I recently found a beautiful hardback copy still in mint condition of Wilfred Thesiger's "Arabian Sands", the book about Arabia to end all books about Arabia. I've only just now found a beautifully made doco-movie by the same name which follows Wilfred Thesiger's crossing of the Rub Al-Khali, Arabia's "Empty Quarter".
Sprawling over parts of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates, the Empty Quarter—or Rub' al Khali—is the world's largest sand sea, holding about half as much sand as the Sahara Desert. It is one of the most arid regions on the planet, and stretches over twelve hundred kilometers from west to east, and is up to six hundred kilometers wide.
It had been the goal of all Arabian explorers from Richard Burton onward and, although Wilfred Thesiger was not the first to cross it, he was the first to explore it thoroughly, mapping the oasis of Liwa and the quicksands of Umm As Sam. He crossed it with Bedu companions twice, and his trek across the western sands from the Hadhramaut to Abu Dhabi was the last and greatest expedition of Arabian travel.
It all began when, in 1945, an entomologist, O.B. Lean, acting on behalf of the Middle East Anti Locust Unit (MEALU), hired Thesiger to search for locust breeding grounds in southern Arabia. Feeling least at home in his own culture and with his own kind, Thesiger resented the juggernaut of western "civilisation" and its inexorable movement to squash what he believed was the colour and diversity of the earth's peoples.
His sympathies were with the indigenes, and his closest human ties were with certain of them who were his companions on his many journeys. Few other explorers of recent times have tried so genuinely to see the world through the eyes of these foreign peoples.
His best years were the five he spent among the Bedu of south Arabia, and one cherished companion from those days, Salim bin Ghabeisha, now a greybeard in his 60s, remembers him. "He was loyal, generous, and afraid of nothing. He was a wonderful man to travel with," he said. Thesiger could have asked for no better epitaph. He died in 2003.
It's been almost four decades since I walked the burning sands of Saudi Arabia. I'm left with my memories as I read "Arabian Sands" while sitting close to a burning fireplace with a painting above it of a "modern" Saudi camel being driven across the burning sands in a TOYOTA pick-up truck.
P.S. Are you drawn in by the desert as I was all those many years ago? Don't let the spell go to waste; come and watch "Lawrence of Arabia".
