DESTINATION MECCA

First published in 1957, Destination Mecca was both an ambitious travel book and a work of ethnographic and cultural research. Shah documents a wide range of fascinating journeys, from his quest for the gold mines of King Solomon on Sudan s Red Sea Coast, to encounters in desert caravanserais and sojourns with Mediterranean contraband smugglers, to his time as a personal guest of the elderly King Ibn Saud. As readable now as it was when first published, Destination Mecca acts as a beacon for hands on adventurers and those of a more sedate kind._,