Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Heart of Arabia, Vol. 1 of 2: A Record of Travel Exploration
Circumstances have necessitated the limitation of these volumes to a record of the first part only of my sojourn in Arabia, ending with my return to the Wahhabi capital after an excursion in the summer of 1918 to the provinces of Southern N ajd. Circumstances alone will determine whether the record of the latter part of my wanderings and of the Wahhabi campaign against Hail in the autumn of the same year shall ever see the light of day. But for the moment I have deemed it better to set forth in full the details of a portion of my experiences than to deal more summarily with the whole period of my residence in Arabia. And, finally, circumstances alone - circumstances over which I have unfortunately no control - will decide whether I shall ever return to the deserts of Arabia to resume a task which, I am fully conscious, I have left unfinished.
A few words of explanation on the vexed subject of the transliteration of Arabic names. In view of the lack of uniformity among the various official and unofficial bodies, who have occasion in the course of their work to consider this problem, the Royal Geographical Society has during the past year taken the lead and set to work to discover whether existing differences of practice can be reconciled by the adoption of any uniform system based on the elimina tion of all diacritical marks and accents. After much dis cussion of the subject by the assembled champions of all the systems in the field, a final decision has recently been arrived at in favour of a system based on and but little differing from that in general use by the General Staff of the Army in India. That system was used during the war in Mesopotamia for survey purposes; and there can be little doubt that the modification of it now accepted by the Royal Geographical Society represents as near an approach to the ideal as it is possible to arrive at in the circumstances.
Unfortunately that decision was arrived at after this work was completed in manuscript, and I have not thought it necessary to undertake the considerable labour which would be involved in making the requisite corrections.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
