Hugh Nibley
"After traveling a vast distance in a south-south-easterly direction (16:14,33), the party struck off almost due eastward through the worst desert of all, where they 'did wade through much affliction,' to emerge in a state of almost complete exhaustion into a totally unexpected paradise by the sea. There is such a paradise in the Qara Mountains on the southern coast of Arabia…..
"Of the Qara Mountains which lie in that limited sector of the coast of south Arabia which Lehi must have reached if he turned east at the nineteenth parallel, Bertram Thomas, one of the few Europeans who has ever seen them, writes:
'What a glorious place! Mountains three thousand feet high basking above a tropical ocean, their seaward slopes velvety with waving jungle, their roofs fragrant with rolling yellow meadows, beyond which the mountains slope northwards to a red sandstone steppe….Great was my delight when in 1928 I suddenly came upon it all from out of the arid wastes of the southern borderlands.'
"…Compare this with Nephi's picture….It is virtually the same scene: the mountains, the rich woodlands with timber for ships, the rolling yellow meadow a paradise for bees, the view of the sea beyond, and above all the joyful relief at the sudden emergence from the 'red sandstone steppe,' one of the worst deserts on earth." (Lehi in the Desert and The World of the Jaredites, pp. 125-6)