THE EMPTY

voice crying in the wilderness—a new and unknown chal-
lenger in the breathless tourney of Arabian exploration.
Yet none had crossed Arabia before me except one—Captain
G. F. Sadlier, my predecessor by .a hundred years.

Dr. Hogarth, on the other hand, was the right-hand man
of the British Government in all matters of Arabian import.
Director of the wartime Arab Bureau at Cairo, he was the
acknowledged and pre-eminent authority on Arabian affairs.
And as far back as 1904 he had, under the title of The Pene-
tration of Arabia, published an exhaustive and inspiring sum-
mary of all that had been done in the field of Arabian ex-
ploration from the days of Nearchus and Aelius Callus up
to the beginning of the twentieth century. The gaps he had
noted urour knowledge of Arabia were still for £he most part
gaps after the lapse of fourteen years. And one of them was
perhaps the largest blank on the map of the earth outside
the Polar regions. He was content to contemplate its vast
silence without encouraging rash adventurers to their doom.
The ends of science could be served as well in other ways*
If oxygen could surmount the summit of Everest, the aero-
plane or even the motor car would surely expose the empti-
ness of the Empty Quarter in all good time. But he would
perhaps scarcely have credited a forecast that within four-
teen years more the Rub* al Khali would have yielded up
its secrets—not once, but twice—to ordinary travellers
equipped with no means of locomotion that has not been
at the service of explorers since the beginning of time* Yet
no one desired more intensely to know the exact nature of
that great emptiness, and the suppressed twinkle of his
cautious cynicism was more than a spur of inspiration. More
than anything I regret that he himself had passed beyond
the veil before the veil was drawn from an earthly mystery of
whose significance he would have been the ideal interpreter,

3Trom pleasant weeks of closest contact with Dr. Hogarth
at Jidda and in Egypt I passed that year back iato Arabia
and down into its southern depths round the great Wadi
of the Dawasir, whence I had to turn back regretfully on
June 6th, 1918, having * to rest content with, w&at had been
achieved and the hope of satisfying some day the insatiable