City of Djinns
by William Dalrymple | 
The Age of Kali
by William Dalrymple | 
Travels with a Tangerine
by Tim Mackintosh-Smith | 
The Valleys of the Assassins
by Freya Stark | 
Travels in Arabia Deserta
by Charles M. Doughty | 
The Marsh Arabs
by Wilfred Thesiger | 
In Xanadu
by William Dalrymple | 
Nine Lives
by William Dalrymple | 
Tibet, Tibet
by Patrick French | 
The Masque of Africa
by V. S. Naipaul | 
Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia
by Tony Horwitz | 
In Search of King Solomon's Mines
by Tahir Shah | 
The River at the Center of the World
by Simon Winchester | 
Travels into Bokhara
by Alexander Burnes | 
Secret Tibet
by Fosco Maraini | 
Calcutta
by Geoffrey Moorhouse | 
The Most Beautiful Walk in the World
by John Baxter |
Return to Tibet
by Heinrich Harrer | 
An Irreverent Curiosity
by David Farley | 
In a Sunburned Country
by Bill Bryson |
In 587 a.d., two monks set off on an extraordinary journey that would take them in an arc across the entire Byzantine world, from the shores of the Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. On the way John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist stayed in caves, monasteries, and remote hermitages, collecting the wisdom of the stylites and the desert fathers before their fragile world finally shattered under the great eruption of Islam. More than a thousand years later, using Moschos's writings as his guide, William Dalrymple sets off to retrace their footsteps and composes "an evensong for a dying civilization" --Kirkus Reviews, starred review