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 belongi… - Wilfred Thesiger

..I was thankful that I had not gone there with members of my own race, as one of large, meticulously organised expedition. I should have hated, in those surroundings, to listen to the wireless, the news, sports commentaries and European music; it would have seemed utterly incongruous. All I ever want to bring with me from our civilisation are some books, and those that I had, though there had been little opportunity to read them. In Arabia I had learnt to move from one world to another as easily as changing clothes, but always tried to keep the worlds apart.

As I looked round 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. The knowledge that somewhere in this neighbourhood three previous expeditions had been exterminated, that we were far beyond any hope of assistance, that even our whereabouts were unknown, I found wholly satisfying.

God, you must be a couple of pansies.