The Man Who Couldn't Stop Walking

In 1325, a twenty-one-year-old legal scholar named Ibn Battuta left Tangier to make the hajj to Mecca. It should have taken about sixteen months. He didn't come home for twenty-four years.

He just kept going.

He crossed the Sahara. He sailed down the East African coast. He rode through Central Asia, visited Constantinople, trekked the Hindu Kush, served as a judge in Delhi, was shipwrecked off the coast of India, and made it to China. His total distance — roughly seventy-three thousand miles — was about three times what Marco Polo covered. He survived the Black Death in the Middle East and wrote one of the only eyewitness descriptions of it. He was, by any measure, one of the most restless human beings who ever lived.

Eventually the Sultan of the Maldive Islands appointed him qadi — chief Islamic judge. It was, in theory, the kind of prestigious settled post a traveling scholar might dream of. Ibn Battuta took the job and promptly issued a ruling that local women must cover their breasts in public, a practice the Maldivians had never observed and saw no reason to start.

The women ignored him. The entire population, essentially, shrugged.

He lasted eighteen months. Then he left, resumed walking, and didn't stop until he'd crossed the Sahara one more time.

Some people are not meant for staying.