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Sire,Dear Gentlemen and Ladies,The Somalis' Country, of which I have the honour of relating, stretches along the entire East Horn of Africa and is called Bar-as-Somal in the Somali language. The Somalis belong to the Mohammedan religion of the Shafi'ite sect and

excerptTo put it in a nutshell, there are three races living in Congo today:The Pygmies, scattered all over the territory and on the verge of extinction;Nuba, the invaders who live in the north – and, finallyThe Bantu, the most numerous. Several distinct and independent

excerptAbout the Earth's Crust A loud knock on the door of the cabin disturbs my sweet morning sleep. Gibrelterra!… Gibrelterra!… I rub my eyes sleepily and, without understanding anything, I ask stroppily: what is it? what's happened?Gibrelterra!…We can

The summon sounded imperative, I had positive interests, thank goodness – I was to receive by the hands of professor Cioranescu the second volume of his memoirs - this, as he had no intention of coming to the country this year – moreover, my curiosity was not inconsiderable.

We are stepping in on a realm of legend. My reader undoubtedly knows the thrill of finding himself in places bearing a special aura. Something memorable has occurred there. Not necessarily a glorious, heroic deed, a moment of history, but an act of spirit (pardon my grandiloquence!)

excerpts30th September When I get on the tram, in Zurich, I cross myself. To whom? Not to the tram, of course, but to the Power that gave some people (engineers, technicians, workers) the ability to create such public means of transportation: and to others (the passengers)

The news that a German foundation offered me, many years ago, a scholarship to Heidelberg gave me an incommensurable joy and an unrestrained curiosity of knowing places that, for a very long time, I could only associate with the plot of Wilhelm Meyer Förster's play.

All roads to the West go through Vienna. Generous crossroads where the western world fuses with the horizons of eastern Europe and the Germanic spirit seems to have rich confluences with Latinity, the old Austrian metropolis still conveys the same charm that those claras

excerptThat afternoon we took a train to Constanta where, the same evening, we planned to embark on a Romanian ship bound to Constantinople. We arrived in Constanta late at night, so we didn't get to see any of the city or port. All I remember is the very agitated sea.

excerptsThe 18th of March. Depressing weather in Berlin, yet I'm not depressed, only sleepy, in spite of a coffee and a lot of bitter chocolate. Coming back from Italy is like waking up from a Paradise dream or from a heroin trip and finding again those four walls of

Chapter XLV – How to TravelTraveling is a spiritual need of everybody: our life actually ends with a trip that we are so sorry we have to take in mourning and without companions, leaving the body to which our soul, which is in fact ourselves, was so much connected. We

excerptsVienna, December 1838 Extra Hungariam non est vita, si est vita, non est ita.  Vienna and Bucharest! Oh, what a difference between these two cities! Like the sun and the planets is this Capital surrounded by adequate corollaries stretching to the margins of the