THE FEARFUL VOID
by GEOFFREY MOORHOUSE 288 pages. Lippincott. $10.
Perhaps because its sun-blasted emptiness is so different from their cozily crowded, fog-shrouded island, the trackless desert has always attracted Englishmen. A straight line leads from Sir Richard Burton crossing the Arabian desert in 1853 and Lawrence of Arabia down to Geoffrey Moorhouse. Burton had a simple thirst for the exotic. Lawrence was a complex mystic. Moorhouse, who left Nouakchott, Mauritania, in October of 1972 heading east into the Sahara, is a fortyish ex-journalist. In challenging the desert, he was intent on...