ADVENTURES IN A LOST WORLD

I BEGAN THIS BOOK at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, after my travel plans – along with those of just about everyone else on the planet – had to be cancelled. With everyone confined to quarters, and city centres eerily empty, the world seemed both enveloped in crisis and strangely becalmed.

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Stuck at home for months on end, I started looking for travel stories from the medieval world and found a report from an anxious, tenth-century diplomat named Ibn Fadlan, sent by the caliph of Baghdad into the badlands of modern-day Russia to forge an alliance with a distant king.

Ibn Fadlan’s journey from the comforts of cosmopolitan Baghdad to the frozen wilds of the north was a terrible ordeal, physically and spiritually. When he finally reached the king’s city on the Volga River, he realised the money promised to the king had never arrived. And so he was held hostage in this strange land for several months.

The long sojourn in the north was an hallucinatory experience for Ibn Fadlan. He saw the Northern Lights and believed he was witnessing a cosmic battle between the jinn. He was taken to a pile of colossal bones at the foot of a tree where he was told a giant had been hanged.

Then, several months into his stay, a party of Viking traders arrived on the Volga and set up camp. When their chieftain died, they asked their slaves for a human sacrifice.

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THE REPORT OF Ibn Fadlan’s journey to the north led me to a trove of other travellers’ accounts from the Abbasid caliphate. There was the tale of Sallam the Interpreter, sent into the Far East to investigate the integrity of the Wall of Gog & Magog - a barrier of metal bricks said to have been built by Alexander the Great to pen in a race of hideous apocalypse beasts.

There were sailors’ tales, both plausible and fantastical of their voyages to China, India and East Africa. And there were the accounts of the Blackbird, the African musical genius, trained in Baghdad, who introduced fine dining, seasonal fashion and the deodorant to the dazzled elites of ninth century Muslim Spain.

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In piecing together these accounts with those of Chinese and European travellers from the same era, I found they formed a wonderful crazy quilt atlas of a long lost world.