Arabian Sands

Wilfred Thesiger crossed the Empty Quarter of Arabia twice in the late 1940s with Bedu companions, on camel, carrying almost nothing, and wrote this account knowing the life he described was already ending. He was clear-eyed that oil money would finish it and that he himself was part of the intrusion. The prose is spare to the point of austerity, and the book is as much about the men he travelled with as the desert.