Word: battuta
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...beamed ceiling. As the show opens on the circle of earth below, a gypsy troupe sleeps as their horses gather around a waterfall. It is the morning of a great wedding feast. Bartabas, who co-founded the equestrian theater Zingaro (Italian for gypsy) in 1984, has a new show, Battuta (beat or rhythm in Romany), which also features bears, geese, dogs and acrobatics galore. But this is no circus act - it's a celebration of the migratory tradition, and of the cycle of life modern society seems to have forgotten. Resplendent brides, angry fathers, jealous rivals and belly dancers race...
Back when most people stayed home, travel writing was a highly imaginative genre. Ask Pausanias, Ibn Battuta or Marco Polo about the strange creatures and bizarre customs that they, and evidently nobody else, encountered in their wanderings. But modern practitioners - Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer - have helped elevate travel writing, if not to a science, then at least to an art that values truth. No one has mastered that task more deftly than Jan Morris, 79, the England-born, thoroughly Welsh writer and historian. In more than 40 books and countless essays over the past half-century...
...like these days. They've seen it on TV. So as a writer you have to be more transcendental, more allegorical. Nearly everything has more to it than meets the eye. Even my life." Pausanias, that ancient Greek connoisseur of myth and meaning, would be pleased. So would Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo. They're both mentioned in Hav, well before the allegorical tunnel...
...chin and his words turned to mush. These symptoms of a mild stroke quickly cleared, but not the cause: cardiac arrhythmias that required the planting of a pacemaker in his chest. West variously refers to this retrofit as his "titanium tit" and that "little lead soldier ... making a small battuta on my suet...
...droppings of camels. Troubled by mirages, once nearly dying of thirst when he dropped his waterskin, Hsuan made himself so popular everywhere he went that he had to go on a hunger strike before one Central Asian king would let him depart. An entire chapter is devoted to Ibn Battuta, sprig of a Tangerian family of judges who in the 14th Century visited every Moslem colony in the world. The sedately written narrative is spiced with many a quaint excerpt from the original chronicles, maps and reproductions of old engravings, tid bits of curious information. Sir Percy manifests the complacent...