Where the Dawn Rises

Eothen: Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East is the work that established the reputation of A. W. Kinglake (1809–1891), the British travel writer and historian. First published anonymously in London in 1844, it recounts a journey begun in the autumn of 1834, when Kinglake and his friend Savile set out from inland Europe by way of Berlin, Prague, and Vienna, crossed the Save into Ottoman Turkey, and declared themselves to have entered "the East." After reaching Smyrna, Savile was called home by his family, and Kinglake continued alone with a guide and an interpreter: he sailed to Cyprus and Beirut, went on to Jerusalem and Cairo, crossed the Sinai Desert, and finally arrived in Damascus. The book is written in the first person in a discursive, essayistic style, and its cast of characters ranges from Bedouins and pashas to slave traders, monks, and pilgrims; among its episodes are a stay in plague-ridden Cairo and a journey by camel caravan across the desolate Sinai. Kinglake deliberately plays down geography, history, statistics, and scholarship, refusing to pose as an authority or to instruct his readers; what truly concerns him is his own impression of foreign lands, so that a solitary journey becomes in these pages an exercise in self-observation and self-liberation. This ironic, brisk, never-complaining aristocratic humor made the book immensely popular in the Victorian era, and it has since come to be regarded as one of the early models of modern travel literature.