In Search of Sheba: A John Murray Journey

by Barbara Toy

Introduced by Lois Pryce, author of Lois on the Loose , Red Tape & White Knuckles and Revolutionary Ride .

In 1959 Barbara Toy, famous for her solo overland travels in North Africa and Arabia, set out in her trademark Land Rover to drive from Libya to Ethiopia.

Alone, she crossed the Sahara Desert and the equatorial forests of the Congo before ascending the highlands of Haile Selassie's empire. Her Ethiopian travels took her from modern Addis Ababa to the ancient ruins of Aksum, through bandit-ridden countryside to the summit of Mount Wehni - where male heirs to the emperor were traditionally imprisoned for life - on a quest to explore the legend of the Queen of Sheba. Full of good humour and grit, In Search of Sheba chronicles a remarkable feat of endurance and adventure by one of the twentieth century's greatest travellers.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction

320 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Barbara Alex Toy FRGS (11 August 1908 – 18 July 2001) was an Australian-British travel writer, theatrical director, playwright, and screenplay writer. She is most famous for the series of books she wrote about her pioneering and solitary travels around the world in a Land Rover, undertaken in the 1950s and 1960s. Toy was drawn to deserts, and so the majority of her journeys were in the arid lands of Northern Africa and the Middle East.
Toy's first solo journey took place almost five years before the perhaps more celebrated six-man team Oxford and Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition, a London to Singapore overland trip between September 1955 and March 1956 that was also undertaken in Land Rovers.

Reviews

[Alex Hutton · Rating 3 out of 5]

i love travel writing!! Barbara drives across the Sahara solo in 1959 & boy is the language a product of it's time...:/ full of adventure & grit but I would have really appreciated some pictures/maps to accompany her descriptions