Feb 11, 2023 | Essays, Non-Fiction, Travel |
There is no anti-depressant quite like sea-swimming, and Holkham is where I usually go when I’m feeling sad. Striking out into the enormous expanse of cold sea, over the vast sands, I immerse myself like the fox ridding himself of his fleas. I leave my devils on the...
Dec 24, 2022 | Non-Fiction, Travel |
They are not searching for us yet, or, to be more precise, they are searching elsewhere for us. Probably in Arabia. And in fact we shall hear no plane until tomorrow, after abandoning our own. And that single distant flight will mean nothing to us. Black specks...
Jul 23, 2022 | Non-Fiction, Travel |
A handful of pilots, of whom Mermoz was one, surveyed the CasabIanca-Dakar line across the territory inhabited by the refractory tribes of the Sahara. Motors in those days being what they were, Mermoz was taken prisoner one day by the Moors. The tribesmen were unable...
Apr 30, 2022 | Non-Fiction, Travel |
I once knew a young suicide. I cannot remember what disappointment in love it was which induced him to send a bullet carefully into his heart. I have no notion what literary temptation he had succumbed to when he drew on a pair of white gloves before the shot. But I...
Oct 23, 2021 | Non-Fiction, Travel |
I arrived back in Salala on 16 October 1946. I planned to cross the Empty Quarter from Mughshin to the Trucial Coast, and to return to Salala across the gravel steppes at the back of Oman, but I realized that if a hint of my plans reached the Wali he would forbid the...
Jun 26, 2021 | Non-Fiction, Travel |
From Abyssinia I was sent to Syria, where I served in Jabal al Druze and later worked for a year among the tribes. The deserts in which I had travelled had been blanks in time as well as space. They had no intelligible history, the nomads who inhabited them had no...