Visit to the Holy Land, Egypt, and Italy

Vienna, 22 March 1842. A Viennese woman writes her will, silences the objections of her family and boards a Danube steamer. Her destination is the Holy Land, of which she has dreamed for years.

Ida Pfeiffer travels down the river to the Iron Gate, endures the quarantine at Galatz and a storm on the Black Sea, then discovers Constantinople, with its whirling dervishes, its bazaars and its stray dogs. From Beirut an Arab boat takes her to Jaffa; after a night's march through the Judean hills, she stands at dawn before the walls of Jerusalem. She spends a whole night in prayer at the Holy Sepulchre, wins a place in an armed caravan to the Dead Sea and the Jordan, and sleeps alone in the tower of the monastery of Mar Saba.

Then come Nazareth and Tiberias, the harem at Acre, Damascus, the temples of Baalbek and the cedars of Lebanon, a false alarm about pirates, the lazaretto of Alexandria, the Nile and the Great Pyramid of Giza, which she climbs to the top. She crosses the Suez desert alone on a camel, sees a fire break out on board the Eurotas, reaches Malta, Sicily, Naples and the crater of Vesuvius, before Rome and the Pope.

Nine months of a journal kept day by day, by a practical, devout and ironic woman who hides her fever and her dizzy spells so that no one will leave her behind. How far will this stubbornness take her?