"ARABIA DESERTA"

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 49, 27 February 1937, Page 27

"ARABIA DESERTA"

NEW EDITfoKI&OF CLASSIC

Reviewing" in ;itie London a new edition "of t-lilz.f Charles '.M. Doughty's: gfeat;v\yorkvT .' "Travels^in Arabia. Deserta.'^;o£i"'C. Fifield slys that'reading-for'press; its 650,000 words and figures called for more close and intense concentration of eye and mind than anything else read in the course of 68 years, mainly spent in reading manuscript and proof.

T. E. Lawrence, who. should know, says in his fine introduction: "The more you learn of. Arabia the;more you find in 'Arabia Deserta.'. The more you travel there the greater your respect for the insight, judgment, and artistry of the author,.-... .The book ha»/no date'and- can never grow old. It.is the .first and indispensable work upon the Arabs-of. the.desert";.and, indeed, here in these old pages is' valuable .information pn two of the newest problems: Abyssinia and the fanatical hatred of Arab for Jew; while, when Dr. Doughty, wrote of, r'the inalienable chaste: bond of Christian .itiamage,";;he might have been dreaming of a future Hollywood or~Reno. Why has no one thought of filming this book? In hundreds of pages it contains : the ' very stuff of the finest 'film, though without the "Oriental romance" he despised; but; there are the unforgettable pictures of the 61d foot pilgrimage to Mecca, the terror and the majesty of the empty desert, the uneasy" and- ': brutal' life in the garrisoned water, towers,, the movements of the ' Bedouin nomads with their1 flocks .and herds and their butter caravans, the tragedy .and "drama of the basis.towns, the inter-tribal ghrazzus, or raids,- and/ above all, the singular and moving and often perilous adventures of this noble-minded, simplehearted English poet and scientist roaming the forbidden wastes without other protection than his courage, stoicism, and good, will, and his power of seeing the amusing in the most difficult situations; ■: It is one ot the most healthy-minded books in the' English' tongue. There isn't a ha'p'orth "of introspection or "inferiority^complex,1'; or cick-soul in its 1250 pagesi ;or of egoism or self-import-ance; as Lawrence says, he is not the hero of his own. story. The work was what" mattered—the geography, the geology, thei climate,- the fauna and flora,'the men and women, tribes and tribal subdivisions and feuds, and religion of "some 200,000 square miles of Arabia not unknown to me," in his unboasting phrase. ; k .