Nearly eight centuries ago, they swept from the heart of mysterious Asia to the shores of the Danube, following Genghis Khan, marking the apex of what continues to fascinate us—what René Grousset called The Empire of the Steppes, the empire of nomadic "barbarians", a shifting empire with no fixed boundaries, the empire of the wind. Setting out from Istanbul to the ancestral homeland of the Mongol hordes, Stanley Stewart travels 1,600 kilometers on horseback across Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolie, through the Gobi Desert, across steppes and mountains, to Dadal—the birthplace of Genghis Khan. He shares the lives of nomads, gradually discovering their culture, unchanged for centuries. Stewart possesses a rare gift for blending the spirit of adventure with historical insight, drawing you simultaneously into a landscape of extraordinary power and into one of history's most remarkable human epics. From the opening pages, you are captivated by prose that flows with restrained lyricism and constant wit. These nomads, extraordinarily remote from our world, the opposite pole of our culture, inheritors of a vanishing world, reveal themselves as equally extraordinary in their humanity. Intensely human, intensely poetic, a narrative driven headlong at a gallop from beginning to end, this book is a genuine delight.