If you've followed me for a while, you know my all-time favorite book is Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Anyone who truly loves this book (or the equally great—albeit different—film) has, at a minimum, become intrigued with one of the settings: the pre-WW2 Libyan Desert.
I’m going to start a series of posts that will provide some background information to The English Patient (TEP). This is the first. Also, I should mention that while TEP is a work of fiction, it borrows (steals?) greatly from events and individuals who really existed.
The explorers and cartographers of TEP traveled to the Libyan Desert in the early- and late-1930s in search of the “lost oasis” of Zerzura, a mythical city that curiously is said to have existed in one of the harshest stretches of the Libyan Desert. The discovery of an oasis here, in one of the last unexplored regions on earth, was a call to adventure with the promise of historical immortality for any fraternity of explorers who might find it, as with it they would breathe life and certainty into a people and culture that was rumored to have existed for centuries.
More to come.
Pictured: 1861 edition of Herodotus’ Histories; March 1933 and April 1939 editions of The Geographical Journal, published by the Royal Geographical Society, London.