A Christian riding with the hajj
Doughty did not arrive in Arabia by accident. He had spent eight months in Damascus on intensive Arabic study[6], and his plan was to ride south with the pilgrims bound for Mecca as far as Mada'in Salih[7]. Then he would stay put while the caravan went on without him.
What made the plan strange was the passenger. T. E. Lawrence, who introduced the 1921 edition of the book, called Doughty a pioneer "both as European and Christian" in nearly all the districts he entered[8]. A Christian inside a Muslim pilgrim column is not a footnote but the whole risk of the trip.
He went without official cover. The British consul gave him no support, and the Turkish authorities refused him safe conduct[9]. He meant to follow the caravan without his Turkish commander knowing, and without hiding that he was a Christian and a stranger[10]. The one great personage he called on was the Kurdish Pasha of the Haj, Mohammed[11], who advised him to bring a firman of the Sultan[12]. On the road a Persian companion warned "Khalil Effendi", as Doughty was known in the column, that the matter "may be told to-morrow in the ears of the Pasha"[13].
The ride took three weeks. He called it "tedious riding" among a pilgrim multitude he described as "often clamorous, mixed and in their religion devout"[14]. Past Birket Moaddam, the column's next hope of water was the station at Bar el-Hamra, "where is commonly none"[15]. Over 150 long miles of continuous marching, he noted, "many of the wayworn people die"[16]. One march set out "at ten o'clock of the starry night" and rode until two in the morning[17].
Then the road ended where he wanted it to. "The next station is that fabulous Medain Salih," he wrote, "which I was come from far countries to seek in Arabia"[18]. Few travellers get a sentence that plain for the moment they arrive.
Two months waiting at Mada'in Salih
At Mada'in Salih the caravan did what caravans did, and Doughty stayed behind. He lingered about two months, waiting for the pilgrims to come back[19]. Counted from a November departure and three weeks on the road, that carries the stay over the new year and into 1877. His schedule belonged to the caravan, which is the opposite of how anyone visits Hegra now.
The Arabs there took time to get used to him. Once they were "accustomed to the Nasrany", he wrote, "I began to wander alone, in all the site of Medain Salih"[20]. So the first scholarly look at Hegra happened like this: one man on foot among the tombs.
He carried a stack of blotting paper to take impressions of the inscriptions[21]. The facades were not small work. On the crag he called the Mahal el-Mejlis, or "senate house"[22], the face had been hewn into a monument of "a solemn agreeable simplicity" and more than forty feet wide[23].
His one night-time note from the field here is about the cold. On a hunting trip a clear night left him and his companions too cold to sleep, and he found only 38°F before morning, about 3°C[24]. The lesson survives 150 years: dress for a winter desert night, not for the afternoon.
What the copied inscriptions proved
What did the two months produce? Copies, made partly by squeeze and partly by drawing in 1876–78, which Euting later credited to Doughty under great hardship[25]. They appeared as Documents épigraphiques recueillis dans le nord de l'Arabie[26], printed in Paris by the Imprimerie nationale in 1884[27]. Britannica says Ernest Renan published Doughty's observations[28]; a bookseller's note adds that Renan wrote the preface and supervised the publication[29], and counts 57 plates of inscriptions, sites and maps[30]. Many of the Hegra texts are funerary, including dated tomb inscriptions that name Nabataean kings[31]. Barnaby Rogerson's summary is that this record positively identified the Nabataeans' "lost city"[5]. Of every honorific attached to him, first European scholar is the one that holds.
It holds because it claims only what was documented. A headline that says "first Westerner" asks the record to prove a negative: that no other European ever passed through unnoticed. Nobody can show that. What anyone can show is Renan's publication, Rogerson's verdict and Lawrence's testimony, all of which point at Doughty.
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AlUla Stargazing
Stargaze above Hegra's 2,000-year-old Nabataean tombs in AlUla, the Gulf's first DarkSky-accredited Dark Sky Park. When to go, where to stay, and how to plan.
Lawrence conceded in 1921 that later collectors had surpassed Doughty's copies, yet said he "holds the enduring credit of their discovery"[32]. The right frame is not the best recording but the first.
His verdict on the city itself was bleaker. Little remained of el-Hejr, and "her clay-built streets are again the blown dust in the wilderness"[33]. Stone carries the story, which is why the tombs' own dating habits, covered in our piece on Hegra's Nabataean star gods, matter more here than any ruined house.
The book that came of it, Travels in Arabia Deserta, took nine years to write[34]. The book was slow to win its reputation, and Britannica notes it was still being published in the early 21st century[35]. Lawrence called it "a bible of its kind"[36]. The Royal Geographical Society gave Doughty its Founder's Medal in 1912[37].
Huber, Euting and the Dominicans
Julius Euting and Charles Huber left Damascus in 1883 on a dangerous expedition into northern Arabia after inscriptions and graffiti[38]. Seven years separate their departure from Doughty's. Huber went ahead to Mada'in Salih and was blockaded in the castle for ten days until Euting stepped in[39]. Euting himself had only three days at el-Hegr, 26 to 28 March 1884, against Doughty's months there[40]. Huber was dead by July 1884[41]. A lecture on Euting's travel account places him with Doughty and Huber as a founding father of Saudi Arabian archaeology[42].
French Dominicans came next. Antonin Jaussen and Raphaël Savignac belonged to the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem[43]. Their first mission left Jerusalem on Sunday 17 March 1907[44], and their scientific expeditions ran between 1907 and 1910[45]. The order of play is easy to remember: pilgrims first, Doughty alone, then specialist teams. Each step made the one before it look rough.
Inscriptions of a different kind are covered in Jabal Ikmah and its ancient astronomers. I have kept this piece to the explorers.
From caravan stop to Dark Sky Park
Doughty's copies opened the file on Hegra. UNESCO later inscribed it as the first World Heritage property in Saudi Arabia[46].
The sky got its credential 148 years after Doughty left Damascus. The park covers 2,334 sq km across two reserves, AlUla Manara and Gharameel[47], and DarkSky International's certification was a first for the Gulf[48]. Note what the designation names: those two reserves. Hegra is not among the places it lists.
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I haven't been to AlUla, so I won't dress this up as a pilgrimage in Doughty's footsteps. What the record supports is plainer: a documented explorer, a cold winter on the site, and a protected sky in the same region.
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Astrotourism means travel built around dark skies: meteor showers, auroras, the Milky Way. What it means, where to go, and how to plan your first trip.
Where to set up for the night is a separate question, and best stargazing spots in AlUla answers it. Getting to AlUla covers the way in. Doughty spent two months here, but most visitors will not, so what to do in AlUla beyond stargazing fills the daylight hours around a night session.