Gone birding

THERE’S a passage in Far Horizons, Frank Gardner’s account of ‘unusual journeys and strange encounters from a travelling life’, where he describes peering into the abyss of a hissing Sumatran volcano, which reads like a Jules Verne or an H. G. Wells adventure story. In another age, he might have been an explorer. It’s no surprise that he spent hours listening to the last of the old-school desert adventurers, Sir Wilfred Thesiger, befriender of the Marsh Arabs and intrepid tracer of the source of the Awash River.

Even after the horrific incident in Saudi Arabia