ABSTRACT
Thus spoke Sir Richard Burton, arguably the most celebrated traveler and savant of the nineteenth century, as he saw the Kaaba in Mecca in 1853. For readers today the language might seem lugubrious and pretentious, but it does reflect the style of the nineteenth-century intellectual. Burton was an intellectual and an adventurer, a man driven by curiosity and the need to see and hear for himself. For Burton the more exotic and foreign the better, and Mecca was the most exotic of all, a mysterious and hidden place, eternally sacred for Muslims.
