A river on a rocky bed and a chain of tors serrating the skyline enclose an endless fairyland of ruins. One gets bewitched walking into these eerie ruins strewn in a desolate landscape, which hosted a capital city in the middle ages. The city that it hosted for centuries was Vijayanagar, capital of the last great Hindu empire in India by the same name. Hampi, a sleepy village, 220 miles north of the city of Bengaluru, is the site where the dead city of Vijayanagar was discovered several centuries after it was lost and forgotten. Tracing A Lost City is travel writing on Hampi. The book attempts at travelling from today's village of Hampi back in time to the city of Vijayanagar of the middle ages and from there to the palmy days of the empire, of which it was capital. In the style of a compelling story, the narrative transgresses time, passing between the present and the past. Taking time off the package of history, the traveller also wanders from ruins, monuments, and basso-relieve to a landscape of scrub jungle on the rocky hilltops of Hampi to photograph sloth bears and birds.