"Offering an intimate look at the people and places of Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan, this memoir by adventurer and historian Mathew Wilson recounts journeys into remote areas as a member of the British army and with his family in the late 1960s. Wilson relates stories of crossing the Hindu Kush with his pregnant wife and two-year-old son and running a gauntlet of armed border guards to get his injured son to a hospital. Twenty-one years later, Wilson returned to honor a promise made to a Hindu priest in Central India—to seek, find, and follow the fleeting shadow of the Rani of Jhansi, one of the heroines of India's 1957 revolt against British rule."