Pages Lost
in the Mists of Time
I
have been very fortunate to find a few rare books and some not so rare,
but not always available to folks with more sense than me when it comes
to spending wisely. Like my horses, old books are an obsession that
would best be served if I could find an encounter group to provide
intervention when I am overcome by the fever. Lacking that, and knowing
if I have $3 I will find a $3 book I cannot live without, I will at
least try to share passages that I have found interesting, enlightening,
or at least amusing.
I
have recently been interested in the Arabian peninsula as opposed to that Arabia
we now call the Middle East. The nineteenth-century Western explorers
most familiar to us like the Blunts, Raswan and others, mostly launched
their journeys from the Arabian ports on the Mediterranean (with the
noted exception of the intrepid Freya Stark). Bertram Thomas began his
journey in Doha on the Persian Gulf so he traveled through an
environment very different from that described by others visitors.
Bertram Thomas (1892 - 1950) was a British representative in
Trans-Jordan, sometime political officer in Iraq, and wazir to H.H.
Sultan of Muscat and Oman. I chose this first entry simply because I
enjoy his talented writing style and his ability to let us see what he
saw; a different view of Arabia.
Arabia Felix :
Across the Empty Quarter of Arabia,
1938
Arabia Felix! Strange that the epithet
"Happy" should grace a part of the earth's surface, most of it barren
wilderness where, since the dawn of history, man has ever been at war
with his environment and his neighbor. Yet there can be no mistaking the
classical geographers. To Strabo, Pliny, and Ptolemy, the term Arabia
Felix served for the entire peninsula south of the Syrian desert (Arabia
Deserta) and the mountains about Sinai (Arabia Petraea). True, the term
consorts ill with the horrid wastes of Rub' al Khali that form no small
part of Arabia, but there lies in the central south, bordering the
Indian Ocean, a land at once of rare physical loveliness and of ancient
fame. If there be any region in Arabia entitled to the epithet "Happy,"
other than the Yemen, whose glories were well known to the ancients, it
is this province of Dhufar, an Arcadia of luxuriant forests that clothe
steep mountains overlooking the sea, of perennial streams and sunny
meadows, of wide vistas and verdant glades. Here, according to the
writer of Genesis, Jehova had set the limit of the known world “as thou
goest east unto Mount Sephar;” hither came the ancient Egyptians for
frankincense to embalm their sacred Pharaohs; here, may be, were hewed
the pillars of Solomon’s Temple, if indeed Dhufar be not the site of
Ophir itself, and the traditional market for ivory and peacocks’
feathers. . .
The virgin Rub’ al Khali, the Great
Southern Desert! To have laboured in Arabia is to have tested inevitably
of her seduction, and six years ago when I left the Administration of
Transjordan for the Court of Muscat and Oman I already cherished secret
dreams. The remote recesses of the earth, Arctic and Antarctic, the
sources of the Amazon, and the vast inner spaces of Asia, have one by
one yielded their secrets to man’s curiosity, until by a strange chance
the Rub’ al Khali remained almost the last considerable terra
incognita, which is surprising considering the great antiquity of
settled Arabia, the borderlands of which touched the early civilisations
of Egypt and Babylonia.
Yet Arabia has remained the forbidden
land. Throughout the centuries scarce twenty European explorers have
been able usefully to penetrate to her inhospitable heart. For this
there are two main reasons. First, lack of rain and the merciless heat
of the Arabian desert permit of but scattered and semi-barbarous nomad
societies, which are at such perpetual war that, even for themselves,
life is insecure. Secondly, the religion of these desert men, at least
in practice, is fanatical and exclusive. . .
The Qara
Mountains – What a glorious place! Mountains three thousand feet high
basking above a tropical ocean, their seaward slopes velvety with waving
jungle, their roofs fragrant with rolling yellow meadows, beyond which
the mountains slope northwards to a red sandstone steppe. Two
incongruous aspects, but true at any point throughout the strip above
the Jurbaib plain. Great was my delight when in 1928 I suddenly came
upon it all from out of the arid wastes of the southern borderlands. The
red aspect came first. A white pebbly bed (Wadi Dhikur) led up into a
magnificent gorge of red cliffs, three hundred feet high and more, their
faces carved by nature into recesses that threw dark fantastic shadows.
The scene brought back old Petra to my mind. Thence we crossed the
watershed of the Qutun, thick with tishgaut jungle, a
libaniferous shrub inferior to frankincense, and so on down through
wooded valleys to Dahaq, a mighty five-hundred-foot precipice, wither
the Bents had come and wondered whether Ptomemy’s Abyssapolis was not to
be found there. But ere we reached it the hazy rim o the distant sea
lifted beyond to the brink of the Valley of Darbat, an exquisite picture
as we looked down through a tangle of tree-tops to the stream, lined
with trembling willows, a wall of tropical jungle rising sheer above us
on every side. We made our way towards the plashing waters, the snapping
of the undergrowth as we went giving alarm to the herons that lived amid
these sylvan scenes.
