Paul and Janet Starkey, editors
UNFOLDING THE ORIENT
Travellers in Egypt and the Near East
318pp. Ithaca. £35.
TLS £34.50.
0 86372 257 1
INTERPRETING THE ORIENT
Travellers in Egypt and the Near East
278pp. Ithaca. £35.
TLS £34.50.
0 86372 258 X 

Katharine Chubbuck’s essay, “‘Ah! That the Desert were my Dwelling Place’: The romance of Persia in the early writings of Gertrude Bell” (which appears in Interpreting the Orient ), is good on Bell’s intense awareness of her youthfulness as, some twenty years earlier, she rode out “in the gleaming morning air outside Tehran, in the company of the dashing legation secretary”. Looking back on those rides, Bell herself wrote as follows in Safar Nameh (her first book, published in 1894):
Life seized us and inspired us with a mad sense of revelry. The humming wind and the teeming earth shouted “Life! Life!” as we rode. Life! Life! The beautiful magnificent! Age was far from us – death far; we had left him enthroned in his barren mountains, with ghostly cities and outworn faiths to bear him company. For us, the wide plain and limitless world, for us the beauty and freshness of the morning! for us youth and the joy of living!

  Travel is especially associated with youth, with Wanderjahren and with rites de passage . Young people travel to test and discover themselves. Such journeys are the subject of John Ghazvinian’s “English Pleasure Travel in the Near East, 1580–1645” and of Philip Mansel’s whistle-stop survey, “The Grand Tour in the Middle East 1699–1826” (both essays in Unfolding the Orient  ). Ghazvinian’s essay celebrates the achievements of wild young men like Thomas Coryate (whom Donne referred to as the “great lunatique”) and George Sandys, “who travelled for nothing but the satisfaction of their daydreams and their curiosities”. 

Mansel’s grand tourists are more earnest. They made sketches of ancient ruins and travelled with copies of Pausanias and Herodotus. But Mansel notes that the best brothel in Istanbul was beside the British Embassy. James Bruce, the eighteenth-century explorer of Abyssinia and the subject of a fine essay by Carl Thompson in Desert Travellers , was another wild traveller. Bruce’s Travels To Discover the Source of the Nile is a wonderfully unsystematic, boastful and comic narrative of exploration. Bruce thought the Linnaean system of taxonomy was rubbish and set his face against the sort of scientific exploration promoted by Sir Joseph Banks