Abstract
ALTHOUGH this expedition into the Libyan desert, with Mr. Kennedy Shaw as leader, undertook scientific investigations, its primary function was exploration; and to the author of “The Paradise of Fools”, in which it is described, it was mainly “a joyous adventure”. The expedition, of which Mr. Shaw gave accounts in The Times during August 1935, and later before the Royal Geographical Society, covered by motor-car altogether six thousand three hundred miles, of which some three thousand were in country previously unexplored. Starting from Cairo, the cars travelled along the Nile to Assiut, then south-west to the Gilf Kebir plateau and then by devious ways from oasis to oasis to El Fashir, about four hundred miles west of Khartoum. They returned, mainly westward of their outward route, by way of the Selima oasis, through the Great Sand Sea between Gilf Kebir and Siwa northward to the Mediterranean.
The Paradise of Fools:
being an Account, by a Member of the Party, of the Expedition which covered 6,300 Miles of the Libyan Desert by Motor-Car in 1935. By Michael H. Mason. Pp. 282 + 23 plates. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, Ltd., 1936.) 15s. net.
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Miscellany. Nature 138, 634 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/138634b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/138634b0