Richard Halliburton – författare

With a new foreword by Tahir Shah, this book is one most captivating travel books of the 20th century.It was perhaps inevitable that Richard Halliburton, such a romantic, imaginative wanderer, would follow in the footsteps of another legendary traveller - Odysseus. Halliburton's second book, The Glorious Adventure, describes his journey through the Mediterranean in the shadow of his mythical hero.In Greece, Halliburton charged Mount Olympus 'in order to visit the gods that dwelled there'; he swam the Hellespont as Byron had before him and journeyed on to Troy, where Odysseus's long adventure began. He sailed to Stromboli in the Tyrrhenian Sea, home of Aeolus, god of the winds; then to the Bay of Naples, Circeo - 'island' of Circe - and Li Galli, the siren isles that shimmered off the Amalfi coast. Battling through the Straits of Messina, Odysseus's Scylla and Charybdis, he explored Sicily and Corfu before setting out for the shores of Ithaca, long-forgotten home for one, the end of an adventure for another.As epic and eventful as The Odyssey itself, The Glorious Adventure evokes the romance of another time, when heroes and gods walked the earth.

"I've just given myself an airplane and I want you to fly us to all the outlandish places in the world, Turkey, Persia, Paris and - Pasadena. We're going to fly across deserts, over mountains, rescue imprisoned princesses and fight dragons. We must have the world. We can have the world!"Thirsting for a new adventure and announcing that 'an adventure not in the air is obsolete', Richard Halliburton hired pioneer aviator Moye Stephens in 1931 and fearlessly set out to circle the world in an open cockpit biplane optimistically named The Flying Carpet. For Halliburton it was the ultimate in romantic, risky exploration and was a means of seeing the world in a way that few had ever seen it before.True to form, his journey was breathtakingly audacious. They performed aerobatics in Fez, landed in mysterious Timbuktu, spent time with the French Foreign Legion in Algeria and explored Cairo, Damascus and Petra. In Iran, they met legendary aviatrix Ella Beinhorn and gave Princess Mahin Banu a ride. In Iraq, it was the turn of King Faisal's young son, Ghazi, who was escorted by two RAF fighter planes. In India, they flew over the Taj Mahal - upside down - and, soaring over the Himalayas, Halliburton took the first aerial photograph of Everest. In Borneo they were entertained by Sylvia Brooke, the 'White Queen of Borneo', and by the chief of the Iban Dyak headhunters, who gave them dozens of shrunken heads.A journey as dazzling as Halliburton himself and, with the world at war less than a decade later, marking the end of an era, the story of The Flying Carpet is as captivating today as it was to the world 80 years ago.