The Hong Kong fortune-teller, after all these years, continued to shower me with blessings. The next were eighteen long, restful days of silence and solitude on board a ship sailing from Europe to Asia, crossing the great seas of history: the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean. For some strange reason we tend to think of human events as taking place on land. We see the past in the physical solidity of monuments, in things that have been built, in the remains of things destroyed, in tombs. But much of history—often the most dramatic part—is written on the seas, where
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