A worn-out table, some wooden or lead typographic characters, a press like the one Gutenberg might have used: this is the workshop of José Francisco Borges in the village of Bezerros in northeastern Brazil, in the hinterland. The smell of ink and wood. The wooden plates are waiting for their turn, while the fresh engravings, which have just taken shape, dry hanging on the wires.

I go to his workshop to propose a collaboration. I explain my plan to him: his own images, his engravings, and my own words. He remains silent. I continue to talk, to talk, to give explanations. And he, nothing.

And this goes on, until suddenly I realize that from my words, the music is missing. I blow into a broken flute. What has not been born cannot be explained, it cannot be perceived:
you feel it, you sense it moving, only when it leaps. Then I stop explaining and start narrating. I tell him the stories with the fascinating and terrible things that I have collected and want to record, the voices of all those I have encountered on my way, the dreams I had while awake, delirious events, and deliriums that became reality, the wandering words I found, or that found me.

I tell him the stories, and thus this book was born.

The words travel: a separate, "magical" book by Eduardo Galeano, where the first word is not History, but Myth. Galeano dives into the world of popular imagination and tells us myths and legends of yesterday and today, speaking about the mysteries of life, about life and death, about love and hate, about men and women, about God and the Devil, about music and silence, about words and things, about memory and oblivion... and with the common denominator of all these stories, the journey, which justifies the title of the book. And in the myths, he inserts some "windows" of reflections, which always begin with the phrase "A few words about...", and function as indirect, literary comments on the myths.

As a companion in this endeavor, Galeano has the popular engraver José Francisco Borges, who, visually, speaks the same language as Galeano's stories: a rough, rejected, direct, and pure language.