"Who are these from the strange, ineffable places, From the Topaze Mountain and Desert of Doubt, With the glow of the Yemen full on their faces, And a breath from the spices of Hadramaut?Travel-apprentices, travel-indenturers, Young men, old men, black hair, white, Names to conjure with, wild adventurers, From the noonday furnace and purple night.Burckhardt, Halévy, Niebuhr, Slater, Seventeenth, eighteenth-century bays, Seetzen, Sadleir, Struys, and later Down to the long Victorian days.A thousand miles at the back of Aden, There they had time to think of things; In the outer silence and burnt air laden With the shadow of death and a vulture’s wings.There they remembered the last house in Samna, Last of the plane-trees, last shepherd and flock, Prayed for the heavens to rain down manna, Prayed for a Moses to strike the rock.Famine and fever flagged their forces Till they died in a dream of ice and fruit, In the long-forgotten watercourses By the edge of Queen Zobëide’s route.They have left the hope of the green oases, The fear of the bleaching bones and the pest, They have found the more ineffable places— Allah has given them rest."
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Original Language: English
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"Arabia: Hogarth’s Penetration of Arabia" (1925)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J._Meade_Falkner
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J. Meade Falkner
John Meade Falkner (8 May 1858 – 22 July 1932) was an English novelist and poet, best known for his 1898 novel Moonfleet. An extremely successful businessman, he became chairman of the arms manufacturer Armstrong Whitworth during the First World War.
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