The Life of My Choice

Front Cover
The author was reknown for his travels through some of the most inaccessible places. He wrote two books, Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs, about his sojourns in the Empy Quarter and the marshes of southern Iraq. In this book he recalls his life and adventures, which started when he was quite young. He was born in Abyssinia in 1910 in one of the mud building housing the British legation in Addis Ababa. He witnessed the army of Ras Tafari (later to become Emperor Haile Selassie) going to war and return in triumph. By age 23 he had made his first trip to Danakil, where a man's status in the tribe depended on the number of men he had killed and castrated. In 1935 he joined the Sudan Political Service and while there hunted lions on foot and horseback, and explored the mountains in the Libyan Desert. War took him to Abyssinia where he fought under Wingate in the Gojjam campaign. In 1942 he joined the SAS under Stirling in the Western Desert.

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