Rose red city!

Rose-red city!

Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Abdallah, AKA Johann Ludwig Burckhardt

Following a recent trip to Petra, the ancient city carved from rock in southern Jordan, I was struck by the entirely inadequate treatment given to the city's discovery in my guidebook. The history of its founders, the Nabateans, was discussed at length, but they were primitive and were only independent for a short while before being absorbed into the regional political systems, starting with the Romans. The Nabateans carved a lot of mountainsides, but they are nowhere near as interesting as the western travellers who braved all kinds of privations and bloodthirsty natives to "discover" the city two thousand years later. I had read briefly about the first one in an unrelated book on Egypt, and wanted to know more.

So on a slow day at work, I decided to consult some of the original sources. I started with the diaries of the first explorer,Johann Ludwig Bruckhardt, a Swiss traveller who had set out from Cairo to find the source of the Niger and ended up way of course, disguised as a wandering holyman. His disguise was so convincing, that he was adopted by the locals as a sort of saint, and his today enshrined in Cairo in a Muslim graveyard. I read his first-hand account of shedding all of his belongings before entering Petra, knowing that what he had would be stolen, only to have his remaining rags of clothing lifted from him in his sleep. My edition of his journals was published in 1829 following Bruckhardt's untimely death by the British "Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior of Africa".

I turned to the fantastical journals written by the New York lawyer John Lloyd Stephens, who for the journey transformed himself into Abdel Hasis, "a respectable Cairo merchant, dressed in flowing robes and armed with a brace of pistols." He describes his entrance through the canyons as "the most extraordinary that Nature, in her wildest freaks, ever framed… it is perhaps the most wonderful object in the world, except the ruins in the city to which it forms the entrance." Stephens, unlike Bruckhardt and other early explorers did not encounter significant resistance from the local Arabs, a point he laments at length.
I even stumbled across a 2nd edition of "Petra", the epic and not very good poem by John Wiliam Burgon where I re-read the famous description of the ruins being "A rose-red city, half as old as time!" The exclamation is Burgon's, one of many he seems to like to use!

So how did I manage to have these classics of exploration literature in my consultant's team room? Why by Google Book Search, of course. I have known about this resource for some time, but I see now that the scope of the books made available online is reached stunning proportions; just about every classic of exploration I can think of: Burton, Shackelton, and even my ultimate hero, Col. F.M. Bailey (who loyal readers will remember from my Uzbekistan posts) are all there in the original editions. The text is all indexed and searchable, and as all these books are long since in the public domain, they can be read at leisure.

The user interface is good, but not great, although it contains a lot of nifty features such as a list of all the references and cross-references made in other books. I was browsing the Google Reader blog, where I learned that they have made a mobile client for the Android platform, which actually may be a compelling reason to buy an Android phone (need to check if there is a good podcast client, like what I have on my Nokia/Symbian phone).

Many of the classics of historical/travel writing genre which I have come to love, such as the books written by William Dalrymple, Alan Moorehead, and of course Peter Hopkirk, were based mostly on the primary sources created by the original wave of explorers themselves, backed up with extensive travel of their own. The digitization of the primary sources makes them accessible to lay travellers such as myself, who can create their own scaled-down works of travel literature, such as... this blog.