Tribulations of a Swiss Man on His Journey to Jerusalem and Lebanon

May 1812. In Arbon, on the shore of Lake Constance, the mills have fallen silent. So that his workers may still have bread, Johann Heinrich Mayr, a textile maker from Thurgau, sets off to sell goods in the Levant. He travels down the Danube from Vienna, alone, without a word of Greek, Turkish or Arabic.

What was meant to be a business trip turns into twenty months of wandering. A caravan of a hundred horses across a ravaged Bulgaria; Constantinople, where plague carries off ninety thousand people during his stay and Pera burns before his eyes; the Nile, followed up to the Fayum, sabre in hand against a guide who means to hold him to ransom. Then the desert of Damietta beside an Albanian passing himself off as a janissary, and at last Jerusalem, its walls, the crowds of the Holy Sepulchre.

In Lebanon, this Protestant, driven out of a Maronite monastery, lives as a hermit in an abandoned house among the mulberry trees and silkworms. There he keeps company with Pierre Loustonau, a former general in the service of the Great Mogul, measures the cedars of Bsharri and shares a meal with a prince blinded with a red-hot iron on the emir's orders.

A practical merchant, a stubborn believer, an unvarnished observer, Mayr compares everything with his Switzerland: the bread, the silk, the monks, the pashas. But the road home, through Salonica, the Balkans and the quarantine stations of Wallachia, still holds many trials before he sees his lake again.