The Island of the Colorblind and Cycad Island by Oliver Sacks. What a romantically mystical phrase:
. . . O'Connell had another side, as a curious and careful observer. He was the first European to call Pohnpei, Ponape, by its native name (in his orthography, "Bonabee"); the first o give accurate descriptions of many Pohnpeian customs and rites; the first to provide a glossary of the Pohnpeian language; and the first to see the ruins of Nan Madol, the remnant of a monumental culture going back more than a thousand years, to the mythological keilahn aio, "the other side of yesterday."It reminds me of the Russian term for their former frontier soviets, "the near abroad".
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