In Praise of Savagery (14 page)

If you do have such a thing about you, then what you should do with it is to put the bloody thing on your head.

You will be surprised at the difference it makes.

And you will be surprised also at your own stupidity for not having done it sooner.

I was congratulating myself for having worked this out, and feeling rather pleased about it, and also thinking, as we all did, about water and about ice-cold lemonade and about other things that we might drink, one day, when we got back, when, quite suddenly, something happened.

What happened was that I had diarrhoea.

By this, I don’t mean that I felt a sudden need to go and squat down behind a bush, and then I had diarrhoea; or even that I pulled my shorts down and then did it.

What I mean is,
I had diarrhoea
.

This was unfortunate.

It was unfortunate for a number of reasons.

It was unfortunate because the only clothes I had with me were the ones that I was wearing. And also because the next water in which I might wash them was several days away.

Taking my shorts off and rubbing them in sand sort of cleaned them up a bit.

Luckily, they were brown anyway.

Looking back on it now, I could, I suppose, have used the drinking-water from my bottle. That would have cleaned them up a bit. Equally, I suppose, I could have cut off my own right arm, wrung it out and used the blood. However, neither alternative occurred to me at the time.

Lunch was
ugali
. We had run out of dried goat.

And here’s a thing. Now, there may be some who like
ugali
. The Rendille, for example: they can’t seem to get enough of it. But to me, boiled flour tastes rather like—well, boiled flour, actually. It may be marginally better than boiled sawdust, perhaps, but not by so much as you’d notice.

However, you would imagine that after however many days it is in the desert, and being beset by constant hunger and thirst and still visibly losing weight every day, then it might sort of taste better as you go on.

This was not the case, in my experience.

We pressed onto the top of the mountain, reaching it before nightfall, and there we came across a wide dirt track, which, Osman said, was the runway for the flying doctor. At the far end of this track we found an octagonal tin hut, beside which sat a man. The man greeted us and warned us to take care where we made our camp, because a lioness had lately taken to crossing in front of his hut at night, and heading off along a faint dirt track that he pointed out to us. Much better, he said, that we put our animals in the thorn-bush
kraal
on the far side, and make it firm and secure, and build up a big fire and sleep by that, taking turns to watch in the night.

This we did, and the night, or most of it, passed without event, almost until dawn.

My watch was a late one. After it I drew my sleeping-bag close to the fire and lay down, and listened out for lions for a while,
until it struck me that I didn’t really know what one would sound like, creeping up on you. It would be pretty quiet, I’d reckon, if not completely silent. And besides, Apa was squatting by the fire leaning on his spear, so I went to sleep instead.

I am a great enthusiast for sleeping.

I sleep soundly, most of the time, and I sleep long and well. It is a talent of mine, sleeping, and a great pleasure to me also. It is something that I have perfected over many years of diligent practice.

I have done this on the floors of coaches and trains, on the decks of boats being lashed by spray, and once, dressed in a business-suit and with a briefcase as my pillow, on the marble floor of Barcelona airport, having got up and arrived at some unearthly hour of the morning only to find that I had turned up at the wrong terminal. By the time I discovered this, my plane was leaving from the terminal I should have been at, and as a consequence I had to wait for the next plane, which was some four hours later; and so I lay down there and slept. The sleep was delicious, despite all of the people walking by; and it was made all the more so by the knowledge that I had set the alarm on my mobile phone to wake me up in just enough time to buy a pastry and a strong
cortado
coffee before boarding my flight.

But when the screaming started I was up and out of my sleeping-bag in an instant. As were we all.

It was the camels. The camels were screaming, if you can imagine such a thing; and as they screamed they reared and charged at their thorn-bush wall, in a frantic attempt to break through; and the two Rendille were running around to the far side with their spears and sticks, and Andy was upending the sack in which the pangas were kept and Frazer grabbed two and passed me one and we ran around.

And then nothing.

Rock and scrub beneath a starry sky.

Rock and scrub and stars and the shadows of the night, and the earth spinning silently on its axis in the endless depths of space.

I don’t know; sometimes I just don’t know.

The longer I live, these days, the less I seem to understand about people, and how life works.

I mentioned sleep, a while back. I do know that many people take a different view of it to the one I take. Which is fine.

Some people, upon waking up in bed early on a Sunday morning, would not lay there for several hours more, luxuriating in the wonderfulness of it, but rather would get up and go and do something useful instead.

Some people take great pride in how little sleep they can get away with, and how constantly busy they are. Politicians, for example, and captains of industry.

But here’s the thing: I had assumed that it was their pleasure so to do, just as it was my pleasure to do otherwise; and that the driving force in all human life, beyond the mere necessity of things, was pleasure.

Or, better still, that living, as distinct from merely being alive, was the art of making pleasure out of necessity.

We have to eat. We have to sleep. We have to make our way in the world. There is any number of things that we have to do to get by and to get on.

So we might as well enjoy them, or else what would be the point?

Aristotle says something similar in his
Nicomachean Ethics
. What he says, in essence, is that pleasure is the completion or perfection of human life. That even though the things that bring pleasure may vary dramatically from person to person, yet in its essence all pleasure is one and the same thing, and is distinct from mere transient ‘fun’ or distraction, which often ends up in a far greater quantity of misery or dissatisfaction. For Aristotle, pleasure is the attainment of serious, deep-seated and long-lasting happiness.

Suffering spontaneous diarrhoea in your shorts may not strike you as a particularly pleasurable sort of thing to do, but I would not have had it otherwise. Well, not now, anyway. At the time it was a bit of a surprise, and not, I’d say, altogether fun.

But I felt then, and feel still, that I was living, rather than just being alive.

And I feel, now, joy and gratitude in being able to write about it, and to be able to say, I did this.

But there are people who seem to go out of their way not to have pleasure, or who seem to think that pleasure is somehow frivolous or unworthy while there are more important things to be done.

I read a while ago about a man, an American man, who built up a business in his twenties and then sold it for one and a half billion dollars. Ten years on, he’s working twelve-hour days in an office. At least. Gets in at eight, works till eight, nine, ten. And his wife has a job, too.

Which would be all well and good if that was what gave them pleasure, and yet between them, they say, they struggle to find the time to be together, and this causes them concern.

‘My wife has a stressful job,’ he says. ‘She works in the financial services sector.’

She has a job in the financial services sector
.

She has one and a half billion dollars to her name.

In what way, stressful?

In what conceivable universe could she feel anything even remotely resembling ‘stress’ about her job performance, or concern about the fate of other people’s money, when she has so much of it herself?

So she fails. So they sack her. And then what?

For what reason could either of them, the husband or the wife, not be able to find the time to do what they want to do?

Is this living? Or is it merely being alive?

And I read also a newspaper interview with a pair of athletes, a brother and a sister, who both trained furiously at the triathlon, and who achieved a considerable degree of success at it. They both did this training, running, swimming and cycling, for many, many hours a day, day in and day out. Which, in itself, is no bad thing. I know people who love doing triathlons, even though I’ve never been tempted myself.

If you have things that you love to do, and if you love to do them more than almost anything else in life, then to be able to devote most of your waking hours to doing them well would seem to be the perfect pleasure.

Except that in this interview, both the brother and the sister said that neither of them actually enjoyed the cycling.

Or the running.

Or, indeed, the swimming.

Which, when you put them all together,
is
the triathlon.

‘I was never going to be a swimmer,’ said the brother, in his interview. ‘I wasn’t big enough and I never really enjoyed it. I still don’t enjoy it now. To be honest, most of the time I don’t like swimming, cycling
or
running.’

Despite which, he spends thirty hours a week doing them.

And about which he says:

There really isn’t a whole lot of excitement with training thirty hours a week. It’s a nightmare. Most of the time you’re very tired, and the tiredness accumulates … it catches up with you and you get this massive low … I don’t feel I’d be where I am today without complete self-sacrifice.

Complete self-sacrifice
. And for what, exactly?

It wasn’t just him, either. The whole family seemed to be like it. Here is the sister:

We trained at different times at different pools when we were kids, so my mum used to spend half her life driving us back and forth … I don’t think we showed any particular talent at that age, but Mum just didn’t like us quitting things.

Mum just didn’t like us quitting things
—I have read that sentence over and again since first coming across the article, and I cannot but think of what a joyless, miserable, utterly pleasureless existence these people must have.

It shakes my understanding of human nature, that there should be people who live in this way.

Bicycle thieves I can understand, even though I might want to beat them to a pulp. And also those people who gain their pride and pleasure and status from killing, who split their ears in celebration of it and who adorn themselves with the marks and badges of their murderous ways—even at the risk of being themselves killed. I can see how they fit into the world, even though I wouldn’t want to find myself on the wrong side of them. There is a heady potency to them, a power and a swagger; and so long as they
confine themselves to killing each other—or maybe the occasional outsider who enters their land in full knowledge of the risks—then I can’t see how it’s anyone’s business to stop them.

But these relentless, sensible, duty-driven people, they unsettle me.

The expedition headed north for nine days, and a hard going they had of it. The land by the river’s edge was difficult, and at times was thickly forested. To make matters worse, they were obliged to stop at every village they passed, to receive from the headmen gifts of sheep—to the point where they were driving along with them a substantial flock, which grew faster than it could be eaten. They were also required to preside at dances held in their honour. In return for these things there was an expectation that they would donate to the village items from their own supplies, and each of the men found themselves constantly beset by outstretched palms on all sides, and requests for ammunition, for spare belts and shoes, for pots and pans and even for the very clothes they wore.

But move they did, though painfully slowly, and by the end of the second day they found themselves at a large open plain, enclosed on three sides by forest, and on the fourth side, slanting away before them, they saw a range of extraordinarily coloured hills, streaked and variegated in every shade: mauve, orange, brick-red, yellow and white.

These, said the Asaimara guides, were the Asdar Hills. They marked the frontier between Bahdu and a land called Borhamala, in which lived many bands of Adoimara. Some of whom, no doubt,
were at that very time sitting by their huts gazing proudly at the pole upon which they had hung the various body-parts of Hamdo Ouga, while lazily picking from their teeth the last remaining fragments of the cattle that had set out to recover from them.

They moved onward with apprehension, noting the numerous Adoimara villages upon the slopes of the hills, and also the large numbers of fortified kraals and defiles round about, the evidence of much raiding and retaliation.

But the tribes kept away.

Or at least, they mostly kept away.

One day, however, Thesiger’s party set up camp, only to notice a short while later that they had one less camel than when they had stopped. They looked round about but it was nowhere to be seen. The Somali camel-men set off further up river to look for it, and some two miles from camp they spotted two armed Adoimara driving it away.

When the camel-men opened fire on them the warriors bolted and the camel was recovered, but it was a sign that there was a need for constant vigilance. The next raiding-party could be bigger—considerably bigger, given the number of villages in the vicinity.

The military escort, meanwhile, was in the process of falling apart.

They had always been unwilling participants in the expedition. Their levels of readiness were never high, not even at the best of times; but by now whatever discipline or cohesion they had ever had crumbled and their headman lost all semblance of control over them. They were, mostly, unwilling now to do any work or even to stand sentry-duty. Instead, they spent their time bickering and squabbling among themselves.