ARABIA DESERTA.* Tnnrry-Tanen years ago the Spectator welcomed Mr. Doughty's
wonderful book on Desert Arabia. We are glad now to record the appearance of a handsome reprint, containing the whole of the text and illustrations and the map, with an introduction by Colonel Lawrence. It is passing strange that so great a book should not have been reprinted in full long ago. Arabia had no special attractions for the English public until the war came, and brought the King of the Hedjaz and the Emir of Er Riadh into prominence as our allies. But no discriminating reader could afford to overlook Mr. Doughty's astonishing narrative of hazardous adventure, written in prose, by turns whimsical and majestic, such as no one else in our time has achieved. It is not an easy book. The author interweaves so many Arabic words into the English of the Authorized Version and of Robinson Crusoe that he at first repels us. Yet, after the first twenty pages, the account of the " Haj " or pilgrimage to Mecca becomes so absorbing that it is difficult to put the book down, and the interest is sustained throughout Mr. Doughty's wanderings in the desert until the very end, when he fell among thieves near Mecca and barely escaped with his life. As a picture of a strange people it is incomparable. Mr. Doughty describes the nomads as they are, with their virtues and vices. The truth of his description is obvious.
• Travels in Arabia Darnel. By Charles Id. Doughty. With an Introduction by T. E. Lawrence. 2 vole. London : P. Lee Warner and Jonathan Cape.
119 2e. net.] Colonel Lawrence, who, as we all know, lived and fought with the nomads for several years during the war, says bluntly :—
" It is not comfortable to have to write about Arabia Deserta. I have studied it for ten years, and have grown to consider it a book not like other books, but something particular, a Bible of its kind. To turn round now and reckon its merits and demerits seems absurd. I do not think that any traveller in Arabia before or since Mr. Doughty has qualified himself to praise the book—much less to blame it. 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. . . . I have talked the book over with many travellers, and we are agreed that here you have all the desert, its hills and plains, the lava fields, the villages, the tents, the men and animals. They are told of to the life, with words and phrases fitted to them so perfectly that one cannot dissociate them in memory. It is the true Arabia, the land with its smells and dirt, as well as its nobility and freedom. There is no sentiment, nothing merely picturesque, that most common failing of Oriental travel-books. Doughty's complete- ness is devastating. There is nothing we would take away, little we could add. He took all Arabia for his province, and has left to his successors only the poor part of specialists. We may write books on parts of the desert or some of the history of it, but them can never be another picture of the whole in our time, because here it is all said, and by a great master."
Mr. Doughty, in a new preface, says that, as " a disciple of the divine Muse of Spenser and Venerable Chaucer," with a keen interest in men and in geology, he travelled for ten years in Europe, Syria, and Egypt. He visited Petra, to the south of the Dead Sea, and llama, and there heard of the rock-inscrip- tions at Medain Salih, farther south on the pilgrim route to Medina. " Interested as I was, in all that pertains to Biblical research,- I resolved to accept the hazard of visiting' them." Disguised as a Syrian, he went with the Persian pilgrims in the great caravan of 1876 to Medain Salih and copied the inscriptions. Then he " rode with a friendly sheykh of the district Beduins to live with them awhile in the high desert," and afterwards went eastward across the desert to Hail and thence south and west to Taif, passing on by the outskirts of Mecca to .Teddah. For these two long and weary years he was alone among a wild and treacherous people. He made no secret of his Christian faith, which exposed him to constant peril. He was poor and slenderly equipped. All that he could offer his hosts was medical advice and a few simple drugs. Apart from that he had to depend on his own personality. The nomads evidently liked him and found his conversation entertaining. Yet as the Russo-Turkish War was raging, and the Crescent was being driven back before the Cross, some Moslem fanatic might at any moment have been moved to avenge the Turkish defeats on the harmless traveller. Mr. Doughty profited to some extent by the respect which all Eastern peoples had for " the word of an Englishman," though the British Consul at Damascus, in an excess of discretion, had refused him any help. But his readers are left marvelling, even now, at the good fortune which attended Mr. Doughty and enabled him to survive his dangerous adventures. " I spent nine months in Western Arabia," says Colonel Lawrence, " much of it in the districts through which he had passed, and I found that he had become history in the desert " :—
" They tell tales of him, making something of a legend of the tall and impressive figure, very wise and gentle, who came to them like a herald of the outside world. His aloofness from the common vexations of their humanity coloured their imagination. He was very patient, generous and pitiful, to be accepted into their confidence without doubt. . . . He was the first Reglish- man they had met. He predisposed them to give a chance to other men of his race, because they had found him honourable and good."
Nothing in Arabia Deserta is more memorable than the repeated insistence on the terrible poverty of the land. The Spectator quoted some typical passages in 1888, and we cannot do better than quote them again, for they are fundamental :- "Arabia is a lawless land of famine. . . Almost as the birds must the poor Beduins live at such times of the year, when the milk is up until the new dates. As the sun's vast flaming eye rose each day upon us with new bringing of suffocating hours, the remembrance revives within our fainting breasts of our want with the hollow thought : What shall be for this day's life Y '- and the summer I passed thus fasting and Beduin-wise, lying upon the elbow. Yet in this low state there was hardly a week when some householder had not some sacrifice, whether the year's mind for his ancestors, for the birth of a son, for his recovery from sickness, or for the health of his camels. Then a man's friends assemble to the distribution of the boiled flesh. . . . Bare of all things of which there is no need, the days of our mortality are so easy, and become a long quiescence ! Such is the nomad life, a long holiday, wedded to a divine simplicity, but with this often long tolerance of hunger in the the desert). . . . The nomads lie every day of their lives on their hungry maws, waiting, for the mercy of Allah."
And again :
" This is the incurious misery of human minds faint with the hunger of generations and grown barren in the desert.. . The Arabs, in their suffering manner of life (their cup of life is drawn very low and easily stirred at the dregs) which eagers the blood and weakens the heart, are of a jealous frenetic heat towards their enemies ; of this also is the Semitic fanaticism. They are in any warfare as the wasps of mankind, too much tempted in their nature to sting the adversary, even though they leave some of their' own bowels in them. . . . For any endeavour that their necessity may cast upon them, they can rouse themselves erect and magnanimous, whence that saying on the oases' The Bedu are all heart,' but the famine upon them, it• is a short fit, as man's brains unsettle over the fainting stomach, he submits himself to Allah and must sit down again."
Colonel Lawrence concurs in this view of the effect of famine on the Beduin temperament :- " The desert Arab finds no joy like the joy of voluntarily holding back. He finds luxury in abnegation, renunciation, self-restraint. He lives his own life in a hard selfishness. His desert is made a spiritual ice-house ; in which is preserved intact but unimpaired for alleges an idea of the unity of God."
We will touch only on one other point. The attentive reader of Mr. Doughty's book will be slow indeed to believe in the fine projects of an Arab Confederation which have been put before the world of late. Mr. Doughty shows only too clearly that the nomad Arabs are incapable of sustained co-operation for any purpose. He could not persuade a few idle men of one tribe to combine together and clear out a ruined well for their common benefit. The tribes were, and are, divided by ancient feuds. Hail and Er Riadh, Er Riadh and the Hedjaz, may at any moment be at war. The nomads detest the town Arabs and are disliked by them. Only by ignoring these facts can one profess any confidence in an Arab State, embracing all Arabs. The United States of Europe of which some enthusiasts dream would be less of a chimera than a United Arabia.
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