Patrick Leigh Fermor, the artist of the highway

On December 9, 1933, as a forest of dripping umbrellas and bowler hats littered the streets of London, an 18-year-old boy in studded ankle boots strode toward Thames harbor. Soon the catwalk rose. Finally, he had broken the moorings! He was going to walk from Rotterdam to Constantinople. Alone, free, he would descend the Rhine then veer eastward, following the Danube to the gates of the Orient.

The young Patrick Leigh Fermor escaped "like a jinn comes out of his flask" . He had been advised to postpone his project until fine weather; he hadn't wanted to hear anything. He would sink into the winter "like a pilgrim or an itinerant monk, a desperate knight" , with four pounds a month for his subsistence: "I would travel on foot, sleep in millstones in summer, take shelter in barns. when it would rain or snow and only hang out with peasants and tramps ” , he wrote in the introduction to the trilogy in which he will tell his odyssey

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