In the steppes of a warlord

I suspect travel writing was once a fairly simple business: the author travelled somewhere, the reader did not; the author explained what the place was like and the reader was duly informed and even entertained. Dr Uno von Troil, for example, went to Iceland in 1772 and served up lurid descriptions of the devil holes and lairs of Beelzebub (geysers). None of his readers had been to Iceland; no one was inclined to argue with Uno von Troil.

Later, with the advent of mass travel in the 19th century, Uno von Troil’s former audience could go by steamer to Iceland (or ‘Hell’) and witness the infernal pools themselves. More intrepid and solitary travellers, such as Richard Burton, were then inspired to write Icelandic travelogues in which they complained bitterly about the tourist crowds and pronounced the geysers far less satanic than billed. Yet, there were many other remote places for Burton to explore, and, unabashed, he promptly went off to explore them.