Heart of Arabia e-bog

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Of the pleasant year I spent sojourning and wandering amid the deserts and oases 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.<br><br>It was with little fitness to undertake geographical or scientific work of any kind that I entered Arabia, but chance led me far afield from the tracks of those who had been in that country before me; and natural curiosity, fortified by a sense of duty, impelled me to record day by day and almost hour by hour everything I saw or heard in the course of my wanderings in the hope that some day, the grain being separated from the chaff, there might remain a residue of useful matter worthy of presentation to the world. The few scientific instruments I carried with me, with a limited knowledge of their proper uses, have enabled the experts of the Royal Geographical Society to use the detailed itineraries of my journeys in the preparation of reasonable maps of a country hitherto in great part conventionally charted on the basis of second-hand information.