Themes Of Our Araby

The car plunged from sun drenched desert into tall, dark palms. Into a different world. Inside, the road softened to a track that wound and bumped its way forward over sandy, unimproved soil, shielded from the sun’s glare by walls of greenery. That is, the track came about as close as any vehicleway can to being in harmony with earth and vegetation. But before long it ended; just petered out. A few yards ahead, nestling so naturally among the palms that at first my eye hardly registered it, stood a thatched-roof cabin. Or perhaps the right word is “shanty.” For the place had a definite South Sea Island air. The big stars-and-stripes hanging from a flagpole seemed almost colonial.
- Colin Fletcher, The Man from the Cave, 1980

The village itself
Chase wrote the slim volume in 1920 to attract visitors “– not too many – to a region that was meant for a discerning few.” He chose the book’s title to evoke the romantic connotations of Arabia, playing off of an earlier writer’s description of coastal southern California as “our Italy.” Hollywood quickly adopted this theme. Scenes from The Sheik, starring Rudolf Valentino, were filmed at Thousand Palms Oasis in 1921, the first of many movies filmed there over the years. Though the city of Palm Springs today bears scant resemblance to Chase’s pastoral descriptions, many of the surrounding natural features remain much as he described them in Our Araby and in his better known California Desert Trails. Route descriptions for horse and rider have largely, and perhaps unfortunately, been negated by the automobile, but many of his destinations remain recognizable and, with a little luck, today’s visitors may have them as much to themselves as Chase
Visited and described by Chase, this was later the long-time home of Paul Wilhelm, whose palm-log house now serves as visitor center for the Coachella Valley Preserve. Wilhelm first saw the area with his father several years after Chase’s visit. The elder Wilhelm had acquired 80 acres of the oasis as a water source for his cattle. Paul Wilhelm described his reaction to the oasis in a late 1970s interview with Colin Fletcher (who used a pseudonym to protect Wilhelm’s privacy) for his book The Man from the Cave.
By the time I was eight I knew exactly what I wanted in life – a place way out in the desert where I’d find peace and solitude. And when I was fourteen I came to this oasis with my dad and fell in love with it. My dad said, “You’d better finish school first, son. And go through college. Then, if you still want to, you can come out here.” And I did. All three. And except for four years in the Army in World War II, I’ve been here ever