Kapuscinski is a great reporter who has written numerous travel books.
In this case, he recounts how he became a reporter and describes some of his journeys to China, India, and Africa.
Above all, however, he speaks of his great literary love, Herodotus.
Whenever he travels, he carries Herodotus’s Histories with him.
Kapuscinski’s travels are simultaneously real journeys and voyages into the world of Herodotus, to the point that it becomes difficult to distinguish present reality from that of Herodotus’s era.

The more time I spent reading Herodotus, the more I felt a sense of friendship and almost affection toward him.
It became increasingly difficult for me to do without not so much the book as its author

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He fascinates him

for his way of being and relating to others: a person who, wherever he goes, immediately becomes a gathering point

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What does Herodotus say to the modern world?

For Herodotus, the world’s cultural plurality is a living, pulsating fabric where nothing is given or established once and for all, but is continually transformed, creating new relationships and contexts

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And then

a journey does not begin at the moment we set out, nor does it end when we reach our destination.
In reality, it begins much earlier and never truly ends, since the reel of memories continues to play inside us even after we have stopped

History is an uninterrupted succession of presents, and therefore the world is not the exclusive property of the living, in which the dead hold no market shares

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Reading Herodotus allows the author to express his feelings about the world and about history: diversity; travel not as escapism, but as a means of knowing and listening to others; history not as a description of past events discarded in the trash, but as an immanent presence «so that the deeds of men may not be forgotten in time».

Travels with Herodotus