Of Walking in Ice

Werner Herzog's Of Walking on Ice, a fever-dream of a book, one (mule-like) man's febrile pilgrimage to save an ailing friend. Herzog was contacted and told that his mentor Lotte Eisner was dying of cancer, and he became possessed with the idea that if he walked to her in Paris from his Munich home she would live. The account is frayed and hallucinatory: Herzog walks through blizzards and rain, sleeps in barns and empty holiday homes; the landscape consumes him, space is blurred by motion, dominated by the force of exorcism and the need to arrive. This is walking as sacrament, what Chatwin called a 'poetic activity that can cure the world'. The book's power doesn't come from great writing, although it does have a certain haunting descriptive power, rather it comes from its status as an event, a document of a journey of belief. Eisner was waiting to receive Herzog on his arrival. Her recovery was complete and she went on to live 10 more healthy years.
The book isn't in print as far as I can tell (the cheapest copy on Amazon is £234!) - hence the odd picture above; but it's well worth tracking down (I know for sure the British Library have a battered copy as it is now soiled with my grubby paw prints).