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But to Bertram Thomas's increasing dismay, the sultan was reluctant to let his wazir go roaming north across the great desert. And a rival now threatened Thomas's dream. In Riyadh, in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Harry St. John Philby, a flamboyant Arabist late of the British Foreign Service, was poised to attempt a crossing of the Rub' al-Khali in the opposite direction, north to south.6 The two men knew each other. Earlier in the decade, Thomas had spent some time working for the British Foreign Service in Transjordan. Harry Philby had been his superior and had advised Thomas to take the Muscat and Oman assignment, confiding that Muscat was "the best starting point for crossing the Empty Quarter." There's a hint of duplicity here. Did Philby make the suggestion out of the goodness of his heart? Or did he see this as an opportunity to get Thomas out of the way, to put him in the clutches of a possessive and paranoid sultan, so that he, Philby, could claim exploration's last great prize?

The rivalry was heightened by a strange shared vision. Both Thomas and Philby saw the Rub' al-Khali as a beckoning yet veiled virgin. Thomas called the Rub' al-Khali "the sands of my desire." Philby called the same sands "the bride of my constant desire."7 But, though there were two suitors, there could be only one husband.

On an October night in 1930, unbeknownst to his sultan, Bertram Thomas stole away from Muscat with the anticipation that "tomorrow, the news of my disappearance would startle the bazaar and a variety of fates would doubtless be invented for me by imaginations of oriental fertility."8 He rowed to a rendezvous with a passing oil tanker and "ere four bells had struck" was on his way by sea to the southern Omani town of Salalah. There he would find guides and outfit his expedition.

Thomas liked Salalah. The place had a cheerful African air. He was particularly amused by the unusual fate of the town's black slaves. Their Arab masters led grim, obsessive lives, forever worrying over the shame that would fall upon them if any of their veiled, sequestered wives or daughters took a wayward turn. By contrast, a household's slaves enjoyed a happy-go-lucky freedom unimaginable to their masters. And, dancing and singing in the dirt streets of Salalah, they saw Thomas off on December 10, 1930, as he headed north with a train of fifteen camels and a rascally band of bedouin of uncertain repute. Salalah's wali, or mayor, had warned Thomas, "If there is a thing they do better than lying, it is stealing."

Far to the north, in Riyadh, Harry Philby was informed that this year, at least, he would not be granted permission to travel south across the Rub' al-Khali. If he would like, the following year he could again petition the king, 'Abdul 'Aziz ibn Sa'ud.

Crossing the Dhofar Mountains, which abruptly rise beyond Salalah, Thomas displayed a fine eye for geographic and ethnographic detail. In Arabia Felix he noted that the mountain tribesmen spoke a strange, non-Arabic language and considered themselves descendants of a mythical race known as "the People of'Ad." He witnessed blood sacrifice and an exorcism performed with frankincense and fire. All the while, he charted his progress with an accuracy that is amazing considering that he had to make his navigational sightings in secret, "lest I be suspected of magic or worse."9

Beyond the mountains lay a "barren plain, sun-baked and filmy with mirages," desolate but for occasional sightings of Arabian oryxes, running wild and free. Five waterless days took Thomas to the remote waterhole of Shisur, the site of an abandoned "rude fort," a last, forlorn trace of civilization. A day beyond Shisur, Thomas sighted "the sands of my desire." But his little band did not immediately plunge into the Rub' al-Khali. They skirted its southern edge, on the lookout for the first of a series of wells they hoped would see them safely across the dunes.

The seventh waterless day out of Shisur began like the others. Thomas wrote:

Our morning start was sluggish.