Travels In Arabia Deserta; Volume 1

Doughty wrote in a relatively laboured, archaic style which demands patience from the reader. Initially on that account it was hard going for me (and I would image, for most people), but the book, wherein he presents an account of his solitary travels and tribulations during a period of nearly two years between 1876 and 1878, has long been widely regarded as a classic. It rewards persistence, and I found it quite spell-binding. Doughty was not without an ironic sense of humour as you can see from what he wrote about an Arab he encountered; "...his strength lay in his stubborn brawns and large breast, and little in his brains which indeed were not very well settled." And something of his style as he wrote about pilgrams he fell in with on the way to Mecca: "... peasants for the most part, as the richer and delicate livers are ever less zealous to seek hallows than poor bodies with small consolation in this world."

Convinced in the late 1800s that the English language had become hopelessly corrupt, Charles Doughty attempted in Arabia Deserta (and, less successfully, in his epic poems) to graft Victorian English onto Elizabethan syntax. The result was a beautiful, sometimes obscure, entirely original style that had a great deal of influence on the English modernists, particularly Henry Green. I recommend it to anyone with a modicum of patience and taste.