Landfalls

Following on "Travels with a Tangerine" (a "New York Times" Notable book)and "The Hall of a Thousand Columns," here is the third volume inthe author'spassionate pursuit of the 14th-century traveler who out-traveled Marco PoloFor Ibn Batuttah of Tangier, being medieval didn t mean sitting at home waiting for renaissances, enlightenments, and air travel. It meant traveling the known world to its limits. Seven centurieslater, Tim Mackintosh-Smith s fascination takes him to landfalls in remote tropical islands, torrid Indian Ocean ports, and dusty towns on the shores of the Saharan sand-sea. His zigzag itinerary across time and space leads from Zanzibar to the Alhambra (via the Maldives, Sri Lanka, China, Mauritania, and Guinea) and to a climactic conclusion to his quest for the man he calls "IB"a man who who spent his days with saints and sultans and his nights with an intercontinental string of slave-concubines. Tim s journey is a search for survivals from IB s worldmaterial, human, spiritual, ediblehowever, when your fellow traveler has a 700-year head start, familiar notions don t always work."