Wilfred Thesiger is one of the great explorers of this century. However, he is unique in that, unlike any of the other great travellers and writers of the past - T.E. Lawrence, Doughty, Burton and Livingstone - he had the opportunity, and developed the skill, to take photographs which do more than complement his achievements. While he has wondered at the landscapes, the buildings and the animals of so many distant places, and held them unforgettably in his lens, it is the people and their daily life which are paramount in this recollection of times past. This is partly because Thesiger has always found the greatest reward, not in remoteness for its own sake, but in the companionship he found there. It is also true because the assembly of portraits is unrepeatable - quite simply the way in which people lived, moved and had their being has irrevocably vanished. The last 50 years has destroyed forever the inheritance of the previous 500. From the many thousands of photographs taken over 50 years - with a Leica camera, protected from sand, frost or the miasma of the marshes in its goat-skin bag - Thesiger has chosen for this book those photographs which most satisfy him. Here are some rarely seen images from his Asian travels, images of Africa where he has now lived for almost 25 years, a mixture of familiar and unknown pictures of the Arab world in which he found himself most at home. Wilfred Thesiger is the author of "Arabian Sands", "The Marsh Arabs" and "The Life of My Choice".