By Desert Ways to Baghdad

In 1908, Louisa Jebb Wilkins did something extraordinary: she rode on horseback through the dying Ottoman Empire with a female companion, unable to speak the local language, dressed in cumbersome full-length skirts and riding side-saddle. They were enthusiastic amateurs who believed courage and common sense would see them through. Remarkably, it did. Their journey from Brusa through Asia Minor into the heart of Mesopotamia, on to Baghdad and Damascus, traverses a world that would soon cease to exist. They encountered guarded harems and regal pashas, fabled rivers and deserts of intense beauty. Yet what Wilkins discovered was something beyond geography: a personal freedom found in moving through untraveled lands unchained from the demands of civilized time. "In the untravelled parts of the East you reign supreme," she wrote. "Ignore Time, and he is your servant." The book captures both the romance of that vanished world and the melancholy of return, as Wilkins laments trading dirt and isolation for cleanliness and constraint. It endures for readers who seek accounts of unlikely journeys undertaken with spirit over preparation.