Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme
Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.
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Ibn Joubayr, Relation des voyages (1183-1185)
The Andalusian pilgrim from Valencia made the pilgrimage to Mecca between 1183 and 1185 and wrote the notebook that would found the classical Arabic genre of the rihla. He passed through the same Egyptian ports, sailed down the Red Sea, and saw Mecca one hundred forty years after Nasir, under the Ayyubids of Saladin. More literary, more brilliant, and also more laudatory toward the restored Sunni power, he completes his predecessor on every point where Nasir remained silent. The two notebooks read almost like a two-voice score on the same Levant.
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Marco Polo, Le Devisement du monde (1298)
On his way back from China, the Venetian sails along the Coromandel coast, stops at the tomb of Saint Thomas, describes the pearl fisheries, the naked kings covered in jewels, the widow-burning pyres and the kingdom of Ceylon with its sacred peak. All the marvels that Hamilton finds diminished or disputed, Marco Polo sees in their full brilliance, four centuries earlier. To read one after the other is to follow the slow transformation of the same shore, from medieval splendors to the fortified trading posts of the age of the companies.
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Ibn Battuta, Voyages (1325-1354)
The great traveler from Tangier crisscrossed, over thirty years between 1325 and 1354, the entire Muslim world, from sub-Saharan Africa to China. When he passes through Jerusalem, Cairo, or Mecca, it is three centuries after Nasir, and the world has been transformed: the Crusades over, the Mongols established, the Mamluks in Cairo. The contrast with the Persian's notebook gives the measure of what has changed. Where Nasir describes in a few pages, Ibn Battuta expands into personal adventures, marriages, learned disputes, and princely banquets.
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Ludovico di Varthema, Itinéraire (1510)
A Bolognese adventurer of the early sixteenth century, Varthema is one of the first Europeans to visit Mecca disguised as a pilgrim, then to sail down the Red Sea to Aden and reach India. He travels the Arabian coast that Hamilton will follow two centuries later, stops at the same coffee ports, and describes the same sheikhs greedy for tribute. His picaresque account illuminates, in advance, the Arab world that the captain will later observe with the colder eye of a merchant.
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Antonio Pigafetta, Relation du premier voyage autour du monde (1519-1522)
Two centuries before Hamilton, the gentleman of Vicenza embarks with Magellan and survives the expedition that first crosses the Pacific. He touches at the Philippines, where the captain will meet his death, reaches Borneo and its splendid court, loads cloves from the Moluccas and sails along Timor, these same islands the Scottish merchant will visit two hundred years later. His wonder-struck journal shows the spice archipelago at the very moment Europe discovers it, when Hamilton will see nothing of it but the trading posts the companies fight over. To read one after the other is to follow the passage from the dream of spices to their ordinary trade.
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Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Lettres turques (1581)
The imperial ambassador to Istanbul publishes his four Latin letters from the court of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1581. A hundred and eighty years after Schiltberger, the same Ottoman empire, more powerful than ever, receives another Westerner, this time an ambassador. Busbecq describes the Sublime Porte at its height, in the very years when the Frankfurt printer republishes the Bavarian's account for his contemporaries as a cautionary tale. Reading Busbecq right after Schiltberger means following the Ottoman Empire from its childhood to its zenith.
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Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault, Histoire de l'expédition chrétienne au royaume de la Chine (1615)
The Jesuit Ricci, who entered China at the end of the sixteenth century, learns the language and the classics, wins the friendship of the scholars and makes his way to Peking. His account, set down by Trigault, reveals to Europe a refined civilization that the captain, a century later, will encounter only through the customs gate at Canton. Where Hamilton rages against the Hoppo and his extortions, Ricci describes the court from within, the examination of the mandarins and the wisdom of Confucius, and lends to the China of the merchants a learned depth that the trader's eye alone lacks.
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Tomé Pires, Suma oriental (c. 1515)
A Portuguese apothecary and agent, Pires writes around 1515, from Malacca itself, the most complete description of the great Asian trade of his time, before dying a prisoner in China. He lists the cargoes, the routes and the nations that cross paths at the strait, that same chokepoint where Hamilton ends his second volume. His meticulous inventory shows Malacca at the height of its mercantile fortune, when the Scottish captain will see in it no more than a Dutch colony, still rich but fallen from its former glory.
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Duarte Barbosa, Le Livre de Duarte Barbosa (c. 1516)
A Portuguese factor of the early sixteenth century, Barbosa describes the Indian Ocean at the moment his nation holds its keys, two centuries before Hamilton observes its decline. Cambay, Diu, Hormuz, Mombasa, Mozambique: every stronghold the Scottish captain finds fortified, besieged, or lost, Barbosa sees new, in the hands of the Crown of Portugal. Reading the two in succession is to measure the slow tide that draws Lusitanian power back from these shores.
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Adam Olearius, Voyage en Moscovie, Tartarie et Perse (1647)
The diplomat from Holstein publishes in 1647 his account of the 1633-1639 journey through Moscow, the Volga, the Caspian Sea, Isfahan, and back by way of Baku. Two hundred years after Schiltberger, the same Siberian, Caucasian, and Persian geography, but under different rulers: the Romanovs in Russia, the Safavids in Persia, the Ottomans in the Caucasus. Schiltberger had seen these roads amid the disorder of Tatar successions; Olearius sees them consolidated into modern empires.
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Nicolas Sanson and the Cartographers of the Grand Siècle (1650-1700)
Before modern surveys, the Indian Ocean can be read on the maps of the king's geographers, where the coastlines Hamilton calls so poorly rendered gradually take shape. Following these maps, from the Ethiopic Sea to the mouths of the Indus, helps explain why the captain constantly complains of shoals and rocks missing from the charts: he sails through a world still only half guessed at, one that others, after him, would finish drawing.
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Johan Nieuhof, L'Ambassade de la Compagnie orientale des Provinces-Unies vers l'empereur de la Chine (1665)
A member of the first great Dutch embassy to Peking, in the middle of the seventeenth century, Nieuhof travels up China from Canton to the capital and brings back hundreds of drawings that fix, for a long time to come, Europe's image of the country. He sees, fifty years before Hamilton, the same rivers, the same bridges and the same cities, but from the side of the pleading embassy rather than the deceived merchant. His book sheds light on the ceremony and the haughtiness of the imperial administration that the captain will suffer in his turn, without ever penetrating its ways.
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Arnoldus Montanus, Ambassades mémorables vers les empereurs du Japon (1669)
A Dutch compiler of the seventeenth century, Montanus gathers the accounts of the Company's envoys to the Japan of the shoguns, that country closed upon itself which only the Dutch may still approach, through the narrow window of Nagasaki. His book, alive with processions and marvels, shows the closed empire that Hamilton only glimpses from afar, and tells in full the suppression of Christianity and the cunning of the merchants that the captain sums up in a few forceful pages. It is the great European picture of forbidden Japan, of which Hamilton gives only the sketch.
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Gemelli Careri, Voyage autour du monde (1699-1700)
At the end of the seventeenth century, the Neapolitan jurist travels around the world at his own expense. He crosses China, goes up to Peking, contemplates the Great Wall, then embarks at Manila on the galleon that links the Philippines to America. Almost a contemporary of Hamilton, he sails exactly the seas of this third volume, but as a free-roaming man of curiosity rather than a merchant. His testimony confirms, corrects or colors many a scene of the captain's, from the court of Canton to the streets of Manila, and gives a learned traveling companion to the crossing of the Malay Archipelago and the China seas.
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Engelbert Kaempfer, Amœnitates exoticæ (1712)
The physician and naturalist from Westphalia crosses Russia, Safavid Persia, and the Caspian Sea in 1683-1685. His scientific Latin from the close of the seventeenth century offers the first complete European portrait of modern Persia. Where Schiltberger bore first-person witness to Timurid destruction, Kaempfer describes Iran rebuilt under Shah Abbas, with its gardens, its mosques, its caravanserais.
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Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Relation d'un voyage du Levant (1717)
The Sun King's French botanist publishes in 1717 his account of the 1700-1702 mission to Anatolia, Georgia, Armenia, and Constantinople. The same places as Schiltberger, exactly three hundred years later, seen through the eyes of a scholar of the nascent Enlightenment. The Caucasus and Anatolia have changed Ottoman rulers, but the names of the cities, the peoples, the religions are much as the Bavarian had seen them.
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Constantin-François Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte (1783-1785)
Less than twenty years after Niebuhr, the young Volney travels through Egypt and Syria and publishes, in 1787, the very year of the Remarks on Aleppo, a picture that would become authoritative. His pashalik of Aleppo overlaps Niebuhr's line for line: villages abandoned at the edge of the desert, the road to Alexandretta infested with thieves, fallen Antioch, the fevered air of Alexandretta and the refuge of Beilan in the mountains. He adds the carrier pigeons and the famous Aleppo button. But Volney generalizes and judges Ottoman despotism as a philosopher of the Enlightenment, whereas Niebuhr, more modest, tells what he has seen and lets the reader conclude.
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Volney, Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie (1787)
The French philosopher traveled through the Ottoman Orient between 1783 and 1785 and published his account in Paris in 1787. He describes Jerusalem, Damascus, Cairo, and the Levantine coast with a rationalist and critical eye. The same geography as Nasir's, seven centuries later, under another empire and other dynasties. A foundational text of modern Orientalism, illuminating to read after the Persian because it shows, ten generations later, what the same land had become: an Ottoman Levant, impoverished, numbed, yet still largely recognizable as the one Nasir had crossed.
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Volney, Travels through Syria and Egypt (1787)
Ten years after Plechtcheïev, from 1783 to 1785, the young Volney stayed in Egypt and then in Syria, where he spent several months learning Arabic in a Lebanese monastery. His book devotes long pages to very recent history: the career and fall of Ali Bey, the rise and death of Sheikh Zahir, and the tyranny of Jazzar, his successor at Acre. What the Russian lieutenant saw with his own eyes, Volney reconstructs as a historian and an Enlightenment thinker. Readers of Plechtcheïev will find in it the sequel and the outcome of a story of which he lived one chapter.
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James Bruce, Voyage aux sources du Nil (1790)
Half a century after Hamilton, the Scotsman James Bruce finally enters the Abyssinia his countryman had known only through the accounts of fleeing missionaries. He lives at the court of the ruler Europeans called Prester John, and sees with his own eyes the customs, the raw meat, and the salt currency that Hamilton had known only by hearsay. His account confirms, corrects, and extends the astonished pages the captain devotes to the Christian kingdom of the mountains.
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Ali Bey el-Abbassi, Voyages d'Ali Bey el Abbassi en Afrique et en Asie (1803-1807)
Under an assumed name and in the costume of a Muslim prince, the Catalan Domingo Badía crosses Morocco, Egypt, Mecca, Syria and Anatolia. In the spring of 1806, a storm nearly swallows his ship before he lands at Larnaca. From there he makes his way to Nicosia through hills he finds worthy of the island's goddess, notes the richness of the soils and observes a Cyprus still squeezed by its governors. His Travels, published in Paris in 1814, offer a striking counterpoint to Niebuhr's pages: forty years later, the same island seen by a false Muslim who served Napoleon's policy.
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Jean Louis Burckhardt, Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (1810-1812)
Sent by the African Association of London to prepare for crossing the Sahara, the Swiss Burckhardt chooses Aleppo as his school: he learns Arabic there, lives under the name of Sheikh Ibrahim and radiates from it across all of Syria. Lebanon, the Orontes valley, the Hauran, then in 1812 the road to Cairo, during which he becomes the first modern European to describe Petra. His journals, published in 1822 after his death, extend Niebuhr's gaze exactly: the same patience, the same taste for measured itineraries, the same attention to the sects and tribes that hurried travelers ignore.
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Chateaubriand, Travels in Greece, Palestine, Egypt, and Barbary (1811)
In the autumn of 1806 Chateaubriand landed at Jaffa, the town before which Plechtcheïev had watched Ali Bey's assault fail, and rode up to Jerusalem under escort. He spent a few days there, visited the Holy Sepulchre, Bethlehem and the Dead Sea, then set off again for Egypt. His Itinéraire is the great book of the Romantic pilgrimage: the Holy Land is above all a landscape of memory and faith. Plechtcheïev had crossed it as an officer, between two battles, and saw in Jaffa only a stronghold to be taken. Between the two, a generation had changed the way Europe looked at the East.
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Alexander Kinglake, Eothen (1834-1835)
In 1834 the young Englishman Alexander Kinglake left Belgrade and rode across the Ottoman Balkans to Constantinople, then on to Smyrna, Cyprus, Beirut, Nazareth, Jerusalem and, through the desert, to Cairo during the plague of 1835. It is almost Mayr's itinerary twenty years on, with the same quarantines and the same fear of contagion. Eothen, published in 1844, is written with a nonchalant humour that has made it a classic. The Swiss merchant and the English gentleman share a dislike of bombast and a taste for the lived anecdote.
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Alphonse de Lamartine, A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1835)
In 1832 Lamartine settled with his family in Beirut and set out from there for the Holy Land with a small caravan. He recalls the siege of Acre just carried out by Ibrahim Pasha, crosses the plain of Haifa at the foot of Carmel, rides up to Nazareth and goes on to the Sea of Galilee and Mount Tabor. These are Plechtcheïev's own landscapes, from the bay below Carmel to the hills of Galilee. But the poet seeks religious emotion and the beauty of places, where the officer noted fortifications and revenues. On his return, the death of his daughter Julia in Beirut cast a shadow over the whole journey.
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Edward Lane, Mœurs et coutumes des Égyptiens modernes (1836)
The English Arabist settled in Cairo in 1825, then again in 1833, in the time of Muhammad Ali, and published in 1836 the most meticulous description of the Cairo of his century. He too distinguishes, as Nasir had eight hundred years earlier, between Cairo and Old Cairo, the pomp of power and the abundance of the bazaars. It is the same labyrinth of alleys, the same call to prayer, the same spice merchants, but the dynasty has changed many times over and the caliphate no longer exists. Lane completes from within what Nasir had begun: an anthropology of the city as lived.
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John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (1837)
In 1836, the American John Lloyd Stephens follows Laborde's route almost step by step: Cairo, Sinai, the fortress of Aqaba, the Wadi Araba, Petra. He travels in the dress of a Cairo merchant and, at Aqaba, the garrison immediately demands baksheesh: they still remember the shower of gold scattered there ten years earlier by Laborde, and Linant is still known to everyone. In Cairo, Stephens had in fact called on Linant before setting out. His account, published in 1837, lively and ironic, is a great success and launches him towards the Maya cities. To read Stephens after Laborde is to see the same route made more expensive by the passage of the first.
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Hans Christian Andersen, A Poet's Bazaar (1840-1841)
In the spring of 1841 Hans Christian Andersen returned from Constantinople by the Black Sea and the Danube, on the steamers that now plied the river up to Vienna. He did quarantine at Orsova, the frontier town where Mayr had spent twenty-one days in the lazaretto in November 1813, and describes the Bulgarian, Serbian and Wallachian banks. The book, published in 1842, turns the journey into a poetic tableau. What had been for Mayr a dangerous crossing by caravan and boat had become, a generation later, a steamboat cruise; but the lazaretto had hardly changed.
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Edward Robinson et Eli Smith, Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea (1841)
In the spring of 1838, the American biblical scholar Edward Robinson and the missionary Eli Smith leave Cairo, cross Sinai, reach Aqaba and then travel north to Hebron and Jerusalem, before heading back down from Hebron to Petra. Smith speaks Arabic; Robinson measures, compares and questions the Bedouin about place names, in which he often finds those of the Bible. Their Biblical Researches, published in 1841, laid the foundations of the historical geography of the Holy Land and earned Robinson the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society. Robinson cites Laborde's map and plates there, judging them accurate while faulting them for giving no overall idea of the city.
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Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient (1843)
Nine years after Macbrair, Gérard de Nerval lands at Alexandria early in 1843 and settles in Cairo, where he rents a house, buys a Javanese slave girl and has the legend of the caliph Hakim told to him. He then travels on to Beirut and Mount Lebanon, at the heart of the rivalries between Druze and Maronites that Macbrair had already seen fermenting under Ibrahim Pasha. His Voyage en Orient, published in 1851, blends reportage, reverie and embedded tales. The contrast is complete: the poet seeks in the East a mystery to love, the missionary a people to save, yet both describe the same teeming city, its cafés, its markets and its alleys.
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Harriet Martineau, Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848)
Four years after Ida Pfeiffer, the Englishwoman Harriet Martineau, already famous for her writings on political economy, set out in turn for the East at the end of 1846. She goes up the Nile into Nubia, crosses Sinai, visits Petra, then Jerusalem, Galilee and Damascus. Like the Viennese woman, she travels as a mature woman, not letting the fatigues of the saddle and the tent stop her. But where Pfeiffer prays, Martineau reasons: her Eastern Life, Present and Past turns Egyptian temples and holy places into stages in a history of religions, to the point of scandalising some of her readers. Two women before the same stones, two ways of believing.
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Gustave Flaubert, Voyage en Orient (1849-1851)
In November 1849, Gustave Flaubert, aged twenty-seven, sails from Marseille with Maxime Du Camp, who has been entrusted with a photographic mission. They ascend the Nile in a cangia as far as the Second Cataract, stop at Philae, Thebes and Esna, then go on to Beirut, Jerusalem, Damascus and Baalbek. The notes and letters from this journey, published after the writer's death, are raw, funny, sensual, with a painter's precision. Fifteen years after Macbrair, Flaubert follows almost the same route, from Cairo to the ruins of Baalbek, but with the eye of an artist who wants to see everything and judge nothing: the reader can set two views side by side, one pious, the other profane, of the same riverbanks.
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Thomas Eyre Poole, Life, Scenery, and Customs in Sierra Leone and the Gambia (1850)
Colonial and garrison chaplain at Freetown, the Reverend Thomas Eyre Poole published in London, in 1850, two volumes on Britain's West African colonies. From Sierra Leone he moves on to the Gambia, visits the settlements on the river and travels a long way up it. He depicts the life of the colonists, of the liberated Africans and of the riverside peoples, and dwells on the neglected churches, the cemeteries overrun by grass and the fevers that cut down Europeans, which he himself survives several times. The reader rediscovers the fragile colony, with its trading posts and missions, that Macbrair had known, seen this time by an Anglican clergyman rather than a Methodist.
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Ludwig August Frankl, The Jews in the East (1856)
Three years after Énault, the Viennese poet Ludwig August Frankl, secretary of the Jewish community of Vienna, went to Jerusalem in 1856 to found a modern school there, the Lämel foundation. His book, published in 1858, describes from within what Énault saw from outside: the life of the city's Jewish communities, their poverty, their disputes, their dealings with the consuls and the Ottoman authorities. The Catholic pilgrim stopped at the Western Wall; Frankl entered homes, synagogues and hospices, and gave the Jerusalem of those years a face that Christian accounts left in shadow.
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Herman Melville, Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant (1856-1857)
In the autumn of 1856, Herman Melville, worn out by the failures of Moby-Dick and Pierre, sets out alone for the Mediterranean. He discovers Constantinople, goes down to Egypt, where the Pyramids overwhelm him, then lands at Jaffa and spends several weeks in Palestine, from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, before Beirut, Greece and Italy. His journal, scribbled day by day and published only in the twentieth century, follows almost the route of Thackeray, but in another key: where the Englishman jokes before the Holy Sepulchre, the American finds a spiritual desert there. From this journey will come Clarel, a long poem on religious doubt published in 1876. See Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant.
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Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt (1862-1869)
Suffering from tuberculosis, Lucie Duff Gordon went to Egypt in 1862 in search of drier air and spent the last years of her life there. She settles in Luxor in the "French House" built on the roofs of the temple, learns Arabic, treats the peasants, receives notables and Copts, and writes to her family letters of rare freedom, published as early as 1865. In them she describes the corvée, the taxes and the levies of men that crush the fellahin, as Macbrair had done thirty years earlier under Muhammad Ali. But where the missionary saw souls to be won, she sees neighbours and friends, and reading her one measures all that European arrogance let slip.
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Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1867)
In 1867, Mark Twain sails from New York on the Quaker City for one of the first organised cruises: Gibraltar, Tangier, Italy, Athens, Constantinople, Smyrna, Beirut, the Holy Land and Egypt. It is, twenty-three years later, Thackeray's cruise in an American version, with its pious pilgrims, its travellers who break off souvenirs from the monuments and a narrator who refuses to gush on command. Twain slips onto the Acropolis at night, haggles in the bazaar, is irritated by the relics of Jerusalem and contemplates the Sphinx. Published in 1869, the book became one of the best-selling travel narratives of its day and extends, in a louder tone, the satire of the tourist. See The Innocents Abroad.
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Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869)
In 1867 Mark Twain sailed from New York on the Quaker City, an organized cruise, a novelty at the time, with American pilgrims bound for Europe and the Holy Land. In Palestine the little party rode from Damascus into Galilee, visited the Sea of Galilee and Nazareth, then Jerusalem, before re-embarking at Jaffa. Twain mocks the pious travellers, the guides and his own illusions, and describes without indulgence a poor and dusty land. A century after Plechtcheïev, Nazareth and Jaffa had become stops on a package tour, and the writer's irony replaces the gaze of the officer at war.
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Vasily Vereshchagin, Tableaux et croquis de l'Asie centrale (1870)
The great Russian painter, who follows Konstantin von Kaufman's military expedition to Turkestan in the 1860s and 1870s, paints Samarkand, Khiva, and Bukhara before they are absorbed into Russia. His descriptions accompanying the paintings depict a Central Asia still recognizable from Schiltberger's: local emirs, religious fanaticism, Circassian slaves, processions of horsemen. The last years when the steppe still looked like the steppe.
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Edward Henry Palmer, The Desert of the Exodus (1871)
In 1869, the Cambridge orientalist Edward Henry Palmer takes part in the survey of Sinai carried out for the Palestine Exploration Fund; he then sets off again with the naturalist Charles Tyrwhitt-Drake to cross on foot, without escort, the desert of the Tih, the limestone plateau that Laborde saw bordering the Wadi Araba to the west. Ten months under a small tent, inscriptions copied in the valleys, nights among the Bedouin who call him Abdallah Effendi: The Desert of the Exodus, published in 1871, seeks, like Laborde's introduction, the traces of the Exodus in the landscape, but with the instruments of a new science. The desert Laborde skirted at last becomes a mapped country.
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Amelia B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1873-1874)
A novelist and journalist, Amelia Edwards arrives in Egypt almost by chance, in November 1873, to escape the rain of Europe. She hires a dahabeah and sails up the Nile beyond Abu Simbel to the Second Cataract, sketching everything she sees. Her book, published in 1877, combines humour, erudition and indignation at monuments mutilated by treasure hunters and visitors. In 1882 she would found the Egypt Exploration Fund, to excavate and protect this heritage. Macbrair had seen the same temples at Thebes, Edfu and Philae; forty years later, Edwards shows what nascent tourism had made of this Nile of missionaries and pashas.
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Amelia B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1873-1874)
Thackeray stops at Cairo and the Pyramids; the English novelist Amelia Edwards, who arrived in Egypt almost by chance in the winter of 1873, goes much further. On a dahabieh, with a friend and a Nubian crew, she sails up the Nile to Abu Simbel and the second cataract, draws the temples, has sand-buried paintings cleared and is outraged by the plundering. Her book, published in 1877, mixes life on board, landscapes and a scholarship that grows page by page. The journey decides her life: in 1882, she founds the Egypt Exploration Fund in London. See A Thousand Miles up the Nile.
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Samuel White Baker, Cyprus as I Saw It in 1879 (1879)
A year after the Ottoman Empire ceded the administration of Cyprus to Great Britain, the Nile explorer Samuel Baker lands at Larnaca and travels the island for several months with his wife Florence, by cart and under canvas. He describes the roads, the devastated forests, the peasants, the taxes, the towns of Nicosia, Kyrenia and Famagusta, and judges the new administration as harshly as the old. More than a century after Niebuhr, the question remains the same: why is so fertile an island so poor? Baker's answer, that of a pragmatic colonist, echoes the anger of the Cypriots of 1766.
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Laurence Oliphant, Haifa, or Life in Modern Palestine (1882-1885)
In 1882 the British writer and former diplomat Laurence Oliphant settled in Haifa, at the foot of Mount Carmel where Énault's journey ends, and spent his summers in a Druze village on the mountain. His letters to the New York Sun, collected in 1887, describe the German Templer colony, the first Jewish villages, the monasteries, the excavations, the Druze and the Bedouin. Where Énault saw a sacred land frozen in its biblical memories, Oliphant observes a changing country, cleared, settled and coveted. The pilgrims' Carmel becomes in his hands a vantage point on modern Palestine.
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Lord Curzon, Russia in Central Asia (1889)
The future Viceroy of India publishes in 1889 his account of a journey through the newly conquered Russian Turkestan. Schiltberger had seen Sarai on the Volga in its splendor; Curzon crosses its ruins of sand. A thousand roads the Bavarian had traveled as a captive, the Englishman retraces by trans-Caspian railway. Industrial modernity has replaced the nomadic steppe.
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Guy Le Strange, Palestine sous les musulmans (1890)
In 1890, the English orientalist gathered the descriptions that Arab and Persian geographers had left of Syria and Palestine from the seventh to the fifteenth century, giving considerable space to Nasir's account of Jerusalem and the Haram. Reading this collection after the Safarnama places the Persian's notebook within the chorus of all those who described the holy city before the Crusaders: Le Strange translates, compares, situates, and lets Nasir's voice be heard among his peers.
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Matilde Serao, In the Country of Jesus (1893)
Forty years after Énault, the Neapolitan journalist Matilde Serao, co-founder of the daily Il Mattino, made her own journey to the Holy Land in 1893 and drew from it a series of articles, collected in a volume in 1898. The same profession, the same Catholic faith, the same road to Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Galilee. Serao writes with fervour and a keen sense of scene, crowds and colour that recalls her predecessor's. The two journalists, the Parisian of the Second Empire and the Neapolitan of the century's end, form a diptych of pilgrimage as seen by the press.
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Pierre Loti, Jérusalem (1894)
In the spring of 1894, after crossing the Sinai on camelback, Pierre Loti arrives in Jerusalem as a pilgrim without faith, come to seek a religious emotion he does not find. Fifty years after Thackeray, he describes the same Holy Sepulchre crowded with rival sects, the same throngs of pilgrims, a grey city under the rain, but in a tone of fervent melancholy that is the exact opposite of the Englishman's irony. Published in 1895, the book forms with Le Désert and La Galilée an Eastern triptych. To read Loti after Thackeray is to measure how the same place can arouse satire in one and nostalgic fervour in the other. See Jérusalem.
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Pierre Loti, La Galilée (1895)
In the spring of 1894, after Jerusalem, Pierre Loti headed north and crossed Galilee on horseback, through April showers and fields of flowers. He passed through Nazareth, lingered on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, then went on to Damascus. His book closes a trilogy begun with Le Désert and Jérusalem. Loti looks in these landscapes, without being sure he will find it, for the trace of Christ, and he notes the poverty of the villages and the melancholy of the holy places. More than a century after Plechtcheïev's ride to Nazareth and Cana, the same land becomes the setting for an inner quest.
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Pierre Loti, Le Désert (1895)
On 22 February 1894, Pierre Loti leaves the Springs of Moses with a camel caravan, climbs to the monastery of Sinai and goes down towards the Gulf of Aqaba, determined to take the longest route, the one through the desert of Petra, precisely because the guides advise him to avoid it. At Aqaba, the Ottoman administrator bars his way: the tribes of Idumea are in revolt, and Loti must turn off towards Gaza across the desert. Le Désert, published in 1895, is a journal of light and silence, all in shades of sand and granite. It shows what the entry into Petra was worth, won by Laborde through patience and gifts.
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Gertrude Bell, Syria: The Desert & the Sown (1905)
In early 1905, Gertrude Bell leaves Jerusalem on horseback, crosses the Hauran and the Druze country, reaches Damascus, Homs and Hama, then lingers at Aleppo before descending by Antioch to Alexandretta, where her book, published in 1907, ends. It is almost Niebuhr's itinerary, in the opposite direction and a hundred and forty years later: the same Bedouins masters of the desert, the same Nusayris, the same ruins of Antioch. Bell, an archaeologist and future player in British policy in Iraq, writes with a sense of dialogue and portrait that makes this account one of the classics of travel in the Levant.
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T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926)
On 6 July 1917, Thomas Edward Lawrence enters Aqaba with the Howeitat of Auda Abu Tayi and Sharif Nasir, after a long march through the desert that has taken the town from behind: coming from the plateau, they descend the valley of the Itm, Laborde's Wadi Djetoum, while the Turkish defences face the sea. The fortress where Laborde waited for the Alawin chiefs becomes the base of the Arab Revolt, and the approaches to Petra a front line. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, privately printed in a small edition in 1926 and then published in 1935, tells of this land of Edom crossed by dromedary, almost a century after Laborde and Linant passed through.