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Arabian Sands (Travel Library)
Books: Travel: Bahrain: Item 7
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Arabian Sands (Travel Library)by Wilfred Thesiger
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40 of 40 people found the following review helpful: Extraordinary Journeys in the "Empty Quarter" of Arabia, August 30, 2001 Reviewer:"bcj222" (Newport Beach, CA United States) - The deserts of Arabia cover more than a million square miles. The southern desert occupies nearly half of the total area. It stretches nine hundred miles from the frontier of the Yemen to the foothills of Oman and five hundred miles from the southern coast of Arabia to the Persian Gulf. It is a wilderness of sand, a desert within a desert, an area so enormous and so desolate that even Arabs call it the "Empty Quarter." Wilfred Thesiger was born in Addis Ababa in 1910 and educated at Eton and Oxford. Though British, he was repulsed by the softness and rigidity of Western life, "the machines, the calling cards, the meticulously aligned streets, etc." In the spirit of T.E. Lawrence, Thesiger spent five years exploring and wandering the deserts of Arabia. With vivid descriptions and colorful anecdotes he narrates his stories, including two crossings of the Empty Quarter, among peoples who had never seen a European and considered it their duty to kill Christian infidels. Thesiger greatly illuminates our understanding of the nomadic bedouins of Arabia. He loved, admired, respected and was humbled by a people who lived desparately hard lives in the harshest conditions with only a few possessions that might include saddles, ropes, bowls, goatskins, rifles and daggers and traveled days without food and water. Yet these people were unflappably cheerful, welcoming, generous, self-reliant, loyal and dignified. Thesiger explains why the Bedu with whom he traveled refused to forecast the weather (blasphemy against God)or could discern where to find a hare in the sand (only one set of tracks into the buried hole). As a reader I could almost sense I was traveling with Thesiger, could not help but mourn the passing of the way of life he described, and, as he, pondered the meaning of the word "civilized" as we Westerners conceive the term.
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