The Story of a Desert Knight is the second volume of a trilogy entitled Oral Poetry and Narratives from Central Arabia. It is devoted to the narratives told about and the poems composed by Slēwīḥ al-'Aṭāwi and his brother Bxīt, both famous desert knights in the middle and second half of the nineteenth century. The principal source of this book is Slēwīḥ's great-grandson Xālid, a sheikh of the 'Utaybah tribe. The introduction discusses inter alia the general characteristics of Bedouin oral culture, the linguistic,...