To Your Scattered Boddies Go

Sir Richard Francis Burton had been sure that when he died, the world would cease to exist. Imagine his surprise, then, to wake up from his death in 1890 in a "heaven" no one ever dreamed of. At its center was a seemingly endless river, rimmed by insurmountable mountains, studded with food-generating stone mushrooms. And there he was - the erstwhile expired 69-year-old explorer, brawler, scholar and womanizer - naked and bald in a flawless 25-year-old body, amid a landscape as mysterious as any his translation of The Thousand and One Nights.