Thomas, Bertram

FIRST EDITION, 8vo (233 x 153mm.), xxx, [ii], 398pp., folding coloured map, 74 photo illustrations on 51 plates, original light brown cloth, printed dust-jacket, slipcase

"Thomas developed an ambition to make the first crossing of the ‘empty quarter’ (the Rub' al Khali) of Arabia. He recognized that if he applied for official permission to do this he was likely to be refused. As he subsequently admitted in Arabia felix, ‘my plans were conceived in darkness, my journeys heralded only by my disappearances, paid for by myself and executed under my own auspices’. While other British officials in the gulf escaped from the heat of the summer to the hill stations in India, Thomas worked through the gruelling gulf summers and stored up his leave until the winters—the only possible season to explore the desert. In the winter of 1927–8, for instance, he made a 600-mile journey through the southern borderland of the area that he wished to penetrate. On these trips he dressed as a Bedouin, eschewed tobacco and alcohol, and spoke only Arabic.

Finally, in October 1930, Thomas slipped away in the middle of the night from the port of Muscat and (hitching a lift, by arrangement, on a passing British warship) arrived at Dhufar, on the Indian Ocean (southern) coast of Arabia, from where he intended to commence his south–north crossing of the empty quarter. After waiting some months for his guides (who were involved in desert hostilities) he eventually set out with a small camel caravan but no promise of protection from the warring and predatory tribes of the interior. He emerged fifty-eight days later at Doha, on the Persian Gulf" (ODNB).