Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things - An Impossible Journey from Kabul to Chiapas

Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things - An Impossible Journey from Kabul to Chiapas

by Gary Geddes

Sterling, HK$200

Everyone knows Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492 - except a lot of historical fact points to previous voyages by the Vikings to Newfoundland, and possibly even transatlantic odysseys by Irish monks in coracles. And there's a fair body of opinion that Asians either island-hopped or sailed across the Pacific Ocean much earlier.

Alfred Hitchcock used to employ what he called a McGuffin in all his movies, a device to drive the plot but which otherwise had comparatively little relevance to the film as a whole. Travel writers have frequently imitated the master of suspense's technique of selecting an unlikely peg for their story - Tony Hawks' Round Ireland with a Fridge, and A Fez of the Heart by Jeremy Seal being two examples. For Gary Geddes, the McGuffin is an Afghan monk, Huishen, who apparently made his way to the Americas via China 1,000 years before the Genoese adventurer was born.

It's an interesting premise, and for Geddes - an award-winning Canadian poet - a journey made all the more intriguing by starting in Afghanistan in August 2001, a month before the suicide attacks on New York and Washington.