Karizma Al Tefel | Mona Saleh Janahy

The magic of Arab travel is that we visit something that has long since disappeared from our West, and in the East it can only remain for a short while. It is this subconscious background of the disaster that draws us more to the desert nomads than to the modern effendi who live in cities like ours and share our future whose fleeting nature is not yet apparent. In desert life, in much of the eastern world, every detail counts because it may never be repeated: even an irregular traveler must feel that the light it sheds is far more important because there are two eternities and not one, the past and the future, waiting to be engulfed. Gerald de Gouri is one of my old friends. He knows and adores his desert world and wrote this faithful record of his journey with a sense of his own as a transient in time. The trivia of the desert court, the weather of the Bedouin life, the details of travels reminiscent of “Harun al-Rashid and Charlemagne, will soon be forgotten.” Gerald de Goure sees it with an expert and loving eye, and like a butterfly collector, he catches with his net the distant moments.