An account of the travels of an Englishman through Arabia, including an eye-witness account of the 1911 siege of Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. This siege was one of the last big events in the Yemeni-Ottoman conflicts, which started with the first Ottoman attempt to conquer Yemen in 1538. In 1911 a treaty was signed, with which Yemen became a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire until Yemen could take advantage of the collapse of the Empire during and after WWI to reclaim its independence.
After his travels in Arabia, described in A modern pilgrim in Mecca, he returned to Africa. During the First World War he remained in Africa, where he founded a coastal defence force called the "Arab Rifles", active around Mombasa. Later he was sent to serve near the border of Kenya with Tanzania (then British East Africa and German East Africa), where he was killed as a result of a German ambush in 1916.
Binding slightly rubbed, very slight foxing on the edges, some foxing on the first and last flyleaves. Small tear in the in the inner margin of the map, without affecting the map itself. Sharp folding lines in the plate of The Haram in Mecca (between pp. 152-152). With an ownership inscription: "R.S. Breene, 1 June, 1928." over the remnants of an erased inscription on the first flyleaf. Howgego IV, W13; Smith, The Yemens, 103. cf. Macro 2266. cf. Canton, From Cairo to Baghdad British travellers in Arabia, pp. 161-165; (other ed.) Sotheby's the library of Robert Michael Burrell, 858.