Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: n TRAVELLERS rgo out among strangers, to be a man of the world, to travel, has always taken more or less courage and considerable inducements—wives, treasure, slaves, foreign-made goods, foreign alliances, the favours of the gods, lands to be claimed or seas charted, a Golden Fleece, a Sacred Tomb, a North-west Passage. Of course if, like raider or sailor or crusader, or like the modern tourist, you seek out only compatriots when you travel, you feel comparatively secure, a feeling they whose business it is to exploit the tourist fully appreciate; but a solitary stranger in a strange landf hasever had to have an adventurous spirit. Realization of the perils he faces is apt to find ceremonial expression. In his behalf sacrifices are offered to the gods or prayers said or he is himself the recipient of farewell gifts. He is provided with amulets or letters of introduction or wished a "ban voyage" or "good luck." As he sets off he is on the lookout for omens, and often an unfavourable omen checks his start. There are days too, he learns, when he had better not start at all— Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday in the Soudan,1 Friday among us, and Friday, too, in Persia, if western bound. In Persia a kinsman holds a Koran over a traveller's head as he crosses the threshold.2 Elsewhere too he is "seen off." In Northern Albania he is accompanied for a mile or two on his journey by his relatives, returning to them, on leave-taking, the gold and silverearrings he has had to take from a jar of magic water.3 On setting out to the East Coast the Wanyamwesi of the Soudan smear their cheeks with a kind of meal porridge4 or else have their medicine-men spit it over them,s just as before going to Europe we might have our hair cut or buy a "travelling suit." No Moslem ever travels without taking wit...