Árminius Vambéry, His Life and Adventures

A lame Hungarian Jew teaches himself twenty languages, walks to Constantinople, crosses Central Asia disguised as a dervish, and comes back to a professorship and a knighthood. Vámbéry made the journey to Khiva, Bokhara and Samarkand in 1863, when discovery meant execution, and wrote this account of the whole life afterwards. The chapters on the road to Bokhara are as good as travel writing gets. Fifty-eight plates, from Vereshchagin's Samarkand to Turner's whalers and Venetian light, follow the wanderer's road across Central Asia.