Our civilisation grew up by the building of roads. From the first rough tracks of antiquity, beaten into hill and plain by the feet of caravans; to the Silk Road, which stitched East and West together; to the paved highways of the Romans, of whom it was said that all roads lead to Rome — wherever a road was opened, trade and thought and art and belief flowed after it. The road was never merely a passage for goods; it was a vein through which the blood of civilisation ran. Nations that settled upon the roads flourished, and those that were left far from them were forgotten in isolation.
But among all the things that moved along those roads — silk and spices and gold — the most precious cargo was the human being himself: the traveller who went and returned, and who, on returning, was no longer the same person as before.
This book is about that traveller, and about a new road which could make this oldest of human experiences possible for all the people of our own age. But before I speak of the future, let us look together at what the great minds have said, across the millennia, about travel itself.