num_pages: 370
description: Following on Travels with a Tangerine (a New York Times Notable book) and The Hall of a Thousand Columns  here is the third volume in the author's passionate pursuit of the 14th-century traveler who out-traveled Marco Polo For Ibn Batuttah of Tangier being medieval didnt mean sitting at home waiting for renaissances enlightenments and air travel. It meant traveling the known world to its limits. Seven centuries later Tim Mackintosh-Smiths fascination takes him to landfalls in remote tropical islands torrid Indian Ocean ports and dusty towns on the shores of the Saharan sand-sea. His zigzag itinerary across time and space leads from Zanzibar to the Alhambra (via the Maldives Sri Lanka China Mauritania and Guinea) and to a climactic conclusion to his quest for the man he calls IBa man who who spent his days with saints and sultans and his nights with an intercontinental string of slave-concubines. Tims journey is a search for survivals from IBs worldmaterial human spiritual ediblehowever when your fellow traveler has a 700-year head start familiar notions dont always work.
language: English
title: Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam with Ibn Battutah
publisher: John Murray