Doughty was one of those legendary eccentric Englishmen who made the late-Victorian era so brilliantly fun to read about. "Arabia Deserta" (and, yes, the full work is worth finding) is his account of his wanderings amongst the Bedouin of what's now southern Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia, back when it was all loosely under Turkish rule. Doughty was a lone infidel--- and very much upfront about being a believing Victorian Christian ---with no money or real skills, living with tribes whose reaction varied from violent robbery to open-handed hospitality. His account was written up in a strange, archaic, almost 17th-c. English that he developed himself. Beautiful language, powerful scenes, a kind of violent empathy for his hosts. Don't look to Doughty for enthnography or politics or geography. Look to him for the sweep of the language and for a vivid and overawed sense of place.
Doughty's deliberately archaic language makes this book tough going, but his account is still fascinating. Harder for me than the language, actually, is his intense religiosity and endless proselytizing. (Needless to say, I skimmed right over those numerous passages.)
I should probably get the "condensed" version of this book (selected passages), for I've never managed to finish it and doubt I ever will. Still, even just in bits, it's a book that made a distinct impression. You've got to admire anyone with that much determination, stamina, and pigheaded individuality, if nothing else.
It gives a very good idea about the manner of people living at Arabia 150 years ago ! Although Doughty was an extremist to his religion he was fair when he describe the Bedouins and their rude behavior and manners . I thought the book interesting
An eccentric English poet spends two years in the 1870s wandering Arabia, or perhaps better, blundering around Arabia. The natives, with a few exceptions, don鈥檛 live up to his standards. We never learn what they thought of this exotic stranger who didn鈥檛 understand and was unwilling to live by the customs of the country. This memoir is written in his unique version of English, for example 鈥渋t is written in their hard faces that they are overcomers of the evil by the evil, and able to deal in the long desert way with the perfidy of the elvish Beduins.鈥� Why did I stick with it? He is an engaging story teller and I was captivated. But I think more importantly his account of travelling with the Bedouins tells how these people lived a precarious life at the edge of death: by thirst, or starvation, or mishap. Most of human time on this planet has been so, but we have no experience of it today. Samuel Hearne鈥檚 account of crossing the Barren Lands in 1769 tells a similar story, but such accounts are rare.
S矛, 猫 bello, s矛 ti porta in un mondo sconosciuto, ma alla fin fine le sue disavventure in Arabia, coi wahabiti ( come gli attuali) che ce l'hanno con lui perch猫 ammette di essere cristiano, bene o male si ripetono. Si sentiva sicuro perch茅 "inglis"? certo che la regina Vittoria al caso lo avrebbe vendicato? e come faceva, veniva continuamente derubato ma gli rimanevano sempre medicine e qualcosina... al principio mi ha ricordato quando una trentina di anni fa, in viaggio organizzato, anche noi bevemmo il t猫 sotto una tenda coi beduini in Siria.
Charles Doughty鈥檚 imposing 1,400 page tome is one of those strange books many people hail as a masterpiece of travel literature but which few of those people have read. Famous among scholars of Arab history and culture, it鈥檚 more often been described as 鈥渁n achievement鈥� than a gripping read. But thanks to this well chosen selection from Dover Publications, the casual reader can now enjoy some of the author鈥檚 best passages without bogging down in rambling Victorian-age digressions.
Charles Doughty traveled the Arabian peninsula in the 1870鈥檚, when Wahabi fanaticism was at its height. Other explorers had made similar journeys before him, but usually in disguise. Doughty traveled openly as a Christian and an Englishman, among ragged Bedouin tribesmen and devious Arabian townsmen, through desolate wasteland where his life was worth less than the coins in his pocket. He was repeatedly robbed, sometimes beaten, and often taken advantage of, but he also found kindness, honesty, and companionship on his journey. Once you get past the old-fashioned style of his prose, the story of his famine-level existence and his endurance of climactic and cultural extremes makes for a gripping read.
Doughty鈥檚 remarkable firsthand observations of Arab life and culture provide modern readers with a window into our now vanished past, as well as a glimpse of what it was like to travel before there were hostels, tour packages, or the Lonely Planet. Travels in Arabia Deserta can be a challenging read, but the insights you鈥檒l come away with are worth the effort.
A masterpiece of travel writing, a tour de force of adventure writing, a profound philosophical work, in one of the most elegant styles written since Spenser. It is very long, longer than War and Peace, but like that work, the longer the better because when it stops, when he leaves his journey in Arabia among the Bedu, you wish he would keep going. You feel like you are with him on the entire journey, experiencing what he experiences, the beauty, the agony, the frustrations, the wonder of it all, the death threats, the friendship, the loneliness, the discovery of another world and way of life. The Folio edition is a fine one and contains very evocative photographs from the period. If you have not read it, then you do not know what you are missing.
Ongoing experiment I have the book on my phone and occasionally read it when stuck in lines somewhere. Any random place in the book is good enough though. 2 minutes and you are in a different world. A great window into Arabia as it was before the modern world hit it (or it hit the modern world). by the way, I think Lawrence of Arabia met Doughty at some point in England and got tips about the Arabs (if i remember correctly)
Wildly racist and full of excessive detail on such as rocks, weather, and baroque tribal formations. Doughty was an amazingly cantankerous fucker, constantly proclaiming the inferiority of Arab ways to anyone who would listen, and his seemingly endless supply of cowpox vaccine and other medical gear is, one imagines, the real reason he managed to live through all this. There鈥檚 some really amazing prose interspersed throughout; you just can鈥檛 read it like a normal book.
I really tried but found "Travels in Arabia Deserta" to be impossible to get through -- I gave up 200 pages in. The book is extremely dry and consists of Doughty mostly wandering around, describing the artifacts and landscape while dropping tons and tons of Arabic words into the mix. Apologies to T.E. Lawrence, who loved this work, but this book just hasn't aged well.