Author

A traveller must buy his own experience, and success or failure depends mainly on personal idiosyncrasies.

It is extremely interesting to live in a private house and to see the externalities, at least, of domestic life in a Japanese middle-class home.

From Isabella Bird

The kimono, haori, and girdle, and even the long hanging sleeves, have only parallel seams, and these are only tacked or basted, as the garments, when washed, are taken to pieces, and each piece, after being very slightly stiffened, is stretched upon a board to dry.

From Isabella Bird

The Shat-el-Arab is a noble river or estuary. From both its Persian and Turkish shores, however, mountains have disappeared, and dark forests of date palms intersected by canals fringe its margin heavily, and extend to some distance inland.

From Isabella Bird

The Tigris is so fierce and rapid, and swallows its alluvial banks so greedily, that it is probable that some of the buildings described by the Hebrew traveller Benjamin of Tudela as existing in the twelfth century were long since carried away.

From Isabella Bird

The Tigris in parts is wonderfully tortuous, and at one great bend, 'The Devil's Elbow,' a man on foot can walk the distance in less than an hour which takes the steamer four hours to accomplish.

From Isabella Bird

Only the long melancholy call to prayer, or the wail of women over the dead, or the barking of dogs, breaks the silence which at sunset falls as a pall over Baghdad.

From Isabella Bird

Baghdad is altogether built of chrome-yellow kiln-dried bricks.

From Isabella Bird

Poverty brings one blessing in Turkey - the poor man is of necessity a monogamist.

From Isabella Bird

If one's memories of Baghdad women were only of those to be seen in the streets, they would be of leathery, wrinkled faces, prematurely old, figures which have lost all shape, and henna-stained hands crinkled and deformed by toil.

From Isabella Bird

Isabella Bird

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