Lawrence's sprawling, lyrical account of his role in the Arab Revolt is one of the great adventure memoirs, and large sections of it are set in and around Wadi Rum. His descriptions of the desert landscape — the play of light on sandstone, the immensity of the silence, the sudden violence of sandstorms — remain some of the most vivid writing about this place ever published.
The prose is dense and occasionally self-mythologising, but Lawrence's eye for landscape is extraordinary. Read the Wadi Rum chapters before you visit and you will find yourself recognising scenes he described a century ago. The desert has not changed.