Where the Strange Trails Go Down: Sulu, Borneo, Celebes, Bali, Java, Sumatra, Straits Settlements, Malay States, Siam, Cambodia, Annam, Cochin-China

In the early 1900s, a young E. Alexander Powell finally escapes the drawing rooms of London to chase the ghost of a whaling captain's bedtime stories. He finds something stranger than imagination: aSoutheast Asia still thick with headhunters and colonial outposts, where rubber barons minglevwith rajahs and the morning mist lifts to reveal volcanoes smoldering above tea plantations. Powell is an affable guide, occasionally pompous, often awed. He treks through the Borneo jungle, gets lost in the Sultanate of Sulu, watches shadow puppetry in Java, and stands before Angkor Wat while it was still reclaimed from the jungle. The prose fizzes with that particular Edwardian wonder: every page assumes the reader has never seen a water buffalo or a woman wearing a Tanjong. This is a time capsule of empire at its sunset, written by a man who sensed he was documenting something already vanishing.