If, as Yves Bonnefoy has written, “Poetry is an act by which the relation of words to reality is renewed,” then Patrick Leigh Fermor’s prose ranks with the best poetry in English. Usually labeled a travel writer, he is in fact a maker of memorable images, resurrecting lost worlds he was lucky enough to have seen firsthand.

A friend of mine who read one of his books, “Mani,” in Greek translation, reacted to its descriptions of her native region (the middle finger of the southern Peloponnesos) by calling them phantasia, her face alight as she pronounced the word. She meant “fantasy” as we know it, but also its root sense, a “making visible,” as if the author were a sorcerer.

He is known especially for a youthful walk from the “Hook” of Holland to Constantinople in 1933-34. That journey is two-thirds recounted in two of his finest volumes, “A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople, From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube” and “Between the Woods and Water: On Foot to Constantinople, From the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates.” Long unavailable in this country, they are now being reprinted by NYRB Classics, and one can hope more readers will discover their magic.

These books depict not just Europe before pulverizing bombs and Cold War madness so utterly trans formed it, but also the tangled tribal legacies that made it what it was and is. They are a record of friendships and curiosities, ebullience, pluck, and good fortune, their verbal resources a match for his extraordinary life.

The pleasure such writing affords is old-fashioned, to be sure. Few images stand alone without becoming occasions for ecstatic dilation. Few people are recalled without generosity. His devotion to visual imagery rivals Ruskin’s, and when he muses upon peoples and their origins, he can sound like a more mellifluous Darwin poring over species of orchid or barnacle. Human histories become fugal choruses: “This was the overland link between the Kings of Hungary and the Byzantine Emperors; it was the path of Barbarossa and his crusaders on the journey which ended with the Emperor’s death in the chill flow of the Calycadnus.”

Our guide delights at the etymological strata of numerous languages. If you love words, this is prose that will make you salivate. Badly played gypsy music is like “treacle and broken bottles,” and the gypsies themselves have “eyes like shrewd blackberries.” In one of his historical flights, he imagines the “stampede of lamentation” made by Huns at the death of Atilla. Like the late W.G. Sebald, Patrick Leigh Fermor (now Sir Patrick, or Paddy to his friends), has traveled in the mind as much as on foot, on horseback, or by more exotic modes of transportation.

I’ve known Paddy since 1980, when I lived in a tiny stone hut next to his Palladian villa in Mani. At that time he had recently published “A Time of Gifts” (1977), which garnered him the popular and appreciative readership he had long deserved. When he published its sequel, “Between the Woods and the Water” (1986), readers learned that these would be followed by a third volume. Suddenly one met Leigh Fermor aficionados at parties and found his books on other people’s shelves. Penguin brought out his earlier works in paperback, including “The Traveller’s Tree,” “The Violins of St. Jacques” (his only novel), “A Time To Keep Silence,” and the two great books about Greece, “Mani” and “Roumeli.” Visitors to Kardamyli, the village where he has made his home since the early 1960s when it was barely accessible, were often seen lugging copies of his books. He had always been a legend; now he was also a tourist destination.

The legend includes Paddy’s World War II exploits – parachuting onto Crete after the disastrous retreat, joining the resistance among such figures as Xan Fielding and George Psychoundakis, ultimately kidnapping the German commander, General Kreipe, and, after a chase over the mountains to the south, spiriting his captive to Egypt in a submarine. This single exploit has dogged Paddy – Dirk Bogarde played him in the film version. Reviews of his books refer to it as if his soldiering were more important than his writing. Everyone notes the passage in “A Time of Gifts” when Kreipe looks out at snow-capped Ida and quotes some Latin lines from Horace. Paddy – like one of the aristocrats in a Renoir film – finishes the quote, adding, “We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.”

Skeptics challenge the veracity of the scene, but the surrounding pages detail a writer’s coming of age, and how in youth one can easily learn by heart great swatches of prose and verse, as well as new languages – hardly a controversial observation. Having heard Paddy sing and recite in person, I can vouch for his verisimilitude, and even his modesty. He is also quite reticent about his war exploits – the movie was based on a fellow officer’s memoir of kidnapping Kreipe – far more likely to emphasize the happy companionship he encountered on his long walk. There is, for example, a Frisian Islander named Konrad, met in a Viennese hostel, who looks like a bedraggled Don Quixote and speaks a hilariously archaic English gleaned from Shakespeare:

‘We must beware,’ he said. ‘Among good and luckless men there is no lack of base ones, footpads and knaves who never shrink from purloining. Some love to filch.’

In another encounter he finds himself sketching a 10-year-old girl who has dolled herself up to have her portrait done by the young Englishman:

Perching on a tuffet, she crooked a bangled wrist on her hip while her other hand flourished a twelve-inch cigarette-holder and tapped off the ash with vampish langour. It was convincing and rather eerie, an advanced case of lamb dressed up as mutton. ‘Isn’t she silly?’ her mother said fondly. I’m not sure the sketch did her justice.

Throughout “A Time of Gifts” and “Between the Woods and the Water,” Paddy finds himself from solitary marches through farms and cities suddenly elevated to the castles and Schlosses of nobility. If there’s a dash of Orwellian down-and-out in these books, there’s also a constant theme of rescue by both rich and poor, as if this rare young man from a broken home were being adopted by the larger world. The few hints he gives of his parents suggest that he came by his eccentricity honestly. His father, who directed the geological survey of India, “had discovered an Indian mineral which was named after him and a worm with eight hairs on its back; and – brittle trove! – a formation of snowflake. (I wondered, much later on, when white specks whirled past in the Alps or the Andes or the Himalayas, whether any of them were his.)” His mother naturally worried when her son got the sack from a public school and subsequently planned to tramp across Europe, but gave him her blessing and sent him off with an encouraging quote from Petronius: “Leave thy home, O youth, and seek out alien shores.” Chapters on Hungary find the boy fraternizing with gypsies and farm girls, but also undergoing social metamorphoses:

When a mid-morning sunbeam prized one eyelid open a few days later, I couldn’t think where I was. An aroma of coffee and croissants was afloat under a vaulted ceiling; furniture gleamed with beeswax and elbow grease; books ascended in hundreds, and across the arms of a chair embroidered with a blue rampant lion with a forked tail and a scarlet tongue, a dinner jacket was untidily thrown. An evening tie hung from the looking glass, pumps lay in different corners, the crumpled torso of a stiff shirt (still worn with a black tie in those days) gesticulated desperately across the carpet and borrowed links glittered in the cuffs. The sight of all this alien plumage, so unlike the travel-stained heap that normally met my waking eyes, was a sequence of conundrums. Then, suddenly, illumination came. I was in Budapest.

From this point Paddy’s opulent narrative, including a dicey tour by automobile through Transylvania with an unhappily married aristocrat named Angela – “a darting, luminous phantom in these pages” –

brings him closer to the Balkans and a future he cannot yet imagine. This would include the near-obliteration of everything he has seen by the worst of all wars, a catastrophe shadowing even the brightest of these scenes.

“Between the Woods and the Water” took him only as far as the Iron Gates in the Transylvanian Alps. The trilogy’s conclusion would open in the Balkans and take us to Constantinople, perhaps dealing as well with Greece’s pre-war struggles between republicanism and monarchy – the groundwork, we might say, for the rest of Paddy’s life. In his still-vital 60s and 70s when he published these two books, Paddy knew very well what had been lost, making his acts of literary resurrection more moving and heroic, as if he were pitting recollected civility against the worst that time and humanity can do.

Now that he has turned 90, I’ve not had the courage to ask whether we will ever see this trilogy completed. Hints of the riches a third volume might contain can be found in the writings of others, as well as a few lectures and fragments in Paddy’s own prose (only a small sprinkling of these were selected for “Words of Mercury,” 2003, edited by Artemis Cooper). To call what he has published so far one of the great tales of our time seems imprecise. In a sense it is entirely out of time – otherworldly – made of both memory and accurate phantasia. Those for whom Paddy’s prose is still an undiscovered country are to be envied for what lies ahead – hours with one of the most buoyant and curious personalities one can find in English.

Mr. Mason’s most recent book is “Arrivals” (Story Line Press), a collection of poems.