The Road to Oxiana

“The Road to Oxiana” is an account of Robert Byron’s ten-month journey to the Persia and Afghanistan in 1933–34 in the company of Christopher Sykes. This travelogue is considered by many modern travel writers to be the first example of great travel writing. Bruce Chatwin has described it as “a sacred text, beyond criticism” and carried his copy since he was fifteen years old, “spineless and floodstained” after four journeys through central Asia.
Most of the mighty rivers that rise in the northern slopes of the mighty Hindu Kush and Pamir mountain ranges, the western Himalayas, do not flow into the sea, but drain into large deltas in the sands of the Karakum and Taklamakan deserts. In these deltas, there have been rich oasis cities since ancient times, crucial points on the Silk Road, such as Merv, Bukhara, Samarkand or Kashgar. Not far away is the equally isolated and fertile Fergana Valley, where Babur, the mythical founder of what would become the rich, cultured and tolerant Mogul Empire of India, was born.
Feeling suffocated in a Europe plunged into great disorder, fresh out of World War I, with the Great Depression in full swing, Hitler's ascension to the Chancellery riding his hysterical and inflammatory speeches, the Soviet Union strengthened under the iron hand of Stalin, and the British Empire in full decline, bowed to the peaceful protests of Gandhi, but stubbornly maintaining the rigid Victorian morals that had condemned Oscar Wilde to prison, Robert Byron dreams of taking refuge in the remotest corner of the earth, in one of those Central Asian oasis cities beyond the Oxus River, the Transoxiana!
Despite enormous bureaucratic and financial challenges, Byron manages to seize a unique moment in history, when the balance of power between the Soviet and British empires allows for the rebirth of Persia and Afghanistan as independent countries, buffer states that geographically separate the two great powers. It is through this corridor in space and time that Byron sets off in the company of his friend Christopher Sykes. 
“The Road to Oxiana” is the journal of this incomplete journey towards a lost paradise. It is a travelogue full of humor and intelligence, contemplating history, architecture, landscape, peoples, reflecting the soul of the author in pursuit of an intangible dream. But isn't this the essence of travel? The irrepressible will to explore the world in pursuit of our dreams?