All the best armchair travellers are sceptics. Those of the fourteenth century were no exception: for them there were lies damned lies & Ibn Battutah's India. Born in 1304 Ibn Battutah left his native Tangier as a young scholar of law; over the course of the thirty years that followed he visited most of the known world between Morocco & China. Here Tim Mackintosh-Smith retraces one leg of the Moroccan's journey -- the dizzy ladders & terrifying snakes of his Indian career as a judge & a hermit courtier & prisoner ambassador & castaway. From the plains of Hindustan to the plateaux of the Deccan & the lost ports of Malabar the author reveals an India far off the beaten path of Taj & Raj. Ibn Battutah left India on a snake stripped to his underpants by pirates; but he took away a treasure of tales as rich as any in the history of travel. Back home they said the treasure was a fake. Mackintosh-Smith proves the sceptics wrong. India is a jewel in the turban of the Prince of Travellers. Here it is glittering grotesque but genuine a fitting ornament for his 700th birthday.