Böcker i Eland Classic-serien

The Station follows three high-spirited young men as they visit twenty monasteries on Mount Athos in 1927. They examine treasures, photograph frescoes and sketch the courtyards and those who live in them. They swim ecstatically off the sparkling, deserted beaches, climb mountains, talk and share meals with monks and transcribe these conversations with relish. For life is very different for a celibate hermit on Mount Athos. Time has no meaning: the Son of God, His Virgin Mother, the Angels and the Saints are all living creatures of flesh and blood, and the Pope is a heretic. This slim book was little short of revolutionary in its fearless championing of Greek Orthodoxy and Byzantine civilization, reversing centuries of western prejudice. It was the first of Robert Byron's travel books, revealing the flashing wit, bravery, passion and astonishing powers of visual observation which made him such a brilliant writer. The playfully obscure title is only finally explained in his last sentence: 'This is the holy Mountain Athos, station of a faith where all the years have stopped.'

The Sultanate of Muscat and Oman was a hermit state until 1970, preserving in every detail the poverty, personality and picturesque reality of a medieval kingdom. For forty years, Sultan Said bin Taimur personally controlled everything that happened, deliberately cutting the nation off from the headlong development of the rest of the world. Fortunately for Oman this would change, and fortunately for us, we have a first-hand witness to this complex society before that watershed. Ian Skeet traveled across the vast sand deserts and arid highlands of Muscat and Oman in 1966-68, preparing the wary inhabitants for the coming of oil, visiting its isolated walled cities, fortified oasis communities and independent-minded Bedouin tribes. The sultan's motives may have been pure - to preserve his people from the sin of usury and the slavery of foreign debt - but Ian Skeet's portrait is a devastating study of the dead hand of autocracy.