The Red Sea Mountains of Egypt and Egyptian Years

The English scholar and explorer Leo Arthur Tregenza (1901-98) arrived in Egypt in 1927 as a school teacher, and remained there until the 1952 Revolution. From his native Cornwall he brought with him an abiding passion for Roman civilization, natural history, and walking, interests which he continued to pursue in Egypt by traveling on foot during school vacations through some of the country's wildest and most historic landscapes. In The Red Sea Mountains of Egypt and Egyptian Years Tregenza describes and Egypt now unknown to us, in which the waters of the Nile still flooded and Bedouin of the desert practiced a way of life unchanged for thousands of years. The two volumes deal mainly with his three long treks (1947, 1949, 1951) in the Eastern Desert. They also provide highly valuable depictions of the pre-High Dam rhythms of the Nile and its rural peoples. Walking with Tregenza, we probe the Greek and Roman mining and quarrying sites of the desert wilderness, including Mons Porphyrites and Mons Claudianus. An assiduous observer of the wildlife around him, Tregenza tracks down birds, mammals, and reptiles, teaching us the names and habits of each species.
Most memorably of all, we get to know the individual Bedouin men of the desert who were his constant companions and friends. 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.