Books published by publisher Secretum Mundi

This edition brings together Tahir Shah's full collection of travel writing: from India to Africa to South America, join the author on his unusual adventures and expeditions around the world.The first and last books in the collection are of international travels. Beyond the Devil's Teeth is the author's first travelogue, and spans a journey from India, to Africa, to South America. Travels With Myself is a collection of travel essays that span the author's world travels. Sorcerer's Apprentice is based in India, and chronicles the author's bizarre apprenticeship to a tyrannical master of illusion. Trail of Feathers and House of the Tiger King are set in Peru. The former details the author's search for the secret of how the ancient Incas flew like birds over the Amazon; the latter covers his expedition that searched for the lost Incan city of Paititi. In Search of King Solomon's Mines is set in Ethiopia, as the author searches for undiscovered mines known only in folklore. Shah's overwhelming laugh-out-loud style is present as he educates, informs, and amuses readers about the locations and people he discovers on his journeys.About the AuthorTahir Shah is the author of more than fifteen books, many of which chronicle a wide range of outlandish journeys through Africa, Asia and the Americas. For him, there’s nothing so important as deciphering the hidden underbelly of the lands through which he travels. Shunning well-trodden tourist paths, he avoids celebrated landmarks, preferring instead to position himself on a busy street corner or in a dusty café and observe life go by. Insisting that we can all be explorers, he says there’s wonderment to be found wherever we are – it’s just a matter of seeing the world with fresh eyes.

For more than a century Henry Rider Haggard’s novel King Solomon’s Mines has inspired generations of young men to set forth in search of adventure. But long before Rider Haggard’s classic, explorers, theologians and scientists scoured the known world for the source of King Solomon’s astonishing wealth. The Bible’s wisest king built a temple at Jerusalem that was said to be more fabulous than any other landmark in the ancient world. It was adorned with an abundance of gold, gleaned from a mysterious land known as Ophir.Taking his leads from a mixture of texts including The Septuagint, the earliest known form of the Bible, as well as using geological, geographical and folkloric sources, Tahir Shah sets out in search for Solomon’s gold mines. For him the obvious place to look is Ethiopia, in the horn of Africa.The ensuing journey takes him to a remote cliff-face monastery where the monks pull visitors up on a leather rope, to the ruined castles of Gondar, and to the rock hewn churches at Lalibela. Then in the south of the country Shah discovers a massive illegal gold mine, itself like something out of the Old Testament, with thousands of men, women and children digging with their hands. But the hardest leg of the journey is to the ‘cursed mountain’ of Tullu Wallel where legend says there lies an ancient shaft, once the entrance to Solomon’s mines.About the AuthorTahir Shah is the author of fifteen books, many of which chronicle a wide range of outlandish journeys through Africa, Asia and the Americas. For him, there's nothing so important as deciphering the hidden underbelly of the lands through which he travels. Shunning well-trodden tourist paths, he avoids celebrated landmarks, preferring instead to position himself on a busy street corner or in a dusty café and observe life go by. Insisting that we can all be explorers, he says there's wonderment to be found wherever we are - it's just a matter of seeing the world with fresh eyes.Shah's forthcoming novel is titled CASABLANCA BLUES. Blaine Williams is a thirty-something New Yorker with an mid-life crisis and an obsession of the movie Casablanca. His world collapsing around him, he flees to the one place he thinks he knows and understands. A fragment of security in his troubled imagination, Casablanca the genuine article reveals itself as a roller coaster ride of danger, intrigue, and true love — a realm where nothing is what it seems.He recently published a collection of his entitled TRAVELS WITH MYSELF, a body of work as varied and as any, with reportage pieces as diverse as the women on America's Death Row, to the trials and tribulations of his encounter in a Pakistani torture jail.Another recent work, IN ARABIAN NIGHTS, looks at how stories are used in cultures such as Morocco, as a matrix by which information, values and ideas are passed on from one generation to the next. That book follows on the heels of the celebrated CALIPH'S HOUSE: A Year in Casablanca, lauded as one of Time Magazine's Top 10 Books of the year.His other works include an epic quest through Peru's cloud forest for the greatest lost city of the Incas (HOUSE OF THE TIGER KING), as well as a journey through Ethiopia in search of the source of King Solomon's gold (IN SEARCH OF KING SOLOMON'S MINES). Previous to that, Shah published an account of a journey through the Amazon on the trail of the Birdmen of the Amazon (TRAIL OF FEATHERS), as well as a book of his experiences in India, as a godman's pupil (SORCERER'S APPRENTICE).Tahir Shah's books have appeared in thirty languages and in more than seventy editions. They are celebrated for their original viewpoint, and for combining hardship with vivid description.Tahir Shah lives at Dar Khalifa, a sprawling mansion set squarely in the middle of a Casablanca shantytown. He's married to the graphic designer, Rachana Shah, and has two children, Ariane and Timur. His father was the Sufi writer, Idries Shah.

"Forty-five million years ago, the supercontinent of Gondwanaland split apart. This created what are now known as India, Africa and South America. The huge landmass was named after the Gond people of India. Meeting a Gond storyteller on a visit to Bombay, Tahir Shah heard their ancient saga. He vowed to visit all three parts of Gondwanaland. As he travelled he met an extraordinary range of wanderers and expatriates, attended magical ceremonies and sought mythical treasures. Roughing it most of the way, Shah's expeditions move through sweltering India and Pakistan, Uganda and Rwanda, Kenya and Liberia, Brazil and finally Argentina's Patagonian glaciers.Roughing it for most of the journey, Shah shared his travels and his tales with a diverting mix of eccentric and entertaining characters, from Osman and Prideep, Bombay's answer to Laurel and Hardy, to Oswaldo Rodrigues Oswaldo, a well turned out Patagonian version of Danny De Vito. "About the Author"Tahir Shah is the author of fifteen books, many of which chronicle a wide range of outlandish journeys through Africa, Asia and the Americas. For him, there's nothing so important as deciphering the hidden underbelly of the lands through which he travels. Shunning well-trodden tourist paths, he avoids celebrated landmarks, preferring instead to position himself on a busy street corner or in a dusty café and observe life go by. Insisting that we can all be explorers, he says there's wonderment to be found wherever we are - it's just a matter of seeing the world with fresh eyes.Shah's forthcoming novel, TIMBUCTOO, is inspired by a true life tale from two centuries ago. The story of the first Christian to venture to Timbuctoo and back - a young illiterate American sailor - it has been an obsession since Shah discovered it in the bowels of the London Library twenty years ago.He recently published a collection of his entitled TRAVELS WITH MYSELF, a body of work as varied and as any, with reportage pieces as diverse as the women on America's Death Row, to the trials and tribulations of his encounter in a Pakistani torture jail.Another recent work, IN ARABIAN NIGHTS, looks at how stories are used in cultures such as Morocco, as a matrix by which information, values and ideas are passed on from one generation to the next. That book follows on the heels of the celebrated CALIPH'S HOUSE: A Year in Casablanca, lauded as one of Time Magazine's Top 10 Books of the year.His other works include an epic quest through Peru's cloud forest for the greatest lost city of the Incas (HOUSE OF THE TIGER KING), as well as a journey through Ethiopia in search of the source of King Solomon's gold (IN SEARCH OF KING SOLOMON'S MINES). Previous to that, Shah published an account of a journey through the Amazon on the trail of the Birdmen of the Amazon (TRAIL OF FEATHERS), as well as a book of his experiences in India, as a godman's pupil (SORCERER'S APPRENTICE).Tahir Shah's books have appeared in thirty languages and in more than seventy editions. They are celebrated for their original viewpoint, and for combining hardship with vivid description.He also makes documentary films, which are shown worldwide on National Geographical Television, and The History Channel. The latest, LOST TREASURE OF AFGHANISTAN, has been screened on British TV and shown worldwide. While researching the programme Shah was arrested along with his film crew and incarcerated in a Pakistani torture jail, where they spent sixteen terrifying days and nights.His other documentaries include: HOUSE OF THE TIGER KING, SEARCH FOR THE LOST CITY OF GOLD, and THE SEARCH FOR KING SOLOMON'S MINES. And, in addition to documentaries, Shah writes for the big screen. His best known work in this genre is the award-winning Imax feature JOURNEY TO MECCA, telling the tale of the fourteenth century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta's first pilgrimage to Mecca.Tahir Shah lives at Dar Khalifa, Casablanca.

AMERICAN ENGLISH EDITION. Inspired by a true story: In October 1815, an illiterate American sailor named Robert Adams was discovered roaming the streets of London, half-naked and starving. In the months that followed, high society was rocked by his tale.At a time when the European powers were posturing for empire, there was one quest above all else, one destination to which no Christian had ever ventured and returned alive – Timbuctoo.Regarded as a golden metropolis par excellence, an African Eldorado, fashioned from the purest gold, it was for centuries a European obsession. The British, Germans, French, and others, dispatched their most capable explorers to seek it out and to sack it. Most of them never returned.The only nation uninterested in the mania for Timbuctoo was the fledgling United States. And so, when a young American sailor claimed to have visited the city as a guest of its king, while a white slave in Africa, it caused uproar on an unknown scale.More shocking still was the sailor’s description of the Eldorado – as a poverty-stricken and wretched place – and the fact that he seemed blasé and uninterested at having been there at all.Set against a backdrop of the British Regency, a time of ultimate decadence and avarice, of haves and have-nots, Robert Adams’ tale has been all but forgotten, until now.An astonishing story of survival and hardship, it’s a one touched with irony. A man who had set out to make his fame and fortune through trade, Robert Adams gained both, but by selling the tale of his journey.Almost twenty years ago, Tahir Shah noticed an inch-thick quarto-sized book propping up a water pipe in the basement of the London Library. Pulling it out, he first set eyes on Robert Adams’ Narrative, published by John Murray in 1816.The book became an obsession to Shah, just as Regency London was itself fixated with the golden metropolis of Timbuctoo. Packed with well-researched detail of the time, and inspired by Adams’ ordeal, Timbuctoo is a fast-past and compelling read. It’s a tale of treachery, greed, love and, above all else, of survival in the face of insurmountable odds.