The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism. Contributors: Eric J.

Leed -
author. Publisher: Basic Books. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1991

The guilt often attending the traveler who changes shape is significant evidence of the
contradiction at the heart of social structure, which seeks to channel recognitions toward
uniform and unchanging identities, creating a pressure to be one thing which creates a
counterpressure to be many and to escape the confinements of a fixed and unitary self. T. E.
Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia—a master of disguises who sloughed off feelings of self-
hatred in assuming the anonymity of the stranger or the garb of an Arab, contrarily admired
travelers who refused to change or adapt to foreign circumstances. Charles Doughty, the first
Englishman to live and travel in Arabia as an undisguised Englishman, was a particular hero
to Lawrence. In the introduction to Doughty's classic Travels in Arabia Deserta (1923),
Lawrence described two types of English traveler:

We export two chief kinds of Englishmen, who in foreign parts divide themselves into two
opposed classes. Some feel deeply the influence of the native people, and try to adjust
themselves to its atmosphere and spirit: To fit themselves modestly into the picture and
suppress all in them that would be discordant with local habits and colours. They imitate the
native as far as possible, and so avoid friction in their daily life. However, they cannot avoid
the consequences of imitation, a hollow, worthless thing. They are like the people but not of
the people, and their half-perceptible differences give them a sham influence often greater
than their merit. They urge people among whom they live into strange unnatural courses by
imitating them so well that they are imitated back again. The other class of Englishmen is the
larger class. In the same circumstances of exile they reinforce their character by memories of
the life they have left. In reaction against their foreign surroundings they take refuge in the
England that was theirs. They assert their

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aloofness, their impassivity, the more vividly for their loneliness and weakness. They impress
the people among whom they live by reaction, by giving them an example of the complete
Englishman, the foreigner intact. 32

The assimilator only confuses the natives, who think, regardless of his efforts at conforming
to local circumstances, that he is still a particular but unfocused species of stranger, an
Englishman. In the shape-changing traveler they see only a distorted image of a type, not a
true performance of an identity. But the "authentic" Englishman is clearly a construct of travel
—assuming departure, a land left behind, which the uprooted Englishman realizes in his
performances before an audience of ethnic others. The authentic and uncompromising
Englishman is a stereotype and, like all cultural stereotypes, is generated in the process of
intercultural communication, observation, and identification. His defining traits are
assembled, too, not just in order to give visibility to just any cultural type but to represent a
superior cultural type, one deserving of honor and recognition everywhere. It was the
successful performance of this persona to which Lord MacCartney—the first English
ambassador to China, in 1793—94—attributed the Chinese anxiety to get rid of him and his
party. Somehow he had inadvertently given expression to "that superiority which, wherever
Englishmen go, they cannot conceal from the most indifferent observer." 33
*****************************
English Travellers in the Near East. Contributors: Robin Fedden - author. Publisher:
Longmans, Green. Place of Publication: London. Publication Year: 1958

V
DOUGHTY

Fourteen years after Palgrave, another traveller passed through Ma'an on the first stage of a
journey which was to produce one of the most impressive books in the English language. The
traveller was Charles Doughty ( 1843-1926) and the book Arabia Deserta. After leaving
Cambridge, where he developed the geological interests that are reflected in his writings,
Doughty travelled for six years on the Continent, in North Africa, and in the Near East. In
1875 he heard while in Transjordan of rock monuments southward at Medain Saleh, and so
was prompted almost by chance to undertake his Arabian journey. In November of the
following year he set out from Damascus with the hajj, the cumbrous caravan that yearly
makes the journey to the Holy Cities. At Medain Saleh, having seen the hajj depart, Doughty
struck inland across the deserts to Teyma, Hayel, Kheybar, Boreida, and finally Tayif. Though
he had assumed the name of Khalil, he travelled frankly as a Christian, and suffered recurrent
persecution in addition to the natural hardships of his journey. He reappeared finally at Jidda,
ill and exhausted, after twentyone months of 'such solitary adventuring as perhaps no one of
his race, station, and culture has sustained before or since.'

His copious notes on the people, geology, vegetation, and fauna of the deserts, which the
suspicion of the Beduin compelled him to take in secret, formed the basis of Arabia Deserta.
The writing occupied ten years. 'I have', he said, 'taken great pains and so far as the seeing of
one pair of eyes can suffice and Nature can be portrayed in words, [ Arabia Deserta] is the
mere truth of things according to my conscience.' It was indeed, as his preface states, 'a mirror
wherein is set faithfully some parcel of the soil of Arabia, smelling of sámn and camels'. The
mirror of the geographer and the traveller was, however, created with a strictly literary
purpose. Doughty later said:

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In writing the volumes 'Arabia Deserta' my main intention was not so much the setting forth
of personal wanderings . . . as the ideal endeavour to continue the older tradition of Chaucer
and Spenser, resisting to my power the decadence of the English language: so that while my
work should be the mere verity for Orientalists, it should also be my life's contribution, so far
to literature.

Though Morris, Burne-Jones, and others hailed the appearance of a major work, the value of
Doughty's contribution was not immediately apparent to the public when the two bulky
volumes--over 600,000 words--first appeared in 1888. Arabia Deserta was original in almost
every respect, and even the publishers found 'the style of the book so peculiar as to be at times
hardly intelligible'. The manner was in fact a new stylistic medium evolved by the author for
the close interpretation in words of experiences that had in themselves been observed with
meticulous care. Though the language, as Doughty maintained, is 'chaste and right English',
the texture of his prose is extremely close and thus sometimes difficult. There is no wasted
word in these 600,000. Again, the phrasing and less often the magnificent epithets tend to
archaism; inversions more familiar in the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
are freely used to achieve emphasis and vary rhythm. The consequent movement of the prose,
so different from the laxness of much nineteenth-century writing, must well have seemed
strange to Victorian readers. Further, Doughty's scrupulous fidelity, a determination that his
portrait of Arabia should be complete and true, led to asides and longer disquisitions on
recondite matter which could hardly interest the general reader. These are inherent in the scale
of the work, part of its comprehensive and monumental character, and are often no more out
of place than Homer's catalogue of ships.

Wilfred Blunt pronounced Arabia Deserta'the best prose work of the nineteenth century', a
judgement with which many people would now agree. Yet Doughty's book,

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which he himself called his ars poetica, can perhaps most usefully be regarded as an epic
poem. If approached with the heightened perception that verse demands, its difficulties seem
less and its significance is more apparent. The close description of Arabia and the granitic
style are seen to be the medium through which Doughty conveys the record of a spiritual
experience. Those things to which Burton objected in Arabia Deserta, the indignities and
persecution to which Doughty was subjected and which he suffered with such noble
detachment, appear as an integral and essential part of the book. This story of desert travel is
shown, like most great works of literature, to have a profoundly moral basis. It is not
surprising that Paradise Lost should probably offer the closest English parallel. Both works
have the same large sweep, lofty character, and deep seriousness. Stylistically also there are
affinities in the studied manner, the inversions, the echoing rhythms and noble phrasing. Both,
too, it must be recognized, have their trying passages, and Milton's theological excursions find
their counterpart in Doughty's Arabian lore.

Though the photographs of the tall red-bearded sage are familiar, it is not easy to form a clear
idea of Doughty's personality and character. Here again reference to Milton is useful. Doughty
described himself to his future wife as 'by Nature self-willed, headstrong and fierce with
opponents' until 'better reason and suffering in the world bridled these faults and in part
extinguished them'. The same could be said of Milton. Both were unsocial; retiring men when
questions of principle were not at stake. Doughty lived much out of the world, and acquired
with time almost a crustacean flavour. In 1913 he had not heard of Hardy, nor of Chesterton in
1923. Both Doughty and Milton were deeply serious, of uncompromising integrity, and
dedicated to truth as they saw it. Both were tactless and inflexible; their humour at best a grim
smile; their regard for common opinion non-existent. On his return from Arabia, Doughty--it
was December--stalked the Suffolk

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countryside in 'whitish cotton clothes of some eastern material, and a green band often twisted
round his waist; sockless, feet thrust into heelless sandals, and using . . . a large green
umbrella'. Both were men of heroic mould.

Not only for the stylistic reasons already mentioned does Arabia Deserta remain a difficult
book. Doughty's was a terrible journey and the reader is made to share it. The original
experience is re-created. The grave predicaments, the appalling hardships, the sense of ever-
present danger, the weariness, the humiliations, the gradual loss of health, all these must be
sustained. So great is Doughty's mastery that the waterless desert, the white light, the jolting
pace of the camels, the wind, the sand, the heat, make a physical impact. As the journey
progresses, we too are exhausted by its merciless stages and burned by the sun. Yet the
rewards are proportionate. The severe beauty of that landscape becomes a personal
possession; we feel the cool relief at sundown and sense the silence of the tents at night; we
come upon water and the contrasting lush of the oases after long anticipation. We also meet
persons more real than life usually affords, for Doughty had an extraordinary ability to create
character. Building flesh and blood, often with no more than a phrase or two, he peopled
central Arabia. He had no less a sense of drama. These figures clash in greed, anger, or
indignation, with each other and with the troubled traveller. In their passion Doughty gives
them words that echo in the empty landscape, words that seem portentous and inevitable. It is
one of Doughty's most curious gifts that the conversations he reports bear little relation to the
forms of common speech, yet carry immediate conviction.

Doughty lends himself to quotation and excerpt, and much is to be said for first approaching
his work through the selection published as Wanderings in Arabia. Here in three quotations an
attempt must be made to convey some idea of his stature. Perhaps no work has opened with a
more evocative paragraph than that which prefaces Arabia Deserta:

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A new voice hailed me of an old friend when, first returned from the Peninsula, I paced again
in that long street of Damascus which is called Straight; and suddenly taking me wondering
by the hand, 'Tell me (said he), since thou art here again in the peace and assurance of Ullah,
and whilst we walk, as in the former years, towards the new blossoming orchards, full of the
sweet spring as the garden of God, what moved thee, or how couldst thou take such journeys
into the fanatic Arabia?

When Doughty has journeyed with the hajj little beyond Ma'an, the plight of a pilgrim
occasions a moving passage. It shows, with much else, Doughty's ability to describe an event
succinctly and graphically:

I saw one fallen in the sand, half sitting half lying upon his hands. This was a religious
mendicant, some miserable derwish in his clouted beggar's cloak, who groaned in extremity,
holding forth his hands like eagles' claws to man's pity. Last in the long train, we went also
marching by him. His beggar's scrip, full of broken morsels fallen from his neck, was poured
out before him. The wretch lamented to the slow moving lines of the Mecca-bound
pilgrimage: the many had passed on, and doubtless as they saw his dying, hoped inwardly the
like evil ending might not be their own. Some charitable serving men, Damascenes, in our
company, stepped aside to him; ana meyet, sobbed the derwish, I am a dying man. One then
of our crew, he was also my servant, a valiant outlaw, no holy-tongue man but of human
deeds, with a manly heartening word, couched by an empty camel, and with a spring of his
stalwart arms, lifted and set him fairly upon the pack saddle. The dying derwish gave a weak
cry much like a child, and hastily they raised the camel under him and gathered his bag of
scattered victuals and reached it to him, who sat all feeble murmuring thankfulness, and
trembling yet for fear. There is no ambulance service with the barbarous pilgrim army; and all
charity is cold, in the great and terrible wilderness, of that wayworn suffering multitude.

In describing the open deserts Doughty is at his best. Here he evokes the unbearable heat of a
summer day in the peninsula:
The summer's night at end, the sun stands up as a crown of hostile flames from that huge
covert of inhospitable sandstone

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bergs; the desert day dawns not little by little, but it is noontide in an hour. The sun, entering
as a tyrant upon the waste landscape, darts upon us a torment of fiery beams, not to be
remitted till the far-off evening.--No matins here of birds; not a rock partridgecock, calling
with blithesome chuckle over the extreme waterless desolation. Grave is the giddy heat upon
the crown of the head; the ears tingle with a flickering shrillness, a subtle crepitation it seems,
in the glassiness of this sun-stricken nature: the hot sandblink is in the eyes, and there is little
refreshment to find in the tent's shelter; the worsted booths leak to this fiery rain of sunny
light. Mountains looming like dry bones through the thin air, stand far around about us: the
savage flank of Ybba Moghrair, the high spire and ruinous stacks of el-Jebal, Chebad, the
coast of Helwan! Herds of the weak nomad camels waver dispersedly, seeking pasture in the
midst of this hollow fainting country, where but lately the swarming locusts have fretted every
green thing. This silent air burning about us, we endure breathless till the assr: when the
dazing Arabs in the tents revive after their heavy hours. The lingering day draws down to the
sunsetting; the herdsmen, weary of the sun, come again with the cattle, to taste in their
menzils the first sweetness of mirth and repose.--The day is done, and there rises the nightly
freshness of this purest mountain air: and then to the cheerful song and the cup at the common
fire. The moon rises ruddy from that solemn obscurity of jebel like a mighty beacon: --and the
morrow will be as this day, days deadly drowned in the sun of the summer wilderness.

Arabia Deserta finished, Doughty devoted--the word must be taken literally--the remaining
thirty-five years of his life to poetry. His poems are not for consideration here, but they have
the same immense scale as his travel-book and offer greater obstacles. They are not often
read, but neither was Arabia Deserta for half a century. There are devotees who think that his
epics Dawn in Britain and Adam Cast Forth may one day rank as high as his account of the
Arabian journey.

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VI
T. E. LAWRENCE

Walter Harris A Journey through the Yemen ( 1893), and D. G. Hogarth A Wandering Scholar
in the Levant ( 1896) show no trace of Doughty's influence. They represent a less conscious,
and less purposeful, way of writing, as does also Gertrude Bell The Desert and the Sown
( 1907). The last gives a vivid and attractive account of the author's journeys in Syria, and for
this reason her archaeological preoccupations remain of interest to others than archaeologists.
It was only with the publication in 1908 of Wanderings in Arabia, an abridged version of
Arabia Deserta, that Doughty's work became generally known. After that date his influence
was difficult to escape. Where it is not found in epithet and syntax, it is apparent in an attitude
to the events of travel and the immediacy with which desert experiences are presented. It is
nowhere stronger than in T. E. Lawrence ( 1888-1935), whose Seven Pillars of Wisdom was
written in 1919.

Though Lawrence's style has been called 'so imitative of . . . Arabia Deserta as to be near
parody', it is in fact an effective adaptation of Doughty's manner for his own purposes. As
writers they had much in common, and this contributed to the success of the adaptation. Both
shared a fine feeling for the dramatic and for character; both were born to the telling adjective
and the biting phrase; both possessed uncompromising clarity of vision; both were dedicated
to their craft, deeply convinced of its importance, and spared themselves nothing in ambitious
execution. Other things were Lawrence's alone: humour, sophistication, and a sourly critical
mind that ran to speculation and despondency. His rhythms are less elaborate than Doughty's,
his phraseology more staccato, and his movement quicker though less assured. Inevitably and
rightly, something of the nervous excitement of the twentieth century, and its uncertainty,
ferment in his writing.

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After leaving Oxford, Lawrence's archaeological interests brought him as a traveller to the
Near East. There he acquired that knowledge of the Arab and the desert which made possible
his exploits in the First World War, when with the Emir Faisal he led, and in a sense created,
the Arab revolt. Whether Lawrence's brilliant guerrilla warfare seriously influenced the issue
of the British campaign against the Turks in Palestine has been questioned. No doubt in time,
like other military achievements as spectacular in their day, it would be forgotten, had he not
given it the permanence of literature. Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a remarkable book, incisive,
imaginative, and perfectly controlled. The complex story of strategy, tactics, and organization,
the history of a minor campaign, is firmly carried by the narrative framework; the reader
sweeps at last into Damascus paying the same profound respect to Lawrence's powers as did
his Arab tribesmen.

Shortly before reaching Damascus, Lawrence had entered the village of Tafas with Tallal, its
impetuous splendid sheik. The retreating Turks had been before them. The village was silent,
its inhabitants dead, obscenely butchered.

Tallal had seen what we had seen. He gave one moan like a hurt animal; then rode to the
upper ground and sat there awhile on his mare, shivering and looking fixedly after the Turks. I
moved near to speak to him, but Auda caught my rein and stayed me. Very slowly Tallal drew
his head-cloth about his face; and then he seemed suddenly to take hold of himself, for he
dashed his stirrups into the mare's flanks and galloped headlong, bending low and swaying in
the saddle, right at the main body of the enemy.

It was a long ride down a gentle slope and across a hollow. We sat there like stone while he
rushed forward the drumming of his hoofs unnaturally loud in our ears, for we had stopped
shooting, and the Turks had stopped. Both armies waited for him; and he rocked on in the
hushed evening till only a few lengths from the enemy. Then he sat up in the saddle and cried
his war-cry, 'Tallal, Tallal', twice in a tremendous shout. Instantly their rifles and machine-
guns crashed out, and he and his mare, riddled through and through with bullets, fell dead
among the lance points.

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Such dramatic episodes stand out in the narrative of the campaign, but they less indicate
Lawrence's reflective, complex, and sometimes tortured character, than such a passage as this,
where after the capture of Akaba he goes out to look at the Turkish dead:

The dead men looked wonderfully beautiful. The night was shining gently down, softening
them into new ivory. Turks were white-skinned on their clothed parts, much whiter than the
Arabs; and these soldiers had been very young. Close round them lapped the dark wormwood,
now heavy with dew, in which the ends of the moonbeams sparkled like sea-spray. The
corpses seemed flung so pitifully on the ground, huddled anyhow in low heaps. Surely if
straightened they would be comfortable at least. So I put them all in order, one by one, very
wearied myself, and longing to be of these quiet ones, not of the restless, noisy, aching mob
up the valley, quarrelling over the plunder, boasting of their speed and strength to endure God
knew how many toils and pains of this sort; with death, whether we won or lost, waiting to
end the history. . . .

Journeying exhausted at night by camel, it seems to him that he does in part escape from the
flesh of which he was so conscious and so afraid:

Step by step I was yielding myself to a slow ache which conspired with my abating fever and
the numb monotony of riding to close up the gates of my senses. I seemed at last approaching
the insensibility which had always been beyond my reach: but a delectable land: for one born
so slug-tissued that nothing this side fainting would let his spirit free. Now I found myself
dividing into parts. There was one which went on riding wisely, sparing or helping every pace
of the wearied camel. Another hovering above and to the right bent down curiously, and asked
what the flesh was doing. The flesh gave no answer, for, indeed, it was conscious only of a
ruling impulse to keep on and on; but a third garrulous one talked and wondered, critical of
the body's self-inflicted labour, and contemptuous of the reason for effort.

In more than his own weary imagining, Lawrence was a divided character. He seems only to
have found unity under

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the spur of his self-imposed task. To this he gave his whole loyalty. The following passage,
telling of the related loyalty which his Arabs offered the leaders to whom they were bound in
a common cause, throws light on Lawrence himself. The Arabs were, he says,

afraid of the sword of justice and of the steward's whip, not because the one might put an
arbitrary term to their existence, and the other print red rivers of pain about their sides, but
because these were the symbols and the means to which their obedience was vowed. They had
a gladness of abasement, a freedom of consent to yield to their master the last service and
degree of their flesh and blood, because their spirits were equal with his and the contract
voluntary. Such boundless engagement precluded humiliation, repining and regret.

In this pledging of their endurance, it disgraced men, if from weakness of nerve or

insufficiency of courage, they fell short of the call. Pain was to them a solvent, a cathartic,
almost a decoration, to be fairly worn while they survived it. Fear, the strongest motive in
slothful man, broke down with us, since love for a cause--or for a person--was aroused. For
such an object, penalties were discounted, and loyalty became open-eyed, not obedient. To it
men dedicated their being, and in its possession they had no room for virtue or vice.
Cheerfully they nourished it upon what they were; gave it their lives; and, greater than that,
the lives of their fellowship: it being many times harder to offer than to endure sacrifice. . . .

If the Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a lesser work than Arabia Deserta it is because Lawrence,
for all his complexity, was a lesser man. He lacked Doughty's self-knowledge and wisdom, his
monolithic character and unassuming simplicity. The intense emotional conflicts that his
intelligence would not allow him to burke remained unresolved. His faults, among them lack
of frankness, absorbing vanity, and a pathological wish to suffer, in another man would have
been intolerable. As it is his qualities make the waste and disillusion of his later years a
tragedy. The writing of the Seven Pillars was his last achievement. 1.

____________________
1
The Mint, posthumously published, is a sad work, the output of a tired and embittered man

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