The fabled adventures of John Lewis Burckhardt, who dared to penetrate the forbidden interior of ancient Arabia to find the lost palace of Zenobia and the Biblical cities of Baalbek, Gerasa, and Petra. His adventures, based on his own journal, are depicted in the seething land in which they occurred. Because Burckhardt was considered an infidel by the Arab tribesmen, he traveled incognito and learned the various dialects of Arabia and studied their customs and ways of life in order to protect his own. Despite his strenuous efforts, he was attacked many times by desert nomads.