![]() At noon, the temperature of the surface of the sand reaches 80C. It covers 250,000 square miles and contains ranges of dunes 100 miles long and 1,000ft high. ![]() The Empty Quarter is the largest sand desert in the world. He was not in thrall to the desert itself but, like T E Lawrence, to his admiration of those who lived there: “The harder the life,” ran his credo, “the finer the person.” His motive for crossing it was not primarily to reap glory for himself, but to share the hardship of the life of the Bedu and to earn their comradeship. Thesiger’s reputation was established by two epic journeys he made in the 1940s across the Rub ‘al Khali, or Empty Quarter, the most forbidding, least known and least penetrated region of Arabia. Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who died on Sunday aged 93, was the quintessential English explorer, and the last and greatest of that small band of travellers who sought out the secrets of the desert in the years before Arabia was transformed forever by the oil beneath her sands. The great soldier, explorer and travel writer who may have met Paddy in Egypt.įirst published in the Telegraph 26 August 2003 ![]()
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