Around the World on a Bicycle
Volume I.
From San Francisco to Teheran

By Thomas Stevens



CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I. PAGE
OVER THE SIERRAS NEVADAS, . . . . . 1

CHAPTER II.
OVER THE DESERTS OF NEVADA, . . . . 21

CHAPTER III.
THROUGH MORMON-LAND AND OVER THE ROCKIES, . . 46

CHAPTER IV.
FROM THE GREAT PLAINS TO THE ATLANTIC, . . 70

CHAPTER V.
FROM AMERICA TO THE GERMAN FRONTIER, . . . 91

CHAPTER VI.
GERMANY, AUSTRIA, AND HUNGARY, . . . . 121

CHAPTER VII.
THROUGH SLAVONIA AND SERVIA, . . . . 153

CHAPTER VIII.
BULGARIA, ROUMELIA, AND INTO TURKEY, . . . 184

PREFACE.
Shakespeare says, in All's Well that Ends Well, that "a good
traveller is something at the latter end of a dinner;" and I never was
more struck with the truth of this than when I heard Mr. Thomas Stevens,
after the dinner given in his honor by the Massachusetts Bicycle Club,
make a brief, off-hand report of his adventures. He seemed like Jules
Verne, telling his own wonderful performances, or like a contemporary
Sinbad the Sailor. We found that modern mechanical invention, instead
of disenchanting the universe, had really afforded the means of exploring
its marvels the more surely. Instead of going round the world with a
rifle, for the purpose of killing something, - or with a bundle of tracts,
in order to convert somebody, - this bold youth simply went round the globe
to see the people who were on it; and since he always had something to
show them as interesting as anything that they could show him, he made
his way among all nations.

What he had to show them was not merely a man perched on a lofty wheel,
as if riding on a soap-bubble; but he was also a perpetual object-lesson
in what Holmes calls "genuine, solid old Teutonic pluck." When the
soldier rides into danger he has comrades by his side, his country's
cause to defend, his uniform to vindicate, and the bugle to cheer him
on; but this solitary rider had neither military station, nor an oath
of allegiance, nor comrades, nor bugle; and he went among men of unknown
languages, alien habits and hostile faith with only his own tact and
courage to help him through. They proved sufficient, for he returned
alive.

I have only read specimen chapters of this book, but find in them the
same simple and manly quality which attracted us all when Mr. Stevens
told his story in person. It is pleasant to know that while peace reigns
in America, a young man can always find an opportunity to take his life
in his hand and originate some exploit as good as those of the much-wandering
Ulysses. In the German story "Titan," Jean Paul describes a manly youth
who "longed for an adventure for his idle bravery;" and it is pleasant
to read the narrative of one who has quietly gone to work, in an honest
way, to satisfy this longing. THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS., April 10, 1887.





FROM SAN FRANCISCO TO TEHERAN.






CHAPTER I.





OVER THE SIERRAS NEVADAS.

The beauties of nature are scattered with a more lavish hand across the
country lying between the summit of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the
shores where the surf romps and rolls over the auriferous sands of the
Pacific, in Golden Gate Park, than in a journey of the same length in
any other part of the world. Such, at least, is the verdict of many whose
fortune it has been to traverse that favored stretch of country. Nothing
but the limited power of man's eyes prevents him from standing on the
top of the mountains and surveying, at a glance, the whole glorious
panorama that stretches away for more than two hundred miles to the west,
terminating in the gleaming waters of the Pacific Ocean. Could he do
this, he would behold, for the first seventy-five or eighty miles, a
vast, billowy sea of foot-hills, clothed with forests of sombre pine and
bright, evergreen oaks; and, lower down, dense patches of white-blossomed
chaparral, looking in the enchanted distance like irregular banks of
snow. Then the world-renowned valley of the Sacramento River, with its
level plains of dark, rich soil, its matchless fields of ripening grain,
traversed here and there by streams that, emerging from the shadowy