Sir Wilfred Thesiger, writer, explorer and chronicler of a shrinking planet, has died at age 93.
Thesiger, who grew up in Africa and lived most of his life among the African and Arabian peoples whom he loved and admired, died Sunday in a hospital, according to a death notice in The Times newspaper. No further details were published.
Thesiger's most famous books were Arabian Sands, about his travels with the Bedu people across the Empty Quarter of southern Arabia in the 1940s, and The Marsh Arabs, the story of the Shiite marsh dwellers of southern Iraq, who later became a target of Saddam Hussein. Most of the marshland was drained as part of Saddam's campaign to crush Shiite Muslims who had rebelled against him in 1991.
Thesiger became a photographer, illustrating his books and leaving a chronicle of vanishing ways of life.
He lived many years outside Maralal at the edge of the Rift Valley in northern Kenya. Even after he began to lose his sight when in his 80s, he continued to live without electricity or running water in a tin-roofed house with the family of Lawi Leboyare, one of the Samburu tribesmen who were his adopted sons. He never married.
Thesiger finally moved to England when in his late 80s.
He was born in Addis Ababa, Abyssinia -- now Ethiopia -- on June 3, 1910, a few months after his mother and father, the head of the British legation, arrived by mule at the mud and thatch compound.
For young Wilfred, the luck of such exciting origins was multiplied by the good fortune of being nephew of the viceroy of India. By the time he had read Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book, he had already been on a tiger hunt in India.
Wilfred was 6 when he watched the victorious army of the emperor of Abyssinia return to Addis Ababa from battle against revolutionaries.
The sight "implanted in me a lifelong craving for barbaric splendor, for savagery and color and the throb of drums," he said.
When he was 8, he and his family returned to England and he had a conventional education at Eton and Oxford.
As soon as he graduated, he headed back to Abyssinia for a trek into the Danakil desert.
There, one night, he encountered the sultan of the Danakil people, who measured their success as men in the numbers of people they had killed.
"As I looked around the clearing 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 realization of my boyhood dreams. I had come here in search of adventure: the mapping, the collecting of animals and birds were all incidental," he wrote in his autobiography, "The Life of My Choice."
Thesiger served with the Sudan Political Service in the administration of British-occupied Sudan in 1935-40, and then as a Special Air Services commando in North Africa during World War II.
After the war, while working for the Desert Locust Research Organization, he got his chance to cross the Rub al Khali -- The Empty Quarter of southern Saudi Arabia -- which he called the most important experience of his life.
With a few bedouin of the Rashid tribe, he crossed in 1946. He stayed with them, continuing his explorations in Arabia until 1950.
In the 1950s he traveled through the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, the Hindu Kush and the Karakorams of Pakistan.
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