‘The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism. Contributors: Eric J. Led - author. Publisher: Basic Books. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1991 The guilt often attending the traveler who changes shape is significant evidence of the contradiction at the heart of social structure, which seeks to channel recognitions toward uniform and unchanging identities, creating a pressure to be one thing which creates a counterpressure to be many and to escape the confinements of a fixed and unitary self. T. E. Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia—a master of disguises who sloughed off feelings of self- hatred in assuming the anonymity of the stranger or the garb of an Arab, contrarily admired travelers who refused to change or adapt to foreign circumstances. oui. the first Englishman to live and travel in Arabia as an undisguised Englishman, was a particular hero to Lawrence, In the introduction to Doughty's classic Travels in Arabia Deserta (1923), Lawrence described two types of English traveler: We export two chief kinds of Englishmen, who in foreign parts divide themselves into two opposed classes. Some feel deeply the influence of the native people, and try to adjust themselves to its atmosphere and spirit: To fit themselves modestly into the picture and suppress all in them that would be discordant with local habits and colours. They imitate the native as far as possible, and so avoid friction in their daily life. However, they cannot avoid the consequences of imitation, a hollow, worthless thing. They are like the people but not of the people, and their half-perceptible differences give them a sham influence often greater than their merit, They urge people among whom they live into strange unnatural courses by imitating them so well that they are imitated back again. The other class of Englishmen is the larger class. In the same circumstances of exile they reinforce their character by memories of the life they have left. In reaction against their foreign surroundings they take refuge in the England that was theirs. They assert their aloofness, their impassivity, the more vividly for their loneliness and weakness. They impress the people among whom they live by reaction, by giving them an example of the complete Englishman, the foreigner intact, The assimilator only confuses the natives, who think, regardless of his efforts at conforming to local circumstances, that he is still a particular but unfocused species of stranger, an Englishman. In the shape-changing traveler they see only a distorted image of a type, not a true performance of an identity. But the “authentic” Englishman is clearly a construct of travel—assuming departure, a land left behind, which the uprooted Englishman realizes in his performances before an audience of ethnic others. The authentic and uncompromising Englishman is a stereotype and, like all cultural stereotypes, is generated in the process of intercultural communication, observation, and identification. His defining traits are assembled, 100, not just in order to give visibility to just any cultural type but to represent a superior cultural type, one deserving of honor and recognition everywhere. It was the successful performance of this persona to which Lord MacCartney—the first English ambassador to China, in 1793—94—attributed the Chinese anxiety to get rid of him and his, party. Somehow he had inadvertently given expression to "that superiority which, wherever Englishmen go, they cannot conceal from the most indifferent observer."English Travellers in the Near East. Contributors: Robin Fedden - author. Publisher: Longmans, Green. Place of Publication: London, Publication Year: 1958 v Fourteen years after Palgrave, another traveller passed through Ma'an on the first stage of a journey which was to produce one of the most impressive books in the English language. The traveller was Charles Baga 1843-1926) and the book Arabia Deserta. After leaving Cambridge, where he developed the geological interests that are reflected in his writings, Doughty travelled for six years on the Continent, in North Africa, and in the Near East. In 1875 he heard while in Transjordan of rock monuments southward at Medain Saleh, and so was prompted almost by chance to undertake his Arabian journey. In November of the following year he set out from Damascus with the hajj, the cumbrous caravan that yearl makes the journey to the Holy Cities. At Medain Saleh, having seen the hajj depart, Dowdy struck inland across the deserts to Teyma, Hayel, Kheybar, Boreida, and finally Tayif. Though he had assumed the name of Khalil, he travelled frankly as a Christian, and suffered recurrent persecution in addition to the natural hardships of his journey. He reappeared finally at Jidda, ill and exhausted, after twentyone months of 'such solitary adventuring as perhaps no one of his race, station, and culture has sustained before or since.’ His copious notes on the people, geology, vegetation, and fauna of the deserts, which the suspicion of the Beduin compelled him to take in secret, formed the basis of Arabia Deserta. The writing occupied ten years. 'I have’, he said, ‘taken great pains and so far as the seeing of one pair of eyes can suffice and Nature can be portrayed in words, [ Arabia Deserta] is the mere truth of things according to my conscience." It was indeed, as his preface states, 'a mirror wherein is set faithfully some parcel of the soil of Arabia, smelling of sdmn and camels’. The mirror of the geographer and the traveller was, however, created with a strictly literary purpose. Dau Tater said In writing the volumes ‘Arabia Deserta’ my main intention was not so much the setting forth of personal wanderings . .. as the ideal endeavour to continue the older tradition of Chaucer and Spenser, resisting to my power the decadence of the English language: so that while my work should be the mere verity for Orientalists, it should also be my life's contribution, so far to literature. Though Morris, Burne-Jones, and others hailed the appearance of a major work, the value of aun. contribution was not immediately apparent to the public when the two bulky volumes--over 600,000 words--first appeared in 1888, Arabia Deserta was original in almost every respect, and even the publishers found 'the style of the book so peculiar as to be at times hardly intelligible’. The manner was in fact a new stylistic medium evolved by the author for the close interpretation in words of experiences that had in themselves been observed with meticulous care. Though the language, as Doughty maintained, is 'chaste and right English’, the texture of his prose is extremely close and thus sometimes difficult. There is no wasted word in these 600,000. Again, the phrasing and less often the magnificent epithets tend to archaism; inversions more familiar in the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are freely used to achieve emphasis and vary rhythm. The consequent movement of the prose,so different from the laxness of much nineteenth-century writing, must well have seemed strange to Victorian readers. Further, Doughty's scrupulous fidelity, a determination that his portrait of Arabia should be complete and true, led to asides and longer disquisitions on recondite matter which could hardly interest the general reader. These are inherent in the scale of the work, part of its comprehensive and monumental character, and are often no more out of place than Homer's catalogue of ships. Wilfred Blunt pronounced Arabia Deserta'the best prose work of the nineteenth century’, a judgement with which many people would now agree. Yet Doughty's book, which he himself called his ars poetica, can perhaps most usefully be regarded as an epic poem. If approached with the heightened perception that verse demands, its difficulties seem less and its significance is more apparent. The close description of Arabia and the granitic style are seen to be the medium through which DOugHIY conveys the record of a spiritual experience. Those things to which Burton objected in Arabia Deserta, the indignities and persecution to which Doughty was subjected and which he suffered with such noble detachment, appear as an integral and essential part of the book. This story of desert travel is shown, like most great works of literature, to have a profoundly moral basis. It is not, surprising that Paradise Lost should probably offer the closest English parallel, Both works have the same large sweep, lofty character, and deep seriousness, Stylistically also there are affinities in the studied manner, the inversions, the echoing rhythms and noble phrasing, Both, 100, it must be recognized, have their trying passages, and Milton's theological excursions find their counterpart in DEE Arabian lore. ‘Though the photographs of the tall red-bearded sage are familiar, it is not easy to form a clear ices Dat personality and character. Here again reference to Milton is useful. described himself to his future wife as 'by Nature self-willed, headstrong and fierce with opponents’ until ‘better reason and suffering in the world bridled these faults and in part extinguished them’. The same could be said of Milton, Both were unsocial; retiring men when questions of principle were not at stake. Doughty lived much out of the world, and acquired with time almost a crustacean flavour. In 1913 he had not heard of Hardy, nor of Chesterton in 1923. Both Doughty and Milton were deeply serious, of uncompromising integrity, and dedicated to truth as they saw it. Both were tactless and inflexible; their humour at best a grim smile; their regard for common opinion non-existent. On his return from Arabia, ‘Doushtyit was December--stalked the Suffolk countryside in 'whitish cotton clothes of some eastern material, and a green band often twisted round his waist; sockless, feet thrust into heelless sandals, and using... . a large gre: umbrella’, Both were men of heroic mould. Not only for the stylistic reasons already mentioned does Arabia Deserta remain a difficult book. 's was a terrible journey and the reader is made to share it. The original experience is re-created. The grave predicaments, the appalling hardships, the sense of ever- present danger, the weariness, the humiliations, the gradual loss of health, all these must be sustained, So great is y that the waterless desert, the white light, the jolting