Wilfred Thesiger must be fed up with being hailed as the last of the great Victorian travellers, striding along behind Livingstone, Burton and Stanley. After all, he was not born until 1910, and his life of wandering started only in 1933. when he risked his neck (and other delicate parts) on a trip to the trophy-hunting Danakil of Ethiopia.

Yet he looks the part of the great Victorian explorer more than any of his nineteenth-century predecessors. At eighty-eight he is still a great hulk of a man, with a jaw like angle-iron and a nose like a broken piece of the Karakoram (he broke it boxing – at Eton). He has the pale, misty eyes of a visionary.

From the beginning he acted like a traveller from an earlier, more gentlemanly age. His idea of travel was to go alone and without fuss. Of course, ‘alone’ meant without white companions. His local companions he cut to the minimum: a guide, a driver for the donkeys or camels, or porters to carry the tent, and perhaps some armed men if the natives were reported to be unfriendly. Then he vanished, for months at a time, among the Arabs of the marshes or the Kafirs of Kafirstan, following their way of life and dressed in their flowing robes, until he re-emerged back in his London flat – suntanned and a little stiff perhaps, after striding across half the Himalayas, but still the old Thesiger, genial, modest, mysterious.

Was there some purpose in all this wandering – apart from the yearning to escape his own century and propel himself backwards in time? No doubt he was often misunderstood by the Mir, the Wali and the mullah. He seemed like a figure from Kim: noting the height of the