Ralph Bagnold was among a group of eccentric British and Empire explorers who took advantage of the lack of manned borders in the 1930s to explore the deserts of North Africa using battered Model T Fords. This book describes his journeys into the region known as the Western Desert of Egypt or the Libyan Sahara. He is a central character in the group of explorers who would be later fictionalised in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient . Libyan Sands is unmistakably the world of an Englishman, a modest, machine and desert loving young officer whose passionate amateur enthusiasm led to ground-breaking exploration of the Egyptian western desert and the Libyan Sahara on the eve of the Second World War.