8vo. xiv, 339 pp., frontispiece portrait, 1 folding map, 39 b/w plates, arranged for publication by Katherine McGiffert Wright, contemporary cloth, slightly soiled, occasional foxing, otherwise copy in very good condition, Jonathan Cape, Printed in the USA, 1931.

Synopsis

Alois Musil (1868-1944) was a noted, early Arabist, and professor in Prague. This covers his travels in the desert from 1896 to 1915 in what is now Syria, Jordan, Iraq and the north end of Saudi Arabia.
The journeys described in the present volume formed but a part of far-flung wanderings in the deserts of Arabia between the years 1896 and 1915. Musil’s earlier work in the biblical lands of Moab and Edom, or the Arabia Petraea of the classical geographers, established his European reputation as an explorer of exceptional hardihood and courage and as a profound student of Bedouin life and of the ancient history of Arabic lands. In 1898 Musil made the sensational discovery of the “famous Quseyr Amra [or Castle of Amra] near the head of Wadi Sirhan”. Between 1908 and 1915 he carried out far more extended explorations in the immense deserts between the Tigris and the settled frontiers of Syria and southward into the Nejd. [Foreword].