Wilfred Thesiger

Quotes

1. What use will money be to him in the Sands.

   p. 122

2. 

   Memories of that first visit to the Marshes have never left me: firelight on a half-turned face, the crying of geese, duck flighting in to feed, a boy's voice singing somewhere in the dark, canoes moving in procession down a waterway, the setting sun seen crimson through the smoke of burning reedbeds, narrow waterways that wound still deeper into the Marshes. A naked man in a canoe with a trident in his hand, reed houses built upon water, black, dripping buffaloes that looked as if they had calved from the swamp with the first dry land. Stars reflected in dark water, the croaking of frogs, canoes coming home at evening, peace and continuity, the stillness of a world that never knew an engine. Once again I experienced the longing to share this life, and to be more than a mere spectator.

   p. 10

3. 

   It is characteristic of Bedu to do things by extremes, to be either wildly generous or unbelievably mean, very patient or almost hysterically excitable, to be incredibly brave or to panic for no apparent reason.  Ascetic by nature, they derive satisfaction from the bare simplicity of their lives and scorn the amenities which others would judge essential.

   p. 152

4. 

   I could now move without effort from one world to the other as easily as I could change my clothes, but I appreciated that I was in danger of belonging to neither.  When I was among my own people, a shadowy figure was always at my side watching them with critical, intolerant eyes.

   p. 257

5. 

   I knew that I had made my last journey in the Empty Quarter and that a phase in my life was ended. Here in the desert I had found all that I asked; I knew that I should never find it again.  But it was not only this personal sorrow that distressed me. I realized that the Bedu with whom I had lived and travelled, and in whose company I had found contentment, were doomed.  Some people maintain that they will be better off when they have exchanged the hardship and poverty of the desert for the security of a materialistic world.  This I do not believe.  I shall always remember how often I was humbled by those illiterate herdsmen who possessed, in so much greater measure than I, generosity and courage, endurance, patience, and light-hearted gallantry.  Among no other people have I felt the same sense of personal inferiority.

   p. 310

6. 

   The rifles with which they fought were all that they accepted from the outside world, the only modern invention which interested them.

   p. 38

7. 

   I had yet to learn that no Bedu thinks it shameful to beg, and that often he will look at the gift which he has received and say, ‘Is this all that you are going to give me?’  I was seeing the worst side of their character, and was disillusioned and resentful, and irritated by their assumption of superiority.  In consequence I was assertive and unreasonable.

   p. 49

8. 

   The Empty Quarter offered me the chance to win distinction as a traveller; but I believed that it could give me more than this, that in those empty wastes I could find the peace that comes with solitude, and, among the Bedu, comradeship in a hostile world. Many who venture into dangerous places have found this comradeship among members of their own race; a few find it more easily among people from other lands, the very differences which separate them binding them ever more closely.  I found it among the Bedu.  Without it these journeys would have been a meaningless penance.

   p. 4

9. 

   We parted before I went to Abu Dhabi, which I found an Arabian Nightmare, the final disillusionment.  For me this book remains a memorial to a vanished past, a tribute to a once magnificent people.

10. 

    But we seldom spoke of sex, for starving men dream of food, not women, and our bodies were generally too tired to lust.

    p. 110

11. 

    I craved for the past, resented the present, and dreaded the future.

    p. 20

12. 

    In the desert I had found a freedom unattainable in civilization; a life unhampered by possessions, since everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance.  I had found, too, a comradeship inherent in the circumstances, and the belief that tranquillity was to be found there.  I had learnt the satisfaction which comes from hardship and the pleasure which derives from abstinence: the contentment of a full belly; the richness of meat; the taste of clean water; the ecstasy of surrender when the craving for sleep becomes a torment; the warmth of a fire in the chill of dawn.

    p. 22