He had always been fascinated by him. And to this day, he is the greatest for him. Whenever and wherever Ryszard Kapuściński traveled, Herodotus was there. At first, it was not easy to get a copy of his Histories, as there was no translation available in Poland. And when it was finally completed, it could not be printed: Stalin was dying, and the millennia-old book tells as much about decay as it does about the creation of vast empires, equally shocking in its accounts of the fall of the powerful as it is of their rise. It wasn't until 1954 that the young Ryszard Kapuściński came into contact with the book - and it proved to be enlightening. Here was someone, driven by curiosity and a thirst for knowledge, setting out to explore the boundaries of the known world, to see with his own eyes and hear with his own ears, or at least to be told by eyewitnesses what was happening.