"It is safe to say that the lasting travel accounts are quite subjective, that -- within limits -- the more subjective they are, the more readable, the more "valuable" they are. Travelers, like novelists, learned long ago the truth of Todorov's statement of a universal law: "The best description...is the one which is not description...

"For the personal, subjective nature of [travel] literature has always been one of its chief and most endearing elements, no matter how often some readers and critics through the ages have tried to eliminate it from all travel accounts as undesirable, or have failed to find it except in those published after the supposed rise...