The book begins and ends with the visits to give the impression of a tunnel into their ancestors and family history. I believe in going backwards into the past - I felt I was digging a tunnel back to the past.
One of my fantasies in my life has been that I was granted access with a camera to go back in time, and to film the actual campaign of Alexander crossing into India through Iran and Persia.
I have realised how exciting and easy it is to be a time traveller by looking at paintings and films and architecture and playing music or listening to it. I don't think you necessarily have to live in the present all the time.
Most of the southern hemisphere is unexplored. We had more exploration ships down there during Captain Cook's time than now. It's amazing.
History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles.
If given a chance, I would really want to explore the monuments in Delhi, like Qutub Minar and the forts. I have been there as a child, but now I want to go back and understand the history and significance behind them. We take all of these things for granted in life.
The East is marvellously interesting for tracing our steps back. But for going forward, it is nothing. All it can hope for is to be fertilised by Europe, so that it can start on a new phase.
It was the Lord who put into my mind that fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies. All who heard of my project rejected it with laughter, ridiculing me. There is no question that the inspiration was from the Holy Spirit, because He comforted me with rays of marvelous inspiration from the Holy Scriptures.
I do not start with a full knowledge of the facts; the whole attraction of writing history is to educate myself: it is an exploration into the unknown - 'a journey without maps,' to borrow Graham Greene's phrase.
It is in our nature to travel into our past, hoping thereby to illuminate the darkness that bedevils the present.
I saw 'The 39 Clues' as a potential vehicle for doing some education in a fun way - to take some of these amazing stories from history, dust them off and make them alive.
I'm a big history buff so to walk the streets...the ancient world like that was pretty astounding.
What if Hiram Bingham had the technology to find hundreds of other archaeological sites at the same time and create entire 3-D maps of the ancient landscape accurate to within a few inches?
There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.
Ancient travelers guessed; modern travelers measure.
It is my object, in the following work, to travel over ground which has as yet been little explored and to make my reader acquainted with a species of Remains, which, though absolutely necessary for understanding the history of the globe, have been hitherto almost uniformly neglected.
To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.
I enjoy the research element. There are so many stories from the past that interest me, that I want to learn more about, just as an interested person. And if I'm going to learn, if I'm going to research, it's probably going to lead me to writing a novel.
We could imagine nothing pleasanter than to spend all of our lives digging for relics of the past.
The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.
The Afrocentric exploration of the black past only scratches the surface. A full examination of the ancestry of those who are referred to in the newspapers as blacks and African Americans must include Europe and Native America.
Movies give me an opportunity to go places. I'm not only a Swede but an American, not just a man of my time, but I've been living 2,000 years ago-and not just in a new country, America, but in the Holy Land, too.
The lure of the past came up to grab me. To see a dagger slowly appearing, with its gold glint, through the sand was romantic. The carefulness of lifting pots and objects from the soil filled me with a longing to be an archaeologist myself.
Time travel is always more magical somehow when you go into the past. Traveling into the future is something you do, every day. You're just not going to get very far. So, I rather like the past travel.
The history of exploration has never been driven by exploration. But Columbus himself was a discoverer. So was Magellan. But the people who wrote checks were not. They had other motivations. And there's Columbus - he couldn't even get Italy to pay for his voyage so he has to go to Spain.
