Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [7]
"Charles Doughty," I inquired. "Travels in Arabia Deserta. Have it by any chance?"
"No," said Virginia.
"Well, then, maybe..." I started to say, wondering if the book could be tracked down.
"No," repeated Virginia, peering over her steel spectacles. "You wouldn't like it. Not at all." Then, hesitating not a second, she rounded the counter, marched across the shop, ran her finger across a shelf, and removed a modest worn blue volume. "Read this."
"Well, no, what I really..."
"Blowhard. Full of himself, I'll tell you," Virginia proclaimed, coming down pretty hard on poor Doughty. "Tried to reinvent the English language, making it courtly like classical Arabic." By way of contrast she held out the blue volume. On its cover was a lone, faded golden figure riding a camel and the title Arabia Felix. "Read this."
"Well, well I'm not sure ... but okay." Having sampled the cookies, it seemed impolite to leave empty-handed.
"Good. You'll like it. He had red hair, like you," she said, referring to the author of the book, Bertram Thomas.
Bertram Thomas, I soon learned, was an amazing, tenacious, extremely likable fellow. But for his refreshing lack of self-promotion, he would be counted among the greatest of Arabian explorers. He writes nothing of his life prior to the day in the late 1920s that he set foot in Arabia Felix ("Happy Arabia," the old Roman name for southern Arabia), where he had accepted an offer to become the wazir, or financial adviser, to the sultan of Muscat and Oman. It was hardship duty. For the better part of the year, the small coastal city of Muscat baked and sweltered like no other place on earth. Nighttime temperatures refused to drop, as they did inland in the desert. At two o'clock in the morning, the temperature was as high as 124 degrees Fahrenheit, the humidity an unbearable 100 percent.
Thomas's Muscat days were spent managing, as best he could, the accounts of a court and country that exported only firewood, rotting sardines (for fertilizer), and slaves. Every day at sunset, a cannon was fired, and the gates of the walled medieval city swung shut. Until dawn the next day, everyone was confined to their dwellings, with the exception of the chosen few to whom the sultan had issued a special identifying lantern.
As wazir, Thomas had a lantern, and at night he could roam the fitfully sleeping city. He could climb its medieval mud-brick walls and gaze away to the north. Beyond the coastal mountains, he knew, the moon that shone on Muscat shone also on the dunes of the Rub' al-Khali. The desert was the secret reason Thomas had come here: he had long wanted to be the first Westerner not only to venture into its heart but to actually cross it—even though T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) had determined that "nothing but an airship can do it."4
In his time in Muscat, Bertram Thomas changed. A photograph taken early on shows him posed in front of a crumbling doorway, incongruously dressed in a wool suit and felt hat. But soon the hat was replaced by a jaunty turban, the somber suit by a flowing robe. He raised a beard and carried a camel stick. And Thomas found excuses to venture away from Muscat. On his travels he got along famously with desert tribesmen. In their company he rode by camel to the edge of the Rub' al-Khali and saw for himself that (as a bedouin saying went), "Where there is no water, that's the Empty Quarter; no man goes thither."
Back at the sultan's court, Thomas was asked a question:
"Why aren't you married, O Wazir?" was fired off at me by an uncomprehending Arab.
I expatiated on the difficulties under which a Christian labored, especially one serving in the East, and pointed to the comforting doctrine that for a man it was never too late.
"Ah!" said the Sultan, knowing of my secretly cherished desire, "quite right. Insha'allah, I will help to marry you one of these days to that which is near to your heart— Rub' al-Khali. Insha'allah!"
"A virgin indeed," quoth Khan Bahadur, his private secretary.