8vo. Volume I: xxiii 386 pp., frontispiece portrait of Emir Faisal Ibn Saud, 1 plan, 93 b/w photographic plates / Volume II: vii, 354 pp., 8 b/w plates, 2 folding maps, half-titles, contemporary green cloth, slightly rubbed, occasional foxing mainly to endpapers & outer edges, otherwise set in very 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, was 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, Shakespear and Gertrude Bell, to name but a few of those whose names are writ large on the scroll of Arabian explorers”.