Hanover Browsing
THE EXPLORATION of Arabia, that fantastic land which lies between the great land-masses of Africa and Asia, has produced some of the best prose literature of modern times, and has revealed to the world many rich personalities from Alexander William Kinglake, who published his Ed then in 1844, through Richard Burton, Charles M. Doughty, Gertrude Bell and the Blunts, to T. E. Lawrence, who published the famous Seven Pillars of Wisdom in 1926.
This month (I am writing this on New Year's Eve) I shall write briefly on the great books about Arabia. No country that I can think of has been the inspiration of so many classics of travel and exploration. I think that if you would read some of these books you would partly understand the mystery. I recommend them all without reservation.
The exploration of Arabia has been of recent origin. In the World War the British Officers, for instance, did not know the exact distance from the Red Sea to the vastly important Hejaz Railway. The longitude of Medina, the southern terminus of the line, was not known during the war, and even up to 1930 there remained great regions still uncrossed by Europeans.
Seven million people inhabit this territory of sand, steppe, and rocky deserts of lava, limestone and sandstone covering an area of about one million square miles. The Bedouins are organized in tribes, each tribe defending its own members and being responsible for the individual's misdeeds. The tribes have their own stretches of country, but are divided into clans over the scattered pastures, pools, wells, wadis, and water holes. The emirs and sheikhs govern paternally, administer justice, levy tribute, and lead the men to battle. Tribal wars are of common occurrence, and blood-feuds part of the order of life. (Lawrence unified them for the first time in history, but it took a lot of gold to do it.)
Kinglake, when still a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, travelled through the East, and wrote Edthen before he was thirty. There are still men and women who remember the author and can tell you of his idiosyncrasies, his reserved manner, his gifts as a conversationalist, his long preserved social reputation. (He died in
Two noteworthy qualities in his book are, first, an enthusiasm for the life described, and secondly, a sense of humor that is rarely in abeyance. "As I have felt so I have written" and the picture of life in the Mediterranean, in Palestine, and Syria is full of fascination. He lived in Cairo when the plague was rampant, and he was the only European traveller there during this time (1835). Mr. S. L. Bensusan writes: "Kinglake travelled before Imperialism, before the company promoter and concessionaire hold every shore so firmly with their dirty hands that not all the waters of the Mediterranean shall wash the littoral clean. The long procession of men, who were independent under tyranny and picturesque in rags, has passed—but you will find them in Edthen." One of the highlights of his book is a description of his visit to Lady Hester Stanhope, an eccentric English woman, who reigned as "The Queen of the Desert." One quotation must suffice: "A Greek woman wears her whole fortune upon her person, in the shape of jewels or gold coins. I believe that this mode of investment is adopted in great measure for safety's sake. It has the advantage of enabling a suitor to reckon, as well as to admire, the object of his affection."
As early as 1761 a Danish expedition under Karsten Niebuhr landed at Jidda, the port for Mecca, and on the trip into the interior, of six men, only Niebuhr survived. Sickness killed them. His book, one of the earliest, is called Travels Through Arabia.
In 1809 Johann Ludwig Burckhardt left Malta for Alleppo. Wearing Eastern dress he travelled as Ibrahim Ibn Abdulla. He learned Arabic, acquired an astonishing knowledge of the Koran and its commentaries, and fitted himself to pass easily as a learned doctor of their law among the educated Mohammedans. While in Syria he visited Palmyra, Damascus, and the Lebanon, and on a desert journey discovered the site of ancient Petra. Lady Hester Stanhope disliked him. He visited Jidda, Mecca (this before Burton's more famous journey), Medina, and Yenbo. Jidda was later described by T. E. Lawrence as the port where "the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless." Burckhardt gave the most detailed description of Mecca up to that time. His findings may be read in his Travels in Arabia, 1829, and in his Noteson the Bedouins and Wahabys, 1830. He died aged 33, and was buried in Cairo.
One of the most sensational of all Arabian travellers was Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890) who is now known mainly for his translation of the Arabian Nights. He spent seven years in India where he learned Gujerati, Marathi, Persian, Hindustani, and Arabic. He worked ten hours a day at languages, and he became so fluent that he could mix freely without detection among the natives in India or the Near East. He knew a quarter of the Koran by heart. When he travelled his origin was never questioned in caravanserai, desert, or in the holy cities of Islam. He left Yenbo into: "a great iron plain of stones, where grasshoppers were the chief form of life, was dotted with a little sun-parched scrub, and then, behind it, huge hills, bare plains, and desolate valleys; granite mountains, with huge blocks and boulders, cut by dark caves and vast cliffs; above, a sky 'like polished blue steel, with a tremendous blaze of yellow light,' without the slightest veil of mist; no bird or beast; jagged peaks ahead." Such is Arabia. He visited Medina and Mecca. His A Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1855) is marked out from all other works on Arabia by its graphic description, humor, grimness, insight into Arab and all Semitic thought, vast knowledge of Eastern manners and habits, vigorous, trenchant style, and highly individualistic opinions. His book created a sensation though he was not the first European to accomplish the feat of reaching Mecca, and, in fact, he pays tribute in his book to Burckhardt's accuracy of detail.
I shall skip the lesser known travellers .and come at once to Pal grave, nee Cohen. Palgrave, an Englishman of Jewish descent, wrote the most sensational book on Arabia until Lawrence's Seven Pillars. The title of this is: Narrative of a Year's JourneyThrough Central and Eastern Arabia (1865). He gives a wonderful description of a simoon; first the unclouded Arabian sky, the scorched desert between Maan and the "Wadi Sirhan, the first abrupt burning gusts of wind; then the increasing oppressiveness of the air, the Bedouin wrapping cloaks around their faces, and a rush for cover under a small black tent. The horizon darkens to the color of deep violet, there comes a stifling blast like the opening of an enormous oven, and the simoon is upon them. They lie in the tent, heads wrapped and almost suffocating, while the camels are outside, prostrate on the sand like dead beasts. The atmosphere was entirely free from sand or dust, but the heat was like red hot iron.
Burton thought Palgrave insincere and hypocritical, and it must be admitted that there are so many inaccuracies, exaggerations and incongruities that some doubted that he ever made the journey. It is now quite certain that he made the first part of his journey but his description of the Wahhabi country was geographically disproved by St John Philby among others, and Philby is one of the most learned of modern Arabian scholars and explorers. However, Palgrave's book was meant to •enthrall, and that it certainly does.
The father of them all is Charles Montagu Doughty (1843-1926). In 1875 he found himself in Maan. Journeying to Petra he heard in an Arab coffee house of the inscribed cliffs of Medain Salih. He resolved to visit them, partly out of archaeological curiosity, partly to experience the wild Arab life, but mostly to gain material for a narrative which should "redeem English from the slough into which it had fallen since the days of Elizabeth." (Arabia Deserta) With endless patience he strove for accuracy, and garnered a mass of information on the physical features, geology, hydrography, antiquities, Bedouin organization, and social life of Arabia, where he spent twenty-one months in all. Doughty is to be distinguished from all earlier Arabian travellers in that he travelled openly as a Christian, which to the Arabs meant British and Western, and he accepted with dignity and enormous courage the contemptuous term Nasrany. His personality rarely failed to draw some measure of friendship, but he did go through great suffering, particularly in the journey from Aneiza to Mecca with the temperature 110 degrees in the shade and with none near him who would willingly give him food or water. There is a transcendental quality in Arabia Deserta because Doughty, with soul and spirit unbroken, proved himself immeasurably superior to the Moslems. He worked for nine years on his book which Lawrence described as "a book not like other books but something particular, a bible of its kind." (I am indebted for much information on Arabia to R. H. Kiernan's TheUnveiling of Arabia, 1937.)
THE NEW HANOVER-NORWICH BRIDGE OVER THE CONNECTICUT
