Tahir Shah

“A little imagination goes a long way in Fes.”

“Normally I would have been the first to go in search of cannibal monks, particularly as I had heard of a similar tradition at a nunnery in the Philippines. It's the sort of quest I can't resist.”

“I felt sure we could gain the upper hand by putting ourselves in the mindset of the Incas.”

“Searching for a lost city is a particularly European obsession.”

“I had learned years ago never to give original documents to anyone if I could help it.”

“In some warped way, having an embalmed body with us made perfect sense.”

“The very fact that a Frenchman was prepared, after tow minutes of conversation, to be so friendly towards anyone, especially one who had come from England, made me restless.”

“The last thing we wanted was for the Machiguenga to be sad again. Sadness appeared to bring out their violence.”

“Previous journeys had taught me the danger of taking too much stuff.”

“On a hard jungle journey nothing is so important as having a team you can trust.”

“For me, nature is something you watch on the Discovery Channel, or on the evening news -- as you learn how much more of it's been savaged to make way for the Blackberry realm that is my home”

“In some peculiar way, indeed, the rules were now beginning to seem quite logical. It was then I knew that I had been in India long enough.”

“I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realise my good fortune and would never again forget it.”

“It was an awkward moment. We were burning down our host's house, a situation which any guest seeks to avoid.”

“A cross between a foreign legion boot-camp and a secret-society initiation ritual, the ordeals were grounded in pain. One thing was obvious: the agenda, which was dedicated to grave discomfort, had been drawn up by a passionate sadist.”

“Any man who has ever led an army, an expedition, or a group of Boy Scouts has sadism in his bones.”

“Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood. With such a book the impact isn't necessarily obvious at first...but the more you read it and re-read it, and live with it, and travel with it, the more it speaks to you, and the more you realize that you cannot live without that book. It's then that the wisdom hidden inside, the seed, is passed on.”

“Believe, and what was impossible becomes possible what at first was hidden becomes visible.”

“For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories.”

“Enlightenment, and the death which comes before it, is the primary business of Varanasi.”