Back when most people stayed home, travel writing was a highly imaginative genre. Ask Pausanias, Ibn Battuta or Marco Polo about the strange creatures and bizarre customs that they, and evidently nobody else, encountered in their wanderings. But modern practitioners — Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer — have helped elevate travel writing, if not to a science, then at least to an art that values truth.

No one has mastered that task more deftly than Jan Morris, 79, the England-born, thoroughly Welsh writer and historian. In more than 40 books and countless essays over the past half-century, she has marshaled reportorial insight and literary flair to describe nearly every interesting place on the planet. Unique among them is Hav, the microscopic, Levantine city-state she first put on the map 21 years ago with

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) Last Letters from Hav — and which she revisits in her latest, perhaps most insightful book yet, titled simply Hav.

Located south of the Caucasus, north of Turkey and this side of paradise, Hav had drowsed for centuries through Greek, Turkish, Russian and British occupations, wars of all colors and a League of Nations mandate before attaining a genial, pre-civil-war-Beirut balance among its many ethnic and political factions. Morris' word-portraits of Hav's labyrinthine Medina, its precious snow raspberries, its grueling annual "roof race" and the official trumpeter who woke the locals every morning with a tune dating from the First Crusade made the place indelible in the annals of travel. "Hav had seemed to me a little compendium of the world's experience, historically, aesthetically, even perhaps spiritually," Morris writes in her introduction to the new book, "and could surely never be the same place again."

An understatement. The old Hav was bombed to rubble in the 1985 Intervention that led to the current religious regime. The new state, Morris writes, is an efficient, tourism-obsessed, architecturally innovative resort destination — a kind of sanitized Singapore or a deracinated Dubai. The snow raspberries are now genetically engineered and exported aggressively, the trumpeter has been replaced by an electronic carillon, and the old ethic and religious tensions are reasserting themselves. "In many ways," writes Morris, the city has become "a paradigm of our 21st century zeitgeist."

A paradigm it will remain, for Hav exists only in the mind of Jan Morris. Last Letters from Hav, her first novel, was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1985. The volume sowed confusion among Morris' fans, many of whom wrote to request directions and ask if a visa were necessary. "Only one single correspondent," she writes in an epilogue to Hav, "an octogenarian lady in Iowa, saw my little book as allegory."

The new allegory helpfully reprints the entire 200-odd-page original and proceeds smoothly to its slightly shorter sequel, subtitled Hav of the Myrmidons, a reference to the state's new cultlike leadership. "I hadn't planned to do another novel," says Morris from her home in the Welsh village of Llanystumdwy, where she has just said goodbye to a group of admirers from Canada's Yukon Territory. ("We get a lot of visitors up here, especially in the summer.") But the World Trade Center attack and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq changed her mind. "I wondered what had happened to Hav since 9/11. The gloomy picture I present is clearly what I feel now. For years I'd been hearing people say that the world is going to the dogs, and 9/11 was the first time I began to think they were right."

Morris has seen enough of that world to know where it is heading. Born James Morris in Somerset to an English mother and Welsh father, he spent the final years of World War II as a British army intelligence officer in Palestine and Italy before going off to study English at Oxford. He married Elizabeth Tuckniss, daughter of a colonial tea planter, and talked his way into a reporting job at London's Times newspaper. Morris famously broke the news of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's historic 1953 ascent of Mount Everest (the reporter himself made it two-thirds of the way up). After publishing seven books — on the U.S., the Middle East, Africa and Venice, the last a longtime favorite destination of his — Morris left daily journalism for full-time book writing.

But something was wrong. "I never really felt myself to be a man," Morris says today, despite his pre-interview warning that "One thing I don't like to talk about is sex." In 1972 James underwent a sex-change op and became Jan. The gender switch made headlines around the world, and Morris wrote a bestselling 1974 book about it, Conundrum. Nowadays, hardly anybody brings up the subject. Morris can't tell if the change affected the writing. "There must be a difference, though not in my style. I once went back over all my work to see if the style had changed, and it wasn't apparent that it had. But I'd be a very boring writer if I hadn't become a woman. It has enriched my writing."

Morris' writing sprawls from book-length essays on the meaning of place (Venice, Wales, O Canada!, Manhattan '45) to serious works of history (notably the Pax Britannica trilogy, an ambitious three-part work on the fall of the British Empire) to a nonstop torrent of newspaper and magazine articles. Age has not slowed her step. In July she is covering the first direct Eurostar service of the summer from London to Avignon for the Financial Times. Then off on a summer cruise-ship lecture tour. In October she will be fêted at the New York Public Library for her 80th birthday.

Yet there will be no more books, save one. "I've been very ill," she says. "I had two brain surgeries earlier this year, so I'm sort of taking the year off. I'm much better now, thanks.

I can stand, walk, even drive a car. I have this Honda Civic Type R, a special, souped-up model with a very powerful engine. I've always loved fast cars, this one more than most of them. I even wrote it into Hav. It's in the scene in the tunnel [once the romantic principal route to Hav, but now sadly trackless and unused]. Oops, Elizabeth has just handed me a note. Shall I read it to you? It says, 'I'm going out to buy some superglue.' O.K. Well, now what were we talking about?"

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) Yes, that's the same Elizabeth who married James Morris in 1949 and had five children with him, four of whom survive. Elizabeth has remained superglued to her former husband's side through sex change, brain surgery, literary fame and near-constant travel. "We go to Trieste nearly every year," Morris says of that flavorful, heterogeneous Adriatic port. "It has haunted me more than anywhere else. It's the most allegoric city I know. I am Trieste. Trieste is me."

Trieste was also the subject of the 2001 book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, that Morris once announced would be her last serious literary effort. Hav, she says, was an afterthought, but Trieste remains her official valedictory. "It's the best thing I've ever written, and I don't think I could do that again. I don't want to go downhill. There will be no more."

Morris fans, from Yalta to the Yukon, should not despair. "I have written a posthumous book of personal essays," she says. "Faber and Faber will publish it after I die. I just received the contract this morning. I'm calling it Allegorisings. Is that a word? Anyway, they don't awfully like the title at Faber. But the older I get the more I'm obsessed with allegory. Everybody knows what the world looks like these days. They've seen it on TV. So as a writer you have to be more transcendental, more allegorical. Nearly everything has more to it than meets the eye. Even my life." Pausanias, that ancient Greek connoisseur of myth and meaning, would be pleased. So would Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo. They're both mentioned in Hav, well before the allegorical tunnel.

• DONALD MORRISON
• Jan Morris' return journey through the fictional land of Hav