The traveler who presents himself in this little book feels how tedious a person he may prove to be. Most travelers, that he ever heard of, were the happy possessors of audacity and rigor, a zeal for facts, a zeal for Science, a vivid faith in powder and gold. Who, then, will bear for a moment with an ignorant, pacific adventurer, without even a gun?
He may, however, seem even more than bold in one thing, and that is in describing regions where the wise and the imaginative and the immortal have been before him. . . .