W.H. Canaway

A dramatic quest for the rare and beautiful oryx in the Arabian desert. Around which,Canaway has created a brilliant, original and often highly amusing story which moves against a variety of powerfully suggested backgrounds: the brittle world of the oil company settlement; the tough and dangerous world of the drillers on the oil rigs, and the vast and empty desert where men are ruled by a code as harsh as the country itself.

The Hunter and the Horns tells of an English schoolteacher who is stranded in this bizarre world of the East and his peculiar fascination for the oryx. To the Arabs, this graceful animal is a prized symbol of manhood, and through his personal failures the Englishman comes to identify his own future with its fate.