Story of explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton. Born in the early nineteenth century in a Victorian England and a world in full expansion. He spoke more than 40 languages and lived several lifes. He was a seducer, slave to his sexuality, an experimenter passionate about most human perversions, a great lover of prostitutes, opium and hashish that he would consume all his life. He was an empiricist and a man on the ground. Geologist, soldier, explorer, swordsman, poet, doctor, secret agent, discoverer of the sources of the Nile, hypnotist, translator of Thousand and One Nights and the Kama-Sutra, he performed the Hajj, the Mecca pilgrimage and was the first westerner to penetrate the fortress of Harrar in Ethiopia. He was initiated to many secret societies in India, Africa and the Middle East, he even tried to unravel the mysteries of Kabbalah tirelessly seeking to understand the invisible world around us.
—Laurent Préyale