Charles Montagu Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888) is remarkable for its scientific evelations and brilliantly unique style—an artful combination of Arabic and English syntax and diction that rendered a foreign way of life and thought and depicted a distant landscape of stark, barren beauty. The ten original essays in this book examine many aspects of Arabia Deserta, including its Victorian characteristics and aesthetics; its blend of fact and fantasy; its portrayal of Arab society and of Doughty himself; and the accuracy of its geographical, geological, archaeological, historical, and ethnographical observations. Additionally, the book's introduction and two bibliographies probe Arabia Deserta's reception, unique position in the genre of travel literature, and bibliographical history. During the grueling twenty-one-month journey narrated in Arabia Deserta, Doughty endured periods of sickness and near-famine, a series of treacherous guides, attack by a mob, and virtual imprisonment by a corrupt Turkish commandant. Celebrating this epic of scholarship and survival, Explorations in Doughty's "Arabia Deserta" maps the contours of a work that T. E. Lawrence, who had followed Doughty's path to Arabia, called "a book not like other books, but something particular, a bible of its kind."

Journeying from the green, rain-soaked Kerala into the amphitheatre of the Sun, our traveller-journalist finds that there is no better metaphor than the desert to instil the lessons of life and death, love and hatred, thirst and water. From a single shower of rain which brings the gaaf tree back to life after a decade to the ever-shifting dunes of gold and thousand-year-old sand palaces, the mysterious poetry of the desert is everywhere on display, if one but has the eye and heart to see it. As the deserts of Nafud, Dahna, and Rub’ al Khali in Arabia both embrace and trap the travellers, the outpouring of the landscape’s longing for rivers recalls a past filled with water. This narrative describes the history, prehistory, archaeology, legends, folklore, and travails of the émigré Asian work force that tames the harsh desert as never before.