Arabian Sands – Wilfred Thesiger/Penguin Classics (2007)
The most recent Penguin edition of ‘Arabian Sands’ has an excellent introduction by Rory Stewart, himself a formidable walker.
Thesiger who lived from 1910 to 2003, was a traveller of extraordinary distances in the harshest conditions. During World War 2 he had an outstanding military career. After that, as Arabian Sands records, between 1946 and 1948, while the world struggled with genocide, colonialism, revolution, and modernity, Wilfred Thesiger crossed and recrossed the 250,000 square miles of the Empty Quarter, the largest sand desert in the world, in the area of modern Yemen, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Oman. Amazingly he walked barefoot.
Arabian Sands describes these and six other journeys undertaken in five successive years. The landscape is largely barren, there are no monuments to admire and his Arabic is not entirely fluent. Yet, Thesiger turns this confusing and potentially alienating journey into a unified and compelling narrative. It is engaging without being over-simplified, exciting without being over-dramatic and strikingly truthful.
His talents as a writer are a surprise. Arabian Sands was his first book, and he was almost 50 when he finished it. He had little interest in serious literature and did not enjoy writing. But the result was an immediate success.
He wrote naturally in short sentences with few metaphors. He revealed little about why he undertook these extraordinary journeys and rarely drew historical or literary parallels. His writing echoes the reports of 19th C British travellers on the NW Frontier: matter of fact, understated, replete with precise information, useful for Imperial projects. When Arabian Sands was published travel writing was dominated by writers in the tradition of Robert Byron and another leading exponent was Eric Newby which Thesiger detested; James Morris’s book on Oman was described as ‘chatty rubbish.’
Thesiger’s overriding interest was in travel for its own sake. Unlike Doughty or T E Lawrence who returned to Britain to work on their memoirs, Thesiger never ceased to travel. He was perhaps the first to make punishing travel itself rather than government, exploration, knowledge, or writing, his entire vocation. He emphasised that he travelled on foot and by camel only because there were no cars available and that he usually did so in order to draw up a map. He continued to travel on foot and by camel, long after cars had been introduced and wandered in this way for almost 40 years because he found that these journeys gave a meaning and a comfort to his life, which he could not convincingly articulate.
This short extract comes from the third chapter of the book, The Sands of Ghanim:
‘When all was ready we set off on foot. We always walked for the first two or three hours. While we were still in the mountains each of us led his own camel or tied her by her head-rope to the one in front. Later, when we were in the gravel plains or in the sands, we turned them loose to find whatever food they could as they drifted along. We would walk behind them with our rifles on our shoulders, held by the muzzle. …When at length the sun grew hot we rode. The Bedu never bothered to stop their mounts and make then kneel before they got up, but pulled down their heads, put a foot on their necks and were lifted to within easy reach of the saddle. At first, they insisted on couching my camel when I wished to mount. This was meant as an act of kindness. So, it was when they begged me to ride instead of walking as we started in the morning and when they frequently offered me a drink…’