In the empty quarter.(Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer)(Book review)

The telltale knocking of opportunity sounds different to each of us, no doubt, but to Wilfred Thesiger it had an especially odd timbre. It was at a dinner party in Addis Ababa--not a place much known for affording opportunities--that he meta representative of the Desert Locust Research Organization. Would Thesiger by chance be interested in going alone to Rub' al Khali, the notorious "Empty Quarter" of Arabia, to look for locust outbreak centers? Though hardly the sort of offer at which most men would leap, to Thesiger it seemed heaven-sent. He had spent much of his life among various tribes in several deserts, but the Bedouin of Rub' al Khali were the ultimate desert ...