Travels With Herodotus
By Ryszard Kapuscinski,
Penguin, £ 5.25

Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish journalist who died in 2007 at the age of 75 was that rare species who could successfully blend reporting with history and wed observation to analysis. It is difficult to judge the quality of his Polish prose but if the translation is any indicator, he was also a master of the art of writing.

As a young man in communist Poland Kapuscinski was seized by the urge to travel. Much to his pleasant surprise, his editor sent him off to India. Thus started his travels. But this was not the only gift that his editor gave to him. In Kapuscinski’s words, “At the end of our conversation, Tarlowska [the editor] reached into a cabinet, took out a book, and handing it to me said: ‘Here, a present for the road.’ It was a thick book with stiff cover of yellow cloth. On the front, stamped in gold letters,was Herodotus THE HISTORIES.’’

Thus armed the author set forth into the world. His first stop was Nehru’s India, which failed to inspire him. He travelled to Delhi, to Benaras, to Calcutta and to Hyderabad. He gave up the task of trying to understand the country: “In time I grew convinced of the depressing hopelessness of what I had undertaken, of the impossibility of knowing and understanding the country in which I found myself. India was so immense. How can one describe something that is — and so it seemed to me — without boundaries or end?’’

India was only the beginning. Kapuscinski travelled to China and to various parts of Africa. With him went his copy of Herodotus. He splices his narrative of these different places with his reading of Herodotus’s great book.

The book is thus an account of two very different kinds of journeys. The first is the more obvious one: Kapuscinski’s discovery of the countries he visits as a reporter. He is the ideal reporter: observant, curious and eager to learn about the culture and the history of a place. Thus we have fascinating vignettes of the places he has to visit in his professional capacity. The other journey is an intellectual one — Kapuscinski’s discovery of Herodotus.

It is the second journey which is perhaps the more intriguing, and therefore the more attractive, one. He sees The Histories as “world literature’s first great work of reportage”. Even those who believe that this rather diminishes the scale and scope of Herodotus’s work will be fascinated with the use that Kapuscinski makes of a past master of the art of narrative.

Much like Herodotus, Kapuscinski draws the most profound conclusions from the most mundane of observations. Thus the book ends with the haunting line: “We stand in darkness, surrounded by light.”