Ralph Alger Bagnold > Quotes

“There was a glorious stillness after the vibration and rattle of the day. The silence was absolute. We were two hundred miles from Cairo, and there was nothing near by to make a sound. Outside in the open one listened expectantly for some small noise, a cricket chirping or a cock’s crow, but nothing came; only a little gust of cold dry air that eddied softly in the hollows of one’s ears. It seemed odd almost that the stars overhead, twinkling with a frosty vigour, could do so without making some sound about it.”
― R.A. Bagnold, Libyan Sands: Travel in a Dead World

“It was a dead world upon which all life, all movement except that of the wind, had ceased from the far-off time when the primeval Medusa had looked out over the land and petrified it for ever.”
― R.A. Bagnold, Libyan Sands: Travel in a Dead World

“One morning while we were out doing fieldwork we saw a mushroom cloud rising from the horizon. This was followed by an intense shock wave. The wind happened to be blowing in our direction, and a little later things began to arrive out of the sky—unwinding rolls of toilet paper, pieces of charts, and wood splinters; then came a naval officer’s sleeve with an arm still inside it. Later we learned that a fully laden minelayer, HMS Bulwark, in the Medway estuary and about to go to sea, had exploded in one tremendous detonation.”
― Ralph Alger Bagnold, Sand, Wind, and War: Memoirs of a Desert Explorer

“By custom, Thomas Cook’s steamers carried a reserve of mummies as a specially fast-burning fuel for emergencies such as difficult cataracts. My father once heard the captain shout to his engine room staff, “All right, throw on another pharaoh.”
― Ralph Alger Bagnold, Sand, Wind, and War: Memoirs of a Desert Explorer

“It was said that Budge smuggled the bulkier antiquities out of Egypt to the British Museum by organizing funeral flotillas, complete with mourners, down to Alexandria. This no doubt took place to the reward and amusement of the villagers concerned. He taught my father many useful things, including how to enter an already opened tomb: “Always send a native in first to absorb the fleas.”
― Ralph Alger Bagnold, Sand, Wind, and War: Memoirs of a Desert Explorer

“Those silent evenings were worth many times the heat and labour of the day. Now at last there was no hurry to make the most of the daylight driving hours, for the day was gone.”
― R.A. Bagnold, Libyan Sands: Travel in a Dead World

“We were introduced to Brother Thomas, custodian of the mortuary. It seems he had died, robed and sitting in his chair, a century or so ago, and he had been left there to desiccate in the high, dry air of the place. There he sat, upright, overlooking his desiccated brethren. The monks were evidently fond of the old fellow, cheerily stroking his chin as they passed. His head nodded gently. There was nothing repellent in the fresh air of that tidy chamber. Indeed, there seemed to be a peaceful continuity with the obvious struggle for existence in the living monastery.”
― Ralph Alger Bagnold, Sand, Wind, and War: Memoirs of a Desert Explorer