Penguin`s _ Great Journeys_ is a series of pocket paperbacks, each of them an extract from a historic classic travelogue. Writers such as Thesiger, Twain, Chekhov, Kapuzinsky, Marco Polo & even Herodotus are featured, offering the highlights from historic journeys of discovery & adventure. The _ Great Journeys_ series allows readers to travel both around the planet & back through the centuries
- but also back into ideas & worlds frightening, ruthless & cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent & implacable jungles, deserts & mountains, multitudes of birds & flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends & stories were treated as facts & in which so much was still to be discovered.