Why "Irrelevant" Details Make Travel Writing Memorable: Lessons from Nasir Khusraw
The man who counted instead of describing
To be honest, when Naser Khosrow Qobadiani set out from Merv in 437 AH, he had no intention of writing a book; he intended to go on the Hajj and return. Seven years later, he came back with a mass of notes and left behind something that is today one of the most precise social documents of the fifth century AH. But the strange point is this: the part of the travelogue that still holds us after a thousand years is not the account of conquests, gatherings, and miracles. It is where the author pauses and says that such-and-such a mosque has three hundred-odd columns, or that the price of a mann of bread in such-and-such a city is such-and-such.
These are exactly what many novice writers readily leave out: “irrelevant details.” In this article, we will see why these details work in a travelogue and how we can transfer the same function to our own writing.
The calculating eye: Naser Khosrow was, above all, a recorder
Before becoming a travel writer, he was a secretary and a fiscal official; someone who worked with ledgers, numbers, and measurements. This profession is visible throughout the book. In Egypt, he describes the Nilometer: the column used to read the rise of the water, the people who measure it every day, and the direct link between that number and the amount of tax collected from the land. None of this contributes to the drama of the journey; but it tells the reader that the author really stood there and asked.
The more instructive point is that he marks the boundary between what he saw and what he heard. In one place he says, “This is what I saw,” and in another he writes explicitly, “This is what I heard.” The story of the Lighthouse of Alexandria and the mirror that, according to his account, served to keep watch for ships and was done away with by a trick is recounted with this same caution. This distinction seems minor; in fact, it is a travel writer’s greatest asset: credibility.
A rule that emerges from the travelogue: wherever you are certain you have seen something yourself, be precise; wherever you are reporting, say that you are reporting. The reader feels this difference, even if they never put it into words.
Three things seemingly useless details accomplish
If irrelevant details were merely information, it would be enough to list them. But they also do three other things:
- Proof of presence: Anyone can write the general description “a large and populous city”; but the fact that houses are built so high that people live on the roofs can only come from someone who has walked through the alleys of Fustat.
- Creating an image in memory: The mind discards abstraction and retains the scene. Numbers, scale, and the type of materials pull the description out of “brochure” mode.
- Revealing the narrator’s character: This is the most important function. The fact that one person in a city notices the recitation of the Qur’an and the mihrab, while another notices the price of fresh dates, tells us what kind of person sits behind those eyes. Naser Khosrow shows both his wonder and his prickliness.
In contemporary Persian literature, Jalal Al-e Ahmad does the same thing in a different tone in “A Thistle at the Miqat”: he retains small and even unpleasant details so that the journey is his journey. Bruce Chatwin, too, in “In Patagonia,” builds a book from a mass of just such apparently marginal information—a book that resembles a museum more than a report.
Which details should we keep?
The common mistake is collecting everything. A good travelogue is not a warehouse; it is a selection. Three simple criteria help:
- It should be verifiable: number, unit, name, time, distance. Something the reader can measure in their mind.
- It should be unrepeatable: If the same sentence could be written about any other city, it is not a detail; it is a cliché.
- It should be tied to the senses or the body: heat, smell, fatigue, the price of food, illness. The writer’s body is the most reliable document of the journey.
| Decorative sentence | The living version of the same observation |
|---|---|
| The bazaar was very crowded and thriving. | They sold bread by weight and placed the weighing stone in front of the buyer’s eyes. |
| It had a magnificent mosque. | To reach the courtyard, we had to climb some thirty-odd steps; the courtyard floor was polished stone and burned our bare feet. |
| The people of the city were hospitable. | We spent the night in a caravanserai; the guard came at midnight and asked where we were from. |
A Simple Exercise for Travel Writing
When writing, first of all set aside three things from each day: a number, something seemingly useless (a habit, a sound, a smell, a price), and a sentence overheard from someone else. Then run the deletion test: remove the details and see what is lost. If the answer is “nothing,” leave it out. If the sense of presence or the narrator’s character is damaged, the detail has done its job and must remain.
Naser Khosrow also worked in this way—not because he knew narrative theory, but because he was a meticulous recorder who trusted his own eyes. His travelogue reminds us that what endures is not always the result of great moments; sometimes it is the result of insisting on writing down something that no one else considered important.
