The Southern Gates of Arabia

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Embarking from the Gulf of Aden, Stark rode north along the ancient incense route. She was the first European woman to set foot in many places there, and the first foreigner to visit the white-walled city of Huraidha. As a woman, she was able to befriend not just the beduins and shaikhs but women such as the Sultan’s harem at Sewun, who ‘regarded with horror my freckled hands, which they attributed to measles’ . She is equally humorous, learned and lyrical, with an eye for the beauty of vast deserts, fertile wadis and towns with their ‘dusty streets unpaved and silent, and solitary save for a woman here and there trailing her long blue gown by some carved doorway’.
In her introduction, travel writer and biographer Sara Wheeler explains why she considers this to be Stark’s best book – ‘a heady mix of hardship and luxury, scholarship and mischief, loneliness and intimacy’. This edition, styled to resemble a travel journal, features 61 of Stark’s original photographs, integrated with the text. The binding bears a photograph of a town in the Wadi Do’an and a lattice-work design, based on an ornately carved door photographed by the author. The same pattern is reprised in the printed endpapers. Also included are two maps, redrawn from the first edition, showing Stark’s route and the incense routes of Arabia.

[Source: http://www.foliosociety.com/book/SGA]