Adventures in Arabia [antikvár]

PREFACE WHEN a man goes wandering into outlandish places he usually has a reason. At any rate, reasonable people feel that he should have one. Therefore it seems necessary and proper in his preface to explain why I went to Arabia. Actually I have never understood the why of anything -my own obscure but insistent motivations least of all. One of my first memories is a picture-book my grandmother gave me in early nursery days. Its frontispiece showed three majestic figures from another world, cloaked mysteriously, riding upon the backs of strange, towering beasts, following a star. That picture filled my childish mind with indescribable excitement. A second picture showed a baby, with people kneeling. It failed to interest me. My grandmother explained that this was a particular sort of baby-but I was stubborn. I kept turning back to the three men on camels. Somé years later, when I was nine or ten, we moved from Maryland out to Kansas, and were living in Abilene, a prairie town. The prairie was fiat in all directions to the skyline. The nearest town, an adjacent countytown, was called Enterprise. The town itself was hidden by the curve of the globe, but on very clear days the top of a small church-steeple could be vaguely seen. To the boys of Abilene Enterprise spelled mystery. It was before the day of motor-cars, To walk there, across the prairie, was a long-discussed adventure. We had aDaisy air-rifle and an old bowie-knife, and persuaded ourselves that we might encounter Indians. Six of us planned