From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium by William Dalrymple

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The third book from the most gifted young travel writer at work today, author of the best-selling In Xanadu ('one of the best travel books produced in the last twenty years' -- Scotland on Sunday) and City of Djinns ('the best travel book I have ever read' -- George Mackay Brown). In the spring of 587 AD, two monks set off on an extraordinary journey that would take them in an arc across the entire Byzantine world, from the shores of the Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. On the way John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist stayed in caves, monasteries and remote hermitages, collecting the wisdom of the stylites and the desert fathers before their world shattered under the great eruption of Islam. More than a thousand years later, using Moschos's writings as his guide, William Dalrymple set off to retrace their footsteps. Despite centuries of isolation, a surprising number of the monasteries and churches visited by the two monks still survive today, surrounded by often hostile populations. Dalrymple's pilgrimage took him through a bloody civil war in eastern Turkey, the ruins of Beirut, the vicious tensions of the West Bank and a fundamentalist uprising in southern Egypt. His book is an elegy to the slowly dying civilisation of Eastern Christianity and the peoples that have kept its flame alive. It is a rich and gripping blend of history and spirituality, adventure and politics, laced with a thread of black comedy familiar to readers of Dalrymple's previous work.
Publication Details

Title: From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium

Author(s):

  • William Dalrymple

Illustrator:

Binding: Paperback

Published by: Harpercollins Pub Ltd: , 1998

Edition:

ISBN: 9780006547747 | 0006547745

512 pages. 5.08in x 1.3in x 7.8in

  • ENG- English
Book Condition: Good

Cover worn.
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Foxing - Wikipedia
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Age tanning, or browning, occurs over time on the pages of books. This process can show up on just the edges of pages, when this occurs it is sometimes referred to as "edge tanning." This kind of deterioration is commonly seen in books printed before the advent of acid-free paper in the 1980s.
r/BookCollecting - Is this mold or normal aging for a well used book?
 
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