It is an unusual book in that it takes the reader on two parallel journeys which were undertaken nearly 2,500 years apart. One of these was in Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski’s line of journalistic duty as the correspondent for Sztandar Mtodych and the Polish News Agency, PAP, while the other refers to the travels of the Greek historian Herodotus in the 5th Century BC.

The book is absorbingly written, particularly the parts which describe the conditions in which the author lived and travelled in the fifties when Eastern Europe was still part of the Soviet block. I did wonder, however, whether the title of the book had anything to do with the importance and space occupied in it by Herodotus. Kapuscinski seems to have an obsessive compulsion to change course and describe Herodotus’s travels at the cost of his own.

As a young reporter he had his ambitions to go abroad but for him at that time ‘abroad’ was next door Czechoslovakia. Being suddenly posted to India was as much of a surprise as a shock as he knew no language or country except his own and India excited and frightened him. That was when his editor did what has subsequently had a major fall-out on his readers. She gave him a thick, bound book— ‘Histories’ by Herodotus with the suggestion that he would find it a great companion.

It is moving to read his description of his days in college when teachers were in short supply as were text books and classroom furniture. It was one teacher to a hundred students learning Greek history without knowing where Greece was or that Greece had a history at all, even less a history full of glory. His mates were mostly poorly dressed but in a Communist state they were the preferred ones. However, he recalls that his class notes had no reference to Herodotus and that in his years in college there was only a single five-minute reference to Herodotus!

The book reveals the appaling conditions in which he lived and travelled. In India he arrives with none to meet him. He takes the chance of accepting the help of an old man at the airport who escorts him to a lodging place.
The fact that it was a place with the ‘Hotel’ lit up in red and that his room was “furnished with only a bed, table and a washstand”, indicate it must have been one of those places in Sadar Bazaar which have for years been the haven of back-packers. Of course, back-packers no longer accept the standards that the author did.
Herodotus intrudes into the narrative and Kapuscinski cannot help wondering how Herodotus travelled around the world knowing only Greek. He assumes Herodotus was fine as Greek pockets existed all over the world in those distant days. 

The author journeys to China and then Sudan. He takes with him to China lots of Communist literature and tries without success to pierce the natural as well as the enforced reticence of the locals. He then has to digress into a philosophical reverie on the Great Wall of China really being the Great Wall of Language. His stay in Sudan was during the tumultuous days of chaos and political strife. The high point was his meeting with Louis Armstrong in Khartoum.

The account of Kapuscinski’s travels as a journalist is by itself an interesting one as it reveals the horrors and the appaling conditions visited upon countries going through painful change. What irked me were Herodotus’s constant intrusions when all I wanted was to read Kapuscinski.

There are quite a few half-chapters of Kapuscinski swamped by two on Herodotus and the author’s preoccupation with the Greek historian does detract from the readability of his book.
If Kapuscinski can be sifted from Herodotus this book is worth having  and reading.