"Either take to the heather with me or else hang."
In all Christendom I have seen no highway to compare with this, the great highway in the heart of Akbar's Mogul Empire - four hundred miles of broad tree-lined avenue running from Lahore to Agra.
In the shade of one of these trees I stretched out and rested my sore feet. The midday sun had reduced the flow of humanity along the great highway to a trickle. Buffalo rested in the fields, unyoked from their ploughs. The only sounds were a fly buzzing, a yearning flute, and Brother Peter farting in his sleep.
In India, in 1575, Thomas Coryat, English surgeon and rationalist, searches for a cure for his dying wife. With him is his boyhood friend, Frog, a lustful priest seeking is an alien world: the exotic, violent India of the Mogul Empires, a world of peasants and lords, courts and Villages, warriors and travelling players, warlords and princesses.
Colourful, rich, exotic and erotic, mysterious, funny and tragic, LORD OF THE DANCE is a magnificent creation, at once a brilliant picaresque adventure and a profound literary achievement.