When Patrick Leigh Fermor was 19 he decided to walk alone from London, along the Rhine, down the Danube, to Constantinople, now Istanbul. This was in 1933, ten months after Hitler's accession to power, through an older Europe soon to disappear in a world-wide conflagration.

Years later Leigh Fermor pulled out his battered old notebooks and wrote two books about the trip, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. The first was written in 1977, the sequel eleven years after that. Both have become travel classics.

A Time of Gifts is enthralling. It's also an exercise in time travel. As others have pointed out, the high-spirited 19 year-old sets out across Europe joined in the telling by his 63 year-old future self. Youth and maturity, experience and scholarship, impulse and reflection.

The duality creates depth found in few other works of art. We are in more than one place at the same time, experiencing more than one kind of time, more than one state of mind. It blends beautifully.

Some passages of gorgeous description come straight from the 19 year-old's notebooks.

"Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees...Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation... But, in the tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came?"

It does not do great justice to the older author to quote him in short bursts. Remembering an encounter with the late Baroque sounds like this:

"Concave and convex uncoil and pursue each other across the pilasters in ferny arabesques, liquid notions ripple, waterfalls running silver and blue drop to lintels and hang frozen there in curtains of artificial icicles. Ideas go feathering up in mock fountains and float away through the colonnades in processions of cumulus and cirrus..."

Even the younger Leigh Fermor was highly educated. He amused himself on lonely stretches through Dutch or German countryside in the dead of winter by reciting aloud the Latin poets or Shakespeare. At one point a woman walking out of nearby woods with arm loads of kindling was startled by his declamations. She dropped everything and flew back into the forest.

As the last pages approached I found myself reading ever more slowly, not wanting the journey to end. The final scenes in A Time of Gifts occur on a bridge over the Danube.

With Slovakia at his back and Hungary to come, past and future finally diverge:

"Close behind me, girls in bright clothes were hastening excitedly across the bridge, all of them carrying bunches of water-lilies, narcissi, daffodils and violets... I found it impossible to tear myself away from my station and plunge into Hungary. I feel the same disability now; a momentary reluctance to lay hands on this particular fragment of the future; not out of fear, but because, within arm's reach and still intact, this future seemed, and still seems, so full of promised marvels."

How can you not be excited by a book such as this? I look forward to reading, slowly, the sequel.

And I have to admit I've become caught up in the excitement. I have now decided to take a walk around Italy, all of Italy, from Rome to Rome, via Tuscany, and the north, and Venice, and down through Umbria, Calabria and Sicily, up through Naples and back to Rome.

I figure it will take me at least two years. By the time I'm done I'll be in great shape and speaking Italian at least as well as an intelligent child.

Now that the fateful decision has been made, I'm dealing with the real side of the fantasy -- where will I find the time, the money, the chutzpah to do this?

I am collecting books and articles on long-distance walking. There are many of these, but none as fantastically well done as A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water.

Aired Sunday January 27, 2008 at 10:55 am and Wednesday January 30, 2008 at 1:00 pm

Orders/Information:

Patrick Leigh Fermor served in the British Army in Greece during the war. Undercover in the Greek mountains, living as a shepherd, he directed a party who captured a German general and sent him by motorboat to Egypt. He has written other books of travel, been medaled and knighted, and as far as I can tell, remains alive today. What a guy.

London to Hungary:

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Introduction by Jan Morris. New York Review Books paperback $16.95. ISBN 1590171659.

Hungary to Constantinople:

Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Introduction by Jan Morris. New York Review Books paperback $15.95. ISBN 1590171667.

The thrilling story of the General's kidnaping told in the New Yorker in 2006: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-16387551_ITM but to read the entire article you will have to register... sorry.

Words of Mercury is an anthology of Leigh Fermor's writings. It is out of print, but many copies are available, mostly in Canada and the UK; at this moment two US booksellers have copies (and I just purchased one of them). To research this, go to www.addall.com

You can read a review here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/travel/0,6121,1105876,00.html

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