The Desert and the Sown ¹

Abstract

SOME of the best books of travel nowadays seem to be written by women. We may instance Mrs. Bishop, Miss and now Miss Lowthian Bell, who, in “The Desert and the Sown,” has given us a most of description of a wandering undertaken by alone with native servants from Jerusalem across Jordan to the Haurân and Jebel Drûz, thence to Damascus and on by Homs, Hama, and Aleppo to Alexandretta. Miss Lowthian Bell's route is, of course, not new. She has, seen nothing that has not been seen before, and has contributed nothing new to our archaeological knowledge beyond one or two short Arabic inscriptions. But this we do not expect, nor had she any archaeological intent in the shaping of her travels beyond the desire to see the famous ruins of Roman Syria. The reason for her journeyings is frankly set forth by her as pure delight in the life of the Near East, and more especially that of the desert. To “travel on where travels above him the Mother of all, the clustered stars,” deeming “the wild the sweetest of friends,” in the words of the Arab poet prefixed by the author to her book (“yeraya al-wahshaha al'ansha al-anîsha, wa yahtadî behayithu ahtadat Umm en-nejumi esh-shawabîkî”), was her desire, and she has given us a good book describing what she saw in her wandering. As she says at the beginning of the book, “To those bred under an elaborate social order few such moments of exhilaration can come as that which stands at the threshold of wild travel.”