Books, Arts & Manners: Desert Light

‘A new voice hailed me of an old friend when, first returned from the Peninsula, I paced again in that long street of Damascus which is called Straight; and suddenly taking me wondering by the hand ‘Tell me (said he), since thou art here again in the peace and assurance of Ullah, and whilst we walk, as in the former years, toward the new blossoming orchards, full of the sweet spring as the garden of God, what moved thee, or how couldst thou take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia?’ ”

From this delicate flower of a paragraph grows one of the mighty oaks of English travel writing in particular and English literature in general: Charles Montagu Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, first published by Cambridge University Press in 1888 and for many years out of print before a second edition appeared in 1921 with an introduction by Colonel T. E. Lawrence, whose adventures and writings both were inspired by his great precursor. Unless I have missed something, no notice has been taken in this country (other than my own very brief one in The American Spectator) of the book’s centennial, even though Arabia Deserta has been available since 1979 in a quality paperbound edition in two volumes totaling 1,408 pages and published at $14.95 apiece by Dover Publications in Mineola, N.Y. It strikes me as a minor literary sin to let the year 1988 slip astern without marking the undiminished greatness of a book that, in Lawrence’s words, “has no date and can never grow old.”

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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‘A new voice hailed me of an old friend when, first returned from the Peninsula, I paced again in that long street of Damascus which is called Straight; and suddenly taking me wondering by the hand ‘Tell me (said he), since thou art here again in the peace and assurance of Ullah, and whilst we walk, as in the former years, toward the new blossoming orchards, full of the sweet spring as the garden of God, what moved thee, or how couldst thou take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia?’ ”

From this delicate flower of a paragraph grows one of the mighty oaks of English travel writing in particular and English literature in general: Charles Montagu Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, first published by Cambridge University Press in 1888 and for many years out of print before a second edition appeared in 1921 with an introduction by Colonel T. E. Lawrence, whose adventures and writings both were inspired by his great precursor. Unless I have missed something, no notice has been taken in this country (other than my own very brief one in The American Spectator) of the book’s centennial, even though Arabia Deserta has been available since 1979 in a quality paperbound edition in two volumes totaling 1,408 pages and published at $14.95 apiece by Dover Publications in Mineola, N.Y. It strikes me as a minor literary sin to let the year 1988 slip astern without marking the undiminished greatness of a book that, in Lawrence’s words, “has no date and can never grow old.”