Arabian Sands Book

"…There was a very lovely girl working with the others on the well. Her hair was braided, except where it was cut in a fringe across her forehead, and fell in a curtain of small plaits round her neck. She wore various silver ornaments and several necklaces, some of large cornelians, others of small white beads. Round her waist she had half a dozen silver chains, and above them her sleeveless blue tunic gaped open to show small firm breasts. She was very fair. When she saw I was trying to take a photograph of her she screwed up her face and stuck out her tongue at me…"

Arabian Sands: Have I just finished an epic tale of man's perseverance against the majesty of indifferent nature? Or a philosophical essay on how a wild and unforgiving terrain can elevate us to the heights or human dignity and bring us the deepest spiritual insights? Or have I finished an exhaustive text on camel husbandry?

Who can tell, but I am sure that I know more about the care and breeding of camels than the average suburban office worker will ever need to know. For example:

I learnt that drastic measures are required to ensure that female camel brings down their milk:
"...Bin Kabina's camel and Amair's had become inseparable, while mine showed a preference for the mirri, an ugly grey, which we had bought in the Raidat because she was in milk. At first she refused to give us any, although her calf had already been weaned, but Amai sewed up her anus, saying he would not undo it until she let down her milk. After that she gave us about a quart a day..."
I learnt that my camel stick is a multipurpose tool. With it I can train my camel, use it to regulate my camel's speed and my camel stick can help me find a girlfriend:
"...If you see a girl that pleases you, sit down next to her in the dark, push your camel-stick through the sand until it is underneath her, and then turn it over until the crook presses against her. If she gets up, gives you an indignant look, and marches off, you will know that you are wasting your time..."
while keeping an eye on my wife:
"...I had dropped my stick for the second time when bin Kabina, who jumped down from his camel to pick it up, said as he handed it back to me, 'Really, Umbarak, this is too much. If I were you I should divorce her as soon as you get back.' The Bedu have a saying that whenever a man drops his stick his wife is being unfaithful..".
I learnt to recognise a contented female camel:
"...Whenever anyone approached her she flipped her tail up and down in a ridiculous manner, a sign that she had recently been served successfully..."
I learnt that the life of a male camel is bitter-sweet:
"…[As they do not give milk so are the first to be slaughtered] bull camels to act as sires are consequently very rare. Later, when I travelled to the Hadhramaut, I was accompanied by a man who rode one. We were continuously pursued by tribesmen with females to be served. We had a long journey in front of us and this constant exercise was visibly exhausting my companion's mount, but he could not protest. Custom demanded that this camel should be allowed to serve as many females as were produced…"
The demands on a bull camel may bring exhaustion leading to death. Bitter-sweet indeed.

Arabian Sands is rightly recognised as a classic work. The book covers an area of the world about which I am wholly ignorant: Oman, The Yemen and southern Saudi Arabia; it sets one thinking about man's insignificance before nature and how our consciousness of the evanescent uncertainty of life is these days lost, concealed behind fragile mask of modernity; it portrays a way of life that I am sure in only a few decades has disappeared forever; it has a lot to teach us about camels.
"...Their way of life naturally made them fatalists; so much was beyond their control. It was impossible for them to provide for a morrow when everything depended on a chance fall of rain or when raiders, sickness, or any one of a hundred chance happenings might at any time leave them destitute, or end their lives..".
A closing message of the book is prophetic while also being a sad tribute to Thesiger's insight into the human condition and the superficiality of the modern world that he demonstrates so well in the rest of the book:
"...Yet I knew that for them the danger lay, not in the hardship of their lives, but in the boredom and frustration they would feel when they renounced it. The tragedy was that the choice would not be theirs; economic forces beyond their control would eventually drive them into the towns to hang about street-corners as 'unskilled labor'..."


The Pitt-Rivers Museum has Thesiger's photographs from the trips in the book in an online virtual museum. This is a fantastic resource for following the book.