A Pilgrimage to Nejd

A Pilgrimage to Nejd, the Cradle of the Arab Race is an inspiring 2-volume historical and travel account of the journey in the Middle East based on the journals of Lady Anne Blunt edited by her husband and companion Wilfrid, first published in 1881. Nejd, in the imagination of the Bedouins of the North, is a region of romance, the cradle of their race and of their ideas of chivalry. This carefully crafted e-artnow ebook is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. 'We spent a week at Damascus, a week not altogether of pleasure, although it was to be our last of civilised life. We had an immense number of things to buy and arrange and think over, before starting on so serious a journey as this, which we knew must be very unlike the pleasure trip of last year. We could not afford to leave anything to chance with the prospect of a three months' wandering, and a thousand miles of desert, where it was impossible to count upon fresh supplies even of the commonest necessaries of life. Jôf, the first station on our road, was four hundred miles off, and then we must cross the Nefûd, with its two hundred miles of sand, before we could get to Nejd. The return journey, too, to the Persian Gulf, would have to be made without coming to anything so European as a Turkish town. Nobody could tell us what supplies were to be had in Nejd, beyond dates and corn. Mr. Palgrave's account of Jebel Shammar was, in fact, the only guide we had to go on, and its accuracy had been so much doubted that we felt obliged to take into consideration the possibility of finding the Nejd towns mere oases, and their cultivation only that of the date.'

Anne Blunt, 15th Baroness Wentworth (1837-1917), known for most of her life as Lady Anne Blunt, was co-founder, with her husband the poet Wilfrid Blunt (1840-1922), of the Crabbet Arabian Stud in England and the Sheykh Obeyd estate near Cairo. From the late 1870s, Wilfrid and Lady Anne travelled extensively in Arabia and the Middle East, buying Arabian horses from Bedouin tribesmen and the Egyptian Ali Pasha Sherif. To this day, the vast majority of purebred Arabian horses trace their lineage to at least one Crabbet ancestor. Lady Anne travelled extensively in the Middle East, and is particularly noted as the first European woman to ride through the Arabian desert to reach the city of Ha'il.