Educated at Oxford where he won fame as a fencer, Sir Ahmed Mohammed Hassanein, an Egyptian of Bedouin descent, returned home and initially served as a diplomat for King Faud. But Hassanein’s love of adventure came to the fore and for a time overrode his diplomatic career.

Despite their dangerous appeal, there are a few desolate places in the world that call to a man, daring him to return to their deadly beauty again and again. The world’s last unexplored desert held such an allure for the remarkable author of this book. At the dawning of the 20^th century the vast desert of Libya remained one of last unexplored places on Earth. Because travel was restricted by the distance camels could trek between wells, vast portions of the Libyan interior were still blank spots on the map. Enter Sir Ahmed Hassanein, the dashing Egyptian diplomat turned explorer.

Having befriended the Muslim leaders of the elusive Senussi Brotherhood who controlled the deserts further on, Hassanein became aware of rumours of a “lost oasis” which lay even deeper in the desert.

In 1923 the explorer mounted his horse and led a small camel caravan on a remarkable seven month journey across the centre of Libya. More than two thousand gruelling miles later Hassanein emerged with marvellous tales of having not only located the “lost” oasis of Uweinat, but having also discovered a cave which contained ten-thousand-year-old drawings. Attributed to djinns, these Paleolithic images depicted a flourishing, but now extinct, pastoral world inhabited by giraffes, ostriches, gazelles, even cows, but no camels. Yet the most startling image depicted human beings swimming in what had become a forbidding desert.

Upon his return, Hassanein was hailed as a hero of exploration and awarded the Founders Medal by the Royal Geographical Society, while the mysterious “Cave of the Swimmers” Hassanein discovered became a legend which featured in the film, The English Patient.

Many men are born. Some are remembered. Few become legends.

Such was the fate of the English Long Rider Aubrey Herbert, whose amazing true-life adventures served as the inspiration for one of the most dashing heroes in British literature.

Aubrey Herbert was a renowned traveller who set out at the beginning of the 20^th century to explore Anatolia, Arabia, Mesopotamia, the Middle East and the Balkans. Burdened at birth with poor eyesight, this son of wealthy English aristocrats compensated by becoming a linguist who spoke French, Italian, German, Turkish, Arabic, Greek and Albanian. The latter language, though seldom heard outside its mountainous native land, was to play an influential part in Herbert’s later life.

During the course of his many wanderings, hair-raising quests and narrow escapes from death, Herbert was accompanied by Riza Bey, a notorious Albanian tribal prince, who had thrown his lot in with the wandering Englishman for the lordly sum of ten English pounds a year.

In 1905 Herbert and Riza explored Yemen on horseback, at which time Herbert wrote, “The desert is a cruel place, where strangers rarely thrive.”

The following year they rode from Baghdad, across the Syrian Desert, to Damascus, where the famished Herbert and his Albanian comrade cantered up to the best hotel in the city.

“For three weeks we had been tanned by the sun and stung by the wind, sand and rain. Our clothes were fastened with string. With his gun slung over his shoulder Riza marched before me into the ordered quietness of the dining room. I followed, as well armed as he. There I sat down, and penniless and unknown, ordered a royal luncheon. Silence fell upon the room. Luckily for me our English Consul was there. He backed my name upon a piece of paper for all the money I wanted and for three days I revelled in luxury and baths.”

The remarkable duo next rode across Albania in 1907, a country which Herbert described as being so isolated from the rest of Europe that the chivalry of the Middle Ages still existed there.

In his autobiography, “Ben Kendim,” Herbert recalled an episode from his Albanian adventure which makes for interesting Long Rider reading today.

While riding with his horses and servants through a vile and dangerous portion of the mountains, a soldier stopped the author and demanded his yol teskere (road permit), which was packed away.

Soldier: "O Effendi, O my two eyes, give up thy teskere. The merciful government requires this. Praise be to God !"

Herbert: "God prosper the merciful Government ! This law is not for me, nor will I unpack my luggage."

Soldier: "O educated sir, O corner of my liver, stay. Thou shalt not pass."

Herbert: "O dog, eat dirt, but behold that we part in friendship."

Soldier: "I am grateful to you, O Bey. Depart in peace."

"So," writes Herbert, "in those days were the obstacles of travel surmounted."

When the First World War broke out, Herbert was declared unfit for military service because of his poor eyesight. Not to be put off by a few rules, the intrepid Long Rider was able to launch his military career by the simple expedient of purchasing an officer’s uniform and boarding a troopship bound for France. Upon being discovered, the noted linguist was transferred to Cairo, where he joined the British Intelligence Bureau and worked with T. E. Lawrence.

It was thanks to his amazing ability to blend into foreign cultures, and transform himself linguistically to fit his surrounding environment, that Herbert gained a reputation as being a cultural chameleon who was able to disappear into enemy territory. That reputation inspired the English novelist, John Buchan, to use Herbert as the inspiration for the fictional hero, Sandy Arbuthnot. In Buchan’s most famous novel, Greenmantle, a Herbert style hero infiltrates the Muslim world of the Turkish-Ottoman Empire in search of secret plots, deadly spies and the fabled green mantle once worn by the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).

When the war was over Herbert returned to England, at which time the fledgling democracy of Albania twice offered its throne to this Englishman they had grown to trust.

Though Arthur Hopkinson was born into an ecclesiastical English family in 1894, that didn’t stop him from riding across the Himalayas in 1947 with some of the most important news ever heard in Tibet. After being educated at Oxford, Hopkinson was made a captain during the First World War, whereupon he was decorated for his exceptional conduct.  

Armed with this combination of intellect and military expertise, Hopkinson entered the Indian Civil Service. He was quickly made an Assistant Political Agent and stationed in a number of colourful, and dangerous dangerous, locales including Chitral. Then in 1926 he set out for the distant town of Gyantse in Tibet. His job was to act as Assistant Political Officer for Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet.

It was at this time that Hopkinson met and married Eleanor Richardson. Many of the letters that he wrote to her during his time in Gyantse give a detailed and colourful account of his time in the Tibet-Sikkim area. He was at the post in 1947, when the British government asked him to ride to Lhasa and inform the Dalai Lama of India’s independence. He made that trip, accompanied by Eleanor, then returned to England in 1948.

Eleanor Hopkinson was one of the very few Western women to have travelled extensively in the old Tibet. Her husband, A. J. Hopkinson of the Indian Civil Service, was the last British Political Officer and Resident in Sikkim in the Himalayas. In 1947, her 20th year in India, the Hopkinsons made a month’s tour of the Tibetan administrative centres of Shi-gatse, Gyantse and Sakya to tell them – at the behest of Whitehall – that the British were gone and thenceforth they would be dealing with an independent India.

Eleanor Hopkinson was born in 1905 into a large Quaker family in Newcastle upon Tyne. She recalled that, one day in 1926, her future father-in-law sent his son, Arthur, on leave from India, to call on her parents who were known to have two eligible daughters. On Arthur’s next leave two years later they were married. In 1928, aged 22, she joined her husband in India, first in Kathiawar and later in the North West Frontier Province.

She found herself in “part of Kipling’s India”. She recalled: “In winter tribesmen came down from Afghanistan with their womenfolk and camels, going as far as Bengal. They were moneylenders who extracted their interest with ‘the big stick’ – literally. The men were tall, burly and much bigger than the small farmers; if they couldn’t pay, they beat them with a pole 8ft long as thick as my arm, bound with four brass rings.” With war looming Hopkinson returned to England, living with her parents in the Lake District and (apart from two short spells of leave) separated from her husband. At the war’s end (a fourth child was born on VE day) she rejoined him, by then in Sikkim, leaving her sister to take charge of her four children.

India had been badly disrupted by the war, but the journey from the railhead at Siliguri up the Teesta Valley to Gangtok, surrounded by the Himalayan giants, impressed her. Her husband was supposed to be in charge of the trade route to Tibet “but that was a bit of a pretence because really it was to control the high border passes and to check that law and order was kept. The British Indian Government regarded Tibet as an autonomous buffer between the great powers of Russia, China and India.”

In Gangtok she found that the residency, supposedly a private house, was always full of visitors; her husband and his predecessor had been posted there alone, so they liked plenty of people around. Guidebooks recommended that Europeans should travel with dinner jackets.

The Hopkinsons’ daily transport was ponies, though Eleanor always feared that she would fall off. The daily trek on tours of duty was 12 to 14 miles at a steady pace. When breaking the news about independence the Hopkinsons went via north Sikkim – where very few Europeans, and no British woman, had ever travelled – rather than on the regular route over the Natu La pass.

In Tibet they reached Khampha Dzong, a magnificent and still intact inhabited medieval castle. The Tibetans reacted to the Hopkinsons’ news with dismay as they were the only outside people they had known. But in some places there were big parties: “Their barley beer was awfully good,” she recorded. “One good drink did you no harm, but you hadn’t to indulge.”

On earlier journeys she had had what was then the rare privilege of travelling to the Kingdom of Bhutan, east of Sikkim, as well as to Gyantse in Tibet.