8vo. Volume I: xxiii, 386 pp., frontispiece portrait of Emir Faisal Ibn Saud, 1 plan, 93 b/w photographic plates, author's signed Presentation copy to T. D. Cree, dated 1929 / Volume II: vii, 354 pp., 8 b/w plates, 2 folding maps, half-titles, original green cloth, lightly rubbed at spine extremities, occasional foxing mainly preliminary leaves and outer edges, otherwise set in good condition, Constable & Co., London, first edition, 1922.

Synopsis

Harry St John Bridger Philby CIE (1885-1960), also known as Jack Philby or Sheikh Abdullah, an Arabist, explorer, writer, and British colonial office intelligence officer.
“Of the pleasant year I spent sojourning and wandering amid the deserts and cases of Arabia I have endeavoured to compile a record, at once fully descriptive of my own experiences and designed to serve my successors as a faithful guide in their wanderings, when in their turn they take up the torch which has been held in the past by so many distinguished hands: Niebuhr and Burckhardt, Sadlier and Burton, Doughty and the Blunts, Wallin and Wellsted, Huber and Halevy, Euting and Guarmani, and, in modern times, Shakespeare and Gertrude Bell, to name but a few of those whose names are writ large on the scroll of Arabian explorers”.