From ‘Arabian Sands’ by Wilfred Thesiger

24-page manuscript book, written out in Chinese ink with gouache illustrations on 100 gsm Zerkall hammered paper with 80 gsm Satogami yellow endpapers, 300 gsm Somerset card cover and Gampi Bougainvillea paper jacket. Completed in April 2021

I spent some time during the Covid lockdown restrictions re-reading many of the books on my shelves. One of the most rewarding was Arabian Sands, the account of Wilfred Thesiger’s hugely impressive several crossings of the Empty Quarter with the Rashid between 1945 and 1949, which I possess in the admirable Collins edition of 1959.

In the section I have chosen to reproduce, Thesiger emphasizes the importance of the manner in which the journey is conducted, which has to be achieved in his view with the simplest of means. Though nothing like as rigorous, I find an echo in my own walks through the mountains, carrying all that is needed for survival.

I am not sure that I agree with Thesiger about Scott’s heroic failure in the Antarctic, since it seems to me that he jeopardised not only his own life but also those of his team through his refusal to use dogs. However, as subsequent events have proven, it is possible to climb Everest without oxygen, although the mountain these days has become a symbol in many ways of all that is wrong in our society - ‘not mountaineering, but queuing,’ as Robert Macfarlane has written elsewhere.

Perhaps for complex reasons, Thesiger was notably hard on himself, as the amusing episode towards the end of Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush exemplifies, where Thesiger castigates Newby and his companion Hugh Carless for the use of blow-up mattresses when camping - in itself a simple enough expedient to avoid Evelyn Waugh’s well-made assertion that ‘any fool can be uncomfortable’.