Wilfred Thesiger

In December 1946, as the English explorer Wilfred Thesiger was starving in the Arabian desert, he comforted himself with the thought that there was no place he would rather be.

“I lay with my eyes shut, insisting to myself, ‘If I were in London I would give anything to be here,'” he wrote in Arabian Sands, his memoir of crossing the Empty Quarter twice, traveling by camel with a small group of Bedu tribesmen he had grown to love fiercely.

He sheltered for three days in the shade of his cloak thrown over a bush, watching the stars wheel through the night as a bitter wind keened through the dunes, imagining the jeeps and lorries at a distant British outpost so vividly that “I could hear the engines, smell the stink of petrol fumes.” Even in such a state, the thought of whisking across the desert in an automobile was abhorrent to him. “No, I would rather be here starving as I was than sitting