This article is concerned with various modes of narrative memory in Travels with Herodotus, considered against the background of Ryszard Kapuściński’s other travelogues. A close examination of the specifi c manifestations of memory in terms of its content and the manner of remembering and presenting a story reveals that each of the key narrative fi gures in Kapuściński’s factual fi ction, i.e. the reporter, the writer, the historiographer, and the traveler, is endowed with a bundle of narrative memory modes (attitudes). These attitudes are distinct and complementary, but they also interlock in a way peculiar to each of the Kapuściński’s character types. Their integrity is also secured by the author’s intention to keep track of ‘Memory [travelling] along the Roadways of the World’.

This article argues that the narrative strategy employed by Ryszard Kapuściński in The Emperor can enables the reader to read it as a mythical story. In The Emperor the presence of myth can be detected on two levels, i.e. in the ‘mythical thinking’ of Kapuściński’s informants and in the shape of the highly stylized authorial narration. Myth controls the spatial structure of the story, the characterization of Haile Selassie, the concepts of time, language, and especially the incrustation of the text with elements explaining the unknown by the known.