Jo tatchell biography

Tell me about the Wilfred Thesiger book.

This was written in the 1950s after Thesiger returned from five years of Arabian travel.

He was one of the few non-indigenous people to cross “the Empty Quarter”, the desert that occupies a huge part of what is now Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It’s almost a million square kilometres of billowing amber dunes – and more terrifying than an ocean.

Usually, people travelled around the peninsula by sea, hugging the coast to get from town to town. A group travelling from Qatar to Mecca would make their way around the southern part of the peninsula.

Jo tatchell biography

But there were ways of crossing it and, after World War II, Thesiger was offered a role mapping out the patters of locusts travelling across the desert. He jumped at the chance and joined the Rashid, a Bedu tribe, who lived in the old way, unsullied by the modernity that would soon accompany the arrival of oil prospectors.

Thesiger relished the intimacy