Madame de Stael has somewhere said that travelling is the saddest of all pleasures. But we all have the longing of Rasselas in our hearts. We are ready to leave the Happy Valley of home and eager to see something of the world beyond the streets and steeples of our native town.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Preface to Poems of Places
Onward, my camel- on though slow; Halt not upon these fatal sands. Onward, my constant camel, go,—, The fierce simoom has ceased to blow…Droop not, my faithful camel, Now the hospitable well is near!…I grieve the most to think that thou and I may part, dear comrade, here!
-from The Ship of the Desert, William Motherwell, Scottish Poet, via Longfellow
Where did Longfellow come up with some of these howlers? In his anthology Poems of Places you can read topographical verse by mostly forgotten poets under the rubrics Mecca, Medina, Petra, Babylon, and beyond. This one by Motherwell was from Arabia: Desert. For Nubia he found poems about Meroe (“Ethiop’s city”), Aswan (“Ultima Thule of Egyptus”), and Abu Simbel (“Ipsamboul!”), and in the Sahara he found Mirage (“…Timbuctoo’s caravan…”), The Spectre-Caravan (“my Beddaweens…”), and The Simoom (“the desert is their grave, the sand their shroud…”).
The best of this bunch was Keats’ To the Nile- “Nurse of swart [!] nations since the world began”. Pity those who learn their geography by reading musty verses of dead British poets, not being teased by Kababish drovers for confusing the village of Mahtoul with the well flat of Maraheek.