Meadows of Gold, Roads Without End: The Life and Ideas of Al-Masudi, the Herodotus of the Arabs (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798196921988)

What did you stop being curious about?

There was a version of you that asked questions without checking first whether they were reasonable. Somewhere along the way the asking got expensive, and you learned to want smaller things. Most people do. Almost nobody notices the day it happens.

In the tenth century, a young man in Baghdad refused.

Al-Masudi had everything a scholar could want. He lived in the richest intellectual city on earth, in a house of books, among men who could trace what they knew back three hundred years. He left anyway. He sailed the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, walked the coast of East Africa, sat with Brahmin priests in India and Zoroastrian priests in the mountains of Persia, and stood on a Caspian shore while men described a fleet of five hundred ships that had come down the Volga and never gone home. Then he wrote it all down in a book called the Meadows of Gold, and did something almost no one in his century did: he told his readers exactly where each piece of it came from, and which parts he was unsure of.

This is his story, told as the life it was rather than the footnote it became.

• Feel the specific pull of a question you cannot answer from a chair
• Watch a man choose difficulty over comfort, at twenty-one, and never regret it
• See the medieval world as it actually was: connected, argumentative, astonishingly wide
• Understand why the habit of saying "I have not seen this myself" is the rarest kind of courage
• Recognize the question you set down years ago, and pick it back up

This is a book for anyone who used to want to see things, and who still catches themselves looking at maps.

He was not the greatest mind of his age. He was the one who went.

The road is still there. Open the first page.