Grove Koger
As I expand and update When the Going Was Good, I’m posting revised entries from the first edition. Today’s deals with a classic account of travels in the Arabian Peninsula in the mid-19th century by one of the greatest explorers of that or any other century, Sir Richard Francis Burton, who was born March 19, 1821.
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Richard F. Burton: Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah. London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1855–56)
The prodigiously gifted Burton towers above his contemporaries like a human Everest. The preeminent explorer of his generation, he published more than three dozen works of travel and exploration. He also mastered nearly as many languages and dialects, translating an unexpurgated sixteen-volume edition of the Arabian Nights and such classics of Oriental erotica as the Kama Sutra. A master swordsman scornful of the Victorian society upon which he nevertheless depended, “he prided himself,” as a contemporary put it, “on looking like Satan.”
Securing a year’s leave from the Indian army and the backing of the Royal Geographical Society, Burton traveled to Arabia via Egypt and the Red Sea in the company of a band of Muslim pilgrims. He was disguised as an Afghan physician, but carried concealed paper and pencil. Thus he was able to sketch and write descriptions of cities and shrines that were forbidden to non-Moslems, including the sacred black stone—which, in the estimation of Burton as well as most others, was a meteorite—embedded in the wall of the building in Mecca known as the Kaaba.
Burton clearly reveled in the daring of his exploits. Penetration of his disguise would very probably have meant death, but he could not resist the temptation of engaging in a brawl on the voyage down the Red Sea, precipitating a huge earthenware jug of drinking water over aggressive fellow pilgrims who coveted his share of the deck.
Burton’s two-volume account of his experiences is a treasure-trove of sometimes unfocused information, revealing a rather “tawdry” reality behind the then-storied glamour of the Arab world. Readers today are likely to turn to it not for such dated content but for the self-portrait it offers of a man at great and rambunctious odds with the world around him. As he himself wrote in his long 1880 poem The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî, “Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause; / He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws.”
The literature about Burton is extensive, but two good places to start are Fawn M. Brodie’s The Devil Drives: A life of Sir Richard Burton (1967) and Mary S. Lovell’s dual portrait of Burton and his wife, A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard & Isabel Burton.
The title of the first, by the way, is taken from Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well: “I am driven on by the flesh; and he must needs go that the devil drives.” The second comes from Pope’s Moral Essays: “Wise wretch! With pleasures too refined to please, / With too much spirit to be e’er at ease, / With too much quickness ever to be taught, / With too much thinking to have common thought: / You purchase pain with all that joy can give, / And die of nothing but a rage to live.” Words to ponder …
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The illustrations of Burton show him in disguise on his way to Mecca and posed for a studio portrait. The latter is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 70 years or less.
World Enough 