The Southern Gates of Arabia: A Journey in the Hadhramaut: A Journey in the Hadramaut (John Murray Travel Classics) - Softcover

Stark, Freya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0719563380 ISBN 13: 9780719563386

Publisher: John Murray, 2003

Synopsis

In 1934 Freya Stark travelled alone to the Hadhramaut in what is now Yemen. Then, it was a little-known country torn by tribal warfare, but it had once been the centre of the hugely profitable incense trade. Freya's aim was to trace the old incense road to the coast. An Arabic speaker, she was able to travel with tribesmen, accept hospitality from sultans and Arab chiefs, and even study harem life. Here, she gives us her first-hand experience of an ancient world that has all but gone.;Freya Stark was one of the greatest women travellers of the 20th century, and also one of the finest travel writers. She inspired a whole generation who followed her. In The Southern Gates of Arabia, she combines a sense of adventure with a unique eye for history and landscape.

About this title

Review:

In 1934, a 42-year-old Englishwoman named Freya Stark arrived in the British-governed Protectorate of Aden on a singular mission: to locate the fabled, long-lost city of Shabwa. The Southern Gates of Arabia is her story.

Located on the high Hadramawt plateau in what is now Yemen, Shabwa was renowned in antiquity as the source of frankincense. Little visited even then, it was also thought to be a particularly forbidding place; Genesis mentions it as the "enclosure of death", and the Roman geographer Pliny reported that it contained 60 great temples and wealth beyond measure. That was good enough for Stark, who, having not long made a difficult passage across the badlands of Iran, thrived on improbable adventures; and so, by burro and whatever mechanical conveyances she could find, she ascended the high mountains into a world that was sometimes perilous, but that also sometimes approached fairy-tale dimensions, as when, climbing the Hadramawt she writes: "The path kept high and open, until gradually the valley clefts narrowed again upon us, and shut us in walls whose luxuriant green made a romantic landscape of the kind usually only invented in pictures."

Stark never reached Shabwa; laid low by the measles, she had to be evacuated from territory overrun in any event by warring religious factions and gangs of bandits. Though cut short, her time in the Yemeni highlands yielded this superb travel narrative, full of uncommon vistas and milieus--harems, bazaars and Bedouin camps among them). Anyone who values tales of adventure well told will find Stark's body of work--and this book in particular--to be full of treasures. --Gregory McNamee

Review:

'This book recaptures all the romance, beauty and primitive atmosphere of that still unspoilt Arabia of spices ... and the high-walled cities and little-known desert stretches.' (Irish Times )

'Extraordinarily rich and authoritative ... a book to treasure' (New York Times )

'There aren't many writers who rise so clearly above the teeming marketplace of travellers as Freya Stark' (The Spectator )

'Freya Stark unites in one mind the traveller, the historian, the philosopher and the poet' (TLS )

'The Hadhramaut is still unfamiliar ... No outsider has caught its spirit as gently and wonderingly as did Freya' (Tim Mackintosh-Smith )

About this edition

• Publisher: John Murray
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0719563380
• ISBN 13: 9780719563386
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288