In Praise of Savagery (5 page)

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 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.’

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.