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 of desert travel and the company of desert peoples. I set myself a goal on these journeys, and, although the goal itself was unimportant, its attainment had to be worth every effort and sacrifice. Scott had gone to the South Pole in order to stand for a few minutes on one particular and almost inaccessible sport on the earth’s surface. He and his companions died on their way back, but even as they were dying he never doubted that the journey had been worthwhile. Everyone knew that there was nothing to be found on the top of Everest, but even in this materialistic age few people asked, ‘What point is there in climbing Everest? What good will it do anyone when they get there?’ They recognized that even today there are experiences that do not need to be justified in terms of material profit.

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 I resented modern inventions; they made the road too easy. I felt instinctively that it was better to fail on Everest without oxygen than to attain the summit with its use. If climbers used oxygen, why should they not have their supplies dropped to them from aeroplanes, or landed by helicopter? Yet to refuse mechanical aids as unsporting reduced exploration to the level of a sport, like big-game shooting in Kenya when the hunter is allowed to drive up to within sight of the animal but must get out of the car to shoot it. I would not myself have wished to cross the Empty Quarter in a car. Luckily this was impossible when I did my journeys, for to have done the journey on a camel when I could have done it in a car would have turned the venture into a stunt.

Some people maintain that they will be better off when they have exchanged the hardship and poverty of the desert for the security of a materialistic world. This I do not believe. I shall always remember how often I was humbled by those illiterate herdsmen who possessed, in so much greater measure than I, generosity and courage, endurance, patience, and lighthearted gallantry. Among no other people have I ever felt the same sense of personal inferiority.

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 danger lay, not in the hardship of their lives, but in the boredom and frustration they would feel when they renounced it. The tragedy was that the choice would not be theirs; economic forces beyond their control would eventually drive them into the towns to hang about street-corners as ‘unskilled labour’.

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 me as an intruder; I myself felt that I was little better than a tourist.

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 change my clothes, but I appreciated that I was in danger of belonging to neither. When I was among my own people, a shadowy figure was always at my side watching them with critical, intolerant eyes.

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 of a hundred chance happenings might at any time leave them destitute, or end their lives. They did what they could, and no people were more self reliant, but if things went wrong they accepted their fate without bitterness, and with dignity as the will of God.

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 had once been spoken b y Menaeans, Sabaeans, and Himyarites, I realized that here was a link with the past even older and more authentic, for scholars believe that the Mahra are descended from the ancient Habasha, who colonized Ethiopia as long ago as the first millennium b.c. and gave their name to the Abyssinians.

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 anywhere else?’ and having decided that I would not, I felt better.

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 held.

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 moments of despair. Now I had crossed it. To others my journey would have little importance. It would produce nothing except a rather inaccurate map which no one was ever likely to use. It was a personal experience, and the reward had been a drink of clean, nearly tasteless water. I was content with that.

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 would slowly wear me down, mentally if not physically, and that I should be often provoked and irritated by my companions. I also knew with equal certainty that when this happened the fault would be mine not theirs.

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 silence upon that long-awaited vision, as excited as a mountaineer who sees above the Indian foothills the remote white challenge of the Himalayas.

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 the desert’s edge: the Minaeans, Sabaeans, and Himyarites in southern Arabia; Egypt of the Pharaohs; Sumeria, Babylonia, Assyria; the Hebrews, the Phoenicians; Greeks and Romans; the Persians; the Muslim Empire of the Arabs, and finally the Turks. They lasted a few hundred or a thousand years and vanished; new races were evolved and later disappeared; religions rose and fell; men changed, adapting themselves to a changing world; but in the desert the nomad tribes lived on, the pattern of their lives but little changed over this enormous span of time.

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 had ever been other than it was, that flowers and crops may once have flourished here. Now it was dead; the earth’s bared bones lay round us, sand-scoured beneath a glaring sky.

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 round his emaciated face; a single tooth wobbled as he spoke. He looked at me for some time and then mumbled again, ‘I came to see the Christian’. Sultan said to me, ‘He is a Shahara’. I wondered what he saw as he peered at me with bleary eyes, this old man whose ancestors were tabled in genesis. Perhaps dimly he foresaw the end. As we went down the hillside I asked my companions who he was. ‘He is mad’, one of them answered, and parodied ‘I came to see the Christian’, and they laughed. Yet I wondered fancifully if he had seen more clearly than they did, had sensed the threat which my presence implied – the approaching disintegration of his society and the destruction of his beliefs.

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 to us.

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 and the pleasure which springs from abstinence: the contentment of a full belly; the richness of meat; the taste of clean water; the ecstasy of surrender when the craving for sleep becomes a torment; the warmth of a fire in the chill of dawn.

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 which only the winds played, and a cleanness which was infinitely remote from the world of men.

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 London office, dreaming of freedom and adventure; but here, surely, I had all that I could possibly desire on much easier terms. But I knew instinctively that it was the very hardness of life in the desert which drew me back there – it was the same pull which takes men back to the polar ice, to high mountains, and to the sea.