The Heart of Arabia - A Record of Travel Exploration #227884

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.