Tahir Shah devises a get rich quick scheme which brings him to India to seek his fortune. He also has other interests namely the mysterious Gond people who may have walked the earth when the earth was one joined land mass. However this book is so much more than that. India \ Africa \ South America are all experienced and observed from a most interesting angle. The author roughs it al the way. There are many side-splitting moments in this book. There is youth and vivacity in the words that flow. Tahir Shah is clearly in love with life. Incidentally while this book is truly excellent, his latest effort "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is I believe a masterpiece. You will not be disappointed in either book.

TAHIR SHAH is without doubt the most original travel writer of his generation... never before have I been so touched by, and become so involved in, a book. I am struck dumb by Shah's genius.

Read this book.

A fast gallop through the Indian sub-continent, Africa and South America, with a cast of eccentric characters perhaps unprecidented in modern travel writing. It put me in mind of Peter Flemming for the sheer pace and sense of adventure. Yet it was a hundred times funnier. Gives Redmond O'Hanlon a run for his money as the Number 1 funny travel writer at work today. Also, I notice it is easy to find in the UK, available in an Orion paperback, not out of print at all!

It's another of Shah's peculiar passions, shrunken heads, that spurs his quest up the Amazon in search of the legendary fliers of Peru. "..." Alas, all the heads at this invitation-only auction ("...") are scooped up and Shah's only consolation is the cryptic remark of a French collector that if he was forty years younger, he'd seek out the Birdmen of Peru.

As it happens, this also dovetails with Shah's interest in flight (...), and after some serious research into scant legends of pre-Wright flight, he takes the Frenchman's advice.

Shah, born into Afghan nobility, brought up in Britain, combines a neophyte's wariness with a a scholar's penchant for research and a dogged will to follow the clues anywhere. As a writer, his gift for capturing the absurd is surpassed only by his ability to laugh at himself, making for an aborbing, educational and hilarious trip through the remoter regions of Peru and Inca culture.

Ridiculously over-supplied, Shah struggles with his mounds of luggage from campsite to crowded bus and train, from dusty village to timeless ruins to, at last, the jungles of the Amazon rain forest. To start, a four-day backpacking trip across mountain passes brings him to sunrise over the lost Inca city of Macchu Pichu, missed by the gold-hunting conquistadors, but overrun by busloads of modern tourists. Here Shah examines a temple dedicated to the condor, but his guide tells him his obsession with flight misses the point. " 'Whether the Incas flew or not is irrelevant,' she said. 'Instead, you must ask why they wanted to fly.' " Shah takes this advice to heart and incorporates the spiritual element into his quest.

Passing the time with shopkeepers, launderers, expatriates and anyone else who crosses his path, Shah acquires good luck totems and encounters the looted graves of Peru's mummies, the mummies themselves littering the ground. In small museums he finds hundreds of woven birdmen in the mummies' exquisite funerary robes. He pauses in a town famous for vampires (to tourists anyway) and stays in a deserted luxury hotel, haunted by a bloodthirsty ghost. He reaches his own conclusions about the Nazca Lines, ancient desert etchings of animals whose forms can only be seen from the sky. He meets several shaman, one of whom cures Shah's troubled mind with a rite which involves a guinea pig and a prohibition against shaking hands for 40 days. Others use datura or curare.

Meandering, Shah makes his way toward the Shuar, the Birdmen, who live still in the remote jungle. A group of missionaries was murdered only the previous month for arriving with empty hands, he's told. Loaded with gifts as well as his state-of-the-art gear, Shah at last embarks in search of the tribes and their ayahuasca, a mind-altering "Vine of the Dead," their secret of flight.

His guide is a taciturn naturalist and Vietnam vet, an American named Richard, who seldom sleeps. The mysteries of nature are Richard's passion...Their transportation is a half-rotten hulk and after their first night, Shah discovers his shoes have been gnawed by rats. He decrees death to the rodents but the boat is shortly overrun with cockroaches and then wolf spiders - staples of the rats' diet. At a shoreside village, Shah buys new rats.

This is only the beginning. After arriving at his first Shuar village (...) Shah is taken to a shaman in the jungle and his description of the trip perfectly captures the difficulty of the modern traveler: "..." By the time he arrives at the Shaman's village he contemplates taking up life there. "..." But only here, deep in its natural home, can he fulfill his desire and learn the Shuar's ancient secret of flight.

Reader's of Shah's previous book, "Sorcerer's Apprentice" (a quest for magic in India) will recognize his unique affinity for the bizarre and surreal encountered while fulfilling his avid curiosity for the knowledge and traditions of other cultures. His writing is elegant, witty and often enigmatic and his eyewitness information is enhanced with meticulous research, seamlessly woven into the narrative. Shah's travel writing is in a class by itself.

There are perilous things that can happen if you try to start a collection of shrunken heads. Tahir Shah was "desperate to start a collection of my own," and so he showed up at a secretive, invitation-only auction of eleven such heads under the auspices of a "learned British society." To his dismay, within fifteen minutes, the whole set of heads was knocked down to a Japanese collector who had been "trying to corner the shrunken head market for years." The evening was not a total loss, as an elderly Frenchmen advised Shah to go to Peru. For the shrunken heads? Why, no, for the birdmen. This didn't make any sense, and the Frenchman would not elaborate, but a week later an envelope came from Paris, bearing an old feather and a quotation from a 1638 book that said Incas flew like birds over the jungle. Shah was launched onto research and travels recounted in _Trail of Feathers: In Search of the Birdmen of Peru_ (Arcade Publishing), and they make for frequently hilarious reading. He is a different type of explorer, pursuing an idea rather than going to regions no one has ever seen, and has endured with good humor atrocious travel arrangements and louche characters that would make other people scream.

After some research, he starts, of course, at the current hotspot for archeological tourism, Machu Picchu, which he finds looks from above like a condor. He goes to Nazca, the region of the famous patterns in the desert that only make sense when seen from high above. He is pursued by a Parisienne who is looking for a father for her children, and who comes equipped with a dried lama fetus which can be made, she says, into an aphrodisiac soup. In the village of Trompeteros, he attends with all the citizens the beauty contest sponsored by Inca Brand Condoms. (The master of ceremonies declares that the beauties on the stage were "clean-living girls who always used an Inca condom.") The crowd goes wild over every entrant, especially number six, who for the talent portion performs a dance which includes sucking live tree grubs from the floor and eating them. The search loops around into the upper Amazon regions, when Shah is convinced that rather than physical flight, the birdmen were psychic, or psychedelic, fliers. The experts in such flying were the Shuar tribe, the headshrinkers themselves. He finds a Vietnam vet who is only at home in the jungle, to act as guide and to hire a boat, which turns out to be rotten and full of rats and wolf spiders. After a trip of hellish tortures, they wind up in Shuar country only to be shocked: the Shuars have not only given up headshrinking and other tribal rituals, they have not only become Christians, but they have become evangelists. The missionaries have not, however, taken what would have been the fatuous step of trying to make the tribesmen abstain from ayahuasca, a hallucinogen. Shah's trip on it is the climax of the book. Yes, there were Inca birdmen.

This is a hilarious, picaresque tale which is not without its scholarly moments; Shah has done a good deal of research, and even has appendices to tell about hallucinogens and the theory of shrunken heads. There is a good deal of more-or-less practical information; read this book and you will ever after be able to perform a simple check to tell a good shrunken head from a bad one. His Vietnam vet dispenses the Five Rules of Jungle Travel: "One: chop stems downward and as low to the ground as possible; then they'll fall away from the path. Two: go slow, as speed only snags you on fish-hook thorns. Three: rest frequently and drink liquid. Four: love the jungle, don't hate it. Five: check your groin for parasites twice an hour." Words to live by. And if, by chance, the closest you get to a jungle expedition is to be reading this merry recollection, you will consider yourself lucky.

Beginning with the Wright brothers, Tahir Shah spreads his flying carpet for the unsuspecting reader of travel tomes.

There is a legend that a great bird which, if found, would confer ultimate fulfillment for the seeker. It drops a feather within the mundane where an ordinary man or woman may find it, and, from this single clue, find the fabulous bird. This theme was exploited by Stephen Spielberg in "Close Encounters of the Third Time," where Richard Dryfus begins with the slightest hint of a meeting place he must attain for a rendexvous with superior beings beyond earth, then slowly, intuitively builds a model of the site until he recognizes the place and goes there, arriveing just in time.

While TRAIL OF FEATHERS is ostensibly a literal, if zany, hike through the jungles of Peru in search of the reality behind winged men woven into the ancient textiles of the region, it bears all of the elements of a mythic search for ultimate meaning. Several contacts scold the author for his obsession with flying, which, they say, is nothing. All that counts, they tell him, is the reason for flight and the treasure brought back to earth.

The author's search for the flying men of Peru seems akin to the Australian aboriginee "walk about." As Shah again and again chooses the most uncomfortable means of travel and lodging, I could not help suspecting that his was a ritual journey and that the trail, not the feathers nor the flying, was the destination.

Reading what seemed quite similar to Latin American "magical reality," I learned an enormous amount about Peru's real history, geography and its people--far more, I felt, than I could have learned in any other format, unless I went there myself and took the same risks as the author. That he emerged alive would seem to place the whole tale in question but for the Vietnam vet and jungle expert who shows up just in time to guide Shah and to keep him alive in the process. I got the feeling that there was a hidden hand behind this particular journey. I don't mean mysticism. Hints, such as the ease with which Shah could replenish as needed lost money, point to a human infastructure. The book not only solves dozens of mysteries. It's reading was for me a mysterious journey in its own right.

The author gives a 'lateral' approach to cultural changes, groupings. He shows that trends are both recent and yet many have occurred throughout history.

Sorcere's Apprentice, Tahir Shah - Excellent, excellent book! From an unbelievable start to an equally astounding
finish. Tahir sets out to expose the mendicants, magicians, godmen (for they are almost always men), and tricksters of
India. What a better way to do it than to become one! But that requires a rigorus tutelage under the Master, requring
Tahir to perfom tasks least related to magic: eat pebbles, ingest soap, dig a deep trench armed only with a teaspoon,
etc. The book can be divided in three broad parts: the early years which detail why Tahir became interested in this
arcane area, the second part discusses tutelage under an exacting Master, and the final part consumes itself with a
journey across India putting the latest learned skill to test. Here is the explanation of the famous Indian disappearing
rope trick, or making vibhuti (ash) out of thin air, walking on fire, dangerous surgeries where the godmen pluck out
livers and intestines of the patient only to have the patient recover and walk away! Of the three parts, paradoxically, the
last one is the least interesting. Maybe the author could not sustain the levity, humor, quick wit, and sarcastic writing
that is evident in the first two parts. In any case, this was an excellent read. (September 2001).

Do baby-renters (people who make a living out of lending out babies to beggars), skeleton-dealers (people who export unclaimed dead bodies to the west for studies in anatomy), ghamelawallas (people who collect gold from city dust), multi-generation executioners (people who inherited their job as an executioner from their parents), acid-drinkers, etc, etc sound intriguing to you? Do you enjoy self-deprecating, and at times self-abusive humor? If (and only if) so this is the book for you. Shah does a splendid job in exploring and writing about his arcane experiences all across India. This was the most entertaining book I read in years.

The English-born son of an aristocratic Afghan (Pashtun) family, Shah became interested in magic as a boy, introduced to it by a clansman, Hafiz Jhan. Jhan was forced to give up his own study of the illusionist's art when he came into his legacy - the guardianship of the tomb of Shah's great-great-great grandfather, a warlord - a duty he had temporarily forsaken to save young Shah from a premonition of an early and undignified death.

Already this story of Shah's Indian sojourn and apprenticeship is fantastical, enchanting, exotic and hilarious and the rest of the book easily lives up to its stranger-than-fiction promise. Shah himself - the naïve foreigner, wide-eyed, sometimes arrogant, self-deprecating, tongue-in-cheek, observant but sometimes not observant enough, curious and determined - keeps us guessing. How much is real, how much is trickery?

The first of three sections of "Sorcerer's Apprentice" describes the background story and Shah's early travels in India visiting his ancestor's tomb and Hafiz Jhan and looking for Jhan's teacher, India's greatest conjuror, Hakim Feroze, in Calcutta. He is robbed by tricksters on the famously dangerous Farakka Express and interviews widows made outcast by a husband's demise, now clustered in the thousands by the sacred Ganges, waiting for their own death.

Finding Feroze by happenstance, Shah embarks on a grueling course for the second part of his story. He digs trenches with a teaspoon, sorts rice and lentils blindfolded, learns to regurgitate on command, reads voraciously. Feroze, dapper, aristocratic, diabolically demanding, wakes his student in the middle of the night to answer arcane questions while balanced, blindfolded, between two chairs.

Feroze also shows him the illusionist's tricks, exposing the secrets of spoon bending, plunging a hand into molten lead, stopping and restarting the pulse. He hands Shah a ball of tin foil and tells him it will soon become too hot to hold, which it does. Feroze explains the trick - a rubbing with mercuric nitrate.

" 'Mercuric nitrate?' I said. 'Isn't that incredibly poisonous?'
'Yes, as a matter of fact it is,' said Feroze coldly. 'It's lethal. The toxicity is the drawback of the trick. But that's irrelevant for now.'" Somewhat worse is the trick of raising Shah's body temperature to 104 degrees.

At last the pupil is ready for his "journey of observation," a trip across India observing godmen, healers and fortune-tellers; illusionists who pass their art off as miracle. Shah has already made smaller journeys around Calcutta. Guided by a resourceful rickshawalla, he has observed the workings of Calcutta's underclasses: the goldsmith shop sweepers who pay for the privilege, then sift the dirt for gold dust, selling the remains to a still-poorer class who sift again; beggars who pay to take care of another's cow so passers-by will pay to feed it; childless beggar women who rent babies; men who steal the corpses of paupers to sell their skeletons to Western medical schools.

For section three Shah is joined by a 12-year-old con man, an ingenious guide who knows all the scams. With the boy's aid, he saves an old woman from a witch's fate, discovers the secret of bloodless surgery, watches water turn to petrol, sees tulips nod as a godman passes, meets the world's richest man, learns how to stop not just a pulse but the heartbeat itself, witnesses a duel of miracles, and much more, exposing the secrets of venerated scam artists in their temples and tents, while maintaining a aura of surreal enchantment.

Shah reveals not only the tricks but the real marvels of Indian life - the amazing resourcefulness of poverty, where nothing goes to waste, everything is recycled and recycled again (Shah even visits a restaurant where all the dishes are made from discarded food), where practicality and ruthlessness coexist with mystical gullibility, and the ordinary Western reader is amazed, appalled and humbled.

Funny, illuminating and very different, Shah's first book-length account is itself a marvel.

This is a travelogue with a difference. Shah becomes obsessed with the tale of the Queen of Sheba and her relationship with King Solomom. While in the holy city of Jerusalem, he purchases an old map from a dubious shopkeeper. The map points to the mysterious country of Ethiopia, the land that allegedly possesses the prized Ark of the Covenant. He then takes on the quest to find the legendary city of Ophir, the ancient home of Makeda, the Queen of Sheba. It is this location that King Solomon's mines might have existed. In the Ethiopian holy text, Kebra Negast, (The Glory of Kings) tells the story in full of Sheba's relationship with the wise king, their exchange of unimaginable riches, and the theft of the Ark, which supposedly still resides in the city of Axum. Shah begins his journey in this mysterious and misunderstood country, experiencing many hardships, adventures and disappointments along the way.

Tahir Shah is a walking-talking anachronism - as he models himself after the great explorers of the 19th century - Stanley, Burton and Livingston. He has that dogged-persistence and general Romantic spirit of the old explorers, which makes this text inspiring and enormously entertaining. The book contains a myriad of strange characters that have many unusual, funny and macabre stories to tell. Shah's central guide, Samson, an Ethiopian taxi driver and devout Christian, reluctantly accompanies our narrator to the end, and the reader will empathize with Samson because of his many hardships throughout the journey. Then there is Bahra, the 'qat' consuming Somalian, who chauffers Shah and Samson around Ethiopia for most of the trip. Close to the end of the journey, Bahra simply stops the truck, claiming adamantly that 'his luck has run out' and simply refuses to go any further. This proves to be extremely frustrating for Shah, and totally hilarious, but there's nothing he can do about it, and must leave the man behind.

Most Westerner's usually think of Ethiopia as a barren, dusty desert. Surprisingly, though, we discover that parts of the country are rich in vegetation and quite beautiful. However Ethiopia ia a developing country and one is constantly reminded of this with Shah's descriptions of the people's general living conditions. This is an irony because the country still, after thousands of years of mining, continues to be rich in gold deposits. The big question is who is benefiting from this wealth, because it certainly isn't the common people?

This is an extraordinary modern adventure that rings of the 19th century Romantic traditon. Shah writes with enthusiasm and wit and makes one envious of his adventurous spirit. Excellent reading.

"As soon as there's a bomb, an earthquake...or a riot, I call the travel agent," Tahir Shah says, explaining his thirst for adventure. In this account he searches for King Solomon's legendary gold mines, armed with books and research he acquired in preparation for his trip and a "treasure map" he purchased in Jerusalem. King Solomon had built a lavishly appointed temple there three thousand years ago, using gold which the Queen of Sheba had brought from Ophir. No one knows from what direction she came or where the legendary Ophir actually was, however, with different researchers claiming that it was in Zimbabwe, South Africa, or even Haiti or Peru.

A sacred Ethiopian text claims that the son of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon is the ancestor of the Ethiopian emperors, and since Ethiopia's gold is also one of its richest resources, Shah accepts the idea that the legendary Ophir was probably in Ethiopia. Hiring a guide and translator, he checks out many mines, both legal and illegal, where gold is so close to the surface that men, women, and children dig for it with their hands. Always, Shah seeks some connection to Ophir.

The author keeps the reader constantly intrigued with the fascinating characters he meets during his many side trips. When he hears that hyenas guarded Solomon's gold, Shah travels to Harar seeking out Yusuf, the hyenaman, who handfeeds wild hyenas each night so they will not steal the town's children. He meets Noah, a powerful miner at a dangerous, illegal mine; Rachel, an elderly woman, who is the last survivor of Beta Israel, the group of Ethiopian Jews who were airlifted to Israel; a "miracle man," who performs four miracles; and Kefla Mohammed, leader of a salt caravan, who weeps when he must euthanize one of his camels. And Shah also includes wonderfully revealing photographs of these people and the artifacts he finds.

Occasionally, Shah, a member of Afghan royalty who grew up in London, betrays an unfortunate sense of entitlement in his attitudes toward the people around him. He does not give his devoted interpreter a "sick day," even when he is clearly very ill, and he does not always share his supplies and equipment, once hiding from his employees to eat canned food. He also fails to offer assistance at the site of a terrible road accident--something which he says never occurred to him. His unflagging sense of adventure is admirable, however, and he brings fascinating and unique Ethiopian cultures and people to the attention of readers who would not otherwise be exposed to them. In providing rare glimpses of a world which few tourists have seen, he provides a service for which we can all be grateful. Mary Whipple

As someone who has travelled the continent and lived in it for more than a decade, this is the book for all those who still maintain a romantic vision of modern times in Africa. And for the so-called African experts (some of which have never actually traveled outside of multi-star hotels and government sponsored trips into the 'bush') I strongly suggest that they spend some time getting to know the real Africa. Well done Mr. Shah and I look forward to your next great adventure into the daily, and sometimes miserable, lives of average people who aren't motivated by political gain but are just trying to get by. I would caution those pundits of Africa's present day ills, however, that this real life story will not conform to the text book learning and rhetoric used so often to describe a wonderful continents self-generating decline.

The book had some interesting parts but was overall a dull experience. It did prompt me to take a Namibian safari but overall it was below average.

This is by far the best of the best when it comes to books on Namibia, Africa's most mysterious nation. Tahir's prose is as smooth as silk. Buy it and enjoy!