Arabian Sands (1959)

Five years spent in southern Arabia, Yemen and Oman are chronicled by Thesiger. Classic British travelogue by another Brit not comfortable being one. But a great look at the quantumm leap the Arabs took from being fierce bedu to "hanging around on street corners". Also intriguing were the differences between tribes and how the Sauds used the Wahabi's to extend theirs. There are more than one Arabias. ( )

Thesiger found his deep-down nomad soul when he explored the Empty Quarter with the Bedu. I wish he had not included the sentence "I shot 70 lions" but overall his writing is beautiful and fills me with nostalgia for a life I could never have known. Lots of interesting information about camels, too. ( )

While this was an entertaining read and provided an excellent insight into Bedouin culture it remains in the shadow of Lawrence's Seven Pillars. In fact I believe that to be the case why Thesiger wasn't so inclined to publish it in the first place and faced with the fact that his thirst for exploration and part of his reason for taking up life with the Bedouin was because of Lawrence's experiences - which cannot be surpassed in terms of English literature in the Arab world. Thesiger's influence is made more clear in his portrayal of himself with matched closely the modesty Lawrence had and the poignancy with which he wrote of the Bedu. Thesiger certainly wasn't a modest man. But in short it is excellent reading. ( )

The record of Thesiger's extraordinary journeys through the parched 'Empty Quarter' of Arabia first published 1959

Exploring is normally a rather egotistical activity. You travel through antres vast and deserts idle in order to boast about your achievements afterwards: to publish books and make films about how intrepid you are, to make money for your sponsor, or (like Othello) to help you chat up girls.

The wonderful thing about Thesiger as an explorer is how modest he is. You get the idea that he would really have preferred to keep the whole thing quiet. When word gets out about where he's been, he's more likely to have problems with the local authorities next time around, and he also knows that other people will emulate his journeys and spoil the fragile, pristine ecologies he has had the privilege of seeing. In the case of his Arabian journeys, he was only persuaded to write a book ten years after the event, much against his better judgement. By this time it was becoming clear that the life of the Bedu in the deserts of southern Arabia had already been changed irreversibly by the discovery of oil.

Despite his reluctance to commit himself to the printed page, Thesiger turns out to be a wonderful travel writer. His work has a rather different slant from what we are used to seeing: much less about moving accidents by flood and field or rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven, but much more about his travelling companions. The Bedu who cross the Empty Quarter with him are presented more like characters in a novel than colourful extras in a travel book. They are all very clear-cut individuals, with their own backgrounds, worries, ambitions, families, habits endearing and otherwise, and so on. Thesiger makes sure we understand how they fit into Bedu society, how the economy and ecology of the desert works, how social customs are linked to the particular constraints of living in a decentralised, tribal and nomadic society. It's an affectionate, sympathetic account, with none of T.E. Lawrence's lyrical bombast (and certainly none of Lawrence's "Me! Me! Me!"). Thesiger does admittedly let himself go a little bit when he's talking about the beauty of the two teenage tribesmen who travel with him, but judging by the photographs he's got some reason for that... He does make it quite clear that the Bedu, contrary to what Lawrence leads us to believe, don't go in for hanky-panky in the desert, and includes a rather grisly (second-hand) description of an execution for "sodomy" in Riyadh.

The real joy of this book, for me, are Thesiger's descriptions of the inconsequential everyday discussions in camp or on the march, the endless debates about the qualities of different camels, and the infinitely recursive nature of Bedu storytelling. Even a simple request for information about the travelling time between two wells has to be answered with a detailed description of the journey, the ancestries of the camels involved, the Arabs met in the way and the reasons for their journeys, etc. ( )