Books in Brief: The Southern Gates of Arabia

The Southern Gates of Arabia, by Freya Stark (J. P. Tarcher, 328 pp., $9.95)

Yemen in 1935, two thousand years after the heyday of the incense trade, languished in the depths of poverty and ignorance. Along the old trade route—scarcely a dirt track—potentates waged war on one another’s dried-mud cities for reasons half forgotten. Bedouins ranged the desert between, plundering pilgrims who were traveling in search of blessings at the tombs of minor saints. Men wore rags about their middles, and over the rest of their naked selves a smear of indigo. Layers of black cloaked women from head to foot. People shunned soap, thinking the scent weakened their lungs. To unlock the door at night you had to cry, “Slave, O slave!” Dates and goat cheese eaten from trays on the floor, and sweet tea drunk from thimble cups, sustained life of a sort. Into this menagerie trooped Dame Freya Stark in flowery dress and beach hat. She was an instant hit. Fluent Arabic gained her entry to the inmost harems of the nobility and won her the admiration of Bedouin guides. In the grip of a host of dizzying ailments, traveling by donkey from town to town, Dame Freya was preserved by a near-miraculous optimism. Through thick and thin she scribbled notes. This book, a reprint, contains those notes and the thoughts they gave rise to as she transcribed them back in England. She gives detailed descriptions of landscape, flora, architecture, and customs in eccentrically crafted sentences that themselves embody a philosophical view requiring no elaboration. To these she adds concise afterthoughts, rooting her flights of unnatural optimism firmly to earth, or, elsewhere, sending accounts of mundane things aloft like birds. She has just enumerated the dusty contents of a sultan’s guest house in the coastal city of Mukalla and laid herself to bed amid cigarette butts and scurrying mice when, she writes, “A dim little feeling came curling up through my sleepy senses; I wondered for a second what it might be before I recognized it: It was Happiness, pure and immaterial; independent of affections and emotions, the ethereal essence of happiness, a delight so rare and so impersonal that it seems scarcely terrestrial when it comes.” Freya Stark travels as travel writers should: with mind open, receptive to nuance, tolerant of squalor, prepared to admit the unlikely to the realm of the treasured.

PH

About the Author

Paul T. Hornak

Featured Tags

The Southern Gates of Arabia, by Freya Stark (J. P. Tarcher, 328 pp., $9.95)

Yemen in 1935, two thousand years after the heyday of the incense trade, languished in the depths of poverty and ignorance. Along the old trade route—scarcely a dirt track—potentates waged war on one another’s dried-mud cities for reasons half forgotten. Bedouins ranged the desert between, plundering pilgrims who were traveling in search of blessings at the tombs of minor saints. Men wore rags about their middles, and over the rest of their naked selves a smear of indigo. Layers of black cloaked women from head to foot. People shunned soap, thinking the scent weakened their lungs. To unlock the door at night you had to cry, “Slave, O slave!” Dates and goat cheese eaten from trays on the floor, and sweet tea drunk from thimble cups, sustained life of a sort. Into this menagerie trooped Dame Freya Stark in flowery dress and beach hat. She was an instant hit. Fluent Arabic gained her entry to the inmost harems of the nobility and won her the admiration of Bedouin guides. In the grip of a host of dizzying ailments, traveling by donkey from town to town, Dame Freya was preserved by a near-miraculous optimism. Through thick and thin she scribbled notes. This book, a reprint, contains those notes and the thoughts they gave rise to as she transcribed them back in England. She gives detailed descriptions of landscape, flora, architecture, and customs in eccentrically crafted sentences that themselves embody a philosophical view requiring no elaboration. To these she adds concise afterthoughts, rooting her flights of unnatural optimism firmly to earth, or, elsewhere, sending accounts of mundane things aloft like birds. She has just enumerated the dusty contents of a sultan’s guest house in the coastal city of Mukalla and laid herself to bed amid cigarette butts and scurrying mice when, she writes, “A dim little feeling came curling up through my sleepy senses; I wondered for a second what it might be before I recognized it: It was Happiness, pure and immaterial; independent of affections and emotions, the ethereal essence of happiness, a delight so rare and so impersonal that it seems scarcely terrestrial when it comes.” Freya Stark travels as travel writers should: with mind open, receptive to nuance, tolerant of squalor, prepared to admit the unlikely to the realm of the treasured.