The lives and travels of great explorers
I read this weekend an article in the BBC that I interpreted as a good thing. The article was discussing a recent decision of Pakistan’s Supreme Court to replace English with Urdu as the official language.
I should say at the outset here that I have never been to Pakistan and know nothing about its languages. So why was I happy to see the Pakistan elevate Urdu as the official language? This is the reason: it shows that the dominance of English can be challenged.
Travel writing is a popular genre. We live in an age of travel, where it is easy to plan a sojourn to the most remote of locations. Most people today hardly give a thought to the fact that their routine international destinations of travel were, until very recently, accessible only by ship or overland travel. Even as late as the 1860s, the source of the Nile River in Africa was unknown.
(To find the book, click on the image above)
This week I will consider one of the titans of Arabian exploration, Wilfred Thesiger. You can click here to read the article. Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003) may be considered the last of the great English adventurer-explorers of the Orient in the tradition of many such characters from that unique island. Besides his travels in the Arabian desert, Thesiger also lived for many years among the Madan (“marsh Arabs”) of southern Iraq. He also traveled extensively in the Sudan, Syria, Kenya, and Ethiopia.
Quintus Curtius 
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