The popularity of "Eothen" is a paradox: it fascinates by
violating all the rules which convention assigns to viatic
narrative. It traverses the most affecting regions of the world,
and describes no one of them: the Troad--and we get only his
childish raptures over Pope's "Homer's Iliad"; Stamboul--and he
recounts the murderous services rendered by the Golden Horn to the
Assassin whose serail, palace, council chamber, it washes; Cairo--
but the Plague shuts out all other thoughts; Jerusalem--but
Pilgrims have vulgarized the Holy Sepulchre into a Bartholomew
Fair. He gives us everywhere, not history, antiquities, geography,
description, statistics, but only Kinglake, only his own
sensations, thoughts, experiences. We are told not what the desert
looks like, but what journeying in the desert feels like. From
morn till eve you sit aloft upon your voyaging camel; the risen
sun, still lenient on your left, mounts vertical and dominant; you
shroud head and face in silk, your skin glows, shoulders ache,
Arabs moan, and still moves on the sighing camel with his
disjointed awkward dual swing, till the sun once more descending
touches you on the right, your veil is thrown aside, your tent is
pitched, books, maps, cloaks, toilet luxuries, litter your spread-
out rugs, you feast on scorching toast and "fragrant" {10} tea,
sleep sound and long; then again the tent is drawn, the comforts
packed, civilization retires from the spot she had for a single
night annexed, and the Genius of the Desert stalks in.

Herein, in these subjective chatty confidences, is part of the
spell he lays upon us: while we read we are IN the East: other
books, as Warburton says, tell us ABOUT the East, this is the East
itself. And yet in his company we are always ENGLISHMEN in the
East: behind Servian, Egyptian, Syrian, desert realities, is a