In 1970, a chance meeting with my old Harvard tutor led to a 1,200-mile camel trek across northern Saudi Arabia and two more books. Prof. William Polk told me he  had persuaded the Saudis to allow the trip for the purpose of documenting and translating an ancient Arab poem.  Would I come along and illustrate the poem's 72 verses with photographs?  After half a second deliberation, I said "Yes."

 
We completed the journey in 35 days, and experienced the purity of the desert as well as sundry adventures of getting lost and running out of water.

Then a front-page article about our trip in the Christian Science Monitor led an editor at the  New York publisher A.A. Knopf to ask us to write a second book about the trip itself. Thus we produced an "art book"  The Golden Ode, about the poem and a travel book, Passing Brave about our trek through an area last traversed by camel100 years before. It was a land that would never again be free of roads and oil wells.   

Sales were handsome and the reviews almost uniformly laudatory.