Colonel P. Yorke and Dr. Shaw, a deputation from that distinguished
body, with their usual zeal for discovery and readiness to encourage
the discoverer, honoured me by warmly supporting, in a personal
interview with the then Chairman of the then Court of Directors to the
then Honourable East India Company, my application for three years'
leave of absence on special duty from India to Maskat. But they were
unable to prevail upon the said Chairman, the late Sir James Hogg,
who,[FN#1] remembering the fatalities which of late years have befallen
sundry soldier-travellers in the East, refused his sanction, alleging
as a reason[FN#1]

[p.2]that the contemplated journey was of too dangerous a nature. In
compensation, however, for the disappointment, I was allowed the
additional furlough of a year, in order to pursue my Arabic studies in
lands where the language is best learned.

What remained for me but to prove, by trial, that what might be
perilous to other travellers was safe to me? The "experimentum crucis"
was a visit to Al-Hijaz, at once the most difficult and the most
dangerous point by which a European can enter Arabia. I had intended,
had the period of leave originally applied for been granted, to land at
Maskat-a favourable starting-place-and there to apply myself, slowly
and surely, to the task of spanning the deserts. But now I was to
hurry, in the midst of summer, after a four years' sojourn in Europe,
during which many things Oriental had faded away from my memory,
and-after passing through the ordeal of Egypt, a country where the
police is curious as in Rome or Milan-to begin with the Moslem's Holy
Land, the jealously guarded and exclusive Harim. However, being
liberally supplied with the means of travel by the Royal Geographical
Society; thoroughly tired of "progress" and of "civilisation;" curious