Just Before the Sands Ran Out THE LIFE OF MY CHOICE by Wilfred Thesiger; Norton; 459 pages; $25

By R.Z. Sheppard

Wilfred Thesiger was born in June 1910 in a mud building in Addis Ababa. His father was the British Minister to Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), and his mother, an Irish beauty, seems to have had a knack for prophetic understatement. "My mother," says Thesiger early in this autobiography, "always maintained that the first words I said were 'Go yay,' which meant 'Go away.' "

Which is what Thesiger has been saying and doing in a big way for more than half a century. His adventures as an explorer and soldier in the legendary tradition of Sir Richard Burton and T.E. Lawrence are recorded in his books Arabian Sands (1959), The Marsh Arabs (1964) and The Last Nomad (1980). These celebrated works are distinguished by a direct and bone-dry style that balances Thesiger's luxuriantly romantic relish for tribal peoples and desolate places. The Life of My Choice says goodbye to all that and good riddance to the 20th century and its airships, land vehicles and instant communication, which destroyed the silence and threaten a world Thesiger saw just in time.

Now 77, this sun-creased survivor of courted hardships and invited dangers spends most of his time in northwestern Kenya, near the village of Maralal. There, TIME Correspondent James Wilde found Thesiger living simply in a mud- caulked house with a distant view of the Great Rift Valley escarpment. The shelter has a concrete floor, wire-mesh windows, no electricity and no well. There is a separate sleeping hut that the author shares with up to 15 villagers and tribal friends who, he notes, "snore like elephants."

The local Samburu and Turkana tribesmen call Thesiger "Mzee Juu," the Great One. Should he die among them, they would give him the customary | funeral: the body is tossed down the escarpment for the hyenas. Passersby would then throw stones at the spot until a cairn arose over the bones. This honorable send-off would probably have to be altered should Mzee Juu expire in London, where he spends three months of the year in a Chelsea flat with his 92-year-old housekeeper. He is a member of The Travellers, one of London's more exclusive clubs, and many of his friends are dons at Oxford, his alma mater.

"The most important thing to remember," Thesiger stressed to Wilde, "is that when I did my journeys, I did them the only way they could be done, by camel or on foot." He wrote his books in the same unhurried fashion, patiently putting one incident after another, savoring the landscape, the history and the lore. As well as any travel writer of the 19th and 20th centuries, Thesiger conveys the explorers' bond of shared solitude. He shows human nature in its crucible, including the elements of savagery and the instinct for hospitality, which flourishes best in the most inhospitable terrain.

The Life of My Choice leaves no doubt that Thesiger had plenty to choose from. What better beginning for a spirited boy than a privileged African childhood during the confident Edwardian age? While nine-year-olds in Britain listened to tales of adventure, young Wilfred lived them. "My brother Brian and I watched the Shoan armies as they went north to give battle to Negus Mikael and his Wollo hordes," he writes. "All were armed -- some with rifles, others with spears, while nearly all wore swords and carried shields."

Not long after, the future vagabond and his brother were sent to boarding school in England where, he recalls, "as English boys who had barely heard of cricket we were natural targets." Classmates branded him a liar when he told them of warriors and lion hunts. Rejected, he withdrew into primal memories of Abyssinia.

Thesiger did not return to his birthplace until 1930. Haile Selassie, a friend of his late father's, invited him to attend his coronation. The feudal pageantry of the occasion has been described with condescending vividness by Evelyn Waugh, then a correspondent for Fleet Street. By contrast, Thesiger notes sadly that during his absence of eleven years "the age-old splendour of Abyssinia" had been fading. The Emperor's bodyguard wore khaki; the palace secretaries were in tailcoats. Thesiger met the celebrated author of Vile Bodies and found him foppish and petulant. He refused Waugh's request to accompany him on an expedition among the touchy Danakil. "Had he come," he adds menacingly, "I suspect only one of us would have returned."

During the next 50 years, Thesiger repeatedly put his life at risk. His safaris into unmapped regions were frequently threatened by bandits and tribesmen who had a tendency to kill and castrate strangers. On the staff of a British district commission in the Sudan, he was regularly called on to shoot cattle-killing lions. He did so on foot, sharing great dangers with villagers armed only with spears. During World War II he fought Italians in Ethiopia; in Libya he took part in raids on German encampments and communications as part of a jeep-mounted guerrilla unit.

Thesiger's greatest adventures came after the war in the vast deserts of southern Arabia, where for five years he traveled with the Bedouin. They receive his highest praise: "I knew I could not match them in physical endurance, but, with my family background, Eton, Oxford, the Sudan Political Service, I did perhaps think I would match them in civilized behaviour." That they do not make men like Thesiger anymore is obvious. That men like Thesiger were always as rare as water beds in the Sahara is gloriously evident in his proud and courtly autobiography.