In the spirit of T.E. Lawrence, Wilfred Thesiger spent five years
wandering the deserts of Arabia, producing Arabian Sands, 'a
memorial to a vanished past, a tribute to a once magnificent
people'. The Penguin Classics edition includes an introduction by
Rory Stewart. Wilfred Thesiger, repulsed by what he saw as the
softness and rigidity of Western life - 'the machines, the calling
cards, the meticulously aligned streets' - spent years exploring in
and around the vast, waterless desert that is the 'Empty Quarter'
of Arabia. Travelling amongst the Bedu people, he experienced their
everyday challenges of hunger and thirst, the trials of long
marches beneath the relentless sun, the bitterly cold nights and
the constant danger of death if it was discovered he was a
Christian 'infidel'. He was the first European to visit most of the
region, and just before he left the area the process that would
change it forever had begun - the discovery of oil. This edition
contains an introduction by Rory Stewart discussing the dangers of
Thesiger's travels, his unconventional personality and his insights
into the Bedouin way of life. Sir Wilfred Patrick Thesiger
(1910-2003) was a British travel writer born in Addis Ababa in
Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). Thesiger is best known for two travel
books: Arabian Sands (1959), which recounts his travels in the
Empty Quarter of Arabia between 1945 and 1950 and describes the
vanishing way of life of the Bedouins, and The Marsh Arabs (1964),
an account of the traditional peoples who lived in the marshlands
of southern Iraq. If you enjoyed Arabian Sands, you might like T.E.
Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, also available in Penguin
Modern Classics 'Thesiger is perhaps the last, and certainly one of
the greatest, of the British travellers among the Arabs' Sunday
Times 'Following worthily in the tradition of Burton, Lawrence,
Philby and Thomas, it is, very likely, the book about Arabia to end
all books about Arabia' Daily Telegraph
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