Publisher's Synopsis
In The Red Sea Mountains of Egypt and Egyptian Years, English scholar and explorer Leo Arthur Tregenza (1901-98) describes an Egypt unknown today. In his prose the Nile still floods, and Bedouin of the desert practice a way of life unchanged for thousands of years. L.A. Tregenza came to Egypt in 1927 to teach school, and remained until the 1952 Revolution. His passions in his native Cornwall had been the civilization of Rome, natural history, and walking. He carried on all three in Egypt, traveling on foot during school holidays through some of the country's wildest and most historic landscapes. The books deal mainly with his three long treks (1947, 1949, 1951) in the Eastern Desert. They also provide an extremely valuable depiction of the pre-High Dam rhythms of the Nile and its rural people. Walking with Tregenza, the reader probes the Greek and Roman mining and quarrying sites of the desert wilderness, including Mons Porphyrites and Mons Claudianus. When Tregenza finds an inscription he translates it on the spot, drawing us closer to the lives of those who toiled here so long ago. He is a careful observer of wildlife, so with him we track the birds, mammals, and reptiles, learning the names and habits of each species. Most memorably, we get to know the individual Bedouin men of the desert who were Tregenza's companions and friends. The nightly show in the firmament captivates him, inspiring him to write beautifully of life's mysteries. The reader becomes, as Tregenza described his own sensation, "subordinate to the strange, overmastering appeal of the desert itself." Tregenza's two classic accounts, published respectively in 1955 and 1958, are published here together in one volume, with a new foreword by Joseph J. Hobbs.
