Charles Davis writes:
“from
The Telegraph:
Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who died on Sunday aged 93,
was the quintessential English explorer, and the last and greatest of that small band of travellers who sought out the secrets of the desert in the years before Arabia was transformed forever by the oil beneath her sands.
Paradoxically, one modern invention gave Thesiger
an edge over predecessors such as Richard Burton
and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt – the camera. Thesiger
taught himself to become an excellent photographer
and perhaps his most enduring legacy will prove to
be his vast photographic record (willed to the
Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford) of ancient races and
ways of life since extinguished within a generation”
[I heard Paul Theroux eulogizing Thesiger on All Things Considered yesterday. -Karl]
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