AN IMPRESSIVE ENTERTAINMENT
The Syrian Desert. Caravans. Travels. Exploration. By C. P. Grant, M.A., Ph.D. (Black. 18s.)
A Boos can earn a reader's gratitude in no more heartening and satisfying way than by increasing his curiosity at the expense of his critical spirit. This The Syrian Desert, owing little to style, nothing even to the imaginative flight over this most tempting of taking-off grounds, achieves by an acute sense of selection, hand in hand with an impressive .knowledge of the subject. This book is obviously destined for every library with an oriental department, but it deserves a wider public than it will probably reach. For too long specialists have extorted homage from the frightened herd by appearing in the sacerdotal devil-mask of unreadability ; Dr. Grant is a specialist who has succeeded in establishing beautiful term.; with the general reader. Her account is admirably easy to follow, and the interest of the reader is maintained because everywhere her book vibrates with the pure poetry of facts.
Briefly this work might be described as a comprehensive
reference book. As the authoress points out, Arabia, Deserta or Felix, has enticed nearly every travelling scholar to itself, and away from the Syrian Desert, a region, in some respects, of greater historical importance although geographically more inaccessible. Therefore it has come abdut that the history of travel and life in the Syrian Desert is to -be found, not in an accumulation of records, so much as in the byways and digressions of a multitude of books on neighbouring subjects. To pick out what is relevant to her own appointed study in travel records from El Mukaddassi to the author of The Black Tents of Arabia, besides extensive travelling and observation on her own, has been a task to which Dr. Grant has devoted four years. She touches on no subject in her versatile work which she cannot approach with an expert understanding. Nor has she put a jealous guard on the harvests of her research. Her notes on sources provide an illuminating guide to a like achievement by the ambitious reader : the original materials of every one of her pages are neatly tabulated, in the order of the pages, in an appendix at the end of the book.
It is easy to praise this book and the fine sustained effort which must have produced it ; it is difficult to explain exactly what makes it so extraordinarily pleasant to read. At a first glance one might say that although it is a work of important scholarship its readability does not depend on the individual manner, for this is quite impersonal ; but perhaps that very impersonality gives the book its great quality.
" Caravans in danger or distress were accustomed to send a nadeer for aid ; and such a messenger was recognised from afar by his reversed saddle and his rent garments."
That is the kind of information which remains in the memory for ever, nourishing the imagination like a concentrated food pill. " In time, perhaps," the authoress says in her last paragraph, " a History of the Syrian Desert will be written." This is not a piece of false modesty, and one can only hope that Dr. Grant will undertake the task. The maker of such a palatable pill might well try her hand at the preparation of a banquet.
CHRISTOPHER SYKES.
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