AMAZING BUT TRUE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 June 1940, Page 6

AMAZING BUT TRUE

THIRTY-THREE ADVENTUROUS YEARS.

He sleeps in the Mohammedan cemetery at Cairo, and on his stone is the name Ibrahim ibn Abdallah.

But he was really John Lewis Burckhardt who began life at Lausanne in Switzerland in 1784, and ran his course in 33 of the most adventurous years any man has ever lived. Glamour and romance are about his name as a halo lights up a saint, yet few people have ever heard of him. No traveller ever did more astonishing things. Educated at Leipzig and Gottingen, he had ever a roving spirit. Blessed with a genius for acquiring languages, he was in England a year after Trafalgar, studied Arabic in London and Cambridge, and in 1809 set out on his incredible travels.

When he had left Europe behind he went on disguised as an Indian trader. He found his way to Aleppo, and there for over 24 months he lived a strange life which might have ended in disaster at any moment, for all about him were people who hated Europeans. They never suspected John Burckhardt. So carefully did he live, so completely had he become one with his surroundings, so perfectly was he in harmony with his apparent life, that he fraternised with everyone, and passed for anything but what he really was.

In 1812 he went on to Egypt alone, explored the Nile valley, and reached Suakin a year before Waterloo. Then, passing as a Moslem, he wandered into market places, slept with travellers from east and west, entered towns where no white man was safe a moment: and at last made his pilgrimage to Mecca, carrying his life in his hands. He was. it is believed, the first white man to enter the sacred city. It was his hour of triumph, an hour won by sheer audacity and amazing knowledge. He entered, and he came out alive. But he did not live long to boast of it. for he died in 1817.