meant that I had to lift my foot conspicuously and place it down flat with every step, like a clown pretending to creep.