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Images of Arabs and the desert salt western art. In the 19th century, pictures of palm trees and belly dancers outnumbered thatched cottages and milkmaids on the walls of the Royal Academy. There were burgeoning schools of Arabists. And in the chilly foreign offices of dark Europe, young men would look out of lachrymose windows and imagine the keening, shadowless sands with a desperate yearning ­ from Richard Burton, the translator of The Perfumed Garden and one of the first westerners to travel to Mecca, and Edward FitzGerald, whose translation of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat is still one of the most reprinted and recited poems in English, to T E Lawrence and his Seven Pillars and Wilfred Thesiger wandering in the empty quarter and the multitude of overheated young remittance men who escaped the social straitjacket of home to relax in souks and marbled halls.