[Beirut and mountains of Lebanon:  page15.jpg]

As they grew up and engaged successfully in professional pursuits, Madame Pfeiffer, who had lost her husband in 1838, found herself once more under the spell of her old passion for travel, and in a position to gratify her adventurous inclinations.  Her means were somewhat limited, it is true, for she had done much for her husband and her children; but economy was natural to her, and she retained the simple habits she had acquired in her childhood.  She was strong, healthy, courageous, and accomplished; and at length, after maturing her plans with anxious consideration, she took up her pilgrim’s staff, and sallied forth alone.

Her first object was to visit the Holy Land, and tread in the hallowed footsteps of our Lord.  For this purpose she left Vienna on the 22nd of March 1842, and embarked on board the steamer that was to convey her down the Danube to the Black Sea and the city of Constantinople.  Thence she repaired to Broussa, Beirut, Jaffa, Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, Nazareth, Damascus, Baalbek, the Lebanon, Alexandria, and Cairo; and travelled across the sandy Desert to the Isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea.  From Egypt the adventurous lady returned home by way of Sicily and Italy, visiting Naples, Rome, and Florence, and arriving in Vienna in December 1842.  In the following year she published the record of her experiences under the title of a “Journey of a Viennese Lady to the Holy Land.”  It met with a very favourable reception, to which the simplicity of its style and the faithfulness of its descriptions fully entitled it.

With the profits of this book to swell her funds, Madame Pfeiffer felt emboldened to undertake a new expedition; and this time she resolved on a northern pilgrimage, expecting in Ultima Thule to see nature manifested on a novel and surprising scale.  She began her journey to Iceland on the 10th of April 1845, and returned to Vienna on the 4th of October.  Her narrative of this second voyage will be found, necessarily much abridged and condensed, in the following pages.

What should she do next?  Success had increased her courage and strengthened her resolution, and she could think of nothing fit for her energies and sufficient for her curiosity but a voyage round the world!  She argued that greater privations and fatigue than she had endured in Syria and Iceland she could scarcely be called upon to encounter.  The outlay did not frighten her; for she had learned by experience how little is required, if the traveller will but practise the strictest economy and resolutely forego many comforts and all superfluities.  Her savings amounted to a sum insufficient, perhaps, for such travellers as Prince Puckler-Muskau, Chateaubriand, or Lamartine for a fortnight’s excursion; but for a woman who wanted to see much, but cared for no personal indulgence, it seemed enough to last during a journey of two or three years.  And so it proved.