| 1 From Venice To Beirut. Letters 1-12 |
|
1 | (22) |
|
In the first of these letters Freya Stark has left her home at Asolo and has set out from Venice on a small cargo vessel for her first journey east of Italy and her first contact with the Near East. |
|
|
|
The s.s. Abbazia takes her as far as Rhodes, where she spends a few days before proceeding on s.s Diana to Beirut. |
|
|
|
The whole passage occupies three weeks. |
|
|
|
In the course of it she describes her first impressions of many famous places. |
|
|
| 2 Learning Arabic at Brumana. Letters 13-63 |
|
23 | (64) |
|
The writer of these letters is now to spend three cold winter months at Brumana, a Syrian village on a slope of the Lebanon high above Beirut. |
|
|
|
She went with a recommendation from the well-known orientalist Sir Thomas Arnold, and her object in settling there was to gain a command of fluent Arabic. |
|
|
|
She had already received a grounding in this difficult tongue, first from an old Franciscan missionary friar at San Remo, then in 1926 from an Egyptian teacher in London, and finally in 1927 at the School of Oriental Studies. |
|
|
| 3 First Visit to Damascus. Letters 64-89 |
|
87 | (40) |
|
Telling of a month at Damascus, where the writer stayed in a native household in the Moslem quarter, and was much hampered by ill-health due to insanitary conditions. |
|
|
|
After three weeks' convalescence in Brumana she is joined by her friend Venetia Buddicom, whose acquaintance the reader has already made in the course of this correspondence. |
|
|
| 4 Brumana To Damascus And Thence To Jerusalem. Letters 90-108 |
|
127 | (62) |
|
The two friends go by car to Baalbek and Damascus. |
|
|
|
Their next expedition is an unconventional and adventurous one, seeing that the Druse revolt of August, 1925, had continued until March, 1927, and that the French rulers of Syria were far from welcoming intruders. |
|
|
|
They are mounted on donkeys and with a Druse guide called Najm make a leisurely progress towards Palestine. |
|
|
|
At the end of eleven days they are at Bosra. |
|
|
|
There they dismiss their guide and take a car for Jericho and Jerusalem. |
|
|
| 5 Postscripts From Asolo And Brumana. Letters 109-111 |
|
189 | |
|
These letters re-introduce some persons and places already familiar to the reader, who will perhaps discern in the last sentence of all a link with the opening chapter of 'Baghdad Sketches.' |
|
|
Biežāk uzdotie jautājumi par e-grāmatām