Tahir Shah's In Search of King Solomon's Mines is armchair travel writing at its finest: interesting characters (especially Samson, Shah's sometimes unwilling travel companion, a Christian Amhari who totes an enormous Bible wherever he goes), nice-sized splotches of history and geography (both Ethiopian and biblical), and most important, an appealing writer whose sense of humor is apparent right from the beginning, and which continues through even the most trying of times (he's jailed as a suspected spy in Ethiopia). After a visit to the Middle East, Shah, a native Afghan who grew up in England, found himself somehow compelled to locate the mines of the biblical King Solomon, a journey that eventually took him back and forth across Ethiopia into the mostly illegal gold mining camps.
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