"Reading the wonderfully varied and unexpected stories assembled here, I was struck by how much the notion of pilgrimage today has to do with retrieving a sense of purpose (and simplicity, and constancy); with putting oneself, quite literally, in the footsteps of the past. Once upon a less secular time, almost everyone made pilgrimages, and most of the great works of our early literature -- Dante's ascent into the stars, Chaucer's wanderers to Canterbury, the tales of Orpheus and Odysseus and Hercules -- commemorate both inward and outward journeys; these days, I suspect, many of us travel in part to experience pilgrimage by proxy. Most of the travellers in this volume leave home, as I have done, to partake of someone else's pilgrimage, and so to learn what animates people to undertake such sacrificial tasks; the destination of pilgrimage is pilgrimage itself." -- Taken from the foreword by Pico Iyer.