God's Fugitive (Text Only) (ePub)

Explorer, scholar, scientist, travel writer and poet, Charles Montagu Doughty was one of the greatest nineteenth-century adventurers. In the 1870s Doughty spent two years wandering through Arabia, first with the Hadj pilgrimage, then joining nomadic bands of Arabs. Unyielding in is independence of mind, the tall, red-bearded Englishman consistently refused to conceal his Christianity, making his perilous travels even more dangerous: he was threatened with death, spurned, insulted and often beaten by angry mobs.

The story of his obsessive archaeological investigations and wide-ranging observations of Arabia and desert life were published in 188 as the vast and celebrated 'Travels in Arabia Deserta'. Although he was now feted by the literary establishment, his abrasiveness and refusal to compromise meant he frequently found himself at odds with the learned societies of England and Europe, his work rejected and his genius (as he saw it) neglected.

Doughty was far more than an eccentric traveller and adventurer. He was dedicated to his mission of rescuing the English language from the decadence into which he believed it had fallen since the eras of Chaucer and Spencer, and spent ten years writing a four-volume blank-verse epic about the origins of Britain. He died in 1926, his literary reputation largely restored thanks to the editors oaf T.E. Lawrence.

'Taylor brings back to life, with vivid sympathy, a lost hero of the Victorian age.'
JOHN CAREY

'Compelling...Taylor has resurrected one of the greatest adventures in the history of travel.'
PHILIP MARSDEN 'Observer'

'Exciting reading...a triumph of balanced and sympathetic characterisation.'
THE TABLET