First edition of a rare work describing the second journey of Dutch Arabist, diplomat and photographer Daniël van der Meulen (1894-1989) to Hadhramaut, a region in the southeast of the Arabian peninsula. He was one of the first Westerners to visit this region. He travelled through Hadhramaut for the first time in 1931 and published a work about his experiences, called Hadramaut, some of its mysteries unveiled (1932). However, he only succeeded in crossing the mountains between Aden, an important port city in Yemen, and Hadhramaut on his second expedition in 1939. The present works relates his experiences during this journey, complete with 91 black-and-white photographic illustrations of the region and its inhabitants during the 1930s.
In 1939, the Hadhramaut region had just become part of the Aden Protectorate, a British protectorate formed after the conquest of Aden by the Bombay presidency of British India in January 1939. Since van der Meulen had already been to Hadhramaut before, he was able to compare the situation in the region before and during British intervention. The present work, therefore, offers a fascinating insight into the effects of the British colonial administraton in Hadhramaut.
With two owner's inscription on the first flyleaf ("Amst. 1 mei 1948" and A. groothoff"), four Dutch newspaper clippings about Aden and Hadhramaut from 1939 and 1952, and annotations in Dutch on page XII and page 242, about the Dutch edition of this work. Without the dust jacket. The spine and edge of the boards are browned and slightly foxed, the corners are slightly bumped. The fore- and bottom edges of the bookblock have not been trimmed. The leaves are somewhat browned and the bottom outer corners of the leaves showing photographic illustrations15-18 have torn, without affecting the images. Otherwise in good condition. Macro 1580; cf. Rentz, G., Recent literature on Hadramaut. In: Middle East journal, vol. 5 (3), 1951, pp. 371-377.