2019 marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of Arabian Sands (Longmans 1959) by Wilfred Thesiger, arguably the last of the great British travelers in the Middle East who published their accounts. Arabian Sands, found on almost any respectable list of travel literature, recounts two back to back journeys in the great Arabian desert The Empty Quarter and inner Oman between 1946 and 1948 and documents the post-war erosion of thousand year old Bedouin ways of life due to changes inherent in development, particularly that of the expanding oil industry. Thesiger especially disdained oil companies' exploration in spite of the fact they had, in part, financially supported some of his travel. Thesiger also considered automotive vehicles the paramount factor responsible for the destruction of the Bedouin since they ultimately nullified the camel herding and trading at the heart of their nomadic lifestyle. Modern modes of travel also diminished a geographical space the Bedouin was formerly able to use to his evasive advantage. In a 1999 Washington Post Book World report by David Streitfeld, Thesiger is quoted, "The biggest misfortune in human history is the invention of the internal combustion engine. Cars and airplanes diminish the world, rob it of all its diversity. Young men who meet me want to know how they could do what I've done. But all they can be is tourists now." And further on, "I resent every material manifestation of our modern civilization." Surely he'd cast a frown at the highway across the Empty Quarter that opened in summer of 2018.
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| Empty Quarter Rd. c. 2018 Saudi Gazette |
Thesiger's father and grandfather were notables in the British Foreign Service and colonial administration and Thesiger himself, prior to his Arabian journeys, had had expeditionary experience in several parts of Africa. For me, a 1930 photograph of him, in comparatively plain clothes, among more than two dozen other members of the British delegation in Addis Ababa, almost every one of whom is attired in truckloads of decorations and medals and horsehair plumed helmets, achingly illustrates disparities within the Empire's foreign subjects in the advancing 20th century, the one obdurately preserving the patrimonies of a waning Pax Britannica and the other squirming to shed the pomp and throw his lot in with the locals to see what ho on the other side of the wadi.
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| Plate 24. The Empty Quarter |
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| The Qarra Mountains Plate 5. The Northern Slopes Plate 6. The Southern Slopes |
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| Plate 37. Our Party Loading Up in the Sands Plate 38. A Saar Encampment |
British travelers in the Middle East and Ottoman lands from Freya Stark to Robert Byron to Wilfred Thesiger produced a canon of inspired travel writing that detailed rigorous journeys and exploration to places still remote and barely known to the average reader at the time. They excelled in burnishing their reporting with insider gravitas and elitism that welcomed the hardships inherent in their exploits as the cost of doing business. But this business did often include immersive kinship and deep empathy with the inhabitants of these lands, particularly the Arabs, although it can't be overlooked that their sojourning was safe in the foreknowledge they would someday return to their green home or, at minimum, was secure in the conviction that they brought to the table an incomparable civility even if the fire of the Victorian ethos was not recognized to be in its dying embers. Is it paradoxical that these travelers upheld a culture they simultaneously sought to escape? I've often wondered if they questioned their romance to ponder if their motivation played at hardship and deprivation or if that's just a jaded supposition from this armchair. Play or not Thesiger did, in fact, crisscross by foot an infamously inhospitable desert in the few scant years before it became more charted, more navigable, and more penetrable all without needing the assistance of Bedouin guides. And he left us with one of the great wanderlust stories of all time.
Lastly, below are images of the large foldout maps included with my first edition of Arabian Sands. In searching for these on the internet I only found other charts of Thesiger's journeys or thumbnails of these maps. Here the maps are reproduced in single frame as well as in a larger format for use with the computer's scroll bars for closer detail.
