In the year 1812, a Swiss explorer and eccentric named Johann Ludwig Burtkart was traveling

in the Middle East, in the region of what is today Jordan.

Burtkart was a strange and colourful character, born on the shores of Lake Geneva, he had

travelled to England to study, and there had been employed by a group known as the African

Association, a gathering of upper-class Englishmen who financed expeditions of exploration.

They had given Burtkart the task of crossing the Sahara Desert from Cairo and making contact

with what was then considered a lost city, the city of Timbuktu.

Burtkart took his assignment seriously and he threw himself into it with all the energy

of a true Georgian eccentric.

He began to study Arabic at Cambridge University and while there he began dressing in traditional

Arab clothing, wearing long white dish dashes and a turban, much to the bemusement of

his fellow students.

After graduating, he moved to Syria and spent two years there practising his Arabic, even

adopting the name Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Abdullah and attempting to pass himself off as a Muslim.

It's not clear how successful Burtkart's disguise really was or whether anyone in the

Arab world was fooled.

In preparation for his great journey, he set out on a number of expeditions into the Syrian

Desert, but many of these ended in disaster.

He was robbed on a number of occasions, often by the same people he had hired to act as

security on the journey, but his desire for adventure was unabated by these setbacks.

And in 1812, he set out on the journey from Syria to Cairo with the intention there

of securing passage across the great sandy sea of the Sahara.

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