The Tao of Travel

THESIGER, WHO DIED in 2003 at the age of ninety-three, is often thought to have been the last real explorer, someone who traveled in remote regions and made significant discoveries—in essence a mapmaker, in the spirit of Richard Burton and H. M. Stanley. Fluent in Arabic, a rider of camels, with a deep sympathy for traditional cultures, Thesiger fought in Ethiopia during World War II and after the war made scientific and personal expeditions in Arabia. He also lived for long periods among the Madan people in the marshes of southern Iraq, an experience he recounts in The Marsh Arabs (1964). That book has great historical value, because the people were displaced by Saddam Hussein in one of his persecutions. Even an average day among the Marsh Arabs seems like an ordeal, but nothing in Thesiger's work compares with his starving in the Empty Quarter of Arabia:

I had almost persuaded myself that I was conditioned to starvation, indifferent to it. After all, I had been hungry for weeks ... Certainly I thought and talked incessantly of food, but as a prisoner talks of freedom, for I realized that the joints of meat, the piles of rice, and the bowls of steaming gravy which tantalized me could have no reality outside my mind...

For the first day my hunger was only a more insistent feeling of familiar emptiness; something which, like a toothache, I could partly overcome by an effort of will. I woke in the gray dawn craving for food, but by lying on my stomach and pressing down I could achieve a semblance of relief...

I faced another night, and the nights were worse than the days. Now I was cold and could not even sleep except in snatches...

In the morning I watched Mikhail turn the camels out to graze, and as they shuffled off, spared for a while from the toil which we imposed upon them, I found I could only think of them as food. I was glad when they were out of sight ... I lay with my eyes shut, insisting to myself, "If I were in London I would give anything to be here"...No, I would rather be here starving as I was than sitting in a chair, replete with food, listening to the wireless, and dependent upon cars to take me through Arabia. I clung desperately to this conviction. It seemed infinitely important. Even to doubt it was to admit defeat, to forswear everything to which I held.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard: The Worst Journey in the World (1922)

CHERRY-GARRARD WAS ONLY twenty-three when he joined Robert Falcon Scott's Antarctic expedition in 1912. Scott and four of his men died on the way back from the pole. But before that, in the winter of 1912-13, Cherry-Garrard trudged through the polar darkness and cold (minus 79°F) to find a rookery of emperor penguins. This was "the Worst Journey." After returning to Britain Cherry-Garrard fought in World War I at the Battle of the Somme, where almost a million men died. But he said, "The Somme was a relative picnic compared to the Antarctic." He also said, "Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion."

In this magnificent book, in a chapter titled "Never Again," he wrote:

And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing; if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, "What's the use?" For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg.

Jon Krakauer: Into Thin Air (1999)

IN THE SPRING of 1996, Jon Krakauer, forty-two, on an assignment for Outside magazine, joined a guided expedition to Mount Everest. Just a story about guided climbing, but he found himself in the deadliest Everest season since climbing began there seventy-five years before, on Sagarmatha, Mother Goddess of the World.

Like all ordeal books, this one contains many lessons. The central issue is that you can buy your way up Everest, but to what extent is the hubristic motive in guided climbing an invitation to disaster? A person pays $70,000 (the going rate in 1996) to an expert, on the understanding that the client will successfully reach the summit. The client may be reasonably fit and experienced, or may be (as some clients Krakauer describes) first-timers at high altitudes, with a minimum of know-how. In the latter case, the client might be "short-roped" and yanked up the mountain, photographed at the top, and then dragged down.