There were many Burtons. One may find evidence of this not only in his long, motley career as ‘explorer and ethnographer, polyglot and poet, consul and connoisseur of the sword, infantry officer and enfant terrible’, but also in the nature of his output:over twenty travel books, which all greatly differ from one another. Even within the short span of the first years of his writing career it may prove difficult to recognize the same author behind the little known Sindh and the Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus, published in 1851, and the celebrated Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah, published in two volumes in 1855 and 1856. Dane Kennedy's solution to the enigma consists ofxplaining that Burton ‘moved over time from a philological to a physiological to a cultural conception of racial difference’. This is certainly true, and very persuasively demonstrated. I wish to argue, however, that the shift was often more synchronic than diachronic, and that Burton's theories of racial difference, whatever the rationale behind them, were constantly supplanted by cultural practices which broke down the boundaries between Self and Other.

Burton was not the first European to venture into Sindh, where he was stationed between 1844 and 1849. The province – encompassing the lower Indus valley and annexed to the Bombay presidency in 1843 – had assumed geopolitical importance for the British in the early nineteenth century, when it had become clear that it could serve as a gateway to Afghanistan and therefore become a crucial buffer against Russian expansion. Nor was Burton the first European to cross Arabia's Empty Quarter, or even to visit Medina and Mecca, Islam's holiest cities. But being the first to encounter the not-Self was not Burton's foremost ambition, if only because first encounters had almost become a thing of the past in the 1850s.