The Lion of Petra

The Arabian desert after the Great War: a sheikh who has made himself master of Petra and the rock city, an American, and a British officer who must decide whether the Lion is a bandit or a king. Mundy was born William Gribbon, spent his twenties in India and East Africa as an ivory poacher and confidence man and was jailed for it, then reinvented himself in America as a writer of the East. The disreputable past is why the desert reads true. Fifty-one plates range from David Roberts to Edvard Munch, though the landscapes and figures here sit oddly beside a tale of brigandage in the Arabian desert.