Arabian Sands Read Online Free PDF Page A

difficult letter,
Ghain
, I have used the conventional ‘gh’. Experts say that this soft guttural sound is pronounced like the Parisian ‘r’. This letter occurs in the name of one of the chief characters in the book, bin Ghabaisha.
    Only I know what my mother’s interest and encouragement have meant to me. I was nine months old when she took me from Addis Ababa to the coast, the first of many long childhood journeys with camels or mules. Having herself known the fascination of African travel before it was made easy, shehas always understood and sympathized with my love of exploration.
    In writing this book I owe a great debt of gratitude to Val ffrench Blake. He read the first chapter as soon as it was written, and since then has read the whole typescript, not once, but many times. His understanding and encouragement, as well as his excellent advice and criticism, have been invaluable to me. My brother Roderic has also read the text with the greatest care and patience and offered many valuable suggestions. To John Verney and Graham Watson I also owe much: John Verney for invaluable advice, and Graham Watson for his faith in the outcome of the task on which he launched me. W. P. G. Thomson of the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names was kind enough to check and approve the spelling of the Arabic names. I am most thankful to him for doing so. I am also extremely grateful to James Sinclair & Company, of Whitehall, for the great trouble they have taken over my photographs for many years; some of the results are to be seen in this book. I also wish to thank the Royal Geographical Society for the help and encouragement which they gave me before I started on these journeys.
    Although it would be pointless to thank them in a book which none of them will ever read, it will be obvious that I owe everything to the Bedu who went with me. Without their help, I could never have travelled in the Empty Quarter. Their comradeship gave me the five happiest years of my life.
Prologue
    A cloud gathers, the rain falls, men live; the cloud disperses without rain, and men and animals die. In the deserts of southern Arabia there is no rhythm of the seasons, no rise and fall of sap, but empty wastes where only the changing temperature marks the passage of the year. It is a bitter, desiccated land which knows nothing of gentleness or ease. Yet men have lived there since earliest times. Passing generations have left fire-blackened stones at camping sites, a few faint tracks polished on the gravel plains. Elsewhere the winds wipe out their footprints. Men live there because it is the world into which they were born; the life they lead is the life their forefathers led before them; they accept hardships and privations; they know no other way. Lawrence wrote in
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, ‘Bedouin ways were hard, even for those brought up in them and for strangers terrible: a death in life.’ No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match.

1. Abyssinia and the Sudan
    A childhood in Abyssinia is

followed by a journey in the

Danakil country and service in the

Sudan. The opportunity to travel

into the Empty Quarter of Arabia

comes from a wartime meeting

with the head of the Middle East

Locust control
.
    I first realized the hold the desert had upon me when travelling in the Hajaz mountains in the summer of 1946. A few months earlier I had been down on the edge of the Empty Quarter. For a while I had lived with the Bedu a hard and merciless life, during which I was always hungry and usually thirsty. My companions had been accustomed to this life since birth, but I had been racked by the weariness of long marches through wind-whipped dunes, or across plains where monotony was emphasized