Works by David Ker
- Written by David Ker
Published November, 1888
What sort of temple requires a warning about pickpockets? The kind where beggars lay their beds on sacred stones and cook supper in the ruins of abandoned cells. Wat Cheng, the oldest of Bangkok’s countless shrines, is half cathedral, half ruin, and the guided tour Miss I. provides through its gloomy corridors would have given Dante himself something fresh to sketch. Above it all, a pagoda soars two hundred feet into the sun like an embodied prayer.
- Written by David Ker
Published March, 1889
Monsieur Ker has barely stepped past the gorge of El Kantara before the comforts of French restaurants vanish into the brassy glare of the Sahara. Between the scarred faces of soldiers battling Biskra boils and the scowl of captured marauders, the desert offers no mercy. When a sudden display of ventriloquism turns a hostile crowd into a panicked retreat, one must wonder if wit alone can survive such eternal desolation.
- Written by David Ker
Published Feb., 1889
The Russians call it the bad steppe, and Dante himself could not have conjured anything grimmer: no color, no motion, no life, only an immense gray silence stretching to the edge of the world. It was through this voiceless desolation that Hepworth Dixon and this author traveled in 1869, running aground on thirty-nine sand-banks, stumbling through pitch-black Cossack villages, and discovering that the warriors of the Don were exactly as wild as their ancestors.
- Written by David Ker
Published Dec., 1888
Beneath the chandeliers of St. Petersburg, Madame M hosts a grim assembly of “historical celebrities” whose hands are stained with Warsaw’s blood. While Prince Gortschakoff masks his lies with a pleasant smile, a veteran of 1812 recounts the harrowing retreat from Moscow. Between the soup and the silk, the ghosts of Napoleon’s frozen army haunt a table of living tyrants.
- Written by David Ker
Published March, 1889
Monsieur Ker jolts awake to a French officer’s warning about North Africa’s worst precipice, and within seconds his train is lurching over a black abyss above Constantine, the city the Arabs call “the City in the Air.” Ker has crossed strange railways on four continents, but this outlawed crag, severed from the earth by a chasm where Jugurtha once held Rome at bay for six years, asks something of its visitors that guides cannot prepare them for.
- Written by David Ker
Published June, 1888
Young Harry Fenton arrives in the heat of a Burmese port with a head full of romantic notions about the gentle wisdom of nature. Under the guidance of the cynical Captain Weatherly, he marvels at the dockyard elephants piling timber with the precision of hired laborers. Harry is charmed by their apparent cleverness; he believes a few sugar-cakes have secured him a loyal friend. But when he returns empty-handed one afternoon, he discovers that a beast’s memory is sharp, but its gratitude is dangerously short-lived.
- Written by David Ker
Published April, 1888
The glittering streets of St. Petersburg are alive with the Czar’s wedding festivities, but a more dangerous spectacle unfolds on a balcony overlooking the Winter Palace. The exiled warrior-prophet Schamyl watches his fierce Circassian Life-Guard parade in the uniforms of their conquerors. Beneath the scarlet tunics and antique helmets, a single word from this “Old Lion” could instantly rekindle the bloodiest war the Caucasus has ever known.
- Written by David Ker
Published September, 1886
Professor Pundit has traveled the length of the Lower Niger for one specimen, the Yauri crocodile, a beast said to carry a jaw unlike anything else in Western Africa. Every attempt has failed him. So he sends for Gezo, the most feared hunter in the district, who arrives looking rather too slight to cast a proper shadow in the noonday sun. What Gezo does next, armed with nothing but a roll of ox-hide and a knife, is not for the faint of heart.
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