Rail Europe (08705 848848; ) is offering a fare of £79 return from Waterloo to Ostend. Double rooms at the Hotel Helios (00 32 50 42 90 20; ) in Blakenberge start ar €105 (£75) per room per night based on two sharing Rooms with sea views start from €125 (£90). For further information contact Tourism Flanders on 0906-302 0245 (calls cost 60p per min) or see . Freya Stark was born in 1893 in Paris, where her parents were studying art, and started to travel from the age of two.

After studying Arabic at university in the 1920s, she spent the next decade travelling on her own in Luristan, Iran and the Hadhramaut. Her intrepid nature and knowledge of classic Arabic and Greek literature provided substance to her many travel books; ‘The Southern Gates of Arabia’, an extract of which follows, was published in 1936 and is one of her best known. She married the writer Stewart Perowne in 1947, was made a DBE in 1972 and died at the age of 100 in 1993. The reason I gave, that peace and happiness with the beduin depend on being alone with them, carried no conviction. I was the third European woman to visit the interior, and the first to go there alone – any eccentricity was possible and even probable, but, because of a lack of precedent, difficult to deal with.

In the matter of the escort, however, I was not to have my way: they handed me over to a black Nizami slave soldier, whom they made responsible for my life, safety and general comfort.He was just as dubious about this task as I was and more fussy. He had small eyes, shallow, and red at the corners, and high cheekbones in a flat face: he appeared at the moment of departure, dressed in a magenta cotton futah, a vest, and a red turban, which, on formal occasions, he used to replace by a white knitted cap of the kind used for winter sports. The only military thing about him was his cartridge belt, which hung well filled and loose about his hips. He settled himself and his rifle on the step of the car which already contained me and ‘Ali Hakim, and two other friends, who were to come as far as the road would carry. This was 10 miles or so to the village of Thile, at the back of the mountain of Makalla, round whose wind-eaten curves we jolted, north and then east among the desolate valleys where the citizens go in summer to sit in patches of rock-bound palms. We passed below the Sultan’s garden, away on the left, and the two earth-coloured forts that hold the road, and Harshiyat, a green thread in a hollow – and other forts, square towers “left over”, said ‘Ali Hakim, “from the days of Fear”, but still used by the ‘Askar The landscape was all stone, with samr trees in its clefts. They are not whitewashed like the wealthy houses of Makalla, but are solidly built of mud, five storeys high.