Wilfred Thesiger - Arabian Sands (Penguin Classics)

1. Bin Kabina

2. The author during the second crossing of the empty quarter

3. The Empty Quarter: the crest of a great dune from the windward side

4. The Empty Quarter: descending a great dune

5. Wind-towers on a house beside the creek at Dibai

6. A Woman of the Harasis

7. A Saar family on the move

8. Bin Ghabaisha

9. Sulaim, our rabia from the Mahra

10. One of the bin Maaruf Saar, the wolves of the desert

11. Zayids falconers

12. A camel from the Batina

13. A Kuwaiti boom returning from Zanzibar

14. In the Oman Mountains

15. In the oasis of Liwa

16. Bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha in Oman

ARABIAN SANDS

WILFRED THESIGER was born in Addis Ababa in 1910 and educated at Eton and Oxford where he got his blue for boxing. In 1935 he joined the Sudan Political Service and, at the outbreak of the Second World War, was seconded to the Sudan Defence Force. He later served in Abyssinia, Syria and with the SAS in the Western Desert, and was awarded the DSO. After the war he travelled in Arabia, Kurdistan, the Marshes of Iraq, the Hindu Kush, the Karakorams, Morocco, Abyssinia, Kenya and Tanganyika, always on foot or with animal transport. In recognition of his journeys he received the Founders Gold Medal from the Royal Geographical Society, the Lawrence of Arabia Medal from the Royal Central Asian Society, the Livingstone Gold Medal from the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and the Burton Memorial Medal from the Royal Asiatic Society. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy. In 1968 he received the CBE, and a knighthood in 1995.

In his two greatest books, Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs, he gives a vivid account of a way of life which, until recently, had continued for thousands of years. The Marsh Arabs, which won the 1964 W. H. Heinemann Award, is also published in Penguin Classics. Wilfred Thesigers other books include Desert, Marsh and Mountain: The World of a Nomad, his autobiography, The Life of My Choice, and Visions of a Nomad. An accomplished photographer, he donated his extensive collection of negatives to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Wilfred Thesiger died in 2003.

RORY STEWART was born in Hong Kong and educated at Eton and Oxford. He served briefly as an infantry Officer in the Black Watch before joining the Foreign Office and serving in Indonesia and then as British Representative in Montenegro. Between 2000 and 2002 he walked 6,000 miles across Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal and Afghanistan. In 2003 he was appointed as the Coalition Deputy Governor of Maysan and Dhi Qar in the Marsh regions of southern Iraq. He is the author of The Places in Between and Occupational Hazards. He now lives in Kabul where he runs the Turquoise Mountain Foundation. He was awarded the OBE in 2004.

WILFRED THESIGER

With an introduction by RORY STEWART

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN CLASSICS

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First published in Great Britain by Longmans, Green 1959
First published in the United States of America by E. P. Dutton 1959
Published in Penguin Books 1964; reprinted with a new preface 1984; reprinted with a
second preface 1991
Published with a new introduction in Penguin Classics 2007

Copyright The Estate of Wilfred Thesiger, 1959, 1984, 1991
Introduction copyright Rory Stewart, 2007
All rights reserved

The publishers are indebted to Messrs J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd for permission to quote
a prayer from the Rodwell translation of The Koran in the Everyman Library edition.

The moral right of the authors has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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which it is published and without a similar condition including this