For those who may not know the import of “A Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah,” in 1853, they will not take it amiss when I say that there are Holy Shrines of the Moslem world in the far-away Desert, where no white man, European, or Christian, could enter (save as a Moslem), or even approach, without certain death.  They are more jealously guarded than the “Holy Grail,” and this Work narrates how this Pilgrimage was accomplished.  My husband had lived as a Dervish in Sind, which greatly helped him; and he studied every separate thing until he was master of it, even apprenticing himself to a blacksmith to learn how to make horse-shoes and to shoe his own horses.  It meant living with his life in his hand, amongst the strangest and wildest companions, adopting their unfamiliar manners, living for nine months in the hottest and most unhealthy climate, upon

[p.xviii]repulsive food; it meant complete and absolute isolation from everything that makes life tolerable, from all civilisation, from all his natural habits; the brain at high tension, but the mind never wavering from the role he had adopted; but he liked it, he was happy in it, he felt at home in it, and in this Book he tells you how he did it, and what he saw.

Sir Richard Burton died at the age of 70, on the 20th October, 1890.  During the last 48 years of his life, he lived only for the benefit and for the welfare of England and of his countrymen, and of the Human Race at large.  Let us reverently raise up this “Monument,” aere perennius, to his everlasting memory.

Isabel Burton. 
May 24, 1893.

[p.xix]preface to the third edition.

After a lapse of twenty-five years, a third edition of my Pilgrimage has been called for by the public, to whom I take this opportunity of returning thanks.  Messrs. Mullan have chosen the very best opportunity.  My two publications concerning the Khedival Expeditions to Midian ("The Gold Mines of Midian,” and “The Land of Midian Revisited"), are, as I have stated in the Preface, sequels and continuations of this Pilgrimage from which the adventures forming their subject may be said to date.

The text has been carefully revised, and the “baggage of notes” has been materially lightened.[FN#1] From the Appendix I have removed matter which, though useful to the student, is of scant general interest.  The quaint and interesting “Narrative and Voyages of Ludovicus Vertomannus, Gentleman of Rome,” need no longer be read in extracts, when the whole has been printed by the Hakluyt Society. (The Travels of Ludovico di Varthema in Egypt, Syria, Arabia Deserta and Arabia Felix, in Persia, India, and Ethiopia, A.D. 1503 to 1508.  Translated from the original Italian edition of 1510, with a Preface by John Winter Jones, Esq., F.S.A., and edited,