The Land of War Elephants; Travels Beyond the Pale in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India

Offering an intimate look at the people and places of Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan, this memoir by adventurer and historian Mathew Wilson recounts journeys into remote areas as a member of the British army and with his family in the late 1960s. Wilson relates stories of crossing the Hindu Kush with his pregnant wife and two-year-old son and running a gauntlet of armed border guards to get his injured son to a hospital. Twenty-one years later, Wilson returned to honour a promise made to a Hindu priest in Central India -- to seek, find, and follow the fleeting shadow of the Rani of Jhansi, one of the heroines of India's 1957 revolt against British rule.

Mathew Wilson, a graduate of Sandhurst, served twenty-eight years in the British Army, saw active service in Cyprus, Borneo, Aden, on the Yemen border, in Northern Ireland, and the Falkland Islands, was decorated three times, and retired having held one star rank. After pioneering small group eco-travel in Kenya and India for the Wilderness Foundation (UK), he settled in the United States Over the last twenty years he has lectured on the role of ocean voyaging in the spread of civilization, the result of lifelong interest, research, and wide travel