Travels in Arabia Deserta - Volume Two Only

New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1979. Trade Paperback. Very Good/No Dust Jacket. 6 1/2" X 9 1/4. Doughty, Charles Montagu - Numerous Sketches. 696 Pages with Comprehensive 117 Page Index and Glossary. This is VOLUME TWO ONLY. Light wear to covers. Back cover has price blacked out. No other marks or stamps and interior text pages are white and tight. This Dover edition, first published in 1979, is an unabridged and unaltered republication of the definitive version of the third edition published in London in 1936 by Jonathan Cape Ltd. The work was originally published in 1888 by Cambridge University Press. The second edition was published in London by P. Lee Warner in January, 1921, and the third edition was first issued by the same publisher in October 1921. Colonel T. E. Lawrence derived much of the original inspiration for his Arabian adventures from Charles M. Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta. Of this book, little known to the public but long famous among Arabists, travelers, geographers, and connoisseurs of English prose, Lawrence wrote, "I have studied it for ten years, and have grown to consider it a book not like other books, but something particular, a bible of its kind . The book has no date and can never grow old. It is the first and indispensable work upon the Arabs of the desert." By training geologist, by inclination itinerant scholar, Doughty first heard of strange Arabian inscriptions while drifting about Syria. To see and record them, and to chart the unknown land formations, he joined the pilgrimage caravan to Mecca, leaving it to live with the fanatical Hejaz and Nejd nomads, at all times subject to abuse, threats, and indignities for refusing to deny his Christianity. His descriptions of Beduin grandeur and pettiness, his accounts of daily famine level existence and endurance of desert and Mohammedan extremes, rank the book with the greatest travel~ethnographic journals and geographic commentaries. Yet it is his style which marks the book unique: Doughty believed the English language had fallen from grace since Spenser; he set out to restore its beauty through sonorous rhythm and a vocabulary and syntax recalling the Tyndale Bible. The result is a memorable fitting of style to subject, for it often seemed to Doughty those two years that he was back among the Patriarchs of Judah and Ishmael. The uncut Dover edition in two volumes brings Arabia Deserta back, after many years' regrettable absence, to rejoin the few travel masterpieces of the language. The Aramaic inscriptions Doughty recorded are translated by Ernest Renan; a note on architecture, a note on geology, numerous sketches by Doughty, and an index with glossary of Arabic words complete this most unusual essay, this book which has been, like Arabia itself, much talked of, but rarely seen.