Winter in Arabia - Tapa dura

"As an explorer, Stark could claim no major discoveries, but her acute observations and her surveying skills had earned her professional respect . . . She was a vivid describer of scenes and landscapes . . . She was a finely calibrated recording instrument in a land that was just awakening to the changes being wrought by paved roads, nation-states, and oil . . . "A Winter in Arabia" recounts how, bored and disillusioned by an expedition with a trained archeologist and with its painstakingly glorious achievements, Stark set off again to explore the frankincense lands . . . There is a quiet melancholy to these books-- an unshakable sense of cultures irretrievably lost, and of the ruthlessness of time, which seems to arise both from the nature of the subject and from the nature of the traveler growing old." -- "The New Yorker"
"Freya Stark... must be left to ride her donkey forever along the empty beaches and the roadless valleys of the 50s Turkish landscape... She, like Homer, Al

Freya Stark (1893-1993), 'the poet of travel', was the doyenne of Middle East travel writers and one of the most courageous and adventurous women travellers in history. She travelled extensively through Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and Southern Arabia, where she became the first western woman to travel through the Hadhramaut. Usually solo, she ventured to places few Europeans had ever been. Her travels earned her the Founder's Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and she was created a Dame in 1975. She received huge public acclaim and her many, now classic, books include Traveller's Prelude, The Valleys of the Assassins, Ionia, The Southern Gates of Arabia, Alexander's Path, Dust in the Lion's Paw and East is West. 'She has written the best travel books of her generation and her name will survive as an artist in prose.' - The Observer