# Read the first page of The Marsh Arabs by Wilfred Thesiger Read the opening of The Marsh Arabs by Wilfred Thesiger free, no signup. Life among the communities of the Iraqi marshes before their world was transformed. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/the-marsh-arabs-wilfred-thesiger - Genre: Travel writing - Year: 1964 - ISBN: 9780141904436 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9780141904436&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9780141904436 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9780141904436 ## The opening @@CHAP@@ 1. A Glimpse of the Marshes All day we had ridden across a flat plain, and the dust rose from under the horses’ hooves and choked us. The rains had failed, as they so often did, and the plants that had come up lay crumbling on the gaping soil. There was not a bush, nor even a rock, to serve as a landmark to measure our slow progress towards the horizon. Cur saddles, of the usual Arab design, were hard as boards. The stirrups, being hung far back, forced us to sit forward on our forks and pressed us into the pommel which stuck up like those on cowboy saddles. Indeed, it struck me that the American saddle had probably derived from such as these, the Arabs introducing the design into Spain and the Spaniards taking it with them to the New World. We kept our horses at a walk for my companion had not ridden before. He was Dugald Stewart, British Vice-Consul at Amara. Though only twenty-nine and obviously very gifted, he maintained that he had no ambition except to end his career as Consul at Split, where he could get all the wild-fowling he wanted. We exchanged memories of Eton, as Old Etonians will. He had been a scholar and in spite of a game leg, made worse by two operations, had won many school colours, whereas I, with two sound legs, had never managed to get any. We camped that night among the Bazun, sleeping on the ground in the sheikh’s guest tent after an enormous meal of rice and mutton. Except that it was supported on eleven poles and was far larger, the tent did not differ from the other black goathair booths pitched all around us. Open along one side, all faced the same way and most had a shackled horse or two picketed in front. A solid mass of sheep and goats pressed around, and often partly inside, each tent. I had watched them being driven in at sunset by the shepherd lads, each flock moving in a golden aura of dust. Throughout the night their bleating made a background noise against which the barking of dogs rose and fell. I was on my way south from Iraqi Kurdistan, where I had gone to try to recapture the peace of mind I had known in the deserts of Southern Arabia. There I had lived with the Bedu for five years, and with them had travelled ten thousand miles across country where no car had ever been – until seismic parties, the vanguard of modern progress, began to arrive in search of oil. In Iraqi Kurdistan, which I had always wanted to visit, I had ridden from one end of the country to the other, accompanied only by a young Kurdish servant. The scenery was wild and beautiful, and the Kurds who lived there still wore the finery of tribal dress – tasselled turbans and baggy trousers, short jackets and cummerbunds, of every colour and pattern – hung with daggers and revolvers and crossed with decorated bandoliers, heavy with cartridges. I had slept in terraced villages that hugged the mountainsides where the flat-roofed houses rose from the roofs below, and in the black tents of the nomads on bare mountaintops where gentians grew among the grass, and snowdrifts lay throughout the summer. I had followed tumbling rivers through oak forests where bears grubbed in the thickets, and I had looked down on a herd of ibex, threading its way along a three-thousand-foot wall of rock, while huge griffon vultures swung past, the wind whistling in their pinions. I had seen the glory of the Kurdish spring, valley-sides covered with anemones, and mountains crimson with tulips. I had gorged on grapes, freshly picked and warmed by the sun or cooled in a nearby stream. But having seen Iraqi Kurdistan I had no desire to go back. Travel was too restricted, rather like stalking in a Highland deer forest. Across this stream was Turkey, beyond that watershed lay Persia, where uniformed police waited at the passes demanding visas I did not possess. I was fifty years too late. Half a century earlier I could have gone up through Rowunduz to Urmia, and on to Van, and the only effective hindrance would have been brigands and warring tribes. Admittedly the Marshes, for which I was now bound, covered a smaller area than Iraqi Kurdistan, but they were a world complete in itself, not a fragment of a larger world to the rest of which I was denied access. Besides, being fond of Arabs, it was probable that I could never really like Kurds. Although the landscape appealed to me the people did not. Admittedly I was hampered by not speaking their language, but even had I done so I felt that I should still not have liked them. As people are more important to me than places I decided to return to the Arabs. ## Books with a similar feel - [Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux](https://uncovered.ink/read/fresh-air-fiend-paul-theroux.md) - [To Jerusalem and Back by Saul Bellow](https://uncovered.ink/read/to-jerusalem-and-back-saul-bellow.md) - [A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson](https://uncovered.ink/read/a-walk-in-the-woods-bill-bryson.md) - [The Best American Travel Writing 2012 by Jason Wilson & William T. Vollmann](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-best-american-travel-writing-2012-jason-wilson-and-william-t-vollmann.md) - [No Baggage by Clara Bensen](https://uncovered.ink/read/no-baggage-clara-bensen.md) - [Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake](https://uncovered.ink/read/entangled-life-merlin-sheldrake.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). A short sample shown for reading and discovery. Rights holders can request removal at https://uncovered.ink/takedown.