SOURCE: Introduction to The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron, Pan Books, 1981, pp. 9-15.

In the following essay, Chatwin expresses his admiration for The Road to Oxiana.

Anyone who reads around the travel books of the thirties must, in the end, conclude that Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana is the masterpiece. Byron was a gentleman, a scholar and an aesthete, who drowned in 1941 when his ship to the Mediterranean was torpedoed. In his short life he travelled as far as China and Tibet, and to most of the countries nearer home. In 1928 he published The Station, an account of a visit to the monasteries of Mount Athos, and followed it up with two pioneering volumes on Byzantine civilization, which, at that time, received scant consideration from academic circles. He had some lively prejudices. Among the tar-gets of his abuse were the Catholic (as opposed to the Orthodox...