Travel Library
2 total works
Wilfred Thesiger charts the time he spent living with the Bedu, including his legendary traverses of the Empty Quarter. Wilfred Thesiger is the last of the great British eccentric explorers, a legendary figure renowned for his travels though some of the most inaccessible places on earth. Arabian Sands was his widely acclaimed first book and is recognized as one of the great travel classics. His evocative prose and stunning photographs capture the spirit of the proud tribespeople who became his friends and the harsh landscape he inhabited with them in a way very few westeners have.
Wilfred Thesiger's classic account of the eight years he spent living with the tribes people of the Marshes of Iraq. First published in 1964 to great acclaim, this book by one of the century's greatest explorers describes a way of life which lasted for thousands of years, but has now all but vanished. Travelling with his medicine boxes and his teams of canoemen around the junction between the Tigris and the Euphrates, Thesiger visited nearly every village in the Central Marshes and came to know intimately the people who inhabit this landscape of islands, lakes and waterways, living with them in their reed houses and sharing their unique way of life. He beautifully evokes the landscape and its teeming wildlife and vividly brings to life the many friends he made among the Marsh Arabs. His extraordinary photographs provide a stunning record of the last remnants of a people and their culture.