In his latest book, Anywhere Out of the World: Essays on Travel, Writing, and Death, Nicholas Delbanco, the Robert Frost Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature, writes what one reviewer calls "compelling meditations on the shifting nature of travel writing, death, and loss in both literature and life." Here, in excerpts from two of his essays, "Anywhere  out of the World" and  "A Letter from Namibia," Delbanco explains the art of travel writing and then illustrates it beautifully with a journey into Africa.

Travel writing is, I think, coeval with writing itself. We move and remember the place that we left; from a distance we send letters home. Those scribes who first kept laundry lists in Nineveh or Babylon, those men in Egypt naming names belong to the one genre. An account of journeys taken or a report at journey's end, a message from the provinces or dispatch from the capital: each must be written down. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Hindu epic Mahabarata, The Tale of the Genji on his wanderings: all these record departure and new terrain traversed. And there's retentiveness also entailed; when the bear goes over the mountain to see what he can see, he carries with him -- if he be a writer -- a computer or quill pen.

In the western tradition of literature, the common denominator of The Odyssey and Pilgrim's Progress, The Canterbury Tales, and The Divine Comedy -- not to mention Don Quixote or Moby-Dick or Faust -- is near-constant motion. One way to read the Book of Genesis is to consider that expulsion as a journey out of Eden; the long travail of Moses is a hunt for promised land. So too is The Aeneid a travelogue that starts in Troy and ends hard years later in Rome. "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer" are descriptions of waterlogged distance traversed; Captain Cook and Magellan and Lewis and Clark get parsed now for their prose. Although we're not certain how widely he traveled, Avon's Bard set many of his plays abroad; it sometimes seems as though all texts we hold to be enduring ones evoke a world of wonders that at first seem passing strange . . . .

This holds just as true for those who -- like Jane Austen or Emily Dickinson -- remain inside the house. Imagination needs to be neither time- nor space-bound, finally, and writing gets done at the desk. The stay-at-home may take projected trips or may, like Marcel Proust, remember where he lived when young; A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is a remembrance not merely of time but scenes and places past. The writer may be imprisoned, as was the Oscar Wilde of De Profundis, or, like Charles Darwin, confined to a cabin on the H.M.S. Beagle -- but each and all of them are travel writers in the largest sense; I have been there, witnessed it, and am come alone to tell thee what I saw . . . .

When you travel you take yourself with you, and adventure happens in a hammock as well as on a storm-tossed, hand-constructed raft. The conscious voyager -- whether solo or part of a party, whether hired or on some private quest, whether male or female, young or old -- is almost always hunting change, in search of something new.

It may be as literal as discovery:a stretch of coast not mapped before, a mountain range not previously climbed or named. More likely nowadays it's an inward-bound journey, and the writer reports on distance traversed by the wandering self. Almost by definition (again I exclude those accounts of arctic expeditions found beside the frozen body or those ship's logs retrieved from a drowned sailor's sea chest), to record a voyage is to return enlarged. When the bear went over the mountain, he found another mountain -- or at least had a story to tell.

A Letter from Namibia

Etosha National Park, a game preserve larger than Rhode Island, is our final destination; we drive to and then across it for three days. The word "Etosha" means "Great White Place," and the Etosha Pan -- blindingly empty and white -- heralds a prehistoric waterway and was a delta once. When the rare rains come, flamingos materialize, and I have seen photographs of thousands of pink flamingos on what now is a mud-caked, hardscrabble expanse: no water, only the illusion of it in the dry shimmering air. The land is organized for the animals' sake, not for the sake of the humans who watch; there are strict rules of the road. At peril of expulsion from this Eden, you must stay on the network of dirt tracks that lead from water hole to water hole and remain inside your car.

There are three places to spend the night within the park: Namutoni, Halali, and Okaukuejo, proceeding east to west. The first is a fort, established at the turn of the 20th century in order to control the spread of rinderpest; the second, a resort so named because of a German hunting song whose chorus is "Halali"; the third, a ring of bungalows beside a water hole. On the drive from Namutoni we see elephants in quantity -- so many I lose count of them -- and they cross the path we travel on not 50 meters away.

The water hole in Halali hosts elephants and rhinoceros and giraffes. At nine at night the world is dark, but there are spotlights focused on the water hole, and the animals are used to them and do not seem to mind. There are benches for the visitors and posted warnings to stay silent and alert. Park lore has it that, some years ago, a tourist fell asleep on a bench and was eaten by a lion marauding there at dawn. But here we have safety in numbers, some 60 or 70 humans in ranked rows above the water hole; a pack observing in shared silence while elephants gambol and drink. The white light leaches color from the scene.

I watch the people watching: lovers, parents with their children, a group of teenagers from Italy who had set their camp up raucously but now are standing rapt.

On our last afternoon in Etosha, 15 kilometers distant from the lodge at Okaukuejo, we see a pride of lions stalking prey. This is at the Okandeka watering hole; we have been told that lions have been sighted and drive out to see. There are oryx and springbok and zebra; there are wildebeest and warthog and kudu and giraffes. But the game is skittish, refusing to drink, for downwind of the water hole a lion prowls and upwind the pride lies in wait. It is hard to spot them; motionless, ears twitching, the color of the sand and grass, but we find and count them not 50 meters from the road: six heads behind a hillock, seven, eight. A lion sleeps 20 hours a day; these creatures are awake.

We cannot remain there, however, for it is growing dark. The gates are locked at sundown and the rules of the park are absolute: if you violate the curfew -- no one can be on the roads from sunset to sunrise -- you are thrown out. So we can only briefly watch them while they prepare to kill.

Our guide in Okaukuejo is a friend of Hellmut's, Irmgaard, a woman in her forties, and she says, "Let's come back at dawn, at first light let's return." She is a handsome woman, garrulous; she was born in Okahandja and tells us about her two daughters and how they are at boarding school but come home every weekend and how the members of the family all get along; she speaks about her time in Windhoek, working at a disco, and how she met her husband and curtailed a trip to Munich and how many brothers her husband has and how many people work on his farm; she asks do we have allergies and do we mind if she smokes? "Not inside the car, of course, I never smoke inside the car," says Irmgaard, "and I'd never cheat on my husband because first of all I don't want to and in any case, in this little country everyone would know. They don't have enough to think about," she says. "These people poke their noses in everybody else's business, and they talk and talk."

At dawn, however, she stays silent and drives on the qui vive. The lodge gates opened at six. A giraffe is silhouetted by the rising sun, in a far field, and when we return to the watering hole there are lions on the road. We count eight. They swagger heavy-bellied past us, unperturbed; the dark-maned leader lurches by, not 10 meters off, and vouchsafes us no glance. At the Okandeka water hole his pride has gathered, waiting, and he selects a hummock and lies down.

By a camel-thorn tree are jackals, hunched above a carcass, but there are so many clustered to the lion kill I cannot tell what animal they feed on. "Oryx," says Irmgaard, and points, and indeed there is a horn. "Perhaps the one we saw last night. The old one on the hill, remember? The one who was standing alone?"

The jackals finish feeding and trot off. There are red bones protruding, a single horn above the grass, and then the pied crows arrive. Next they will take their turn.

Excerpted from Anywhere Out of the World: Essays on Travel, Writing, and Death by Nicholas Delbanco. Copyright © 2005 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.