Once, in 1946, Wilfred Thesiger lay starving on a sand dune in Arabia's Empty Quarter for three days, waiting for his Bedu companions to bring back food and tortured by hallucinations of cars and lorries that could carry him to safety.
"No," he later wrote, "I would rather be there, starving as I was, than sitting in a chair, replete with food, listening to the wireless and dependent on cars to take me through Arabia."
As an explorer, Thesiger, who has died aged 93, recognised that satisfaction in attaining a goal is directly in proportion to the hardship and challenge involved in getting there.
He reserved the word "abomination" for both cars and aeroplanes and, throughout his life, resented the intrusion of any innovation post-dating the steam engine.
His mystical regard for tradition was a product both of his childhood in still-medieval Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), and an intense pride in his aristocratic forbears, the Barons Chelmsford.
Born in Addis Ababa, where his father was British minister, he grew up in the barbaric splendour of an imperial court, and was privileged to see a victorious and bloodied Abyssinian army marching through the city in the full panoply of war. It was an experience that he never forgot.
Daydreams of Africa were his means of escape throughout awkward and often unhappy schooldays at Eton, and his time at Magdalen College, Oxford.
At the age of only 23, he set off to explore Abyssinia's Awash River and the forbidding Aussa Sultanate with its Mar or Danakil nomads, chiefly noted for a disturbing tendency to kill men and carry off their testicles as trophies.
Such practices held little horror for Thesiger, who had survived tagging and flogging at Eton, and saw at least one young Afar, flushed from the exertion of slaughtering and mutilating four victims in a day, as "the equivalent of a nice, rather self-conscious Etonian who had just won his school colours for cricket".
Thesiger gained his own blue, for boxing at Oxford, and like many an athletically talented young Oxbridge graduate of the 30s, sought a career in the country where "blues" were said to rule "blacks": the Sudan.
As an assistant district commissioner in the Sudan political service, he served in arid Darfur, and later in the steaming swamps of the Sudd, where one of his chief jobs was shooting lions that attacked local herds.
It was in Darfur that he first learned to travel by fast riding camel with local companions, dressing as they did, eating food out of the same bowl, and asking nothing of technology but a good rifle, a torch and a compass.
During one leave, he completed a long and dangerous journey to the almost unknown Tibesti mountains in the Sahara.
In the second World War, he was a bimbashi (junior office) in the Sudan Defence Force, won the DSO fighting the Italians at Gallabat, and served under the idiosyncratic Orde Wingate in the liberation of Abyssinia.
He later fought with both Stirling's SAS in north Africa and the SOE among the Druze in Syria. A chance meeting in the last year of the war brought him a job in Food and Agricultural Organisation's anti-locust unit, and with it the opportunity to make his most famous journeys in the deserts of Arabia under its aegis. Arabia's legendary Empty Quarter had been the goal of all Arabian explorers from Richard Burton onward and, although Thesiger was not the first to cross it, he was the first to explore it thoroughly, mapping the oasis of Liwa and the quicksands of Umm As Sam.
He crossed the desert with Bedu companions twice, and his trek across the western sands from the Hadhramaut to Abu Dhabi was the last and greatest expedition of Arabian travel.
During his journeys, he was caught up in inter-tribal raids, pursued by hostile raiders and arrested by the Saudi authorities. He travelled alone in the Hejaz, the Assir and Najran, and explored the Trucial coast and Dhofar in southern Arabia.
He left Arabia in the early 1950s, as he found westerners proliferating in the search for oil. He trekked for years in the mountains of Iraq and Pakistan and then settled with the canoe-borne marshmen, the Madan people along the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq.
He ingratiated himself into their culture and gained an appreciation for their practical habits attaining acceptance only by learning the unusual skill of circumcision.
"Madan live like their buffaloes," he wrote in The Marsh Arabs. "Their houses are half under water, filled with mosquitoes and fleas. If you try to sleep in one of them you will probably get your face trodden on by buffaloes during the night."
He still found time to travel in Kurdistan, Hunza, Swat, Chitral and Nuristan where, 16,600 feet up in the high passes he bumped into a dispirited Eric Newby and friend Hugh Carless, and invited them to spend the night with him. They got on well until Thesiger saw them inflating airbeds before retiring. "You must be a couple of pansies." he said.
He moved to Kenya in 1968, where Samburu tribesmen, noticing his large ears and nose and craggy features, gave him the playful sobriquet "the Old Bill Elephant Who Walks By Himself". He criss-crossed postwar Abyssinia, traversed most of northern Kenya, travelled with the Bakhtiari nomads in Iran, trekked across the burning plains of the Dasht-i-Lut, and explored inner Afghanistan.
All these journeys and many more, totalling tens of thousands of miles, were made either on foot or by traditional transport, be it camel, horse, mule, donkey or canoe. He felt least at home in his own culture and with his own kind. He resented the juggernaut of western "civilisation" and its inexorable movement to squash what he believed was the colour and diversity of the earth's peoples.
Thesiger, who was knighted in 1995, said he never set foot in the United States and did not care to.
"The long-term effect of US culture as it spreads to every nook and cranny in every desert and every mountain valley will be the end of mankind," he told the Guardian last year.
"Our extraordinary greed for material possessions, the ways we go about nurturing that greed, the lack of balance in our lives and our cultural arrogance will kill us off within a century unless we learn to stop and think. It may be too late."
His sympathies were with the indigenous peoples, and his closest human ties were with certain of them who were his companions on his many journeys: his Zaghawa servant in the Sudan, his Bedu companions in Arabia, his paddlers in Iraq and his Samburu family in Kenya.
Few other explorers of recent times have tried so genuinely to see the world through the eyes of these peoples. Yet, much as he despised civilisation, Thesiger was never able to completely forsake his place in it.
Had he done so, he might never have left us unique glimpses of strange worlds in his classic books Desert, Marsh and Mountain and The Marsh Arabs, his autobiography A Life of My Choice, his portfolio of superb monochrome photos, Visions of a Nomad and, above all, his description of the traditional life of the Bedu, Arabian Sands.
The latter is probably the finest book ever written about Arabia, and is a tribute to a world now lost forever.
Thesiger won the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, together with three other medals from learned societies, honorary fellowships of Magdalen college, Oxford, and the British Academy, and an Honorary D. Litt. from Leicester University. In 1968, he was awarded a CBE.
Yet, far more than these many honours, he valued the friendship and confidence of the nomadic peoples with whom and among whom he travelled.
His best years were the five he spent among the Bedu of south Arabia, and one cherished companion from those days, Salim bin Ghabeisha, now a greybeard in his 60s, remembers him.
"He was loyal, generous, and afraid of nothing. He was a wonderful man to travel with," he said.
Thesiger could have asked for no better epitaph.
Wilfred Thesiger: born June 3rd, 1910; died August 24th, 2003.