In Praise of Savagery (15 page)

In an effort to ease their passage through the land of the Adoimara and to head off the possibility of an attack that they were ill-equipped and ill-prepared to defend themselves from, Ali
went out with a party to the nearest village and sought out the elders, telling them that they came with an Englishman who was a great doctor, and who, if they gave him safe passage through their land, would heal their sick and injured with the medical supplies he carried with him.

The offer was accepted, and messengers were sent out to pass the word around the surrounding villages.

Within a short while, a great number of men, women and children had made their way to the camp shivering with fever, groping their way blindly with badly infected eyes—to which they seemed, as a race, to be unusually prone—and also carrying on their bodies a suppurating fungus-like growth, which ate away great chunks of flesh, and which, if it healed, left the most appalling scars. And in addition there were any number of gougings, gashings, woundings and manglings from spear and
fusil gras
.

Thesiger had had experience of doctoring in Bahdu, and, by and large, the Asaimara had been pleased with the results. So it was with the Adoimara of Borhamala.

Again Thesiger’s party moved on up the river, painfully slowly, in short marches followed by endless halts for more doctoring—for word had spread far faster and further than they had anticipated—until they left the villages behind and came, at last, to a series of deep and rocky ravines which they could not cross.

The only alternative open to them was to follow the ravines around, even though they stretched for many miles on either side. This they did, and it took them far out into the stony desert to the east known as Adou or ‘the place of thirst’.

They rejoined the Awash five days later at a place called Abakaboro, where there were fresh-water wells ten feet deep, and they made their camp beneath umbrella-thorn trees on the bank nearby.

A little way from where they rested they could see the remains of some fortifications. These had been built some four years before
by a large band belonging to the Wagerat tribe. They had been destroyed shortly afterwards when the Wagerat were confronted by a force sent against them by the Sultan of Aussa.

The Sultan did not take kindly to outsiders straying into his lands.

On the horizon, across the river and beyond the ruined fortifications, they could now see the Magenta Mountains, the border of his kingdom.

That day, Thesiger sent Ali and two companions ahead on a mission.

It was one on which not only the success or failure of the expedition depended, but their lives also.

They were to make contact with the Sultan.

The original plan had been for Ali to take with him Ahmado, his companion from Miriam Muhammad’s village, but at this point a slight difficulty emerged. Ahmado, who had been chosen to accompany the expedition to Aussa, actually came from a family that had a long-standing and vicious blood-feud with the people of Aussa. And also, as it happened, with many of the people in the villages surrounding their current camp. God knows why he was sent: perhaps this kind of thing was what counted for humour among the Asaimara, and perhaps his kinsmen were even at that moment rolling on the ground outside their huts clutching their sides with mirth.

The three men left, and those who remained waited and hoped.

Night fell, and mosquitoes swarmed from the river in vast numbers and sucked their blood. The next day came and went, and the mosquitoes came again; and the same the next, and the next, and all that they could do was to wait and hope.

From time to time local Adoimara warriors came to their camp, with messages for Ahmado. Once they said that their people had prepared a feast for him, and would he like to go along? He would not, as it happened.

On another occasion they said that they had some Asaimara women in their village who were keen to meet him; but on this occasion and on every other one—and there were many—when they came for him, Ahmado refused to move away from the door of Omar’s tent.

On the seventh day, Thesiger went out to shoot some game.

He returned to find that three strange warriors had been in camp, asking many questions about their purpose and their destination and the nature of the things they carried with them. In particular, they had been especially keen to know whether the expedition had a machine gun.

Omar thought they had been sent by the Sultan.

This could be a good sign, he said.

Or else it could be a very bad one.

The next day Ali returned, bringing the news.

He had been away for eight days.

We descended on the farther side of Mount Kulal, which was steeper than the side that we had climbed: steeper and rockier, and the camels were unhappy about it, and did not hesitate to let us know. We were obliged, again, to guide their feet, which was hot work, hot and dry.

There had been cool cloud about us when we set off, but as the morning wore on we left it far behind us, or it burnt off, or both; and the sun beat down on us more fiercely than at any time on our journey so far. It promised to become hotter still, where we were going, for spread out far below us we could see the shimmering heat of a wide plain strewn as far as the eye could see with a lifeless rubble of black volcanic rocks.

By midday we had managed to get the camels about halfway down the mountain, and we stopped in what little shadow was afforded by a large rock to make lunch, which was, as ever, boiled
ugali
.

As we sat, a speck appeared in the desert below us. It was moving towards us, growing larger as it approached. As it climbed up towards our camp, we recognised it at last as a
moran
. He greeted us when he reached us, and we him, and then he sat with us and exchanged news with our camel-men, according to the
custom of his people. This took some time, but no one was in any hurry, it seemed; and at some point in the conversation Osman turned towards us and said that the
moran
was, in fact, a nephew of Apa. He seemed to have rather a lot of cousins and nephews.

And then, quite suddenly, the
moran
stood up, and turned around and made his way back down the mountain. We watched him go, and as he went he planted his spear in the ground to steady himself against the slope, and gradually he became smaller and smaller until he appeared to be no more than a tiny speck on the plain. We looked at Osman—he sat, clutching his knees, smiling to himself as if somewhat deep in thought. The two Rendille were similarly disposed.

Frazer opened his mouth to speak, as if he were about to say, ‘Shall we pack up?’ but Osman raised his hand as if to say, ‘Not now—all will become clear soon.’

And, indeed, it did, in time. Rather a lot of time, as it happens, but it did become clear in the end as we saw the speck on the plain again, coming towards us once more. He was walking rather strangely this time, and appeared to be hunched or carrying a burden of some kind across his shoulders. He was. For as he climbed the rocky slope we could make out, eventually, the shape of the goat carcass that he carried.

Reaching where we sat, he flung down the goat and grinned, at us all, and said something in his language which I imagine would have translated as,

‘What do you want to eat that
ugali
rubbish for when I’ve brought you some proper food, eh?’

He and our Rendille between them cooked some of the meat on our fire, and the remainder of the skinned carcass they split down the middle along the backbone, as butchers do. One half was put into a sack and loaded up onto one of our camels;
the other half the
moran
hefted back up onto his shoulder and, with a cheery goodbye wave, set back off down the mountain.

We reached the plain in the mid-afternoon. It was hot such as I have never known, and yet the going was easier than it had been on the mountainside in spite of it, and the camels more willing.

Towards nightfall we reached some hills where it seemed that there might be water, or at least grazing, for we began to encounter flocks of what I would have described as goats, but which were, apparently, sheep.

‘When the Son of Man shall come in His glory,’ the Bible says, ‘and all the holy angels with Him, then shall he sit upon the throne of His glory. And before Him shall be gathered all nations: and He shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats.’

I’d never considered that too much of a challenge, to tell the truth. It had always struck me as the sort of task that even I could manage, if He had happened to be indisposed, for some reason, on the Day of Judgment. And I’ve never done any shepherding in my life. Big white woolly things shaped like clouds but with dirty backsides—those are your sheep; and your goats are the others, the narrow-faced short-haired ones with the sticky-up horns who try to eat everything.

Bloody townies, eh?

But in that part of the world the sheep and the goats look remarkably similar, to the point of being practically identical, and telling the one from the other was considerably trickier—apart from the sheep, from the back, having slightly fatter, more blubbery tails. But what if you had a scrawny sheep? Or what if you had a goat with a fat backside? Would they still be sheep and goat respectively? Or would they, in fact, become goat and sheep? And how would you know?

It makes one wonder whether there might be countries in the world where other things we think of as being very different are, in fact, considerably less so: wheat and chaff, for example; or men and boys. Or whether there might, somewhere, even, be a nation whose inhabitants genuinely do find it difficult to distinguish between their arses and their elbows.

Maybe in the kingdom of the blind, where the one-eyed man is king.

We made our camp beneath a tree in the shadow of a cliff, on top of which a troop of baboons played lazily, and there we lit our fire. Presently we were joined at it by a pair of Turkana, who sat with us long into the night.

We sat, then, on our outspread sleeping-bags; and when, at last, I came to get into mine I found, to my surprise, that it was already taken, for there was in it a great spider of the most extraordinary proportions, the like of which I have never seen—not even in the zoo, and not even in pet-shops, and I’ve been to a few of those in my time—and which, were it not for its eight legs, it might easily have been mistaken for a small sheep. Or indeed a goat.

The Sultan, said Ali, was courteous. Courteous but deeply suspicious.

The conversation had lasted for the greater part of an entire day. The Sultan had wanted to know, in detail, why were they approaching the borders of his land, and where they intended to go, and for what purpose, precisely, they were following the river. He listened politely to Ali’s replies, taking small sips, from time to time, from the cup proffered to him by the waiting slave, and then asked the same questions all over again, in a slightly different form, and listened again to the answers, before suggesting in the end that the party might prefer, instead, to take the route around Aussa, for which he would provide them with an escort.

Ali bowed, and then replied that the Englishman, unfortunately, was determined to proceed in the direction he had chosen.

To which the Sultan folded his hands across his stomach and replied that in which case the Englishman should do so, then. And in the meantime he would decide what action to take, or not take, at his leisure.

And now, his guests might wish to return to their camp to inform the Englishman of his words.

Ali’s small group had not travelled far from the borders of Aussa when they met a large party of Danakil who, seeing their appearance and the direction from which they had come, assumed them to be the Sultan’s men.

They hailed Ali, and warned him to be on his guard and to watch out for a band led by an accursed
Ferenghi
, Foreigner, down by the river. This
Ferenghi
, they said, had a machine gun and many rifles, and although he had not yet hurt anyone, was probably waiting his moment to raid their lands. But unbeknown to him, he was being watched from afar by three separate war-parties who had been following his progress.

And, they said, before bidding goodbye, Ali should also be aware of a second band of outsiders on the river, a large and well-armed group from the Wagerat tribe, one day’s march away, who had raided Adoimara lands and stolen many cattle.

Ali thanked them for their information and hurried off to tell Thesiger the news.

‘Well,’ he said, when they told him, ‘we must press on, then.’

Two days later, as the expedition was setting up camp, two elderly
askaris
or officers of the Sultan arrived, one of them holding in his hand a stout bamboo stick bound about with bands of engraved silver. They said that they had come far and fast and were weary, and they pressed the expedition to stop and set up camp nearby.

Ali and his companions fell back before the visitors, and immediately began doing their bidding. Thesiger, sensing their importance, led them to a place of honour and had food and drink brought for them from their supplies, which were, at this stage, rapidly depleting: even their once-large flock of sheep was now all eaten.

The
askaris
spoke to the Englishman through Ali, asking his
business once more and repeating the Sultan’s suggestion that the party take the shortest route to the French Somaliland border, rather than following the river through the heart of Aussa.

Thesiger thanked them for their interest in his plans, but informed them that it was their intention to move forward towards Aussa, if the Sultan would be so gracious as to allow them to pass.

‘In which case,’ said the senior
askari
, ‘we shall see what the Sultan has in mind for you. But for now your people need better food.’

And with this he and his companion set off in the direction of the nearest village.