Jeffrey Tayler's Glory in a Camel's Eye: A Perilous Trek Through the Greatest African Desert (Houghton Mifflin) tells how he became intrigued by the romance of Islam's rich cultural past in general, and by the Bedouin and the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula in particular. In 1987 he "sailed from Algeciras in southern Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar to Morocco, from where [he] intended to make [his] way east across the entire Arab world." Because of a bad case of food poisoning in Morocco, however, he never reached his destination, Baghdad. Instead, Tayler returned to the U.S. and joined the Peace Corps, which promptly sent him back to Morocco. There he heard tales of the Draa Valley, which begins about 240 kilometres southeast of Marrakesh and connects with the Sahara.

"From the 9th through the 15th century," he writes, "the Draa served as one of the main caravan routes between Europe and Timbuktu. The desert-wise Bedouin, or Ruhhal (from the Arabic rahala, 'to wander from place to place') in the Arabic dialects of North Africa, were the master navigators of this 1,100-mile channel across the sea of sand." As this excerpt suggests, Tayler is generous in passing along to readers his knowledge of Arabic and also at weaving in historical context.

Tayler made his journey across the desert in the late 1990s. What's most memorable about his detailed and nuanced account is how thoroughly the poor Bedouin had abandoned so many of their traditional ways for an uncomfortable foothold in the contemporary world.