"Dr. Livingstone, I presume." Welsh-born American journalist Henry M. Stanley (1841-1904) uttered those words, or so he claimed, upon tracking down the Scottish missionary and long-missing explorer Stanley Livingstone beside Lake Tanganyika in central Africa in 1871. Stanley continued to investigate Africa on a series of expeditions that he described in "Through the Dark Continent"--journeys that later drew criticism for Stanley's harsh dealings with the tribesmen he encountered. But there was no question of his courage and energy in the face of extreme hardship. This book's subtitle alone--"The Sources of the Nile, Around the Great Lakes of Equatorial Africa, and Down the Livingstone River to the Atlantic Ocean"--is enough to quicken the pulse.
No one could be further from the imperious Henry Stanley than William Dalrymple, a sensitive modern-day Oxford graduate who, in 1986, made a pilgrimage from Jerusalem to the ruins of the palace of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, not far from Beijing. Dalrymple endures a succession of rides in impossibly dilapidated buses on a quixotic journey to the real Xanadu, where he and a friend, in a fine drizzle, declaim Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetic fantasy of the place. Dalrymple, who has since written extensively about India and the Mughal empire, seems in his first book, "In Xanadu," as soft as sealing wax receiving its first impression. Yet his keen intelligence and critical faculties are already apparent. The result is "On the Road" for aesthetes.
In his last work, Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died earlier this year, contrasts his own curiously low-key and enigmatic travels through India, Africa and China in the 1960s and '70s with accounts left by the granddaddy of all travel writers and historians, Herodotus, who lived in the fifth century B.C. But Kapuscinski resists facile then-and-now comparisons. Pondering his first sight of the Nile in 1960, or witnessing a Louis Armstrong performance in the Sudan, he examines different worlds and historical periods through the prism of his own melancholy sensibility. Nothing in this multidimensional work is quite what it seems, because Kapuscinski writes like a reporter and thinks like a poet. He acts as if it were the most natural thing in the world to live one's entire life out of time and out of place.
Every so often, it is tonic to read an honest-to-Pete, can-you-believe-this historical account of nightmarish events. "White Gold" is such a book. The prolific English travel writer and historian Giles Milton describes with riveting immediacy the ordeal of Thomas Pellow, who, along with his English shipmates, was taken prisoner by Barbary Coast slave traders at war with Christendom in the early years of the 18th century. Pellow wound up in the service of Moulay Ismail, the sadistic sultan of Morocco, for 23 years--making for more than two decades of grisly adventures and near-death experiences. "White Gold" offers a topsy-turvy view of a decadent Islamic empire in which orthodoxy fights a losing battle with the temptations of the flesh.
A few decades after the Venetian Marco Polo traveled across Asia in the late 13th century and dictated an account of his adventures to an amanuensis, Ibn Battuta, the son of a prosperous Moroccan merchant, traveled through many of the same regions and cities--and dictated an account of his own adventures. Scholars wonder how much he actually saw himself and how much he simply heard and passed on. (They wonder the same thing about Marco Polo, of course.) Between 1325 and 1349, Ibn Battuta claimed, he traveled across Egypt, Persia, Russia, India, parts of China and even Sumatra. The best way for Westerners to approach "Rihla," as the original account was called, is through Ross E. Dunn's narrative discussion, which captures the flavor of the original but adds astute modern commentary.