UNDERGROUND IN ARABIA John Pint 2012, Selwa Press 978-0-97011-575-1 $12.95 PB
(from Saudi Aramco World Sep/Oct 2012) "What happens when an American English teacher finds his way into Saudi Arabia's "underground"? This is the story John Pint tells in a witty, engaging and thoroughly entertaining record of his caving adventures during working stints in the kingdom beginning in 1981. Pint originally traded teaching and (caving) in France for a job at what is now King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran and resumed his hobby almost immediately. Soon, he and fellow explorers landed a big find near Ma'aqala, north of Riyadh, in an area rich with dahls, a term that means "a natural pit that... might provide access to water," Pint notes. Exploration revealed natural formations like stalactites and gypsum flowers, previously undocumented in Saudi caves. This was just the beginning of Pint's quarter-century of spelunking in the kingdom, his finds enthralling and paving the way for academics to study a beautiful world beneath Saudi Arabia's often-forbidding surface. -Caitlin Clark
