The Imperial Way: by Rail from Peshawar to Chittagong

Paul Theroux and Steve McCurry, The Imperial Way. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.

Small quarto (27 x 21.5 cm), hard cover, dustwrapper, 143 pages, well-illustrated in colour throughout.

Some damage to the base of the spine (please see image 2); otherwise in very good condition.

"India. How does this vast, overpopulated sub-continent manage to run, and even prosper? For 130 years the chief reason has been the railway. Dusty and monumental, its trains often seem as ancient as India itself. In Pakistan, they look like part of the landscape. An old, reliable network of track brings hope to beleaguered Bangladesh."

Paul Theroux has been here before and has described it memorably in The Great Railway Bazaar. On his revisit, he began in Peshawar, up near the Khyber Pass, full of Afghan refugees and guerrilla warriors; journeyed through Islamabad and Lahore to India and Simla, the Himalayan foothill town of Kipling's stories; through New Delhi and then Agra where the Taj Mahal stands; through the high-country tea plantations of Darjeeling on to Calcutta; and finally into flooded Chittagong on the Bay of Bengal.

Theroux describes a present-day India at once as lovely and forbidding as in The Jewel in the Crown and A Passage to India. The Imperial Way comes to life with Theroux's prose and Steve McCurry's superb, prize-winning photographs.