THE VISIT TO HARAR

Sir Richard Burton was an extraordinarily brave explorer and scholar with a genius for language and disguise. A year before this trip to Ethiopia, he became the first European to enter Mecca. Burton would go on to elope with his childhood sweetheart, write more than 40 books, and translate The Arabian Nights from Arabic and the Kama Sutra from Sanskrit. (Considered the first book of pornography in English, it was promptly banned.) After this side-trip to Harar in 1854, Burton returned to Berbera on the coast, where he joined John Hanning