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* Algazy is a nice old man with a toothless smile, his beard shaven and silky, neatly laid out on a grill that is screwed under his chin and surrounded by barbed wire… Algazy does not speak any European languages… but if you wait for him first thing in the morning and

[1]Algazy is an old, loveable, toothless, smiling old man; his beard is shaven and silky, beautifully displayed on a grid, screwed up under his chin and enclosed with barbed wire… Algazy does not speak any European language… If you wait for him, however, at dawn, when

excerptWe arrived on the right riverside of the Congo, in front of the bridge, which the engineers could not even imagine; a general aaah went out of their chests. In addition, at the same time, after casting me glances of imputation, they burst into formidable laughers.

The summon sounded imperative, I had positive interests, thank goodness – I was to receive by the hands of professor Cioranescu the second volume of his memoirs - this, as he had no intention of coming to the country this year – moreover, my curiosity was not inconsiderable.

The news that a German foundation offered me, many years ago, a scholarship to Heidelberg gave me an incommensurable joy and an unrestrained curiosity of knowing places that, for a very long time, I could only associate with the plot of Wilhelm Meyer Förster's play.

The space of Travel is – may be, also a mythical space. In the Archipelago, the sea is filled with mythological rumors. The Mountain, as a colossal genius of the Narrative, partakes in countless secret stories (A. Russo). Arcana of the past, ruins are fragments which

excerptAnybody who spends some time in the United States and tries to go beyond the immediate impressions concerning tourism, notices ever clearer as time goes by, how powerful are the contrasts in the relief of this country. The Rocky Mountains, with their slopes made of

For centuries now, every once in three years, The Feast of Immortality – Kumbh Mela, takes place alternatively in four Indian centers : Allahabad and Hardwar (Uttar Pradesh state), Ujjain (Madhya Pradesh) and Nasik (Maharashtra). Descending from Vedic mythology, the feast

excerptI will never forget the nights spent with Bogdanof and Van Manen around Calcutta, in Serampore and Titagarh. Bogdanof, who had been the consul of the Tsarist Empire to Teheran and Kabul for ten years, was at the time my teacher of Persian. He had made friends with

We are all collectors. Whether it is paintings, art objects, CDs, books, stamps, insects, pipes, watches, posters, napkins, match boxes, memories, connections and many other artful, useful or simply useless things, everybody has the instinct of gathering in a personal collection

Would you please not rank me among collectors, although I pretend I am a connaisseur, in the meaning of the French word, academician Victor Eftimiu told me on one occasion in 1965, seated on a bergère, clad in a night gown, rather worn down but adorned with fine embroidery,

excerpts IV In his office on the ground floor, Saferian, on a chair and surrounded by four men, all standing, was contemplating an oil portrait, set near them against the back of an ordinary straw chair. It is an Ingres, most certainly, said one of the four, a man with trimmed