Barbara Toy followed the Mediterranean coastline of North Africa, travelling through what was then French Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, to Cyprus, then down through Lebanon, Syria and then through Jordan to Iraq. While in Iraq she visited several archaeological sites, including in May 1951 Sir Max Mallowan's excavations at Nimrud where his wife Agatha Christie was helping with processing the finds. The work on the site had just finished, and the finds for that season included the stele of King Assur-nasir-pal II. Her journey home is not described in the book, although in her second book "A Fool in the
Assyrian independence movement dead from disease. Two hundred Assyrians were burned to death inside a church, and the Russians had discovered more than 700 bodies of massacre victims in the village of Hafdewan outside Urmia, "mostly naked and mutilated," some with gunshot wounds, others decapitated, and still others carved to pieces. Other leading British and American newspapers corroborated these accounts of the Assyrian genocide. "The New York Times" reported on 11 October that 12,000 Assyrian Christians had died of massacre, hunger, or disease; thousands of girls as young as seven had been raped in sex attacks, or forcibly converted to Islam; Christian villages