ARABIA Dli3SERTA.*
ADVENTURE is the very marrow of life. It is said that certain animals, if deprived of their fleas, die of mere boredom and inanition, their occupation gone. So man without adventure would perish, for adventure permeates all that he does : it is his only reason for doing and being. Eating and drinking are simply an adventuring among flavours and consistencies ; love is, in its very being, adventure ; so is every kind of reading ; so are card-playing, commerce, the working-out of sums, the studies of science and philosophy, and the recurring peril of a daily shave. No human activity is too small and none too great to be included under this classification.
If man were a purely physical creature, to peruse or, still better, to enact a Penny Dreadful would be the summit of human experience. It happens, however, that the greater part of a civilized human-being is the spiritual (or, if the term is preferred, the mental) part, and so he demands adventure which is preponderatingly spiritual, whether immediate or gained through the mediation of the arts.
The reasons for the failure of the majority of books which are explicitly travel or adventure books is that they deal too exclusively with external and physical adventure, and that their author opposes the screen of a narrow personality between his readers and the adventure.
Travels in Arabia Desertal is supreme among books of adventure because it can be accused of neither of these failings. In it, physical adventure and spiritual adventure go hand in hand, complementary and inseparable ; and it is, besides, written by a man with a mind so great and universal that the reader can merge himself in it, and experience the adventures directly without the obscuring and numbing medium which a smaller mind must always interpose. Mr. Doughty is never the Englishman observing the Bedouin, never even the man of the West among men of the East. He is simply a great man with keen vision envisaging life and humanity. And so his book contains the body and spirit of desert Arabia and of the inhabitants of its sparse cities and inhospitable wildernesses. It has caught and preserved them in all their essentials, as a convex mirror concentrates into its narrow circle the visible details of a large room ; and we have
only to go to the book to experience desert Arabia for ourselves. For to read the book is really and profoundly an experience.
One emerges from it, in the course of one's reading, as from a vivid reality, to stare surprisedly at one's actual, familiar surroundings. It is easy to imagine that a man who has read the book might describe convincingly in his forgetful old age the strange things he saw, the men he knew, and the dangers out of which he hardly escaped in the Arabia which he had visited only in this greatest of travel books.
• (1) Trarels in Arabia Deserta. By C. M. Doughty. 2 vols. London : Jonathan Cape and The Medici Society, Ltd. [23 3s. net.1--(2) lEanderinys in Arabia. Dy the same Author. 2 vols. London : Duckworth. [20s. net.]
The curious antique style in which the book is written—a style which Mr. Doughty has so wonderfully wrought into a living and individual means of expression—will not baffle the least learned reader after a page or two has accustomed him to its strangeness. Its great cumulative effect does not rely at all upon fine passages and short flights of eloquence, and so it is never possible to represent by quotation the power and beauty of the whole. Two fragments which tell of parting with Amm Mohammed (Khalil is Mr. Doughty himself', will give some sense of the humanity of the book :—
"An Mohammed was displeased because I would not receive from him more than two handfuls of dates :—he was low himseli till the harvest, and there remained not a strike of corn in the village. I divided my medicines with the good man, and bought him a tunic and a now gun-stock : these with other reels of mine (which, since they were loose in my pockets, Abdullah had not taken from me), already spent for corn and saran in his house, might suffice that Amm Mohammed should not be barer at my departure, for all the great-hearted goodness which he had shown me in my long tribula- tion at Keybar. He said, Nay, Khalil, but leave me happy with the remembrance, and take it not away from me by requiting me ! only this I desire of thee that thou sometimes say, The Lord remember him for good. Am I not thy abu, art thou not my son, be we not brethren ? and thou art poor in the midst of a land which thou hast seen to be all hostile to thee. Also Ahmed would not suffer it ; what will my brother say ? and there would be talk among the Keyabara.' I answered, 'I shall say nothing ' : then he consented. So I ever used the Arabian hosptitality to my possibility: yet now I sinned in so doing, against that charitable integrity, the human affection, which was in Amm Mohammed ; and which, like the waxen powder upon summer fruits, is deflowered under any rude handling. When he received my gift, it seemed to him that I had taken away his gcod works I"
" Now God be with thee, my father Mohammed, and requite thee.'—` God speed thee, Khalil, and he took my hand. Amm Mohammed went back to his own, we passed further; and the world, and death, and the inhumanity of religions parted us for ever ! "
The passage which follows is one of many wonderful pictures of desert life :—
"Pleasant, as the fiery heat of the daylight is done, is our homely evening fire. The sun gone down upon a highland steppe of Arabia, whose common altitude is above three thousand feet, the thin dry air is presently refreshed, the sand is soon cold ; wherein yet at three fingers' depth is left a sunny warmth of the past day's heat until the new sunrise. After a half hour it is the blue night, and the cleat hoary starlight in which there shines the girdle of the milky way, with a marvellous clarity. As the sun is setting, the nomad house- wife brings in a truss of sticks and dry bushes, which she has pulled or hoed with a mattock (a tool they have seldom) in the wilderness ; she casts down this provision by our hearth-side, for the sweet- smelling evening fire. . . . At this first evening hour, the Beduw are all fi ahl-ha, in their households, to sup of such wretchedness as they may have ; there is no more wandering through the wide encampment, and the coming in then of any persons, not strangers, were an unseemly ignorance. The foster-camels lie couched before the booth of hair : and these Beduins let them lie still an hour, before the milking. The great, feeble brutes have wandered all day upon the droughty face of the wilderness ; they may hardly crop their fills, in those many hours, of so slender pastures. The mare stands tethered before the booth at the woman's side, where there is not much passage. Such dry wire-grass forage as they find in that waste is cast down beside her. When the Arabs have eaten their morsel and drunken leban of the flock, the few men of our menzil begin to assemble about the sheykh's hearth, where is some expectation of coffee. The younger or meanest of the com- pany, who is sitting or leaning on his elbow or lies next the faggot, will indolently reach back his hand from time to time for more dry rimth to cast on the fire, and other sweet resinous twigs till the flaming light leaps up again in the vast uncheerful darkness. . . . Glad at the fall of the empty daylight, the householders sit again to make talk, or silent and listless, with the drooping gravity of brute animals. Old men, always weary, and the herdtnen which were all day abroad in the sun, are lying now upon an elbow (this is the right Arab posture, and which Zeyd would have me learn and use), about the common fire. But the reposing of the common sort at home is to lie heels out backward about the hearth, as the spokes of a wheel, and flat upon their bellies (which they even think appeases the gnawing of hunger) ; and a little raising themselves, they discourse staying upon their breasts and two elbows: thus the men of this lean nation will later sleep, spreading only their tattered cloaks under them, upon the wild soil. . .
Everyone who loves fine literature will rejoice in the fact that this magnificent book is now somewhat more within the reach of the man of average means. For years both the original edition and Mr. Edward Garnett's abridged version, entitled Wanderings in Arabia,2 have been unobtainable, and the price of the new edition of the complete work, published nearly three years ago, was to most people prohibitive. Now Mr. Jonathan Cape and The Medici Society have issued at three guineas a complete edition which is actually better in appearance than the nine-guinea edition. For those who cannot yet afford the complete work, Messrs. Duckworth and Co.'s new edition of the abridged version at a sovereign will provide an excellent substitute. MARTIN ARMSTRONG.
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