For me, exploration was a personal venture. I did not go to the Arabian desert to collect plants nor to make a map; such things were incidental. At heart I knew that to write or even to talk of my travels was to tarnish the achievement. I went there to find peace in the hardship [...]

No, it is not the goal but the way there that matters, and the harder the way the more worth while the journey. Who, after all, would dispute that it is more satisfying to climb to the top of a mountain than to go there in a funicular railway? Perhaps this was one reason why [...]

On the last evening, as bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha were tying up the few things they had brought, Codrai said, looking at the two small bundles, ‘It is rather pathetic that this is all they have.’ I understood what he meant; I had often felt the same. Yet I knew that for them the [...]

Here life moved in time with the past. These people still valued leisure and courtesy and conversation. They did not live their lives at second hand, dependent on cinemas and wireless. I would willingly have consorted with them, but I now wore European clothes. As I wandered through the town I knew that they regarded [...]

Listening to them talk while a wireless blared in a corner and the barman served drinks, I realized that these officers could have as little understanding of Bedu life as bin Kabina or bin Ghabaisha had of theirs. I could now move without effort from one world to the other as easily as I could [...]

It was too late in the season to attempt a journey into Oman that year, and anyway I needed to rest. My mind was taut with the strain of living too long among Arabs.

It was cosy and very friendly, and pleasing to feel that for a while we had no further need of traveling, that we could eat and sleep at will. I wondered why people ever cluttered up their rooms with furniture, for this bare simplicity seemed to me infinitely preferable.

It took us only ten minutes to load, and as we moved off I though how pleasant it was to be free from the burden of possessions.

As I listened I though once again how precarious was the existence of the Bedu. Their way of life naturally made them fatalists; so much was beyond their control. It was impossible for them to provide for a morrow when everything depended on a chance fall of rain or when raiders sickness, or any one [...]

Fifteen years earlier, watching the coronation of Haile Selassie as King of Kings of Ethiopia, I had been fascinated by the continuity, however tenuous, which linked that ceremony with Solomon and Sheba. Now watching these half naked, indigo-smeared figures, sitting beneath the dying palms of the Wadi Jiza, discussing our movements in a language which [...]

Feeling thoroughly ill-tempered I lay down to sleep, but this was impossible. The others, excited by this meeting with their fellow-tribesmen, talked incessantly within a few yards of my head. I wondered irritably why Bedu must always shout. Gradually I relaxed. I tried the old spell of asking myself, ‘Would I really wish to be [...]

No, I would rather be here starving as I was than sitting in a chair, replete with food, listening to the wireless, and dependent upon cars to take me through Arabia. I clung desperately to this conviction. It seemed infinitely important. Even to doubt it was to admit defeat, to forswear everything to which I [...]

For years the Empty Quarter had represented to me the final, unattainable challenge which the desert offered. Suddenly it had come within my reach. I remembered my excitement when Lean had casually offered me the chance to go there, the immediate determination to cross it, and then the doubts and fears, the frustrations, and the [...]

But I knew that for me the hardest test would be to live with them in harmony and not to let my impatience master me; neither to withdraw into myself, nor to become critical of standards and ways of life different from my own. I knew from experience that the conditions under which we lived [...]

On the second day at sunset we saw the Sands stretching across our front, a shimmering rose-coloured wall, seemingly as intangible as a mirage. The Arabs, roused from the nodding torpor of weary, empty hours, pointed with their sticks, shouted, and broke into a sudden spate of talk. But I was content to look in [...]

As I rode along I reflected that nowhere in the world was there such continuity as in the Arabian desert. Here Semitic nomads, resembling my companions, must have herded their flocks before the Pyramids were built or the Flood wiped out all trace of man in the Euphrates valley. Successive civilizations rose and fell around [...]

Whatever may have been their purpose, these piles of uncut stones are among the few tangible monuments which the Arabs of the past have left behind them in Arabia. They seemed to me a fitting memorial to the ancestors of a people who, at their best, have cared little for material things.

We rode across a somber land. The rocks beneath our feet and the broken scattered fragments were dark with age, sepia-coloured. They looked as if they had been scorched by the sun and polished by the wind ever since they first emerged from beneath the sea. It was difficult to think that this stark land [...]

As we rose to go an old man approached. He mumbled a salutation and we replied. He stood and stared at me, wrinkling his eyes; he wore a short dirty loin-cloth and carried a stick – he was evidently to poor to own a dagger. Grey hair sprouted on his chest and eldritch locks fell [...]

But more wearing still is the nervous tension. I was to learn how hard it is to live crowded together with people of another faith, speech, and culture in the solitude of the desert, how easy to be provoked to senseless wrath by the importunities and improvidence.

I went there with a belief in my own racial superiority, but in their tents I felt like an uncouth, inarticulate barbarian, an intruder from a shoddy and materialistic world. Yet from them I learnt how welcoming are the Arabs and how generous is their hospitality.

The deserts in which I had travelled had been blanks in time as well as in space. They had no intelligible history, the nomads who inhabited them had no known past. Some bushmen paintings, a few disputed references in Herodotus and Ptolemy, and tribal legends of the recent past were all that had come down [...]

In the desert I had found a freedom unattainable in civilization; a life unhampered by possessions, since everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance. I had found, too, a comradeship inherent in the circumstances, and the belief that tranquility was to be found there. I had learnt the satisfaction which comes from hardship [...]

For this was the real desert where differences of race and colour, of wealth and social standing, are almost meaningless; where coverings of pretence are stripped away and basic truths emerge. It was a place where men live close together.

I craved for the past, resented the present, and dreaded the future.

For the first two days we saw occasional white oryx and a few ostriches; after that there was nothing. Hour after hour, day after day, we moved forward and nothing changed; the desert, me, the empty sky always the same distance ahead of us. Time and space were one. Round us was a silence in [...]

I was often tired and thirsty, sometimes frightened and lonely, but I tasted freedom and a way of life from which there could be no recall.

Many who venture into dangerous places have found this comradeship among members of their own race; a few find it more easily among people from other lands, the very differences which separate them binding them ever more closely. I found it among the Bedu. Without it these journeys would have been a meaningless penance.

Far below me a yellow haze hid the desert to the east. Yet it was there that my fancies ranged, planning new journeys while I wondered at this strange compulsion which drove me back to a life that was barely possible. It would, I felt, have been understandable if I had been working in some [...]