PENGUIN BOOKS

JUPITER’S TRAVELS

Brought up in England by a German mother and a Romanian father, Ted Simon

found himself impelled by an insatiable desire to explore the world. It led him to
abandon an early scientific career in favour of journalism, and he has worked for
several newspapers and magazines on Fleet Street and elsewhere. Ted Simon is
also the author of Riding Home and The Gypsy in Me, which is published in
Penguin.
Ted Simon
Jupiter’s Travels

Penguin Books
PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL., England

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Streed, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P
2Y3

(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Ireland. 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Comberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017.
India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books(South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL., England

www.penguin.Com

First published by Hamish Hamilton 1979

Published in Penguin Books 1980

31

Copyright © Ted Simon. 1979

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of Ameriea, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall
not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the
publisher’s prior consent in am form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published
and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequient
purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-192929-3
Jupiter

When the reserve tank ran dry too, and the engine choked and died, I guessed I
was ten or fifteen miles from Gaya. The thought was disagreeable. It might mean
spending the night there, and somewhere I had read that Gaya was the dirtiest
town in India.
I let the bike roll off the asphalt onto the grass under a shade tree. The trunk
of the tree was stout and twisted with prominent roots and a grey scaly bark.
Drooping clusters of small dry leaves gave a medium shade. It was a common
tree in India though I still could not remember its name.
I tucked my gloves into my helmet and stood by the bike looking up and down
the country road and across the field of green wheat wondering who was going to
help me this time, and what it would lead to. I did not doubt that help would come,
and with it most probably some unexpected twist in my fortunes. It had taken
years to achieve that measure of confidence and calm, and as I waited I allowed
myself some pleasure in knowing it.
My thoughts brushed over the years and miles of the journey, tracing the fear
as it had waxed and waned along the way, trying to hold it all together and
reassure myself that there really had been a beginning. Without a beginning how
could there be an end? At times, and more frequently now, I could feel the
tiredness invading my bones, bleaching my retina and raising a mist on the
horizon of my mind. Soon it would have to end. There were many men walking
along the road. Most of them wore loose cotton clothing, once white but stained
right through by the reddish brown soil of Bihar. It caught the sun softly, and the
people passed by under the trees like pale shadows taking up no space.
Few motor vehicles were on the road. Some men were riding bicycles, and a
few drove ox carts or rode in pony cabs. There were some buzzing auto-
rickshaws too, which are three-wheeled scooters with cabs for passengers. They
were unlikely to have spare petrol. In the state of Bihar you could get three or
four meals for the price of a litre of petrol.
A taxi came towards me full of people pressing forward. The driver was bent
over the wheel with his dark face thrust against the windscreen and all the
expression squeezed out of him. The wheels flew up and down on the bumps,
and the taxi slithered and juddered across the waves of tar as though trying to
escape, drawn to its destination only by the concerted prayers of the people
inside it.
By this time several men had stopped to observe me and then reluctantly
walked on, but now one came who spoke a little English. His colour and features
indicated that he was a Brahmin, though his knotted cord, if he had one, was
covered by his shawl and shirt. He told me straight away that he was very poor. I
replied by telling him that I had no petrol.
‘Village is there,’ he said. ‘Not far.’
He stopped another man coming along slowly on a bicycle with a shopping
bag slung from the handlebars, and spoke to him in Hindi.
‘He says they will be having petrol. It is two miles. Not far.’
I thanked him and waited. I felt sure there would be no petrol at the next
village but could not say so. There were more words spoken in Hindi.
‘This man will go on his bicycle. How much petrol you are wishing?’
It did not seem to me that the man had volunteered but he appeared to
accept the Brahmin’s authority without question.
‘That’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘Ί will need a litre,’ and started to fish in my
pockets.
‘No, no, good sir. Afterwards you can pay. Now he will go.’
The Brahmin’s prophecy was instantly fulfilled. The man turned his bicycle
and went. The Brahmin then mentioned again, as a matter of purely academic
interest, that he was poor, this time adding that I was rich. I felt that he was
striving towards some kind of dialogue which would result, without his even
having to wish it, in my turning my fortune over to him and continuing on foot.
This might well have happened in ancient Indian legend, but I was not the warrior
he took me for, and he was not sage enough for me, though he had a sly air
about him.
 So I withdrew politely from the conversation and sat at the foot of the tree to
write and take pleasure in the afternoon. It was February. The light was still cool
and golden, and there was peace here too, a kind of detachment that I found
only rarely in public places in India. It seemed a perfect time to put down on paper
what had been accumulating in my mind since the day, four days back, when I
made my great mistake.
In the three years of my journey I had never made an error like it. I had
planned to ride to Calcutta from Darjeeling, a long ride for one day on Indian
roads, but the highway is better than most. It parallels the border of Bangladesh
and, for part of the way, runs in company with the Ganges. What I had actually
done on meeting the Ganges had been to take the highway that runs upstream to
Patna and Benares. But had I done it? There was no recollection of choice. I had
followed the holy river, secure in the knowledge that it was flowing on my right-
hand side, unaware that I had crossed it in a confusion of streams and bridges
and was on the west side and not the east. When I had noticed my mistake I had
already travelled 150 miles in the opposite direction to Calcutta, a sufficient
distance to change my life.
Why hadn’t I noticed where the sun lay ? Or which way the river was flowing ?
Or that I had crossed into Bihar from West Bengal? I prided myself that these
observations had become second nature to me. Why had they failed me there?
This enormous deflection in my path had led me straight towards the heart
and soul of India, to the birthplace of Buddhism and the most sacred Hindu
places. On examination my reasons for rushing to Calcutta had seemed trivial,
banal, though still, in my tired and confused state, desirable. Then, sadly at first,
I had abandoned them and embraced instead this strange quirk in my destiny. It
had led to remarkable experiences, the last of which had found me in a glider,
high above Patna, whirling in a thermal current alongside a flock of big brown
ferocious birds of prey.
All this took a while to record, and I still kept the pleasant sense of having
been nudged towards some fateful event. My Brahmin had drifted away, tired of
explaining me to every passer-by. His emissary to the village had not returned. I
stood up and, as something to do, beckoned at an approaching car. It was a
polished limousine driven by a chauffeur. Two fat women, lolling in the back,
observed me with amusement, while the chauffeur intensified his glare at the road
ahead and accelerated past me. At the same time a lorry was coming towards
them from Gaya. The lorry moved farther out into the road, and the car was
driven, screeching horribly, into a shallow ditch. The lorry driver smiled at me and
held up his thumb, and I grinned my appreciation.
A few minutes later two men on an Enfield motorcycle stopped just beyond
me and walked back. The driver would have gone on, but the pillion rider insisted
on stopping and, as it turned out, he was the owner of the machine. He was a
young man, stubbily built and very short even in his stylish high-heeled shoes. He
wore tightly fitting flared trousers, an embroidered yellow waistcoat and a
magenta turban of the kind used by members of the Rajput or Kshatrya caste. His
bearded face carried an expression of almost unbearable solemnity, like a boy
trying to show respect at a funeral. At first I thought he was in the grip of extreme
sadness, but the expression never varied, and in fact he was on the way to his
brother’s marriage ceremony and an occasion of great joy.
Eventually, between us, we solved my problem. It involved many people,
including a retired vice-chancellor of Magadh University from whose carburettor
we pumped the necessary litre, and it was very satisfying to all concerned. The
shy cyclist also returned from the village, without petrol, and smiled most happily
to see us all at work. He would accept nothing but a warm handshake for his
trouble. The vice-chancellor left for Gaya, having invited me to drop round for
tea. Then I also rode off, with escort, on my way to a Rajput wedding.

And they brought on the dancing girls.

There were two girls, but only one of them danced at any one time, while the
other sat between the tabla player and the violinist.
We were several hundred men sitting on sheets of thick white cotton spread
over an area of twenty feet by forty feet or so. The day had gone, and the sky
was replaced by a great multicoloured awning lit with fluorescent tubes. Most of
the men wore suits, though only the oldest kept their jackets. Naturally we all had
our shoes off, and they were ranged around the edge of the tent. My friend,
whose name was Raj, warned me mournfully to watch out for my things. Already,
he said, four pairs of shoes and two suitcases had disappeared.
The air was at that perfect temperature in which the skin luxuriates, and
scented by the incense sticks smouldering in front of the bridegroom. The groom
lay back on a throne of bolsters and quilts, with his paternal grandfather on one
side and the pundit on the other, both alert and upright and with bright yellow
turbans on their heads. The groom seemed quite detached, his eyes only barely
open.
‘He has been fasting for two days,’ murmured Raj. ‘He will not eat until
tomorrow after the wedding.’
Two rifles lay on cushions in front of the groom, their barrels pointing over
our heads. At significant moments they would be fired to frighten off hostile
tribes, for the Rajput are a warrior caste.
The principal dancing girl held the floor most of the time. She was my
favourite too, although her shape was far from my ideal. Her arms and shoulders
were impeccable and moved with sinuous grace, and her face was full and pretty.
The rest of her was wrapped tight in bodice and sari, but she proudly maintained
an enormous and agile paunch, which seemed somehow to be much older than
she was. I found myself watching it a great deal, amazed at the liberties it took,
but distracted as I was by her belly I could not ignore her face. With true artistry
she had created an expression of such supreme contempt for men that if I had
been alone in a room with her I would undoubtedly have withered beneath her
scorn. And just as surely, if it had softened towards me at all, I would have fallen
into a state of deepest bliss.
It must have been founded in bitter personal experience.
‘They are prostitutes, you know,’ Raj whispered, in a voice charged with
darkest meaning, and I saw that this had to be the most important thing about
her.
The dance itself was a strange and fragmentary thing, and at first I thought it
quite ineffectual and hardly worth the ten-rupee notes that she peeled off her
audience and passed to the tabla player. She would stand, tapping one hennaed
foot, shaking the ankle bells, swaying to the beat, and arrange her body into one
of several positions, perhaps a hip and shoulder pushing forward, legs slightly
bent, head tilted to one side. Then, catching a particular phrase from the
musicians, she would shuffle forward across the cloth, moving whatever there
was to be moved (the belly moving itself in perfect harmony) for just six steps,
before straightening up, letting her arms fall to her sides and sweeping us with a
stupendous pout that said quite plainly ‘There, you bastards.’
In those six steps she said everything there was to say about men and
women. Most of the time she merely swayed and sang, gesturing mechanically
with her smooth, lovely arms, making not the least effort to put meaning or feeling
into the song. Men shouted insults at her, elders castigated her for being too
greedy or ordered her to moderate her behaviour. She always did as she was
told, but always her scorn triumphed. And I found myself longing to see, just one
more time, those six derisive steps.
When she stopped to rest and her relief came on, and when I was not being
cross-examined by other guests about every most intimate detail of my life, my
eyes would seek out the father of the bridegroom. He also wore the brilliant
yellow turban, but sat among the crowd. Clean-shaven and less solemn than Raj,
he nevertheless had a tough and imperturbable manner and his smile was
controlled and distant. I watched him because I had begun to wonder whether he
was the reason I had found myself following such unexpected paths during the
previous days. One of the first things Raj had told me about his family, when we
stopped for beer on our way to the wedding, was that his father had great
powers. He was a clairvoyant, a seer, he could read a man’s soul and destiny.
‘He will take your hand and tell you things about yourself. He has done this
for many people. It is too important. He will do it for you.’ Raj was becoming
morosely excited by the idea.
‘Palmistry,’ I said.
‘No. No. Not palmistry. You will see.’
And several times after he had introduced me to his father he asked me:
‘Has my father told you yet?’
But no, he had wanted to wait, for the right time, for a quiet moment, and
since in their eyes I had become an important guest, having been gifted to them,
as it were, by fate, and he had a reputation to sustain, I fancied that he was
probably looking at me too from time to time when I wasn’t looking at him.
Long after midnight, when the flow of ten-rupee notes had ceased and the
dancing girls had wilted away, we all stretched out on the floor and went to sleep,
with our wallets tucked under our heads. At the bride’s house, a farm building
about three hundred yards away where other festivities were being held, the
loudspeakers were switched off and the last Hindi pop song went rolling away
under the moon across the great luminous plains of northern India. The lights in
the tent went out, but the curtain of coloured lights that covered one whole side
of the bride’s house from roof to ground went on glowing, at least until I went to
sleep.
The following morning, after we had all wandered off into the appropriate
field, and washed at the pump, and breakfasted, the bride and groom came
together at last. They were led into a small, cloistered courtyard which formed
the heart of the bride’s family house. There they sat on cushions with the bride’s
pundit between them and the groom’s pundit on her other side, and as many of us
as could manage crammed into the remaining space. To my amazement, and
enlightenment, the chief dancing girl was also there with her musicians. The bride
was obscured by veils, flowers and a brilliant wedding sari. The groom wore a
paper hat from which sprouted and hung an extraordinary array of tinselly
objects. To my Western eye he looked like something between a Christmas tree
and an old-fashioned Martian, and his face also was invisible behind the things
dangling from his hat.
The bride’s pundit had some sheets of paper torn from an exercise book and
covered with sacred texts which he read in a harsh jabber, stopping frequently to
decipher an illegible word, or to seek counsel with the other pundit. Meanwhile the
dancing girl and the musicians sang and played the same sexy songs as the night
before, and people chatted loudly to each other trying to make themselves heard.
The groom also had to perform various movements at certain points in the
ceremony, like spooning milk with a folded leaf from a crock onto a pat of
smouldering cow dung. At one time he had to do this with a cloth held in front of
his face, though it is unlikely that he could see much anyway. I thought his ordeal
was quite awful. Half starved, half blinded, stifled by far too much clothing,
enveloped by the most shattering din and propelled throygh these complicated
symbolic acts, I wondered whether any part of him remained quiet enough to
know the meaning of it all. It looked to me like a ceremony devised by women in
revenge for all the overbearing authority and pomposity that an Indian husband is
capable of.
After half an hour no end seemed in sight and I left to walk outside for a
while. Everything and everybody was at peace. I noticed clearly how all the man-
made structures, the mud-walled houses and cow sheds, grain stores, tanks,
irrigation channels and hay ricks were at one with the earth and the trees. A poor
and backward harmony, some would say, best appreciated from a distance, but
surely there must be some middle way…
My appointment with destiny was approaching. Raj’s father was getting ready
to leave for his office in Patna.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘We’ll sit in the car.’
We sat turned towards each other, and he said:
‘Give me your hand.’
I held it out, and he grasped it as in a handshake, but held it in his grip for
several moments. Then, releasing it, he gave my thumb a quick backward flip,
and murmured: ‘Achcha!
‘You have a very determined soul. This also is reflected in your mind.
‘You are Jupiter…’
Why not? I thought. I like the sound of that.
Trouble with Mars

Officially the journey began at 6 p.m. on Saturday the sixth of October 1973. The
announcement was to appear the following morning in the Sunday Times. I had
just stepped out of the newspaper office with a last armful of film and other
oddments, and I had seen the story in proof.

MARATHON RIDER OFF

Ted Simon left England yesterday on the first leg of his 50,000-mile
motorcycle journey round the world…

I really had to go.

It was not an auspicious day, far from it. Unknown to me it was the Jewish
holiday Yom Kippur. More important, it was the day chosen by the Egyptian High
Command to begin a devastating assault on Israel. Soon after midday the radio
began to report massive attacks on Israeli positions in the Sinai. By the end of
the afternoon the Middle East was at war again. The ‘Yom Kippur’ War.
The war lay right across the route I had been planning and preparing for six
months. I thought they had done it on purpose. Maybe you know how it is when
you have decided to do something really enormous with your life, something that
stretches your resources to the limit. You can get the feeling that you are
engaged in a trial of strength with the universe. Dock strikes, assassinations,
revolutions, droughts, the collapse of the Western world, all those things you
usually say ‘ho-hum’ to in the papers begin to look as though they were designed
as part of your personal fate. I mean, I had trouble enough with the Ethiopians
over their Muslim guerrillas, with the Triumph factory going on strike, with the
Libyans running a holy crusade in their visa department. But a full-scale tank war,
I thought, was going a bit too far.
The route of my first seven thousand miles to Nairobi had become so familiar
to me that it lit up in my head at the touch of a button like those maps in the Paris
Métro with their strings of little coloured bulbs. I knew I was utterly committed to
that route, by a thousand considerations, climatic, financial, geographic and
emotional. War or no war, I would have to go through, but it filled me with
trepidation. The only consolation I could find was that fate had obviously marked
me out for something special. If the omens were dark, they were at least
vigorous. It seemed uncanny. I felt blessed and cursed at the same time. Star-
crossed.
I stood alone in the gutter with my laden Triumph in the black and rainy night,
fumbling with my parcels and wondering where to pack them. I was wearing a lot
of clothing I still had not found room for on the bike, in particular an old RAF
flying jacket and, over that, a waterproof anorak. The anorak was too tight. To
get it on at all I had first to stuff the jacket inside it and then struggle to pull this
whole rigid assembly down over my head. It usually took several minutes and
made an amusing spectacle at the roadside, but I was sentimentally attached to
the jacket and did not want to spend money on another waterproof. The effect,
once inside, was excellent for sitting still in cold driving rain, but movement was
awkward and robotlike, and produced a lot of heat.
Drops of sweat rolled into my eyes as I struggled and juggled with the
packages, unable to put them down, because every surface was streaming with
water, unable to find space anywhere, for every last crevice seemed to be
packed with something.
A Good Luck postcard from a friend, which had touched me deeply, fell to the
pavement and I watched helpless as the writing dissolved in the rain and the inky
water washed around my boots. This, I thought, was not the heroic departure I
had envisaged.
I looked at the absurdly overloaded Triumph standing next to me in the gutter
and had my first cruel glimpse of the reality of what I was embarking on. My vision
had been dazzled by the purple drama of warfare and banditry. Now I saw, with
awful clarity, that a large part of my life henceforth would be devoted to the daily
grind of packing and unpacking this poor, dumb beast.
‘It’s impossible,’ I whispered.
For weeks it had been an enthralling game, a meditation, and at times an
obsession, wondering what to pack and where to pack it. The major departments
were Food, Clothing, Bed, Tools, First Aid, Documents, Cameras and Fuel. The
Kitchen was pretty much established in one of the side boxes. I had a neat
Optimus petrol stove in its own aluminium saucepan; a nonstick frying pan with a
folding handle; a pair of nesting stainless-steel mugs; some ill-assorted
containers for salt, pepper, sugar, tea, coffee and so on; cutlery, a tin opener
with a corkscrew, matches and a water bottle.
The problems were the same here as in the other departments. One had to fill
the space completely and stop things from rattling, breaking, unscrewing
themselves, leaking and rubbing against each other. The temptation was to stuff
the spaces between the hard objects with odd items like bandages, spare gloves,
toilet paper and socks. The results were impressive in terms of insulation, but as
the software spread everywhere amongst the hardware it became impossible to
remember where anything was, or to get at it, or to notice when it was missing.
The subtleties of packing a house and garage into the equivalent of four
suitcases can be learned only with experience. At that time I was still at the
loaded-wheelbarrow stage, and the bike looked and felt like it.
The Wardrobe was in the Bedroom, and that was in a red nylon rucksack
which lay across the bike behind my saddle. The theory was that if ever I broke
down in a jungle I would have a rucksack to walk off with. It contained a sweater,
spare jeans, long woollen underpants, a number of shirts, socks and shorts, and
an impeccable white linen jacket reserved for garden parties on the lawns of
tropical embassies. The Bedroom consisted of a light one-man tent, a mosquito
net the same shape that could be supported on the same poles, a down sleeping
bag with a cotton liner and a small inflatable airbed.
Strapped down beneath the rucksack were two sealed gallon cans of oil
intended ultimately to be used as spare fuel containers. The rucksack was high
enough to act as a back rest, and was held by a long elastic cord.
Behind the rucksack was a fibreglass box. This was Casualty and
Photographic. I was blessed with a medical arsenal of great power and flexibility,
assembled by some very conscientious friends. As well as various antibiotics and
other drugs and salves, I had bandages of every description, dressings suitable
for amputations and third-degree burns, tweezers for extracting bullets and
disposable scalpels for performing my own appendectomies. In screw-top bottles
I was given some horrendous white stuff for body lice, and a strange mixture of
cod-liver oil and glucose, which, they said, was an old naval remedy for tropical
sores, Packed in with all this were two Pentax camera bodies, three: lenses and
three-dozen aluminium canisters of film, and under it all, to deaden the sound, lay
a pair of carefully ironed and folded white trousers in a plastic bag to accompany
the linen jacket at consular cocktails.
The Workshop was slung on either side of the petrol tank in two canvas
bags, and the Office sat on top of the tank in a zip-up bag with a map holder.
Annexed to the Office was the Bathroom, consisting of a rather luxurious sponge
bag and a roll of paper.
The remaining side box had to cope with the biggest department of all,
Miscellaneous. Here were two inner tubes, a piston, shoes, waterproof gloves, a
torch, a visor and a hundred things I had collected that had no other home to go
to.
I knew I had too much stuff, but there was no logical way to reduce it. Some
of the problem was, of course, pure sentiment. How could I junk anything as
unique and exotic as a mixture of cod-liver oil and glucose? It was worth carrying
round the world, worth even cultivating a sore, to see whether it worked. But
generally I was on the horns of the fork and spoon dilemma: if you take a fork,
why not a spoon, if salt then surely pepper; if you are going to ride fifty thousand
miles on a motorcycle then at least you want to lie comfortably at night. There
was nothing I had not chosen carefully, and it always seemed that the least
important things were also the smallest and lightest and least worth discarding.
How can one anticipate the unknown? Preparing for the journey was like living
a paradox, like eating the cake before I’d had it. More than once I realized the
absurdity of what I was doing. The whole point and beauty of the journey was not
knowing what would happen next, but I could not help myself striving to work it all
out in advance. My mind became a kaleidoscope of scenarios that I had conjured
up out of my imaginary future, showing Me Crossing the Andes; Me in a Jungle;
Me in a Monsoon; Me Fording a Torrent; Me Crossing a Desert.
The mystery deepened the more I tried to penetrate it. I bought and packed
bits of this and that for emergencies which, when looked at in a different light,
seemed like the purest of fantasies. A snake-bite kit like a rubber thimble, a field
compass, storm matches, a space blanket to stave off death on an ice field, all
beckoned to me from the shelves of the big camping shops, and when they were
small enough I took them. But it was beyond me to imagine myself steering a
compass course across a wilderness, being marooned on a glacier or wanting to
boil water in a cyclone.
And who can walk along the pavements of the city of London and seriously
contemplate the prospect of being struck by a cobra?
I suspended my judgement and went on adding to my pocket universe like an
agnostic crossing himself before battle.
In a linen belt next to my skin I carried £500 in traveller’s cheques. In a black
wallet locked into one of the boxes were small amounts of cash in currencies
ranging from cruzeiros to kwachas. In the bank, or promised, 1 had over £2,000.
I considered that with all this I had enough money to go round the world, buy
what I needed and take two years doing it.
Fuel costs I estimated at £300, shipping costs at £500. It was 1973. Petrol in
Europe cost around a dollar a gallon, and there were $2.40 to the pound. The
war, which came to be called the Oil War, had just begun. Inflation was
considered bad at 5 per cent. I could allow myself £2 a day, on average, for food
and occasional accommodation, and considered that to be generous. Seven
hundred and thirty days at £2 comes to, say, £1,500. Grand total: £2,300,
leaving £200 for troubles and treats. Crazy arithmetic, but the best I could do.
How was I to know the world was about to change, not having been there yet?
The idea of travelling round the world had come to me one day in March that
year, out of the blue. It came not as a vague thought or wish but as a fully
formed conviction. The moment it struck me I knew it would be done and how I
would do it. Why I thought immediately of a motorcycle I cannot say. I did not
have a motorcycle, nor even a licence to ride one, yet it was obvious from the
start that that was the way to go, and that I could solve the problems involved.
The worst problems were the silly ones, like finding a bike to take the driving
test on. I resorted to shameless begging and deceit to borrow the small bike I
needed. There was a particularly thrilling occasion when I turned up at the
Yamaha factory on the outskirts of London to take a small 125-cc trail bike out
‘on test’. I had my L-plates hidden in my pocket, but first I had to get out of the
factory gates looking as though I knew how the gears worked. Those were the
first, and some of the hardest yards, I ever rode; now it can be told.
I failed my first driving test and I thought I might just as easily fail the second.
Since that would not do at all, I obtained a fraudulent licence and was quite
prepared to go off with that, but fortunately it turned out to be unnecessary, and
my life of crime ended there.
I was lucky to get the support of the Sunday Times, and in particular its
editor, Harold Evans, and it was partly to acknowledge my good fortune that I
chose to ride the Triumph rather than the BMW. The British motorcycle industry
had crashed to its lowest point ever and I felt that a journey started in England
and sponsored by a great British newspaper ought to be done on a British bike.
The decision gave me some heartaches later on, but no real regrets. It always
felt like the right thing to have done, which was all-important.
The bike was essentially the same Triumph that had been on the roads for
decades: a simple, solid piece of engineering, difficult to break and easy to
repair. It was a vertical twin, with pistons that moved up and down in unison and
had a reputation for drilling the marrow out of the rider’s bones, but I had low-
compression pistons that allowed me to run on low-grade fuel and also flattened
out the vibration. In fact it was a comfortable bike to ride. It was the 500-cc Tiger
Hundred that had been used by the police. Its single carburettor was easier to
tune and more economical than the twin carburettors of the Daytona. Good
petrol gave me sixty-five miles to a gallon, so that even a standard three-gallon
tank offered a range of nearly two hundred miles. It had high, wide handlebars so
that I could sit up and take notice as I went, and good ground clearance to take
me over rough going. And it was light as well as sturdy. Of all the bigger machines
it was the lightest by thirty pounds or more, the equivalent of about three gallons
of petrol.
We had planned all sorts of interesting modifications at the factory, a list as
long as a sheet of foolscap, but when the time came to fetch it, I was lucky to
get a machine at all. The workers had just decided to lock the management out, it
was the end of the road for the old-style Triumph company and I think my bike
was the last one to leave the factory for a very long time. It was totally
unmodified, and so hastily prepared that a pint of oil fell out of the chain case on
my way down the Motorway from Coventry.
I know Triumphs are supposed to leak oil, but this is ridiculous.
But it was nothing, a paper seal slipped in assembly, easily put right. You
could stop the oil if you took the trouble. That was what British bikes liked, a bit
of trouble. They thrived on attention, like certain people, and repaid you for it. Not
a bad relationship to have.
We got on well together from the start. I thought of us as constituting a sort
of space capsule that could travel at will, at least in two dimensions,
unconstrained by the need for hotels, shops, restaurants, good roads, bottled
water and sliced bread. I was aiming at self-sufficiency because I wanted to
travel the way Livingstone did, or Columbus; as though anything could happen
and all of it was unknown. It was going to be the journey of a lifetime, a journey
that millions dream of and never make, and I wanted to do justice to all those
dreams.
In spite of wars and tourism and pictures by satellite, the world is just the
same size it ever was. It is awesome to think how much of it I will never see. It is
no trick to go round the world these days, you can pay a lot of money and fly
round it nonstop in less than forty-eight hours, but to know it, to smell it and feel
it between your toes you have to crawl. There is no other way. Not flying, not
floating. You have to stay on the ground and swallow the bugs as you go. Then
the world is immense. The best you can do is trace your long, infinitesimally thin
line through the dust and extrapolate. I drew the longest line I possibly could, that
could still be seen as following a course.
Generally the great overland journeys follow the Asian land-mass east until
the traveller is at last forced to take to the water at Singapore. I chose a different
way because I was powerfully attracted by the challenge of Africa, and in great
awe of it too. If I could conquer Africa, I thought I would be able to face the rest
of the world with confidence.
So I chose Africa, and logic prescribed the rest. Cape Town led naturally to
Rio de Janeiro. A cruise ship sailed that route three times a year at very
reasonable rates, and as an act of faith I booked my passsage for February
24,1974. From Rio a long loop of fifteen thousand miles around South America
would bring me up the Pacific coast to California. Across the Pacific the picture
was more confused. China was interested in receiving only coach parties, and.
Southeast Asia was seething with the war in Vietnam, but there was Japan,
Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Coming home through India seemed
absolutely right. That was a challenge I would be better prepared to meet after
being loose in the world for a while.
Dutifully I collected information about Pacific fares and sailings, about road
conditions in the Andes, ferry services in Indonesia, the weather in northern
Australia, but it was all foolishness and at heart I think I knew it. When I spread
the Michelin maps of Africa on the living-room floor (and they must be the most
beautiful road maps ever made), when I gazed down at the enormity of that
continent, the physical variety and political complexity of it, and when I
considered my complete ignorance of it, Cape Town seemed as distant as the
moon.
What point, then, in worrying about the stars. It was enough to know they
were there and that I was heading for them. I thought myself to be the most
fortunate man alive to have the whole world almost literally within my grasp.
There was no one on earth I would have changed places with.
Or so I thought – until that black night on the pavement of Grays Inn Road,
when I stood dripping rain water, sweat and despair, crushed by the unwieldiness
of the monster I had created, and the enormity of the prospect I had invented for
myself.
Only three yards away, behind the thick glass doors of the Sunday Times
lobby, was the bright and comfortable world that suited most people well enough.
I could see the commissionaire, smoothly uniformed behind his desk, looking
forward to a pint of beer and an evening with the telly. People in sensible light-
weight suits, with interesting jobs and homes to go to, flaunted their security at
me and I felt my gut scream at me to strip off this ridiculous outfit and rush back
into that light and the familiar interdependence. It struck me very forcefully that if
I went on with this folly I would forever after be the man outside in the gutter
looking in. For a moment I was lost beyond hope, utterly defeated.
Then I turned away from all that, somehow fumbled my packages away, got
on the bike and set off in the general direction of the English Channel. Within
minutes the great void inside me was filled by a rush of exaltation, and in my
solitary madness I started to sing.

All the way I was saying good-bye.

Good-bye to parents and friends, good-bye to London. Goodbye to Snodland
on the Canterbury road, always good for a laugh. Good-bye to the lambs and
oasthouses and orchards of Kent. Good-bye to Friday night piss-ups and
Saturday football and Sunday roasts.
In Dover I bought a big blue and white golfing umbrella for £4. How can I
explain such craziness? It fitted neatly alongside the bike.
Good-bye to the White Cliffs, to Boulogne and the sugar beet of Picardy, to
Grandvilliers (‘Son Parking, Sa Zone Industrielle’), to the saucisson of Beauvais
and the Paris Périphérique, all intimately known to me for a decade or more.
In Orléans I slept in a hotel and basked in the admiration of a garage
proprietor. ‘I owned many English motorcycles, AJS, Norton, Matchless,
Sunbeam. I wanted to make a journey like yours, but…’ He shrugged. ‘All this
Japanese rubbish they make nowadays.’ Not true, but I appreciate the sentiment,
so good-bye to him too, and to the fog over the tree-lined avenues and the high
passes and the fairy citadel of St Flour, all so familiar but all seen with fresh
wonder because of where I am going, because of knowing that maybe, possibly, I
might not quite make it back here again.

And the swoop down into Millau, where I just, and only just, miss being killed.
With my lungs full of adrenaline I shout ‘Madman! Assassin’ at the blind commuter
who overtook me in his liver-coloured Simca and pushed me off the road against
a stone wall. I squeezed past on the dirt, very shaken. How can I possibly
anticipate such insanity? Yet I must, somehow, to survive. I will survive.
Remember, then, that outside cities, towards evening, when the light is failing,
people are driving home in a hurry, tired and bored by their work. And you will be
going the other way, also tired. So at the end of the day, when you’re anxious to go
quick, SLOW DOWN.
 Lodève. A Last Night in my house. How can I bear to leave something so
beautiful? The contradiction is too painful, and the pain makes me anxious to be
gone.
There are other good-byes too delicate and too fraught with emotion to be
written about in passing, for I have lived a while. On my way down through
Europe I learn the value of the love I am abandoning. At times I experience a
degree of misery and loveless-ness I have not known since adolescence. I
wonder whether I will have the capacity ever to bear such pain again. It occurs to
me that that may be the condition for perpetual youth.
Good-bye to my unfinished dream, to the toasted vineyards of the Hérault, to
Montpellier, Nîmes and Aix-en-Provence.
In Nice I have a friend who manages a ‘Grand Hotel’ on the Boulevard des
Anglais called the Westminster, slightly faded since its Edwardian heyday when
expeditions like mine were undertaken by gentlemen. It strikes me as a suitable
place from which to say a last Good-bye, and the ‘ departing explorer’ poses for
a picture by the potted palm outside the revolving door. We had hoped to line the
hotel staff up outside, but the union wouldn’t allow it. So off to Monaco and the
Italian frontier, good-bye to France, and…Shit! I’ve left my passport at the hotel.
The departing explorer returns red-faced to depart once more. Dramatic
farewells, it seems, are not for me.
Enough of this messing about, I tell myself. It’s time to take the journey
seriously. For one thing, no more hotels. Tonight you sleep out and save money.
Monaco, Genoa, La Spezia and, as night falls, Florence. I pick up a
‘Camping’ sign and follow it to Fiesole, where I am ambushed by an English
couple in a small restaurant who tell me to look up their relatives in Sierra Leone.
If only I were going there.
It is late. The’ Camping’ sign leads up a very narrow steep hill, with a gate at
the top. The gate is locked; the campsite deserted. The slope is too steep and
the bike is too heavy. I can’t turn it around. It falls over and I am too weak to
move it. Disgusted with myself, I unpack it, pick it up, turn it around, repack it.
Rain begins to fall. I will not go to a hotel. At the bottom of the hill is a small
parking place. I put the bike up on the centre stand, put up my umbrella and go to
sleep in the saddle, lying forward on the tank bag. I am amazed how easy it is,
how little I care what others may think, how little sleep I need. I am riding high on
energy, like a surfer on a big wave.
 To Rome on the autostrada, but the tolls are too high, and I get off it to go
south through Latina and Terracina. Just before Naples, in the dark, I find a
campsite that’s open. During the last hours on the bike, my mood had plunged to
despair, but the work of unpacking and cooking keeps misery at bay, and a bottle
of wine washes it away.
To Naples and Salerno, and now the autostrada is free. It rides the bumps
down the spine of Italy, a wonder of engineering, always either tunnelling or
soaring across great airy chasms. The weather is wonderful too, hot sun, crisp
clean air. On the empty highway I begin to feel the rhythm of a long, uninterrupted
ride. In most of Europe this is impossible, life is so dense, intricate, a million
parishes joined up higgledy-piggledy and every patch intimately known to
somebody for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. I feel I am already
leaving Europe, I can feel Africa there, so vast I am already within its aura.
The movement has a complex rhythm with many pulses beating
simultaneously. Underlying it is the engine with its subtle blend of sounds, eighty
explosions a second, cams on push rods, push rods on tappets, rockers on
valve stems, valves on seats, ball bearings revolving and racing, cogs meshing
and thrashing in oil, oil pumps throbbing, gases hissing, chains whipping over
sprockets, all this frenzy of metal in motion, amazing that it can last for even a
minute, yet it will have to function for thousands of hours to take me round and
home again. Through all these pulses blending and blurring I seem to hear a slow
and steady beat, moving up and down, up and down, three semi-tones apart, a
second up, a second down; as I listen it grows clearer, unmistakable. Is it there
or am I inventing it? Is it the pulse of my own body intercepting the sound,
modifying it with my bloodstream? Try as I will I can hear no other pulse, no other
pitch. There are other instruments in the orchestra, however. The lapel of the
flying jacket flicks against my shoulder like a kettle drum, my overlong chin strap
beats a more complicated tattoo on the helmet and undeniably there is vibration
too, a faint tingle spreading from foot rests, grips and saddle, comfortable at
fifty, distinctly unpleasant at sixty-five and then flattening out again at seventy.
With 1,500 miles on the clock I consider the bike run in, and I’m riding at seventy
and over. On the autostrada the load has no apparent effect, until I go up over
eighty on a curve and feel the beginnings of a nasty wobble. I settle back to
seventy and lean forward to hit less air. A full tank takes me almost three hours
without a stop, three hours of contemplation and speculation, contemplation of
past mistakes, speculation on future dangers. Why does my mind dwell so much
on the down side of life, when the present is so exhilarating and satisfying! I find
myself anticipating ghastly accidents, desperate situations, macabre and quite
unreal challenges, like riding the bike over a rope bridge swinging across a
Peruvian canyon, as the vines slowly untwist and snap, a strand at a time…
shades of San Luis Rey. My heart is actually beating faster when I catch on to
what’s happening. It’s the ‘B’ movie syndrome. In my childhood they always used
to show two movies, ‘A’ and ‘B’, though often they were both ‘B’. In ‘B’ movies
everything spelled disaster. Windscreen wipers at night meant a horrific crash. A
creaking door, a footstep, an oversweet smile, a ‘nice’ stranger boded pure evil.
Anything whatever to do with aeroplanes or of course rope bridges, and you were
clinging to your seat (or girl friend) waiting for the spine-chilling consequences.
Was that how I was conditioned to expect the worst? Or were the pulp
moviemakers simply cashing in on an archetypal human instinct? Is it possible, I
asked myself indignantly, that all these years you’ve been palpitating because of
some cheap Hollywood con trick…?
Something touches my foot, and I look down to see objects streaming onto
the road surface. One of the canvas bags has stretched down to the right-hand
exhaust pipe and caught fire. Half my tools and spare parts are spread across
the autostrada. They are undamaged, the bag is easily tied up with string and I
go on.
There you are, you see. If you had imagined it, you would have had the
screwdriver through your foot…
At four o’clock, with an hour of daylight left, I turn off the autostrada to find a
place to camp. The small road leads me through a hot and dusty land, horse and
cart country still, Calabria on the instep of Italy, where the favourite colour for
clothes is still black. Rising towards the mountains, I come to Roggiano, a small
town baked into the hillside, encrusted with age, inward-looking and shy of
visitors. In the town square I halt, uncertain what to do but unconcerned. I have
seen nowhere yet to put a tent, but my night under the umbrella has given me a
strange confidence. I no longer care what happens to me. I stop the engine, pull
off my helmetand, still sitting astride the bike, light up a cigarette and let peace
settle about me. On the further pavement a small group of men is assembled, all
wearing carefully pressed suits. Some children spot me and rush up shouting.
Eventually I walk over to the men, who are dignified but curious, and at a slow
and easy pace we exchange pleasantries until, at last, one of them suggests
that if I go up the hill I will find an ‘international centre’. They will give me a bed. A
swarm of small boys bears me and the bike like a carnival float up the hill.
The ‘centre’ is an assortment of low buildings set among trees and flowering
bushes. In part it is devoted to the national campaign for literacy, but there is
more to it.
A handsomely bearded young man welcomes me without hesitation, as
though such arrivals were commonplace. In a matter of moments I am standing in
a communal hall drinking black coffee, served by a young woman in black, who
stands by us gravely as we drink. A minute ago I saw her, with a vast bundle of
laundry at least as tall as herself balanced on her head. She passed easily
through a doorway with not an inch to spare anywhere. Such impressive poise. It
should be an Olympic event.
The young man explains that the buildings were erected by people from all the
fourteen villages of the Esore Valley in their spare time. There are bedrooms for
those who come from a long way off. It has a full-time staff of four: his father
and himself, another teacher and a secretary.
The father and founder, Guiseppe Zanfini, receives me in his study. He
beams at me with such concentrated benevolence that I want immediately to vote
him into office, any office. Then, without preamble, he launches directly and
astonishingly into his story:
‘When I was eighteen I was a Fascist from my eyes to my boots.’
His hands describe the ample portions of himself which that includes.
‘I volunteered for the army to go to war. I was in an officer school, then in
Sicily, and four years after came my first real battle. 1 heard the toot toot on the
bugle’ – he goes ‘ toot toot’ into his fist – ‘that meant “Prepare arms.” I was in the
tent to pick up my gun and clean it, and I thought: “This time it is not for paper
cut-out figures. This time you will have to kill real men,” and I knew then I
couldn’t. Not to kill men with mothers like mine, with childrenmen who have come
from homes like mine which will be in misery.’
In a measured hush he speaks of love and brotherhood, his face flitting
between solemnity and ecstasy. As the battle progresses he shows graphically
how others lost a hand, an eye or a leg, and wipes imaginary blood – other men’s
blood – from his face. Tears tremble under his lashes as he relives his moment of
conversion in front of me, at his office desk.
‘Afterwards the colonel wanted to give me a decoration for staying on my feet
through the battle. I refused. I told him I could never bring myself to kill another
man. He said he understood and asked me only to keep my sentiments to myself.
Three months later was armistice and I was able to go to university. In the new
democratic Italy I studied to be a teacher and I came home to Roggiano to teach
others that we must have peace not war.
‘Then I saw that our men were returning from the prison camps to their
firesides and talking about war. And soon the children in the square were rushing
about going “Bang, bang” and “Boom, boom.” I saw that although we had
already lost one war, we were in danger of losing an even bigger one around the
hearth.’
Zanfini is about to see his last and most extensive project realized. After
seven years of bargaining and persuasion he has brought the mayors of the
fourteen communes of Esore – seven Christian Democrats, four Communists,
three Socialists – together to agree on one school for the whole region. A school
for children and adults too.
Zanfini rises like Caesar and unfurls his blueprint, which is magically to hand.
‘All this,’ he says, and there is a lot of it, some thirty or more buildings, sports
stadium, pavilion, theatre and so on, ‘all this will cost only an eighth of what must
be spent if each commune were to build its own necessary school.
‘Calabria has agreed. Now we wait only for Rome and the Law.’
He sinks majestically to his seat.
‘Another march on Rome,’ I suggest jokingly.
 ‘Never,’ he says. ‘There must never be another march anywhere.’ And that
same ineffable sweetness floods over his face. ‘Peace and Love. Love and
Peace.’
I am absolutely convinced of his sincerity. His operatics only enhance the
impression. If you really believe in something, why not give it all you’ve got. I am
sizzling with excitement at having stumbled on something so rare and
passionate. I know that somehow the manner of my arrival enabled me to draw
much more out of this man and the situation. I feel alive to every nuance, every
colour, aroma and texture, even the soup stain on Zanfini’s jacket.
I really did not expect the journey to start so soon.
In the morning I spend an hour repacking the bike. Every morning it’s the
same, but the improvement is always noticeable. I’m getting the weight where I
want it, the bike feels better and there’s more room as things settle into place.
Today I want to get to Palermo. I know it is about 150 miles to Reggio, where the
ferry crosses to Sicily, but after that I have no idea. It did not occur to me to
bring a map of Italy, so little did Europe figure among my preoccupations.
The ride to Reggio is glorious, with glimpses of the Mediterranean, as from a
small aircraft, and then the drop down to the sea. The ferry chugs across to
Messina and a promising new autostrada points to Palermo. Then abruptly, after
ten kilometres, the road becomes narrow, twisting, replete with roadworks and
jammed with impassable trucks throwing undigested diesel in my face. It is 150
more miles to Palermo, much farther than I thought possible. Most of the way I
crawl along in the dark. I arrive in Palermo at eight, very far gone, and lose myself
in a maze of impoverished streets.
I stop, I have to stop somewhere, in the Via Torremuzzo, and try to collect
my wits. After a really long hard ride I feel my blood fizzing in my veins as though
suddenly decompressed. I sit on the bike, for I dare not leave it, surrounded by a
press of urchins, outside a noisy bar. In this strange period when movement has
stopped but the noise and vibration are still ringing through my body I seem to
have stumbled into an enchanted canyon populated by circus freaks and the
odder characters of fiction from Rabelais to Damon Runyon. Dwarfs, giants, fat
men, rubber men, sweeps, touts, pimps, slobs, whores and bearded ladies,
throng in the spotlights and cavernous shadows, lurk behind bead curtains and
make theatrical appearances on impossible balconies among outrageous articles
of underwear. After a few moments my vision sobers down. Much of the effect is
due to almost mediaeval street lighting, and a warmth in the night air that allows
people to display a lot of skin, but even so Torremuzzo is a very flamboyant
street.
I am beat. Too tired to think in English, let alone Italian. Where am I? No
idea. Where should I go? No notion. The street life surges around me. I feel a
hundred sharp and hungry eyes fastened on my bike as on a Christmas tree hung
with gifts ripe for the plucking. Ashamed of my weakness, I can think only of the
telephone number I was given of friends of friends. The Fat Man, playing cards
on the pavement, says, Yes, there is a telephone in the bar. I carry the looser
items of luggage in with me. The friends of friends are at home. They will come in
a car and fetch me. I sit where I can watch the bike, and wait. What will I do
when there are no friends of friends? I resolve to deal with this question later.
An Israeli approaches me. Yes, an Israeli, selling himself hard. Do I think, he
asks, that if he goes back to Israel now they will put him in gaol for desertion?
What would you do, I ask, if you arrived in a strange, exotic city at night and
had no friends to turn to?
He goes away. It’s as I always thought. There are two kinds of people in this
world: those who ask questions and those who answer them.
Africa

At first I thought he was a noisy, obnoxious fool. He was sitting on one of the
green, slatted benches on the deck of the Tunis ferry, humming an Arab tune to
himself and tracing the course of the melody through the air with fat and grimy
thumb and forefinger joined at the tips like Siamese carrots. His face, all pits and
wrinkles, wore the determined bliss of someone trying hard to get high. His head
was the shape of a coconut and he saw me coming with eyes like black olives
buried in old grey cheese. He wore a padded green combat jacket zipped up to
the neck, patch-grey trousers and old-fashioned pointed shoes. His body seemed
to be coconut-shaped as well.
‘Ah, you, vous, was machen. Sprechen Deutsch. Ich auch. Scheisse.’ Then a
burst of Arabic, and ‘Ich bin Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Amsterdam. Viel fraulein. Folies
filles. Eins. Zwei. Fa. Scheisse.’
The wave of gibberish hit me as I walked towards him, and I thought it was
some kind of invitation to talk, but he broke off again and went back to his
trance-like singing. There were other Tunisians around, all grinning madly, and I
felt embarrassed and annoyed. For me this ferry crossing to Africa represented a
decisive leap into the unknown, a voyage of no return. Although the fighting
between Egypt and Israel had stopped, I thought it might break out again at any
moment. I was full of stern forebodings and in no mood for mockery, and I shied
off to the far rail to talk to two effete Englishmen from Tangier who offered me
the proper degree of respect. As far as I could see, we were the only European
passengers. The crew members were Italian and wore fancy blue sashes around
their middles, which I thought less than manly. The other travellers were evidently
Tunisians going home from the great casual labour exchanges of the North,
dressed by the flea markets of Europe and carrying their belongings in big
cardboard boxes or papier-mâché suitcases tied with string. As my friends
gossiped about the goings-on at the court of the King of Morocco, I watched the
thin, hardy men with their enormous bundles of stuff fighting their way along the
gangways and through the hatches, the scapegoats of Europe, wearing our
castoff clothing, hustled and slandered from border to border, available to do any
job too dirty for a white man. No wonder they looked ugly and morose, except
when grinning. No wonder I thought they had been mocking me.
After a while my smart friends decided to take to their cabin for a snooze,
since they were travelling first-class, and I went into the main saloon to see how I
would pass the rest of the ten-hour crossing. The saloon was nearly full of
Arabs, stretched out in the upholstered chairs and sofas trying to sleep. I started
talking in French to my neighbour, a gentle Tunisian engine driver called Hassen,
but it was only a few moments before I began to be aware of the barman. He was
twiddling the knobs of the television set. He was angry. The thick white flesh of
his face was set in an expression of stubborn conceit. He was literally
pigheaded. The set had been tuned to a programme of Arab music, but the
channel he wanted was showing an Italian football match. The picture was
indiscernible through the interference patterns and the sound was merely a
crashing roar of static but it seemed to satisfy him. It was plain that he was not
going to have any bloody wog music in his saloon. He was a fat short man and
his pregnant belly slung over the silly blue sash made him look unbearably
pompous. As he steered his bumptious body back to the bar, he kicked aside the
out-stretched feet of sleeping Tunisians rather than walk around them. On his
way he picked up empty soda bottles and flung them skilfully halfway across the
lounge into a large cardboard box where they fell with a regular, shattering din.
From then on I was unable to take my eyes off him.
It was truly breathtaking to see one man seize upon an environment which
belonged, theoretically, to his forty or so customers, and use it for the complete
expression of his own selfish and domineering nature. Behind the bar, his seat of
power, he granted or withheld his favours as capriciously as any despot.
Europeans he served with a ghastly conspiratorial grin. Others he refused
altogether, loudly, rudely, with vulgar gestures. When some newcomer dared to
tamper with the TV he flew into terrible tantrums.
His strutting and posturing were unforgettable. He treated the lounge and its
occupants as his private colony and, with great energy, found a thousand ways
of showing his contempt (mildly reflected in other members of the crew) while the
rest of us submitted in our various ways, resigned, resentful or merely numbed.
He represented in my eyes all that is brutal, greedy and corrupt in human
behaviour, and he was a powerful influence in stimulating my sympathy for the
Arabs. Short of violence it was obvious that the man could not be stopped.
The singer came in a little later, when it started to rain outside. He sat at the
far end of the lounge still chanting and smiling as though at some Sufi vision. In
the confined space the songs were much clearer. Hassen said they were
nonsense about girls and love, and he was apparently making them up as he
went, but at least he offered an alternative kind of vitality to the terrible malignant
power of the barman.
The Arabs nearest him began tapping and clapping along, and others drifted
closer, but he continued for a while as though he were unaware of any of us,
playing the fool for another audience that only he could see. The barman was
noticeably annoyed and the tempo of his outrages increased, but although he still
commanded two thirds of the saloon he did not meddle with the singer, whose
territory was growing. I sat for a while on the border line of their two spheres of
influence, and it was like looking out on two different worlds. To my left, shouting,
hostility, the smashing of bottles and, from the TV, the gibbering howl of the
ether. To my right, singing, laughter and a beat that was beginning to reach into
me. Hassen and I moved across to the right.
The singer judged this the moment to come out of his private retreat, and
began to respond to his followers. I could not imagine how I had ever thought him
distasteful. At worst he was a simple clown, but his power now seemed to grow
as the barman’s dwindled. He interrupted his buffoonery with poetry, and Hassen
told me it was original and good. The same thumb and forefinger placed the
words in the air with a precision and meaning that I felt I could understand,
though I spoke no Arabic. The songs also became longer, more lyrical. Slowly,
over a period of several hours, the pitch of his performance built up. The barman
by now was utterly effaced, the TV could no longer be heard. Everyone in the
saloon was with the singer, his to a man, and yet he still seemed strangely
detached from us, not feeding at all on our adulation in the manner of a Western
‘star’. Nor was there ever an attempt by anyone to compete with him. He
remained the focus of energy for the rest of the crossing.
Towards the end he moved from songs and poetry to oratory. It was a long
speech, and if the rhythms were anything to go by, it was in the Arab equivalent
of blank verse. His voice now was very muscular and gritty. The harsh, hard-
nosed syllables flew out in formation and beat on my ear. His audience replied
with moans and cries of agreement. I imagined the voice amplified a thousand
times, a hundred thousand times, from loudspeakers on all the minarets of Islam.
The sounds conjured up an atmosphere of great ferocity, yet the sense of the
speech, it turned out, was moderate. It had to do with peace and war in the
Middle East. It praised the moderate statesmanship of Bourguiba, and poured
scorn on the troublemakers who would fight, like Qaddafi of Libya, to the last
Egyptian. Hassen said it was good sense, realistic and very poetic.
‘I too thought at first he was just a fool, but now what he says is very
impressive.’
It was well after dark when the ship arrived in Tunis. By then I had made
another friend, Mohamad, a young Tunisian who was one of the singer’s most
enthusiastic accompanists. He was more stylishly dressed than most, with a
jazzy peaked cap on, which he never removed. His nickname, loosely translated
from Arabic, meant ‘The Swell’. He asked me where I was going to stay in Tunis,
and I said I had no idea.
‘Then you will stay with me. My family will be very honoured. You will have
everything we can offer. We will be extremely proud to have such a famous man
in our house and our friendship will last forever. I have a dark skin but my soul is
white as a lily. You will be safe and well in my house.’
Before leaving the ship I happened to notice the barman. He seemed a rather
insignificant person, cleaning up after us, hardly worth bothering with.

Arriving in Africa was, after all, pretty much like arriving anywhere. You used
your imagination to make it different. There was a harbour, a passenger terminal,
offices and officials, the usual formalities and indignities. Everyone spoke heavily
pointed French against a background of murmuring Arabic.
The ferry was a drive-on, drive-off ship and there was no delay in unloading. I
took the bike outside the dock gates and waited for Mohamad. I had explained
that there was no room for him on the bike and he had swallowed his
disappointment and said he would find a taxi. I wondered whether he had invited
me so that he could get a lift home on the bike. It seemed important to expose all
these ignoble possibilities, to get a true measure of his hospitality. After all, I was
going to write about it. I wouldn’t want to say that a pure flame of generosity
burned in his noble breast if all along he asked me home only for the ride. I mean,
let’s get it right, shall we?
However, Mohamad and the taxi duly appeared and we wound round the
streets of Tunis and out into the dark countryside for a way, to arrive at the Cité
Nouvelle de Kabaria. It was difficult to grasp it at night. Most of it was in shadow,
but it appeared to be recently built beside a main highway. I saw a maze of ten-
foot walls plastered white. No visible windows or roofs. Not like houses at all.
Eerie. We plunged down a dirt alley and stopped by a door.
The door opened not, as I expected, into the house but into a small
cemented yard. Mohamad went first and then asked me to bring the bike inside. I
barely squeezed through. The father was standing there in a fez, loose shirt,
trousers and sandals. He greeted me very formally and politely, with few French
words. The yard was maybe ten feet square, and the rooms opened off it on
three sides, so the whole house was, in effect, a tiny walled fortress, with one
door leading out. I could see already that the rooms were very small. I was
ushered into a room opposite the street door, which was like a little cave. It was
about seven feet wide, and half of it was filled with a brass bed, covered
sumptuously by a shiny cotton-pile rug. There was a bit of floor space and a
chest cluttered with ornaments, like a shrine, with an oil lamp burning.
I was left to sit there for a while as whispered conferences took place
outside, and I began to feel nervous about what was going on, so I went out to
look. Mohamad’s mother and two small children were there with him, moving
about in deep shadow. The five of us and the motorcycle filled the yard.
Some hint of suspicion must have shown in my movement or expression.
‘If you wish to watch over your motorcyle, please do, but I assure you it is
safe,’ said Mohamad. He spoke gently and quietly, not at all the brash boy on the
ship. I felt ashamed and went back to the room (three steps away, everything
was so close) to find that a supper had been laid out on the chest. Two small
lamb chops in heavily spiced hot sauce with peas and pimentos, and some
bread. No cutlery.
I ate the bread with the chops, and then made a mess having to scoop up the
peas and sauce with my fingers. The sauce burned my mouth terribly and I could
not finish it, and that made me feel bad too. I turned to the door and asked for
water. The mother came in with a jug and a metal cup and I saw her face in the
light, small and worn, but very calm and tender. This is definitely not a ‘B’ movie, I
told myself, and from then on felt absolutely secure.
The bed was Mohamad’s but I was to sleep on it. I protested, but in vain.
‘Whether you sleep on it or I, it’s the same thing. If you sleep in it, it is as if I
were sleeping in it,’ he said, offering it as a pleasure rather than a sacrifice, and
though it was a traditional formula of hospitality, maybe, it came alive on his lips.
I lay down on it like a visiting emperor, with a small boy lying on the floor by
my bedside, and prepared to fall immediately into a deep sleep, but sleep would
not come for a long time, and my skin, which had been itching nervously for some
weeks, tingled even more than usual. Sometime in the night I came half out of
sleep again to hear muffled drumbeats and what seemed in my dreamy state to
be a procession of phantoms moving through the darkness.
I awoke with numb lumps all over my wrists and neck and half my face. Bugs,
I told myself. Not nervousness, not heat rash. Bedbugs. But I refused to believe it.
That beautiful bed, infested? Never.
I slept on the bed three nights. The second night was just as bad. The third
night I got out my nylon tent and wrapped it around me and that was better. The
pleasure was Mohamad’s, the sacrifice was mine.
So on that first morning I squinted through my swellings at an African day.
Everybody was up and about early. They had nibbled at something before dawn
because it was Ramadan, and for that month no Muslim may eat while the sun is
in the sky. The drums were to tell people it was breakfast time, but as a nominal
Christian I was exempt and had a peppery fried egg.
In daylight the place seemed even smaller. There were two other rooms the
size of mine. The rest of the family, mother, father, Mohamad and little daughter,
slept in one of the other rooms, which was also a tobacco shop. The father had
been a prison warder, and as a retired civil servant he qualified for a licence to
sell tobacco. It was not a roaring trade.
How they all fitted together in that tiny space, why they weren’t constantly
colliding in the doorways was a matter for wonder. There was never a harsh
word, no hint of impatience or frustration, the children kept to their own little
world, seemingly content, looking up from a modest mud pie with big eyes full of
liquid love.
They designed their lives around each other with the intricate harmony of an
oriental carpet. Obviously it required much submission, mostly on the part of the
women. Was it submission or repression? Or a different view of space? I could
not tell.
Just how uncrowded they felt became clear when I asked about their third
room. They said that since their eldest children had moved out, they had so much
space that they had offered their spare room to a couple of elderly poor relations
who were still sleeping. So now we were eight.
There was one other door through which I passed after breakfast. Behind it
was a square yard of cement with a hole in the middle, and a jug with a slender
spout. I went to get some paper, and then returned and squatted down, rather
puzzled, because it was obvious that nobody else used paper. I had been told
many times, of course, that you should never greet an Arab with your left hand. It
was a serious insult, because that was the hand they used to wipe their behinds,
and I had grinned and said, Yes, I know, and somehow I had never really thought
what it meant because everyone has paper. Don’t they?
No, they don’t. They have a jug of water and a left hand, and the hought of
having to touch my shit with my own hand disgusted me. God, it was bad enough
having to stick your fingers in your bod. So I turned my thoughts away from the
whole problem, and hoked up their toilet with paper, which was no easy thing to
do.
There was no running water in the house and no electricity. The houses were
as small as they could be, and built of the cheapest materials. The roads
between them were dirt. Kabaria was a slum. A new, still uncompleted slum, or it
would have been but for the people who lived in it, for a slum, I discovered later,
is the people and not the place.
Just how mean a place it was became obvious when Mohamad’s brother-in-
law took me to visit his father in the country. We rode offdown the highway and
up into some low hills, lovely nourishing curves like the breasts of mother earth,
planted with big shade trees and olive groves. I saw a brown cow suckling its
calf, and a compound of thorn and cactus, and we turned in there to a couple of
huts set at right angles. They were made of mud plastered over wattle and you
could see where the hands had shaped them at the corners. The door frames
revealed how thick and satisfying they were, like gingerbread maybe, topped with
thatch, and at their base were two colour-matched orange marmalade cats.
Inside, the spaces were about the same size as the rooms at Kabaria, but
this was real space, under the rafters, with room for the imagination to grow. The
old man sat down opposite me across a rough coffee table while his old lady
busied herself behind me with a charcoal stove, always behind me so that I never
really saw her, Behind her and filling the width of the hut was a wicker-work bed
stretched on a wooden frame, less shelter for bedbugs.
The old man talked crazy nonsense to me about the world beyond his cactus
fence, and he had a perfect right because it was a crazy world. I ate his bread
and honey – his own wheat, his own hives – and heard about the Jews.
‘These Jews,’ he said. ‘They have a strong smell. I can smell one a mile
away.’ We were face to face, and half of me is Jewish, Maybe it’s the rear half.
‘I have heard of a Jewish tribe,’ he went on, ‘which was conquered, and the
invaders slew all the men, but the women allowed themselves to have children by
their conquerors. “Beshwaya, beshwaya,” they murmured. “In time. In time.”
Secretly they taught the children to hate their fathers, and when they grew up
they murdered them.
‘As long as there is one left alive they will never give up.’
 He was a fine old man and his nonsense did not disturb me. Any Jew could
come into his house and be as safe there as in his own home, as long as he
came as a person and not a label. I watched him, listened to his voice rather
than his words and drank in the scene. Everything fitted, everything was right;
shape, size, colour, texture, all the parts had grown together, into something that
would shape the instincts of the people who made it and lived in it. Whatever
messages of hate he picked up and repeated, his personal dealings guided by
those instincts would surely be all right. But what was there in Kabaria to provide
the same inspiration, living in those shabby, cramped boxes, fighting for work on
the edge of an overcrowded city? Perhaps the old man led a tougher life, perhaps
at times he ate less or felt the cold. If so it had only done him good. But the kids
couldn’t see it. How could they? They had to get into that mess on the edge of
the city so that one day some of them might appreciate what they had left behind.
Did they choose or were they driven? Either way, I thought, they were the stuff
that wars are made of.
In Tunis I worked the embassies. The Libyans gave me my visa, and took out
one heavy anxiety, which the Egyptians replaced with another. There would be no
possibility, they said, of crossing the border from Libya into Egypt.
I stared at the map. There was THE road, no other. North of the road was
the sea. South of the road, the desert. Here and there tracks trailed into the
desert…and disappeared, punctuated full stop by an oasis, or dwindling into
nothing. There was no other way. A fourteen-hundred-mile cul-de-sac to Salloum
on the Egyptian border. I had to go down it, just in case…
On the third morning I was ready. The bike was packed. Mohamad had his
gang around him, and they were going to escort me to the highway, and take
ritual pictures on my cameras. Each time the bike had gone out into the street
more people had seen it. By the third day every kid in town knew about it. As I
rolled it along in first gear, overheated and dressed up to kill, the parade swelled
to fantastic proportions. The Pied Piper or the Wizard of Oz could not have had
a greater success, but I had nowhere to take this crusade and I began to get
nervous wondering where it would take me. It was immodest, out of all
proportion; I couldn’t stop it, but I knew it had to go wrong.
As my army turned the last corner, in sight of the main road, the police came
in and wound it up. They grabbed Mohamad, who was carrying my cameras, and
told me to follow. The rest they sent scattering. There were only a couple of
them, in dark and dingy suits, but they looked awkward and angry. When I got
into their office on the highway one of them had already managed to find the
release to open the camera, but didn’t know what to do then, so I grabbed it, and
closed it and rolled the film back into its cassette and then opened it for him.
Mohamad was looking very put down, and they were shouting at him. Then
one of them turned on me, and accused me of being a sensation-mongering
journalist trying to get pictures of Arabs stabbing each other in drunken brawls,
exploiting their poverty and ignorance to sell my dirty rag. It was a good story.
Maybe it fitted somebody else. Then they turned to accusing Mohamad of being
out to rob me, and said I had been taking my life in my hands, and I said all the
best things I could as convincingly as possible and tried to get the temperature
down. So then they took us out in the street and told Mohamad to go home and
told me to piss off.
I tried to make it all right with Mohamad before I went, but he was very
chastened and didn’t want to talk. I didn’t like to go but I was a provocation just
being there and so I said a sad good-bye and rode off into my cul-de-sac.
Tunis rolls by. The first marvel comes in right after Kabaria, a huge Roman
aqueduct swings alongside me for a few miles, crumbling but unconquered like a
monster from the depths of time. The rains are early and I see the water hanging
in the sky ready to fall on me. The land needs it but I don’t, and I hurry past
wheat fields and over hills to beat it. Halfway to Sousse I know it’s going to get
me (it’s a personal thing between the rain and me) and I stop to pull on the
waterproofs. The land is very quiet, just a bunch of horses about a mile away. I
wish I shared that calm.
As I ride along I’m thinking about Kabaria. Why did it end like that? It would
have been prudent to leave the day before.
Yes, well it would have been prudent to stay at home. You have to let things go
their own way, or why be here at all.
Still, I am uneasy. I have to find a way to be with people in a less spectacular
fashion. I didn’t see how Mohamad thirsted for prestige. He got drunk on it, and
how can I blame him? It’s all very well for me to go around feeling humble, but I
must also be aware of the effect I am having on others. It could be potent.

Sousse is a big town of eighty-four thousand people. Hassen the engine

driver lives here, but his directions are hopelessly inadequate. Maybe he never
meant me to find him. Anyway, I have spent too long now looking for him, and it’s
too late to ride on. I come across a beautiful old part of town, and a hotel of
mosaic, tiles, frothy arches and cool interiors. A room for a dinar. Behind the
hotel is a tiny lean-to shelter crammed with rags and boxes where I can put the
bike. A man in a torn and dirty kaftan watches me struggle to manoeuvre the bike
in through a narrow gate, ten minutes of hard work, and then says: ‘One dinar.’
I am furious at him. ‘You should have told me before,’ I yelp.
That’s right, you tell him. Let’s have some English justice and fair play around
here. God, Simon, you are a prick.
I argue the price down to something reasonable. In the morning, where I
thought there was room only for the bike, I see there are people sleeping too. The
information hits me like a custard pie in the face.
There’s a lot of water everywhere. The roads near the sea front are under
two feet of it. Do they mention this in the brochures? I see a package of Nordic
tourists washed up in a hotel lobby. The hotel looks as though it has absorbed
its own weight of water.
Crossing overland to Sfax I see another antediluvian wonder rear up ahead
of me. A vast wall shot through with rows of ragged windows bars my way like a
small mountain range. At the last minute it veers off sharply to the right and
becomes the remains of a coliseum.
El Djem is flooded. Sfax also. The watery greyness keeps me going. Along
the coast now, more life, more traffic, mud-brick houses, market gardens, date
palms, donkeys, camels, all the things you read about, see in pictures. When you
get there you know none of it was right.
Riding cautiously in the wet, I have gone only 165 miles by midafternoon. I
decide to stop at Gabès, very aware of the Libyan frontier coming close. I want
to prepare for it somehow. Tunisia is not part of the war. It is a Western-oriented,
tourist-conscious, bilingual country. Libya is belligerent, fanatical, oil-rich and
runs according to the laws of the Prophet Mohammed, or so I am told. I decide to
post all my exposed film off now, and at the last minute remember a document I’m
carrying that has an Israeli stamp on it and send that away as well. Images of
search and interrogation flash across my mind. They make me both shiver and
laugh at myself. Extreme situations always seem absurd until they happen.
When does the ‘B’ movie become a documentary? Back at the factory in
Meriden we laughed about my untried, unprepared motorcycle. ‘Chances are,’
said one mechanic, ‘if you don’t worry about it, it’ll go all the way with no bother.’
said one mechanic, ‘if you don’t worry about it, it’ll go all the way with no bother.’
I chose to worry. I took all the tools and spare parts I could carry, and half an
hour later the oil fell out. Because I was prepared?
Does it rain because you carry your umbrella, or because you don’t? It’s a
personal matter depending on how you remember it. The way I write my own
history it’s low on winning streaks. I never could gamble. I like to work things out
in advance, but it bothers me to think of what I might have been missing. I’ve
done too much hacking away against the grain of life. Without all that solemn
effort, maybe, I could have gone further, faster, easier.
Remember what my headmaster said thirty years ago, that tar-stained old
walrus: ‘Simon, you think too much.’
Thinking’s like a black tunnel. Once you’re in it you have to think your way
through to the other end. At least I think so.
The Libyan immigration man, if that’s who he is, has a limp shotgun folded
over his arm and hunting boots laced up around his trouser cuffs. He appears
happy. He has several duplicated forms in Arabic, and points to where I should
sign. I am being processed into Libya like a monkey, by sign language. I put my
name to everything without question.
He takes my passport. ‘Helt,’ he says. Helt? Oh, health. His first and only
English word. I produce my vaccination certificates, grinning (like a monkey) and
pass on. There’s a lot of hanging about. Nobody will speak to me in a language I
understand. The customs chief is in a shiny silver Italian suit, with a carton of
Marlboroughs under his arm. He touches a few of my dusty things fastidiously.
‘Visky?’ he says. And that’s his English word for the day. The Infidel monkey
shakes his head and enters Libya. It is not that they cannot speak anything but
Arabic. They will not. It is part of the Libyan crusade for Islam. We are not
always kind to our foreigners and it is a sobering experience to have the tables
turned. In the good old days, I suppose, one would have spoken English at the
top of one’s voice until the natives just naturally gave way, but then we had
Queen Victoria to fall back on.
On my left, a few miles of sand dunes and then the sea, blue fading to grey.
On my right, desert, and nothing but desert. The map says there are 1,500 miles
of it to Nigeria as the crow flies, if a crow could. Above, the sky is clear in all
directions. Ahead the road is an impeccable two-lane tarmac. A mild wind raises
a curtain of dust over the desert, nothing awkward, just enough to blur the
outlines of a few camels. There is no trace of a human presence anywhere.
I stop to taste the emptiness, listen to the silence, like the hiss of a blank
tape playing. It’s a bit awesome. Although I could easily do the hundred miles to
Tripoli before nightfall, I know that I must sleep out in a real desert tonight.
The city-bred boy in me is frightened, and all the usual alarm signals go off in
my head. Can I ride on this stuff? What will happen if I sink into it? Is it safe?
Who might come by in the night? A tingling mixture of fear and anticipation,
waiting to combine into something like joy. Once the decision is made it’s easy. I
choose a spot among some dunes on the seaward side and prop up the bike,
thanks to a metal disc welded onto the end of the swing stand, one good idea
t ha t did get carried out. Then the tent. Where? Which way? How anchored?
Every action is part of a routine to be studied and perfected. How many times will
I be doing this? Hundreds? It is worth getting it right. I use the bike to anchor one
side of the tent, and find a boulder for the other side. What about the fly sheet?
Will it rain? It seems impossible. The sky is clear from horizon to horizon, but
still, just in case…Then in goes the bedding. The flying jacket folded inside out
makes a great pillow. So it goes on. As I move around the bike I try to notice
everything about it, chain tension, tyre tread, anything coming loose, falling off,
trying to build up a picture of it as it should be so that any change rings a warning
bell…and sure enough there’s a rocker box cap loose. I can see the thread.
Those bloody things. What a fucking awful design. Fifteen seconds of profanity
to make their ears burn in Meriden. Must remember to tighten it, with jointing
compound. No! Do it now. You’ll forget. And while you’re about it check the battery
level.
There’s the Optimus stove to fill from the tank, a messy business because I
can’t see the level in the stove, and it’s hard to control the flow of fuel anyway.
Must find a better way. There are stuffed peppers canned in Hungary to eat with
rice. The whole performance, unpacking, checking, cooking and clearing up
keeps me moving and thinking for nearly two hours. I have almost forgotten
where I am. With coffee and a cigarette I settle back into the astounding hush of
the desert and remember, and then a really fierce flood of joy comes rushing over
me.
Just look at me. Look where I am. Isn’t this too bloody fantastic for words? It’s
me here, not Lawrence of Arabia or Rudolf Valentino or Rommel and the Afrika
Korps. Me, and this little machine, we made it here.
The sun has run off into the sand somewhere in Tunisia. The stars are
making unbelievably big holes in the moonless night. I am in a stupor of delight. If
the journey ends tomorrow it will have been worth it, but a premonition sweeps
away all doubt and for once I allow myself to know that the journey will not end
tomorrow and that there will be many times when I will feel this same
overwhelming joy. Tonight we are showing the ‘A’ film.
Life never leaves well alone. I feel the wind change, see the lightning at sea,
hear the thunder. In early morning the storm moves inland. It rains very heavily
and I’m afraid the water may undermine the bike and drop it on the tent and me,
but I did choose slightly higher ground and it should be all right. I decide to wait it
out. At last a break in the rain. I pack hastily, the tent full of water and sand, and
get back on the road to Tripoli.
All I know of Libya is the Road, a thousand miles of road, good fast highway,
stretched along the African coast like a washing line. Libya hangs from the line
like a giant’s bedsheet, pegged on by Tripoli and Benghazi, blistering in the sun.
They say there are some lovely damp spots down below among the folds at Kufra
and Sebha, but what I see from the road is outrageous.
Out in the desert I see a tent, the old kine made of hides strung on poles in
graceful peaks and troughs where the Sheik of Arabee forced our forebears to
swallow sheep’s eyes and murmur ‘delicious’. Out of the top grows a television
aerial. Alongside the tent are two gas bottles, and beside them is parked a new
Mercedes limousine. The owner strides out in billowing white cotton, leaps in
kicking off his sandals and presses a leathery foot down hard on the accelerator.
A little way along the road on the other side, are two camels tethered next to
an aeroplane.
Every man in Libya, employed or not, single or married, gets a weekly oil
dividend from the state. In the towns people are doing up their places. Every
other shop sells paint. And every other shop sells audio/optical gear from Japan.
The Koran is proclaimed throughout the land on triumphal arches set across the
roads. Alcohol and women out of wedlock are forbidden. Whisky is twenty-five
dollars a bottle and forty-eight hours in gaol for a first offence. Women wrap
themselves in a chequered shroud, holding it in their mouths so that sometimes
only an eye and a tooth are visible. You must not look at the eye. (Who would
want to? The one I saw glittered like glass.)
Tripoli looks as though it were recently bombed. It still has an Italian air
about it, I think, from the colonial days. The Italians are back with contracts. In
my hotel red-necked Italian pipe layers lounge in the breakfast room reading
comics. The hotel is very expensive and I have to go to the bank. There are three
cashiers, but the man ahead of me in the line reaches into his plastic shoulder
bag and brings out a pile of notes a foot high, mostly in tens and twenties. Now
all three cashiers are counting his money. Halfway through a stack someone
shouts a greeting, a cashier replies, has a little chat, loses count and starts
again. It takes twenty minutes before they manage to get through it all without
interruption. I draw one five-pound note and wonder why they don’t just give me a
handful.
From Tripoli to Sirte is three hundred miles, and I’m really flying with the
engine singing for me and everything rapping along nicely. There’s a lot of rain,
but I’m less nervous of the wet now, on tar at least. The land and sea lie flat out
forever, and I can see the weather coming maybe fifty miles ahead. I have never
seen so much weather. I can see where it begins and where it ends; I can see the
blue sky above, and the approaching storms and then the good times beyond.
Remarkable. Like having an overview of past and future. I am a world spinning
through visible time. The weather so much resembles history. Great forces
meeting, interacting, discharging their energies. Over there the blackest of clouds
is shedding doom on the land below. What does that poisonous-looking deluge
represent? Plague? Famine? Civil war? Those who are under its terrible
judgement can certainly not see beyond it. To them it must seem as if the
universe is engulfed. While I can see that it is a momentary thing.
All morning I’m flying along under the weather, with my head down at seventy,
left arm resting along the handlebar, listening to the rroomm-rroomm of the
engine, the zappity-zappity of the anorak rippling in the airstream, the crackling of
the visor on the open-face helmet. This part of the coast is more fertile: olive
groves, thousands of date palms, settlements with paddy cultivation, many wells
with curious stepped walls on either side of them. There are many big, white
Peugeot taxis on the road. Outwardly they are the familiar blank modules of
industrial civilization; inside, turbans, fezes and veils huddled over bundles of rich
fabrics. The effect is like a Frigidaire packed with shrunken heads, or a digital
display that tells fortunes. Thousands of these taxis run immense distances
between Tripoli and Cairo. Sometimes I see one leave the road without warning
and plunge into the open desert. Only with shaded eyes can I see the dark speck
of a tent on some distant rising ground.
Now it’s getting noticeably drier and wilder. Soon there’s only desert on both
sides, and the wind is whistling clouds of it across the road. Sand flickers on the
tarmac like flames and, in places, dunes are building up on the surface. Many
camels graze at the roadside where, for some reason, there seems to be more
shrubbery, lanky young animals starting away in fright at the unfamiliar sound of
the bike. I see a sandbar across the road and relax on the throttle to slow down.
No change. The engine races on and suddenly it’s urgent. Brakes on, clutch out,
and I lean forward to switch off the ignition, since there is no kill button.
The carburettor slide is stuck. I have to ride on like that for twenty miles, an
interesting problem until I get to Ben-Gren, where there’s shelter, petrol and a
cafe.
My first roadside repair is easy enough once I get out of the flying sand. The
garage owner is so intrigued that he gives me a free spaghetti lunch with meat
sauce and grated cheese. There are very few strangers in Libya, and I am able to
see how the absence of tourism allows people to take a natural and generous
interest in travellers. I am highly privileged.
It’s dark long before I get to Sirte, and a road barrier looms up with a
diversion arrow pointing off into the open desert on my left. My lights can pick up
no track there, but the tarmac ahead looks fine, so I go cautiously ahead. The
tarmac widens abruptly, and I begin to grasp that I am on an airstrip. After a
while a jeep rushes up behind me and stops. It is full of army. A lieutenant in
British-style uniform takes my passport and searches through it with a torch.
Their faces are most impassive, and I am expecting trouble. Instead they all take
turns to shake my hand warmly and wave me on. A nice moment.
I have just decided to sleep out when I get to the police checkpoint at Sirte.
The guard insists that I go straight to a hotel. I ride up the muddy hill to spend the
evening among men lounging in pyjamas, curly slippers and tasselled fezes,
playing trictrac and smoking elaborate pipes. The clerk pretends to speak English
and I ask him about the stepped walls alongside the wells.
‘It is like this,’ he says. ‘From here is Benghazi three hundred and fifty miles,
and…’ Ah. Yes. I see.
Three hundred and sixty-five miles, to be exact, is quite a long way on a
motorcycle. I’m up early and flying again. After a few minutes of sun, the rain
breaks over me. For three hours I ride through it, constantly grateful that the
electrics hold up. There are two shaky moments on ridges of dried mud made
soapy by fresh rain. Other than that I am only wet. The rain has worked its way
through the seams of the rubberized waterproofs, and my boots are squelching.
When I come out from under the roof of rain cloud the desert around me
looks like primaeval swamp and the camels make suitable-looking monsters.
Rivers of floodwater rush along the side of the road. Then, within hours,
everything, myself included, is dry as a bone again.
Benghazi’s tallest buildings are already in sight when I run out of petrol.
Evidently the petrol is poor since it is not delivering the expected mileage, but I
feel stupid and annoyed with myself for being caught like this.
I stand by the roadside to wave at the traffic and the first car stops for me. It
is a little Fiat saloon with two young men in the front and a large bundle of
laundry on the back seat which turns out to be not laundry at all but an elderly
female relative.
The men are clean-shaven, tidily groomed in Western dress and energetically
helpful. They shower services upon me. We siphon some petrol from their tank.
They escort me into town and help to find me a hotel. On the way, at a petrol
station, they fill my tank and absolutely refuse money. And finally they lend me a
pound because the banks are closed.
The Oilfield Hotel is my home for a week. It costs one pound to occupy one
of the three cast-iron infirmary beds in a room, but most nights the other beds are
empty. Only once do I have a roommate, a coal-black Nubian cook on his way to
work in an oil rigger’s camp near Tripoli. His friendly chuckles when awake are
offset by the loudest snore I have ever heard. In the night I throw everything at
him, but the express trains continue to roar in and out of his nostrils. If he stayed
one more night I would have had to move out.
The Egyptian Consul confirms that it is entirely out of the question for me to
cross into Egypt by road.
‘I suppose I can always try,’ I say.
His smile is the one reserved for troublesome idiots.
‘Yes. You may try.’
I research all the other ways into Egypt. By ship? At best time-wasting and
uncertain, but now captains are refusing to take their vessels into Alexandria.
By air? Terribly expensive for the bike and also, at present, uncertain. I could
fly myself and road freight the bike, but I am warned that I might never see the
bike again.
T he Sunday Times has offered to send credentials to help me across the
border. It seems worth waiting a bit. Benghazi is, at first, an enjoyable city. It has
lovely squares with palms, pools and fountains, and a big bazaar, a gold market,
cloistered shops full of desirable objects like ivory back scratchers and musical
instruments.
In the same street as the hotel is a motorcycle repair shop. Kerim el Fighi, the
owner, cannot do enough for me. I have the run of the place, and decide to paint
the boxes green. The gleaming white fibreglass offends me now. I want a bike
that loses itself in the landscape, rather than standing out. I even wind green
tape over the bright chrome of the headlamp and handlebars.
It is easy to make friends here. There are so many young men around with
nothing to do. They are courteous, inquisitive and good company, but very cut off
from the world and from knowledge in general. They seem hungry for involvement,
and prowl the streets like wolves, but there is nothing to occupy their minds
except the latest film, which they are likely to see several times. The new money
has liberated them, but for what? They seem very bewildered by the changes, and
the obvious conflict between the religious values preached by Qaddafi and the
Koran, and the New Age of technology. In any case it is all speculation, over
endless rounds of fizzy drinks. In Benghazi, at least the women are freer of
purdah, and many walk around in Western dress, but they are still quite
unapproachable.
After a week of waiting there is still no mail from London. I can’t bear the
inaction any longer. Tomorrow I’ll go to the border, right or wrong. An English
technician tells me the border is a military one.
‘They have very itchy trigger fingers. Shoot first and ask afterwards. Poof!
One more Sunday Times man gone.’
I feel as though I’m going to the front, rather than crossing a frontier. Kerim
tells me that there are some interesting ruins on the way to Tobruk. ‘Roman. Very
good.’ I decided to take the shortest route to the border and do my tourism on the
way back, but I am quite convinced that in a few days I shall be back in
Benghazi. The road follows the coast awhile and then rises gently into the hills of
Cyrenaica. This is the part of the coast closest to Greece and Crete, where the
Greeks and Romans gained their first foothold in Africa, but I knew little and
cared less about antiquity at the time.
The air was fresher and the land more fertile. There were farms all around
and many small peasant huts. A man walked out of a hut and, three steps from
his threshold, swept his robe up over his hips and squatted in a single,
surprisingly graceful movement. Only afterwards did I realize what he had been
doing.
‘Good God,’ I said aloud. ‘So close to his own doorstep?’
The way wound among outcroppings of crusty white rock, enfolding pine
woods, areas of scrub and gorse, patches of soft springy grass and streams
with reedy banks. The landscape felt familiar and drew me irresistibly. I found a
particularly luxurious-looking patch of grass shielded from the road by a row of
low thorns and set up the tent there. No question, that land felt like mine, and I
was entirely at home in it.
 The moon was full and I realized for the first time that I had started my
journey under a full moon exactly a month before. That night the moon seemed
more brilliant than I had ever known it, and night was simply a reflection of day in
a silver mirror. I ate and drank and smoked and wrote, doing all those things with
great pleasure, and then lay down in the tent convinced that the day was over.
As I lay, drowsily waiting for sleep, a male voice drifted across, seeming to come
from the road. I heard a dog bark. The voice replied. They were moving along, but
instead of fading, they grew stronger.
By now I was fully awake, trying to locate the position of the intruder and
track his movements. Not for the first time I thought how hopelessly vulnerable I
was, practically naked and inside this small nylon envelope. For a while there was
silence, but I was increasingly nervous for I had heard nothing to suggest that he
had moved away. Suddenly the voice broke out again, but very close this time
and loud, singing a lusty song. This was too much for me. I scrambled into my
clothes and prepared to struggle out of the tent, but as soon as I put my head
out, my fears dissolved in astonishment.
I was surrounded by sheep. I looked out on a sea of silver fleece, a hundred
animals or more. Not one sound had I heard to mark their approach. Well beyond
them, farther away than I had thought and perhaps even unaware of my
presence, stood two figures.
If everything in that light seemed to be painted in silver, their robes appeared
to have been woven of the metal. Their faces were in shadow, but they carried
their silver raiment with the majesty of kings. A window flew open on the past, on
half-baked impressions left by Bible tales and Christmas carols which I had
discounted then as silly fables and superstitions. Such things had no place in the
crowded streets and classrooms of my childhood. They were only possible here,
under this sky, in this light and on this land. This was Bible country, and on a
night like this one could believe.
I walked over to the shepherds and exchanged the Arab greetings I had
learned. We could do no more. We smoked a cigarette together peacefully and
after ten minutes I returned to the tent and slept.
During the hours before dawn the temperature fell below freezing and I woke
to find the frost glistening on the ground. The shepherds were still there, and now
they were as remarkable for their poverty as they had been for their grandeur.
Their faces were ugly and dulled by ignorance. Their robes were transformed from
silver cloth to sacking. They were huddled on the ground, miserably cold, two ill-
favoured and pathetic peasants gazing in awe at the paraphernalia I was
struggling to pack with frozen fingers. I would have made coffee for them, but
there was no water left. The contrast between day and night inspired no lofty
sentiments in me at the time. It was too cold for that.
I shared my last cigarettes with them and left. At the next town I realized that
I was not on the road I had meant to take, but was headed willy-nilly for the
antiquities. An hour later I was at Cyrene.
I meant to pay only a token visit. Roman ruins, I felt, were a bit too close to
home, and my mind always seemed to be travelling several thousand miles ahead
of my body. The entrance to the site was a wonderful gateway of honey-coloured
sandstone soaring above me. I entered and found myself in a vast forum, rows of
columns reaching out beyond anything I could have imagined possible, and
between the columns tantalizing glimpses of more marvels in every direction. I
was alone in a great Roman city, certainly the only sightseer there. At one time I
saw some robed women in an amphitheatre, but they fled at my approach. I spent
the day wandering, entranced, among pools and patios, gymnasia, temples, and
in and out of the homes of ordinary Roman citizens. In one part an Italian
archaeologist was involved in restoration with some workmen, but they seemed
to belong more to the city’s past history than the present. Later in the afternoon
the bubble burst for ten minutes when a party of very superior air force
commanders swept round the ruins at the speed of flight, with their uniformed
photographer bursting blood vessels to break the record for exposures per
minute. He was using flash in that blinding sun, which meant that he was
interested only in their faces, and I thought that summed up their trip very well.
Just faces.
I finished the day on the lower level of the city, with the Mediterranean spread
out below me. As the sun itself faded, the light seemed to spring out of the stone,
and the city glowed before falling back into the night. I knew that these
experiences, the shepherds, Cyrene, were striking deep into me, that each day’s
events seemed to intensify the following day, and yet I had barely grazed the
edge of my first continent. At the hotel I ate a meal with two French salesmen
taking time off for a side trip. They were pleasant to talk to, informative about
Arab deficiencies, but they seemed to me to have left their imaginations at home
in Paris. Did I seem as ordinary, as uninspired to them? They were used to
Africa, of course. To them, this was like visiting the Tower of London. It struck
me that everywhere in the world I would meet people to whom being there would
be an ordinary, everyday event. Was my journey really nothing more than a state
of mind?
I slept out again that night, on the coast just beyond Marsa Susa, and I knew
next morning that I would have to reach the border that day. By lunchtime I was
already in Tobruk, a dry bone of a city, splintering and powdering in the sun. I met
an Irishman in the street. He worked for the ‘Aisle’ Institute, where he taught
English (or Irish) to Libyan oil men. He was earning £500 a month, a fortune in
those days, and with his savings he was buying an apartment in Rome, another
one in Ancona and a farmhouse in Ireland. He asked me in for lunch with his
Italian wife and small children. She hated Arabs, and said her children couldn’t
play with their children for fear of catching skin diseases.
‘I can’t say I care for them myself,’ said the Irishman. ‘They seem to regard
all Westerners as exploiters. But it wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t treat us like
Martians in the streets.’ They invited me to sleep there on my way back. I didn’t
know if I would. I felt rather sorry for them. These were nice people who seemed
to have missed the point somewhere, but then I didn’t have to live their lives.
I set off with the maximum of nonchalance, to do the last seventy-five miles,
knowing I couldn’t get through, but unable to forget what a fantastic triumph it
would be if I did.
The first checkpoint appeared across the road about an hour before sunset,
time for me to get back to Tobruk before dark. There was a barrier and a small,
portable cabin. The guard looked at my passport, and the sheaf of Arabic
documents, extracted the currency control form and handed the rest back to me
with a grin. He slid the barrier back and said ‘Bye-bye.’ Obviously he was having
his little joke. I laughed too, and went on to the real frontier. A small queue of
taxis was lined up ahead of me a few miles farther on. I joined the queue, but a
soldier spotted me and waved me to the front. He took my passport into the
office with him and brought it back with the visa cancelled. I began to get very
excited and a little alarmed at what might happen when the Egyptians sent me
back. Because surely they would send me back. I looked at the visas again, idly,
and the ground suddenly seemed to slide away from under me. The Egyptian visa
had an extra bit tacked alongside it, reading the wrong way on the page. In all the
times I had looked at the passport I had somehow failed to notice it. The
message was direct and shattering. It read: ‘Access to the U.A.R. via the coast
of N. Africa & Salloum is not permitted.’ Part of it was almost obscured by the
thick border of the principal visa stamp, but even so, if you were looking for it you
could not miss it.
Well, either the Libyans had missed it, or they were playing me a sinister trick.
There was only one thing for me to do, and that was to go on as though I hadn’t
seen it either. The gate swung open, and I went through, swallowing hard.
A hundred yards or so farther on was something that looked like a railway
station, with three platforms, and two tracks for incoming and outgoing traffic,
but first came another barrier. Always I was waiting for the hand that would rise
before me and bar my way. Again I was waved on.
‘You can go through.’
‘What? All the way?’
‘Yes, you can go.’
The station was in a ferment of activity. The platforms were piled high with
mounds of carpets and cushions in plastic bags, being guarded or argued over by
men dressed in every kind of robe and headgear and an army of officials in
crumpled khakis. I rode straight through it all and out the other side. The guard at
the gate there was about to let me through when a voice shouted: ‘No. Stop.
Come back please.’
The guard pointed back and mumbled something. I turned to see a small roly-
poly man with a shiny unshaven face, smiling at me through his whiskers.
‘Come please,’ he said. ‘We cannot ignore the formalities. Can I see your
passport please? You are going to Cairo? Welcome to Egypt. Now we must see
the captain.’
I brought out my newspaper cutting, almost a full page of the Sunday Times
with a photograph of me, the bike and all my gear spread out around it. I talked
about my journey as though the future of Egypt depended on it, and did
everything to distract attention from the visa. Even so, I was surprised by the
enjoyment it seemed to give them.
‘I will do everything to help you,’ said Roly-Poly. ‘Would you like some tea?’
With a glass of clear tea, sweetand delicious, in my hand, feeling like Alice in
Wonderland, I confronted the first of the Eight Mandatory Obstacles between me
and Egypt. The first man read my visa several times, paying particular attention
to the ‘No Entry’ qualification. He seemed to see nothing there of interest. Number
two was the police. They read the visa again, but upside down, and then filled out
a small form torn raggedly off a sheet of duplicating paper, having great difficulty
with the XRW 964M. Numbers three and four had to do with the papers I had
brought from Libya. There were flurried exchanges, and already I had difficulty
finding a way to hold on to them all. At one point I lost sight of the first paper
from the police.
‘Is it important?’ asked Roly-Poly.
‘Well, I don’t know.’
‘It is not,’ he said firmly. ‘Never mind,’ and swept me on to change my money
at number five, to pay for licensing the bike at number six. Then back to number
three for an argument about the customs carnet, and on to number seven, where
the Libyans discharged it. Finally, in an office well away from the crowd, a police
officer sat behind the most venerable set of ledgers I had ever seen. They had
been thumbed so often that their corners had been rounded off, and the paper
was the colour of the pyramids. They lay right along the length of his table like
blocks of eroded sandstone, and I had no doubt that it was on these that the
future of Egypt really depended.
He filled out my carnet and handed me two heavy metal number plates.
‘Finished,’ he said.
‘Finished?’ asked Roly-Poly. ‘Have you thanked the captain?’
‘I always thank everybody,’ I replied, naively.
He burst into laughter.
‘Now,’ he said with special emphasis, ‘can I help in any other way?’
I fumbled towards my pocket and then decided against it. Why should I
assume he wanted a ‘gratuity’? I thanked him sincerely and turned away. His
contented expression did not falter.
I went to the bike. I simply could not believe it. My heart had been in my mouth
and was still there, pumping hard. I folded all the pieces of paper I had been given
into my passport. Because the jacket had no pockets, I laid the passport on top
of my wallet and some waterproof gloves in one of the side boxes. I locked the
box. I found some wire and tied both plates on tight at the back of the bike. All
the while I was expecting to hear someone shout ‘Hey. You. Just a minute.’
I got on the bike, very deliberately, tickled the carburettor and kicked it over.
Then I rode slowly through the gate into the town called Salloum. I delayed the
moment of triumph as long as possible. Salloum was small but treacherous in the
night. The road was narrow and bad, and there were cows roaming about loose.
Ticking like a time bomb, I rode downhill through the winding street, and then,
abruptly, I was out in the open spaces again and I could hold my ecstasy back
no longer.
I roared and sang and jiggled with delight. I was in Egypt, and everything was
different. The moon, the stars, the temperature, the smell of the air, all seemed to
be subtly Egyptian. It was a wonder I stayed on the bike, I was so pleased with
myself, as though it were some remarkable quality in me that had achieved the
single-handed conquest of Egypt.

So sure had I been that I would not get through that I had not once
considered where I would head for if I did. I had not even thought about petrol.
Holding my map under the headlight I saw that there was a pump at Sidi Barani,
fifty miles along. I seemed to arrive there in no time at all. There was fuel, but
nowhere to stay. The town, if there was one, had melted into darkness.
Eighty-five miles to Mersa Matruh. Nothing. I felt like riding all night, to Cairo if
necessary.
Ten miles short of Matruh I saw some painted oil barrels across the road,
with a hurricane lamp burning on one of them. Light shone from the doorway of a
little hut. I slowed down and a soldier approached me. He laid his left arm across
his right wrist and opened his right hand, palm upwards, in the sign that meant
‘Papers!’
I stopped, unlocked the box and brought out the passport. An older man in
pyjamas and fez came out of the hut.
‘Please wait,’ he said. ‘It will be ten minutes only.’
I heard a manual telephone cranking and lit a cigarette. After a while a third
man came out and got into a black car parked beyond the barrier. As he started
the engine and drove off the man in pyjamas hurried over to me.
‘Follow that car, please,’ he said urgently. ‘They will clear you in Matruh if you
hurry, but they are just going to close down.’
I was infected by the slight sense of panic and rushed off. The car was doing
over seventy miles an hour and I had some difficulty catching it. Then, for the
second time that day, the bowels of the earth slid open beneath me. I reached
back with my right hand. The lid of the box had been blown off. Expecting to put
the passport back, I had not locked it again. I stopped immediately. The wallet
had gone. I looked at the mileage indicator. It could have happened anywhere in
the last six miles.
 The wallet contained driving licences, vaccination certificates, credit cards,
photographs, currency and an address book. Losing it seemed like an
overwhelming disaster. Two cholera shots, a yellow-fever shot and a smallpox
vaccination would have to be done again. There were addresses I might never
recover. The cash, the credit cards were extra layers of defence stripped away.
But how far could I get without a driving licence?
 Slowly I drove back, on the wrong side of the road, searching but numbed by
this sudden reverse in my fortunes. I had ridden nearly four hundred miles that
day, and the weariness hit me then. I tried to think clearly. The gloves should
have been the last objects to fall, and as they were quite bulky I hoped to see
them where a black wallet might not show.
For a mile I saw nothing. Then I saw light ahead, and the murmur of engines
running. I came across two taxis, one coming, one going, stopped alongside
each other with their interior lights on. One driver was in the middle of the road, a
tall bearded man in white robe and turban. He stood in the space carved out of
the darkness by the car lights, and seemed very much in command of that space.
I wanted to stop and ask whether he had seen anything, but he waved me on
peremptorily. His hand was raised in a threatening way and he stared at me
fiercely. I felt too weak to resist, and rode on.
I went on searching vainly until I got back to the police post. A truck was
coming through, and the police commandeered it to help me search in the much
brighter illumination of its headlights. After a while I found the lid of the box. Then
the truck driver spotted the first glove, and soon after I saw the second one. The
wallet should have been between the lid and the gloves. I went up and down
several times but found nothing.
I was in a state of despair out of all proportion to the disaster. Weariness,
the end of a long day, me alone with the bike at midnight in a Strange country at
war; that was part of it. From Mark Antony to Charlie Brown in one thoughtless
moment. I snatched at the lesson. As always I felt I could endure my tribulations
if there was something to be learned from them. Euphoria leads to
thoughtlessness. That’s how fortunes are told. So OK. No more mindless chasing
after cars. Is that all?
No, that was not all. I went over the incident again in my mind, saw the Arab
standing in that pool of light in the darkness, with his arm raised. Yes, but I had
seen something else, before I had even known what I was looking at. I had seen
him straightening up, that was it, straightening his legs. He had been rising from
the road surface and I had seen him do it but I had not wanted to know because I
was too tired. No! Not too tired, too frightened. I was too frightened of that
imperious wave of the hand, of that fierce glance, to face up to the fact that he
had just found my wallet on the road.
The discovery was devastating. I had thought I was a man. I had taken risks
and come through them in the way a man was supposed to, and yet here I was
after all just a boy quailing before the first figure of authority that came my way. It
went very deep in me, this fear of authority, and it sickened me to find myself as
vulnerable as ever. I knew the robed figure would haunt me for a long time. It was
the beginning of a long struggle.
Hard as it was to bear this moment of self-realization, I found some kind of
strength in it. I piled up some stones to mark the place where I had been
searching and rode on to the checkpoint at Matruh where I was given back my
passport. I explained what I was doing, and went back to go on with the search,
but with no more success than before.
Then I started thinking. If the Arab had taken the wallet, he would probably
not keep it. He would take what was valuable and throw away the rest. Where?
Before the checkpoint. I rode up to the first checkpoint again, and worked back.
The driver of a car going to Libya would throw something from his window across
the road to the other side. But no. In Libya traffic drives on the right, in Egypt on
the left. So it would be a left-hand-drive car, driving on the left of the road. I
followed the right-hand verge going towards Matruh. Fifty yards along I saw a
small bundle of paper against the root of a bush. The wallet had been broken in
half. No money. No address section. No photographs. No credit cards. But the
vaccination certificates were there, and one international driving licence. I could
find nothing more in the area. Partly relieved, and a little better pleased with
myself, I returned to Matruh.
It was two in the morning. The police corporal received me with genuine
pleasure. He was short and unprepossessing, his uniform crumpled and short in
the leg, with some kind of blue and white band around one arm. He was in charge
of a small platoon of even more ragged soldiers, but they were all obviously
excited by the arrival of a man on a motorcycle, and determined to look after me.
They produced tea. Then a handful of dates much bigger than any I had seen,
and some corned beef and flat bread. The corporal’s face was a landscape
devastated by pockmarks. He spoke a little English and was fiercely patriotic. He
wanted me to know about the crushing defeat Egypt had inflicted on Israel. As I
munched my dates, sitting on a rough bench near a charcoal fire, he stood over
me repeating, fanatically, the same words.
‘Nekesta week, brekfast in Tel Aviv. Nekesta week, brekfast in Tel Aviv. Israel
finish. Is good?’ And all of them stared at me looking for the truth in my eyes, but
I wasn’t going to let myself slip twice in a night, and I said there should be no war
and that nobody wanted to fight on either side. By a charcoal fire in the Egyptian
night the most banal remark can have the force of prophecy, and my words were
received with wonder and agreement.
They built me a bedroom. Literally. While the corporal taught me Arabic, they
made a soft-board roof over some heaps of brick, and a platform to lie on. At
four o’clock I was allowed to sleep.
In the morning I went back for the third time to the police post on the Salloum
road, and found pages of addresses and photographs spread over the desert.
They were all there. Only cash and credit cards were still gone. I thought I had
been very lucky after all.
The road to Alexandria had military on it all the way. Immediately outside
Matruh a very pukka officer with a dapper moustache sat behind a desk in an
open tent. He asked for my permit to travel to Alex. I brought out all my papers. It
was not among them, he said. I began to suspect that I might still not be in Egypt
after all. Then, purely by chance, I found the scrap of paper that had been filled
in by the semi-illiterate police clerk, that my roly-poly guide had dismissed as
unimportant. It was, in fact, the only piece of paper I really needed.
On the road, the new war and the old one blended together. (English,
German, Italian – ‘Manqua fortuna, non valore.’) War cemeteries, thirty-year-old
tanks, routing instructions for Monty’s armies still scrawled on semiruined walls,
and El Alamein, where I had a good lunch and a pint of beer for a dollar.
Matruh to Alex, one hundred and eighty-one miles, the hottest miles so far.
An older, narrower, bumpier road than the Libyan highway. The coast was
absurdly picturesque. On a postcard one would have said the printing was far too
garish. Turquoise sea, radiant sand. Small homesteads by the roadside, donkeys
and camels ploughing, turning over the top three inches of sandy soil with
wooden ploughs. Graceful women in brilliantly coloured dress carrying water on
their heads. Then, more and more houses, gardens, and just before the plunge
into the city an extraordinary area of stone, whipped and carved and flung into
waves and troughs like a high sea suddenly turned to salt.
Then Alexandria, and in the twilight an endless scramble through miles of
cobbled dockside streets, tramlines, mad traffic and people in ever-greater
compression, nowhere to go, nothing to aim for, except the centre. The fate I
escaped in Palermo caught up with me in Alexandria. I broke through the
commercial areas at last and found a square on the sea front, and parked
opposite an expensive hotel called The Cecil. As I nudged the front wheel against
the kerb and looked behind me I saw black smoke around the exhaust pipes. I
knew I was in trouble, but refused to think about it. A thin man in a blue jellaba
and headcloth appeared at my side.
‘You want hottle,’ he said. I agreed, and followed him around behind The
Cecil and into a high old Parisian-style building. He asked me for a coin and fed it
into a slot in the lift. The lift digested it slowly and began to rumble upwards. The
landings were open and Alexandrian life seemed to reveal itself by layers. On the
top floor was the Pension Normandie. I could not have asked for a better place.
It was cheap, clean, authentic, owned by a cuddly French widow and run on
her behalf with doting indulgence by an elderly employee called Georges. I
noticed only two other guests and both were French. One was a bluff middle-
aged man with a handsome, ruddy face and fair hair turning to white. He adored
competitive conversation, in which the object is either to sap or cap the last
speaker’s story, a sort of verbal bridge. His anecdotes were planned and
delivered more with the intention of frustrating the opposition and keeping the
play than simply to amuse, but it amounted to much the same thing, for he was a
skilful player and his stories about the resistance were new to me. He taught
French at a university in Cairo. The other guest, another French widow, had been
married to a very wealthy Egyptian in King Farouk’s time and was now retired on a
small income. She also told languid tales of life in the days of sashes and
cummerbunds and ten-foot wedding cakes, all very reminiscent of St Petersburg
under the czars, and could herself have been a Russian duchess, angular, erect,
always carefully groomed and lightly varnished all over.
Mme Mellasse, the owner, would kick off her slippers and fold her plump
stockinged legs on the sofa, the widow sat under a lamp stand examining her
carmine nail varnish and uttering brittle remarks, the professor, in good voice,
dominated the proceedings, and I, I suppose, brought news from the front rather
like a young cavalry officer on leave. We made a quaintly period quartet.
I carried out my first-ever major motorcycle overhaul in Alexandria. Both
pistons, I found, were deformed by heat, and I had only one spare piston with me
(a piece of nonsense which inspired more waves of telepathic profanity to burn
the ears of Meriden). I found a cavernous garage near Ramilies Station and
haggled bitterly over five piastres for the right to work there, and then received
many times that amount back in tea, cigarettes, snacks and true friendship from
the poor men who struggled to earn a livelihood in that place.
I took two days to do a job that might be done in two or three hours, but
every move was fraught with danger. Already I knew that there would be no
chance at all of getting spare parts in Egypt. I dared not make a mistake. The
pistons had seized their rings, and I replaced the less distorted one after
sculpting the slots with a razor blade. It seemed the only thing to do. I prayed
that I was right. I had no real idea about what had caused the overheating after
only four thousand miles, and felt rather gloomy about it.
There were many British motorcycles pumping round the streets and some
shops still had stocks of parts for them, but they were single-cylinder BSA’s,
Enfields, AJS’s of ancient vintage. It was warming to see all these old British
bikes plodding on after twenty years or more, and obviously held in high esteem,
but it was rather pathetic also. I knew that it was only economic policy that
prevented them importing new machines, and that small Japanese bikes would be
much better suited to them. If the Japanese ever got a foothold, British bikes
would quickly become only a nostalgic memory. There was so much goodwill
towards us that it seemed criminal to fritter it away, yet we had nothing to offer
now in competition.
When the Triumph was all buttoned up again I tested it rather nervously. The
first clouds of smoke frightened the life out of me but when the excess oil was
burned away, it ran clean and sounded fine. Only then did I allow myself the
luxury of looking at the city.
It took me an hour to clear the grease out of my fingernails in the
Normandie’s bathroom. I admired the tiles, the old-fashioned fittings and, as I
stood by the sink next to the lavatory, a bowl of Western design, I noticed for the
first time a brass valve wheel sticking out of the wall. Its function was obscure so
I gave it a turn to see what would happen, and a jet of water hit me in the chest.
Instinctively I turned it off, and looked for the source of the mischief, feeling like
the victim of a practical joke. It took me some while to notice the slender copper
pipe pointing straight at me out of the bowl of the lavatory. Once I had seen it I
couldn’t quite believe it, and had to play with it awhile, watching it, but even this
latest sophistication in oriental toiletry did not convert me, and I went on leaving
my paper trail across the face of Africa.
The obvious place to walk to from the Normandie was the sea front, only a
hundred yards away. In my linen jacket and white trousers I strolled along the
promenade, cameras slung ostentatiously round my neck, and raised the
telephoto lens experimentally to look at the lighthouse. One moment I had been
looking for someone to photograph, next moment I was surrounded. A hand
seized my shoulder, a voice shouted hysterically close to my ear. People came
rushing towards me. It seemed to me that they appeared from nowhere, out of
the cracks in the pavement. The man who had me in his grip was much smaller
than I. He wore a dirty brown fez and a jumper over a tee-shirt, something I have
always considered a sure sign of bad taste. His face was distorted by hate, his
veins and tendons stood out throbbing.
‘From where you come?’ he screamed, again and again, and when I said
England he went on screaming. ‘No. No. From where you come?’
The truth is I had completely forgotten about the war.
Fortunately there was a naval barracks just along the road, and some naval
police arrived before the mob grew big enough to lynch me. They were all for
treating me in a civilized way, but my captor insisted that they pin my arms behind
my back and frog-march me off. He would have liked to see me blindfolded and
led before a firing squad there and then.
As soon as we got into the navy yard, they let go of me and apologized
profusely. The apologies were taken up more elaborately by captains, majors and
finally a colonel who asked me to please not let this unfortunate incident colour
my good opinion of Egypt. Eventually a blue jeep was arranged to take me to the
general-in-command of the defence of Alexandria.
The general, like all the other officers, had a bed made up in his office. His
desk was burdened with a great quantity of patent medicines and tonics as well
as paper work, and he looked dyspeptic, myopic and tired, but he received me
with much grace, devoted ten minutes to discussing my journey, the merits of
Pentax cameras and the publicity that Triumph would undoubtedly get. By now I
had learned always to produce the Sunday Times cutting with my picture, It
opened more doors than my passport did.
The general took the film from the camera, a new roll with nothing on it,
wished me luck and returned reluctantly to his war. A brigadier next door gave me
tea and talked fondly of the years he spent living in London next to Harrods. I
was returned to the promenade and turned loose.
I went back to the Normandie, dumped the cameras, changed my swank
jacket for a disreputable sweater and went out again determined to see
something of Alexandria. Not far away, I found the sort of area I had been
looking for, a poor working neighbourhood crammed with tiny lockup shops,
people caning chairs, plucking chickens, bundling firewood, counting empty
bottles, scooping grain out of sacks into small cones of thick grey paper, beating
donkeys, dragging trolleys, recuperating scraps of everything under the sun. A
small boy in rags, no, in one rag, had his capital spread on the kerbstone in
aluminium coins and was counting it solemnly as though about to make an
important investment. A number of delicate gilt chairs stood tiptoe on the
pavement, like refugees from a revolution, having their seats stuffed.
I was standing, fascinated, in front of a display of dried beans; swarming with
weevil when a hand fell on my shoulder. I turned to face a man in a grubby blue
suit with a mourning band on his arm. He made the sign for ‘Papers’ and I had to
swallow my irritation, because I had left my papers in my jacket. He handed me to
another man, similarly dressed but less shaven and more villainous. They had the
same hard edge to their expressions that I had seen on the police in Tunis. They
sat me on a chair outside a cafe. A crowd of people began to gather, murmuring
‘Yehudi.’ The proprietor came out with a bucket of water and threw it over them.
They scattered and reformed, pressing closer. The ‘chief’ decided to take me to
his headquarters, a hutch buried under the staircase of a building across the
road, eight foot square, windowless and lined with ‘wanted’ pictures. It was the
sort of place where ‘B’ movie heroes are usually beaten up, and for the first time I
began to squirm a little. During both arrests, I had surprised myself by remaining
very cool and detached, and I was interested to see how disarming my behaviour
had been in the face of possible violence. Now, as I sat against a wall, facing the
door, where privileged onlookers were allowed to peer in at a genuine Israeli spy,
I felt less sure of my tactics. I watched a fire hose being dragged along the
corridor to the street, where the crowd had evidently become a mob, and thought
how helpless I was and how much I preferred being with the navy. Then the chief
brought a cup of coffee, and the time for a beating had evidently passed.
The episode dragged on, however, for the rest of the afternoon. I was driven
to police headquarters, then to the Normandie for my papers, then back to the
police and at last let go. There was a lot of waiting, but no attempt at ugliness. I
got to know a number of police and their relations, but to be arrested twice in one
hour was enough to convince me that my third attempt might be unlucky. I got my
bike out and rode to King Farouk’s old summer palace, the Montasah, to sneer at
the vulgarity of it, to admire the cool light inside and to be won over, finally, by the
bathroom showers that operated somewhat like a modern dishwashing machine,
and were no doubt supplied by Harrods.
The war news was not good. Tension was rising at Kilometre 101, where the
opposing sides were discussing an armistice. I decided to hurry on to Cairo and
Sudan. Already I guessed that I would be refused permission to ride the road to
Aswan. Big troop concentrations, radar installations and airfields were said to lie
along the road. If the train was my only way south, then the sooner I got on it the
better.
I had my last lunch at the Normandie, washed up on the shores of time with
my three exiles from better days. Speaking French, which was the hotel language,
the professor entertained the ladies with an account of my escapades.
‘It would be apparent to a babe-in-arms that our friend set out yesterday
morning determined to provoke an incident. When his cameras and his obviously
sinister wardrobe failed to do the trick, he climbed on a pedestal and pointed his
telephoto lens at a Russian submarine in the harbour. However, his “arrest” by
the navy was disappointingly civilized and apologetic. He therefore exchanged his
jacket for an Israeli sweater, deliberately abandoned his papers and sauntered
off to the roughest neighbourhood available to behave as much like a spy as
possible. And in case that was insufficient, he made sure of popular hostility by
drawing attention to a merchant’s infested beans, saying “In Tel Aviv, we have
laws against this kind of thing.” ’
There was much laughter, and perhaps a grain of truth.
At the end of the lunch, just as I was about to leave, a telegram arrived for
the Frenchman. He opened it, drew a sharp breath and stored at it.
‘My son is dead,’ he said. ‘I knew it.’
He was petrified by grief. He was inconsolable, and immovable. None of us
could find anything to say. I murmured good-bye, and left. On my way to Cairo I
reflected, uneasily, that a lot of things were happening to me and around me.
Every day it seemed added its quota of significant encounters, events and
revelations. Were they already there, waiting to happen, or did I bring them with
me? Could turbulence and change be ‘carried’ and transmitted like a disease? I
knew I had brought excitement into those three lives, but the news from the front
was not always good. I wondered, unhappily, whether I was destined to leave a
trail of grief and misery behind me too. ‘What colossal arrogance,’ I thought, but
could not quite brush the idea aside.
From Cairo to Aswan the train ran for a night and a day. I boarded at the
blacked-out station in a tumultuous rush of bodies to share a two-berth sleeper
with a fat middle-class Egyptian in robes and turban. I also shared the
sumptuous chicken feast he had brought bundled in a large white napkin, and he
politely accepted a bit of my fruit. We munched together contentedly until it was
time to sleep, undistracted by the efforts of conversation because he spoke only
Arabic.
Most of the following day I watched Egypt and the Nile pass by from the
dining-car window. I saw no missile pads or airfields, though a company of newly
drafted soldiers came on board for a short distance. There was a bruised
astonishment in their eyes that brought back sharp memories of my first weeks
as a conscript.
I enjoyed the train, but resented the onward rush of it that rationed me to
such fleeting glimpses of life outside. It was a quite different world, I realized,
viewed through this thick screen of plate glass.
At one of the inexplicable stops trains make between stations I found myself
looking down directly on a rice field beside the track where a grizzled old man and
a boy were turning the soil with hoes, The man wore only a tattered galabia. As
he leaned forward to chop at the mud it revealed the whole of his stringy body
tightening with effort and his genitals swinging back and forth. Beside him stood
a woman in a black robe and shawl, also old but slim and perfectly erect. In
contrast to the old man’s coarse, dull face, her features were exquisitely drawn.
Her eyebrows, nostrils and mouth were arched like spring steel under tension,
expressing complete authority and contempt for her circumstances. She held a
long and slender cane, like a wizard’s wand, and supervised the work with
smouldering eyes.
Pharaoh’s daughter could not have looked more handsome or commanding
than this woman standing barefooted in a rice paddy. The group was quite
oblivious of the train or of my stares. I saw that there was nothing they wore or
used that they might not have had thousands of years ago. If I could discover, I
thought, the secret of this woman’s presence and the old man’s submission I
might have the story of Egypt, but before I could melt the glass with my eyes the
train took me away.
The ferry is tied up at a wooden wharf above the Aswan Dam. It is not one
boat but two; two small paddle steamers lashed together and run on a single
paddle. The nearest one is first-class. I and the bike have to cross to the
second-class boat. While this is no problem for me, I can see immediately that it
will be impossible to manhandle the bike there. I can see that, but the porters can
see only a glorious opportunity to earn a fortune in baksheesh by achieving the
impossible.
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ they scream and, in a flurry of brown limbs, they fight with the
Triumph up a gangplank, over a rail into a narrow gangway, through hatches,
over sills and bollards, four hundred pounds of metal dragging, sliding, flying and
dropping among roars and curses and pleas for divine aid, while I follow, helpless
and resigned. Finally the bike is poised over the water between the two boats.
The outstretched arms can only hold it, but they cannot move it, and it is
supported, incredibly, by the foot brake pedal, which is caught on the ship’s rail.
Muscles are weakening. The pedal is bending and will soon slip, and my journey
will end in the fathomless silt of Mother Nile. At this last moment, a rope
descends miraculously from the sky dangling a hook, and the day is saved.
For three days and two nights I drift up the Nile along Lake Nasser. The
sunrises and sunsets are so extraordinarily beautiful that my body turns inside
out and empties my heart into the sky. The stars are close enough to grasp.
Lying on the roof of the ferry at night, I begin at last to know the constellations,
and start a personal relationship with that particular little cluster of jewels called
the Pleiades, which nestles in the sky not far from Orion’s belt and sword. Really,
those stars, when they come that close, you have to take them seriously.
I sleep illegally on the roof of the first-class boat, because the second-class
deck is indescribable. I would rather swim than sleep there. Hundreds of Nubian
camel drivers are returning to the; Sudan, with their huge hide bags and whips, to
pick up another consignment of camels and drive them remorselessly up into
Egypt. They are all dressed in grubby white, and lie side by side among their
bundles across the deck. The crevices between them are caulked with a mixture
of orange peel, cigarette ends and spit, The hawking and spitting, which is a
constant background murmur to Arab life, here rises to become the dominant
sound, louder than speech, louder than the ferry’s engine, drowned out only, and
rarely, by the ship’s hooter. Lungs rasp and rip, you can hear the tissues tear into
shreds, and the glutinous product flies in all directions. I am not ready for that
yet.
During the first night we cross the Tropic of Cancer. During the second day a
Turkish passenger goes mad. He has been looking more pale and drawn by the
hour. Now, with his black eyes buttoned to the back of his brain, he begins to
twirl in the saloon, stopping suddenly to point his finger and cast some fatal
spell. He collapses, then rises to twirl again. His eyes have seen something too
terrible to be borne.
The ferry ties up in the night somewhere south of Abu Simbel, and the Turk is
taken ashore, but after much discussion he is brought aboard again and we
continue. When we land at Wadi Halfa at midday he is quiet.
I meant to ride from Wadi Halfa, but the police say I must take the train at
least as far as Abu Hamad, and I cannot get petrol without the help of the police.
I have made friends with a Dutch couple, and once on the train I might as well go
with them as far as Atbara. What’s a few more miles in the whole of Africa?
The train rattles on through beer, supper, songs, sleep, tea and English
breakfast. In the oval engraved mirror of a colonial dining car I actually take
notice of my face for the first time in a long while. Action has freed me from self-
consciousness, and I am becoming a stranger to my own appearance. It is a
very satisfying feeling. I no longer think of people seeing me as I see myself in a
mirror. Instead I imagine that people can see directly into my soul. It is as though
a screen between me and the world has dropped away.
Through the carriage window, the desert has been sweeping past, almost
unbroken, for hours. I stare at it mesmerized, trying to imagine myself riding over
it. Now there are signs of life. Some animals, more thorn trees, tents and huts.
The train slows. Atbara Station. The corridor is jammed with people and bundles.
My mind is in gear again. To meet trouble halfway, what disasters shall I
anticipate now? Perhaps the bike has vanished off the train somewhere en
route? Maybe half of it will be missing? Or I will be asked to bribe someone to
unload it?
The wheels screech on the rails. The crowd tumbles off. The bike is still
there. Nothing is missing. There are no problems. To me this is a sort of miracle.
I wheel it to where my bags are heaped on the platform and pack them on as
children peer into the speedometer where they believe the soul of the machine to
reside. I flood the carburettor. For God’s sake start! I mutter. Don’t give me any
trouble. It’s too hot to wrestle with you now.
One kick and she starts. You lovely machine.
First to the police, to be registered as an alien. The locomotive is hissing and
panting in the station. I can hear it across the road. It howls and clanks into
action. Plunk, plunk, plunk-plunk-plunk-plunk as the train’s vertebrae stretch. It
rolls away to Khartoum, but now there is more noise, and agitation continues
with a taxi for my friends, and the bike following, to find a hotel. The hotel.
Atbara is a frontier town; mud houses, wooden façades and the dirt road
flowing round them and between them like a brown flood ready to reclaim it all.
Here’s a more imposing street with houses of red brick and cement. Is this the
hotel? We stop. The taxi leaves, but the travelling noise goes on in my head.
We’re not there yet. The buildings look abandoned.
‘Hotel?’
An old man sweeping leaves shakes his head angrily, and points down the
street.
Alongside the next building is an alley. It debouches into a garden with tables
and chairs rooted here and there among the weeds. A cemented verandah at the
back of the building gives access to a series of closed green doors. Hotel!
At a round iron table sit five men.
‘Hotel?’
‘Hotel, yes. Come and sit.’
One last effort, to fetch the bike into the garden, park it against the
verandah, close the petrol tap, walk to the table…and sit.
The noise stops.
The sun is getting low now, the light is yellow and grainy. The five men are
gathered like a conspiracy of pantomime pirates. One has a black eye patch,
another a vivid scar. The one next to me, an Arab in galabia and turban, has a
squint and a thin-lipped smile of artless evil. Every child in the audience knows he
has a dagger under his robe.
The table is laden with date-sherry bottles, all empty but one. With
exaggerated hospitality the Arab sweeps up the sleeves of his galabia and pours
out glasses for the Dutch couple and myself. Yo-Ho-Ho and a bottle of date
sherry.
The pirates are passing a joint around. The Arab waves it in the air and
murmurs sibilant nonsense as though in a haze of mellow stupefaction, but his
eye is much too bright. The scent of the smoke is delicious, the silence around us
is like a cool bath. Is anything more relaxing than the hospitality of harmless
villains? How do I know they’re harmless? I don’t, yet I do.
The Arab invests in another bottle of sherry and we sit for an hour as the sun
goes down, lost in lazy contentment. During that hour I feel I have arrived in
Sudan.
A muscular black man comes towards us, urgently, asks us to come to the
hotel. The bar is open now, and a naked bulb is shining down on ugly plastic
surfaces. I am very reluctant to leave the garden. The man insists. He has a
tigerish body, too restrained in his neat shirt and trousers.
‘I am coming to see ip you are all right, and I pind you sitting with a bad man.
I am Pabiano,’ he said. ‘My name is Munduk, my brother is in the folice. That man
is not good. He is a teep. He is only fretending drunk so that others will become
drunk. Then he steal prom your focket. He has been in frison.’
I look back to the table. In the last faint light the Arab has twisted in his chair
to look at us, one arm outstretched towards us, the long cotton sleeve trailing,
imploring us to return. I feel a sad affection for him. There was a kind of
understanding.
Three nights in Atbara. From the ceiling hangs an enormous propeller, slowly
kneading the thick night air. During the days I prepare for the desert. There is an
obstinate electrical fault in the bike. I take the lens off the headlamp, and it drops
its wiring over the verandah, pitifully, as though spilling its entrails. I work on it as
martial music drifts across the wall from a school sports day. By evening the bike
is repaired, the hernia sewn up. I have been considering how to carry water. I
have brought a collapsible plastic container, and can carry a gallon on the back
of the bike, but I am not quite convinced it will work and I want a reserve. If I fill
the aluminium bottle with distilled water, then I can use that for the batteries also.
A garage fills the bottle for me. I have to cross 250 miles of desert to Kassala
and the next petrol pump. With three gallons in the tank, and the jerry half full I
should have enough. Tomorrow I will buy more, just in case. Today I can’t
because I haven’t enough money. It’s Sunday and the banks are closed.
I have asked everyone about the way to Kassala. They all say it is ‘queiss,’
which means good. Thomas Taban Duku, the registrar of aliens, said so. It was
more usual for people to go to Khartoum, but many buses go to Kassala, at least
one each day. He could not remember anyone coming by motorcycle before, but
then, he said, a motorcycle can go anywhere. If a bus can go, then so can a
motorcycle, isn’t it? And faster even. ‘The road is queiss.’ He was quietly
confident.
So is the man at the hotel. He says it’s a good road, now the rains have
gone. And the Michelin map calls it a marked and recognized track.
Munduk also says it will be easy. He comes to the hotel, and that evening,
under a waxing moon, we visit his house to see how to make date sherry at
home, and then to look at the Nile.
‘Here is the Blue Nile,’ he says. ‘The White Nile is one day walking from here.’
He is wrong. The Blue Nile joins the White Nile at Khartoum, two hundred
miles upstream. How can he be so wrong about something like that? Who
knows? Away from Western cities you get used to it. If you want to know
something, you ask again and again. When many opinions run together they
thicken to form a fact. Isn’t that the essence of modern theoretical physics? So
often it seems that every scientific principle has its counterpart in social
behaviour. Simon’s Hypothesis?! Waves & Particles. Critical Mass. Fission,
fusion, all of thermodynamics with Maxwell’s Demon as the exception that proves
the rule…My head is flying and my feet slip into the marsh. Eye Pierce Heaven,
Foot Stick in Mud. As I stumble out I see Munduk prowling round some bushes,
more like a tiger than ever, sniffing the air, cocking his ear. He reminds me of
Castaneda’s Don Genaro looking for a car under a stone.
‘Serpent,’ he says. ‘Or some animal maybe. I show you how we hunt in the
bus’.’
He and his six brothers, he says, fled to Uganda when the Muslims killed his
parents in the war. They lived by hunting in the bush. Now all his brothers are
famous. So he says. Why not believe him, until it becomes important?

Atbara is among the hottest places in the world. In summer it goes to 110 in
the shade. In winter it simmers at a few degrees below ninety. Shops do their
business early and late in the day. Banks, I thought, would do likewise. But no. In
Atbara, as everywhere else in the world, bankers followed their own inscrutable
whims. Opening time was nine-thirty.
It was already half-past seven. I was packed, paid up, booked out and ready
to go. By ten the last cool hours of the morning would have evaporated. I thought
I had enough petrol. What need could I have for money in the desert? The time
was ripe to begin my great adventure, to catch the tide.
I rode out of Atbara directed by dry, black fingers.
‘Queiss, queiss,’ said the owners of the fingers. ‘Road good, this way.’
Atbara’s only stretch of tarmac gave way to mud. I went past the Ethiopian
prostitutes, alongside a last row of mud houses and came to a piece of stony
ground surrounded by thorn trees. Spread out before me was a vast heap of
stinking rubbish. No road. Not a sign of a road. I was not looking for tar or paving
or even made-up dirt, but there was not so much as a track.
 The difference between men and gods is farce.
During all the months of preparation, the girding of loins and steeling of
resolve, the one feat which I thought would set me apart from mortal men was my
single-handed crossing of the Atbara Desert.
And now I could not find it.
I rode back into town to ask again. Once more I followed the fingers, other
fingers, along the same route. I could find no other way.
Twice I inspected Atbara’s garbage, and twice I returned. I was in a fever of
impatience and I felt completely ridiculous. If Neil Armstrong had lost his way to
the launching pad he could not have been more frustrated.
There was a police station along the way which I had carefully avoided, but
now I could think of nowhere else to go for an explanation. I was always afraid of
involving myself unnecessarily with officials. Generally when a man in uniform has
something unusual brought to his attention, his instinct is to stop it. Uniform is as
uniform does. There are honourable exceptions however. The Atbara police
delayed me, but they did not stop me, and they explained that the road to
Kassala did, indeed, go past the rubbish tip. And I began to understand, with
some embarrassment, that in Sudanese English the word ‘road’ has no mineral
connections, it simply means ‘the way’. I had fallen into the simplest linguistic
trap, imagining that the road had a physical reality. There was no road; only an
imaginary line across the desert.
By now it was nearly nine o’clock. I should have swallowed my pride, gone to
the bank, cooled off and left the following day, but I was rolling under the
momentum of my own folly, and I knew I could not stop or something might break.
A dream for instance,
This time I rode around the rubbish tip. Beyond it was a gap in the trees.
Through it I saw the open desert. To the right of the gap was another heap of
fresh garbage, and as I rode past it a big red eye met mine.
The eye was level with my own. It was inflamed, and encrusted with dirt. The
dirt was sticking to the few vagrant hairs that remained on a bald and dreadful
head. I was deeply shocked by it, and rode on before I had collected my wits and
assembled the images. Then I saw that it was a monstrous bird, of human
proportions, with a great pendulous beak and long and filthy white neck. I wanted
to turn back, but I was carried on relentlessly by some inner current, and the bird
became for a while a mythical beast and guardian of the desert.
I rode into the desert. It looked flat, but of course it was not. Nor was it
sandy, but made of a rather greyish, fairly compact stuff halfway between sand
and soil, littered with small shards of stone. I found I could ride across it quite
easily, and the faster I went, the smoother the ride, though stopping might be a
problem.
The question was, which way to go? Ahead and to the left, the desert
stretched to infinity, interrupted only by the well-defined profile of an occasional
umbrella tree. To the right, however, perhaps a mile away, was a line of trees,
what I took first to be the edge of a forest. Then I realized that they were palm
trees, and that they must define the bed of the Atbara River, which ran from
Atbara to Kassala. My first great fear was dispelled. Obviously I could never be
lost in the desert as long as I kept the river bed in view.
Also there were tyre tracks, quite deep ones, made when the ground was
softer at the end of the rain, but their direction was puzzling. Some headed
towards the river, others made for the heart of the desert, none followed the
route I thought I should take. I tried to move closer to the river, but the ground
became softer and occasionally even drifted into dunes which would certainly
swallow my wheels. I wondered whether the desert-bound tracks might be aiming
for a better and firmer route away from the river, and I followed one for a way, but
it showed no sign of bearing right, and as the river line was almost lost to sight, I
thought better of it and headed back.
So I steered a middle course and, gaining confidence, increased speed until I
was doing nearly forty miles an hour in third gear. Then, quite unexpectedly, two
sets of wheel tracks converged and intersected in front of me. I could not avoid
them, nor could I stop. I bounced through the first track but nose-dived on the
second. I saw it coming, and was interested to notice that I did not say ‘Christ’ or
‘Fucking hell’ or ‘Here we go, my darling’ or even ‘Sic transit gloria.’ I said: ‘Oops!’
Anything could have happened. I had never fallen with a full load at any
speed, and I was prepared for a major disaster. The result was immensely
encouraging. The bike slid along on its side. The Craven pannier, packed solid,
took the weight with a few scratches, and I fell easily and without harm.
I was shaking with excitement and relief, but had to get the bike upright
quickly before I lost too much petrol, and for once I was able to twist it up from
the handlebars without unpacking it.
Then I found out how hot I was. The effort, and the unused adrenaline, had
me sweating from every pore. I was drenched. I looked at the mileage indicator. I
had come approximately nine miles from Atbara in just over an hour.
I continued more cautiously, rarely exceeding twenty miles an hour. Twice
more I fell, but easily, coming almost to a standstill before toppling over. After a
while I found a tyre track that seemed to be following firm ground in the right
direction. Occasionally it moved in towards the river, and once I thought I saw a
hut among the palms, but immediately before the trees the ground was very soft,
and dunes were reaching out into the desert. I stayed away from the river, and
picked my track up as it came out again farther on.
Just as I was beginning to feel that I had found the winning system, it led me
into a trap. A ridge of high ground formed on my left. The track veered right. Then
suddenly a fence appeared. A fence in the desert! The track followed the edge of
the fence, and the ground became softer and softer. I was forced to go faster to
stay on top, and then it was too late and I was buried up to the axle in fine ash-
coloured sand.
Fifty miles in three hours.
Another two hundred miles to go.
It was plainly impossible to move the bike, so I began to unload it. I noticed
immediately that my water bag was empty, the plastic perforated, the contents
drained away. Well, at least I had a litre of distilled water.
With all the luggage off I glanced in the petrol tank. Had it been possible at
this stage to shock me, I would have been shocked. There was only a puddle of
petrol left, hardly a gallon. My fuel consumption was twice what it should have
been, and when I thought about it, that was perfectly natural. Grinding along in
second gear over a loose surface in such heat, it is what you would expect. Only
I, of course, had not expected it.
By now I was assimilating information like a robot. Buried in loose sand, with
scarcely enough petrol to get halfway, one litre of distilled water, and no money.
It was very plain that I was going to need help, the sort of help that was hard to
come by in the best of circumstances. Where do you look for help in a desert?
There was no point in getting upset. All the riding and falling had emptied me
of surplus emotion. I felt fit, and strong enough to survive a long time. If the
worst came to the worst, the river was not too far away. There might even be
water in it. I set about digging myself out.
Scooping the sand out by hand took half an hour, but I managed to make a
lane back to the firmer ground. There was a bit of brush growing on the dunes,
and I paved my lane with twigs. Then, inch by inch, I was able to haul the bike
back to where I wanted it. Again I had lost a lot of sweat, and I got the water
bottle out. It was warm to the touch. I put it to my lips, and then spat vigorously
on the ground, mustering as much of my own good saliva as I could. The bottle
contained acid. Battery acid.
It occurred to me that I might easily have taken a swig, instead of a sip. I
knew many who would have done. At least I had that reserve of caution. In a
silly, minor way I was encouraged, as though it entitled me to survive.
I started looking for a better way forward, and found one. With the bike
repacked I went slowly along, hoping the fence might have something to do with
people. After a mile the going got easier again. The ground flattened, hardened
and opened out. I moved towards the river. There were buildings, a figure on a
donkey, a murmur of voices.
The biggest buildings were two storeys high and stood inside a compound.
The voices came from there, and I rode up to the compound gate, dismounted
and walked inside. A young man in a blue shirt and khaki trousers received me
gravely as though I had been expected, and we exchanged greetings. ‘Salaam,
salaam, salaamat, salaamat,’ and so on for the proper amount of time, shaking
hands the while. Then he fetched me a bottle of fizzy orange and introduced me
to the headmaster of Kinedra Secondary School for Boys.
When I had explained my circumstances, struggling between honesty and
embarrassment, I was complimented richly on my courage, wisdom, initiative and
good fortune, and the school was placed at my disposal. There were hundreds of
boys and a staff of six young men, all anxious to devote themselves henceforth
to my bidding. As far as possible I allowed them to continue with their normal
routine, but it was clear that for the duration of my stay the functioning of the
school became of lesser importance. Only one thing was demanded of me. I must
stay. There could be no question of my going on.
 Fortunately this coincided very well with my own ideas.
I was taken to the dormitory shared by the teachers, and a special meal was
prepared and brought to me by the headmaster, with dishes of different meats
and vegetables, in delicious peppery sauces. I did not disgrace myself. My fingers
were nimble and my palate was thoroughly attuned. I ate with relish as the
teachers sat around, admiring and plying me with questions. At other mealtimes
they all ate from a common bowl of mutton, vegetable and rice, scooping up the
food with pieces of an unleavened bread baked from millet and called kissera, but
I was always brought specially prepared dishes. They were cooked by the
headmaster’s wife, but I never saw her.
We discussed the matter of petrol, or benzene as they called it. Perhaps the
district officer at Sidon might have some. He had a car.
Sidon? That was the town, three miles away. My concept of the desert was
undergoing some changes. In fifty miles I had not seen a living soul, only the
illusion of movement on the horizon where the heat haze bent the light and made
it sway. That was the desert as I had imagined it since childhood, as I had
wanted it to be, a place of awe-inspiring emptiness where only bleached bones
could be at rest.
Obviously it was that, but it was also a home for thousands of people who
lived around it and crossed it frequently as a matter of course. Had I been
extraordinarily lucky to stumble upon Kinedra, or was the world a more hospitable
place than I had ever realized? My memory flashed back to the beastly bird
guarding the desert. Supposing I had been stranded out there, on that baking
ground, thinking about my bones bleaching in the sun, what a bird of ill omen that
would have been. Instead I was being attended to like a lord. With little effort I
could imagine the headmaster as a sheik, the boys as slaves, the walls as hides,
the school as a great Bedouin encampment, and I was the honoured envoy of a
distant monarch. Such excellent fortune. Shouldn’t I thank that red-eyed monster,
and treasure its memory, for teaching me to drop my superficial judgements and
let the world be what it was?
I tried to describe the bird to my friends, and at last they recognized it as
something they called a ‘bous’, and screwed up their faces in revulsion. I later
learned to call it a Marabou, a stork turned scavenger, which appears with minor
variations across Africa and Asia. I always thought of it with pleasure, and
recognized it as a friend, although it was everywhere regarded with loathing. It
joined the Pleiades as an ally on my journey. There were other creatures with
which I had a special affinity. I was a great admirer of goats, donkeys and
camels for their leathery determination to endure, and was always glad when they
were around, but they had no magic power over my destiny, I felt. Just friends.
To show my gratitude I asked whether the boys might enjoy hearing me tell
them about my journey. The teachers said they would arrange something that
evening, but first they took me on a guided tour to see how their vegetables were
grown and irrigated. An ancient Perkins diesel engine pumped water from the
Atbara River in the winter, and so precious was the water that the owner of the
pump got half the crop in payment. Even more wonderful though was the now
disused wooden construction with interlocking vertical and horizontal gears,
driven by an ox on a circular walkway. It hauled up water in buckets on an
endless chain dipping into a deep slot in the riverbank.
They described how the houses were built up from slabs of wet mud, one row
a day left to bake in the sun, tapering slightly to the roof, which is made of split
palm and thatch and again covered with mud. The word ‘mud’ in no way does
justice to these houses. With their rich yellow colour, the impression of enormous
mass exaggerated by the inclined walls and absence of windows, they looked
more like great ingots of gold. The space inside, dark, cool and mysterious, had
more in common with the interior of a cave than a house. In fact, passing through
the door of such a house from the desert at midday would be like dropping
magically into some other dimension of space and time. Or so I fancied.
In the evening the teachers took off their Western clothing and put on
galabias. The boys wore nothing else. In its simplest everyday form the galabia is
no more than a cotton shift with floppy sleeves, and I also was given one to wear
and to sleep in. That evening, however, the senior master wore a more
voluminous and elaborate robe, crisply laundered, and a turban. He said the boys
had been assembled to hear from me, and I changed back into my travelling
clothes to give them a better idea of it.
 I had given no thought to how it would be done, and I was rather taken
aback. A rostrum had been setup outside on the open ground, with a lamp. The
boys, all in white, sat on the ground in a huge circle, and beyond them was only
the great velvet night.
The master translated my simple account into Arabic. The boys listened, and
laughed at the right places. Then they asked questions.
‘How often do you write to your mother?’
‘Do you always wear those boots?’
‘How do you get the money?’
And other sensible things like that.
The setting was dramatically beautiful, the whole thing had the air of a great
theatrical event, and I was rather carried away by it, but the kids brought me
down to earth again. Thank heavens for little boys.
Next day I took my five-gallon jerry and walked the three miles to Sidon,
across paddies and through scraggy trees. The district commissioner received
me with interest and changed a traveller’s cheque for me, but he had only enough
petrol, he said, to get his own Land-Rover to Kassala. He thought I would be
lucky to find any, because most of the traffic that came through was diesel.
I began to face the unpalatable truth: I would have to go back to Atbara for
petrol. Apparently a bus was due to come through from Kassala that evening. It
would stop in the square.
The teacher accompanying me took me to the elementary school in Sidon,
and left me in the care of a fiery headmaster called Mustafa, who tried hard to
convert me to the Muslim faith, and kept me entertained through the afternoon. In
the early evening he introduced me to another man who was also on his way to
Atbara. We drank tea together, and then Mustafa left, saying:
‘He is a rich merchant. He will take care of you.’
I looked at the merchant with interest, but my curiosity was unrewarded. His
face was smooth and unmarked, if a shade plump. He could have been any age
from twenty-five to forty-five, though his status indicated age. His smile revealed
two rows of excellent white teeth and nothing more. His body, probably well fed,
was hidden by the folds of an expensive white robe and he wore a voluminous
turban. He spoke no English and his expression was as controlled as it was
courteous.
The square of Sidon is simply a piece of desert, as big and stark as a parade
ground. Along one side is a line of low mud buildings with thickly encrusted roofs
sloping into the square and leaning on pillars to make a sheltered walkway. The
roofs, walls and pillars flow together and the entire row looks as though it were
made from one piece of clay by a giant hand.
At one end of the row was a tea shop, and we waited there as the sky
dimmed and the heat subsided. Life in the square died down until there was only
the proprietor of the tea shop and one other man. An oil lamp was lit in the shop
and by the thick yellow flame and the red glow of the charcoal burner I watched
them. They spoke between long pauses. Occasionally one would roll up the
phlegm in his throat and discharge it, staccato, to the floor.
The buildings across the square dissolved in the darkness and were
forgotten. The night swallowed all except the little oasis of life by the tea shop.
Soon even the shop closed. The merchant and I lay on the soft, dry sand, the
only two mortals left in the universe, waiting.
We tried from time to time to speak to each other. I had a small vocabulary of
Arabic, enough to suggest roughly the subject I wanted to discuss, but no more.
He had a very few words of Italian. For the most part we lay in silence and I
occupied myself with thoughts and cigarettes. I had almost decided to sleep and
was lying on my back gazing at the stars, when the soft, careful voice asked:
‘Sudan signora queiss?’
I was still wondering about the question, when I felt a finger tap my thigh, and
the voice repeated, with slight urgency:
‘You Sudan Signora?’
I could not think how to tell him that I had never seen a Sudanese signora.
‘Si,’ I said. ‘Yes’ – trying to sound offhand and academic, wondering what
was going on and looking up towards the voice. A moon was just rising. The
merchant’s robes gleamed, the turban had been released to fall as a shawl
around the shoulders. The face was quite invisible, only the even teeth shone
white as the disembodied voice spoke.
 What was the voice going to suggest next? A little shudder of excitement ran
through my body, because I knew, at that moment, that I could not be sure of my
responses. The strange emptying effect of the desert seemed to have drained
away all my conditioning. I did not know whether I was young or old, wise or
foolish, strong or weak, and perhaps I did not even know whether I was male or
female. But I did know that the tap on the thigh had released a current of sexual
energy, and this invisible figure close to me had become mysteriously potent.
‘Sudan signor queiss?’
Ah, there it was. The voice went on softly, but with a sharp edge of
interrogation.
‘You Sudan signor?’
This time the finger tapped, very precisely, on my cock, which was already
straining slightly against the denim.
Ted Simon was shocked. He wanted to do something to demonstrate.
Nothing like that had happened to him in his conscious life. But I was already
somewhat removed from him.
Don’t be such a prig, I told him. How often have you wondered, secretly,
whether you were caught up somewhere deep inside by other cravings, by
repressed desires and weaknesses. What about that other Arab on the highway?
What about your problems with male authority? This is a moment when you have
absolute freedom of choice. Morality has blown away into the desert, you are not
accountable to anyone. This is a privilege you have never allowed yourself
before. So, do you want a sexual adventure with this man?
‘Sudan signor, queiss?’ repeated the voice, and the finger tapped again.
‘Si,’ I said, but only to avoid offence, and I put myself out of range of the
questing finger. ‘This way is no good for me,’ I said in English, relying on my tone
to tell him.
It seemed to me that I really did not want it. That one important question had
been finally answered.
There was no awkwardness, no break even in the mood. The episode
seemed quite natural. It went one way, could as easily have gone another. I sat
up with my back against a pillar and smoked another cigarette, lost in the mystery
of it.

The bus came at midnight. Its light and sound preceded it far across the
desert and it grew in noise and brilliance, approaching as I imagined the end of
the world would come, or a landing from Mars. For all the long warning, its arrival
in the square was very sudden. It stopped by us, and from its bright interior a
horde of people jumped out. They seemed to be all men, and each one had a
sword slung across his back. They wore sleeveless jackets over shirts over
robes, and without further ado, they fell to the ground all about the bus and went
to sleep, their swords hugged to their bodies. When I saw that the driver was
among them, I did likewise.
At four in the morning we were all wakened. It was still dark, and now it was
also chilly. I had not anticipated a night in the desert. My thin shirt left me very
cold. The merchant and I sat side by side, the physical contact feeling rather odd
to me now. Uneasily I began to ponder again on the meaning of our encounter for
me. He must have felt me shivering slightly with cold, because he opened his
shawl and laid it around my shoulders as well as his own. This paternal gesture
seemed to offer some clue to what I was looking for. I was still uneasy. It was
only long afterwards that the dark and inscrutable face of my own unknown
father joined the mosaic of images that whirled around that incident, because I
had forgotten that he, too, might have been taken for an Arab.
The bus juddered along into the dawn. I dozed and woke and dozed again.
The two men in the seat in front of mine sat very upright, with their swords in their
strange, paddle-shaped scabbards, sticking up beside them. Their hair hung in
greased ringlets over the collars of their dung-coloured shirts, and I smelled a
particular, musty but not unpleasant odour, which might have been animal fat.
A little way outside Atbara, the bus made a stop, and all the passengers got
out to stretch their legs and relieve themselves. One family was getting off for
good. They had small bundles of pots and pans, and some poles wrapped in
cloth off the roof of the bus. As they set their belongings in the desert, I noticed
that there were, after all, some women among them, carefully veiled from view.
They all looked miserable and sick, coughing and shivering in very thin clothing,
and their small boy, I realized, was the one that had been coughing throughout
the journey. I was quite absorbed in their plight when the bus’s horn called us
aboard again. Only then did I realize that the merchant had disappeared. I could
not understand it. There seemed to have been nowhere for him to go out there. I
looked in all directions, but he had left my life as discreetly as he entered it.
By eleven I had my five gallons of petrol and had found a lorry going to
Kinedra. By midafternoon I was back there. The lorry set me down about a
kilometre away, and a small boy on a donkey carried the petrol as I walked
alongside.
The warmth and generosity of the schoolmasters rose to a crescendo on my
last night. In the morning they gave me a gift of money which they had collected
among them to help me on my way. I knew that for them it represented a sizeable
sacrifice and it was difficult to take it, but I felt that such gifts could not, and
should not, be refused.
I had become close to them and it was a wrench to leave. They were very
solemn in their farewells, giving the parting its full value as they did with
everything and not shirking the emotion. A great crowd of boys had gathered to
wave me good-bye. I would have been embarrassed if I had not known the feeling
was genuine.
My feeling for the Sudanese was one of total admiration. Never had I met
such unmotivated generosity, such a capacity for imbuing the simplest life with a
touch of splendour. I had felt it straight away in Atbara. In the teahouses there it
had been rare for me to pay, though I had tried. When it was time to settle I would
find that someone had paid my bill and left before me. Only afterwards would I
remember the quiet greeting from a stranger on his way out. Or the proprietor
would refuse my piastre. They were small amounts, but they added great value to
the tea and made it rich.
The previous day I had been told that a district forest officer was taking his
Land-Rover to Kassala for brake fluid, and had agreed to lead me on to the best
route. When we met, I asked him, naturally enough, where his forest was. He told
me that this desert I was travelling through, which I had thought of as being as
old as the stars above it, had become a desert only in the previous thirty years.
Before that there had been grasses and trees, but the travelling herds of cattle
had increased and stripped away all the natural vegetation, and men had cut
down the trees. Now dunes were beginning to form, and soon it would be like the
Sahara. The fence I had encountered the other day was to protect new
plantations of grasses and trees to stabilize the soil once more. He was not
cheerful about the prospect. ‘We are too few,’ he said, ‘and they are too many.
The dunes will spread. We are like Canute against the waves.’
At midmorning he was ready, and we set off. From the start it was touch and
go. His driver, overimpressed by the size of the Triumph, set a pace that was
altogether too dashing. I managed to keep him in sight for several miles, but
dropped far behind, unable to fly across the dips and soft bits as he could. It was
while trying to catch him again, on a fairly easy stretch, that I ran into the same
trap of intersecting ruts that had caught me on the first day. This time my ‘Oops’
was a good deal louder. The bike came crashing down again, but much harder,
ripping one of the boxes off its mountings and smashing the headlamp. My
shoulder also took a fair blow.
Even so, all the important things were all right. The jerry was intact, the bike
was functioning. My shoulder would manage. I found some wire and tied the box
back on where the screws had torn through the fibreglass, taking my time,
determined that I would get through somehow, and resolving that I would never
again ride at anybody else’s pace. Two such disasters, I thought, must teach me
the lesson.
I was almost ready to go again when the Land-Rover returned. They had
missed me, eventually. I explained that it was far better for me to ride alone, if
they would just describe the route as best they could. They wanted to try to load
the bike on the car, but I refused, and at last they did their best to draw me a
diagram of what to look for, and left wishing me luck.
That was the beginning of the hardest and most rewarding physical
experience of my entire journey.
Falling and Rising

I am trying to keep track of the number of times I have fallen. Yesterday, three
times. Today twice, the hard fall that wrenched my left arm, and one soft tumble
since. The arm is all right, but weakened.
My great problem is keeping up concentration. I have to watch the surface all
the time, with only occasional glimpses at the longer views around me. The light
is intense, but luckily I was given some Polaroid ski goggles in London and they
are excellent for the desert. When wearing them I sometimes have the feeling that
I am travelling under water. They give everything that cool clarity you get in a rock
pool.
Heat does not worry me, even in the jacket and the sheepskin-lined boots. It
seems crazy, but I don’t feel it. It is not hot by Sudanese standards of course,
but it must be nearly ninety in the shade. And I am not in the shade. It is very dry
heat, easier to support. Does the clothing help to conserve sweat?
Goz Regeb, said Mochi, is the place to spend the night. It is still a hundred
miles away, five hours at this present rate. I will not make it today.
Something is moving on the horizon, something live. I stop. Far away I see
cattle crossing the desert, but they seem to be swimming through a silver lake. A
mirage. A fantastic sight.
It is Thursday the thirteenth of November. I have been travelling five weeks.
How many days of actual riding? I count twenty-one. How far have I ridden? The
clock shows 5,137 miles. Minus 867 when I started, leaves 4,170 miles on the
journey. Average, two hundred miles a day. Not bad. Well, the average will start
dropping now.
After three more hours I have come another fifty miles. In an hour or two it will
be dark, but there should be a tea hut soon. I think it is called Khor el Fil, which is
supposed to mean the Crocodile’s Mouth. Spelling is very optional and distances
are vague.
I have had one more soft fall, but each jerk on the wheel pulls the muscle in
my left shoulder and prevents it from healing. I feel no hunger, no thirst. I am
absolutely wrapped up in this extraordinary experience, in the unremitting effort,
in the marvellous fact that I am succeeding, that it is at all possible, that my
worst fears are not just unrealized but contradicted. The bike, for all its load, is
manageable. I seem to have, after all, the strength and stamina to get by, and my
reserves seem to grow the more I draw upon them. The natives, armed with
swords and fierce pride, show me only the greatest respect.
Sometimes I wonder why the wilder parts of the world have always seemed so
frightening, why the word ‘primitive’ has always meant ‘danger’. If it weren’t so,
would I be falling over tourists out for a day in the desert? Would I meet Len and
Nell from Cranfield Park Road sitting under a tree at Khor el Fil, mopping their
brows and writing picture postcards?
No, I must not forget why I am able to function here. These five weeks have
changed me already. My stomach has shrunk drastically, my blood has changed,
my sweat glands are adapted to a different regime, my palate has altered and my
muscles have certainly hardened, to speak only of physical changes.
I have also had time to learn a confidence I never knew before, and surely my
own confidence in the face of strangers must, in turn, increase their confidence
in me. Then there is also the fact that I am proud of what I am doing. There is no
denying it. I try to be modest, to say anyone could do it. But they don’t, and I feel
I have managed to pull off something special. It helps me to know that, as though
I were plugged into a kind of power I did not know I had.
Why doesn’t everybody do it? I don’t think it’s only timidity. I was as afraid as
anyone would be. They have careers, of course, and mortgages. They say they
would do it ‘if it weren’t for the kids’. I used to laugh at that, but why should I? It’s
perfectly legitimate. Much as they envy me, they are simply too absorbed in their
lives to want to leave them behind. They are fascinated, as I pass by, to hear
about my plans and my stories, but in the end they are happy enough to let me do
it for them. Len and Nell can mop their brows under the pyramids for a week and
leave the stomach shrinking to me.
Why you?
 Why were you chosen to ride through the desert while other men are going
home from the office?
Chosen? I thought I chose myself. Were Odysseus and Jason, Columbus
and Magellan chosen?
That is a very exalted company you have summoned up there. What have you
got in common with Odysseus, for God’s sake?
Well, we’re all just acting out other people’s fantasies, aren’t we? Maybe
we’re not much good for anything else.
Looking back on what has already happened I can see that it would have the
makings of a legend. Every encounter seems so significant, each one testing me
and preparing me for the next. Zanfini; the Via Torremuzzo; the S.S. Pascoli;
Kabaria; Sfax; Cyrenaica; Salloum; Mersa Matruh; Alexandria; the Great Bird of
Atbara; and Sidon. And why did the Twirling Turk on the ferry point his finger at
me?
In my childhood I was devoted to stories of men who overcame terrible
obstacles to win the hand of the princess; dogs with eyes like saucers, dogs with
eyes the size of dinner plates, dogs with eyes as big as cartwheels. They always
came in threes. I did not know then that they were tidied-up versions of ancient
mythology. In my childhood, nobody talked about myths and legends. They were
just stories. The job of explaining life was left to science, but science eventually
failed the test. So did politics, of course. And love. And property. And journalism
just went on begging the question.
So here I am, still looking for an explanation, acting out those childhood
stories which, perhaps, were always the most satisfying after all; making myself
the hero of my own myth?
These are not so much sequential thoughts as feelings interspersed with
memories, dancing in my brain as the bike rolls comfortably over an easier
stretch. The symbols group themselves in my mind. The Yom Kippur War, the
Turk and the Bird loom large as omens. What do they portend?
My thoughts are interrupted by the sight of a lorry ahead of me. It is
stationary. There are people grouped around it. Tracks start to sweep in across
my path from the open desert, and following them around I see they converge
near the river, by a group of trees and a hut. Khor el Fil, the halfway mark.
Nothing ever tasted more delicious than the tea I hold in my hand.
‘Take the lorry,’ they are saying. ‘You cannot go through. There are big
dunes. Take the lorry to Goz Regeb. It is not far.’
I resist, but their concern for me is so genuine that I feel excused by it. Fifty
miles in the truck, that’s not too much.
There are four Bescharyin here at the teahouse with me, exotic figures,
splendidly robed and armed, their hair teased out and glued into strands. I realize
with a start that these must be the ‘Fuzzie-wuzzies’ who fought so fanatically
against Gordon at Khartoum. The contact between us is instantaneous and
overwhelming. There is a spirit in this tea, a magic solvent to wash away our
differences. This is another reason why I am here: to experience (nothing less)
the brotherhood of man. Imagine meeting these men in a London pub or an
American diner. Impossible. They could never be there what they are here. They
would be made small by the complexities, the paraphernalia that we have added
to our lives, just as we are though we have learned to pretend otherwise. I had to
come here to realize the full stature of man; here outside a grass hut, on a rough
wooden bench, with no noise, no crowds, no appointments, no axe to grind, no
secret to conceal, all the space and time in the world, and my heart as
translucent as the glass of tea in my hand. The sense of affinity with these men
is so strong that I would tear down every building in the West if I thought it would
bring us together like this. I understand why the Arab idea seems so perverse, so
fanatical, untrustworthy and self-destructive to the Western mind. It must be
because the Arab puts an ultimate value on something we no longer even know
exists. Integrity, in its real sense of being at one with oneself and one’s God,
whoever and wherever that God may be. Without it he feels crippled.
We Europeans sold our integrity many years ago for progress, and we have
debased the word to mean merely someone who obeys the rules. A chasm of
misunderstanding yawns between us. At this moment I know which side I want to
stand.
The lorry is being loaded by members of another tribe, the Raschaid. I gather
they originate in Iraq, are known as nomadic camel herders and are supposed to
be rich. This is a large family moving house by truck rather than camel. They have
their tent wrapped up, in great bundles of hide; the poles tied together; enormous
heavy glass bottles slung in rope nets; the rest wrapped in carpets. Their women
are with them, the first women I have been close to since Egypt. They wear finely
woven silver veils over their faces, just below eye level. For them it is the mouth
which must not, in any circumstances, be seen by a strange man. Their robes
hang loose, their breasts are visible from time to time, it does not bother them. It
does bother me, however, and I have to guard my expression carefully. I am
helped in this by the playful way in which the head of the family toys with his rifle,
as he sits on top of the truck and supervises the loading.
Four men load the bike without difficulty. I pay a small sum, and we’re off. I
sit jammed up against the members of the family, trying to ignore the sumptuous
femininity jiggling so close to me.
There really are dunes. The lorry has to put down metal tracks to cross them.
I would not have had a chance here, but I might have made it through the trees.
All I can see of Goz Regeb, at night, is the big teahouse with many rooms.
There is food too, meat and beans and kisser a. There are wooden bedframes
strung with jute to sleep on. All around me men fall to their knees in prayer, arms
rising and falling, voices chanting:
‘Allah Harkborough, Allah Harkborough’ – at least that’s what it sounds like.
Then again the silence, the stars, and the early morning chill, but this time I am
prepared.
Approaching Kassala at last, I can scarcely believe the skyline that rises
before me. A range of high mountains with smoothly rounded tops like mounds of
ice cream half licked. I feel as though I am approaching an enchanted land, and
more and more often I feel that I am acting out some fairy tale or legend. All I
lack is a clear idea of my purpose. Maybe the reader knows.
In Kassala I seek out the forest officer, hoping to spend more time with him.
The driver of the Land-Rover is the first to see me coming. His broad face
radiates happiness at seeing me.
‘You are a real man,’ he says.
I almost choke with the pleasure that gives me. It was worth it all just to hear
that.
From Kassala there are two ways to go. The usual route, which I had
expected to take, follows a big highway through Eritrea to Asmara. According to
the Ethiopian Consul, the road is untroubled by rebels at present. I find the
prospect rather tame. A real man has his responsibilities. I decide on another
route, continuing south through Sudan for 240 miles and then crossing into
Ethiopia at Meterna.
On the map the road is graded one better than nothing as far as the border.
After that it reverts to the same condition as the one I have just travelled, but I
know now that this can only be the vaguest indication. All I am fairly sure of is
that there is no more open desert.
The first stretch as far as Khashm el Girbar runs alongside the railway line. In
fact it is part of the bed of the track, and made of dried mud, baked and cracked
in the sun. At times it is raised above the surrounding brush, at others not, and it
varies a great deal in width. There are some shallow ruts that reduce speed
drastically, but worse still, most of the way is mildly corrugated.
The riding is not only as difficult as it was in the desert, it is also more
uncomfortable and frustrating, as the bike rattles furiously over the bumps. The
fifty-three miles take me three hours of hard work. There are teahouses on the
way. I have made it a rule always to stop. At Khashm el Girbar I am rewarded by
a teahouse with wonderful fresh fish from the reservoir there. Again the
atmosphere is one of all-embracing intimacy. I have only to sit down in these
places now to feel that I am among old friends.
The road to Gedaref?
‘Queiss,’ they say. ‘Much better.’
I reserve my judgement this time, but draw strength from their encouragement.
The road to Gedaref is worse. Much worse. Worse than anything I imagined.
At times, in fact, I believe it is impossible, and consider giving up. The
corrugations are monstrous. Six-inch ridges, two feet apart, all the way with
monotonous, shattering regularity. Everything on the bike that can move does so.
Every bone in every socket of my body rattles. Not even the most ingenious
fairground proprietor could devise a more uncomfortable ride. I feel certain that it
must break the bike. I try riding very slowly, and it is worse than ever. Only at fifty
miles an hour does the bike begin to fly over the ridges, levelling out the vibration
a little, but it is terribly risky. Between the ridges is much loose sand. Here and
there are sudden hazards. The chances of falling are great, and I am afraid of
serious damage to the bike. Yet I feel I must fly, because I don’t think the
machine will survive eighty miles of this otherwise. It is hair-raising, and then it
becomes impossible again. The road swings to the west and the sun burns out
my vision. I realize I must stop and make a camp, because I shall never arrive at
Gedaref anyhow, today.
Between some bushes I set up the mosquito net, cook some rice and tea,
smoke a cigarette, and sleep. I have been going from dawn to sunset, a full day
of total endeavour, and I have come just under a hundred miles.
Something wakes me from my sleep. Huge shapes loom around the net in the
darkness, threatening to squash me. I am petrified. A herd of camels is being
driven through the night across my campsite. The camels obviously sense my
presence though, because they avoid me daintily. After a minute I lose my fear
and simply gaze up at them in wonder. They are really like ships in the night. Even
so, I think I was lucky.
In the morning, refreshed, I lose patience with the corrugations and fly over
them regardless. I find that I can control the bike better than I had thought. I still
fear for the effect on the bike, but I am hopeful that after Gedaref things may
improve. These corrugations are the result of traffic. Beyond Gedaref, according
to the map, the road is less important. I even hope, nostalgically, that it may be
as pleasant as the desert track. At least, in the desert, I was able to think. Here
every part of me is pinned to the road and survival.
I get to Gedaref in two heart-stopping hours, and find another place to eat
fish, but this is a different kind of town from Atbara or Kassala, busier and more
crowded, and the crowd is curious and pressing. They are all around me, peering
at me, and I am glad to get away on the road to Doka. Until I see what the road
is like. My alarm takes me to the verge of despair, and then turns to laughter. It is
too ridiculous.
The washboard corrugations continue, as before, but not consistently. The
ground here is obviously softer and heavy vehicles have been going through in
the rain. The road is saucer-shaped, that is it has a steep reverse camber. At the
bottom of the saucer are deep slots, usually two side by side. They are only a
couple of feet apart, and must have been made by lorries travelling with one
wheel in the road and another on the bank. The space between the slots is not
flat, but rises to a crown, and also narrows from time to time or disappears
altogether as the two slots merge into one. It is not possible to ride between the
slots without, soon, falling into one. The slots are fifteen inches deep and the
same width. They might have been tailored to fit the bike. The pipes just fit inside
them, the side panniers just clear the tops of them. I am forced to ride in the
slots, but I see a great danger of breaking my legs against the side if the bike
should lurch one way or another, and for much of the way I have to keep my legs
raised in the air.
Where the slots are shallower or broader the ground is corrugated or covered
with loose sand. For several hours I am unable to average more than ten miles
an hour. My feelings have changed now, though. I see this as a part of what I
must do, and I am resigned to the fact that each day the hazards will multiply
until I meet the dog with eyes like cartwheels. My worries are now all for the
motorcycle. With one suspect piston I am worried about overheating. Three times
I fall; once when riding between the slots the bike falls into a groove and is
almost upside down. Each time I stop and relax, and let the bike cool off. I’m
trying not to let the riding overwhelm me so that I forget where I am and what I’m
doing.
The soil here is pitch black, and flat, but far ahead I see it rising steadily
towards the Ethiopian plateau. On either side of me are fields of cotton and
millet, and the cotton is just bursting out of its pods in little puffs of white. Not a
soul anywhere, not a vehicle or an animal or a person. What does it matter? I
have water, rice, tea and sugar, and salt. I can take as long as I like, stop where
and when I like.
So, plodding along, horseback fashion, I arrive in Doka just past four. The
police have a large open space with a fence around it. I don’t need their fence,
but their hospitality is welcome and they share their food with me. New day, new
problems. The road is rising now, in short steep swoops. Where it does the road
is stony, big loose stones ripped out of the rock and flung loose. Something
enormous has been travelling this road. It has also ground the rock into a fine
powder, a pink talc like face powder that reflects the sun and kills all contours. I
cannot see the rocks before I hit them, and since climbing necessitates some
speed and momentum, I find myself bouncing from one side of the track to the
other, hoping to find a safe line through. Twice more I fall, spread-eagled across
the track, and here it’s worse because the rocks catch on the panniers, ripping
them off, and denting the pipes. Once I am trapped with my foot under the rear
wheel. The strap on the boot is caught on the axle, and I can’t move. As I lie
there, mustering strength, I remember the boy in the store selling me that boot
and telling me that the strap was ‘for when you come off’.
Why don’t the tyres tear to shreds under all this punishment? Why no
punctures? I think a puncture might finish me, I’m so beat. Why doesn’t the
Triumph just die? It has no need to go on, unlike me. It protests and chatters. On
one steep climb it even fainted, but after a rest it went to work again. I hate to
think what havoc is being wrought inside those cylinders. We have such a long
way to go.
The morning passes in effort and short stops. The countryside is more
pleasing as it rises among trees. The mountain kingdom of Ethiopia must be near
now. The Sudanese side of the border is called Galabat. I see some men in
uniform outside a building and ride up to them. They are soldiers and ask me to
eat with them. We squat on the ground outside their garrison in front of a large
bowl, scooping up the food with handfuls of kissera. All the usual politenesses
and courtesies are offered, the symbols of mutual respect. Soon I shall leave
Arabia behind, and I suspect already how much I shall yearn for it, and Sudan in
particular.
A deep dry gulch divides the two countries. The Sudanese customs official is
correct and helpful, despite a lost document. His office is tidy and efficient, the
compound neat and clean. He is shaven and wears a freshly laundered galabia.
These are the things I remember as I ride down the gulch and up the other side
into Metema.
The differences are shocking. Here is a crowded shanty town, slovenly
unshaven soldiers, absentee officials, dirt, dilapidation and already a whiff of
corruption. The army checks me out for explosives. It is three in the afternoon
but customs, they say, won’t be back until next morning. I ride up the road to find
a hotel. Every hut is a hotel, or pretends to be on a painted sign in blue or
magenta. ‘The Best Hotel in Town’ is a square room under a tin roof with rough
daubed walls and an earth floor, a wooden bar, shelves of drink and, strange to
see on an earth floor, some upholstered chairs and a sofa around a table. I had
forgotten about upholstery. Then, the biggest shock of all. A woman, quite a
pretty woman, in a plain cotton frock with an emancipated neckline and a hem
just below the knees walks across to me, looking me in the eyes, and shakes my
hand. It is as explosive as a kiss. I had forgotten about women too.
She gives me a small cubicle at the back. The culture change is too great for
me to risk sleeping outside here. Metema has a true frontier town feel to it, and I
smell lawlesssness and a hint of violence.
I learned something about Ethiopia travelling through Sudan. The prostitutes
in Atbara came from Asmara, and did a lucrative business. Occasionally the
police rounded them up and shipped them over the border by truck, but the story
went that the girls would bribe their way back and be in business before the police
even had time to get home.
Where the women of Islam are so concealed and repressed as to form
virtually an underground society, the women of this most ancient Christian
kingdom are shamelessly exposed, unprotected and exploited at the opposite
extreme. Both the women in this hotel are prostitutes, and have several children.
They keep their money in a big iron chest under one of the beds. Even the
smallest sums are immediately put away there, and all their actions indicate that
they must watch out for themselves constantly. They say they have saved to buy
this place, that it must keep them in their older age. In the morning they make a
poignant sight, nursing their illegitimate babies and their tightly rolled wads of
Ethiopian dollars. I admire and sympathize with them.
There is much more colour here than in Sudan. Literally, A camel passes with
two men sitting on it, back to back and laughing out loud. One is wearing a vivid
carmine cloak. Another camel has birds sitting all over it, feeding off its coat.
Even the birds have bright red bills.
At the border post they say ‘No customs until the afternoon.’ Obviously it is
not possible to believe them, nor am I going to make an offer, but I must have my
customs carnet stamped. A policeman who seems to know what he is talking
about tells me I can have it done in Gondar. I decide to chance it. The travelling
is so hard that I must keep moving. I need the momentum to balance the
hardship.
Gondar is the target, the point where I rejoin the main highway system. I
cannot help thinking of it as Gondor, the gloomy mountain fortress towards which
Tolkien’s hero, Frodo, had to carry the Ring of Power. All my thoughts are still
dominated by the physical battering that I and the machine are taking on this
road. Before leaving today I have to clean up a terrible mess in one of the boxes.
The vibration has loosened the lid of the cod-liver oil and glucose pot. It has also
caused the aluminium film canisters to grind together and form a powder.
Everything in the box is now smeared with a paste of cod-liver oil and aluminium,
the most bizarre example yet of what vibration can do on a bike. Happily the
cameras were no longer in there, and nothing is ruined.
The fourth day of the ride from Kassala begins. The road here is like a cart
track on a mountainside, not bad on the level sections, but treacherous on the
inclines with that same blinding dust obscuring loose rock. Gondar is almost five
thousand feet up from here, but there is a series of lower ranges to cross, and
the road is climbing or falling almost constantly. This much, however, I became
accustomed to yesterday. What new monster must I wrestle with today?
Here it comes. A river. I stop to look at it, and my heart sinks to my boots.
How can I ever get across it? There is a ford about thirty feet wide. The water is
not too deep, a foot or two at most, though fast-running, but the river bed looks
impossible for two wheels. It is littered with black boulders the size of footballs.
How can I possibly expect the bike to stay upright, even if the tyres can grip the
stone, which looks slippery.
I am very frightened of what will happen, almost certain of disaster. Only the
thought of those thousands of miles behind me forces me to confront the
problem. I have never forded a river before. For five or ten minutes I walk up and
down, looking for a better way, trying to stifle the panic in my breast and find
some calm and resolution. It comes. The fear is somehow anaesthetized. I know
that if I am going to do it, it must be now.
‘There is a first and last time for everything,’ I tell myself, and launch into it,
trying to guess the right speed. There is nothing for me to do but hold on tight and
pray. I’m going too fast to be able to change direction or choose a path. The bike
leaps about like a mad thing. To my complete astonishment, I find myself riding
up the other side. I stop, quivering with relief. All the strength has left me and my
leg will hardly hold up the bike while I fiddle with the stand.
What a wonderful place this world is. It really does look as though I am
meant to get through.
My boots are full of water, and I go back to the stream and wash my feet,
wring out my socks and take a drink. The ford looks more manageable now that
I’ve crossed it, but there will be others. For sure.
There are four more that day, and the last one is the most monstrous of all.
The bike stalls just before the other side, but I am able to keep it upright in the
water. This ford is doubly unlike the others though, because here there are
people. Some men come to help me drag the bike out of the river. They seem very
friendly, and I discover they are building a bridge here and have a camp. They tell
me to stay the night with them.
They are different from other men, these road builders. Some kind of esprit de
corps animates them, as though the roads and bridges they make are only the
physical symbols of a desire to help the world along. I have observed it many
times before, in many countries.
That night I lie out under the stars again. The Pleiades are there winking at
me. I am no longer on my way from one place to another, I have changed lives.
My life now is as black and white as night and day; a life of fierce struggle under
the sun, and peaceful reflection under the night sky. I feel as though I am floating
on a raft, far, far away from any world I ever knew.
The men are gathered around a fire, talking. The language is Amharic, and
quite impenetrable by me, but I can hear when they are just making conversation
and when they are telling stories, because they have two voices. Comments are
made in normal speech, but for stories they speak in a higher register, in a voice
that trips and burbles along at a fast rate, full of mimicry and giggling laughter. I
feel my raft floating right back to the beginning of time.
The fifth day out of Kassala, and the slopes are immediately steeper and
longer. It is clear that the bike can barely cope with the combination of load, work
and heat. The road is scarred and ripped to rubble. It’s like following the track of
some stumbling monster of destruction. Halfway up a particularly hard climb, I
lose momentum and the bike simply dies on me. I don’t know what’s happened,
what to do. I wait awhile and kick it over. It starts and revs up fine in neutral, but
when I engage the clutch it dies on me again. I am quite near the top of the hill,
and I unload the heaviest boxes and carry them up myself. Then I ride the bike
up, and load again. The plugs and timing are OK. What else can I do but cross
my fingers, and try to keep up momentum?
Another long steep climb and I take it as fast as I can. When I get to the top,
bouncing like a mad thing all the way, I find that I have lost one of my boxes at
the bottom. It is way out of sight. As I walk down, I hear a big engine
approaching. Farther down is the monster that makes this road what it is. A
twenty-ton Fiat truck, with ten gears, is grinding uphill in first. It fills every inch of
the track on its sixteen huge tyres. The driver points to his left-hand side, then
stops. He has the box with him, unopened, and I climb in beside him and ride back
to the top, very grateful for his honesty.
It takes a while to fix the box, using largish pieces of flattened tin as an
anchor where the fibreglass has been torn away. The road continues as before. I
fall again, twice within a minute or two. The weak arm is wrenched again every
time the stones snatch at the wheel and try to tear the handlebars from my grip.
The climbing is intensely difficult. Up and down and farther up and down again
and still farther up, always a new mountain ahead as the road rises through the
eroded edges of a high and massive plateau. At one fall, some boys see me pick
myself up from the dust, and they rush away, only to reappear with a kettle full of
cold mountain water for me to drink. Another time, two boys in rags with gourds
tied around their waists leave their cattle and come to watch. One carries a flute
and hands it to me, but my brain is too addled by heat and effort to know what he
wants. I hand it back and he plays the musical equivalent of a mountain torrent.
His dexterity is astounding. He pours out notes with the speed and confidence of
a n absolute virtuoso, creating not a single stream of melody but a cascade of
sound, which seems to be in several keys and registers simultaneously. He
bathes me in his music and I know, as I listen, that I will never hear anything like
this again. When he finishes I try to show my gratitude. We have not one word in
common, and foolishly I feel it is impossible to repay such a gift with money.
Afterwards I am ashamed to have made him the victim of my idealism. A dollar
would have suited him better than my lofty sentiment, no doubt.
Still, his music is the sign that this ordeal is almost ended. A towering finger
of rock appears, standing alone on the right of the road. Then I breast the final
escarpment and run free on the plateau at last.
Chelga is the last village, about fifty miles from the highway, a mountain
village, houses and people huddled more closely together, faces lined and
angular, showing cunning and suspicion. There is a hotel ‘that serves meals. The
food is ‘injer a and wat’, a variation on the Sudanese meal. The bread is different.
It comes like a pancake, or rather an enormous soft muffin, covering the whole of
a circular tin tray. Under it is a small bowl of chopped mutton in spiced sauce.
Gathered around a table at the far end of the room is a group of men in
Western business suits of solid dark worsted. Their skin is black, but their
features are prominent and European. Several of them wear dark glasses. By
their prosperity, the way the hotel owner treats them, by their assumption of
nonchalance and the careless glances they cast over me and others I know they
are some kind of power elite.
After a little while the hotel owner asks me for my passport. He hands it
obsequiously to one of the men, who studies it lightly, makes a laughing remark
to the others and passes it back. The word that springs to mind is ‘mafia’. When
they have left, a bearded man to my right starts to speak.
‘That man is a police general,’ he says. In good English.’ I have to keep
silence when they are near, but you will find that there are many like me who are
ready to throw them out. Ethiopia is like France before the revolution.’
 He is a teacher, and asks me to make contact with students in Addis if I want
to find the truth.
‘But look out for bad people on the road, who will try to stop you. If you joke
with them they will steal from you. You must keep a good face. And it is not good
to walk around Gondar alone.
‘But after all your travelling you will have your own trick.’
I am glad he says that. I know it is no good to go around expecting trouble.
Better to hope that, in the last resort, you have found ‘your own trick’.
The last fifty miles of road are shown on the map as ‘improved’. The
improvement consists of several inches of loose stone spread over the surface. I
find it deadly, particularly on bends. There is one more ford, and one more fall. I
feel now that I have been treated to every variety of bad surface that I could ever
expect to meet. All that awaits me now is to ride the same surfaces in the wet,
but that privilege is deferred to another time and another continent.
At Azezo I ride out on to the highway and for the last eight miles I am on
smooth tarmac. It is like a flying dream. I cannot feel my wheels touch the
ground, and I enter Gondar floating through the air. I have ridden 450 miles from
Atbara in seven unimaginable days, and in many different ways I feel I have
arrived.

Ethiopia means trouble. Once on the highway to Addis Ababa, I sense it most
of the time. Perhaps, unknowingly, I even symbolize it. The men I pass, stubborn-
looking men with hard, impassive faces, sometimes raise their sticks as though
torn between the impulses to salute and to lash out. Small boys, almost naked,
crouch and raise their fists in defiance. Sometimes, under the condoning eyes of
adults, they throw stones, and I feel sure they are acting out their parents’
wishes.
It seems natural that something as rare and strange as a helmeted figure on
a motorcycle approaching at speed should arouse whatever are the dominant
emotions. Here I would have to say that the first emotions to spring to the
surface are fear and resentment. In Wollo province, three hundred miles from my
route, thousands are said to be starving to death, but I can see no sign of it. The
livestock looks fat and grain grows everywhere, but the country is seething with
rebellion and the Emperor’s long, harsh and corrupt reign must be nearly at an
end.
 In a small village called Emmanuel, just north of the Blue Nile Gorge, after
another difficult day riding through heaps of loose stones, I am forced to stop by
failing light. Small boys gather like flies, as usual, and a bigger boy, who has
learned some English, appoints himself my guide and protector. Their concerted
efforts sweep me and the bike over the high threshold of a doorway in a wooden
stockade. Within the stockade is a pinkly painted hut labelled ‘Hotel’, and at last I
am leaning back in a chair with my boots, grey from powdered granite, stretched
out in front of me in a comic posture of relief.
At the bar on my right, on a high stool with her bare feet dangling, sits the
proprietress in a pink dirndl dress and head scarf chopping up mutton in a dour
mood. Opposite me, side by side in identical positions, sit four nearly identical
men staring straight ahead, staves clasped with both hands and planted between
their feet, elbows resting on knees, polished knees spread apart to touch the
neighbours’. In their shiny black woodenness they might have been carved from a
single huge ebony log.
I have not yet got the taste for home-brewed corn beer and am drinking a
warm and expensive bottle of Italian beer, waiting for a meal, when the teachers
come in from the street. There are three of them. The boys must have told them
about me, because they come in noisy with good cheer and obviously determined
to entertain me and have a good time. They are an oddly assorted trio. One is a
tall handsome Arab. One is a short, black, wrinkled and canny mountain man.
The third is true African, with a smooth oval head balanced on his neck at forty-
five degrees. The African is in a beige gabardine suit and the others are in
traditional Ethiopian dress and shawls edged with a coloured stripe.
The African is already drunk. He squeezes up beside me waving his arms
around me and pushing his face close to mine. His eyelids are papery and taut
and the same colour as his suit, his mouth splutters saliva and his breath is bad.
It is hard to like him.
‘What are your opinions about South Africa?’ he shouts. ‘What can you tell
me about this country? I am definitely short of opinions on this subject. What is
your information? ‘and so on. He is so absorbed in his questioning and posturing
that there is no need for me to reply, mercifully, since I have nothing to say.
The others are more restrained, and show willingness to be light-hearted and
amusing, but in spite of themselves their questioning becomes hostile and
suspicious and turns to interrogation, with demands for proofs and evidence.
‘Where do you come from? ‘
‘Where do you live? ‘
‘But that is impossible. You are British. How can you live in France? ‘
‘How old are you?’
‘I cannot believe that. Show me your passport. I will not believe unless you
show me in black and white.’
‘What is this? Born in Germany? How do you explain this?’
‘What is in that wallet? Show me. I will not believe you are not keeping a gun
in there. A notebook? What kind of notes? Let me see what you are writing down
about us.’
I refuse. Not because of what I have written, but because, by now, I am
afraid of losing it under a flood of beer or vomit. The scene has a feverish
significance that is heightened by the effort I have to make against my own
weariness and to ‘keep a good face’. The four peasants staring impassively, the
sour woman ordering her skivvy about, and these three tipsy interrogators, their
good intentions helpless against the tide of anger and frustration that wells up
inside them – all that seems a quite excellent model of Ethiopia as I sense it from
the road.
Food comes, and with it, I hope for some relief. I have to struggle to stop too
much of the African’s spit from falling on my plate, but most of it is dribbling over
his food as he scoops up the mutton with fistfuls of injera and stuffs it into his
mouth. Then I start back in horror as I see his dripping hand head straight for my
own mouth. He tries desperately hard to reach me with it, but I am ducking and
weaving like Muhammed Ali, and he has to give up.
The other two are severely amused.
‘It is a custom of hospitality in our country that you may show your love by
placing your food in the mouth of your guest.’
That, I thought disgustedly, sums it up. Where else could a gesture of
friendship become a repulsive act of aggression. In Ethiopia, for once, I allowed
myself the luxury of a generalization. Two words described them all for me.
Fucked up!

In the south of Ethiopia, it’s better. The roads are terrible again, but the
people are softer and not so paranoid. Will it always be like that, better away
from the highways?
The last stretch to the border of Kenya is partly a river bed, and I have seen
some spectacular termite mounds, in red and white. The white ones, dotted all
about the landscape, are like an outdoor exhibition of Henry Moore statues.
Inevitably I think of Lot’s wife and the pillars of salt.
The Ethiopian mood may be mean, but the high landscape has been
magnificent. Now I am coming down again, into the African rift valley, and the
desert provinces of Kenya and Somalia. Moyale is the border town. It’s New
Year’s Day, and I am on the Ethiopian side, but a road engineer is in with the
Kenya government brass and we get across for a celebration on the other side.
Different world. Almost an English pub, drinking Tusker Ale and Stout, chatting
with the D.C., struggling to catch the barman’s eye.
The district commissioner is a tall, stylish Kikuyu African called William. He
tells me two things of great interest. One, that tourism is the only thing that will
save African wildlife, since Africans themselves can see no advantage in keeping
endangered species alive, unless it’s to make money out of sentimental
foreigners. Two, that Africans can’t put up with ‘hippies’. When an African sees
five ragged Americans sharing the same bottle of Coke, he knows they all have
millionaire fathers in Milwaukee, and considers he is being conned.
Next day I cross the border officially. Two busloads of Jehovah’s Witnesses
are coming back to Addis Ababa from a congress in Nairobi. All their belongings
are strewn over the ground, and customs is going through everything mercilessly.
Their literature is all being confiscated, huge heaps of tracts and books and
‘news letters ‘are ready for burning. It surprises me to see how prosperous they
all look.
From Moyale begins the last long run to Nairobi, three hundred miles of
scorching semi-desert and then the Equator. I’m very excited. There is a real road
this time, part of a big new highway, but unsur faced. It is heavily corrugated
most of the way, but somehow that doesn’t bother me so much anymore. Halfway
along, the luggage rack on the back of the Triumph fractures, whipped to pieces
by the vibration.
I’m standing there wondering how to get my stuff to the next stage to repair it
when a Peace Corps man comes along in a pickup and carries my luggage on to
Marsabit for me. There a gnarled Danish woodwork instructor with a workshop
helps me to weld the rack together again. I begin to understand that in Africa,
some-how or other, there is always a way.
This country is not properly desert, but savannah. There are bushes and low
trees, and there is game. Already I have seen ostrich with glorious pink plumes,
and then, just before Marsabit, I come across a herd of giraffe. When I stop, they
observe me quizzically for a while over the tops of the trees, and then gallop
away. I am absolutely spellbound. The only other kind of movement with which I
can compare this incomparable sight is that moment when a big airliner, having
just taken off, seems to hang over the end of the runway in complete defiance of
nature. The giraffe glides through the air as though in free fall.
A hundred miles from the Equator, the ground begins to rise out of the desert.
On January the fifth, and only thirty miles from the Equator, I find it hard to
believe my eyes. I seem to be travelling through the south of England, Sussex
maybe. The air is cool and fresh. There are flowers in the hedgerows. On either
side, well-kept farms, with gates, cows on green pasture and country cottages
with lawns, and on the gates, painted wooden signs announcing Smith, and Clark
and Thompson. At Thompson I cannot bear to go any farther and on impulse I
turn into the driveway. It ends in front of a cottage built partly of stone, partly of
wood. There is a dovecote on a post, a lawn with rose beds, a stream running
past. Beyond the lawn, like a picture postcard in the sky, is Mount Kenya under
snow. An African servant receives me. The master and mistress are not home
yet. Please to wait, and have some tea. In a chintz armchair, among English
country furniture, like a very self-conscious bull in a china shop, I wait and
marvel.
Arthur Thompson and his wife, Ruth, seem not at all surprised to find me
sitting there. They talk to me for a while, and invite me for the night. He was a
soldier, from Northumberland, older, grey-haired, ulcers. Speaking with a trace of
Geordie mixed with colonial, he puts much emphasis on the ‘classlessness’ of the
white community here. She is younger, plump, pretty, strong-natured. They grow
maize, wheat, barley, pyrethrum, have eighty Jersey cows, a thousand or so
sheep. All on three thousand.acres.
‘Had a good life for thirty years,’ he says, ‘but it’s nearly over now. The Kenya
Government is bound to buy us out soon. They’re settling Africans out here now.’
Where to go then?
‘South Africa looks good. I can’t see Europe letting that go. If they do there’ll
be no way round for shipping. Too important strategically. I think Rhodesia’s
bound to stay white for the same reason.’
Wishful thinking, but it is January 1974. Even the Portuguese a e still in
Africa.
Thompson is direct, but not bitter. He does not strike me as a bigoted man.
He feels for his land, like a good farmer.
‘It’s not suitable for settlement, for Kikuyu farming,’ he says. ‘There’s not
enough rain. The Kikuyu needs rain. His method is to exhaust a patch, then move
on and let it go back to bush. He goes around in circles. A round hut. Then the
woman grows yams around that. Outside, in a bigger circle, the man grows
maize, and around that he hunts.
‘But without irrigation, he’ll get nothing up here, and the land will be ruined.’
True or false? I cannot possibly know, but I do feel his concern, and that, I
know, is genuine. He is still reclaiming land washed out before he arrived, even
though he is certain never to profit from it. I feel his identification with these
acres, and wonder how he could ever tear himself away. All over Africa the white
man is being pulled up by the roots. Weeded out. There will be much pain.
Next day I’m in Nairobi! Halfway through Africa. Another magic milestone. Like
all milestones, something to look forward to, something to look back on, but at
the time, nothing more than a pretext for indulgence. Hotels, Restaurants, Drinks,
Showers, Banks, Clubs, Publicity.
London to Nairobi. Seven thousand miles. Something to shout about.
None of this means anything to me. Nothing of my journey means anything to
anyone here. We are engaged in a conspiracy, pretending to understand each
other. Isn’t that what makes the world go round? I meet a man I once knew in
London. He is rubbing his hands together over the same deals, pickled and
preserved in the same urbanity. Nairobi and London are joined by a silver tube
that swoops through the pasteurized ether, and the same stuff pours out at each
end.
I dress for the Muthaiga Country Club, a functioning relic from the days
before the tables were turned. Anyone can join now, but in practice it’s much the
same blue-eyed crowd, still enjoying the privileges without the power.
Dark polished wood, spacious rooms, parquet floors and pillars, and a wine
cellar still intact.
‘Well, old chap, they say your boat’s in absolute shite order.’ Game
fishermen, New Zealanders, talking about the marlin off Kilifi.
‘Whatever they say, life’s still pretty colonial here. The Africans pretend to
object, but…’
Smoked sailfish and lamb’s kidneys turbigo for lunch, with a good claret.
At my hotel in the afternoon there are three people sitting near me, an
African, an Indian in a turban and an Asian woman.

She: Look, you can see, one eye is higher than the other.

Indian: Well, your nose is crooked.

She: Yes I know, it was a bad accident I had. Very bad. Now I

have the feeling when I look that one side is higher than the other.

African: You should take a hammer and straighten it.

She: You shouldn’t think it’s so funny.

African: It’s better to see something than nothing. But if you lie on the ground
I’ll give it a good kick.
 On the terrace at sundown two Africans in grey flannels and short-sleeved
shirts have been sitting at a small table since lunch-time, with beer coming at the
rate of three or four pints an hour. They are speaking Swahili larded with English
phrases and words. ‘Anyway, let us compare this thing,’ or ‘We must analyse that
thing.’ Rather the way we used to think it smart to use French.
‘Is it better,’ one of them bursts out in English, ‘to make the wrong decision at
the right time, or the right decision at the wrong time? ‘
I feel sympathy and kinship. I too am playing this white man’s game,
pretending it is important.
My host, the Lucas agent in Nairobi, rises above pretence. He is the real
thing, a huge florid man with a big appetite who loves the life, the business, the
whole ridiculous mixture.
‘We’ve just bought a plane,’ he tells me. ‘Brand-new. Arrived yesterday.
Thirty-four thousand pounds. Where do you want to go?’
‘Well, there’s this Irish doctor who invited me to Lodwar?’
‘Fine. No problem. We’ll take you there on Tuesday, fetch you back on
Thursday. Suit you? ‘
Lodwar, in the northwest corner of Kenya, hundreds of miles from Nairobi, at
the edge of nowhere. Desert to the north, desert to the west, desert to the south.
To the east, Lake Rudolf, and beyond that, desert. The Turkana tribe lives here,
alongside a river bed, now dry; long thin black bodies swaying indolently against
a backdrop of hot sand and bleached grass. They had goats, grow some millet,
live off the desert, help to make the desert. At night they dance, in a big circle,
men and women, stamping feet, chanting a descending fifth – ‘Hommhommmmm’
– the man in the middle jumps and sings, look I’m a giraffe, I’m a lion, I’m an
antelope, and so he is, they all recognize him, see how he sets his shoulder,
cocks his head, higher and higher he jumps, our brother, our prey. The Turkana
were hunters, but hunting is illegal and there is almost nothing left to hunt. At
night they dance, and wear ostrich feathers and ostrich eggshell ornaments, and
ankle bells, and brightly coloured tablecloths from India, and the girls wear long
goatskins painstakingly sewn all over with beads, and collars like bridles, and red
mud in their hair. And sometimes, secretly, the men take their spears over the
edge into nowhere, and raid somebody else’s livestock.
During the day a blacksmith in a grass hut makes spears out of car springs
for sale to tourists in Nairobi. I am the only white visitor here but I am made to
feel like a tourist. The girls come, arms outstretched, begging and selling. For a
few shillings I could strip any one of them bare of the little she wears.
Who are the Turkana?
‘The Turkana are very treacherous…conceited and idle.’

H. Johnston, 1902
‘The Turkana is a careless and cruel herdsman and a most efficient liar.’

E. D. Emley, 1927
‘A feature of social life…is the continual begging…the only limits I am aware
of are that a man may not beg another man’s wife.
‘Savage and wild as the country he lives in, so he will remain, in my opinion,
to the end of time.’

P. H. Gulliver, 1963
Time came to an end abruptly a few years after those last words were
written, with the bad drought and cholera of the sixties. Until then the Turkana
had been free of aid or interference. There had been no schools, no clinics, no
administration. Only an occasional punitive expedition to control tribal warfare.
But famine and disease persuaded the government to open up the Northern
Frontier Province to the missionaries and aid societies.
Today there are flying doctors from Nairobi, mission clinics, schools. There
are tin roofs, and souvenirs and the self-conscious assumption of haughty pride
in front of the camera, followed by the outstretched hand for a posing fee. Life
seems to go along much the same as before, the dancing and laughing and
begging and lying, except that now there is more to beg for, you don’t die so
easily and there are white people fussing around in pants and dresses. Not like
the old days under District Commissioner Whitehouse, who made native dress de
rigueur for everyone, but everyone.
 And the Turkana still think nothing has changed. They actually believe they
are the centre of the universe. Listen to the old head-man, the M’zee, talking:
‘With one spear we can kill a lion or an elephant or a giraffe. Accurate at
twenty feet. The Turkana will never change their customs. If any other tribe tries
to overcome us we will beat them.’
Savage and wild until the end of time? But the M’zee is wearing corduroy
trousers, for heaven’s sake, and a striped shirt. Old man, can’t you see, you
were bought and sold for a handful of white medicine and some ruled exercise
paper. Your children will not kill a lion, not with twenty spears, not at twenty
inches. Why did you want schools?
‘So that children can get good jobs in the city and send money back to their
parents. But they will never forget their tribe - only the bad ones.’
Oh, there will be many bad ones in the shanties of Nairobi, where other tribes
won the war long ago, and most of the good jobs.
In the District Hospital, Dr Gerry Byrne from Dublin looks up from a patient’s
bedside and I diagnose astonishment all over his cherubic countenance. Six
months earlier he had written to the Sunday Times: ‘Dear Mr Simon, If on your
journey round the world you happen to be passing near Lodwar…‘ but he never
for a moment believed.
He is really chuffed, his big spectacles gleam with pleasure. Black bodies lie
all about with modest green cotton wraps around their middles. It’s the women’s
ward; wrinkled paps flapping, dust on the soles of their feet. There are lots of
bright new bandages where they’ve been cut open, a batch of post-ops left to
heal by the monthly flying doctors from Nairobi. Mostly they have had hydatid
cysts removed, the local menace; they grow to enormous size, often in the liver
or spleen, like clusters of grapes in syrup, and when they burst you die. It’s
thought the dogs carry it about.
There’s a pretty girl with spindly legs dying of a malignant tumour, but no one
can be told, certainly not the family, because their rage, says Gemy, would be
uncontrollable. Also, he says, when the grief is all burned out, there is nothing
left. When Turkana parents know their child is dying, they leave it to starve.
There never was too much food around. They don’t bury the corpses. They put
them out for the hyenas, to keep the meat in circulation, as it were.
It is hot in Lodwar, excessively hot. At times you can see the heat waving in
the air.
Outside the hospital are many more patients lying on the ground with their
families, not through shortage of beds so much as because they like it there and
their families come and cook for them. Hygiene? So what? The rate of recovery is
high. The pain threshold is high too.
‘The men like having their feet cut off,’ says Gerry.
‘What? ‘I almost shout.
‘There’s a thing they get that swells their feet up. We can stop it, but the foot
stays big. But they prefer to have it cut off.’
White Medicine Is Amazing, says Gerry, full of wonder and misgivings. I
mean, it was never like this back in Dublin. Out here a miracle drug still does
miracles. Penicillin is like it was in the days of Fleming: a shot cures just about
anybody instantly, specially children. Trouble is, you ask yourself sometimes,
what am I saving them for? Almost everybody in Kenya is under sixteen already.
There’s nothing for them to do, not much for them to eat, even in the prosperous
parts of the country. To multiply the population out here, in the desert, seems
crazy. Oh, my Hippocratic oath, says Dr Gerry, I don’t know. Why don’t you ask
the bishop?
The doctor’s expenses and modest wage are paid for by the Medical
Missionaries of St Mary, and there really is a bishop in Lodwar, Bishop Mahon.
Does he have the answers? Not on your life.
‘I’ve given up thinking,’ he says. ‘I never did very much of it and now I don’t
bother at all. Just get on with it. Let the future take care of itself.’
Spoken with humour, vigorous humility. He’s got my number all right. If he did
have the answers I wouldn’t believe them.
He is quite ready to accept that he might be creating more problems than he
solves.
‘What can you do? You can’t let people die. Can you? ‘
I’m not brave enough to say, Yes, it’s being done all the time.
We are sitting in a house the bishop built. He knows exactly where to sit, with
his back to an open-lattice cement wall that he designed himself from easily
moulded units. The breeze comes through to him, but fails to reach me, and I am
abuzz with thirsty flies swarming fanatically into my lips and my eyes. I am
uncomfortably aware that there are no flies on the bishop.
He’s a strong, lean, tough man with tobacco-coloured teeth and straight
silver hair, in shorts and a tea-stained shirt. Nine years in Nigeria, six in Turkana
and an occasional whirl around the States raising money. He has small hospitals
in various outlying villages, staffed by Danish volunteers as well as his own
home-grown Irish pastors and sisters.
He can’t explain what motivates the Danes (it is certainly not religion) but
says they are much better suited to the work, and less demanding than his own
church folk. His nuns, he fears, are too often doctrinaire and officious, and their
inflexibility makes it hard for them to withstand the pressures. All these naked
breasts, for example, although they don’t, anymore, go around persuading
natives to cover up. The bishop smiles faintly at remembered scenes of outrage
at the Norwegian-donated swimming pool where inflexible nuns in uptight
swimsuits are exposed to the unself-conscious naturalism of supple Danes.
The bishop’s ‘action man’ stance has not blinded him to his responsibilities.
Having wrought the miracles of modern medicine, he felt obliged to try for the
fishes and the loaves as well. An FAO man reported that Lake Rudolf was
capable of breeding and delivering between 50,000 and 150,000 tons of Nile
perch a year, so the bishop got that one going. Ambitious Asian businessmen
smashed an airplane and a lorry bringing in the refrigeration. There was already
an iron trawler in the lake, brought and assembled there by the British in more
expansive times. They had good early catches, but then yields dropped and the
scheme failed to fulfil itself. So he turned to loaves, with an irrigation scheme up-
river.
‘At next rains, in April, we should get about fifty acres under cultivation. We’re
aiming for several hundred, but it’s hard going. They aren’t all industrious.
‘Without us there to direct them I don’t think they could manage it on their
own. I’m afraid the channels would soon choke up.’
But that’s worrying about the future, and we don’t do that, do we.
Mahon relates the ups and downs of his missionary life in the way older men
describe the hopes and disappointments of their sons, with a wistful fondness
and faith in the essential goodness of the life and its intentions, whatever the
outcome. He would not willingly return to Western life (nor would any of the
volunteers – its selfish, indulgent nature is too blatant viewed from here) but he
has few expectations. He is resigned to criticism of his ‘meddling’ in nonmedical
matters. One feels that the technocrats of Oxfam and the specialist relief
agencies have often snubbed his people, and he feels they are all vulnerable.
‘We project a terrible image on these people, going round in Land-Rovers,
living in concrete buildings, but if we build in mud the termites work their way up
the walls and eat the doorjambs and attack the roof. We’ve tried most things.
There’s a chap out there now living in a tent. He’s happy enough, but I think he’s
doing harm because when he goes I can find nobody to replace him who would
put up with those conditions.’
He warns his people always about imposing their standards on the Turkana.
‘My only hope is that after a few years we can overcome the bad effects by
showing them that we care as people.’
Truly a pious hope.
My people are a treacherous, conceited, idle, careless, cruel, lying and begging
people. Have you come to preserve us or to change us? Ha! My people are a tall,
beautiful, vigorous, savage and wild people; our men can move like the lion, the
antelope and the giraffe, and our women can move as your women have forgotten
to move. Do you want us to care, as well?
Still, I like the bishop a lot, and I even prefer his nuns to the pop-eyed UN girls
I saw Rovering around in Ethiopia in their solar topees and pretty safari suits.
And I really like the horrible Turkana. As well as all the other things they are, I
find them very sexy. I should know, we danced together. Homm-hommmmm I
went, and stamped my feet. They were determined to make a tourist out of me. All
right, I said, I’ll BE a fucking tourist, and I bargained for everything in sight. At
night I went to the stamping ground down beyond the grass huts, where the fire
was lit, and watched them doing their magical leaping zoo numbers. Oh boy, I
said. Pictures, I gotta have pictures.
 The chief’s son and heir apparent and prospective Member of Parliament for
Lodwar whispers gently to me through the hole they all have knocked in their front
teeth in case of lockjaw. ‘Two goats and some corn beer, and I think we could fix
something,’ he says.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘Get the goats.’ Two sleek little black goats and enough corn for
eight gallons of overnight beer cost ninety shillings, deductible on expenses.
Emmanuel, the chief’s son, is being nice to me. It’s a knock-down price for a
rave-up. His adjutant, the Minderbender of Lodwar, in khaki shorts and sandals,
has a whole intrigue going already. Two goats, he says, will not feed a tribe, so
we will choose only the best and bravest dancers, and the choicest and most
nubile maidens, and we will make a secret rendezvous away over there.
Even I know there’s not a chance of keeping it quiet. This fellow just loves to
plot, and everybody’s very happy to join in the mischief. Next afternoon the
chosen few assemble. The men gather inside one of the compounds, where they
pretend to be unobserved as they bring out their best warrior headgear and their
finest table linen to wrap around their waists. The girls are already on their way,
twittering excitedly like all girls everywhere going to a ball, the long goatskins
polished and weighted with red, white and blue beads swinging dramatically from
side to side, stretched and moulded over each tourist-tantalizing buttock, so
girlish and prominent that I can’t help making the incongruous comparison with
bustles in a Regency ballroom. As well as their finest beads, they are slung with
necklaces and bracelets and ornamental aprons to indicate their wealth and
marriageability, and they have fresh, glistening red mud on their partly shaven
heads. The newly fermented corn beer is in two square and shiny four-gallon
cans called debbies, and two girls carry them on their heads with breath-taking
ease and grace, making the cans dance with their bodies, investing those blunt
tin cans with the elegance of the richest amphorae, leaving their arms free to trail
enticingly through the air as they plunge forward, almost rushing, but beautifully
controlled, to the dance. While the men stalk along, in a separate group, wearing
their ostrich-feather crowns and brilliant cloaks like lords, and at this stage I
don’t care whether the tablecloths were made in Birmingham.
Of course the whole village knows there’s something up. Little naked black
spies have been buzzing around the compounds for hours. As we proceed
across the dunes, a mob of the curious follow at a respectful distance. What
puzzles them is the time of day. It’s much too early for dancing, but I insisted on
pictures by daylight. On the chosen site a big fire is started immediately, and the
two innocent black beasts are ceremonially speared, gutted and tossed into the
flames in one piece, hide and all.
The girls are rehearsing, hands linked in a line, singing a chant and making
little runs across the sand. The men insist on posing for endless group shots,
faces set in the sternest expressions, except for Minderbender, who fools about
constantly in his khaki shorts, ruining the fake authenticity and making it real.
Then they dance and I have to go leaping and squatting and rolling about on the
ground with my 28-mm trying to remember how David Hemmings did it in Blow Up,
until the light dies and it’s time to carve the goats.
By now the camp followers have caught the scent of sizzling hide and are
assembled on the rising ground watching enviously, and in their front rank are
several ancient geezers with expectant expressions. The tribal butchers begin
cutting the animals into lumps and laying them out on a table of branches and
green leaves, but there’s trouble in the air, and I hear voices raised among the
warriors. Not too loud, as yet, because their mouths are full of meat and gristle,
but as the meat dwindles away, the altercation becomes more heated and to my
surprise half the first team gets up and stalks off, looking very fierce.
‘Ah,’ says Emmanuel, ‘I am sorry but we must finish now.’
There has been a schism in the tribe. A heresy has been exposed. According
to tribal tradition, the goats should be sliced up in a certain way, and the choice
cuts offered to the tribal elders first (who would undoubtedly accept). Fuck that,
said Minderbender and his Revolutionary Council, why should the old geezers
have the best bits. They weren’t even invited. But some of his followers are not
so staunchly progressive. Having licked their chops, they decide it’s time to suck
up to the elders, and they stage a Royalist Demo and Walkout. Under their
tablecloths, it is whispered, they carry extra pieces of goat for later.
A good afternoon’s work. I got my pictures; I have shown that the Turkana
are indeed conceited, treacherous and all the rest. And I have demonstrated
what one tourist and a couple of goats can do to rip apart the structure of a
tribal society. Tomorrow the sightseers can come on their 747s from Frankfurt
and Chicago and clean up the remains.
There is nothing left for me to do but to gather up my souvenirs and fly back
to Nairobi. I wonder, would it have been like that if I had arrived on my
motorcycle? No. I’m sure it wouldn’t. Flying, I realize, can be very, very
dangerous. I hear the purists mocking me. Motorcycles, they say, are just as
alienating as aircraft, same technology sliced a different way. They don’t
understand. It’s the effect on me I’m talking about. The long, hard, solitary
journey induces a different kind of respect. I mean to keep it that way from now
on.
But then, I would never have got the pictures. Oh God, I don’t know, and it’s
no use asking the bishop…
I wanted to get to Mombasa and drink a beer.
I not only wanted it, I expected it. Life in Nairobi had softened me. Instead of
a beer I had a flat tyre.
‘Bloody hell,’ I said bitterly. ‘Just the sort of thing you’d expect.’
Petulant. Frustrated. I raised my voice. Why not? Empty highway. No one
around.
‘Isn’t that just bloody perfect? ‘I shouted.
‘Yes,’ said God, but I didn’t hear him.
I swore at the top of my voice and the word lost itself in the tangle of weeds
at the roadside. It became time to do something useful.
I was annoyed because I had just had two weeks in Nairobi to overhaul and
repair the Triumph, to wash it and grease it and fit fine new leather bags on the
tank, and new tyres and tubes on the wheels, and here I was 150 miles down the
road to Mombasa with a puncture, and a lot of dirty, uninteresting work in front of
me. Furthermore it was midday and I was two degrees south of the equator and
almost down to sea level at the hottest time of the year and wearing a flying
jacket.
 Hot as it was, I found the flying jacket comfortable to wear as long as the
bike was moving. Its stiffness saved me from a lot of the fatigue that comes from
being continually buffeted by the air, and I was spared the problem of finding
somewhere to pack it. I knew it looked odd to be wearing sheepskin in the tropics
and I enjoyed the effect, but when the airflow stopped, I had about thirty seconds
before I reached boiling point, and my thirty seconds were up.
I trundled the bike carefully on the wheel rim off the edge of the road, kicked
out the swing stand, dismounted and threw the jacket to the ground. Then the
gloves. Then the helmet. Then I started on the baggage.
‘Not even a mad dog would do this in the midday sun,’ I thought.
In Nairobi they had warned me. It’s a good tar road to Mombasa, they said,
four or five hours in a car, but the road surface gets so hot that it causes
punctures. In Nairobi I had let someone else fit the new tubes and he had pinched
the rear one with the tyre levers, making so many holes that I put the older
patched one back instead. Now the heat had melted off the patches. That is
what I thought had happened, and it gave me a good chance to put the blame on
someone else.
‘Bloody fool,’ I said. But the bloody fool was me, for being too lazy to do it
myself, and for not starting earlier in the morning when the road was cooler.
Normally a puncture was not a disaster. With practice and an hour’s
energetic work it would be done. First I had to take all the heavy stuff off the bike,
because with the rear tyre flat it was impossible for me to lift it on to the centre
stand. And on a soft surface I had to find something firm to lay under the centre
stand as well. I got out the tools, and soap and water and a cup and a rag. Then
the right exhaust muffler had to be dropped, which meant unscrewing a couple of
small nuts with their washers and laying them carefully on the outspread rag.
With this done the spindle could be unscrewed and withdrawn from the axle, and
the spacer and wheel adjuster with it, and all put on the rag away from grit and
concealing clumps of grass. I tried to think like a manual.
Then I had a good trick I had discovered. With the swing stand out as well,
the bike would lean over to the left at a crazy angle and there was room to take
the wheel off the splines and slip it out from under the mudguard. Without this
trick, or something similar, it was impossible for one man to remove the rear
wheel. It was called a quickly detachable wheel, and it was certainly easier than
taking off the sprocket and chain also, but it had not, I thought, been brought to
a pitch of great refinement.
With the wheel off, having remembered at the last minute to detach the
speedometer cable, there were the security bolts to loosen. These were two bolts
that clamped the tyre to the rim and cause many spectators to wonder why I had
three air valves on my wheel instead of the usual one. The nuts could be hard to
undo because of the filth that gathered on them, but I had two pieces of plastic
tube over the bolts packed with grease so that, once loosened, the nuts could be
quickly spun off with the finger. That saved about ten minutes each way.
New tyres were harder to get off, especially with the rather small levers I was
obliged to carry, but the soapy water helped a lot. Unfortunately when I pulled out
the tube, the rim belt came with it, snapped. The rim belt protects the tube from
the inside of the rim where all the spokes come through, and it is obviously safer
to have one. I had no spare, another reason for cursing.
There was nothing wrong with the old patches after all. There were two new
punctures on the inside of the tube, tiny slits, and near them I noticed score lines
and places where the rubber had blistered.
‘Shit and damnation,’ I said, and, ‘Merde puissance treize.’ I swore a lot in
those days, in a rather dull way but with feeling.
Clearly the old tube was no good anymore, and I would have to repair the
punctured new one. It was difficult in that heat, with the flies refreshing
themselves on my sweat, to be thorough, particularly with the clumsy patches I
was carrying at the time.
The best trick in my repertoire was provided by a company called Schrader in
Birmingham. They made a valve with a long tube which I could screw into the
engine instead of a spark plug. As long as you had at least two cylinders, you
could run the engine on one and the other piston would pump up your tyre. So I
was able to pump up the tube, and it seemed all right.
I put the puncture routine into reverse. The tyre rims slid snugly into place on
the soap, and the wheel pumped up hard. Twenty minutes later I had everything
back on the bike and was washing my hands in the last of the soapy water when I
saw the tyre was half flat.
The life drained out of me then. I could not even find the energy to swear. I
dropped down on the jacket and pulled out my cigarettes, and tried to think about
other things. It was very pleasant here, I thought, if you had nothing to do. Hotter
than Nairobi, certainly. But not too hot. Not at all. And pleasantly dry.
I looked at the vegetation alongside the road, trying to recognize it or fix it in
my memory, but I could not make out anything characteristic enough to attract
my attention. There were various wild flowers that looked to me like wild flowers
everywhere, and low shrubs and bushes that looked the same as any others. I
was annoyed by my inability to see plants clearly and remember them. It was a
great drawback. Above all things, a traveller should have an eye for natural
detail, I thought, since that is what he sees most of the time. There was some
bamboo and I was glad to find at least one thing I recognized, not knowing that
there were over two hundred different species.
Beyond the low vegetation, where the land had once been cleared for road-
making, were trees, equally unknown to me, leafy and of medium height. I walked
to the edge of the wood to relieve myself and wondered whether some enormous
beast was at all likely to come crashing towards me through the undergrowth.
Probably not, I thought, since I had seen small farms through the trees as I rode
along. In fact, just a mile or so back I had passed a petrol station at a
crossroad, with a sign. What had it said? I looked at the map. This must be it.
Kibwezi Junction.
I was wondering what to do next when I saw Pius coming towards me, though
of course I did not yet know his name. He was a fat man in the best sense of the
word, not gross or obese or flabby or bloated, but of a prime meaty plumpness to
make a cannibal’s mouth water. His black body was enticingly wrapped in a gaily
flowered shirt, and he sat astride his little Yamaha motorcycle on jovial terms
with the world and with a measured sense of his own importance in it. I waved to
him and he stopped beside me.
‘Can you help me, I wonder…’ I said.
‘Absolutely,’ he said, ‘Most definitely. I see you are having trouble, isn’t it. A
spot of bother.’
‘Well, my tyre’s flat…‘ and I went on to explain.
‘I will introduce you to Mr Paul Kiviu,’ he burst out enthusiastically. ‘Definitely
he is the very man of the moment. He is manager BP station Kibwezi Junction and
he is my friend.’
Mercifully the road was level at that point. As I pushed the loaded bike along
on its flat tyre, Pius bobbed around me like a butterfly, calling encouragement,
imploring me to believe that my troubles would soon be over. His good nature was
irresistible and I began to believe him.
In any case I was happy that something was happening and I was in touch
with people. At the time it seemed to me that what I wanted was to have my
problem solved quickly and to get on my way. I had a boat to catch in Cape Town
and the journey was still the main thing. What happened on the way, who I met,
all that was incidental. I had not quite realized that the interruptions were the
journey.
Paul Kiviu understood my problem. There was nothing he could do about it,
but he understood it, and, as they say, a problem shared is a problem halved.
Pius did not so much understand my problem as appreciate it. He revelled in it,
celebrated it, but Paul understood it because he had problems of his own. He
was accustomed to them, and he was the first African I had met who was marked
by them. He was small, thin and intense, and showed signs of worrying.
His BP station had a servicing bay and pumps. The main building was a
sheltered area with coloured metal chairs and tables, served by a small lockup
kitchen where a girl in a head scarf pushed sweets and drinks and snacks across
the counter. It was clean and polished and quite the most modern thing for miles
around. We had some fizzy drinks and potato chips and thought about what to
do.
It was simple really. I needed a new tube and it would have to come from
Nairobi. The punctured tube could be repaired of course, but there was a very
long way to go before I could expect to get a new tube. There would be nothing in
Tanzania, I guessed, or Zambia, and in Rhodesia, with the blockade, it might be
difficult. When I saw how the old tube had perished it made me unhappy to be
without a new one as well as an acceptable spare. So I would call Mike Pearson,
the Lucas agent in Nairobi, and ask him if he could get an inner tube to me
somehow. And a rim belt too.
Meanwhile the bike could be safely locked up at the B P station, and I would
wait in Kibwezi.
‘Definitely. This is the solution,’ exclaimed Pius, and we had another fizzy
drink and some cigarettes. A little later, when a person could see his own shadow
again, I sat on the back of Pius’ Yamaha and we went into town.
Kibwezi was a jumble of painted wood-frame buildings with tin roofs, mostly
single-storey, on a crossroads of baked earth. It was well away from the
Mombasa road and could not be seen from there, but buses came in and turned
around, throwing up a fine dust. Kenya was very dry and crying for rain. Many
animals in the reserves had already died of thirst.
Prominent on the corner was ‘The Curry Pot Hotel’. On the other corner was
the main store, run as usual by Asian traders. There were other small shops and
bars, and in the road were fruit and vegetable stalls.
 Jammed between the store and the next shop, in a space no bigger than a
large changing cubicle, was Kibwezi Post Office. Much of the space was
occupied by a fine old wooden switchboard, and in front of it, earphones clamped
over his head, sat Kibwezi’s determined postmaster. He was scolding one of his
customers on the telephone. For years he had laboured to drag the people of
Kibwezi into the twentieth century. He had lectured and cajoled them on the
proper way to address an envelope, on the disrespect implied by sticking first the
Queen’s head and then Kenyatta’s head on upside down, on the need when
sending a telegram to have some idea of where it was intended to go.
‘Who is this Thomas N’Kumu? I have no knowledge of this man. He is not the
Prime Minister, is it? Prior importance must go to his place of residence. First we
must know where is this N’Kumu, and then we can look about messages.’
His patience was exhausted.
‘That is the correct method for dealing with this matter,’ he shouted scornfully
into the little black tube, and with the wrath of a god at judgement day he pulled
out the plug.
I faced the tyrant with my number, exchange and name of party in faultless
order and he had no choice but to proceed. He manipulated the controls of the
machine through which he ruled the world and, with surprising efficiency, I was
connected to Nairobi and my business was concluded. They would do their best
to find the tubes and deliver them. A telegram would be sent me the following day.
I took up temporary residence at The Curry Pot Hotel.
Pius took me back to the BP station to fetch my red bag with my toilet and
shaving kit and clean socks. Most people in Kibwezi walked barefoot or in
sandals, but I had not got any sandals yet and had read somewhere about
parasites that burrowed into your feet, so I wore shoes and socks. Sandals
would have been kinder to my sweltering feet and to everyone else around, as
well as saving socks, but they were too far down on my list. I had a long list of
duties that I meant to perform when I had time. They included notes, letters and
articles to write, jobs to do on the bike and modifications of my various ‘systems’,
and they took priority over sandals. Once I had had a pair of sandals but could
not wear them because they took the skin off my toes, so they went right down
the list again. I allowed only a proportion of my time to things I did not feel like
doing, since I found that the list of things I ought to do was endless and would
otherwise take all the joy out of life. If at any time I really wanted to do anything
on the list, of course I did it regardless of priority, but sandals never came into
this category because of the painful recollection of skinned toes. That by and
large was how I arranged my life. The list was not written down, but in my head,
and it tailed off down my spinal column where it sometimes gave me a backache.
Paul had another friend visiting at the BP station, a big well-muscled man with
a placid face called Samson. He was a policeman but off duty, so we whiled
away the time until Paul felt he had worried enough for the day, and we set off for
town together.
We went to the bar that was a few doors down from the post office. It was
after dark and the room was lit by softly hissing paraffin lamps. I liked this light
very much, preferring it to light bulbs and the horrific fluorescent tubes which have
probably been installed by now.
The room was square with a counter down one side, and about half a dozen
tables on a plain wooden floor. The doors and windows stayed open, as they did
everywhere else. There were already several groups of men there, and we took
an empty table and ordered. The beer was served by bar girls, and there were
three of them, so they were not very busy. They liked being there because they
could sometimes get off with a man they liked the look of and enjoy themselves,
and if the man was feeling generous they could get some shillings as well.
I did not know about the bar girls when we sat down, but found out about it
as the evening advanced. The conversation was very animated, full of fun and
laughter as they answered my questions and I tried to answer theirs.
The girls all wore the same loose pink overalls, buttoned down the front, and
head scarves. Under the overalls they wore only a nylon half-slip. Of course I
was completely used to nakedness by then, not just in the European way of
feeling free of embarrassment and not going goggle-eyed at the sight of a thigh,
but in the African way of not even discriminating between parts of the anatomy
because when they are all on display together a finely arched back or a
beautifully poised head can be just as exciting as a breast or a buttock. Only the
sexual organs were kept hidden except for special occasions.
The pint bottles of Tusker kept coming from the ice chest, and Paul was
getting anxious to fix me up with a bar girl. At first I was only amused by his
efforts. It had been several months since I had been with a woman, but I did not
consider that a long time and, in another way, I had got used to celibacy. The
travelling was so intense, I was receiving so much stimulation, that it was
completely satisfying in itself. Once out of Europe there was little artificial erotic
stimulation, particularly not in the Muslim countries, and I had begun to think that
we made too much of it in the West. In any case, prostitution would have been
my only recourse, and not feeling the need and considering the risk too great, I
let the whores go by.
But I liked these bar girls. I liked the lazy way they swung their legs around,
the loose-jointed walk. And it was clear that they were choosy. There was a
freedom of expression and movement that liberated me too, and one of them in
particular appealed to me, so I told Paul and he redoubled his efforts.
‘The problem is this,’ said Paul – itching for a problem – ‘these girls have not
slept with a M’zungo before. They are afraid. They are thinking that a M’zungo
will be different. But I will persuade them.’
We laughed loudly at such preposterous ignorance, and eventually one of the
girls promised to Paul that she would come back later, but she did not and I was
a little sad.
In the morning there was a telegram to say that the inner tube would be
delivered during the day to the BP station, so I walked down to the junction and
got to work again on the wheel. The day moved by slowly and I let it, working a
bit, and talking and watching people come and go at the pump. A van arrived in
the early afternoon, shiny and brisk from the city, with two tubes and two rim
belts, and I viewed Nairobi through Kibwezi eyes as awesomely efficient and
remote.
So the hot hours drifted by in work and idleness, until it was dark, and
drinking time again. The Curry Pot Hotel had several features that distinguished it
as one of Kibwezi’s principal landmarks. The first was a most imposing wooden
grill along the counter which faced the visitor as he entered. It was here that I
was given my room at ten shillings a night, and a form on which I wrote 535439A
10 Sept. 73 10 Sept. 83 London Foreign Office British Hamburg Germany St Privat
France Builder Nairobi Mombasa 18 Jan. 74 Edward J Simon without even looking
at my passport or lifting my ball pen from the paper.
From there one walked through an open door into the bar, and from the bar
into an enclosed courtyard. The arrangements at the bar were rudimentary but
satisfying. You could have beer or toddy. I daresay there was whisky and gin for
the better class of clientele, maybe much more.
At the far end of the courtyard was another feature that impressed me. It was
the gents’ piss house, under its own tin roof, at very neat affair of charcoal in a
cement trough. The guests’ rooms were ranged down the far side of the
courtyard. They were a series of compartments made of corrugated iron nailed to
a wooden frame with a hard earth floor. My room had a mat, a bed, with a sheet
and a mattress still in its protective plastic wrapping, a small table with a jug and
basin and I think there was even a mirror. It was entirely adequate and I
considered it rather high-class. The metal walls were painted silver on the outside
to adorn the courtyard and give pleasure to the drinkers.
The silver paint glimmered softly in the lamplight as we all gathered again on
the second night, Paul and Pius and Samson and I. Paul was wearing a white
shirt and a perky little felt hat with a curly brim. Samson was dressed in black
trousers and a midnight-blue shirt with cloth-covered buttons. He was the darkest
of the three, and as the night deepened he dissolved black on black into the
shadows. Pius was, as usual, garlanded in floral print, and his broad pumpkin
face gleamed brightly.
Paul and Samson had both been on duty until sundown, and were oppressed
by thoughts of human bondage.
‘Employment is really a bother,’ said Samson. He rocked his chair and thrust
his legs farther under the tin-topped table.
‘Oh it is a bother indeed,’ said Paul. He nodded his jaunty hat, arid turned to
explain to me.
‘You see, this fellow is not free. He is going round town even after his duties
are finished and some person may come at any time saying his attendance is
sorely needed in case of a sudden crime, or it may be a fatal accident and what
and what.’
Paul himself was expected to be at his post at Kibwezi Junction from seven in
the morning until seven at night every day of the week including Sundays.
‘You saw I had to leave this company for two hours yesterday evening. I was
forced to go, isn’t it. Some stores came for the canteen so I must go to search
the stocks. This can happen at any time…and I do not know if I have a job
tomorrow.’
The voice was neither angry nor complaining. It described in sorrowful tones
the loss of tranquillity. Responsibility and guilt were eating into their lives, and
brought not security but increasing uncertainty.
Thirty miles up the road to Nairobi was Paul’s shamba, a plot of land where
his wife and children lived. Once a month, roughly, he managed to visit there,
‘What is needed here,’ he went on, ‘is a thousand and five hundred shillings.
Then I can build a tank for water on my farm and grow many things.’
Two hundred dollars, I thought. I was carrying five times that amount on me
at that moment. What difference would two hundred dollars make to my future?
Tomorrow I might lose it all, and tonight it could transform a man’s life. I felt the
excitement grow in me, but could not bring it out. Then what will you do tomorrow,
I asked myself,’ when you meet someone who needs it to save a life? Isn’t that
it? Either you keep it all or you give it all away. How can you hope to travel as a
philanthropist? I decided to think about it more carefully, later. At the back of my
mind was the doubt whether things were exactly as Paul said.
Pius was enlarging, meanwhile, on an insurance scheme that Paul could not
afford. There was something both touching and symbolic I felt about this trio, the
small African trying to turn an honest penny, with the muscular forces of law and
order on one side, and the plump power of finance on the other. Who was
Samson really protecting, and who was Pius trying to con?
‘What is this insurance you are selling? ‘I asked Pius, lapsing involuntarily
into the dialect.
‘Persons are looking to me for protection of life and property,’ he replied
proudly.
I wondered what kind of accident was most common.
‘Snakebite is a common matter. My policies are not covering for snakebite,’
he added, as though this were a point in their favour.
I saw that Samson was moved by this information. He stirred and said in a
surprised tone: ‘What is this? You’re selling accident insurance and you are not
covering for snakebite? ‘
I was astonished myself.
‘The snakebite is not an accident,’ said Pius. ‘How can you say it is? The
snake is not biting by accident. It is wanting to bite.’
To our gathering amazement, he went on to his triumphant conclusion.
‘Where it is the agency of a living thing, this is not accident. That is the policy
of my company.’
We all thought this outrageous.
‘What about the man who was killed by a pig falling? ‘I cried.
‘The pig was kept on a balcony in Naples, and the balcony broke, and the pig
fell on a pedestrian and killed him. That was an accident!’
‘This was caused by persons putting pig on a balcony,’ he said smugly.
‘Definitely this was not an accidental happening. It is all the same whether it may
be a pig or a lion or a snake or what and what.’
‘Well,’ said Paul, ‘when the pig was hitting the man it may be already dead
from heart attack, isn’t it. So to be killed by a dead pig is an accident’
‘There will be an inquest on the pig also, and a certificate showing time of
death,’ Samson contributed darkly from the shadow.
‘I am not insuring for pig falls or snakebites in the Kibwezi region,’ Pius said
wildly. ‘Definitely.’
‘I hope you explain all this to your clients,’ I said.
‘Absolutely. They like it very much,’ he said.
The silliness stopped and we sank back into the peace of the Kenyan night.
More Tuskers came. It seemed possible to drink any amount of beer without
much effort. The table was almost invisible now under the empties, but I felt only
a comfortable affection for the company and a frequent urge to visit the charcoal
bed.
 They were sad that I was leaving. We had come to like each other quickly
because there was no obstacle to our friendship. All we wanted from each other
was time and respect. Of course they were flattered by my attention, and it would
bring out the best in them. I, who had come so far already on such an
unimaginable journey, had stopped and given my undivided attention to three men
whose entire lives were described within a one-hundred-mile radius of Kibwezi.
This would be no time for mean or petty behaviour.
The Spirit Incarnate of the Great World of Dreams meets with the Three Wise
Men of Kibwezi, and for forty-eight hours all is light and truth. A man could live up
to his ideals for that long. And they did have ideals, these three, so we were
equals, and they showed me true courtesy and paid for their share of the beer.
And they shed a tear for the moment when the great bird would fly on.
I was becoming a carrier of the dreams of men. I gathered them like pollen,
fertilizing as I went. But I had not yet quite realized my power, nor its
transforming effect on people, and I still thought they were as I saw them.
Paul had relapsed into mild mournfulness.
‘Tomorrow you are leaving, isn’t it,’ he said.
‘Yes. I have to go on to Mombasa.’
He came to a decision.
‘Tonight you must have a girl,’ he said, and called to the nearest bar girl. He
was talking rapidly in Swahili and she came towards us giggling a bit and
protesting, but she took several good looks at my grinning face. There were
further skirmishes over the next round of Tuskers, and then Paul said:
‘The matter is settled. She will come.’
It was too dark to see her face clearly. I saw only that she was small and
seemed to be rather fat. I did not worry because I was sure that, like the night
before, the fear of the dreaded M’zungo would frighten her away.
Soon after, there was no room left on the table for more bottles and it was
time to stop. My friends wandered off and I went into my room and lit the
hurricane lamp. It was very warm even at midnight and the air was still. Happily
there seemed to be no mosquitoes. I took off all my clothes and lay down on the
sheet, ready to sleep like that. I thought for a moment about the girl and,
although I knew she would not come, the idea excited me. Then there was a tap
on the door. Repeated. I stood up and looked for something to hide my erection.
Then I thought ‘to hell with that’ and walked over to the door as I was and
opened it cautiously.
The girl stood there, and she came in and looked at me with an expression of
slight wonder. Then she tapped my stiff prick approvingly a couple of times with
the knuckle of her forefinger. It stood the test. I was utterly amazed at my own
behaviour and enjoying it enormously.
She had a nice young face, though I could not tell how young. She put her
finger to her lips, appearing to be listening for sounds.
‘Mama,’ she whispered. ‘I am coming back soon’ - and she disappeared into
the night.
When she returned she walked straight into the room and took off her blue
overall and sat on the edge of the bed looking a bit shy and uncertain. She was
not at all fat. The arching of her back was so pronounced that her firm breasts
thrust the big overall out in front, and her prominent behind pushed it out at the
back and between the two it seemed to conceal a huge tummy. In fact her body
was lithe and lovely. She still had the half-slip on, but soon that was off too and
another bastion of racial prejudice collapsed, for we seemed to fit each other
perfectly well and nothing I did seemed to surprise her terribly either.
My first concern was whether or not to kiss her, but she didn’t seem to expect
it, and I kissed her body instead because it felt like a nice thing to do.
The main obstacle was not between us but beneath us. The sheet slipped
and slid on the plastic mattress cover, and we glided back and forth on the sheet
in an ecstasy of unpredictable motion. Perhaps it was like making love on skis.
One way or another it seemed that we were bound to wind up in a tangle of limbs
on the ground. Several times I saved us from sailing over the edge to disaster,
but the voyage was finally and successfully accomplished. After a while she got
up, trailing her hand lightly on my face, and left the room without a sound.
I never saw her again. I meant to look for her next morning but I was in great
confusion then and did not know what to do. I was very taken with her, but I knew
I had to leave and it seemed foolishly sentimental to make a fuss. She had not
asked me for anything, not even a hint of it. I wanted to give her something and
had nothing to give but money. In the end I simply emptied my pockets and piled
what was there on the table. It came to seven shillings and some pennies. I
wanted the arbitrariness of it to seem less like a payment, but it never felt right,
and I left the hotel unhappy with myself.
I felt a fool for being afraid to look like one, because I wanted to find her and
hug her.
‘How I do tie myself in knots,’ I reflected sadly.

Riding down the road to Mombasa I saw my first wild elephants.

There were ten of them, about three hundred yards away, gathered close
together under a tree. They were quite still. The tree was a baobab, and its
smooth fat trunk rose well above the animals before narrowing abruptly and
sprouting a broad fan of branches. The baobab is also called the bottle tree; its
young leaves are used for soup, and its fruit makes a drink.
I stopped the bike and watched the elephants in silence for a long time, my
heart bursting with emotion, not quite knowing why I was so profoundly affected.
Although they were some way off there was nothing to obstruct my view. The
land was savannah, grassy and lightly wooded.
The sight of those elephants touched me with a yearning that seemed to
stretch back forever. I could even believe that I was seeing again something
once observed through a remote ancestral eye.
The elephants were brown, and I did not question the colour at the time. It
seemed quite right, it matched my image perfectly, and only afterwards did I
remember that elephants were grey. Evidently they had sprayed themselves with
dust. They were nuzzled up to each other, wonderfully satisfying shapes, smooth
and solid, superimposed in a cluster of curves; all the more alive for being so
utterly still.
Elephants sheltering under a baobab tree, a familiar sight on this earth for
millions of years, and one I had waited all my life and travelled so far to see.
Africa.
The road was easy, with no traffic. I could watch the country as I went. I saw
more giraffe. Then an abandoned petrol station apparently inhabited by a tribe of
baboons. I stopped again, to watch them; the mothers nursing their babies, the
older children playing boisterously, the fathers preserving their dignity. They were
oblivious to me, couldn’t give a damn.
Aren’t they supposed to be vicious? What would I do if they rushed me?
The road dropped to sea level. Clouds formed overhead, and I brought the
first rain of the season to Mombasa, a few fat drops in the dust.
I stopped in the middle of town and an open Mini with a tasselled canvas top
drew up beside me. The driver was a Dane called Kaj, teaching at the
polytechnic. We went to the Castle Hotel for lunch, a seven-course blowout for
fourteen shillings with enough hors d’oeuvres to choose from to make the other
six courses redundant. Afterwards I got a cheap room at Jimeey’s. Everyone was
saying how hot it was but I didn’t feel it for the first two days. Then it got very
sticky.
Kaj took me to the Sunshine Club on Kilindini Street. The moment I stepped
inside my senses began to tingle, and I knew why I never went to night clubs. It
had what clubs in London and New York can never have, however much they
spend trying to simulate it, because it’s illegal. The Sunshine had Life. Lusty,
licentious, disgusting, decadent life. It was a big, untidy place full of people and
happy noise. There was a bandstand and a band going full blast behind a soul
singer. There was a floor and tables and a long polished bar, all under a high
roof, and at the end of the room there was more stuff going on that you couldn’t
quite see. The place had depth and intrigue, and a hint of danger.
There were sailors and tourists and hustlers and bar girls. For all I knew there
were arms dealers, ivory poachers, currency swindlers, slave traders, Cuban
military advisers and agents of the IMF. There were even men who just came for
a beer.
The bar girls did not even pretend to serve beer at the Sunshine, they had
waiters todo that. The girls swanned about in outrageous wigs and long slit
gowns of silver lamé, or fishnet tights or whatever other glamorous junk came
their way, drumming up interest and heating the atmosphere. Kaj knew most of
them. He lived in the Sunshine Club the way Toulouse-Lautrec lived in the Moulin
Rouge, and the comparison was not too far-fetched. When the girls had no
pressing business, they would go back with him for pleasure. He said the girls
had fun there. They came from Nairobi or somewhere around there, leaving their
kids with the other wives, and spent a few months in Mombasa having a good
time and making some money to send home. Nobody was interested in telling
them it was wicked, and they did not look as though they thought it was either.
They had their blood tests every week, and got their green health cards stamped.
As far as I could tell, they were free agents and nobody had the bite into them,
but I couldn’t be sure, and anyway it was obviously going to change and get
nastier.
A big German travel agency had already discovered ‘Sun and Sex’ in
Mombasa. With revolting Teutonic logic it was running a package tour for
‘bachelors’ with a hotel on the beach and a black girl thrown in. There was bigger
money in it, and the girls went, but they hated it. They hated losing their freedom
to those creepy bachelors.
‘And if I give that man a dose, that’s my pleasure and he just gettin’ what he’s
payin’ for, isn’t it!’
Mombasa is a great trading port on a beautiful coast, and seemed the ideal
of what a tropical city should be. Since ancient times Arab, Indian and African
worlds had mixed here. The Portuguese called it Mombaça and planted a massive
fort, and later the English provided order and a minimum of amenities.
It had a genuine cosmopolitan life and you could find it in the faces, the food,
the music, the buildings and the stores. It was far less infected than Nairobi by
the trashy images of international business, credit-card culture, bankers’
baloney, ersatz ethnic, Hilton hybrid, and the rest of the fungus that spreads from
the airports to rot away the world’s capital cities. The sea trade kept Mombasa
alive.
Kaj drove me around the port one night, under the lights. A Kikuyu guard in a
sentry box said: ‘You can pass.’ We drove for a mile among the sheds and
sidings, weaving among piles of copper ingots from Zaire, drums of oil from
Kuwait, sacks and crates and long lines of Yugoslav trucks and trailers.
Brilliantly lit freighters bristled with derricks, unloading under floodlights. A
locomotive with one vast Cyclopean eye pursued us for a while.
Later we went along the coast to Fort Jesus and walked around it in the
moonlight. It loomed above us, too massive to comprehend, huge and black and
cruel, staring out into the Indian Ocean, and four hundred years were wiped away
without trace.
Going home that night, under the streetlamps, an African boy with a bright,
appealing face came up to me, dragging a twisted leg.
‘I am not asking for help,’ he said. ‘I merely want to find a kind-hearted person
to appreciate my problem. I have certificates in maths, geography, history,
English, woodwork, and I have to look for help where I can. I believe God will look
after me. You cannot understand now, but one day when you are in trouble you
will see. Do not offer me a cigarette. How can I want a cigarette when I am
starving? Even though I have not a cent in my pocket I will not ask for money,
only some food. But if I had my fare to go back to my shamba I would not be
forced to look here for help. Four shillings and fifty is all I need.’
I appreciated his talent more than his problem and gave him a shilling.
‘Now give me a cigarette,’ he said.
I did, and he lit it, and limped away smoking. A few yards down the road his
leg became miraculously untwisted, and he began to dance.
The coast of Kenya is irresistible. I rode up to Malindi, and hopped a small
plane to Lamu. There I met the first motorbike traveller who had gone anything
like the distance I meant to cover. Meeting him was intensely interesting to me.
He was a young New Zealander from Hamilton called Ian Shaw. In four years he
had moved through Southeast Asia, India and Africa, doing some sixty thousand
miles.
He had had one bad accident. A high-speed wobble in Thailand had sent him
rolling one hundred feet on a dirt road and skinned him ‘like a potato’. A Thai
hospital had stretched him out and poured salt over him, then washed him, put on
Mercurochrome and sent him off. He rode as fast as he could for Malaysia,
hoping to get to more tender care before he set rigid.
He showed no signs of any ordeals when I met him, nor of the sleeping
sickness he had caught and almost died of in Botswana. The Tanzanian police
had threatened to shoot him, a mob had chased him through the streets of
Karachi, but he was alive and thriving, though he thought he might have picked up
bilharzia.
Naturally I was wondering how my experience would compare with his. I
always assumed that, sooner or later, something very painful was bound to
happen to me. Perhaps my appetites would be less aggressive than his, though.
And already I thought I recognized how many incidents, especially those involving
‘hostile natives’, seemed to be brought on by the victim’s behaviour. His riding
style was certainly more extrovert than mine.
In other respects we understood each other really well. I knew from his way
of describing places, people and events that we had both learned and felt similar
truths. We were both having a rather comfortable time there on the coast, and we
met like soldiers on leave from the trenches. When we left to ride off again, but in
opposite directions, he said with half a sigh: ‘Oh, well, back into it again.’
I knew he meant time to sweat out the beer and replace it with water, to
shrink his stomach back to a handful of millet and mutton sauce, to forget about
washing for a while and get back to the bare essentials. How good that will feel, I
thought, once the withdrawal symptoms have gone and I’m comfortable again
with the least I need to survive.
I fixed on a Sunday morning to leave Mombasa, to pack my things and go.
When that morning came I was reluctant. The weather coincided with my mood. It
was gloomy and uncertain. Any excuse would have done to keep me there
another day, but none appeared and I did not have the wit to invent one.
The bike also felt off balance, as usually happened when my mood was
unstable. I got an impression of confusion, as though the power was not being
transmitted cleanly, and my ear picked up noises and vibrations that fed my
doubts. The responses were fractionally less positive, the gears less than crisp,
the handling felt off, and the whole thing seemed to rumble along in a
disconnected fashion, instead of being the tightly integrated machine I was used
to.
I was unwilling to believe that all this proceeded from my own mind, and I tried
to diagnose faults. I checked the timing, the plugs, looking for loss of power,
speculating whether a jet was clogged or whether the humidity was affecting the
mixture. I looked at the wheel alignment and several times snatched a glance at
my rear tyre, convinced that it must be flat.
There was nothing wrong and none of my speculations made sense, but my
anxiety only increased. The road was wet from a recent shower and I moved over
it gingerly, expecting to slide at any moment. There is a ferry crossing south of
Mombasa, and I approached the steeply sloping ramp of wet planks with such
nervousness that it almost led to a fall.
The road south was a good one and gave me no reason for concern, but I
watched it as though it were a venomous snake, and felt presentiments of
disaster growing in me. The cloud thickened ahead. Within minutes it grew black
as pitch, and thundered ominously, and I seemed to be heading for the heart of
the storm. I felt imprisoned by the route, as though it were a one-way tunnel and I
was doomed to go down it, come what may.
Waves of foetid air swept across the road from the forest, which had been
newly drenched. It was the first time I had smelled that characteristic warm odour
of rotting vegetation which previously I had known only in the hothouses of
botanical gardens. It roused me and reminded me of the wonder and excitement I
used to feel as a boy among those strange lush plants from the tropics, and I
realized with a shock that I was sinking so deep into my state of alarm that I was
defeating the whole purpose of being there.
So, for a while, I rescued myself from my despondency. At that same moment
the road veered abruptly off to the west and took me safely around the storm,
and the bike seemed to run much better. I could hardly resist the odd feeling that I
had been rewarded by some invisible trainer, nudging and cajoling me with lumps
of sugar and a touch of the whip.
I set myself to look for the sources of my anxiety. What was I afraid of?
Was I afraid of having an accident? It felt like that. I felt as though I
expected to fall off at any moment. But why? The road was good. There was no
traffic. The bike was functioning perfectly well, for all my imaginings. Was it the
wet surface? How could it be? My tyres were brand-new, and gripping the road
fine. In Libya I had ridden hundreds of miles through rainstorms at much greater
speeds without a qualm. And I had never fallen off in the rain yet. What was it
then? Come on, dig! Was it the stories that Ian Shaw had told’me? Had they
unnerved me in some way? Surely not. I had always imagined that accidents
would happen. I had imagined far more gruesome accidents than any he had
described. If anything, his example was reassuring. Well, what about his nasty
moment with the Tanzanian police? The border was only a few miles away now.
What about that?
For a moment that looked likely. I always approached borders with great
caution. They were potentially dangerous. Too much power in a few hands. Too
much greed. Too little control. I was always wary of uniforms. And yet, I had
never let the prospect of a border frighten me before. I had crossed five borders
already in Africa, twice in quite unpredictable circumstances, and each time I was
pleasantly surprised. My system clearly worked. I arrived early, ready for anything
and quite willing to spend the day there if necessary. I was always received with
curiosity and good humour. Why should this border be any different? And even if
it was…I shrugged. That was not what was bothering me. I felt sure of it.
Well then, what? I tried to pretend that it was nothing, just a passing fancy to
be dismissed, but I knew that was untrue. And I wanted to find out. It began to
seem passionately important to root this thing out. There was a nameless dread
in me, and now was the time to put a name to it.
When had I last felt like this? To my surprise I realized that it had been quite
recent, during the second week in Nairobi, only ten days before. What had that
been about? I could think of nothing, except possibly the prospect of departure.
But I had actually left Nairobi in excellent humour. There was nothing I could pin it
down to.
When else had I felt like this?
Immediately my mind flew to the moment at Mersa Matrah when I had come
across the taxi driver picking up my wallet; when I had unaccountably, and
shamefully, obeyed his command and passed by, pretending I had seen nothing.
The incident rankled deep in me. I squirmed as though touched by something foul.
Then the border at Lunga Lunga came in sight, and for a while my speculations
had to cease.
The crossing into Tanzania seemed a delicate matter in only one respect,
and that concerned the hostility between the Black African states and White
Rhodesia. Mozambique at that time was still Portuguese, and Botswana was
observing a profitable neutrality, but Zambia was in total confrontation with
Rhodesia, supported powerfully by Tanzania and Kenya. The border with
Rhodesia was closed, and I would have to make a circuit via Botswana to get
there and eventually to South Africa. It was not at all clear in those days what
the Tanzanian and Kenyan attitudes were to traffic in and out of Rhodesia.
Officially they would be bound to disapprove, particularly Tanzania, with its
heavily Marxist-oriented ideology and rigid administration.
What made travel in Africa so remarkable was that one never knew, from one
week to another or from one frontier to the next, what was going on. The only
way to find out was to go and see. I knew that a trickle of people had passed on
the same route going north, and I had heard a few stories about how easy or
difficult it was, but all I could deduce was that it was worth trying.
The customs officer on the Kenya side raised my suspicions by questioning
me in detail about my journey, my plans, my views on Kenya and about the
changes in Britain since she had lost her colonies. It was almost certainly just
harmless curiosity, but it felt like a polite political screening. I did not have to lie,
but I was fairly economical with the truth until he let me go.
On the other side I was received by a schoolmasterish fellow in a light
worsted suit and spectacles. I was relieved to find that he was only interested in
my money. He asked to see traveller’s cheques, which had to be recorded on a
currency form. Then he suggested urgently that he himself could change the bits
of Kenyan currency I had left.
‘There will be no need to record it on the form,’ he said, ‘for doubtless you will
be spending it immediately.’
Obviously he was planning to change the money himself at the black market
rate and since it did not amount to much I let him get away with it, keeping only a
few coins. While we did our business it began to rain heavily. I stood under the
eaves of the hut looking mournfully down the road, which had changed to dirt.
The rainwater lay on it in sheets. It looked slippery and difficult, like red mud. It
struck me that I had crossed into the monsoons now and that for several
thousand miles I might be riding on wet surfaces. I had no idea how much of that
would be dirt, but I was troubled by the prospect. I had had virtually no
experience of wet dirt and it was not a good day to learn.
Also I was out of petrol. The pump marked on my map at Lunga Lunga had
been closed. As I waited, wondering what to do, two tall and expensively dressed
Africans on their way to Kenya stepped out of a Mercedes saloon, and I dickered
with them for a litre or two of petrol to get me to Tanga.
‘You’d better wait and see if they let us through first,’ said one of them. ‘If
not, you can take the whole damn car.’ But they negotiated their passage, and I
got my litre, grudgingly spared at a high price.
The route swung back to the coast and ran through a light-red sandy soil,
banked and ditched to channel the floodwater. For some way back from the road,
the ground was denuded by goats grazing. Huts thatched with coconut stood
among the trees and palms, but very few people were out. Those I saw looked
dull and morose. Although I found the going better than I expected, the damp grey
skies and the sullen people threw me back into my earlier heavy mood. I passed
close to a man walking with a panga swinging from his hand. He looked miserable
and hostile. The two-foot-long steel blade, razor-sharp all the way around, gave
me a start. I imagined the damage one vicious swing with that weapon could do.
It could take my foot off, I thought.
I saw myself struggling with field dressings, riding the bike with one foot. An
image flashed before my mind of a white-faced motorcyclist riding up to a
hospital, collapsing at the entrance. ‘We never knew how far he had come,’ says
the surgeon. The nurse pulls off his boot to reveal only a raw stump. ‘He died
without regaining consciousness.’
That’s ridiculous, I thought. The panga would have taken the boot off too.
With a shock I realized what was going on in my head. It seemed incredible
that I could be riding along a dirt road in Africa engrossed in these macabre
fantasies. What on earth inspired me to invent them? Anticipating difficulties was
one thing, but spinning horror stories to make my own flesh creep was terrible.
It did not occur to ask myself whether I was insane. I knew I was more or
less as sane as most people, for I had decades of experience to support the
view. I could get along in society, and make a living. What other definition could
there be?
Obviously what was going on was part of the same story that was unfolding
before: the anxiety of a lifetime slowly revealing itself.
I began to see that all these particular fears, of falling, of meeting with violent
behaviour, of wildly improbable hazards, were only-excuses for a fear I could not
recognize. They were false messengers I decided, concealing anxieties of a quite
different kind. These noxious vapours arising from some deep well of doubt and
despair writhed and curled into whatever shape was convenient to haunt me at
my feast. I was making it easier for them by offering them ready-made disguises.
I decided I would have no more of it. From then on let them do their worst
unaided. I would no longer lend them the props of my imagination.
So my rational mind issued its tidy instructions and was completely
overwhelmed by the consequences. Fear simply roared up and engulfed me in a
waking nightmare, all pretence thrown aside, shrouding me in a clammy grey
terror to which I could put no name or origin.
It subsided soon after, and left me in peace for the rest of the day, and I felt
some satisfaction at having at least flushed the enemy out. I was very excited by
all this mental turmoil. It seemed clear to me that my journey, the entire concept
of it, was closely related to my struggles with fear.
I had launched myself on a journey to circle the globe, but I seemed to be on
another journey as well, a great voyage of discovery into my own subconscious.
And I trembled a little at the thought of what monsters I might encounter there.
The cloud lifted and dispersed, and the road came back to the sea at Tanga.
The difference between the two regimes became immediately apparent. The town
had been spaciously laid out in colonial days and was physically unchanged.
There was none of the bustle and enterprise of Mombasa. Little advertising, little
traffic, fewer shops, fewer goods, a quiet provincial backwater in dignified
decline, at least to my casual eye.
I sat alone in a fine old cafe where nothing had happened for years.
Beautifully made furniture in wonderful African hardwoods stood and seasoned
while the proprietor grew older and more lethargic, presiding over an ever more
limited range of food and drink. I ate some sambusas, deep-fried triangular pastry
cases stuffed with spiced vegetable which are the Asian equivalent of a
hamburger. After a cup of tea I moved on. It seemed a pity not to stay, but I had
been still too long and needed to make some distance.
From Tanga the road was once again a good tar highway, and struck inland
to meet the main highway between Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. The land was
richly green, with mountains rising to the right of me, and great sisal plantations
all around.
Then I took the turning south towards Dar and Morogoro, and sped over the
green hills and under the overcast sky as far as Mwebwe by the Wami River.
There were two strings of huts, one on each side of the road. I was attracted
by one on my right painted in a jolly colour and called a hotel. Some pleasant
women sitting outside and sewing smiled as I passed so I stopped and asked
how much a bed would cost. They suggested five shillings and showed me a
reasonable portion of partitioned hut. I hung my mosquito net and walked up the
road to where the truck drivers ate. The staple diet was posto, a mash of cooked
corn, like the Italian polenta. With it came a bit of chopped mutton and peppery
sauce. You could have a spoon if you wanted. There were sambusas and sticky
sweet stuff and tea.
After nightfall the low-powered lamps and wicks ushered in the familiar
mysteries of the evening, casting shadows for the imagination to fill. I watched
shiny brown fingers dipping into the posho and rising to sharply profiled African
faces, listened to the fluid chatter of African voices breaking every now and
again into some quaint English cliché and mused over my morning’s discoveries. I
knew that I had never known a more intense period of mental events. There was
something almost physical about it, like riding a tiger in the mind. I was sure it
could only be the beginning.
That night my dreams were interrupted several times by a threatening
presence. I would be engaged in quite innocuous or cheerful activities when this
dominating figure would rise up to overwhelm me with fear and helplessness. I
could not recognize it, but knew it was male. Dark hints echoed through the
tunnel of years from a forgotten childhood.
The next day the sense of fear lingered only for a little while as I consciously
tried to penetrate the identity of the attacker, but it was followed by a sense of
unusual tranquillity. I felt, without quite knowing why, that I had made a
significant advance. There had been no victory, the battle would be resumed
another time, but I thought I had caught a glimpse of the enemy within and knew
that it belonged not to the present or the future but to my own buried past. I had
not overcome it, but in that one episode it had lost much of its power to
overcome me.

Those who find romance in communications, who delight simply in the idea of
spanning vast distances, must dream of the highway from Cairo to Cape Town. If
and when it ever comes about, it will certainly be one of the world’s great
thoroughfares, to compare with the Pan-American Highway and the Bombay-
Istanbul route. The plan has existed for some time. I rode on some of its
sections; in southern Ethiopia I saw parts of it under construction by Israeli and
Ethiopian teams; north of Nairobi the bed was laid and in use though untarred. In
the south the road was much more advanced, but in both hemispheres it was
hopelessly compromised by political upheavals.
For myself, the mere idea of a highway running the length of Africa soon
became tedious and without intrinsic merit. A book that I had found by chance in
Benghazi and carried with me through Africa had some relevant things to say,
though it was written on a different continent in an earlier century by a man who
made a virtue of staying in the same place. It was a collection of the works of
Henry Thoreau, including the journal he kept when he lived by a pond called
Waiden.
He wrote: ‘We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from
Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to
communicate.’
If Thoreau were alive today he would have full confirmation of his fears.
Instant information is instantly obsolete. Only the most banal ideas can
successfully cross great distances at the speed of light. And anything that
travels very far very fast is scarcely worth transporting, especially the tourist.
The highway from Dar es Salaam to Livingstone is 1,500 miles long. It was
notorious in 1973 as a ‘hell run’, known as the Tanzam Highway. When Rhodesia
and Zambia closed their border, it was the only natural route from Zambia to the
coast Primarily Zambia had to export copper and import fuel, and the Tanzam
Highway was put to maximum use. Unfortunately it was not, at the outset, in very
good condition, being only partially tarred. Petrol tankers raced down the highway
at suicidal speeds. Maximum turnover meant big money. Reckless, half-asleep,
drunk or drugged drivers hurtled over the dirt and often enough hurtled off it into
the rocks, trees, gullies and each other.
This was the reputation of the highway when I got onto it from Mwebwe. I had
no difficulty imagining a dirt road in the monsoon churned up by drivers willing to
risk anything for an extra load.
The road when I reached it was worse than bad, it was in the course of
reconstruction as part of a Canadian aid project, and consisted of almost
continuous diversions into the surrounding countryside. Perhaps it was too slow
for other traffic as well. I found it manageable and by the time I got to Morogoro I
was quite at ease.
Outside the bank, where I had changed money at a suffocatingly slow pace,
a European came over to admire the motorcycle. I liked him immediately, as I
liked most of the white men who had chosen to go on living in African countries
after independence. His name was Creati. He was an Italian who had been taken
prisoner during the war in the desert, shipped to a camp in East Africa and who
had taken up the option of staying after the war. He was a motorcycle mechanic
and had a workshop in Morogoro. More astonishing still, he had recently bought
the entire stock of parts from the Triumph agent in Dar es Salaam, who had been
forced out of business.
It was a providential meeting, because a minor accident had ruined my
speedometer cable. Registering my speed was hardly important. Speed limits, if
they existed, were purely nominal, and in any case I knew what speed I was
running at just by the feel of the engine. But I found it disconcerting to have no
record of distance. Petrol stations were far apart, and the quality of the fuel was
poor. The octane value, I was told, might be in the seventies or even less, and I
needed badly to know what my consumption figure was to avoid running dry out in
the bush. Creati had one cable.
‘It will cost you forty-five shillings,’ he warned.
I agreed readily. It was cheap at the price. Anyway, in such circumstances
one does not argue about shillings. We went back to his shop and I told him
where I had come from, and where I was planning to go.
‘How about forty shillings? ‘he said.
‘OK. Fine,’I said.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said, handing it to me. ‘Give me thirty shillings.’ I did. He
drove a shrewd bargain, that Creati.
After Morogoro I was prepared for the road to get worse and worse. Instead
it improved rapidly and, as Creati had promised, it soon turned into a spanking-
new tarred highway.
Above me the sky was in a constant turmoil of clouds forming, condensing,
collapsing to the ground and reforming. When it was not raining it was generally
overcast. The air was very warm and moist. All around stretched the lush green
grasses and trees of Mikumi National Park. I rode on awhile and came across an
elephant. It stood a little way back from the road and facing me, arrested in the
act of chewing a trunkload of grass. The grass stuck out on either side of its
mouth behind the trunk like a cat’s whiskers, giving it a rather undignified and
lugubrious look. We stared at each other for a while. Then I got the definite
feeling that it was fed up with me and planning to do something about it. I kicked
over the engine and rode on.
Farther along a small troop of zebras also stood grazing, and again I
stopped. All stood still as statues, heads turned to face me from whatever
position they had been in. Their small, round ears strained upwards and seemed
to tremble with the effort to pick up any slightest signal. Their markings were
immaculate, as if freshly painted on with immense care. All wild animals gave this
impression of a sharpness and clarity that was new to me, and I began to
remember zoo animals as having lost this edge and looking faded and grubby by
comparison.
Nothing ever enchanted me so much as coming across wild animals. I
thought often how human society had impoverished itself by driving this element
out of its life. In Africa I began to see the human race, sometimes, as a
cancerous growth so far out of equilibrium with its host, the earth, that it would
inevitably bring about the destruction of both. Not an original thought, but it came
to me repeatedly.
Viewed in passing, the undulating country attracted me strongly. So far, I
reflected, I had not once camped out in the African bush, and I stopped the bike
to consider how I would go about it. Immediately the countryside took on a quite
different aspect. The grass, which had looked so enticing, now looked long and
coarse and extremely wet. In fact it was as high off the ground as my tent. I did
not like the idea of camping close to the roadside, but on the other hand I did not
fancy manoeuvring the bike any distance over soggy ground I could not even see.
Whichever way I went about it, it seemed inevitable that everything would get
extremely wet, and that thought discouraged me more than anything else.
The Mikumi Park Lodge, when it came in sight, looked like the ultimate in
luxury after Mwebwe. I felt even less like roughing it in the long grass, and I
succumbed easily, without protest.
The rainy season naturally kept sightseers away and there were few visitors:
two Canadian engineers working on power transmission lines alongside the
highway; two American embassy wives were on their way back to Lusaka, and a
young Indian travelling, as all Indians seem to do, ‘on business’.
The landscape pushed out to far distant hills, and below the lodge was open
pasture and a water hole where an elephant stood in contemplation. Much of the
afternoon I spent on the terrace watching and photographing a party of Marabou
storks on a hillock close by. Presumably they were hoping for kitchen scraps.
They seemed bored and grumpy, and creaked about aimlessly on arthritic-looking
legs, occasionally ruffling their seedy feathers. I tried not to be misled by fancied
resemblances between animals and humans, but the Marabous defeated me.
With their wings folded behind them like the tails of an ancient dinner dress, and
their stooping rheumatic gait, I could not help imagining them as a group of
elderly soup-stained waiters hoping for employment.
The engineers were informative about Tanzania. The country had eleven
million people who lived on a very primitive diet, mostly maize, though they said
there was no starvation. There was no known mineral wealth and Tanzania
depended entirely on agriculture. The gross product per capita came to about
$60, and some efforts were being made to introduce co-operative farming.
President Nyerere they believed to be scrupulously honest, and though there was
some tribalism in government it was nothing compared with Kenya.
The Indian came to sit with me later at the dinner table. He was a young,
intense fellow with a shock of black hair. I listened to his story with fascination.
He had left Zanzibar, he said, after the revolution, which had been very
unfavourable to Asian families. His Zanzibar passport was cancelled when he
left, but he had a British passport also, and with some friends he hoped to get to
England. They tried first to get up through Sudan from Kenya, but were stopped
at Juba and sent back. Next they tried Uganda, but again were sent back to
Kenya. He then went to the British High Commission in Kenya, presumably
knowing that it was a desperate throw. They took the passport and, he says, told
him, ‘You won’t be seeing that again.’ He thought they had burned it.
That had been in 1963. His life’s dream now, he told me, was to build a raft of
mangrove wood twelve feet wide and forty-four feet long (he had the drawing)
with which he said he would float on the currents from the Zanzibar coast to
Australia.
I left the lodge next morning eager to know the country better. The first
stretch of road was particularly beautiful. The road ran beside low mountains on
the left, and then crossed them. For half an hour or so, the Great Ruaha River
tumbled past me, swollen and red from the rains. Tribes of baboons appeared
occasionally at the roadside or on the ascending rock faces, and the country
itself seemed alive with its constant changes of perspective, the rise and fall of
the mountains and the gushing streams. I rode 150 miles without seeing a single
person. Sometimes I glimpsed a hut among the trees. Once I stopped, thinking
that somehow or other I ought to make some contact with people, but the general
silence, the overcast sky and the wetness sapped at my resolution. I fidgeted
uneasily at the roadside, feeling like an intruder, watching the small settlement for
some sign of life, and when none appeared I climbed thankfully back on my
machine and rode away.
The rain held off and there was even a burst of sunshine at midday when I
reached Iringa. I climbed up to the town, a busy junction on the direct Nairobi to
Lusaka road. With trucks and buses coming and going it seemed very lively, but
on examination there was really very little there. A few shops with the barest
provisions, no buildings I could see of any interest, nobody who seemed worth
approaching. I ate the inevitable sambusas with a kebab and a cup of tea, and
set off once more. Almost immediately came the first rain, and I packed myself
into my rain gear, which restricted me and cut me off even more from the world
around me.
The countryside became flat and unvarying. A few small groups of huts
appeared at the roadside from time to time, each looking more sodden and dismal
than the last. Now and again came a square-built shack aggressively labelled
‘Bottle Shop’. Only once did I stop at one hoping to find some life, but there was
none. A counter. Warm American fizz in bottles so often recycled that the glass
was opaque. Some cigarettes. And a man whose face betrayed not a spark of
life or interest.
I rode on. The rain fell harder and longer. The clouds came lower and
blacker. It became ever more impossible to imagine making contact with anyone.
Without the sun to ease my way and bring a smile to a stranger’s face I felt
utterly cut off from these dull and miserable-looking people.
My last hope was a place called Igawa. The map indicated some primitive
accommodation but I could find nothing. I rode up and down the row of huts, and
gave up. Well after nightfall I arrived in Mbey at the border and went straight to
the European Guest House. There were Finnish agronomists to provide me with
more information about maize crops and co-operative schemes, and more
Indians travelling ‘on business’. I had ridden 365 miles from one oasis of luxury to
another. The next morning I crossed into Zambia.
Tanzania became important to me afterwards as my first real failure. In three
days and nights I had crossed an important country as big as Venezuela or the
state of Maine, half as big again as France. I had learned less about it than I
would have picked up from any half-decent newspaper article, and what I had
learned had been by hearsay. When I finally left I was astonished to have to
admit that I had not talked to a single African national there except to pay rent
and buy petrol.
In part I blamed the highway. It was too fast, too good and took me too far
away from the slow-moving people. But mostly it was because I had let the rain
enter my soul.
 The first ten thousand miles of the journey are completed halfway down the
road to Bulawayo from Victoria Falls. It’s an event of sorts, and the least I can
do is stop and contemplate them for as long as it takes to smoke a cigarette.
Yesterday I came into Rhodesia, and I feel out of place. There’s something
weird going on here and I’m trying to get it in focus. Coming through Kenya,
Tanzania, Zambia, I met white men, farmers, business people, professionals
who have lived their lives in Africa. Most were content to accept the inevitable
and go on working under African rule. It was obvious that Africa could not belong
to them and never did.
 Since Kibwezi I have been unable to meet with Africans on level terms. Their
economic and social conditions were too primitive and, as I said before, the rain
got in the way. We are like different kinds of fish in the same bowl, passing each
other, even bumping into each other, but unable to communicate. Of course, I
can always find an ‘educated’ African to talk to, but he does not tell me anything
because to talk to me at all he has to pretend to be white. I don’t even know how
to begin to pretend to be black. That’s how stupid I am.
In Zambia there was a third kind offish swimming in the bowl. The Chinese.
There are shoals of them alongside the Tan-Zam Highway, building a new railway
line to the coast. They are entirely deliberate in their apartness. When I stopped
to admire their work and goggle at their slit eyes, I was waved on by the clenched
fists of a man in blue overalls of a darker shade than anyone else’s. Perhaps he
was the ‘people’s representative’.
I should love to have seen the blueprint of that railway. I am almost sure it
was drawn on a scroll with brush and ink, and most delicately shaded. The
proportions of the stone viaduct I saw them building had a lightness that
suggested silk gowns and parasols, rather than heavy-goods trains. The Chinese
built their own towns, did much of their own labouring, brought in their own
women. The Africans respected them, but felt no warmth towards them. Cold
fish.
If Africa has never belonged to the White Man (and will certainly never belong
to the Chinese) it is also obvious that it does not belong to the Black Man either.
He belongs to it. Normally unreligious people who have been here awhile say that
Africa belongs to God. They say that if you just stop and listen for a moment the
truth appears directly. No doubt this is because people are not yet numerous
enough to jam the airwaves. There is still room for other messages to come
through.
Near Lusaka, two thousand miles on from Kibwezi, I rested for a few days
with an English family on a small farm. They were people whose lives were
consciously and completely devoted to the service of the Christian God, and in
the ordinary way I would have found such company uncomfortable. In the event,
it was not. God entered into their life, and they spoke of ‘Him’ often in my
presence, but it was like hearing about another member of the family whom I had
not met, and nobody was surprised or upset that I didn’t know him.
Their ambition was to extend, as far as possible, their capacity to shelter
people who needed or wanted to stay there awhile. They were rebuilding a house
that had burned down, and preparing a campsite across the river. The
household, with all its children, was in a chronic state of disorder, but the
grounds were well kept. They had a large and growing network of friends
throughout the world, and it seemed to me that they were really intent on
stimulating what was good rather than what was holy. At any rate I could see
nothing but good coming from it.
They were frequently threatened by financial ruin, but ‘He’ always came to the
rescue. Black Rhodesian Freedom Fighters went on lethal rampages from their
training camp down the road, and the farm was a refuge for frightened local
Africans, but no harm came to them. The inefficiencies and shortages and
contradictory policies of a newborn country made farming frustrating and
scarcely profitable, but for them all that was part of ‘His’ design and they took
pleasure in it.
To live in black Africa at all (and Nairobi doesn’t count) you must accept a
very basic existence. Most of the commonplace luxuries and certainties of the
West go overboard. If you can shed your more sophisticated habits, you are so
handsomely rewarded by the natural pleasures of Africa (I heard this often) that it
is easy to see the hand of God at work.
For some, Africa is proof positive of God’s existence. Although my own God
remains as elusive as ever, my experience supports the theory in a practical way.
It is a mistake to worry here. Let Africa do the work, and a solution seems to
follow automatically. A problem here is like that slippery Norfolk town of Diss; as
you approach it Dissappears.
I used to worry about how I was going to get from Zambia into Rhodesia,
considering that they are mortal enemies. No need. What you do is, you go to
Livingstone on the Zambezi, and spend an enchanted day wandering around the
Victoria Falls, the old locomotive graveyard and then alongside the river,
watching the hippopotamuses, listening to the liquid sounds of the bottle birds
and ‘The Shadow of Your Smile’ coming from the cassette player in a red Toyota
pickup, and talking to this fisherman who has caught several catfish and bream,
and is just pulling something else out now.
‘This fis’ we call croaker,’ and to prove it, as he pulls it off the hook and
snaps its spines, it croaks.
Next morning you ride up to the guard on the Livingstone Bridge just in case,
by chance, he should feel like letting you across, but he turns you away gently
with his rifle, so you ride upriver for fifty miles or so and take the ferry to
Kazangula in Botswana. There they sell you a mandatory insurance policy to
cover you against collisions on the six miles to the Rhodesian border. And there
you go.
I sometimes think about those two guards staring at each other from
opposite ends of the Livingstone Bridge, and wonder whether they know each
other’s Christian names. They are undoubtedly both Christians.
The weirdness begins right at the Rhodesian border. First there is this bright
new galvanized wire fence, all properly erected and secured, with no bits hanging
off or rusting away. Then, on the other side of the fence, you see that there are
no weeds. No superfluous or inappropriate growths whatsoever. The cement is
smooth, the gravel swept and free of grass and everything has clearly defined
edges. Squared off, shipshape and in absolute shite order.
I gaze at this model of propriety, this example of ‘how it should be done’ like
some grubby kid on the street with his nose pressed to the squire’s window.
Maybe my first inkling of what it’s like to be black.
‘Pull yourself together, man,’ I say. ‘Where’s your passport? Your British
passport.’
On the other side of the fence, having entered the squire’s mansion, is this
office, all spick and span, but what hits you smack in the retina, what makes you
want to shield your eyes lest they melt in their sockets, are these two White Men.
Man, are they White! They are dazzling, like angels or something. And they are
White in White. They have little White socks, and elasticated White shorts,
perfectly cut to those plump White thighs and tight White tunics. I swear, once I
appreciate that they are real and alive, I don’t see people. I see flesh, and I know
it’s White right through, like pork or chicken, done up in frilly White wrappings the
way it comes ready cooked from the delicatessen.
Well, one of these amazing beings has got a gun that he is carrying against
his chest, with the barrel pointing straight up past his nose. I don’t know what
he’s got in this gun, but it could be full to the brim with instant atom-bomb powder
or something, because he is clutching it with both hands and walking on eggs as
though a variation of one degree from the vertical could blow us all to Zimbabwe.
He’s got a prissy prep-school face that’s saying ‘Look at me, Daddy’ and ‘God,
don’t let me mess my pants’ simultaneously, and he proceeds, transfixed, behind
the counter and through a doorway like one of those toy figures on an old clock
tower.
Then the other being turns his po face to me and says:
‘Can I help you, sir’ in a funny strained voice.
My eyes are growing accustomed to the glare, so I face up to him quite well.
‘Do you have Rhodesian Third Party Insurance, Mr Simon? ‘he asks, knowing
bloody well I don’t.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Can I get it at Vic Falls? ‘
‘Trouble is, the road from here to Vic Falls is bad. If you had an accident you
might not have a leg to stand on.’
There is no horse laugh after this uproarious remark. Perhaps the Rhodesian
sense of humour is unconscious. Even while all this is going on, as I marvel at it,
I am aware that but for the journey I have just made it would seem perfectly
normal. This is how a white immigration office ought to be run, given a little extra
spit and polish for the current emergency. Obviously I have been coloured by
Africa without realizing it, and I see that all those white people I have been
meeting recently, while they are not really African, have lost the edge of their
whiteness, and blend more or less into the racial spectrum.
This is what White really means. The experience continues into Victoria Falls.
The butcher sells me a delicious fillet steak for a derisory price and says:
‘Surely you must believe, as I do, that we are the victims of a world-wide
Communist conspiracy.’
What we have here, I see, is a White Tribe. What are their customs? Rigid
adherence to the standards of Britain before the Fall. Efficiency, cleanliness,
husbandry, pro bono publico, monogamy and cricket. Like the Turkana they
believe that as long as they stick to their customs and rituals they must prevail.
There is no alternative. I can easily imagine a black anthropologist visiting
Rhodesia ten years ago and writing:
‘Arrogant and superior as the country he comes from, so he will remain, in my
opinion, to the end of time.’
Time is running out everywhere, but it is not only pressure from outside that
threatens this culture. A woman yesterday asked me, with a satisfied smirk on
her pretty face, whether I knew that Rhodesia had the highest divorce rate in the
world. Adultery, the Enemy Within.
As I finish my cigarette a figure is walking in my direction, on the other side of
the road, an African wearing a cloth hat and a white coat like a tent buttoned at
the neck. The country stretches forever all around, open, empty plain, as it has
through Tanzania and Zambia. Two thousand miles of empty land. I would not
have believed there was so much space left in the world. The road is asphalt,
and very hot. The African is barefoot.
‘Where are you walking to? ‘I ask him.
‘I am going to Bulawayo to look for work.’
He asks me where I have come from, and says:
‘Oh my goodness! You are very clever, sir.’
Bulawayo is a hundred miles away. When I think of walking barefoot to
Bulawayo my own achievement seems less spectacular.
From Bulawayo to Salisbury the impression persists. The farms are
beautifully managed. The cities run like clockwork. ‘We will not let go. African rule
would be a disaster. They would massacre each other in no time. Everything
would be in ruins. Anyway it’s too late now. Who would buy our property? We will
stick it out. We’ll win through in the end. Someone will come to our aid. Britain.
South Africa. Someone. They can’t let us down.’
From Umtali to Melsetter a road runs through the mountains along the
Mozambique border, famous for its beauty. Halfway along is the Black Mountain
Inn, known throughout southern Africa. It has recently changed hands. The new
owner, Van den Bergh, is a Dutchman who worked in Indonesia and has retired
from business. He and his wife are taking a chance coming here, but they wanted
a change of life.
‘You’d never believe the bigotry round here. Not in the towns so much, but in
the fringe rural districts, and among the Afrikaners. There’s a farmer they call
“Baas M’Sorry”. He brings his labour in from Malawi under contract – a lot of
them do. When his new batch arrives, he puts each one in a jute sack and weighs
him. Then he arranges the feed according to their weight. Like cattle.
‘He wears those big snake boots, you know, knee-high leather boots,
because there are snakes in the fields. If he comes across a cheeky Mundt –
that’s a Kafir who answers back – he steps on his foot and grinds with the heel
of his boot until the fellow says “Baas M’Sorry.”
‘You know there’s a law now that blacks are supposed to be called African
Gentlemen and African Ladies. “African Ladies,” says this feller. “There’s no
such thing. Just Kafir bitches.” ’
Van den Bergh’s stories come pouring out like a vaudeville routine. He hasn’t
met anyone for a while who would understand.
‘When we first arrived we went to get meat for us and the servants. “Oh,” they
said, “for them you want boy’s meat,” and they produced this chopped-up bone
and gristle and sinew. It was cheaper than meat for the dog. We thought, “We
can’t give them that,” so we bought them steak. After a while there was a mutiny
because we weren’t giving them the proper meat’
Things are a bit risky around here, especially at night. There are raids across
the border, both ways.
‘The police are in here every night getting drunk. The army’s the same. I’m
afraid the Rhodesian whites are too flabby. If they ever came up against a really
motivated black army, well they’d get rolled up.’
So what’s going to happen?
‘The blacks will get independence eventually – but it’ll take about ten years.’
The inn is a lovely place, in far better taste than anything else I’ve seen, set
among flowers and lawns. The Van den Berghs seem like the right sort of people
to have there too. It’s sad to think of the fate hanging over them. I think his
forecast is too optimistic. In Chipinga, the next town, a businessman called
Hutchinson, who says his grandfather was governor of the Cape Province,
agrees with me.
‘My date is 1980,’ he says. ‘There’ll be African government by then.’ His
arguments are convincing. He seems to be in touch. What Africans think, I have
no idea. I keep hoping that chance will throw me among them as it did in Kenya,
but it does not happen. They appear before me only as servants, figures
performing menial functions. All I hear is Yes Sir, No Sir, Three Bags Full, Sir.
They inhabit some other world that I can’t get in focus. On my way back to Fort
Victoria I stop at a black village on the Tribal Trust Territory. The site has some
magic. There are huge, smooth rocks piled on each other, like symbols of power
and protection, with sheltered patches of ground among them. I’m not very far
from Zimbabwe itself, and there is a kind of sorcery in the land, but all I see are
endlessly outstretched hands, begging. One dumpy lady runs frantically to fetch
her big copper pot and balances it on her head, in the hope of getting a posing
fee, I suppose. Her haste is such that she gets it on wrong and has to stand with
her head crooked to keep it up there. The anxiety on her face is comical and
leaves a bad aftertaste. No, lady, that’s not what I came for.
Fort Victoria is Rhodesia’s tourist trap for visiting South Africans. It funnels
them right into the curio shops.
‘Get yourself something Unique, something Arty!’
Beit Bridge, the South African border, is a long, dry ride south. On the way a
million storks make a swirling, towering column in the sky, marshalling themselves
for the flight to Europe.
The South African Immigration and Customs authorities can afford to be a
good deal fussier than the Rhodesians.
‘Do you have your return ticket out of South Africa, Mr Simon? ‘says the first
official.
‘Well, hardly. I was booked on a ship to Rio, but the sailing was cancelled.’
‘In that case I must tell you that you are classified as a Prohibited Person.’
He gives me a leaflet and a form, and I see that there is hope here even for
prohibited persons. All I need do is make an interest-free loan to the South
African Government of $600 for the duration of my stay. This money can be used
to purchase a non-redeemable ticket, or it will be refunded at the exit point. Ho-
hum. I suppose they’re good for the money, but I know there will be
complications. Luckily I’ve got the $600.
Now for customs. I get this young fellow, full of bounce. He is even Whiter
than White, but of course I am used to it now. He’s got on the usual white
gymnastics outfit, but unlike all the other officials who have some mark of rank
on their epaulettes, he does not even have epaulettes. He is so junior he hardly
even exists, and he’s trying to make up for it.
First he packs me off across the road to get a road safety token, whatever
that may be. On my way back I see them all gathered around the bike. I’m so
accustomed to the sight that I imagine they are admiring it, as everybody else
does.
Inside the office Billy the Kid fixes me with his dull blue eyes.
‘Now, sir, have you got any meat, plants, firearms, drugs, books or
magazines, cigarettes or tobacco? ‘
‘Yes, I have a book on Christianity.’
‘Christ-i-anity?’ He is incredulous.
I ask him if he’s heard of it, but he’s too busy thinking about his next move.
‘Have you anything else to declare?’
‘No.’
He has a thin voice that shoots into an upper register on certain words.
‘Then why, sir,’ he pounces, heavily, ‘do you not declare the sword?’
The sword? Good God, yes, the sword. I forgot I had a sword. It’s not my
sword. I met a man in Cairo who wanted to emigrate to Brazil, but he was not
allowed to, so he was trying to get his stuff out of the country first. He gave me
$2,000 to send to his brother, and then asked if I could carry his father’s
ceremonial sword. I thought it was a genial idea, and I attached it on the
opposite side to the umbrella. I never gave it a thought.
The Kid shows me his collection of confiscated arms. He is very proud of it,
particularly a three-inch dagger he took only the other day. But a sword ! That’s a
real prize.
 ‘I shall have to take it away from you, sir. I’m very sorry.’
He sounds delighted.
‘I’m afraid you can’t,’ I say. ‘You see, it isn’t mine. Anyway, it isn’t actually a
weapon. It is a family heirloom.’
‘I cannot let you take this sword, I am sorry.’
‘Well, how will I get it back? Obviously I cannot just abandon it. It does not
belong to me.’
‘We shall see if we can wrap it and send it under seal and at your expense to
Brazil.’
I can tell he’s improvising now. The ground is slipping away under his feet.
‘Why can’t I collect it at customs in Cape Town? ‘
He is looking very confused. His neighbour at the next desk, who has a broad
gold band on his shoulder and seems to be keeping an eye on him, leans over to
him and says softly:
‘Why don’t you go and ask your father? ‘
Daddy, of course, is the boss. (‘Ach please, Daddy, let me go to customs,
and confiscate my life away like you.’)
A party collects in his office to inspect the weapon with enthusiasm. Daddy
draws it from the scabbard and makes a few experimental strokes.
‘How can we stop the natives having them if we let you in with this,’ says
number two.
Does he imagine the ‘natives’ engaging in knightly combat, cut, thrust, parry,
according to the rules of chivalry? ‘Natives’ don’t need swords. They have
pangas, which they use to cut cane, and grass, and if necessary, throats. I think
these white knights are mad, but this is not the moment perhaps to say so.
Now Daddy has an idea. ‘Son, see if you can seal it into the scabbard, and
then wrap it up well so no one can see what it is.’
The Kid is happy. He’s got his orders, which he can carry out to the letter, to
the very serif.
‘Come over here, sir, please. Now, sir, you see I am going to wire this hilt to
the scabbard, and seal it. You see there is a number on this lead seal. If this seal
is broken you go straight to jail.’
‘What happens,’ I ask, ‘if someone should happen to steal it from me?’
‘You go straight to jail. Same thing if you lose it or sell it. Straight to jail. Now,
sir, I am going to wrap this sword up in brown paper which will carry the customs
seal also, and I am bound to warn you that if it is tampered with in any way…‘
‘Straight to jail,’ we cry in unison.
He manages quite well with the paper, but the sealing wax is too much. Little
drops of it keep falling on his plump white thighs and he’s dancing with pain and
frustration. He is able at last to get some wax to stick to the paper, but it is
obvious to me that the first rainstorm will soak it to a mash.
‘Usually,’ he says, primly, ‘we get the natives to do this sort of thing. Now I
must ask you for a deposit so that we can be sure you will declare the sword in
Cape Town.’
But this is too much for me, and I am glad to see the older man shake his
head, silently and repeatedly.
‘All right,’ says the Kid, as if it were his idea. ‘You can go.’
From Beit Bridge it is only 350 miles to Johannesburg. I imagine that I will
arrive there tomorrow night, and set off to get as far as I can today. A
considerable range of mountains, the Soutpansberg, bars the way, and the road
climbs up into a cold cloud. There are tunnels to pass through, and on the other
side, some rain. At a small town called Louis Trichardt I decide to stop and treat
myself to a hotel, which proves to be memorable because of the dining room.
This is a large square room, with a smaller room inside it, like nesting boxes. The
smaller room has glass panes for walls and is the kitchen, and all the cooking
can be watched from the dining room. In a London restaurant this could be an
ingenious and even attractive idea, if rather courageous. Here in South Africa it
has a gruesome feeling, because the kitchen staff, naturally, is black. We, the
diners, are white. The owner patrols the dining room in a planter’s safari outfit,
and oversees both parts of his business simultaneously. I watch the ‘galley
slaves’ with a sick fascination. They do not talk to each other, or show the
slightest expression of pleasure, fatigue, self-consciousness or, indeed, any
emotion at all. The scene, to me, is so highly abnormal, and to everyone else it’s
so completely normal, that I feel I have wandered, by chance, into a land as
strange as any Gulliver ever visited. I make a conscious effort to reserve my
judgement. The logic of the arrangement is all too obvious.
I am now only 280 miles from Johannesburg, an easy day’s ride. The
significance of this day’s journey is great. Since Cairo I have been riding with a
damaged piston. It seems scarcely possible that the engine has been able to
survive this far. Not only the distance, more than seven thousand miles, but the
conditions of heat and effort, especially in the north, must have put the machine
to a very severe test. Now, one day’s ride from here are all the facilities I need to
overhaul the cylinders, rebore, put in new pistons and do anything else. Up to
now, at best it would have meant shipping parts from England with great delays
and bureaucratic entanglements. Most of the way it would have been impossible.
My confidence in the Triumph has gone beyond surprise and gratitude. I now
rely on it without question, and it seems past all coincidence that, on this last
day, the unseen fate working itself out in the cylinder barrel should manifest itself.
It is not I who am looking for significance in these events. The significance
declares itself unaided.
Just beyond Trichardt, in the morning, the power suddenly falters and I hear,
unmistakably, the sound of loose metal tinkling somewhere; but where? Although
the power picks up again, I stop to look. The chain is very loose. Could it have
been skipping the sprockets? I tighten the chain and drive on. Power fails rapidly
and after about four miles the engine simply stops in first gear. There’s a strong
smell of burning. Is it the clutch? It seems to have seized, because even in
neutral it won’t move.
Two friendly Afrikaners in the postal service stop their car to supervise, and
their presence irritates me and stops me thinking. I remove the chain case to look
at the clutch, a good half hour’s work. Nothing wrong, and then my folly hits me. I
tightened the chain and forgot to adjust the brake. I’ve been riding with the rear
brake on for four miles, and the shoes have seized on the drum. Apart from
anything else, that is not the best way to treat a failing engine.
I put everything together again and set off, but the engine noise is now very
unhealthy. A loud metallic hammering from the cylinder barrel. A push rod? A
valve? I’m so near Jo’burg, the temptation to struggle on is great. At Pietersburg I
stop at a garage. The engine oil has vanished.
‘That’s a bad noise there, hey!’ says the white mechanic, and calls his
foreman over.
‘Sounds like piston slap. The piston’s seized.’
‘Can I go on like that? ‘
‘As long as it’s not too far. You’ll use a lot of oil.’
From Pietersburg to Naboomspruit is thirty-four miles. I stop for more oil, but
the bike won’t even start again properly. I realize I must give up Jo’burg. It’s 4
p.m. on Thursday, 21 February. I realize that with the bike running well I could still
have made that original sailing date in Cape Town. The thought gives some
satisfaction.
I spend two days at Naboomspruit working on the engine. On the first day I
take the barrel off. The old piston has shattered its skirt. The crankcase is full of
broken metal. The con rod is scarred, the sump filter in pieces, the scavenge pipe
knocked off centre. The sleeve of the bad cylinder is corrugated. I have kept the
old piston from Alexandria, and put it back thinking it might get me as far as
Jo’burg. With everything washed out and reassembled, the engine runs, but no oil
returns from the crankcase. The second day I spend on the lubrication system,
picking pieces out of the oil pump. On Sunday, in bright sunshine, I set off again,
for twenty blissful miles before all hell breaks loose. The knocking and rattling is
now really terrible. I decide that I must have another look, and by the roadside I
take the barrel off again and do some more work on the piston and put it back
again. By now I am really adept and it takes me four hours. There’s a black fellow
sitting there with me most of the time, just happy to be there and watch and have
little things to do. He comes off a farm nearby, and I go there for water just as
they’re eating lunch. From the kitchen I can see into a small furnished room built
separately from the house, where a young girl is eating alone. I catch sight of her
only for a moment and see nothing describably wrong but it is obvious that she is
mad. Intuition works so fast in some matters, why not in others?
My work has not improved things. The rumbling continues and the trouble is
evidently in a bearing. I limp slowly to Nylstrom, and plan to take a train to
Jo’burg, but Nick the Greek at the Park Cafe is very friendly and finds a fellow
with a pickup willing to take me to Pretoria, using my petrol.
This fellow is an Afrikaner butcher, but although he subscribes to apartheid, I
find him unusually tolerant and good-tempered. It turns out that three years ago
his wife, driving this same road in a van, was blown off by the wind and crushed
almost to death. She has now recovered all but the use of her left leg, which is
still bound up. I met her too, a cheerful, handsome woman. His story of those
three years, during which he also built his own house, is very touching. It occurs
to me that these people would be good to have on one’s side in adversity, and
then to wonder whether they choose adversity for that very reason. Is that what
is meant by the ‘laager mentality’? If so, there is less hope for South Africa than I
thought.
He puts me down at Mader’s Hotel because it has a large car park, suitable
for unloading the bike. Mader’s is a great cavernous place, like a railway station,
and intensely gloomy. I’m ten minutes too late to eat. No dinner, no drinks after 8
p.m. I have to fetch fish and chips from a shop and bring them back. As I sit in
the green light of a morbid aquarium I see a couple sitting nearby. He is grey and
shrivelled, his face mud-coloured by sun and alcohol, in a slovenly safari jacket.
She is fortyish, with black-frame spectacles and biggish breasts packed into a
sleeveless blouse. Then the man beckons me over.
‘She likes you,’ he says without preamble, pointing at her. Then, after a
pause: ‘You can sleep with this woman tonight.’ I excuse myself, lamely, but he
wanders off, apparently unconcerned.
‘He makes my life a torment,’ she says.’ He’s my husband but he is still in love
with his first wife.’
The word Move’ falls to the floor like a cigarette butt, waiting to be trodden
on.
I was in Jo’burg for three weeks, and lived in style and comfort. I saw the
sights, lived the life, visited the black township, and learned something of the
good and bad side of South Africa. As in Nairobi, I found that the experience was
in a different coin to the experiences on the road. In these big cities, where most
people confront ‘real’ life, struggling for money and security, I was not able to find
much that was new or fundamentally interesting. I was happy enough to fall into
the easy way of it, absorbing pleasures and information like a sponge and getting
by on conventional truths. All forms of life are fascinating, but ‘The Journey’
seemed to float in another dimension.
Joe’s Motorcycles on Market Street, as agents for Meriden, took the engine
to pieces again and sent me off with a rebored barrel, two new pistons, a new
con rod, main bearings, valves, idler gear and other bits and pieces. The broken
metal had penetrated everywhere and again I was struck by the force of the
coincidence that all this havoc had been wrought virtually within sight of
Johannesburg. I was very susceptible to ‘messages’ and wondered whether
someone was trying to tell me something, like, for example, ‘I’ll get you there, but
don’t count on it.’
A good deal of my time in Johannesburg was taken up in trying to find an
alternative sea passage to Brazil. The Yom Kippur War still dogged my destiny.
Since the war, Arabs having turned from open warfare to economic aggression,
oil was twice the price, shipping was totally disoriented and passenger berths
were suddenly unobtainable. At last, through a contact in a big trading concern,
one ship came to light that could take me to Rio. The Zoe G, a small cargo vessel
under Greek ownership, would be sailing out of Mozambique for Rio de Janeiro at
the end of April. It would cost me the same as the air fare, but the bike would go
free. I was delighted. It could not have suited my idea of transatlantic crossing
better. I had time to travel to Cape Town, and then to ride around the south
coast of Africa to Lourenço Marques, and a quite different aspect of Africa, a
Portuguese colony. It is an ill war that blows no good. Loaded with addresses of
friends of friends, I left on the last long leg to Cape Town and the Southern
Ocean.

The weather played tag with me, and I was dodging between storms and rain
clouds all the way from Johannesburg. On the second morning at Kimberley it
looked wet from the moment the sun came up. The light was the colour of
reflections in floodwater, but the sky was a clear eggshell blue when I set off at
eight. Although wisps of cloud began to marble it, I thought I would probably stay
dry until noon.
These calculations were becoming second nature to me since I entered the
heavy rains south of Mombasa and my record of accuracy was improving
steadily, to the point where they offered a sort of workmanlike structure to the
day. I still needed this reassurance, although it made no practical difference to
my behaviour. I would ride on whether it rained or not, and only the most violent
showers would stop me. It was not cold, the waterproofs worked well enough and
the road was good level asphalt, but I had still not taught myself to enjoy the
prospect of rain. Whenever it threatened to fall, a vague uneasiness would begin
to squirm somewhere below my stomach. Nothing much, but enough to remind me
that there was still plenty of anxiety waiting for a pretext to engulf me.
My encounters with the weather continue to be like reconstructions of a
personal struggle on an epic scale. On the broad landscape of Africa, under the
bright tropical sun, a bank of cumulus cloud appears out of thin air and grows
with stealthy speed into the solid likeness of doom itself.
In an otherwise clear sky one of these monsters straddles the road ahead,
growing at a mile a minute, like an airborne octopus of mythic proportions, its
base filling with inky blackness, already feeling out the ground with stray
tentacles. To leave the sunshine and ride underneath this devouring creature with
its foetid breath and bulging carcass is like challenging the Dark Tower; as
impudent and terrifying as that. To know with the intellect of what flimsy stuff this
thing is really made does not disarm it when you have already fought to
exhaustion with even flimsier devils of your own making.

Perhaps there are men raised in peace and lucidity, with no phantoms on their
tails, who see nothing in a storm cloud hut convection currents and water
vapour. In any case I would not change places with one of them. What grandeur
there is in my life blossoms out of my own mean beginnings. What times of peace
I know are a thousand times more precious for being interludes. And there is
much more. For example, the fascination with which I watch myself come closer
and closer to merge with the world around me, dipping first a toe, then a foot,
then a limb. Although I am made of the same stuff as the world, it used to seem
that I might as well have been born on an asteroid, so awkward and unnatural
was my place in the scheme of things. I remember my clumsy efforts to simulate
‘normality’, to win acceptance by any false pretence, and my desperate betrayals
of my own nature to avoid detection. Then the gradual discovery (born, I think,
out of some irreducible core) that others were twisting and cracking under the
same strains, and that behind the apparent conformity of daily life was a world of
‘all things counter, original, spare, strange’.
Then began a long apprenticeship, to become something certain in my own
right, from which to see and be seen. Beyond that came the search for
connections, freely offered and accepted, to confirm that the world and I, after
all, were made of each other.
There are in me the seeds from which, if necessary, the universe could be
reconstructed. In me somewhere there is a matrix for mankind and a holograph
for the whole world. Nothing is more important in my life than trying to discover
these secrets.
Now, with the engine running beautifully, I ride along the edge of the Orange
Free State towards the Orange River. My waterproofs are crammed away
confidently in a pannier, and my flying jacket is beating off the cool wind. On
either side, among clumps of marshy grass, water gleams pale after the rains of
a few days ago, when parts of this road were eighteen inches deep under floods.
This enormous plain I am crossing, which will eventually become the Great
Karoo, is supposed to be dry as a bone, but the whole of the Southern
Hemisphere is awash this year. Here and there are cattle settled among a surfeit
of greenery. Around them and over them hop cattle ibis, the slim white birds which
live with the cattle, like private nurses, gracefully relieving them of their ticks.
The sky is still only faintly streaked with clouds when I pass Modder River, but
on the horizon to my right are the beginnings of a sinister change. Hundreds of
miles away across the moorland the sky is changing colour from light blue to gun
metal, as though a vessel of dark pigment has been pricked by the western point
of the compass and is seeping out into the heavens. Surely it is not merely
fanciful to read apocalyptic warnings into the sky like this. Out on the veld, miles
from even the nearest tree, there is no escape from the momentous events
unfolding themselves above. Unknown to this human speck making his snail’s
track across the floor of a vast arena, another spectacular has been prepared.
Pressures and temperatures have plummeted, winds veered and strengthened,
and when the first stain darkens the western sky the thing is already all but
accomplished.
The climax is so quick and subtle and on such vast scale that my eye cannot
follow it. The sky is light, then dark, then cloudy, then black. I am still hoping for
another half hour’s grace when the first drops fall splat on my goggles. Cursing, I
pull up at the verge and begin the ludicrous business of putting on my
waterproofs. Then I am in it.
The rain hardens to an obliterating downpour as I cross the Orange River,
and I notice that the river reflects a baleful orange light from its charge of
suspended red silt. Then into Hopetown, slowing down to look for shelter, cursing
again as the goggles mist over without the fast airstream to clear them. Peering
through the mist, I see two petrol stations, one on each side of the road and,
astonishingly, two rival sets of African attendants grinning madly and beckoning
me with theatrical gestures to patronize their pumps. Like the donkey that starved
between two bales of hay, I get several times wetter before deciding to stick to
the party on my own side of the road.
Calling at a petrol station is an event, particularly on a motorcycle with a
foreign number plate. In southern Africa everyone plays the number-plate game.
You can tell instantly where each one comes from – C for Cape Province, J for
Jo’burg and so on. My plate begins with an X, a mystery all the deeper because
some pump attendants belong to the Xhosa tribe.
Peeling off damp layers of nylon and leather, unstrapping the tank bag to get
to the filler cap, fighting to get at the money under my waterproof trousers,
shaped like a clown’s, chest high with elastic braces, I wait for the ritual
conversation to begin.
‘Where does this plate come from, baas? ‘asks the man.
‘From England.’
A sharp intake of breath, exhaled with a howl of ecstasy.
‘From England? Is it? What a long one ! The baas is coming on a boat?’
‘No,’ I reply nonchalantly, knowing the lines by heart, relishing them rather.
‘On this. Overland.’
Another gasp, followed by one or even two whoops of joy. The face is a
perfect show of incredulity and admiration.
‘On this one? No! Uh! I can’t! You come on this one? Oh! It is too big.’
 The wonder of it produces a pleasing sense of intimacy but it is illusory. It
leads nowhere. He is safe in his attitude of admiration while I consent to play my
heroic role. It is not a role in which I feel comfortable. I am learning, as I make my
way through my first continent, that it is remarkably easy to do things, and much
more frightening to contemplate them. I am embarrassed by exaggerated respect.
This black fellow in his boiler suit props me up on my pedestal and feeds me
on a White Man’s diet of flattery and indulgence until I ooze benevolence like a
greenfly tended by ants. African wildlife is full of these symbiotic relationships,
and that may be one reason why apartheid can be entertained at all in South
Africa. As a practical system it has its advantages, and not just to one side, but
the underlying suggestion that it makes a convenient arrangement for two
different species to get along is such a travesty of the human ideal that I wriggle
with embarrassment at being placed in such a false position.
From the shelter of the petrol station, looking along the sodden streets of
Hopetown and into the swirling grey storm clouds above, there seems no hope of
it ending. In my mind’s eye the blanket of wetness lies across the Karoo from end
to end, and no effort of the imagination can raise so much as a corner of it. So
out I go across the mud and puddles, resigned to the advance of moisture
through the pinholes and seams of the waterproofs, past the leather and
sheepskin and denim, through the worn soles of my boots, saturating trouser
pockets and their forgotten contents, leaving a mash of match heads, a pulp of
currency, turning hastily scribbled notes to an inky wash.
Yet only minutes from the town the grey brightens from lead to mercury and a
last flash and flurry of droplets recedes into rainbow, leaving a tranquil blue
vastness ahead. Once again the cosmic drama has been staged both to chide
me and encourage me. The light and warmth were waiting. I had only to ride out
faithfully to find it. Somewhere the same chorus is murmuring the same
inexhaustible theme of light and dark, hope and despair and renewed hope, a
world where everyone can be a hero, where there is an absolute guarantee of
renewal which will be broken only once in a lifetime.
For me this is a landscape and a time to bank up courage in a craven heart,
to carry a greater fund of joy into the next cloud of sorrow, to learn even to love
the sorrow for the pleasure it divides, like the black notes of a keyboard, or
hunger between meals. Perhaps even to discover that pain and pleasure, since
they cannot exist without each other, are really the same thing.
I strip off my waterproofs and bundle them away, feeling a great, heart-
pumping pleasure at being let loose on this shining land. The wind rushes through
my clothes, whipping away the last shreds of mist and moisture, and I sing loudly
about Shenandoah’s Daughter and the Rio Grande.
Strange things peer at me across the corn and pasture. Tall silver objects on
three legs with mooning, fan-shaped faces, straining for a puff of wind to agitate
their rusty bearings, to tug their long slender roots dangling into the ground and
suck up moisture. Poor senseless creatures that can’t comprehend the
abundance, the superfluity of water that has descended all around them. They
remind me of people I have known; of the old newsvendor on my high street who
died at his pitch leaving a fortune; of the big winners who’ll be ‘clocking in at the
works as usual on Monday’.
Far away over softly undulating marshes a cathedral rears up to the sky in
splendid isolation, blankly astonished by its limitless diocese. Where is the
bishop? Who are the flock? It is an immense grain store, with a central tower and
four silos flanking it on either side. What a harvest festival will be celebrated here
from these streaming fields. South Africa anticipates the heaviest crops in
memory as the result of these rains, and there is no end to the good fortune of
the ruling Nationalist Party and its Afrikaner backbone.
Soon an election is to be fought – well, teased would be a better word. There
is nocontest. The price of gold has never been higher. Terrorists on the borders
give patriotism just the necessary injection of the vital jingo serum. The election
is a foregone conclusion. In Jo’burg dispirited Opposition supporters throw up
their hands and say they are tired of fighting God. The grain cathedrals of the
Karoo proclaim his presence. So do the astonishing yellow mine dumps rising
above Johannesburg, monuments to gold the father, gold the son and gold the
holy ghost. All is ordained.
I am grateful for one of the White God’s ordinances. He has kept most of the
traffic off the road. The world oil crisis (more power to God’s elbow) has brought
a nationwide speed limit of fifty miles an hour. It is enforced with dour efficiency.
Khaki-clad policemen everywhere leap along the hedgerows and roadside ditches
uncoiling wires for their speed traps. The fines for speeding are draconian,
hundreds of pounds in some cases. At weekends all petrol stations are closed,
and woe betide him who is caught with more than two gallons in his trunk.
For me fifty miles an hour is a perfect speed, the golden mean between
dawdling and drumming vibration. At this excellent rate I can spin and tumble
along all day in comfort, and see where I’m going. There are now some five
hundred miles between me and Cape Town. By nightfall I should be well within a
day’s ride. I fly past Strydenburg and Britstown feeling like Pegasus on wheels. In
the early afternoon some clouds mount a few scattered fortresses in the sky but I
am able to ride under them before they can release their leaden charges. Now the
heat is building up and the road is steaming. The sun drilling through the haze
begins to poach my eyes in a hard diffuse light, and I stop for a few minutes to
lean forward on the handlebars and doze, cocooned in still, warm air and the
song of the black, long-tailed Sacabula birds perched like crotchets on the
telegraph wires.
When I open my eyes I see that the day has turned to afternoon, the light has
a golden touch to it and a big bank of cloud has stretched across my path
reflecting glimmers of lilac and purple at its ragged, rolling fringes. The bar is
rooted in the west among distant, shadowy hills in a black corm veined with
lightning. I can see under it and beyond to the first peaks of the ranges that
weave across the southern tip of Africa, with their strange Gothic names –
Grootswartberge, Witteberge, Outeniekwaberge – and a hint of Frankensteinian
menace.
Thinking I can easily ride under this cloud bar and out again before it breaks,
I leave Victoria West behind and rush on. Then, just as I am about to
congratulate myself on one more storm avoided, the road swings to the west and
I find myself still under the cloud and headed to the very heart of it. Still gambling,
I think maybe it will break and disperse before I get to it, and so I pass Beaufort
West as well and keep going. Quite unexpectedly, in late afternoon, it breaks on
top of me, a roaring mass of rain and wind laced with lightning. I seem to be in
the heart of the cumulus, and the forces are terrifying. Inches of water rise
immediately on the road. I have to stop, and shelter under the umbrella. The wind
snatches it from me, and I recover it with difficulty. Lightning is exploding
everywhere, and I am seriously concerned about being hit. Rivers of brown water
are already racing down either side of the road, and for half an hour I have to
stand there and wait for the clouds to empty themselves. The rain lets up only as
the last light fails, and I continue in the dark, damp and anxious to stop. The first
town, Laingsburg, seems to lie downhill from the highway on a series of
descending terraces. In the darkness, and still under the influence of the storm
and the mountains, they remind me somehow of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
There is something bizarre going on down there. I arrive to find myself in a plague
of locusts. The air is thick with them, crashing about in the fluorescent light, a
wild, mad scene. They crunch disgustingly underfoot and one hits me in the eye,
quite painfully, before I can get inside the hotel.
Kimberley to Laingsburg is 461 miles. That leaves me with only 170 miles to
go to Cape Town. I like to arrive early in big cities, so that I can get a feel for
them and relax a bit before it gets dark. Also I have people to find, friends of
friends. I’m up and away just after dawn, planning to have breakfast at Touws
River and fill up for the last lap. When I get there it hits me. I forgot it was
Saturday. No petrol. I last filled up fifty miles before Laingsburg. That leaves me
just two litres short of what I need.
No one at Touws River can help – there is hardly anyone there, anyway. I ride
to Worcester, another forty-five miles, through a lovely valley planted with
vineyards. The last range of mountains is piling up ahead of me now. There’s a
tremendous crosswind blowing too, and I have to lean right into it as I go, but it’s
steady and no real problem. I can feel the approach of a milder climate, and an
easier life. More houses, gardens, people. Worcester has a very nice small hotel.
Its name is the Arab word for hotel, but the owners don’t know it and seem
unsure whether to believe me. They are very helpful though and, at last, we find a
legal way out of my petrol problem. The man next door lets me take two litres out
of his lawn mower. Breakfast is a great pleasure, and everything is feeling very
good. I am letting it creep into my conscious mind now that very soon I may
actually come to the other end of Africa. It is not certain. I don’t allow myself
such expectations. Many things can happen in eighty miles, but it is a distinct
probability.
I have a very confused impression of Cape Town. I imagine that I am now on
Table Mountain, and that when I come to the edge I shall look down on the city,
but the valley soon narrows and I come to a pass called Du Toit’s Kloof. On the
other side I look down from five thousand feet to land that looks fertile and busy
with farms, vineyards, prosperous towns, with the ocean still hidden by the haze.
I freewheel for miles and miles to save petrol and feel my heart lightening all the
way. Somehow I know I’m going to make it, and that Cape Town is going to be
wonderful. It is a rare and beautiful feeling, that certainty that nothing can go
wrong.
The great freeways sweep me on past Stellenbosch and Belleville towards
the ocean, into the suburbs of Cape Town, winding me down effortlessly and
without error as though on an automatic flight path to the heart of the old city
and setting me down in the plaza beside the ocean. My joy is almost hysterical as
I park the bike, walk slowly over the paving towards a cafe table and sit down. I
have just ridden that motorcycle 12,245 miles from London, and absolutely
nobody here, watching me, knows it. As I think about it I have a sudden and quite
extraordinary flash, something I never had before and am never able to recapture
again. I see the whole of Africa in one single vision, as though illuminated by
lightning. And that’s it. I’ve done it. I’m at peace.

Among bright flowers and flights of shimmering blue and green birds I came
over the high mountains from Swaziland and down to Mozambique on April 28.
The Zoe G was due to sail on May 3.
There was the friend of a friend in Lourenço Marques, but I arrived too late to
find him. In the twilight I searched for the hotel that a casual acquaintance had
suggested, enjoying my first experience of a Portuguese colonial city, and getting
lost.
Four kids stood idly on the pavement outside a bar and I asked for the
Carlton hotel. The one who answered me was the natural leader of the group,
and about sixteen. He wore a very short, tight red sweater and flared trousers the
colour of strawberry ice cream running down the inside of a dustbin.
‘Hi man,’ he said, with an indefinable mixture of strange accents. ‘Howya
doin’? I’m sure glad to meet you. Sure man. We’re all friends here. We don’t care
about the colour here. I’m just at school. Sure. But I’m in the bar here, fuckin’
plenty of businesswomen. Plenty, sure. Businesswomen from Mozambique. Sure.’
His face was smooth and brown under a woolly black fleece, and his breath
smelled of whisky. He didn’t stop talking. His three companions clung to him
silently, hoping to learn the trick. One was a white Portuguese with a sensitive
face, and the others were wispy in-between kids. I mentioned the name of the
hotel again.
‘Oh you want a room to sleep. Sure. I can show you. Great place. All South
Africans go there. That one you talkin’ about is shit, man. That all Portuguese
shit, shouting and noise. I show you. I can take you all right. Maybe fifty ‘scud, I
don’t know. It was, three months ago. We are smoking too, man, you know?
Grass. Green grass. You know what I mean?’
We set off along the streets, dark and deserted. As we walked, one after
another they opened their trousers and sprayed the pavements and the walls with
wide arcs of silver piss.
Across the República and up two blocks we turned into a doorway and up a
green and brown stairwell to the first floor. Two Africans sat in chairs facing the
stairs, backs to the wall, with a table between them. The nearest one had large
holes in his ear-lobes, but they were empty and he was dressed for business. His
skin was hard and dry and close-pored like old walnut. He wouldn’t speak English
although he plainly understood it.
His price was 120 escudos for the night. For Portuguese it was only fifty, but
for South Africans and lesser foreigners it was 120. That was a fixed price, he
said, the same all over, and could not be altered in any circumstances. For this
price I would get one of four army beds in a nine-foot-square cell. Each one was
120 ‘scud, which meant he was looking for £12 or $28 a night, plus a free meal
for his insects. The enormity of it had me laughing all the way down the stairs. My
whisky-drinking, grass-smoking, businesswoman-fucking schoolboy friend
seemed rather crestfallen. But he put on a brave show. He maintained that all
peoples should be treated alike, and that economic discrimination between races
was a gross injustice. In consequence he said he was unable to persuade me to
accept the price.
The Carlton when I found it was just what I wanted, a big old-fashioned hotel
with a bustling restaurant in the Latin style downstairs. The handsome double
room for ninety escudos seemed like a gift after the previous offer, but it was still
a lot of money.
The following day I resumed the search for the friend of my friend, and found
him in his shoe shop. He took me for lunch to the Clube de Pesca, and we sat at
the bar playing dice while his fishing cronies told filthy jokes and stories about the
war. Everyone was talking about the war. It was obviously coming to a crisis.
When I was in Salisbury I had a firsthand account, obviously authentic, of the
true position of the Frelimo Independence movement in Mozambique, and it was
clear that the Frelimo were more advanced than anyone in white Africa believed.
It would have to end soon, somehow.
The man next to me at the bar started telling me about it, swearing boastfully
in Portuguese Afrikaans English, which is in itself ugly enough not to need
emphasis.
‘I was in it bladdy three and a half years. That’s a bladdy long time. I tell you,
we were losing men all the bladdy time, man. Maybe one man a day. Well, there’s
four bladdy lots like our fuckers, so that’s four bladdy men a day, so in seven
bladdy years, man we lost a lot of bladdy men.’
There were already rumours of crisis in Lisbon about the losses sustained by
the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique, and the white Portuguese colonists
were not happy either. They were milked economically by Portugal and believed
that, given their own independence, they could do a deal with Frelimo.
‘The bladdy worst was, we couldn’t bladdy fight the fuckers. They had bladdy
grenades and Kalashnikovs and bazookas and bladdy mortars behind, and they
would bladdy kill some of our fuckers and then bladdy run away.
‘We were walking forty bladdy miles in a day looking for the fuckers, but when
we find them we can’t shoot them, we got to bladdy bring them in to question.
That’s no bladdy good!’
A satisfied grin crossed his face then, as he swallowed his drink.
‘Not the navy men, though. They were bladdy good. They landed and bladdy
shot everything. They didn’t care if it was us or the bladdy enemy. They kill
anybody, you just get out the bladdy way.’
I could see his point. I thought that maybe, after three or four years of being
shot at, I might want to kill everything in sight too.
Remarkably enough, the very next day the army in Portugal overthrew the old
dictatorship, and Mozambique began its first revolution as though for my benefit.
There were passionate meetings in streets, squares and cafes. Veins throbbed
and fists clenched as orators screamed about independence, liberty, autonomy,
equality and so on. It was noisy but peaceful, a largely white affair of leaflets and
polemics, and the colony was given self-governing status, but the war with
Frelimo continued.
My sailing date was postponed from day to day, as the Zoe G waited for a
loading berth. I spent time with journalists who had flown in from London, but felt
remarkably remote from them and, I know, looked like a freak to them. Other
times I spent in Rajah’s Snack Bar, a splendid Indian establishment where I was
received almost as a son, played innumerable games of chess and consumed
unnumbered sambusas, most of them free. Rajah himself felt none of the euphoria
of the white population. He foresaw great trouble and could not quite decide
whether or not to cut his losses and go. It was the Indians in Mozambique, as
elsewhere in Africa, who saw a political reality that few others recognized, but
theirs was a sterile understanding, for they never joined in the process either way
but stood on the sidelines, self-made outcasts, consoled by their profits.
Another Indian I got to know a little was the shipping clerk in charge of
manifests at the agent’s office. He took me to the Zoe G the day before she was
due to sail. First we walked past the station, with its bulbous Baroque cupola,
blown up just beyond the limits of decency like an over-ripe fruit. The whole thing
was a piece of pure Lisbon dropped from heaven on the shores of Africa. Facing
it stood a heroic stone mother figure, bearing Portugal’s burdens with a sorrowful
expression. She might have been welcoming newcomers. More likely, I thought,
she was wishing she too could catch a train and get the hell out of there.
Beyond the station were the dock gates, and then the endless sheds, and
rolling stock and heaps of everything under the sun, including rubbish and flies.
The Zoe G, when I first saw her, dented my morale severely. Evidently she could
float, because she was tied up at the quayside and wobbling as they put a
thousand tons of copper aboard her, but it seemed unlikely that she would float
for long before the rust gave way somewhere to the sea. Not a clear painted
surface or a gleam of brass could I discern anywhere.
Under the night-loading lights a great chasm gaped in her deck among the
debris. In its depths, black stevedores in khaki shorts chanted and heaved
among sleeper-sized bars of metal. There was some magic down there, but in the
saloon were only sleazy seamen in attitudes of despair. I dumped my bags and
fled.
Next day, Amade the clerk and I returned before dark, and things did not look
quite so bad. I was shown a cabin, the ‘owner’s cabin’, which was far better than
I expected, and had a small drawing room attached, and a proper bathroom,
dilapidated but very acceptable. In its better days this ship, once Danish, would
have been entirely suitable to Agatha Christie. It had had accommodation for
twelve passengers and a miniature grand staircase sweeping down to a saloon
with engraved glass swing doors. If it was now more appropriate to Graham
Greene that was, in a sense, all to the good.
I sat later in the captain’s office and talked to Amade as we waited. The
captain, in cream shirt and grey flannels with a zip that wouldn’t quite close, was
tapping out letters on a prewar Standard typewriter and filling in forms. Amade
had noted the loading for fuel and water, the draught fore and aft, the anticipated
mean draught at Fortaleza and the expected time of arrival.
‘Where is Fortaleza?’ I asked.
‘In the north of Brazil,’ he said. ‘You will call there first.’
It was the first I had heard of it, and an idea slowly formed that I might get off
there instead.
We went on talking about the future for Mozambique.
‘There will be trouble,’ said Amade. ‘You will see. You will hear about it. There
will be no arrangement with Frelimo. There will be bloodshed.’
He was a tall Portuguese Indian with a liquid charm and a wry smile
suggesting always that behind the apparent reality lay an altogether different
reality which promised little good. He listened politely to my counterarguments,
but they carried no weight and didn’t convince me either. The poignancy was
overwhelming.
‘I was four years in the army fighting the war,’ he said. ‘I left university to go
to the army. When I finished fighting I gave up study, there was no time anymore.
It was necessary to put my feet on the ground. Now I am married. I have children.
Am I going back to the army now? We can fight this war for four, eight, twelve,
sixteen years, but we will have to give it away in the end.’
The pilot appeared in the doorway, bearded in a heavy coat. He was
shrouded in darkness and mystery, a portentous figure.
‘Are you ready, Captain?’
The ship had been shivering gently for hours, a soft, almost inaudible rustle in
the panelling, like the breath of a sleeping child, flowing and ebbing, flowing and
ebbing.
Amade%uncrossed his legs and smiled encouragingly at me as though it were
I and not he who was facing the miserable uncertainties of Africa. We shook
hands and he jumped ashore from the rail.
‘Go up on the bridge,’ he said. ‘You will see it better from there.’
The pilot was on the bridge with the captain. Above them was another open
deck where the funnel simmered. I heard the whistle and chatter of walkie-talkies
and the stern swung clear of the bows of the next ship in line. Amade, on the
quayside, gave a last wave and walked away across the sidings, away from the
lights, over the coal-black dust, into the night shadow of the yard. I’m going to
Rio, I thought, he’s going nowhere. An immense sadness reached out to me and
faded as he moved out of sight among the goods wagons.
Over the starboard side a long tugboat was hauling the stern into the
harbour. My excitement surged up in a choking flood, as I saw the full line of
vessels stretched out in both directions as far as my vision could stretch, all
brilliant, glowing under a thousand lanterns, tantalizing, promising joy, like
department stores at Christmastime, like a giant fairground. Nothing, I felt,
gladdens the heart like lights shining in the darkness. I was so overjoyed that I
leapt up and down and shouted, wondering what the captain below would make
of my antics.
The tug let go of the stern and its bulbous, padded nose slid along the shore
side of the ship and rammed into the bows, chugging furiously, swinging us
around to point to sea. Behind me the funnel belched, and the ship’s Burmeister
engines took the strain. The tugboat streaked away to port, flaunting her power.
Ahead a trail of blue-flashing marker buoys perforated the black water leading
out past other floating fairylands at anchor. The prospect of Brazil, the pleasure
of seeing massive objects in effortless motion, the lights which leave so much to
the imagination, all this was a benign magic shaping the world for my special
pleasure. My first great sea voyage had begun.

I woke feeling fine although the ship was already wallowing in a heavy swell,
and sat down with confidence to a breakfast of eggs and bacon at seven. By ten
a gale was blowing, the sea was much bigger and I was beginning to feel uneasy.
The ship was seesawing and rolling heavily. With alarming speed I was launched
into full-scale seasickness, which I had never experienced before.
There was only one place where I could bear to stand, on the starboard
gangway at the pivotal point of the pitch. There, at least, the possibilities for
violent motion were reduced by one. Exhaustion eventually forced me to try lying
down, but my stomach went into a floating wobble, something gripped my throat,
my mouth flooded with saliva, like a beast of prey at full kill, and there was just
time to get to the rail. The croaking, despairing noise that issued with my
breakfast was the worst of it.
In the brief moment of peace that followed I took up my station on the
gangway again watching the sea. It was in an unbelievable turmoil. Lumps of
black water with white crests rushed about in aimless fury, colliding with each
other. The wind whipped up spray, the clouds discharged rain, the two met and
the sky and sea merged all around me in a swirling fusion of air and water.
It was impossible not to think of the sea as alive. There was a life force at
work in it. The waves were mere cloaks for Neptune’s raiders as they tore about
below the surface, and the crests were a froth whipped up by their tridents. The
Zoe G was some four hundred feet long and weighed about four thousand tons.
She rode up on the swell and fell again through at least thirty degrees. When she
came down to hammer the sea with her bows, the sea rushed off screaming
vengeance and pain, showing vivid bruises of pale blue where the ship’s hull had
smashed air and water together so hard that they remained entangled in the wake
as far as one could see.
 Looking down into all this made me grasp the rail very tight. I knew nothing
could survive in that cauldron, and I thought my ordeal would never end. It gave
me only the slightest satisfaction to know that the ship’s engineer was as sick as
I was and, with a belly twice the size of mine, was presumably twice as
uncomfortable.
The next day was clear and blue, the sea was calmer, but I was unable to eat
anything until the evening. Most of all I was afraid of sitting down in the saloon,
which was heavily permeated by the smell of diesel oil and cooking.
I picked nervously at a tomato salad. It went down with no trouble at all.
Every mouthful made me stronger. There’s roast lamb with garlic and greasy
roast potatoes but nothing can stop me now. Beer as well. Delicious. Marvellous.
It’s over!
The great gale (and it was an unusually violent one, they told me) was like
purgatory before paradise. The Southern Ocean was blue and mild, under
scattered cloud, as we floated around the coast of South Africa. I was the only
passenger and passed my days happily on deck teaching myself Spanish,
watching the big sea birds that came to swoop around the ship and
contemplating my journey and its meaning.
On the fourth day, Cape Town, veiled in grey mist, drifted past to starboard. I
stared at it as though at a fairyland doomed to vanish under a spell, feeling the
most painful regret. Then we floated free into the Atlantic and began the long
sweep up to the equator.
Those days were among the most precious of the journey. To balance the
discipline of learning a new language I was reading Memories, Dreams and
Reflections by Jung, given to me by a friend in Cape Town whose perceptiveness I
was now beginning to appreciate.
The book met my needs in the most extraordinary way, dealing so freely with
thoughts and feelings outside the realms of logic and reason. All through Africa I
had felt growing in me the belief that what was going on around me, the weather,
the sudden appearances of animals and birds, the way I was received by people
along the way, was somehow connected to my own inner life. Here was a man of
great experience and erudition not only discussing the subject and describing
similar experiences from his own life, but actually providing a word for it which he
had himself coined: ‘synchronicity’, meaning, for example, ‘when an inwardly
perceived event is seen to have correspondence in external reality’.
What, all my life, I would have called foolish superstition was being pressed
gently home to me by my own experience and interpreted for me by Jung. The
book goes much further, of course, into ideas of afterlife and a collective
unconscious. All of them connected precisely with thoughts that had come
spontaneously out of the journey. I was specially startled to read Jung’s remarks
about mythology and the need of the individual to have some story or myth by
which he can explain those things which reason and logic cannot account for. It
seemed to me then that I had been close to the truth in thinking of my role as a
‘myth-maker’, and not just for myself perhaps.
The book encouraged me immensely, and I spent a large part of the ten-day
Atlantic crossing re-examining my past life and writing furiously about my
discoveries. At the same time I took ever greater delight in the creatures that
appeared around the ship as it moved into warmer waters. A particular albatross
that followed us seemed to have become quite familiar with me, and soared close
by me again and again, showing me his broad white breast and the immense
wings which he (or she) used so brilliantly. Flying fish sprang from the waves, like
small bejewelled rockets, dashing over the water for seconds at a time, their
wing-like fins whirring with an almost invisible swiftness.
At night the Pleiades appeared clear and bright to remind me of the magic of
Sudan, and my dreams were rich with mysterious symbolism.
One event then crowned that whole series of discoveries and reflections. I
had come to a point in my thoughts where one day, on the deck, it seemed to me
that I had uncovered a fact about myself and the world, a way of looking at my
relationship with others, that promised a great liberation.
‘If I can just fix this thought,’ I told myself, ‘I shall find a wonderful new
freedom for myself.’
At that same instant, below me in the sea, a great shoal of flying fish burst
out into the sunlight. It was an incredible display that described exactly how I
was just then feeling. Up to then I had never seen more than one or two fish at a
time, nor did I ever again. It was a dream come true.
America

Land was nearby and the world was closing in, muffling sounds and thoughts.
Thick humid air pressed around the ship and bore it up between ocean and sky.
Clouds of silver and lead boiled above, speared like marshmallows on the
slanting rays of a midmorning sun. A soupy green sea slurped softly below. I
stood above the bridge waiting for South America to appear.
Perhaps I was expecting the whole continent to come over the skyline in a
simultaneous rush of cathedrals, revolutions, llamas and carnivals. Instead I
saw the horizon thicken into smudges of dark green and brown. We drifted in.
The smudges stretched but remained low. A last flying fish swooped over the
waves. I caught the movement from the corner of my eye and moved just in time
to follow it at the end of its course. That streaking spray of light had become as
charged with mystery and hope as a shooting star. I felt a great reluctance to
leave the ship and wished I could go on dreaming of a landfall that never came.
A line of buildings appeared at the ocean’s edge, and I made out two or three
spires pricking the pale sky. I forgot about South America and began to think
about Fortaleza, on the northeast coast of Brazil, four degrees south of the
equator, and five hundred miles east of the Amazon. More than a million
inhabitants, they had told me, and yet I had never heard of it. I felt that I had
slipped oif the edge of my customary world.
A red cutter came popping towards us and the Zoe G slowed to let the little
boat nudge alongside. The harbour pilot came aboard. He was a disappointment
too. He did not even look Latin. We swung to port and headed for another part of
the coast where I could already see a grain silo and some cranes. The shoreline
embraced us and I saw that we were in a broad bay. The only other craft in
motion were narrow rafts, four logs lashed together with a rudder and sail. Most
of them carried one or two men; small men, barefooted, in chain-store nylon
shirts and trousers. The shirts were loose, open and torn. The trousers were
baggy at the behind, narrow at the legs, short at the ankles, patched and split.
They were fishermen, of course, pesqueiros. A raft came by no bigger than the
others but crowded with people, shoulder to shoulder. Even as I watched I knew
it was impossible, and realized that in this new world there were also new laws.
I should have been excited by the prospect of landing, but I found that I was
nervous. Maybe I had a premonition, though it did not figure consciously as such.
I simply balked at the complexity of the process that lay ahead of me, knowing
that the motorcycle would create difficulties and involve me in long and painful
exposure to bureaucracy. I had two prejudices about Brazil: that the bureaucracy
was totally corrupt, and that the police were violent and suspicious, particularly
where journalists were concerned. Although I was not travelling as a journalist,
my connection with the Sunday Times would have to be declared since they were
guaranteeing the bond on the motorcycle. I felt wrong-footed. Vividly in my mind
were accounts of police brutality and torture that I had heard in London. Like all
strong prejudices they not only prepared me for the worst. They paved the way.
Captain Fafoutis already had the crew at work opening the hatches. Winches
whirred. Derricks clattered into position. Deck hands hammered and shouted.
There were four massive tarpaulins to lift, wedges to knock out, planks to throw
about, girders to hoist and lower and temporary hatch covers to position so that
a sudden shower could not destroy the cargo in the holds. The ship rattled and
banged from stem to stern.
At sea the Zoe G had begun to seem quite respectable, even passing fair,
with her freshly painted green decks and white bulkheads, the rust and grime
effaced and the filth of Lourenço Marques washed away by the Cape gales. Now
her corsets were coming undone again. She opened her mouth and showed her
blackened stumps, and the satisfied hum of her engine gave way to raucous
dockside obscenities. At sea she was a lady, but in port she was a trollop.
Her holds were about to be raped of fifty thousand bags of cashew nuts,
each bag weighing as much as an average man. It was supposed to be done in
two days and the job meant hauling out the bags at the rate of eighteen a minute
for forty-eight hours nonstop.
They had to be loaded onto lorries and carted off to a warehouse. Was
anyone in Fortaleza capable of running such an operation? Captain Fafoutis
shrugged. ‘If not,’ he said, ‘they will have to pay penalty.’
The docks were more clearly in view. A row of big grey sheds, the silo, a
cobbled quay, the rails running along it, the big travelling crane on its four stiff
legs like a great creature frozen in prehistory. One other ship, smaller and rustier
than the Zoe G, lay there tied up and lifeless. The sky was uniformly grey now,
and heavy. Soon it would rain.
The ship winched herself alongside, a rough gangplank went down and the
port doctor came aboard, followed soon after by a stream of officials. I went
back to my cabin to gather the last few things together, and felt a slight sense of
panic at something being irrevocably over, felt the powerful attraction of this little
floating universe of peeling veneer, frayed cloth, unvarying routine and familiar
faces. The captain’s cabin, next to my own, became so dense with smoke and
dealing that it oozed illegality like a prohibition honky-tonk. I wanted badly to be
part of what was going on next door, to be one of the gang.
I went out to look down on the quay and saw a small wooden table move
past below me. It was covered by a transparent plastic pyramid that shielded a
display of coloured souvenirs and shells. As it moved along, the sandals of the
man beneath it became visible, and he parked it against a wall and fussed over it
with a duster. Another man in torn cotton clothing arranged custard apples
against the colossal steel base of the travelling crane. They resembled green
hand grenades, and he handled them with appropriate delicacy.
Lorries were already arriving from the dock gates, and stevedores poured into
the ship over the gangplank. Within minutes the derricks began rumbling and the
first net full of bags swung up from number two hold, with numbers one and three
soon discharging too. The bags came up a ton at a time, with three lorries
loading together, and a fleet lined up and waiting. Somebody, I saw, was
determined to beat the penalty.
Eventually a deck hand came to fetch me to be interviewed by the police. I
followed him to the gangway outside the captain’s cabin, where two men stood
watching the unloading. They were ridiculously sinister, figures from a fantasy.
They belonged to an age of crime which I thought had long since passed, and
which to be truthful I thought had only been got up for films and television. The
boss was a big ungainly man in a black leather jacket. He wore dark glasses with
shiny metal rims, and his face was not only swarthy, pock-marked and scarred,
but disfigured by lumps large enough to rival his natural features. He seemed to
draw on two quite separate traditions of violence and could have been cast as a
hit man for Himmler. His companion was stunted and weasel-faced, and could
only be described as a sidekick.
However, they were quite civil, and asked me to fill in a form typed on a piece
of rough paper. Among other things it had a space for my mother’s Christian
names. Then we went to my cabin to inspect my things. The big man was jovial
enough but spoke no English, and the little man translated clumsily. They asked
me several times about ‘scuba’. They were determined that I had underwater
diving equipment somewhere and my denials obviously surprised them. They
seemed baffled and suspicious. After a little while they asked me to go ashore
and have my passport stamped.
I walked along the quay, on firm ground again, absorbed in the strange
illusion that the cobbles were sliding beneath my feet. Two more men in plain
clothes received me in a wooden hut. Unlike the first pair they were not
caricatures. The younger one introduced himelf as Samuel and spoke school
English, mostly in the present tense. He had a handwritten list of details he was
supposed to get from me, and they included my mother’s Christian names, which
are a little unusual. I began to think of them assuming a life of their own and
travelling forever in Brazilian official channels. My father’s occupation was also
demanded again, and I replied with overemphasis: ‘He is dead!’ as though they
had been caught walking on his grave. This, I found, gained a little extra respect,
though in reality I had hardly known my father.
Samuel also asked about my diving equipment, but seemed content to hear
that there was none. He then gave me the same form to complete as I had
already filled in on the ship, and it included all the questions he had just asked
me. I did it without comment. It seemed pointless to object to frontier officials
wasting one’s time, since they are perfectly placed to waste as much of it as they
wish. One just tried to make sure that patience was not seen as servility, a fine
distinction.
In all this life-consuming rigmarole of irrelevancies, common to all frontiers,
one new fact stood out clearly: the idea of going round the world on a motorcycle
meant nothing to these men. It was doubtful even whether they believed me, and
their disbelief disturbed me more than it should have done. I expected people to
look at me and know that I was genuine. Without this tribute I became cold and
defensive. How else could I explain my presence, my strange clothing? Like a real
cowboy stumbling accidentally into a fancy dress party, I wanted to shoot to
prove my gun was loaded.
My passport kindled some interest. It had already been stamped through
fourteen pages of visas in Africa, and the police lingered long over the Arabic and
Amharic scripts. Finally, on page nineteen, I got my stamp: BRASIL ENTRADA
22.05.74 TURISTA, signed João Z de Oliveira Costa.
‘Can I go now?’ I asked.
‘You are free to go anywhere,’ said Samuel. This proved quite soon to be a
wild exaggeration.
My cabin was still locked as I had left it, but I saw immediately that someone
had been searching my things. A tube of salt tablets was lying loose on the bed.
Whoever had looked did not care whether I knew. Nothing appeared to be
missing. Had they been looking for drugs? Or was it another attempt to discover
my diving gear? I began, even then, to think I might be walking into a trap, but the
idea seemed hysterical and I tried to dismiss it.
With Captain Fafoutis I shared a taxi into town, and we followed the
shoreline around the bay. I had never been anywhere that looked so wet. It was
not the quantity of water that impressed me, but rather the way it seemed to have
permeated everything. It covered the road in lakes, partially concealing great
subsidences. In other places sand bars lay across our path, swept down from
the dunes on the left. The buildings alongside seemed sodden to the point of
dissolution, their stone surfaces eroded and spongy, their plaster long since
fallen away. We drove a long way, slithering and bouncing. The people on the
sidewalks, moving along their own obstacle course, did nothing to lift my spirits.
Their tobacco-coloured skin was all that distinguished them to my jaundiced eye
from the population of any industrial suburb, with their downcast faces and ill-
fitting, mass-produced clothing.
The shipping agent’s office was of the old-fashioned brown variety. With
different furniture it could as well have been a bedroom or a salon. The agent, an
elderly man, listened impassively as though I were a young nephew reciting my
homework. My loose shirt and jeans, and the funny belt with the pouch on it, did
not qualify me as a serious client.
‘The customs need a bank guarantee against the importation of the
motorcycle,’ I told him, ‘ and this guarantee is being provided by the Sunday
Times in London. You have heard of it, perhaps? The newspaper?’
His expression indicated a mounting distaste. I hurried on.
‘The guarantee was lodged in Rio de Janeiro. Now I must tell them to have it
transferred here to Fortaleza.’
The agent began to turn away towards the door.
‘So I would like, with your help, to send a telex message, unless’ – I caught
sight of a telephone – ‘unless perhaps I could telephone.’
This last remark seemed to penetrate where nothing else had.
‘Impossible,’ he said.
‘I would reverse the charges, of course.’
‘It is impossible,’ he repeated with a voice like a rubber stamp.
The telephone was one of those ancient models with the mouthpiece on a
stalk like a Bakelite rose. It did not seem adequate for reaching London, and I let
the idea go.
‘Well, when can I get a telex message off?’ I asked.
‘You will not get through,’ he said.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘You must use the telex.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I would like to send a telex message. Do you have telex? ‘
‘Of course,’ he said.
‘When can I use it?’
‘It is too late,’ he said. ‘Please wait.’ And he left the room.
I sat down in a brown chair and considered how much time I should donate to
this useless exercise in order to make sure that the agent did not actually block
my progress. I roughed out a short message to the Sunday Times, and allowed
the agent to enter and leave the room once without demanding his attention.
When he returned ten minutes later I felt I had shown enough humility and asked
him where the telex machine was. He avoided the question and left the room
again, but an elderly clerk was obliged to remain and I harassed him with
questions about time differences and routing details until, in frustration at not
being able to understand me or dispose of me, he took me downstairs to the
street and into another office a few doors along. Within this office was yet
another smaller office, and when the door was opened, icy air struck me, freezing
my sweaty shirt to my skin.
Where before I had seen only brown wooden desks, I now saw green metal
filing cabinets. A young man in a tight-fitting suit, and a shirt with shootable
cuffs, was using a telephone of recent design. Through the hum I heard a
pronounced ‘clack’ that focussed my eyes immediately on a bright new telex
machine chattering its pretaped message to its remote counterpart across the
globe.
Walter Sá, the son of the owner, was a grave and fashionable young man
who spoke good English and, apparently, also got things done, for he was the
man in charge of beating the penalty at the Zoe G. He agreed immediately to send
my message. He warned me that there might be no line open until later, and I
should not expect a reply before the following day.
I should have thanked him cordially, relaxed and left his refrigerated office to
go about my proper business, which was getting used to the climate, seeing
something of the strange city and learning the language. I did not. What I had
already seen of the town depressed me. The strange behaviour of the police
frightened me. I wanted to get away from both, but as long as the bike was
locked up in the customs shed I could not move. I became obsessed by the need
to speed up the process, and could think of nothing else. I sat for hours in the
artificial atmosphere of Sá’s office watching the clock,’ willing the channels to
London to open, willing the message to arrive, willing the answer to return there
and then. It was absurd. The message went out as expected at 4p.m.; that was
7p.m. in London, and too late for a reply to be possible until the next day.
My back was stiff with tension, and the chill air had done it no good. I took a
token walk up the hill into town, but my heart was not in it. Torrents of rainwater
were rushing down the street, making a muddy river over wildly uneven surfaces
of flagstone, cobble, cement and earth. Halfway up the hill was a bridge being
either restored or demolished, it was hard to know which. Above me loomed a
grey granite wall retaining the embanked garden of a colonial fort, and on the wall
stood a soldier, wearing a waterproof cape and carrying a rifle. As I passed he
gave me a malevolent stare, locking on the wallet at my waist. So, I noticed, did
others. I began to learn that in this part of America one thing you looked for on a
stranger was a gun.
Then the clouds began to weep again, and I lost what heart I had and
scuttled back to the ship in a taxi. The shower had stopped when I arrived. The
storm covers were being removed from the hatches and the cashews were
swinging out. The work continued under floodlights through the night. My dreams
were modified to include the rhythmic rumbling of the derricks, and the pace of it
kept my own anxiety alive.
In the morning, over an oily egg fried in garlic, which I had come to
appreciate, I learned that I would have to leave the ship that day. The Zoe G was
expected to sail the following morning before dawn. I took a taxi back to the
agent’s office but there was no message, and I took another aimless walk into
town. It was a shock to discover that the Spanish I had learned was no use at
all. Even when I read out the Portuguese words from a menu at a fruit-juice
counter I could not make myself understood, a blow to my self-esteem because I
had always been good at picking up the ‘feel’ of a language. In revenge I
developed a senseless dislike of Portuguese and determined not to bother with it,
telling myself that I would soon be in Spanish-speaking America and that to learn
Portuguese was a waste of time.
As soon as I reasonably could, I returned to the shipping office and sat,
frozen inwardly and out, waiting. They were patient and tolerant. I was offered
frequent cups of cafesinho and bottles of Fanta.
Shortly before midday the message came.
 It was in three parts.
The bank guarantee had been arranged with the Banco do Brasil in Rio de
Janeiro.
I was introduced to Father Walsh at the Acão Social of São Raimundo, with
an address and a telephone number.
It was suggested that I go to a town called Iguatú, where there had been a
serious flood disaster, and write about it.
I was delighted to have some information that might lead to the release of the
motorcycle, for the bike was the key to my freedom. The introduction to the
priest, who I gathered must be a Catholic missionary, promised at least a
foothold on this slippery shore, and gave something more to look forward to than
bureaucratic entanglements.
The reference to Iguatú scared me. I had no doubt that telex messages were
monitored by the police. In due course they would read that the Sunday Times
had asked me to report on a flood disaster in the state of Ceará. ‘This,’ they
would say, ‘is an odd way for a tourist to be carrying on. Let’s ask him again
where he’s hidden his snorkel. Or something.’
Sá gave me the use of his phone, and I dialled the number in the telex. A
woman’s voice sang in my ear.
‘Quem está falando?’
The words meant nothing to me, and I asked for Padre Walsh. There were
some scuffling sounds, and a man came to the telephone who by pure chance
turned out to be Walsh. I explained how I had heard of him. In a brisk, young
voice with a powerful Irish inflection he established quickly where I was and what
I needed, and arranged to meet me with a car an hour later.
‘If I’m not there on the dot, don’t worry. I’ll be stopped somewhere on the way
with my head under the bonnet. We have the most egregious collection of cars
you’ll ever see. I’ll bring the jatão – that means jet liner – it’s a flashy performer
but it has black moods.’
The jatão was on schedule. Walsh leaned across the empty seat to shout my
name through the window.
I liked the look of him immediately. He was a vigorous man of about thirty in a
loose shirt and sandals with a friendly but shrewd face. I climbed into the green
VW and he suggested lunch before I had even begun to wonder how to mention
it. We went to a fish restaurant on the beach. The food was delicious, the beer
was good and cold and Walsh was a grand talker. His speech came fast and
furious and often his accent made it hard for me to catch, but by the end of lunch
he had illuminated the political landscape of northern Brazil, the Church’s histoiy,
the changes forced upon it and the present role, as he saw it, of a Catholic priest
in Ceará. He was witty, comprehensive and wonderfully free of humbug or pious
rectitude.
Perhaps the major surprise for a pagan like myself was that he concentrated
so thoroughly on the pragmatic approach. As a reaction to the shameful history
of the Church’s indifference to its poor flock, it was refreshing. When Walsh
spoke about the Church or his mission it was with the excitement of someone
engrossed in a stupendous theatrical production, though whether as actor,
director, stage manager or critic was unclear. Presumably the show was put on
for the greater glory of God, but the presumption remained tacit. Walsh had one
criterion for a smash hit, and that was ‘Would it send the people away better off?’
He seemed (and I surely wronged him here) to care nothing for that part of his
duties which required him to wear his cassock unless it made money.
‘You should see our Wednesday novena,’ he said. ‘ “The Wednesday Show”,
continuous performances through the day, the most fashionable thing in town. All
the cream of Fortaleza is there.
‘The takin’s are somethin’ glorious.’
The takings went to support social welfare schemes and were spent on
things as prosaic as food, clothing, building materials and tools for self-help
projects.
I listened bemused and grateful for the torrent of information. If I spoke at all
it was token stuff to show my appreciation and give the man a breather. I showed
him my telex message, and mentioned my fears. To his credit he did not try to
convince me that they were groundless, but simply suggested putting them away
since there was nothing to do about them anyway. In his company that seemed a
most natural and intelligent course to take.
 He drove me to the docks and helped me to fetch my things. A measure of his
influence was that the Zoe G, which that morning had felt like home, now looked
the seedy old freighter she would always be when viewed from shore. I said some
farewells to the crew, trying to breathe a little of the old camaraderie into them,
hut the replies were so offhand that I saw I had long ago been unloaded and
forgotten in their minds, relegated to that other world which the Zoe G always
sailed away from sooner or later.
Walsh and I rattled off to São Raimundo on an endless and tortuous route.
At times we seemed to drive out into the country, only to plunge again into some
waterlogged and sand-strewn suburb. The greater part of the city consisted of
single-storeyed brick buildings undulating and crumbling on loose foundations. I
felt the earth was determined to shake itself loose of an unwanted encumbrance.
Towards the end we ran along a major road whose surface had all but
disappeared, with ditches running alongside and across it. There were cars and
many taxis on the road, all looking as though they had been recovered from the
wreckers’ yard. They flashed as the sun struck the multifaceted dents in their
bodywork, and the doors jiggled visibly in their frames. They slalomed skilfully but
recklessly, in a triumph of temperament over common sense, because vehicles in
Brazil were supremely expensive.
We climbed a sandy embankment, crossed a railway line, stumbled over some
more ditches and arrived at São Raimundo.
For the next few days I ate with the priests, and slept in a hammock down the
road in the caretaker’s home. Antonio Sá, the caretaker, was a tall, happy man,
brown-skinned and handsome, who lived with his wife and children in a small brick
house. They ate in one room and slept in another, so the third room was
available for letting. I shared it with another Englishman, Ian Dall, who was
visiting São Raimundo, and we paid Antonio a few cruzeiros to help him out while
he studied to become an electrician. Ian showed me how to use the hammock. It
was a revelation to find that by lying diagonally across it, one could stretch out
straight and be comfortable rather than be folded up like a banana.
The next day I presented myself at the Banco do Brasil to see about the
guarantee. The bank took me by surprise. I had expected the older style of
shabby and discreet banking. Here was a large airy banking hall full of up-to-date
office machinery and animated people, promising bustle and efficiency. I found
my way to the right official and explained my problem with a translator and
several eager minions standing by. The man had a keen, expressionless face of
European paleness. He wore spectacles finely framed to foster the impression of
a man whose mind ranged far beyond his immediate responsibilities. His suit was
an immaculate lightweight grey, and his shoes gleamed on the comfortable
carpeting beneath his table. Above all I was struck by his opulent linen. His shirt
and handkerchief had that soft and spotless luxury which only dedicated
servants can provide and which no amount of Western money and machinery can
duplicate.
He listened carefully and his entourage gazed on respectfully. Then he
spoke. The translator informed me that what I wanted could not, unfortunately,
be done. The official addressed himself to his papers, and the group obviously
expected me to vanish marvellously without another word. The rudeness of it
astonished me. I demanded an explanation, and the official raised his head and
looked at me as though I really had reappeared from thin air. He smiled at some
private and infinitely subtle joke and even laughed, lightly and delicately. He
repeated that it would be ‘quite impossible’, meaning that only a half-wit could
have imagined otherwise. I still refused to evaporate, and was shunted off to
others, but nobody seemed capable of even hinting at an explanation.
When I was finally ejected onto the pavement, I realized that the Sunday
Times would have to start the process again from London, and I sent off another
telex and prepared myself to wait.
São Raimundo consisted of the church, a large college for boys and girls and
the parish house where Walsh lived with three or four other priests. The priests
were strongly built Irishmen, chosen in part for their fitness. They had adopted
Portuguese names and were known to their parishioners as Padres Mario,
Eduardo, Brandão, Marcello and so on. The slightest of them all, physically, was
Marcello, a visitor from a country parish who had come to Fortaleza some time
back to convalesce from a long illness. We were passing the plastic box of
cornflakes around the table at my second breakfast when I heard that he was
returning the following day, by bus, to his parish in the interior.
‘Where is that?’ I asked idly.
‘Iguatú,’ he said.
But for that chance I don’t suppose I would have gone to Iguatú. Having the
name thrust before me again in such a pointed way made it difficult to refuse,
though quite whom I was planning to oblige I didn’t know. The notion of allowing
a degree of randomness in my movements was already established. My arrival in
Fortaleza was itself a fateful accident, and I was intrigued to see how one
happening led to another in such a way that, somewhere along the thread of
events, it seemed as though a pattern was being woven. I felt impelled to let the
pattern emerge, however ominous it seemed.
‘Why don’t you come and have a look?’ Marcello added, as I knew he would.
‘It’ll only cost you the bus fare.’
‘All right,’ I said, and lightly for Walsh’s benefit: ‘Might as well be hung for a
sheep as a lamb.’
Iguatú is 250 miles from Fortaleza on the Jaguaribe River, and the journey
took most of the day. The countryside moved past like an endlessly revolving
backdrop of the same oil palms and swamps and glistening red laterite soil. Signs
of that year’s massive rainfall were everywhere visible. The road, newly built, was
already broken and potholed, and in places had been swept away altogether so
that we were in any case forced to take a longer route than usual.
There was a stop for lunch in a barnlike restaurant serving the staple
Brazilian meal of steak, rice and coarse floury manioca fried with the meat. After
another short stop in the afternoon the bus arrived in Iguatú, just before dark.
That evening I sat in Father Marcello’s small house brushing aside
mosquitoes while he tried to give me some idea of the life of the people in his
area.
Most of them are among the thirty or so million peasants in the north of Brazil
who are as close to poverty and destitution as any in the world. Since they do
not own the land, their condition is virtually feudal, and the tiny resources they
have are sufficient only to see them through from one day to the next. When the
great natural disasters occur they must succumb, and disasters in the tropics are
as regular as the seasons. Cyclone, flood or drought take their toll annually, and
because of this inescapable punishment, the victims have been known for
generations as the flagelados.
Their original language is Guaraní, an Indian language that was widely
spoken in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and parts of other neighbouring countries.
They are of Indian descent mixed with Portuguese, and have well-defined
cheekbones and broad faces. They are short in stature and have fine smooth
skin like toffee, delicately engraved by age.
Iguatú is a Guaraní word meaning beautiful water. It was on Sunday, 24
March, that the beautiful water had suddenly risen and flooded across the banks
of the Jaguaribe. The flood lasted for three days and swept many houses away.
During the following weeks the victims salvaged what they could from their ruins
and took shelter temporarily in the already crowded houses that had survived. So
far it had been an ordinary disaster. Then, on the third Sunday, the water rose
again but this time much higher and much faster.
As with the first flood, the water took three days to subside. It had risen forty
feet, to touch the lower girders of the big iron railway bridge. Some people in a
barge had been torn from their moorings and trapped for a while under the bridge.
It was said that they had lost a child. Miraculously that would have been the only
known casualty. The second flood left four hundred houses either ruined or
totally demolished.
Hundreds now had no place at all to take shelter, but on the following
Thursday, before any useful measures could be taken to help them, the river rose
yet again to its previous highest level.
I arrived a month later, towards the end of May. In a normal year the rains
would have been over, the sky long since cleared and the soil already scorched
and dusty in the heat of the dry season. But 1974 was exceptional, as I had
already seen in Africa, and the sky was as grey and soggy as wet flannel.
Iguatú is a sizeable small town of several thousand inhabitants with a
pleasant and prosperous centre running rapidly to seed at the edges. It is built on
higher ground on the south side of the river and was largely untouched by the
flooding, although the river did undercut the bank in places and brought down a
few improvised dwellings. The major part of the damage was on the lower north
bank, where poorer people had access to land.
In the morning Marcello and I walked across the bridge to have a look. On the
other side we followed a path that curved away to the left and brought us back to
the river and an open sandy expanse littered with debris. It was here that
hundreds of homes had recently stood. Most of them had been small two-roomed
constructions, some built of brick and others of wattle and daub. The later
houses, ostensibly stronger and made of brick, had collapsed altogether and
nothing remained to show where they had once stood. There was a moral here
somewhere.
It was obvious that the houses on these shallow banks invited destruction by
their very presence. The people cut down the trees for building and for burning.
They kept animals, a goat, a donkey, perhaps a cow, which denuded the ground
of grasses and shrubs. When the river rose the soil slipped away like sand with
nothing to bind it. The process must have happened many times, eating farther
and farther into the land. There was only a limited area available to these people.
Beyond were more prosperous houses with walled and fenced gardens.
We stopped by two old people who were recovering the round clay tiles from
their ruined home. The house was now a transparent structure of wooden
uprights supporting the roof, and the river had laid three feet of sand over the
original floor level, so that the old man, short as he was, stood with his grizzled
white head through the rafters looking at us across his own roof.
His name was Manuel Subino dos Santos, and he was a fine, tough old man
with a dried and salted look. He told us that he was about seventy years old,
sixty-eight or seventy, he was not quite sure. He wore a loose and faded blue tee-
shirt and shorts, with a string of brown beads around his neck and some kind of
silver object hanging at his waist. He was handing the tiles one by one to his wife,
Ignacio Zumira da Conceicão, who looked as old and wiry as her husband but
said she was only fifty. She wore a printed cotton dress and white headband and
she was stacking the tiles. They planned to rebuild their house elsewhere.
They looked quite indestructible, and seemed calm and at ease with the
world.
‘Some other land has been allocated to the homeless for building new
houses,’ Marcello told me. ‘It is on higher ground beyond the town. A committee
was formed to cope with the disaster. There’s the Volkswagen agent, a
businessman with some stores, a local farmer who has some political pull. Then
there’s the bishop and the parish priest who’s another Irishman, and three county
councillors and two doctors.
‘There’s a national organization too, called Ancar, which is responsible for
rural development and they have three people on the committee. I must say they
were really quite energetic, and the governor of the state has put a lot into it.’
It was very pleasant now by the river, with the water running safely far below.
On the opposite bank women were slamming their laundry on stones and
spreading it to dry on the sand, making a big and colourful patchwork. Upstream
a man was fishing. A good place to live, within reach of the water. One could put
out a net and keep an eye on it. Handy for cooking, and washing. If only they
could find a way to protect the grasses and shrubs, to keep the bank stabilized
and resistant to flooding. Why not?
‘Ignorance, perhaps, or apathy. In the past whenever they made an effort to
make something better for themselves it was always taken away from them; if not
by the elements, then by landowners, soldiers, the powers that be. Over the
generations they are left with little desire for improvement. They are hardy and
uncomplaining. They take what comes.’
I took pictures of Dos Santos and his wife, and other less fortunate families
whose houses had disappeared entirely. Then Father Marcello went off on his
duties and I wandered along the riverbanks looking and photographing.
The self-help programme for flood victims was centred around a concrete
slaughterhouse, newly built and not yet functioning, on the other side of town.
Some families were housed in the building. Others took shelter in hutches of
black plastic sheeting draped over wooden scaffolding. The families, though
large, occupied tiny areas of space and had only the most meagre possessions.
I should have examined them more carefully to see what had been rescued, what
objects of veneration stood guard over the mat, the saucepan, the water pot, but
I was too hot and too distracted by my own discomfort to make the effort.
 This same heat, which I found stifling, was the saving of these people. In a
temperate winter, given their circumstances, their scanty food and clothing, most
of them would have died of exposure. In the tropics, with shelter from the rain,
one can subsist a long time on remarkably little. What lacks most is hope and
initiative, and this was being supplied, in practical form, by a machine for making
cement cavity bricks. It had been designed by an Englishman working with the
Oxfam charity, and it was set up in front of the slaughterhouse. Homeless men
who were not working at the time were employed on it, and a great many bricks
were already piled up and waiting to be used in the houses that they planned to
build for themselves on the new land.
So they had been given some sort of a promise of a better tomorrow, but it
was terribly fragile, just as it was painfully obvious that these people were really
not needed. They were unskilled, uneducated and destitute. The big landowners
would never want for manual labour; they had their pick from millions.
Some had been given low army tents to sleep in. Here was a woman with six
children, cooking outside her tent. She had built a small but pleasing shelter from
woven reeds and grasses to serve as a kitchen. In it her smallest child lay in a
cardboard carton. Her husband was at work labouring for ten cruzeiros a day,
which was just under a dollar fifty. She did not know for how many days he would
be employed.
‘Yes, sir, I would like to send my children to school, but how can I? They
have no clothes.’
I asked Father Marcello whether he believed her.
‘Oh, I think so. Schooling is cheap enough, it only costs thirty cruzeiros a
head and that includes a snack for lunch but she would have to find a hundred
cruzeiros at least for clothing, and then more for paper and pencils.’
‘Ten cruzeiros a day doesn’t sound like much,’ I said.
‘No,’ he replied, looking almost apologetic, as though he were to blame. ‘It will
buy three kilos of rice or beans. It’s actually well below the legal minimum, but
they are not in a position to complain.’
Needless to say, the people in the north of Brazil were all thin.
The bus rattled me back to Fortaleza next day. Alone this time, and going
over the same route, I dozed a good deal of the way, with the senseless music of
a transistor radio mingling with the bus’s roar and enveloping me in a tunnel of
fantastic noise.
It was still only midafternoon when I got back to São Raimundo, and I was
restless. It was my seventh day ashore and at last I was beginning to feel more
comfortable with the climate. My curiosity had come to life again in Iguatú and I
was no longer a traveller in limbo with one foot at sea and another on land.
Walter Sá had a telex message from London to say that the Sunday Times
was making arrangements for a guarantee with the Bank of London in Fortaleza.
Father Walsh said he knew the manager, a Scotsman called Alan Davidson. I
called the bank and made an appointment to see Davidson. The young policeman
called Samuel had left a note at the house asking me to call at the Maritime
Police with my documents. There were some details they had forgotten to ask
for.
‘My mother’s Christian names again,’ I said wearily. ‘I suppose I’d better go.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Walsh.
‘Well it can wait until tomorrow,’ I said, and set off for the older part of town.
I found remnants of the old fortifications, a small but pretty park with delicate
fences and ornaments, old sidewalks still paved surprisingly with marble
flagstones. Lights beckoned from a vaulted gateway set in the middle of a fine
old stone building, and I followed faint sounds of music and conversation. The
building had been the old prison and was now converted into a museum. Huge
rooms with ancient and lustrous hardwood floors were turned over to examples
of local art and custom. Behind the prison was a garden of small lawns and
pools, with fountains playing and lights concealed in bushes and among palm
fronds. Alongside ran an arcade of shops trading in leather work, woven goods
and other handicrafts. At scattered chairs and tables young couples or groups
entertained themselves with a seemingly endless répertoire of humorous
anecdotes, the rattle of speech building up into spasmodic climaxes of laughter.
The kids were all impeccably turned out in the pop fashions of the late sixties,
mini skirts, brightly coloured flared trousers, tailored shirts and blouses, three-
inch platform soles. Physically they were no different from the peasants of
Iguatú, but they were planets apart.
I sat for a while, but it was an atmosphere that emphasized my solitude.
Without the language and with no bike to establish my credentials, I felt too shy
to make contact. I was about to leave when my attention was seized by two
guitarists sitting side by side against the wall of the arcade. They had both begun
to play, and one was singing. His voice sent shock waves through me. He took
the syllables of the first line and hammered them out with distinct and equal
emphasis, like blows on an anvil, before leading into the melody that completed
the verse. Then his companion replied in the same manner. The effect was
wonderfully potent. I felt the same astonishment that always overtakes me when
with a few bold strokes something familiar is made strange and thrilling again.
For the first time since landing in Brazil I experienced something I could call
beautiful, and it gave me a place at last in this strange new world and made me
hungry again for life. I understood only afterwards the significance of that
moment.
Suddenly immersed in the tropical poverty of Latin America, I was struggling
not only with personal problems but with moral and ethical questions of great
complexity. How poor is poverty? How rich is rich? Should priests tend bodies or
souls? In whose interests were they acting? Would the Indians be better or
worse off in a democracy? Can a democracy function with an illiterate
population? What kind of aid helps, and what kind is useless, and what kind
corrupts?
Yet underneath all this clinical questioning, what concerned me really was a
much more direct and personal doubt. What I wanted to ask was ‘How can I or
anyone possibly live a good life amidst all this squalor and humidity and decay
and indifference? Where is the point of it? What is there to lift up the heart and
the spirit? What can an individual pit against the power of nature and the apathy
of others? Where is the value that lasts?’
I badly needed some ground in which to root my feelings and the singers gave
it to me.
I had heard Father Walsh say, with honesty and due consideration, that he
could not rate beauty very high in his scheme of things, and I had reproached
myself for letting it bother me. When there were people sick and starving and
homeless, how could it matter whether they ate off china or plastic, whether their
roof was tile or tin, whether the priests lived in a harmonious and pleasing home
or a soulless echoing institution? Wasn’t it enough that these men gave
themselves utterly to the poor, and taught them how to grasp at just a few of the
material benefits of the Machine Age, which had left them so far behind? Wasn’t
there enough beauty in the hearts and actions of these raw-boned foreigners to
offset all the ugliness of their new pragmatism?
I saw peasants coming from hand-made houses to receive help from men
who lived in squared-off boxes lined with inert substances and lit from corner to
corner. Naturally they would fix on this bright new rectangular life as their ultimate
ambition. While in my world millions of descendants of Europe’s peasantry were
longing to struggle out of those same sterile spaces and back to something
resembling a life with natural things.
Was the whole ‘underdeveloped’ world queuing up to be put through the
sausage machine, to come out uniform and plump and covered in the same shiny
plastic skin? It was not the first time I had seen the human condition in such
mean and aimless terms. The same depressing vision had overwhelmed me in the
slums of Tunis, the tin huts of Ethiopia, the shanties around Nairobi and the
black township of Soweto. Try as I would to imagine a rosier future, I could see
only ever-increasing numbers of people determined to seize on the resources of
the earth and pervert them into greater and greater heaps of indestructible
concrete and plastic ugliness, only to look and learn and retreat in penitent
dismay before the next wave of ‘developing’ citizens. And there seemed to be
nothing that I or any individual could do that would make a jot of difference to the
outcome. I met many who shared my pessimism, and some who felt personally
insulted by it, but I never heard anyone propose a convincing alternative.
It was my weakness to become obsessed by these gloomy abstractions. I
made it my duty to save the world, and each time I failed I felt as lifeless and
meaningless as the grey army of unborn billions whose future I was trying to
settle.
Again and again I had to be taught that one single life-giving act is worth
more than a million speculations. Once, in Ethiopia, I was restored by nothing
more than a smile. As I rode out of Gondar a woman walked towards me dressed
in pink and carrying a parasol. When she saw me approaching (and I was an
unusual, perhaps frightening sight there) her face was transformed by the most
extraordinary smile I have ever seen. It shone, it beamed towards me with such
life and depth that I was her son, her lover, her saviour all in one. She bowed
quickly but deeply several times as I passed, but maintaining that same radiating
quality of happiness, so that I was raised to the Gods for a long, long time.
In Fortaleza it was those two men with their urgent, sad voices who reminded
me what life was about and what made it worth living.
I met the manager of the Bank of London next morning. He was a fair-haired,
youngish man who seemed to exude without effort all the qualities of superior
competence that the man at the Banco do Brasil had tried so hard to project, but
of course I was heavily biased. In his studiously furnished sanctum we drank
sweet black coffee. He asked intelligent and flattering questions about my
journey and described his life in Brazil. He enjoyed Fortaleza and was physically
comfortable there, and being with him raised my morale another notch. I expected
that we would meet again some evening and I looked forward to being drawn into
the life of the city while I waited out the formalities. Meanwhile it was clear that
the problem of the guarantee could be safely left with him.
To encourage my rising optimism I treated myself to the luxury of a restaurant
with clean linen and flowers on the table. The weather conspired with me and
waited until I had taken my seat before sending the midday rain smashing down
on the flagstones outside. I revelled in the freshness of the prawns, and
discovered stewed cashew fruit. The rain continued. I smoked several cigarettes
and copied the menu on a paper napkin, determined now to begin learning the
language. Still it rained, and eventually I could put the visit to the police off no
longer. In a corner of my mind they continued to agitate and disturb my peace. I
wanted to be shot of them.
By the time I had found a taxi my clothes were wet. I was still unsuitably and
obtrusively dressed. My shirt sleeves were long, my jeans too hot and heavy. I
still had no sandals, and my shoes and socks quickly became soaked in the
streams of water gushing over the pavements and gutters, but I expected the
afternoon sun to dry me out.
Samuel received me with profuse apologies, looking younger than ever.
‘Now you come for Policía Federal. It is nothing. Some questions only.
Nothing. I am so-o-rry. I will be your friend.’
We sat side by side in the back of a shabby black police car and returned the
way I had come, as Samuel continued to soothe me.
‘Policía Federal is not very long away. I shall like to talk you more for my
English.’
I saw the cathedral pass by, and then the car stopped before a white villa set
back from the road with a flower garden in front.
It was a large and irregular building distinguished from its neighbours by a
web of aerials above the roof. We walked down a red-tiled corridor to a small
reception area at the back. I was surprised by the clean and prosperous look of it
all, as though they were doing good business. We sat on modern black plastic
cushions and gazed at wood-panelled walls, and waited.
We waited more than an hour. Finally a young woman came up to me. She
was slim, pretty, hardly more than a girl really, and dressed for a holiday or a
date with a boy friend. She seemed very composed, and smiled easily at me.
‘I am Franziska,’ she said. ‘I will interpret for you. Please come.’
This can’t be so bad, I thought irrelevantly, as she led me into a very small
office. It seemed to be full of men packed in cigarette smoke. I was seated at a
desk facing a small, tough-looking fellow in shirt sleeves. Franziska sat on my
right between two other men, her green mini skirt well above her shapely coffee-
coloured knees. I smiled at her. She looked grave, but not too grave.
Then the man across the desk began shouting. He made me quite nervous.
He sounded very belligerent indeed.
Franziska began to translate.
‘He says: “You have been to Iguatú. You have been taking pictures. Who
were you with? What pictures did you take? Who were you talking to?” ’
Franziska’s nicely modulated voice did nothing to dispel the brutal impact of
the little man as he sat staring angrily at me, or the menace of the other two, who
seemed to be counting my vertebrae. There was obviously no point in denying
anything or refusing to answer. I admitted the charge, explained as graciously as
I could and added with genuine innocence: ‘Why not?’
I got no answer. The man bellowed at me again.
‘Are you a journalist?’ said Franziska.
It is one thing to have this put as a polite question, and quite another to be
accused of it as if it were a capital offence. I felt the first twinge of hopelessness
and fear, because it was a question I was incapable of answering honestly and
credibly. Yes, I had been, and maybe I would be again. But now, on this journey?
No, I was not
My older passport, which identified me as a journalist, was tucked into the
linen money belt at São Raimundo, together with a correspondent’s card that had
been useful in Cairo. If I had had those with me I would never have dared to deny
the profession. Was I or wasn’t I a journalist? Was it better to tell the truth and
risk being made to look a liar, or tell a lie and have it believed? I remembered
vividly being told in London that foreign journalists were often given short and
painful shrift by the Brazilian police. I decided to tell the truth.
‘No,’ I said firmly, ‘I am not a journalist, but my journey is supported by the
Sunday Times, and I write articles about my personal experience.’
Now came the problem of the telex. That bloody telex, I thought savagely,
sending me off to Iguatú. Any minute now they’ll produce a copy of it. And why,
oh God, was I stupid enough to go? And I thought about being watched at Iguatú
and wondered where else and for how long they had been watching me. So I
decided to show them the telex straight away, like the frank and forthright fellow I
was, hoping I could confuse them over the wording of it.
The telex was tucked inside my working passport. With it, unhappily, was a
black and white snapshot taken by Father Marcello, showing the Jaguaribe River
in full flood beneath the bridge. As I drew out the telex, the photograph fell on the
desk.
If there is one thing dictatorships hate (and with reason) it is foreigners taking
pictures of their bridges. The interrogator seized upon it. Pointless, again, to
deny what it was, who it had come from. I began to feel terrible. How could an
innocent snapshot begin to assume such sinister significance? Yet it
undoubtedly did. And now the priests were tangled up in this too: Marcello in
Iguatú; Walsh in Fortaleza because he was mentioned in the telex; even Oxfam
was there as an incidental reference. I was astounded by the complexity of the
situation, although the game had scarcely even begun. I realized later that even
the most elaborate fictional spy plots would be childishly simple compared with
the real thing.
Franziska struggled to translate the telex. I explained that what it really
meant was that the Sunday Times already had a story about Iguatú. The
message was for my information only, and I had gone there merely to satisfy my
curiosity because the opportunity offered itself. It sounded too complicated to
me. I did not think that they would believe a word of it.
The little fellow was getting more businesslike now, and not bothering to
frighten me anymore. (I was frightened enough.)
‘Where is the film and camera?’
‘At São Raimundo.’
He had Samuel in and told him to take me to the priest’s house to get the
camera and film, todoas as coisas – ‘all the things’ – and bring me back.
It was dark and wet, but not raining. As the car rattled across town Samuel
talked a little, gentle as ever, protested that he knew I was innocent of all
wrongdoing and let me think.
What did they mean by ‘all the things’? Was Samuel going to search my
belongings? Somehow I had to get those other documents hidden, but how?
When we arrived, fate seemed to be going my way at last. The house was empty
and locked, but I knew where the key to the back door was kept. I muttered
something and dashed around the side of the house while Samuel waited
patiently for me to come through and open the front door for him. On my way I got
the money belt from my room and, looking around wildly for a hiding place, slipped
it under the refrigerator in the dining room. It never occurred to me that I might not
be back that evening to recover it.
I let Samuel in and under his gaze I collected my cameras and six rolls of film
that I had shot in Africa. He showed little interest in anything else, and I wished I
had hidden the film as well. Before we left, Father Walsh returned and I told him
what was happening. He showed only polite interest, and I could hardly blame
him. I wanted him to stay detached, but his apparent indifference deepened my
gloom, nonetheless.
At the villa I was taken to the head of the political department, notorious in
Brazil by the acronym DOPS. An elegant man lounged back in a revolving chair
and put his fingertips together. He had formed the unnecessary idea that my
meeting with the priests had been somehow secretly prearranged. He asked me
to explain the films. Five of them were Kodachrome, and could not be developed
in Brazil. I told him where they had been taken. Then, to my astonishment, he
asked me to write out my mother’s Christian names. He dictated a series of
messages to Brasilia and Interpol and, still through Franziska, said I would have
to wait until he got replies to his enquiries.
‘Maybe this evening,’ she said.
An orderly took me back to the entrance hall where an agent was always on
duty, and then through some louvred doors into a large office. There were several
desks and filing cabinets and an electric fan. Two other doorways, barred by
locked wrought-iron gates, led to the street and to a back yard. The agent in the
hall could communicate with the office through a shuttered hatch in the wall. The
floor, I noticed, was tiled and sloped gently towards a drain in the middle. Looking
up, I saw that the roof was really just a canopy raised three feet above the walls,
and that the room must once have been an open patio.
The office was obviously in use, though its people had gone home, and I was
alone. Somewhere nearby I could hear a telex machine, and a loudspeaker
emitted messages in Portuguese or an occasional burst of morse all interwoven
with crackles and howls of static.
The orderly came back after half an hour with a small chipped enamel dish of
rice and beans. There were some fragments of chicken and bone among the rice.
Eventually the DOPS inspector came to confirm that I would be there for the
night. He pointed to the corner where there were some collapsible beds with straw
mattresses. He was polite but curt, and left quickly.
I could not decide whether my situation was mildly inconvenient or extremely
serious. I tried hard to divine how it would seem to them. On the face of it, it was
ridiculous to suppose that I would have ridden a motorcycle the length of Africa in
order to engage in a spying mission in Brazil. But how would they confirm the
truth? And for all I knew they might find the truth even more ridiculous. In my
present position even I found the idea of travelling around the world on a
motorcycle a shade absurd.
I was determined to remain optimistic. After all, I had been arrested before in
similar circumstances, once in Tunis, twice in Alexandria, and each time I was
turned loose again very soon. And, damn it, I was in an office wasn’t I, and not
mouldering in a cell? Yet even during the short time that remained before I
thought I could reasonably hope to sleep, I found myself being sucked into a
vortex of speculation which seemed to drag me always down towards doubt and
fear.
As the evening wore on there was another crashing downpour of rain. Some
splashed in under the roof, some rose up through the drain and water rushed and
gurgled all around the room and under the floor as though we were being swept to
sea. I heard later that it was the heaviest fall of rain that Fortaleza had known in
sixty years.
It was a surprisingly uncomfortable night. I had only the clothes I had arrived
in. My jeans were still damp, my shoes and socks almost wet and my shirt sticky
with the day’s sweat. Two walls of the office were saturated with moisture by the
deluge. The open doors and roof encouraged a night breeze which, normally,
would be a blessing but was a curse for me. Though there was a mattress there
was no sort of cover. The moving air was cold, and the exposed parts of my
body were chilled even further by evaporation. I slept only for minutes at a time,
with the noises from the radio room distorting my dreams into nightmare shapes.
Eventually I put another mattress on top of my body. It helped a bit, stiff as it
was, but covered me with a fine straw dust which stuck to my damp clothes and
skin.
In the morning I felt grey and unappetizing. An orderly took me to a bathroom
where there was a shower but no towel or soap. There were some scraps of
lavatory paper to dry on, but they did not go far. It was useless to ask for
anything, for itwas all too easy for them to brush me off with a blank,
uncomprehending stare. I did not feel strong enough to make a demonstration,
thinking that quiet dignity might serve me better. I expected to be free again that
day.
So, on an empty stomach, I watched the staff drift into the office.
The Policía Federal, it seemed to me, was like a Brazilian FBI staffed by
agentes (agents), men and women in plain clothes with a reasonable education
who drew good salaries and were encouraged to study for higher qualifications. I
saw them more often with textbooks than with guns, but the gun was always
tucked away somewhere in a waistband or a purse, and the textbooks usually
dealt with subjects of a slightly Machiavellian nature like Mass Communications in
the Modern State.
The uniformed police in Brazil, as in most Latin American countries, were at a
much lower level, the departments staffed largely by semiliterate ruffians who
busied themselves with petty crime, extortion and gratuitous violence. The
agentes were above all that and had a more sophisticated function in controlling
fraud, smuggling, drugs, vice, forgery and so on, but I was concerned more with
its other job of enforcing the political repression of Brazil on behalf of the army.
Brazil was a dictatorship ruled by army generals. Their main priority after
taking power in 1964 was to depoliticize the country, meaning to stop anyone
engaging in, or talking about, or even thinking, politics. Football, yes, the Samba,
sim. Politics, ninety million times NO. Political opposition to the generals was
punished by imprisonment, deportation, torture and death.
Naturally such a government would watch most carefully over an area like the
state of Ceará, where so many had so little to lose and where there might be real
potential for subversion and revolt. It was into this high-tension grid that I had
stumbled off the Zoe G in my outlandish dress, with my strange vehicle, my
cameras, my telex messages, my quixotic mission, my passport full of Arabic text
conveying hints of terrorism and my much advertised promenade into the interior.
Facing the door, with my back to the wall, I watched the agentes assemble
around me. There was a bitter humour in my predicament, and I made the most of
it. Which of them, I wondered, would be the one to pull out my fingernails or
attach electrodes to my genitals? What about that fresh-faced young fellow over
there in the sky-blue pants and fawn shirt with the tidy auburn hair? I watched him
set down a pile of books, draw a small automatic from under his shirt front and
drop it in his drawer, perch one buttock on the edge of the desk and, rather
stylishly, light a cigarette, swinging his well-shod foot. Surely not!
Or this older man with the wavy grey hair, the comfortable paunch and the
face of a family doctor who sat at the desk marked ‘TOXICOS’? Ridiculous ! I
became fascinated by this unusual view of humanity. Were any of them capable
of real menace? It wouldn’t be the girl across the room, typing. She was the
complement to Franziska: shorter, fairer, plump and softly appealing.
Well, how about the fellow at the DΟΡS desk? Surely he would be my man.
The Department of Political and Social Order, a bland title for the administration
of terror and thumbscrews. He was another man of mainly European descent,
probably German. I watched him talk and smile, watched his blue eyes and, to my
disgust, I found I liked him.
I could keep the game up no longer. They all looked like reasonable people.
More than that, there was something familiar about them, their restlessness, a
touch of vanity, a subdued energy suggesting that they were just marking time,
that their real business was elsewhere. The parallel came to me immediately. It
was the office of a daily newspaper where I had once worked; a roomful of
reporters fiddling reluctantly with their expense sheets, waiting to be sent on a
job. The comparison was faultless and rather disturbing. Clearly there was little
to fear from these people, they were the glamorous, acceptable and perhaps
naï ve face of the machine. If I needed torturing there would be specialists to do
the job, somewhere else. From the corridor I had already noticed steps and an
open well leading to a gloomy basement area where I imagined the cells to be.
Hurriedly I put them out of my mind.
The agents behaved as though I were invisible, and I guessed they were used
to finding all sorts of riffraff lodged there for the night. I hated, hungry and filthy
as I was, to be present among a group of well-dressed, freshly washed and
breakfasted people gathering for their morning’s work, to be totally ignored by
them, to have to submit to the status of an ‘untouchable’ and yet be obliged by
fear to remain and endure it in silence. I learned a rare lesson in the nature of
serfdom.
The chairs had all been seized and I was forced to stand. After two hours
frustration made me reckless. A rough-featured sergeant figure had come in from
time to time and finally I told him, as best I could, that I wanted to see the
inspector. He dismissed me with the usual grunt and turned towards the door.
Incensed, I followed him, insisting loudly. He turned again, his face working with
rage, and shoved me back against the wall, roaring ‘Ficα!’ Then he performed a
brilliant mime which demonstrated in a few seconds that I was a spy who took
photographs and therefore beneath contempt.
Nobody in the room appeared to have noticed anything untoward. My hopes
slipped even further.
Then there was a break. First, an orderly came in with a tray of coffee, and
the agent nearest me offered me a cup. And then, suddenly, Ian Dall, the
Englishman from Antonio Sá’s house, came in with the DOPS inspector. He
walked straight across to me and shook my hand.
‘I’ve come to help with your statement,’ he said. ‘They thought it would be
better – that it would be better if the fathers stayed away from it. They hope you
understand. How are you? Are you all right?’
He seemed reluctant to say more. I tried to tell him how I was. It was
impossible. Somehow it all translated into ‘not bad’. Anyway, all the misery of the
previous sixteen hours lifted at the pleasure of seeing him.
‘Do you know what’s going on?’ I asked him. ‘Are they going to let me go? I
can’t make out what’s happening. It’s terrible not being able to talk to anyone. I
can’t even get breakfast…’ I heard myself talking and it began to sound rather
pathetic, so I stopped.
‘I think it will be all right,’ he said. ‘They don’t seem very concerned. I expect it
will be over soon.’
We walked, a civilized little group of three, to the inspector’s office. We might
just as well be walking out into the street, I thought, so why don’t I? But I didn’t.
There was a lot of talking and repetition, and the inspector passed several
sheets of longhand to a secretary and then took us to a bigger office where
Superintendent Dottore Xavier lounged in a bigger revolving chair with armrests.
This man evidently spoke some English, and enjoyed practising phrases, but
for the most part Ian translated from the Portuguese. He made an eloquent
statement about security and his role in protecting Brazil from the international
conspiracy of the Communist press. I said the Sunday Times would hardly be
considered part of a Communist conspiracy. He made some reference to Le
Monde’, which Ian found unnecessary to translate.
‘Mr Simon will have to stay until we have replies to our enquiries.’
‘Am I under arrest, or what?’ I asked.
‘You are only detained,’ he said. ‘You will have full privileges.’
‘What privileges? How about starting with breakfast?’
The good doctor appeared shocked that I had missed my breakfast. Why, he
declared, I could be taken out to restaurants for meals if I wished. I had only to
ask. And policemen would buy things for me, like cigarettes or sandwiches. I had
only to give them the money. And yes, I could have clothes and washing articles
brought from São Raimundo. And of course the British Consul would be told.
Indeed this very friend, Senhor Dall, would no doubt perform that service straight
away. One might have thought I had deliberately chosen to sulk in a corner
instead of coming out to have fun with the rest of the boys.
‘The trouble is,’ said Ian, ‘I have to go back to Maranhão. My bus leaves in
three hours’ time.’ My yo-yo heart flopped again. ‘But I will manage it somehow.
There is a vice-consul here. He’s a marine biologist called Matthews. I’ll do my
best. The police have already oifered to drive me to the bus station to save time.’
I could not help my spirits rising once more. They had fallen so low that they
flew correspondingly high. Some notice seemed to have been taken of me at last.
I was an individual again, with rights and an identity. We returned to the
inspector’s office where the typed statement was waiting for my signature. Ian
translated it, and it seemed all right. Prominent in the first paragraph were my
mother’s Christian names, correctly spelled. There were three pages in triplicate,
nine signatures in all. I took a pen to the first page and found, to my horror, that
it went entirely out of my control and produced an unrecognizable scribble. I had
to work very hard to get my signature back, and even then I thought it looked
more like painstaking forgery. I was very aware that the inspector seemed to
regard this as quite normal.
As Ian left he tried to encourage me again, but I felt his uncertainty. ‘Ί think it
will soon be over,’ he repeated.
I was put back in the general office. It was lunchtime. The staff began to drift
away. I waited for someone to take me to lunch. The room emptied. An orderly
came with a dish of rice and beans. This time there was no chicken.
‘I want to go out,’ I said angrily. ‘Where’s the superintendent?’ The orderly
shrugged and left. My morale collapsed yet again. It was all lies, that stuff about
privileges, meals, clothes, all talk to sweeten the Englishman. All fantasy just to
get my statement and send Ian Dall on his way. Dall was my last chance of
contact with the outside world, and he was taking a bus to a place hundreds of
miles away on the Amazon. What could he say to the police if they took him to
the bus and said: ‘Leave the consul to us.’ Nothing. And the priests? What could
they do? Nothing.
The door had been left open and I saw the superintendent coming down the
corridor. I shouted at him and he surprised me by coming in.
‘Don’t you like our home cooking?’ he asked silkily. It was a rhetorical
question. His smile was very close to a sneer, and he left quickly. I was
speechless with black fury. The food was irrelevant. It struck me forcibly after he
had gone that even if the prison served truffles and caviar I would prefer to be out
for five minutes to buy my own rice and beans. There is no relish like freedom.
I was heavily inclined to expect the worst, and when a strange agente came
for me in the afternoon and took me down those grim steps to the basement I
really thought the worst was about to happen. But it was only to have
photographs and fingerprints taken.
‘Do you play the piano?’ asked the agente, with a grin. Perhaps it was meant
as a compliment, but I could hear it only as a threat conjuring up an image of
broken fingers.
The agent who took my photograph told me happily that he had developed my
pictures. ‘Very nice,’ he said, ‘good pictures.’ As we walked up the stairs another
man stopped on his way down, and grinned. Everything was a joke to these
fellows.
‘You will be deported,’ he said. ‘I have seen your passport. Visa is cancelled.’
As the afternoon dragged on I tried to understand what was happening. My
real problem was that I had no way of knowing what was likely, no experience of
the country, no feel for the way things usually happened there. On the other hand
I did know that anything was possible. They could free me or, if they wanted to,
they could kill me. There was no point in denying it. The question therefore was:
‘Why should they want to kill me? ‘Not gratuitously. That would be hardly worth
the trouble it might cause. If they wanted to get rid of me they would simply deport
me, as that last agent had promised they would, but for some reason I was not
ready to believe that, quite.
No, I had raised the spectre of death and now I would have to deal with it.
They would kill me either by mistake, or to cover up something else. They seemed
to believe I was on some kind of revolutionary mission. They would look for
evidence. They would find nothing conclusive, for there was none, but they would
turn up the hidden passport and that would excite their suspicions even more. So
they would come to me for evidence. I would have to deny it. I couldn’t invent it if
I tried. They would have to use torture. That too would be a miserable failure.
And then? It might well be too embarrassing to let me go; easier by far to feign an
accident, say I disappeared, rather than have me fly home to tell my story.
During the following twenty-four hours I could conceive of only two
possibilities: I would be deported, or I would be tortured and killed. As time
passed I became increasingly pessimistic. I could get nobody to talk to me or
listen to the simplest request. The staff left for home. I got another bowl of rice
and beans, and then…nothing. By the end of the evening I knew my attempt to
reach the consul had failed, and the implications of that were overwhelming. It
became impossible then to believe that the way they were treating me was merely
through accidental neglect. It had to be deliberate. I could no longer accuse
myself of paranoia.
The walls were still soaking. During the day it was not notice-able. After
nightfall I began to freeze again. By morning I was shivering, slightly feverish and
had a cold. It was Saturday, and as the minutes built up into hours I realized that
the office would be empty for the weekend.
I searched for any means to relieve the monotony. I tried to recite poetry, and
was appalled by how little I could remember. I counted the tiles on the walls and
on the floor (including fractions). I tried to work out a feasible plan of escape. It
occurred to me that this might be expected of me (from the top of a filing cabinet I
might have clambered over the wall, but into what I had no idea). I began to look
for secret surveillance, a closed-circuit TV lens, perhaps. All the time I was
aware of my fears being almost entirely self-induced, and that in itself made
things worse for I could not shake them off.
Real terror came over me in waves, about once an hour. I found I could not
sustain it any more than I could sustain hope. My thoughts might be mercifully far
away and then some trick of the mind would produce, say, a mental glimpse of
the lumpy-faced policeman on his hands and knees at São Raimundo with his
hands under the fridge; and suddenly sweat would pour off me as the thought
carried me on to unmentionable consequences.
After several hours of this Franziska came into the office and said she
wanted to practise her English. I could have exploded at the absurdity of it, but I
was far too suspicious. Every question she asked seemed loaded. Though I was
grateful for the distraction and wanted to believe in her goodwill, I dared not. She
brought out a tube of vitamin C tablets and offered me some. I refused. God
knows what might be in them, I thought. She promised to ask about being taken
out to lunch and about the consul, but when she left the rice and beans came as
usual, and silence.
The silence was broken in midafternoon by another strange event. The radio
started a great noise of whoops and wails and crackling, as though someone
had just turned up the volume. Then a voice spoke, loudly amplified, very slowly,
repeating everything in phrases so that even I could understand most of it.
‘We have the films of the coast,’ it said.
(My black and white roll included pictures of the coast taken from the Zoe G.)
‘Marcello…the Englishman…to Rio…deportação.’
Up to that moment I had kept alive a last flicker of hope that my danger was
all imaginary. At this point it died. Not only had they apparently deported Father
Marcello, but they had wanted me to know it.
From then on a dramatic change came over my hectic mental life. It feels
immodest, even distasteful to say, after the event, when I am still so much alive,
that I prepared myself for death, but that is undoubtedly what I did. There seemed
no purpose in trying to guess anymore. I might as well make my mind up about it,
be ready to handle it as well as possible.
Death itself, I soon realized, was not such a bad prospect. In a way I had
invited it by embarking on this journey, and could hardly complain. My life, when I
thought about it, had been full of interest. Not a very finished life, perhaps, but
evolving nicely all the time, always changing and generally, I thought, for the
better. It was not really death that bothered me then.
It was pain.
By chance, on the bookshelf at São Raimundo, I had found a copy of
Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt and read it. Greene’s stuffy suburban hero
finds himself seized inadvertently by the police in Paraguay. A policeman hits him,
but he scarcely feels it. Then there follows a sentence which, in my
hypersensitive state, I must have stored for emergencies:
‘Physical violence, like the dentist’s drill, is seldom as bad as one fears.’
As a sentiment it might not seem very reliable, nor specially emphatic. The
point was, though, it was a piece of objective, dispassionate advice. It was not a
piece of my own fevered imagination, and I built on it as on a rock. I
contemplated the possibility that the fear of torture might be worse than the
torture itself, and it seemed possible. And given the laughable folly of doing the
torturer’s work for him I managed somehow just to let the fear go. Instead I
composed a letter to someone I loved; not a very good letter, I realized
afterwards, for it was surprisingly full of clichés and banalities, but it brought a
delicious calm like the answer to a prayer. I owe Graham Greene a great deal for
that afternoon.
My newly found composure continued. I seemed to have discovered a way to
endure, and I watched myself carefully to avoid slipping back into the old spasms
of hope and despair. A few hours later, well after dark, I was seated at a desk,
studying scraps of Portuguese on the waste paper from the bins, when the hatch
slid open and a face appeared. It was a squarish face with a gingery beard and
hair, and a weather-beaten complexion.
‘British?’ it asked.
‘Yes,’ I replied, surprised.
‘Matthews,’ it said. ‘British Consul.’
For an instant I believe I actually resented his interference. It was a stunning
shock.
‘How do you do,’ I said, and: ‘Won’t you come in?’ and: ‘I’m very glad to see
you,’ and other foolish phrases. Then the relief and joy swept through me like
tidal waves.
It was ridiculous. It made me long to laugh. This small, bristling, upright man
had poked his head through a hatch, and I was delivered. Through him I was
joined again to the world I knew, a world in which I had a certain value, where
efforts would be made on my behalf. I could no longer vanish without trace. I had
condemned myself to death on circumstantial evidence and the honorary vice-
consul had brought my reprieve. The very fact that the police had allowed Ian
Dall to get his message to Matthews meant that all my fears might prove
groundless. I was restored to life and it was a most bewildering experience. I
stood blinking in the light like any newly hatched creature.
Henry Matthews was plainly not there to become enmeshed in an emotional
drama. He was a busy, practical man who had just returned to Fortaleza after a
long and tiring journey. He was determined to do his duty and then, as soon as
possible, get back to supper and bed with his family.
We stood by one of the desks under a fluorescent tube, and as I looked
around my ‘prison’ it became again just a pleasant, clean, well-lit office in which I
had spent hardly forty-eight hours.
For a while I could not think what to say. I wanted to describe the fear, the
humiliation, the despair that I had suffered in there, and I knew it was impossible.
I might as well have launched into an account of a bad dream. To Matthews it
would surely be quite incredible and I was afraid of losing his sympathy. So I
stuck, as best I could, to the facts, explaining who I was and where I had come
from.
‘I will see what I can find out,’ Matthews said, and left the office. I watched
through the hatch as he telephoned the superintendent at home. He was polite
but not obsequious, and I awarded him full marks. When he came back I noticed,
for the first time, that his English was heavily accented.
‘He says it is something very big. He will explain it to me on Monday.’
My fears, it seemed, were not groundless after all. There was some
consolation in that.
‘He says you have full rights and privileges’ – I could not restrain the cynical
smile – ‘but unfortunately you must wait for the outcome.
‘I will come back to visit you tomorrow, but is there anything you need now?’
It was kind of him. He would have liked dearly to put me off until the next day.
There were many things I wanted badly: a clean shirt, a towel, a shave, a cover
to sleep under, books to read, paper to write on, dry socks, but I could not
concentrate my mind sufficiently to remember where they would be. I begged
Matthews to go to São Raimundo to fetch my red bag, hoping that what I wanted
would be inside it, because what I craved most of all was news from the priests’
house, to know what had happened there and to Father Marcello.
Dutifully Matthews toiled out to São Raimundo and back. Of all the things I
wanted, the bag contained only my razor. However, the news was as good as it
was baffling. No police had been to the house, and Father Marcello had certainly
not been deported. Matthews promised to return next day with books and a towel,
and I lay down for the third night in the same shirt and trousers.
Next morning the hours passed as slowly as ever. The dampness was getting
deeper into me now, and the fever and congestion were worse. Despite that, the
consul’s arrival had stimulated my imagination again, and once more I could find
no escape from doom-laden speculations.
On reflection, the consul’s arrival seemed less of a miracle. I tried to draw up
a new balance sheet of my prospects. On the credit side, the police were not
after all trying to keep my presence there a secret. But then, why should they?
They were the law. If they needed a pretext for holding me, they would have no
problem finding one. If they wanted to implicate me in some sort of conspiracy
obviously they could do so. My trip to Iguatú gave them plenty of ammunition.
 By now I was beginning to wonder whether there was more going on in Iguatú
than the aftereffects of a flood. Perhaps there really were small centres of
resistance to the regime, struggling to survive. And where better than in a
disaster area?
And those radio messages? I had not imagined them, with their references to
a n Inglês and Marcello and deportation. They must mean something. Why the
concern with ‘photographs of the coast’? Were they afraid of foreign
intervention? From Cuba, perhaps.
I recalled the agent on the cellar steps and his off hand remark about having
seen my visa cancelled. It simply did not sound like a lie. Why on earth should he
have invented a lie like that? Did that mean that the best I could hope for was
deportation? Yet there had still been no attempt to question me further. And most
mysterious of all, they had shown no interest whatever in my belongings. They
had my passport, but my address books and papers, carried openly in the same
wallet, they had ignored. Surely if they suspected me of conspiracy with
‘subversivos’ they would at least go through the motions of examining my address
books. None of it made sense.
Several times I had the strange impression of being two quite distinct people:
one innocent and the other guilty. As though it were, in a sense, my own choice
that would decide the matter. I tried to remember more clearly something I had
read or heard about there being people who were ‘torturable’ and others who
were ‘un-torturable’. Was it Kafka? Or one of the Russians? No matter. I decided
to devote myself to being innocent and untorturable. And immediately I stumbled
over my own guilty secret, which was the passport under the fridge.
A thousand times I cursed the impulse to put it there. The prospect of the
police coming upon it in a search was so disturbing that I even considered
confessing its existence voluntarily.
What stopped me was an even more awful prospect. Suppose the maid in the
meanwhile had swept the dining room and come across the belt. And handed it to
Walsh. And what if he, then, had decided to hide it elsewhere on my behalf. What
then would the police think if, after all, it was no longer there? Would not that
indicate the very thing I was most afraid of, evidence of a conspiracy involving
the priests? I absolutely dared not take the risk of implicating them. During all the
time I was held by the police,, the one thing which constantly undermined all my
resolution was; the image of that hidden package being discovered.
Matthews came at lunchtime as he had promised, bringing books and a towel.
I racked my brains to think of ways to profit by his presence, as the
underprivileged do when given brief access to power. I dared not tell him about
the second passport, so at last I recalled the superintendent’s facile promise that
I should go to dine in restaurants. It struck me then as a ludicrous idea, as futile
to propose as a journey to the moon, and I expected him to laugh when I
mentioned it, but he took it up immediately with the agent in the hall and again I
watched their faces through the hatch.
The agent, who had never even glanced at me before, turned to me with a
smile of electrifying sincerity and said: ‘Of course,’ and ‘Why didn’t you mention it
earlier?’
I was astonished. I walked out into the sunshine and experienced for the
second time in twenty-four hours a shock of ecstasy. The sun reached directly
into my bones. I felt the moisture boiling off my clothes and skin. The relief was
overwhelming, and only then could I measure the effect of the dampness in the
building.
To anyone coming and going my complaints might have seemed hysterical,
though the cold and the fever were real enough. It came as a revelation to me
that real physical and mental harm could be inflicted on a person, quite subtly, in
the ‘nicest’ circumstance, while civilized observers would see nothing particularly
wrong. I was lucky to have had only a taste of it.
T he agente, from being a faceless guard, turned into a genial family man
recently transferred from Rio. He seemed genuinely anxious to please and asked
me where I wanted to eat.
‘Fish,’ I said, ‘somewhere on the beach.’
In his car we drove to the coast south of the city, to a busy restaurant on a
terrace. I was crazy with delight at the sound of voices around me, the traffic,
the clean linen, the sea rolling in on the sand. The agente impressed me even
more by paying for his own meal. The cold beer, Brahma Chopp (‘estupidamente
gelada’), which we shared, I took on my bill with pleasure. In its way, that lunch of
soup, grilled fish, fried potatoes, salad and coffee was the grandest treat I have
ever had or hope to have in my life.
It also marked the beginning of a new phase in my prison life. Matthews’ real
value was that he had broken the ice; the agentes began to take an interest in me
and, at the same time, I picked up a few words of Portuguese and learned to sing
them so that I would be understood.
The books Matthews had brought me were Agatha Christies published in the
twenties, and held together by transparent tape. I devoured them all in a nonstop
orgy to give my restless mind a break, and fell back gorged onto the bed with the
taste of Hercule Poirot’s brilliantine still on my chops. On Monday, Matthews
returned, and this time he brought clothes, a sheet and some more serious books
from São Raimundo. I was able at last to change my shirt for a clean one after
four days and nights, and to plunge into a history of the decline of the Spanish
Empire.
Predictably, Xavier had nothing very remarkable to tell Matthews after all
except that they were determined to hang on to me. I was still unable to get
breakfast. At midday, I was brought a small dish of rice and beans, and again I
protested loudly, but this time Franziska was there to help me. Finally one of the
yo unger agentes, called Daniel, was persuaded to take me into town, and
Franziska came along. From then on, for a while, I had no more difficulty going
out. And it was about this time, too, that I knew Franziska was watching me with
more than ordinary interest. It was the hardest thing to judge.
During the first days, when I imagined myself to be under sentence of death,
or worse, I found her curiosity about me obscene. It offended me that a good-
looking girl with a gun in her handbag and almost unlimited power over my fate (as
I imagined) could expect me to swagger and crow over her favours. Now that my
fears were receding and I felt the blood flowing a bit warmer through my veins I
was intrigued but extremely cautious.
It was impossible to know whether she was acting on her own initiative or
someone else’s or both; and the confusion stifled the excitement I might have
felt. As the days dragged on she would come in, often at odd hours when the
office was almost empty, and question me about England or other places I had
seen. I knew that my answers were not what interested her most, that her real
interest was more personal, but the game seemed full of danger and I dared not
even think about playing it.
Instead, as the novelty of my new privileges wore off and I became
increasingly angry and frustrated at the waste of my days, it was she who bore
the brunt of my bitterness. She seemed authentically surprised by my complaints.
‘Why are you so angry?’ she asked. ‘It is going well for you. You will be free
soon, I think.’
‘When will I be free?’ Tasked harshly.
‘I don’t know. I am not involved in your case.’
‘Then how can you know I’ll be free?’ I said with fine contempt, refusing the
offer like one who has been fooled too often.
‘I don’t know. We can tell. Daniel, the others, they all think so.’ Almost as
though I were a medical case showing signs of remission.
She always looked me straight in the eye. She was never demure or evasive.
At any other time I would have known she was telling the truth, but my instincts
were warped and I saw her as Sarah Bernhardt playing Mata Hari.
I was sick and tired of coping with my fear and resentment. My twice-daily
excursions into town no longer appeased me. I was in a rage of impatience.
‘It’s ridiculous,’ I said. ‘You know I’ll be free. They know it. But how can I
believe you? They must know who I am by now. It’s disgusting to keep me locked
up here, imprisoned, for no reason.’
I had meant my outburst to be intimidating. I would have liked her to burst into
tears. But she was simply amused.
‘Nobody is free,’ she said. ‘Everyone has a prison. Wife, parents, children,
they all make prisons.’
I was astounded, insulted, to have my ordeal compared with petty domestic
trammels, and I ranted on about the principles of justice and liberty, but my
speeches had no visible effect. And I was feeling far too self-righteous to accept
the simple, shocking truth that she presented to me.
Matthews came again on Tuesday, to be told once more that the police were
waiting for a reply to one last cable. He told me he had to leave Fortaleza for four
days. The superintendent had promised that my case would be resolved before
his return.
That night a customs house clerk joined me in custody. He was twenty-eight
years old, frail, timid and very unhappy. He told me he had flown in from a town
somewhere up the Amazon and had been discovered without any identity papers.
He said he had left them at home by accident, and was worried because his wife
would be expecting him back next morning. It was remarkable how much we could
tell each other with the little scraps of language we had in common, but after his
arrival my grasp of Brazilian improved more rapidly. He was called Ignacio, and
he called me Tedge. Like most Brazilians he was incapable of pronouncing the ‘d’
in ‘Ted’.
On Wednesday, Ignacio developed toothache and a big swelling, and I made
a fuss about getting him treated, but with no effect other than to occupy my mind.
While I was obviously now in favour, the clerk was despised as a petty criminal.
Franziska knew nothing against him specifically, but just felt sure that he was up
to no good.
At lunchtime there was an unusually vigorous burst of activity in the office.
Everybody, including the girls, went out on some operation, all with guns. The
guns were neat brown things with tiny barrels. The men tucked them in their
waistbands beneath their loose shirts. The girls put theirs in their shoulder bags
and teetered off on high heels in the best traditions of television crime series.
Franziska later told me it had to do with smuggling, and in the afternoon three
flashily dressed men joined us in the office, followed soon afterwards by a Negro
with eerie pale eyes. They seemed very boisterous and confident. With six
detainees in the office, plus a full staff, the game of musical chairs became
hilarious. Even with two of us to a chair they were not sufficient. As the oldest
inhabitant I felt entitled to a chair of my own, but in the end it was too much
trouble to hang on to it, and by evening the intruders had swaggered off, leaving
Ignacio and me to ourselves.
I made a chess set from scraps of paper and we played an elementary game.
When Franziska saw us, she rushed off to fetch a set of dominoes from her
office. She told us that there was going to be an eclipse of the moon that night
just after dark. We saw it clearly through the gap between the roof and the walls,
and Franziska and I stood and wondered at it. I could not remember whether I
had ever seen one before, and it struck me as odd that I should see it in these
circumstances. The rainstorm on my first night there had also seemed significant
to me, and I realized that on this journey, for the first time in my life, I was
tempted to connect unusual natural phenomena with my personal fate, though I
had no idea how or in which direction the influence might flow.
Then there was another flurry in the office, a big briefing session, and they
were all off again into the night.
By Thursday morning, things had progressed to the point where, when I
wanted to go to the bathroom, I simply walked out of the office without a word or
an escort and was unchallenged. In principle I could have let myself out of the
back door of the kitchen and walked away, though it would have been supremely
silly to do so. Then the barometer swung back suddenly from Fair to Horrible. It
happened at 4.30p.m. after exactly a week in captivity. The fair blue-eyed
operations chief who usually sat at the DOPS desk had moved to a seat near the
door. I was standing not far away, having again been tricked out of a chair. Then
an agente came in who was only rarely seen in the office. He was one of the two
agents I had noticed who looked really vicious, the other one being the lumpy-
faced fellow who had met me on the ship and whom I had never seen since.
This man was an Arab whose face was ravaged by pockmarks, which did
nothing to soften the meanness of his mouth or the shifty glitter in his eye. He
and the chefe spoke in whispers, which caught: my attention straight away, for it
was quite unusual. Worse still, the blue eyes kept flicking towards me, and I was
allowed distinctly to hear the word ‘inglês’ several times. I had already begun to
believe that I was watching some kind of charade, when to my amazement the
other horror with the lumpy face walked in, complete with dark glasses and his
weasel-faced assistant.
They all made a great show of conniving together. Until that afternoon I did
not know it was possible to be amused and terrified at the same time. The chefe
said ‘inglês’ and ‘passaporte’ and ‘Sao Raimundo’ and ‘ espião’ which means ‘spy’,
and ‘Ask the woman’ and ‘If it is there…’ and then he made one of the most
eloquent gestures in the human repertoire: he scooped up an imaginary fly and
crushed it in his fist. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but a deep-down sense
of the absurdity of it all saved me from doing either. It was a hilarious melodrama
with a chillingly serious message. For whose passport could they possibly be
after at São Raimundo if it was not mine, and who was the spy if not me?
The three villains slunk away on their theatrically appointed mission, and I
watched myself carefully to see how I would take the new threat. After all, I told
myself, this was where you came in. To my relief I found that I simply lacked the
energy to be terrified again. It was too exhausting. ‘If it happens, let it happen,’ I
thought, and went back to reading history. From then on, although I was
expecting painful news from São Raimundo at any moment, I was able to push
the thought from the forefront of my mind, It was encouraging to discover that in
coping with terror, as with any other human skill, one improves with practice.
The chefe came back into the office later, like a hound on the scent, asking
his staff whether anyone had heard of orshfam, which had to be Oxfam
pronounced in Portuguese. Nobody had. I found the spectacle utterly comical
and began to wonder whether they were all just incompetent, but that thought
was too uncomfortable and I dropped it. Then the fuss was over for the day and
they all went home.
There was a simple policeman with a merry disposition who sometimes took
me out to eat when there were no agentes to spare. In the office he appeared to
have adopted me as a pet, and whenever he saw me he shouted, ‘tá boa?’ at me
several times in the exaggerated way that one calls ‘good boy’ to a dog. I
humoured him, as he humoured me, with a laugh or a smile, since I couldn’t bark.
It never occurred to him, I’m sure, that I might one day learn to speak to him and
in consequence his company was quite undemanding and peaceful.
It was a glorious evening, dry and bright. As we walked towards the cathedral
I smelled night-scented flowers on the breeze. The cathedral stood two blocks
from the police station, a monstrous thing more like a fortress than a church,
built long ago out of millions of dark waferlike bricks. It was far from beautiful,
but: its size and squatness gave it a power which impressed me more every time I
passed. It overlooked a broad cobbled area where several roads met and many
small bars and restaurants traded, and it was here also that prostitutes gathered
towards evening.
My escort knew most of the women. He shouted ‘tá boa?’ at them and they
exchanged familiar insults. Each time he would turn to shout ‘tá boa?’ at me too,
to distribute his good nature evenly. He led me first, on his invisible lead, to a
small brightly lit shop where bets were taken for a national football pool called
Loto, and he pondered heavily over his card, licking his faulty ball pen until he had
finally decided between the rival merits of Santos and São Paulo. Then we went
up some stairs to the back of a cheap eating house and he watched affably as I
ate my favourite dish, a rich dark pork and bean stew called feijoada.
When we came down the moon was shining full onto the black façade of the
cathedral. Beside me on the doorstep of a bar a man lay back with his legs apart
and his eyes closed in blissful drunkenness. The grey material of his trousers
was so threadbare that a fountain of crystal urine passed straight through it and
rose up sparkling in the light of the streetlamps. On the pavements the refugee
peasants from the flooded interior were already stretched in sleep, as motionless
as the stone beneath them. Some had pieces of cardboard to lie on, others not.
Some lay in couples, back to back. Some had a few belongings, others none. All
seemed utterly at peace, faces tranquil, bodies classically composed as though
they had paid special attention to the placing of their shining brown limbs before
letting the world fade from sight.
I looked out on this scene, and, for once, felt part of it, not just an idle
spectator. As a prisoner of the Policía Federal I felt I had business there, though
God alone knew what that business would be. At least I had come to terms with
the uncertainty, and there was some satisfaction in that. My senses and my
curiosity were both sharpened. Nobody was being sorry for me, and I was not
obliged to feel sorry for anyone else. I felt I was within reach of experiencing a
genuine emotion born, for once, out of the moment itself.
We walked across the cobblestones and the policeman drew me to the right
so that we would have to walk behind the cathedral. After chatting with another
group of women, he beckoned me towards some stone steps. There was a mass
in progress in a chapel in the crypt of the cathedral. My first view inside was like a
hallucination, as though the rough black masonry itself had split to reveal a
glimpse of paradise. A roseate glow washed over the pure white walls and low
vaulted roof, and bathed the priest and his small congregation. The chapel, in its
gleaming simplicity, was the opposite of everything that Fortaleza had seemed to
me to be. A cool, clean and infinitely desirable vision. Anyone who could enter
there, I thought, would lead a charmed life.
Perhaps that was why we stayed outside. The policeman stopped at the
threshold and knelt on the steps, laying his forehead on a low stone buttress. He
was a young, strong man and I was moved by the way his body folded naturally
into a sculptural form of complete humility.
I stood beside him, a cigarette still smouldering in my fingers, unable to take
part but hoping vaguely that there might be a small surplus of grace to take care
of me too and whatever might be waiting for me at the station.
Walking back the last hundred yards he told me that he was a married man
with children and came from Bahia, and that this day was his thirtieth birthday.
The station was quiet. The night passed peacefully. Occasionally I woke up to
imagine an agent with a lumpy face and dark glasses furiously ransacking São
Raimundo. Then I dismissed him and slept again.
The unnatural calm lasted until midday on Friday, and then it was broken by
another triumph of melodrama and corny characterization. I was already on my
way to lunch with another policeman, when a big, battered black car making
terrible noises from its exhaust screeched to a halt beside us. The driver had
obviously escaped from a gangster movie of the thirties. He was what they used
to call a runt. He was weedy and wore an overpadded suit, and on his face were
two huge pieces of sticking plaster, in a cross. Al Capone must have sent him
personally, for he was full of urgency and self-importance. I was bundled into the
back, and the wheels started spinning before the door was closed.
We shot off in the direction São Raimundo, and my adrenaline made valiant
attempts to rise to the occasion. Surely this must be IT, I thought, but then the
car made a surprise left turn and in a moment we were back outside the police
station. I was rushed inside and along the corridors into the superintendent’s
reception area, where Xavier himself was standing and talking on the telephone.
Then Franziska came in and told me there was a call from the Foreign Ministry.
They wanted to talk to me.
I could hear Xavier saying that I had been there four days and I became quite
angry suddenly. I raised eight fingers, and said ‘ocho’ loudly, but Xavier took no
notice. After a while he passed the receiver to me with a smile.
‘You can talk to Counsellor Brandão in Brasilia,’ he said, and walked into his
office.
Brandão spoke good English and sounded concerned.
‘I telephoned the customs about your motorcycle – a technical problem of
ownership – and they told me you are in custody. What is your position? What
are you doing? Are you a journalist, or not? Why didn’t you tell them?’
I tried to explain to Brandão who I thought I was, but with little success. It
began to occur to me that the subtle distinctions I had thought so important
might be invisible to the naked eye. If I was to be connected with the Sunday
Times at all, I would be considered a journalist, and it would be useless to deny
it. Normally there was no need to reveal the connection, but in Brazil, because of
the guarantee on the motorcycle, it was inevitable.
‘I don’t understand,’ Brandão was saying. ‘You say you have been there for
four days…’
‘No, that was Xavier. I have been locked up here for eight days.’
‘Eight! I still don’t understand. Haven’t you got a document from the Sunday
Times?’
I took a deep breath and said: ‘Yes.’ For better or worse I could stand the
complications no longer, and with the Brazilian Foreign Office involved I felt
safer. The conversation lingered on. With each passing moment I felt more
certain that at last the knots would untie and I would be free. I put the phone
down with Brandão’s civilized assurance like music in my ears.
Xavier had returned and was sitting near me.
‘I have a Sunday Times correspondent’s card,’ I told him. ‘It is at São
Raimundo, and I should explain it is with another passport…’ But Xavier had
already got to his feet.
 ‘We will get the card in the afternoon,’ he said. He was in a remarkably jovial
mood. We might have been making a date for tennis. He put his arm around my
shoulder and swept me towards the door.
‘Now it is time for our lunch,’ he said.
I tried one more time to talk about the passport but he would have none of it.
‘See you later, I think you say.’ He grinned, and disappeared. I still did not like
him very much, but I was glad to see him happy. Neither the card nor the passport
were ever mentioned again.
In the afternoon my optimism appeared to be justified. Not only did Matthews
arrive unexpectedly – ‘I was worried, so I came a day earlier’ – but with him came
Alan Davidson from the bank and Father Walsh from São Raimundo. It seemed
impossible that I would not be walking out with them when they left.
Davidson had received the guarantee for the bike and had arranged for an
agent to get the bike out of customs.
I told them about my talk with Brandão. Like me they seemed to think that
must be the end of it, and Matthews went to see the DΟΡS inspector, who was
technically in charge of my case, to ask for my release. Meanwhile I told Walsh
about the strange scene of the day before and the references to São Raimundo.
Once again he insisted that nobody had been there, with or without lumps, pock-
marks or plasters. What surprised me more was that he seemed to attach no
significance to it, and I wondered fleetingly whether they all thought me a bit
peculiar.
Matthews returned and said they refused to let me go until they had a reply
from the Policía Marítima. I was terribly shocked and I cursed loudly and angrily
while they waited for my symptoms to subside. When I was rational again,
Matthews lowered his voice and went on:
‘They say they have grounds. They say they have been looking for an
Englishman, a lawyer, with the same names as yours. He is called John Simon
Edwards and they say he has been involved in subversive activities.’
At first it sounded like an outrageous fiction – another damnable pretext for
hanging on to me. I was convinced that they hated to let people go. Just the fact
that you were in there at all meant that there had to be something wrong with you.
Eventually they would find some way to justify keeping you. Ignacio, the clerk,
seemed to know it. He did not behave like a man who had been deprived of his
liberty, more like a patient in an institution waiting to hear whether he was cured.
Yet the story was almost perfect in its way. It explained nearly everything, the
messages, the snatches of conversation about ‘Inglês’ and deportation. Even the
odd feeling I had of being two people must have come from my frenzied effort to
make sense of the mystery. The cancelled visa must have been in his passport,
but if they had his passport, where was he? Had they thought he was hiding at
São Raimundo? Why hadn’t they been there? But then São Raimundo was a
district, not just a church. Was it only coincidence? Too much coincidence, I
thought. And if the story was true, I could see how my arrival would have
confused the police as much as it confused me. Was Mr Edwards a keen
underwater fisherman? I wondered. I should have liked to meet him.
‘But now,’ I said, ‘now they know there are two of us, so why do they have to
hang on to me? It’s crazy…’ and I went into another fit of fury as futile as the
first.
My friends tried to comfort me, but there was little they could do. Apart from
freedom I had everything I needed. I had clothes, books, the use of a shower,
cigarettes, money, access to restaurants, a fairly comfortable bed and a
companion to play chess with and talk to. Yet the time dragged by as heavily as
ever, and now there was not even fear to spice the hours. Another full weekend
at least, alone with Ignacio, with not even the antics of my captors to amuse me.
It seemed intolerable.
However, entertainment was unexpectedly provided by the management, in
the shape of a lawyer called Andrade. He made his first appearance briefly that
evening when Xavier brought him to the office. I saw a tall man, thin and grey-
haired, who looked as though he had just seen his life fall into ruins.
‘You can stay here if you like, but you must not talk to these,’ said Xavier,
indicating us. Miserably, the man shook his head and mumbled something, and
they left together. He was all the more pathetic because he was so well dressed
and groomed, and obviously accustomed to comfort and respect.
Next day he was back, but in much better spirits. His coming was a revelation
to me, an example to us all. He brought with him a leather bag and a small pigskin
case, and his first move was to unpack a brightly coloured string hammock and
hang it across a corner of the room. To my astonishment the hooks were already
provided in the walls, and in my eight days there I had failed to take notice of
them. There were silver-backed brushes, toilet water, an elegant robe and
slippers and hints of other unidentified luxuries.
The silence lasted only half an hour, if that. Within the hour he had told the
clerk his life story, but it had gone too fast for me to catch more than a
tantalizing detail here and there. We played two games of chess, he won the
second, and I persuaded him to tell his story again slowly. As best I could tell it
went like this:
He was from São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest, busiest, smoggiest city, where he
had been employed as a lawyer in the state government. Then in 1964, after the
military coup, the brother of the governor of São Paulo betrayed him or slandered
him in some way and he went to the governor’s palace to protest and demand
satisfaction. He accused the brother to his face of his reptilian behaviour, and
the brother replied in terms which he, Andrade, could not tolerate. He therefore
delivered to his persecutor a punch on the nose, at which the cowardly fellow
drew a gun and sent Andrade sprawling on the marble floor with a bullet through
his calf. However, as he lay on his back, propped up on his left elbow, he was
able to draw his own gun, and he shot the governor’s brother once through each
shoulder and once through the leg.
Andrade’s account of this event was marvellously vivid, as he moved and
spun with the progress of the story, and he concluded by hoisting his right trouser
leg to reveal a penny-sized scar on one side of his calf and another on the other
side. The scars gave him great satisfaction.
As a result of this incident, he said, he was unable to earn a livelihood in São
Paulo. He lost his job, all doors to private practice were closed and he was
labelled politically undesirable. In 1970 he exiled himself from São Paulo and went
to Ceará, a sufficient distance away to outrun the slanders. In Fortaleza he built
up a new reputation and took part in the creation of several important
enterprises, including a water-treatment plant and a cemetery. He associated
himself with the Ceará branch of the company that sold Larousse encyclopedias
in Brazil, and it became the most profitable branch in the country. His boss in
Ceará became his closest friend.
Then in 1973, just before Christmas, he was suddenly dismissed. The
principals in São Paulo refused to see him or communicate with him, but he
decided to take no action. Then some months later his former boss in Ceará was
also dismissed and accused of fraud. This man invited Andrade to help him
prepare a case against Larousse but in the meanwhile Andrade had discovered
that it was his supposed friend who had originally denounced him in São Paulo as
a swindler. Andrade therefore gave evidence against his former friend instead.
Now he himself had been arrested. He was told that criminal charges, brought
against him years ago in São Paulo, had gone to trial and he had been convicted
in his absence and sentenced to five years. He was now waiting to be sent to
prison. He seemed to be quite without hope.
That evening he received a visit from his son, a young man in casual but
most expensive clothes.
‘Papa!’ he cried, and they fell into an emotional embrace. They were given a
private room somewhere to talk, and Andrade came back beaming. He carried a
plate of roast chicken joints wrapped in a clean red and white napkin, and a bag
of other assorted foods and fruits, which he shared with us.
His son and his friends, he said, had been researching in the records at São
Paulo. The whole story of a prison sentence was a wicked lie disseminated by his
enemies. There had never been a judgement against him he said. Soon the truth
would emerge and he would be free again.
I found it as difficult to believe in the new rosy dawn as I had in the black
picture of despair he had painted a few hours ago, but he was so exhilarated by
his prospects that I pretended to share in the wonder of it all and congratulated
him heartily on his imminent release.
‘At least,’ I said, ‘you won’t have to escape.’ He laughed. Earlier he had spent
some time discussing ways of breaking out of the station. Compared with the
prison at São Paulo, he said, it would be very easy. I did not ask him how he
knew.
 His euphoria carried him through until Monday morning. When I returned from
the bathroom, I noticed Andrade and Ignacio both standing by the wall in a rather
curious position, and could not at first make out what it was that was so odd.
Then I saw that they were standing in such a way that the morning sun, passing
between the wall and the roof, shone on their faces. They were both very serious
about it, and it struck me as the sort of thing one might do if one had spent long
periods in prison.
Shortly afterwards Andrade was taken away. He returned briefly later to
collect his hammock and other things, and his face had fallen once more into the
bitterest dejection. He said nothing and neither did I.
Monday was a poor day for me too. There was no sign of my release. Ignacio
was taken away too during the day, heaven knows where. At lunchtime I was
refused permission to go out, and put back on the prison diet of rice and beans.
Franziska was nowhere to be seen, and nobody else would explain. In the
evening there was a strange agente on duty and again I was not allowed out.
Even worse, I was given nothing to eat either, and the effect was very
depressing. In the mornings, I had established a routine whereby a policeman
fetched me a sandwich, coffee and cigarettes, but on Tuesday morning even that
system failed. I was dumbfounded. It was as though the whole bloody business
was starting from the beginning again. All my carefully cultivated special
relationships had withered. At lunchtime all my usual companions vanished. Nor
was anything brought to me. The anxiety I felt then was unusually corrupting, for
it undermined all my expectations. I could not attribute this new regime to
anything. I could not even be sure it was deliberate. It simply left me with a sense
of total revulsion against every one of the bastards, from Xavier down to the
cook; I no longer cared whether they were cunning, incompetent, corrupt or
naï ve, it made no difference. The result was a rotten, soul-destroying mess and
from that moment I buried the benefit of any doubt I might have had about any of
them.
In the afternoon Matthews and Davidson came to tell me that I was free. I
was to be delivered officially into the arms of the British Consul with Davidson as
witness. It should have been a moment of joy and celebration, but by then I was
so deep in resentment and misery that all I could think was ‘About bloody time
too.’
In gratitude to the others I tried to look happy but it was hard going. I wanted
only to get away, and the formalities dragged heavily. At the last moment, when
Davidson had already left, Matthews and I were standing with Xavier by the
entrance. Xavier looked at me with an indulgent smile and said:
‘Now you can write the story.’
‘Ask him,’ I said to Matthews, ‘whether he is finally convinced that I am
innocent.’
Of course Xavier had to say yes, but I was watching his face and I shall be
indebted to him always for a superlative specimen, in its finest flower, of the
variety of human expression known as the Sickly Grin.
But it was I who was sick,
During those last days something inside me twisted and strangled the source
of my vitality. Up to then I had imagined, without realizing it of course, that the
entire Brazilian police apparatus was devoted to my case. My very existence
depended on whether they found me ‘innocent’ or ‘guilty’. It must have been some
time on Monday that they found that they had no further use for me. From that
moment I was not even worth my rice and beans.
They ceased to recognize my presence. They lost interest to the extent that
they did not even bother to feed me. Then I saw that without them I was nothing.
Worse than nothing. A dog that cowers at the feet of a brutal master grateful for
any acknowledgement, whether it comes as bones or blows. I became disgusted
with myself and loathed them for showing me to myself in such a shameful light.
So they demonstrated their power to me in the end, in a careless, off hand
way, without really trying. They were indifferent to the consul, to the Sunday
Times, to their own government even. But they found me mildly irritating, and spat
me out. Some other time their attention might be attracted and they would suck
me in again. I felt a great and malignant shadow hovering over me and I wanted
only to crawl under a stone and hide.
The consul’s brother Charles drove me back to São Raimundo and the priests
offered me a room in their own house. I felt it was wrong of me to stay there, but
they were quite confident and it was so much what I wanted that I could not
refuse. As soon as I was alone I went to the dining room and looked under the
refrigerator. The belt was there, among ringlets of dust, as I had left it.
I could not shake off the sense of fear and revulsion. It was as though I had
been squeezed too hard. Although the pressure was off, I had no resilience left
to resume my former shape. Never before had I been unable to find the resources
within myself to respond. I cowered inside my shell like a shrivelled homunculus,
and I was worried that it had affected me so deeply.
But nothing actually happened to you, I told myself angrily. What is this
nonsense? It was only twelve days. Now get on with life.
But I couldn’t. It was important to write an account of the experience quickly
and send it off, but everything I wrote seemed false and trivial. I tried all the tricks
I could muster to find a different perspective, to climb out of myself just for a
moment. Physical exercise. Detective thrillers. Getting among crowds of people.
Progress was slow. I watched a lot of television on a big colour set, in a
recreation room upstairs. It was a World Cup year and Brazilians were in a frenzy
about football. The Brazilian sugar monopoly was one of the main sponsors of
football on TV, and its advertisement, a growing mountain of sugar, seemed to
be on the screen constantly. It was one of the first things I laughed at, because
the country had been struck by a sudden and severe sugar shortage, and
Brazilians cannot drink coffee without it.
Or I sat in the cane rocking chair talking to Walsh, or stood in the dark of the
balcony watching the huge fruit bats swoop around the jack fruit tree and scoop
out the pulp. Sounds of music and laughter drifted in from the neighbourhood,
and oil palms in a backyard plantation brushed the night sky with their feathering
silhouettes.
During the day, with paper and the parish typewriter, I burrowed into every
available corner of the house, hoping that a change of space would unblock my
mind. I no longer thought much about the aesthetic merits of the building. It
provided shelter and safety and that was all I cared for.
For a while I worked in an office just inside the front door, with a hatch
opening on the hallway where I could watch the mothers come for a gossip and
to help with the duties of the parish. They had little crushes on particular priests.
Sometimes they telephoned and then they would do their utmost to get their
favourites on the telephone, while the priests in turn defended each other
fanatically.
When I was alone in the house I sometimes answered the phone.
‘São Raimundo,’ I announced in my best Portuguese.
‘Quem está falando?’ sang the shrill, intriguing, matronly voices.
‘Padre Eduardo,’ I replied gravely. That perplexed them for a while, but the
flurry of sounds that followed would be too much for me usually, and I would wait
for a pause to say ‘Sim, sim’ and put the receiver down.
On the third day I tried the game in reverse. The phone rang and I got the
question in first. ‘Quem estã falando?’
A woman’s voice answered: ‘Franziska. Can I speak to Ted, please.’
I felt sick inside and would have told her to go to hell if I had dared.
‘How are you?’ she said, and: ‘Are you happy to be free?’
‘Of course.’
‘I have been thinking about you. Have you thought about me?’
‘Ί have been thinking of many things.’
It was a noisy line. We both had to shout.
‘I would like to see you. Will you come here?’
‘Where?’
‘At my home. When I finish working. When you will come?’
‘I am very busy writing.’
‘Tomorrow I am free.’
‘All right.’
What the hell do you think you’re doing? I asked myself as I took the address.
You can’t seriously expect to make love to a woman who carries a gun in her purse
and works for the forces of evil.
At the docks the customs put thirteen men on the job of discharging my
motorcycle. They were keen to show me where the police had cut the saddle
open to explore the foam rubber underneath. ‘Looking for bombs!’ they said
contemptuously, but I said no, they were after scuba equipment.
 There was no love lost between the two services. As a victim of the Policía
Federal I was an honoured guest and treated to an elaborate coffee ceremony in
the chief’s office. They were all brown men in brown offices with brown ledgers.
Theirs was the old, suffocating kind of bureaucracy that I detested, but they only
imprisoned things, not people, and for once I appreciated their more human
qualities.
Having the bike back was an important step towards freedom. I arrived at
Franziska’s house feeling stronger than I had the day before. Among her own
family it was almost possible to forget what she was. She radiated innocence,
and they all treated me with great affection. There was never a hint of how we
had met, or that I might be in any way a dubious character, but while my
insecurity was soothed a little, a new problem arose. I had no idea what the
moral customs were here. A respectable Catholic family in a provincial city, I
thought, would have rigid standards of behaviour, and if I violated their sense of
propriety…?
Underneath it all the same question lay, sapping my puny confidence. How
could I be sure that a woman scorned, or a woman outraged, would not think to
avenge herself through her connections? Or perhaps the whole thing was set up,
and not necessarily by her? Even while I was certain that these were fantasies, I
had come so recently from a world of fantasy that they inhibited me terribly, and
yet undeniably she was attractive, and far from silly, and her attitude towards me
was directly inviting.
It was too ridiculous. I wanted to break through the web of suspicion, but I
was scared. I touched her, familiarly but awkwardly because my heart was not
strongly in it. There was a brief flash of fury.
‘If my father sees you he will be very angry.’
I felt like a puppy having its nose tapped. Embarrassed, I retreated into
platitudes and neutrality. I could not figure it out. Undoubtedly it should have
become a love affair, but it always faltered on the brink.
I took a week to finish my piece for the Sunday Times, and I had to relive all
the agony to do it. I was greatly relieved when it was written, but by then I had
developed an infection of the gut which slowed me down for several more days. It
was the first illness of the entire journey. In Africa my health had been perfect
although I had eaten and drunk everything that came my way. There is nothing
worse for health than imprisonment and frustration.
Franziska and I met several times, but my fear continued to make me as shy
as a fourteen-year-old. My last days in Fortaleza were the beginning of the
festival of São João, a week of celebration throughout Brazil. We went to a
dance on the beach where I felt sure I would be able to overcome my
faintheartedness. A big crowd sang and danced and drank at wooden tables
under a broad, tiled canopy. The moon was full, the air warm on the skin, the
coconuts swayed on the shore. Everything was auspicious…until I saw her
friends from the office, two policemen I had last seen when I was their prisoner. I
even caught a glimpse of the guns in their waistbands, and my ardour froze to ice
again.
We sat for a while, much later, side by side on the beach listening to the
waves. I longed to touch her smooth long legs, to feel her skin against mine, but I
was paralysed, thinking:
‘Once I start, where will it end?’
I knew it would be our last meeting. We found a taxi after walking a long way,
and in the taxi I kissed her for the first time and knew it would have been all right.
But by then it was too late.
The priests had all been summoned to a diocesan conference at Maranhão,
a long way away. Father Walsh had told me they would all be leaving in three
days’ time. He did not say I would have to leave, but it was obviously time to go. I
was hoping they had not had to invent the conference to get me out of the house.
I was packing the bike in the back yard on the morning they left for the bus
station – wonderful, kindly men whom I would be most unlikely to see again. An
hour or two later I left myself. The thought of going made me nervous. I saw
myself as a target for every idle policeman on the two thousand miles of road to
Rio, and it was not unlike the very first departure in London. In some ways I felt
even more vulnerable than I had then.
At the first police checkpoint on the highway leaving the city they checked me
out but gave me no trouble. I had an impressive temporary driving licence, with an
utterly villainous picture of me taken for it, and they liked that. Still the cloud of
anxiety travelled with me down the highway. Then gradually the familiar
movement, the sound of the engine and the rush of air built up my confidence as
nothing else could. I sat up and took notice of the bright green forested hills, and
the streams and lakes that reminded me of Tanzania.
I began to remember who I was and what I had already done and the strength
came pouring back into me. By the end of the day I had crossed from Ceará into
the state of Pernambuco, and somewhere about there the cloud detached itself
and floated back to Fortaleza. After a month of misery I felt free. At last.

I was travelling south from the equator down the east coast of America on a
parallel track to my journey down the east coast of Africa. It was a magnificent
geography lesson. If Ceará resembled Tanzania, then inland Bahia was similar to
Zambia, while Minas Gerais, the next great state on the southward trail, was
startlingly like Rhodesia, with those same massive rectangular rock formations,
old gold mines, gemstones, broad skies, dry air and peaceful lambent evenings.
As an introduction to the size and diversity of Brazil it was breathtaking.
The life of Brazil though seems to have little in common with Africa, even with
such a large proportion of Africans descended from former slaves. There had
been Europeans here for hundreds of years, imposing themselves on the native
Indian population, building churches, fighting over the spoils, interbreeding,
creating complex hierarchies, becoming rich and destitute, leaving the traces,
layer upon layer, of their passions and virtues.
When the first foundations were still being laid in Salisbury and Lusaka, the
Portuguese palaces and cathedrals in Brazil were already ancient, and the
coastal states were peppered with thriving communities. The towns portray their
history. In the middle they aspire to the church. Around the square where citizens
met and festivals were celebrated and where, occasionally, armies were
mustered, the tallest houses vie with each other for the most ornate façade
 Great efforts were made and many lives expended to cut, haul and lay the
stone that paves the roads and clothes the buildings. Radiating outwards the
roads soon turn from cobble to dirt, and the houses shrink and decay until they
meet the modern highway system where a newer kind of wealth makes a new
stand in cement and girders and asphalt, garages, bus stations and newly
dilapidated hotels.
The streets are muddy in the rain and smell of garbage and urine, laced with
coffee and cigar smoke. Buses and lorries splash through on broken
suspensions, spouting black exhaust, their wooden coachwork gaudy with
fairground colours and slogans: Ά woman is like a truck. She goes faster when
you put your foot down.’ In the evening the streets swarm with people of every
colour but pure white (for the pure white keep apart). During the hot, dry and
dusty afternoons, the streets sleep.
It was a hot, dusty afternoon when I came to Senhor do Bonfim, a small
inland town in Bahia, a day’s ride from Salvador. I came early, wondering whether
to stay, and walked through narrow streets looking in on barber shops, billiard
saloons and people sipping coffee in botiquinhos. The week of São João was just
ending. Loudspeakers on street corners broadcast music, announcements and
advertisements by the town tradespeople.
I liked it, found a room near the railway, parked my bike in the street, dragged
my luggage up to the first floor and flopped down on the bed to doze for a while.
Birdsong and chatter invaded my half-waking state, followed by other, stranger
sounds. There was a noise like muffled tin cans falling in a heap coming
repeatedly from the yard beneath the open window. Then I heard an even
stranger wailing musical sound, winding up and down the scale, now loud, now
faint, as though blown from a long way off by a fickle wind. I opened my eyes
lazily and saw a blue figure of a man, legs and arms outstretched, float up to the
sky to disappear above the upper edge of the window frame. Such benign
mysteries, I thought, are what make travelling infinitely worthwhile. Everyone else
in the hotel knows exactly what these sights and sounds are, but I am free to
imagine anything I choose.
It was easy afterwards to spot the turkeys in the yard, and to guess that the
balloon man was something to do with São João, but the skirling music remained
a mystery. At dinner downstairs I heard it again. The hotel owner came towards
me, agitated; something to do with the motorcycle. It was in danger, he said.
I went outside to look. The music was growing into a metallic howl, but I saw
only the usual small boys gathered round the bike, prodding it and staring fixedly
into the speedometer. The music had the eerie quality of an approaching storm.
Then there came round the corner, at the bottom of the street, preceded by a
pack of dancers in violent motion, a most spectacular thing. A thing; emitting light
and sound on a scale of intensity I had never known,, so intense that it took a
while to focus on its various parts and identify it.
There were two objects shaped like rockets floating ten feet in the air, and
they were about thirty feet long. They were built entirely out of brilliant fluorescent
light tubes. Beneath them,, myriad clusters of coloured bulbs flashed on and off,
each cluster being set into a loudspeaker. Rising above the glare of the rockets
were three men in bright clothing, bowing and grimacing like marionettes high
above us all and plucking furiously at tiny electric guitars. On sumptuous galleries
below the rockets, running all the way around this phantasmic object, were
floodlit drummers dressed in satin, gesticulating, like an animated frieze, as they
hammered away. All of it seemed to be borne along by a throng of hypnotized
dancers jerking their elbows and twirling to the music, which poured out in solid
waves, having no beginning or end.
The thing drifted past at walking pace, carving a great tunnel of light and fury
out of the night, and like everyone else I was sucked into its wake. It came to
rest beside a large ornamental park, with trees, pathways and a fountain. All
around were huts lightly built of palm fronds on wooden frames selling
refreshments. Middle-aged peasant ladies in heavy bodices squatted by charcoal
braziers; roasting skewered meat and corn cobs. A roguish old man in a vel
vetvet jacket and gaucho hat operated a crown and anchor game, with heaps of
toothpaste tubes and soap as currency. A raised wooden stage had been built in
the park and, facing it, a bank of seats for ticket holders and notables. The rest
of us stood among the trees or wandered around the stalls.
On the stage, some young people were performing comic dances, and a man
in a striped shirt and bow tie stood in one corner with a microphone pretending to
be an unusually crass American tourist and making absurd comments in pidgin
English. Of real tourists there were none, but the people of the town and round
about were there in their thousands, enjoying themselves enormously.
But obviously the best was yet to come. A shock wave travelled through the
crowd, and the dancers hastily left the stage. Another man came to the
microphone and said something urgent about the ‘Fogo Symholico de Republico’.
‘Fireworks,’ I thought. The police were making a lane through the crowd,
pushing people back mercilessly to connect the stage with the outside world.
There was a great air of expectancy. Whatever was coming would have to be
sensational to justify it, after all I had seen already. The waiting dragged on.
People came on to deliver speeches of thanks and tributes. We were all shuffling
our feet, impatiently. A group of youngsters in gym clothes ran rather self-
consciously from the road, through the cleared lane and up the steps to the
stage, having much difficulty trying to keep in formation. On the stage some of
them stopped. Others ran on the spot. Those who stopped, started again with
embarrassment, just as those who had continued thought they had better stop.
Then I saw that the front runner had a torch in his hand with a small flame, and a
voice boomed out again about the ‘Fogo Symbolico’.
The applause was the absolute minimum necessary to be audible; evidently
everybody found it all much too symbolic, and I wondered how far down the road
they had struck a match and lit the torch. São João went out with a whimper, and
I thought I had never attended a greater anticlimax in my life. I went back to the
hotel to kill mosquitoes and sleep, but there were not enough blankets and it
became surprisingly cold. Between patches of sleep I tried to reconstruct that
fantastic music, a continuous melody played at the speed of a banjo, with some
of the feeling of an old barrel organ, thickened and amplified to a frenzy of
excitement. For a while I thought I had it, but in the morning it was gone.
Only much later did I discover that I had met, in Senhor do Bonfim, one of
Brazil’s most celebrated institutions, the unique and illustrious Trio Electrico from
Salvador, which was the glowing heart of the Bahia Carnival

For six more days I moved south towards Rio. I began to study Portuguese
seriously, reading menus and advertisements, and learning the road signs by
heart. ‘Νãο ultrapassar guando a ligna esquerda for continua,’ I repeated again
and again. The one I could not understand said : ‘Conserva as plaças.’ Often it
was riddled with bullet holes. I learned later that it meant ‘Do not destroy the road
signs’. I recalled other odd signs from Africa. The one that greeted me as I was
about to take a high viaduct over the Blue Nile Gorge, leaning out from the
mountainside thousands of feet above nothing.
‘Drive slowly and carefully,’ it said. ‘This viaduct has begun moving.’
Or the one painted on the roads in South Africa, just before traffic lights in
the right-hand lane. ‘Siegs Only’ it warned.
‘What on earth are slegs?’ I asked.
‘It’s Afrikaans for “only”,’ they told me.
The last two days before Rio were glorious, riding through the state of Minas
Gerais. That rolling ranch country drew me irresistibly. I walked in the evenings
past the cattle pens, admiring the solidity and workmanship of the stout black
fences with their white-capped posts. Mounted cowboys sauntered by with
carefully laconic faces. The sun set in splendour leaving an air of great
tranquillity over the land, and I swore that one day I would return there.
Then the emerald-clad mountains carried me high up to Tere-sopolis, and
soon I was standing next to the Finger of God, and looking down over the bay of
Rio de Janeiro, feeling exactly the same happy premonition that I had had coming
through Du Toit’s Kloof and looking down to Cape Town. I knew Rio was going to
be wonderful, and Rio did not disappoint me.
The friends of friends lived in luxury in Ipanema. I was welcomed into their
apartment, and stood in my black boots and clumsy gear on their white carpet
among priceless paintings and fragile modern art constructions, feeling as
though every move I made would cause irreparable damage. ‘Fantastic,’ they
said. ‘Wonderful ‘ – as though what they most longed to do was to buy a couple
of bikes and come the rest of the way with me. I was used to some of the things
that wealth could do to people, and I found their swashbuckling innocence a
great relief. They were generous beyond measure, but in a way that made it seem
natural, nothing to make a fuss about, something between friends. I found myself
installed, for as long as I liked, in a small flat within a hundred yards of the
beach, above a ballet school that they ran. Every day I was invited to lunch or
dine or visit with someone. Almost everyone they knew seemed to have been the
governor of one state or another, or related to some famous pioneer in Brazil’s
history. I was riding on Rio’s inner circle, and the fact of what had happened to
me in Fortaleza made it all seem not only unusually pleasurable, but entirely
appropriate. I revelled in it.
So it was not long before I was a dinner guest of the best-known and -liked
politician Brazil had produced this century, President Juscelino Kubitchek. The
dinner was attended by other powerful and more or less obnoxious people, all
striving for mastery in strident Portuguese.
My lack of Portuguese forced me to sit on the sidelines and make do with
whispered translations from my friends and Kubit-chek’s daughter, but I watched
him, fascinated. A battle raged around him about the plight of the white
Portuguese in Mozambique, which Frelimo had now taken over. I thought of my
friends there, of Rajah and Amade, and ‘Vic’, who had put me up. Given the
monstrous nature of most successful politicians, I was surprised to find that
Kubitchek was the only one there whose sympathies I thought could be trusted.
Later I talked to him alone, in French, and found him very pleasant and not at
all overbearing. The army, of course, had rendered him powerless, but he
maintained his dignity and showed no bitterness. This self-made, self-taught man
with the pale, watchful face gave the lie to all my notions of what a South
American President should be.
I was under the particular wing of a lovely dance teacher we called’ Lulu’, who
was the most enthusiastic and intelligent companion any man could hope for.
She had friends and relations in every direction, and we drove all over the
mountains and beaches in her Volkswagen, Brazil’s universal car, tasting every
kind of fruit and sea food and exotic drink that Brazil could provide.
When she was teaching I wandered around on the bike and one day I found
my way up a narrow road to a new vantage point called the Vista Chinesa. High
above Rio, I looked down on the big lagoon and Copacabana. The mountains
rise up tall and thin and rounded on top like the divisions of a papier-mâché egg
box, and the city is squeezed in among them. In the deep clefts the high-rise
blocks rise higher and higher, adding always one more floor of priceless property
on every lot, and the villas swarm up the mountainsides, clinging ever more
precariously. The lagoon, as still as glass, mirrors it all. Rio should really be seen
from the air.
Looking over the bushes in front of the mock pagoda, a stir and a whirr
caught my attention, and a hummingbird appeared in front of me. It flashed black
and blue and green and I thought it was the smallest thing I had ever seen and
the most marvellous. It was a pulsating masterpiece hanging on a blur of pure
movement, its wings no more visible than a heat haze. It dipped its needlelike
beak into a blossom. Then it vanished – I swear it almost did – and reappeared a
foot away, motionless again except for the slight tremor in the enveloping air. My
eyes would have swallowed it whole if they could. When it darted out of sight a
little later I felt as though I had been rooted to the spot for an age. It was one of
those few moments which I felt could justify one’s entire life. I made a note that’
magic was simply experiencing something for the first time’. It occurred to me at
the same time that my purpose should be to increase the number of such
moments until maybe, one day, everything could be magic.
It was spring in Brazil, and a perfect temperature for the beach. Lulu had a
particularly well-placed relation with a house at Buzios, a most desirable beach
because, by a freak twist of the coastline, it faced west instead of east, which
gave it shelter and also a spectacular sunset. That weekend remained in my mind
as probably the most idyllic of my life, and held the quintessence of what Brazil
had to offer.
We wandered away from the main beach across to a smaller one, perfectly
shaped, totally deserted. I swam awhile along the cliff face in the crystal-clear
water, and then stretched out on a rock on the beach to read.
She was standing on the shining wet sand, looking dubiously at her own
footprints. Behind her the green mountains, patched with banana and cactus,
rushed up into a blue sky.
‘How is it when they do the triple jump? ‘ she said.
She stood loosely, with the comical, awkward look dancers sometimes have
when they are not telling their bodies what to do. She was frowning like a clown
and running her index fingers around her thighs under her bikini bottom where it
had ridden up. In the small of her back, where strong muscle held the edge of the
bikini away from her spine, I noticed a trace of salty, sun-bleached fur climbing up
her spine.
‘Oh tell me please, how does it go, the triple jump? ‘ She pronounced it tripee-
el. She had a way of pleading for things in her Brazilian English to make you
understand that they were matters simultaneously of no consequence and of life
and death. You could refuse, and nothing would be changed; or you could give,
and earn undying gratitude. It was a great gift, which she had won by long effort
and sorrow and laughter. It was the humorous residue of craving which had once
been corrosive enough to etch her face.
‘Is that the hop, skip and jump? ‘ I asked lazily from the rock where I was
sitting and reading. I did not want to leave my rock. I had my left leg over the side
with the foot in the sand. Every thirty seconds or so the movements of the water
combined to send a wave swishing along the side of the rock, covering my leg up
to the knee and cooling it. I felt the sun’s heat flowing through me into the sea.
‘I really don’t know,’ I said. ‘Why? What’s fascinating you?’ She had asked
about the triple jump once before, I remembered, in Rio.
‘ I don’t know,’ she said, each word long-drawn-out and husky. ‘I am going to
try it anyway.’
She pursed her mouth and did a coltish sprint along the sand finishing with
both feet together. She stood for a while with the sun on her back, her face in
shadow, looking again at the prints she had left.
I watched her still, exploring the shape of her body. I would have expected a
dancer’s body to be harder, to show more muscle. Her limbs were rounded and
smooth, her thighs filled out and touched to make an airy triangle below the bikini,
her belly curved down from a single crease at the navel. The smooth, firm, well-
proportioned body of a twenty-year-old. Only, knowing she was thirty-six, I could
appreciate what dancing had done for her. Funny though that her calves had
none ofthat ribbed angularity. Funny too that I wasn’t in love with her.
Fused with the wonderful, liquid warmth that flowed around me on the rock,
so tangible that it felt like another element to complement the salty heaviness of
the sea, was a warmth of feeling for this woman that was as close to love as the
skin is to the flesh. Perhaps it would do as well, I thought. In some ways it might
even be better. And she loved me. I knew that. Only…
I put Islands in the Stream face down on the rock at page 241. Strange to be
reading Hemingway again, after so long, on this beach, on this coast. Just for a
moment I could imagine his bleary heroes bitching at each other right here, game
fishing for metaphors in these same blue crystalline waters, drowning in an
eternal round of fancy alcohol, fucking up the place with their manly pursuits. The
image was impossible to sustain. It must have died with him.
I walked over to where Lulu was standing, on the shining wet sand, with its
faint brown wash of iron glittering with fool’s gold.
‘ Look, I am going to jump again. Now, you watch me and see what I do.’
She took a short run and jumped. I thought I saw the difference between a
dancer and an athlete. The power was in a different place. I drew lines in the
sand with my toe to mark off her jump. It was about six feet long. Then I ran and
jumped too. My jump was scarcely better. A couple of inches, maybe. We laughed
at each other.
‘What do you expect from an old man? ‘ I said.
‘You are not an old man,’ she said, ‘and I am an old woman.’
 We ran and jumped some more, and I managed to put on another two or three
feet. Then I paced out the distance I associated vaguely with the Olympic record,
and we looked at the faraway mark with awe.
She took my hand and said: ‘Oh, Tedjy.’ I smiled at her, but instead of pulling
her down onto the sand I ran into the sea, playing for laughs with a silly, high-
stepping trot, dragging her reluctantly behind me until we both fell into the water.
When we came out, she wanted to go back to the other beach. I would have
liked to climb back on to my rock, to read some more about frozen daiquiris and
‘high bolitas’, and impossible battles with legendary swordfish, but I didn’t object,
and we walked back, kicking the sugary sand, towards the other rocks where the
little brown gully began that went up through the scrub and over the promontory
back to Buzios.
There was a shelf of rock that sloped into the sea, where there were clusters
of small mussels in the wash of sea water, their shells gaping like the beaks of
fledgelings in a nest,
‘We could cook some mussels,’ I said. ‘Have you got any matches? ‘
‘Is it all right? We won’t be killed? ‘
She was not really worried. She trusted me.
‘Of course it’s all right,’ I said, though I had never cooked mussels on a
beach before. ‘You just have to make sure they’re alive.’ What nonsense, I
thought, looking down at them. You’re not buying them off a barrow ! How could
they be anything but alive? Either alive or empty.
We found some bigger stones and built a fireplace against the wind. We
pulled some dried sticks out of the scrub. They were as light as straws, and ants
scurried out of them through little holes. She found a piece of round clay roof tile
and I laid it so that when the mussels opened in the heat the juice would run off
along the tile instead of putting out the fire. I became very excited by the idea of
making a meal off this small area of rock, and as I worked I thought about living
on a beach like this. The vegetation began immediately behind the sand, at the
first rise of the ground. Bananas grew there in plenty. Other fruits would certainly
grow there also. Vegetables too. The sea was rich with fish, prawns, lobsters. All
along the coast were huts and shelters built of wood, split bamboo and banana-
leaf thatch. My heart sang with joy just in the knowledge that such a life was
possible. The world changed for me. From that moment on I would always know
that there was a beach in Brazil, if not this beach then a beach, where I could go
and become whole again. What a journey this has become, I thought.
The fire – it was really more like an oven, with a flat stone on top to reflect
the heat down on to the mussels – worked very well. The first mussels were
orange and meaty and she ate them readily, saying how good they were. Then
there were some white ones and she did not like the look of them, so I ate the
white ones, and later she did too. They were all very small. It would be hard work
living off these, I thought.
‘It’s just about perfect here,’ I said.
‘What a beautiful oven we have,’ she said. ‘It’s so good, Tedjy. Let’s have
some more.’
We got through about four dozen. Then she got some cigarettes out of the
little pocket in her cap, which was made of scraps of old jeans and reminded me
of the one Jeanne Moreau wore m Jules et Jim.
I watched a boat rush around the bay pulling a woman on skis. She didn’t
look very secure. Probably she should straighten her legs and lean back more, I
decided. I had water-skied only once, just long enough to know I could do it. I
had tried several new things in that way. I wasn’t really interested in doing them,
just knowing that I could. That wouldn’t have been good enough for Hemingway, I
thought. Well, Hemingway didn’t ride a motorcycle 18,000 miles through Africa
and Brazil. And I don’t stop every hour for a frozen daiquiri either, I thought. Then
I laughed at myself.
‘What are you laughing, Tedjy? ‘ I laughed again.
‘Just happy,’ I said. I did feel very happy. I made a mental note that I wished I
would give up smoking, but couldn’t. Even that didn’t spoil my happiness.
I took a looping inland circuit from Rio to see the old gold-rush towns of Ouro
Prêto and Tiradentes, and the ethereal, lovely church of Congonhas, before
going south to São Paulo. There I delivered the sword to my Egyptian friend, who
to my amazement had got there before me. I don’t know which of us was more
astonished. He told me that he had given sums of money to a dozen strangers
like myself to post on for him, never less than $2,000, and every one had
honoured his promise.
The 250 miles from São Paulo to Curitiba were extremely uncomfortable, dirty
and dangerous. The road was breaking up and ran along the crown of a range of
hills often in cloud. Heavy diesel traffic charged the fog with oil droplets, and
covered the visor with tar. Both the throttle and clutch cable seized and the
ordeal lasted nonstop for eight hours. I arrived frozen, filthy and wet, but the
natural balance of pain and pleasure was rapidly restored. A motorcycle
enthusiast snatched me off the streets and gave me a warm shower, food, a bed
and an introduction to the kind of civilization that southern Brazil can offer.
He was a fat, warm teddy bear of a man with a limp and a big bushy
moustache, and his neat and pretty wife adored him. He and his friends, the
‘motoqueiros’, all owned expensive three-cylinder Suzukis, and kept every spoke
polished. They gathered in a special place in the evenings, like a floating
motorcycle showroom, and looked enviously at my scuffed and battered
workhorse parked among them. I could not help being saddened that so much
fine machinery was so completely underused. It felt almost sinful. If only
machines could speak to each other, I thought, that would be a conversation I
would like to overhear.
I noticed that my friend Marcio was not the only one with a paunch. Since Rio
most of the men I met seemed well fed and fondled their stomachs often through
their jersey knitwear. It struck me that I could scarcely remember a fat man north
of Rio, but I did recall a conversation with a black shoeshine boy who had been
amazed when I described how I travelled. He thought it would be impossible for
me to get enough to eat. ‘You have to eat so many more things than us,’ he said,
patting his very hard flat stomach. I realized with a shock that he really believed I
belonged to a different species and required a quite different diet. Now I had to
admit that I did seem to be among a different species, and m a different country.
At Iguaçu, where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay meet, I chose Argentina,
and wandered down past the old Jesuit settlements of Missiones into the great
beefy heartland of Argentina. The sad and violent history of Argentina was
erupting all around me. There were daily shootings. Revolution and ever-greater
repression were inevitable. Fine sentiments were like froth on the lips of a dying
man. Every shout of’Liberty’ drove another nail in the coffin, and ‘Democracy’
came to sound to me like a dirty word.
Yet in this big open land all the vanity and venom of public life seemed like the
squabbling of children in the wings of a vast and empty stage. Only the chocolate
melancholy of the tango followed me across the Pampa.
I think it was in Argentina that I turned professional. I had been on the road
for a year; I had been very high and very low, and everywhere in between. The
world no longer threatened me as it had; I felt I had the measure of it.
It must have helped that I was in horse country. I felt very much that I shared
something of the gaucho’s view of the world, and my seat certainly fitted my
saddle as closely as his. Riding the bike was as natural as sitting on a chair. It
scarcely tired me at all. I could pack and unpack the bike with the automatic
familiarity of shaving, and I did not allow the prospect of it to annoy me. The
same was true for minor maintenance problems: a puncture, cleaning a chain,
aligning the wheels, whatever it was. I did it without giving a thought to the
inconvenience. These things were facts of life. I slept on the ground more often,
and my bones began to arrange themselves accordingly. The air bed was
punctured and I did not bother with it much. I had a hammock, a wonderful old
hammock made for a married couple, and bequeathed to me by Lulu’s
grandmother. I treasured it and used it as often as possible, finding it very
comfortable.
I felt very much tried and seasoned, and no longer expected to make silly
mistakes or confront unexpected hazards. I had also developed a battery of
useful instincts. I knew when there were thieves around, when the bike had to be
protected and when it was safe. More often than not it was safe. I knew when to
expect trouble from strangers, and how to defuse it. I knew what drivers of cars
and lorries were going to do before they knew it themselves. At times I think I
could even read the minds of stray dogs, though it was a rarity to see one on the
highway that was not already a pulped carcass at the roadside.
 In the natural paradise of the Southern Andes I crossed over to Chile and the
long-awaited Pacific Ocean. I continued my political education in Santiago, which
was still in the grip of curfews and the throes of nightly shootings in the streets,
torture in the prisons and starvation in the slums.
Then again I crossed the mountains, this time at ten thousand feet, to
Mendoza. North of Mendoza the parched bones of the Andes sprawl in the
waterless wastes of San Juan, Rioja and Cata-marca. I rode from oasis to
oasis, coming up at last to the fertile valleys of Tucuman and Salta, where I
spent my second Christmas.
And in 1975 I began my journey along the roof of the Americas, in Bolivia at
fourteen thousand feet.

Antoine usually did the shopping for the three of us. Bruno drove and nursed
their battered Renault van. If I had a role on the motorcycle it was to explore the
route ahead and find good places for us to eat and spend a night. And
sometimes, coming into a small town, I felt like the advance man for a travelling
circus.
It was midafternoon when we stopped in Abancay to buy food and, well, just
to stop for a while. The streets were coming to life after the siesta. In those
Peruvian valleys the sun rises at eight and sets at four, although light pours
across the mountaintops for the normal number of hours. When the sun does
become visible above the peaks the heat bounces down two miles of
mountainside to collect at the bottom around the palms and cactus, to roast the
big stones in the river bed and make the thought of movement disagreeable. The
valley may be at six or seven thousand feet above sea level but at midday it is
very hot. Dogs expose their bellies in the dust. Donkeys stand still as though
stuffed, with their heads bathed in shade. In the silent mud-walled houses the
shadow looks thick as molasses. But the valley is not a desert. Tumbling down
the mountainside come streams of water. There are grains, fruit, vegetables and
flowers in abundance, as there were in the time of the Incas.
We were parked along the kerb of the main street. Bruno was staring angrily
at his engine.
‘I’ve had it up to herewith this heap of shit’ he hissed in French.
Bruno treated the Renault the way he treated horses, with alternate
admiration and contempt. I watched sympathetically, enjoying myself, sitting on
the bike a few yards away and resting my forearms and knees. The long descents
into the valleys over stony dirt roads were worse for me, a constant jarring from
wrists to shoulders, with my knees driving into the leather bags slung across the
tank.
I always liked watching Bruno. He did everything with an animal gravity which
ended either in gleeful satisfaction or an explosion of rage. I was not far from
thinking of him as my son. He had just lost his father and was perhaps still
looking for him.
The men of this small town in Peru did not crowd around me as they would
have in a city. The Indians, as always, appeared to be perfectly indifferent.
Those with more Spanish blood showed their curiosity, at a distance. A large-
bellied man in white shirt and trousers presented himself in a ceremonial fashion,
as though his fatness entitled him to represent the other men, who were mostly
thin.
‘Where are you going on this poderosa?’ he said in Spanish, very
condescending.
‘ I am going to Lima,’ I said, careful to maintain the same steady smile.
Experience had taught me the delicate art of these exchanges. Eagerness could
be an embarrassment. Better to keep a close mouth and savour the tension.
‘Y de donde viene ?
‘I come from England.’
Once, in Bolivia, I had made the same reply, but the man I was talking to
there had never heard of England. Now I watched to see what England might
mean in Abancay. An Indian woman walked past with quick steps, dragging a
small black and white pig on a string. Her gaze barely flickered.
‘You have come on a long journey.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It has been sixteen months.’
‘And when do you hope to regain your family?’
‘In one year, or perhaps two.’
‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘You have much courage.’
There was a flash of gold teeth, and he took off his hat. A crow dropped a
small medallion of black and white shit on the crown of his head. He replaced his
hat.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
Antoine came back with his face smiling but inwardly composed. It was rarely
any other way. His shirt was clean, his hair groomed and there was even a
crease in his safari trousers. He was soigné, as though on active diplomatic duty.
In fact they both had diplomatic passports, having been attached to the French
legation in Paraguay. Bruno had bought the old van in Asunción and wanted to
drive it to Mexico. Antoine was sharing the journey as far as Lima. They both
spoke Spanish with a fluent French accent. My accent was better, but my
Spanish was horrible.
Antoine put back on the dashboard of the van the little Paraguayan bowl
where we kept our mutual funds, and reported on his mission.
He had some tomatoes and eggplants and a strange giant bean. There was
never much in the shops. We all shared the feeling that somewhere behind the
sombre shelves of soap and wire wool the good things were quickly hidden away
when we came in view. There was no hope of finding meat at this time of day.
There were no eggs. Bread was not a local food. We never saw any dairy
products aside from tins of condensed milk, although there was a brand of
indestructible thousand-year margarine.
‘Perhaps farther on we will find eggs and mangoes,’ said Antoine.
‘ There’s a pump down the road, on the way out of town,’ I said.
Bruno slammed the lid on the engine. ‘ The salope will never make it,’ he
shouted.
‘To the pump,’ I asked, ‘or to Mexico?’
‘In any case,’ he said, ‘we will never get up another mountain today.’
I shrugged and put on my jacket and helmet and gloves.
‘I’ll go ahead and see if I can find somewhere for the ni ght, ‘ I said.
From Abancay the road to the north rises steeply again, toiling over the
ascending slopes for thirty or forty miles until it runs free at last with the llama
and the eagles at twelve thousand feet. It would have been good to get about
halfway up and spend the night among the greener trees, the sweeter springs and
the fresher air. I wondered what was wrong with the van that it should lose so
much power. We had tried many things, all the things that seemed most obvious.
At times it went well, but usually it was sluggish and too hot.
I wondered whether to leave them and go on alone. It was always there as a
possibility, quietly understood on both sides. I kept all my things on the bike, even
though it would have been easier to offload some of them on to the van.
I remembered how we had met at La Quiaca, the Bolivian border town, drawn
together by the frustrations of the customs house there. Afterwards we had
eaten together in the big canteen over the bus station, soup and rice, and beans
and sausage in a spicy red sauce. We were very happy to have finished with all
the paper work and the payments of one dollar here, two dollars there for pieces
of paper we did not want and would never need. Our hearts were light as
mountain air, excited by the journeys we had already achieved, and by the ones
that lay ahead.
It was natural for us to travel on together that day. We circled the rim of an
immense bowl, thousands of feet deep. I had often anticipated in my imagination
the vertiginous drops of the Andes, but had not expected so soon to find myself
riding so close to the edge of nothing. I could see the van across this vast
upside-down space, a whitish speck crawling along, and at times I imagined
Bruno and Antoine inside, exchanging desultory comments. I knew it was dusty in
there, and that their vision was limited, and I was glad to be outside and alone,
free to escape from my own ordinariness and the train of other people’s
thoughts.
But at night it was fine to share a meal and talk, to hear about the things I
had missed and the thoughts I had not had. So it went on, day by day, but
always a thing of the moment. And when, in Potosí, Bruno wanted to go on to
Sucre and I wanted to stay and write, it was the easiest thing to separate,
perhaps forever, just as it was the easiest thing for us to find each other again,
as if by chance, a week later in La Paz. We guarded each other’s liberty as
though it were our own.
Only sometimes it was not so easy, and you had to pay the price for
company. On the third day after La Quiaca, just past noon and in bright
sunshine, we came up the highest road I have ever travelled, perhaps the highest
in the world, at sixteen thousand feet or more. Ahead of us a party of Indians
were crossing the road in procession. Bolivian Indians are among the world’s
poorest and they lead a harsh life. Most of their clothing is homespun from hand-
dyed wool, yet no company could have looked more prosperous and content than
these Indians as they appeared before us on the tenth of January 1975. We
passed them by, and then stopped, entranced. The men were smiling
enthusiastically and saluting as they came up to us. Most of them were carrying
pottery vessels or cloth-wrapped bundles.
Bruno asked the leader where they were going.
‘To Otavi,’ he replied, pointing over a long rise of stony ground, partly
cultivated for maize, where houses were just visible.
‘ It is the Feast of the Kings. You are invited.’
They seemed truly happy that we had arrived at this propitious moment, their
happiness no less sincere for having been released by some of the corn beer
they carried in the pots.
It was a wonderful chance. The Indians continued across the hill and we
found our own roundabout way there.
Otaví is a small town of cobbled streets and adobe houses built on a steep
hillside. We climbed the main street still buoyed up by the gaiety and splendour of
the Indians we had met on the road. Then I began to realize that the village was
in the grip of a quite different mood. There were many people on the sidewalks,
standing, leaning, squatting. No one moved. No one spoke. I had the impression
of walking through a museum of ethnic culture.
Of course there was sound and movement of a kind. People still breathed,
and scratched themselves and raised coca leaves to their mouths. They followed
us with their eyes, but a spell had been cast over them and it was like being
watched by pebbles on a beach.
On our left was a house with a more imposing roof. A sign identified it as the
‘Corregimiento’, or magistrate’s office. The somnolent bystanders were thickest
here. The doors were open to reveal people arguing and gesturing, in strange
contrast to the entranced pavements outside.
We stood wondering what to do. Already I was absorbed in this world of
stone, plaster, lime wash, natural wood and hide, sun-bleached wool and bright
vegetable dyes arranged in brilliant traditional patterns. Then another man
looking as outlandish as we did, in a green corduroy jacket and a porkpie hat,
came hurrying down the hill towards us like White Rabbit in Wonderland.
He spoke fluently and eloquently, which was unusual out there even in
Spanish, and he was telling us about his fish. This was a fish he had brought
from Argentina, but I was never able to grasp its significance because he was
quite drunk.
Another man with a crazy black face came to join us then. He was too drunk
to speak much, but he waved his arms in large meaningful swoops, and the two
of them surrounded us and bore us away on a tour.
‘ Churchill, Franco, de Gaulle, Truman. I know them all,’ said White Rabbit. He
spoke with abandon about economic imperialism, military juntas and exploitation,
while Crazy Face conducted the flow of words with his arms. We strolled on past
the rows of enchanted spectators, and it at last came through to me that
everybody in town was simultaneously stoned and squiffy on cocaine and
alcohol.
T h e corregidor had forbidden the annual procession and fiesta. Great
negotiations were in progress while the would-be revellers could do nothing but
drink their chicha, chew their leaf and become silently blotto.
Two women walked past side by side, crooning and carrying white flags,
followed by several children and an old man with a long curved bamboo
woodwind, but this unofficial procession died before our eyes. The old man tried
to play for us, producing three dismal honking notes and sprays of saliva as his
drunken lips failed to hold on to the mouthpiece.
We inspected the chapel at the top of the hill. Most of the stucco had peeled
off it, and old crones sat in the shade of the entrance leaning stupefied against
the chapel walls.
Yet there were some energetic spirits and they were determined to create
some sort of pageant around us, and they pressed us to stay and drink and wait
for the fun to start. Inevitably we were nervous, wondering what would happen to
us if this whole damned drunken town should spring to life in a full-blooded fiesta.
We had to decide because we were a group, and if we wanted to get to Potosí
that day we would have to leave soon. Somehow we let our fears speak for us in
the name of wisdom and we left.
Alone, Iwould have stayed, and learned much more about those people. The
chance did not come my way again.
There is a way to convert fear into positive energy. When I had discovered it
for myself along the way, I used it quite deliberately to project confidence and
sympathy. It had never failed me, and it gave me an unusual and exhilarating
sense of power over circumstance,. But it seemed to function only when I was
alone.
So as I left Abancay and started climbing the dirt road I wondered whether it
was time, again, to go on alone, not to go faster but because I thought I might
lose my power in the group. Then I put the matter aside, satisfied with having
brought it to my attention, thinking, Til know when the moment comes,’ and I set
about looking for a place where we could cook and eat and sleep.
The least we needed was a level area to park the van and pitch a tent. For a
while there was nothing. Small, terraced allotments, heavily cultivated, occupied
every corner of open ground among the rocks and bushes. Then, at the tenth
kilometre stone, a path opened off to the right into a gently sloping field sparsely
planted with olive trees. It was dry and stony, and not very inviting, but it would
do.
It was just the time of day when my hallucinations came to try me out. They
were of the crassest kind possible. Usually they began with nothing more original
than a cold bottle of beer. When my appetite was sufficiently inflamed I would go
on to lobster, roast beef and real coffee, followed by an accidental meeting with
a perfect and most loving woman in a large, clean bed. Sometimes I would
conjure up the settings for these indulgences but it was hardly worth bothering.
They were always roughly similar, and involved clean table linen, polished
glassware, bathrooms with towels and an abundance of friendly hospitality and
admiration. As the afternoons turned to evenings and I began to wonder where I
would eat and sleep that night, this television set turned on in my head and
subjected me to trial by advertisement, hitting me inexorably with every one of my
known cravings in turn.
It was not my appetite for cold beer or perfect loving women that shamed and
appalled me at those times, it was the fact that I allowed these images to
oppress me when they were clearly unattainable, and to make what was there
and real and within my grasp seem undesirable. Under the influence of these
lobster and champagne ravings I became the perfect sucker, vulnerable to the
shoddiest substitutes. For lack of cold beer I would waste money on warm Coke,
and hate it. I would fall prey to any hotel sign, knowing full well that far from
enjoying a clean bed and loving women I would be shut up in a dirty, foetid box
with a hundred mosquitoes.
It is said that at three or four in the morning the body is physically at its
lowest ebb, but it was at five in the afternoon, at the cocktail hour, that my
morale slumped, and the temptations came to me in the wilderness. I fought them
as best I could through all the years of the journey and always, when I won, I
was handsomely rewarded. I carried a stock of memories of magical evenings out
alone in the wild, completely satisfied by the simple food I had cooked, listening
to the silence and toasting the stars in a glass of tea, and I used these memories
as my blindfold against the gross sirens that beckoned with their neon smiles.
Success was built on success, and sometimes I was able to carry through a
victorious campaign for days or weeks on end, becoming hardier and happier with
each succeeding day. But the war could never be truly won. Sooner or later some
warm, generous person on my trail would offer, unsolicited, some or even all of
the delights I had learned to ignore. Then, when it was time to leave, the struggle
would begin all over again. Like a general, I was only as good as my last battle.
Yet the torment only ever lasted for an hour in every twenty-four. During the
day, out in the world, no matter how hard or cold or wet the road might be, I never
wished I were safe in the Ritz. More often the road was neither cold nor wet, and
I felt myself to be the most privileged person on the earth to be able to pass
through where others saw only normality, and to think myself in paradise. While
at night I swam lazily among mysterious and potent dreams.
And still…during the days before I met Antoine and Bruno at La Quiaca my
morale had been sagging badly. I had left Santiago with a heavy heart. I wanted
company, and I knew that was why I was not ready to leave them. They
protected me from my five o’clock follies, and I was grateful to know they were
chugging up the road behind me, pleasant and familiar friends.
So on that evening outside Abancay my cerebral TV channel was showing a
different programme. As clearly as if I stood before it, the white building in the
distance became the stately hacienda that somewhere in South America I had
always hoped to encounter. I saw the richly moulded plasterwork framing heavy
wooden doors studded with black iron; floors of gleaming hardwood polished and
hammered by generations of leather boots; ancestral portraits of Spanish
swordsmen in lace and breastplate; stiff white table linen splashed with the
crimson geometry of candlelight passing through cut-glass goblets of wine; and
myself deep in a leather armchair, listening to my host tell tales of the Conquest,
as I gazed up at the white faces of his perfect daughters flitting coyly behind the
rails of the gallery beneath the coffered ceiling.
With a sigh I stopped the bike and waited. It was not many minutes before the
dusty white van laboured into sight. We turned into the field and chose a good
spot. Antoine got out the plastic water carrier and we all drank some warmish
water. I threw my red bag and jacket to the ground, and added my helmet to the
pile. Bruno lifted the hood of the van and began again to wonder what he could
do to the engine.
‘There’s a house over there,’ I said. They had not noticed.
‘I’ll see who’s there and tell them what we’re doing. Maybe I can get some
meat,’ I added, thinking about the wine and the girls on the gallery. I rode along
the path, about five hundred yards, past an area of thick marshy grass. The
house and its courtyards were enclosed by a high wall, and as I approached, the
house became hidden from view. A van stood outside the broken iron gate, and
three men were talking. Two of them said ‘Adios’ and looked at me curiously, then
got into their van and drove off. The third man watched me, without expression,
as I parked the bike and walked towards him. He was so placed that I still could
see nothing of the house.
‘Buenos días,’ I said.
‘Buenos días,’ he replied, and waited as I composed my Spanish.
‘We are in the field down there,’ I said. ‘We are three. We hope to spend the
night there.’
‘If you like,’ he said, and fell silent again. He was half Spanish and wore
shabby Western clothing. His shirt was buttoned up around his neck, and I
noticed a great many red dots on his skin above the collar and on his arms below
the short sleeves.
‘We would like to buy some meat if you please.’
‘There is no meat,’ he said, without emphasis or explanation.
‘If possible, we would like to buy a chicken,’ I suggested.
‘There is no chicken,’ he said.
This time I simply watched him, patiently, until he felt obliged to fill the
vacuum.
‘We sell all our meat to the buyer of meat. You can ask him.’
‘Thank you, señor. I will try. Where is his house?’
‘At thirty-three kilometres,’ he said.
I could not make sense of his reply as I felt sure the buyer would be in town,
and pointed that way.
‘No,’ he said. ‘At the thirty-third kilometre,’ and waved towards the mountain.
‘He has a house? ‘ I asked. It was a poor question, but I could think of
nothing better. Already I was feeling slightly uneasy.
‘si, hay una casa] he replied. Again silence. He was shrouded in silence. Or he
was listening to sounds I could not hear.
‘Bueno. Muchas gracias? Slowly I turned towards the bike, hoping he might
add something, but he simply stood and watched me ride away.
It meant riding nineteen kilometres. I told Bruno and Antoine what I was doing
and set off up the road. It continued to climb steeply and the air grew cooler. The
trees were leafier, and a pleasant brook bubbled along the roadside. Some
goats, startled on their way home, skittered up an almost vertical face of rocks
and bushes, and a small girl, half their size, shouted and rushed after them at the
same speed, her long skirts flying. Where the road curved around a spur a few
mud and wattle huts stood among banana trees on a shelf of ground overhanging
the valley. An Indian woman was hoeing her corn. I asked for ‘the man who buys
meat’ but she shook her head helplessly. Beyond these huts there was no further
sign of human habitation. I passed the thirty-third kilometre stone. The vegetation
thinned, and large areas of the mountainside were bare. It seemed absurd to
suppose that a meat wholesaler would have his warehouse at the top of a
mountain. My embarrassment and indignation welled up in a tide of fury. I had
allowed myself to want the meat (and the sherry and the daughters) and it had
made me stupid.
I turned around, storing up anger for the man who had sent me on this mad
errand, determined to confront him, preparing phrases which would shame him
into telling me the truth. I could not conceive that he had invented the meat buyer,
but at the same time I imagined his laughter as he watched me roaring off and up
the mountain.
As I passed Bruno and Antoine I could hardly get a word out. Astonishingly,
the man was still standing near the gate. As before he watched me get off the
bike and walk towards him.
‘There is nobody up there, señor,’ I said, tight-lipped.
‘You could not find him?’ he asked.
‘There is nothing there,’ I said. ‘No house, no people.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘entonces, there is some meat. Please come with me.’
His face betrayed no reaction, no hint of mockery, but the voice was, I
thought, faintly tinged with interest. Bewildered, I followed him through the gate.
The house was now revealed in all its glory, but it was the glory of total
decay. Windows without frames stared blankly from peeling and cracked walls.
Broken shutters hung drunkenly by one hinge. A once magnificent porch was
littered with wrecked furniture and masonry rubbish, and the lath and plaster
ceiling above it bellied down like the breastbones of a decomposing whale. We
walked towards it across a muddy and unkempt yard. A wave of athletic pigs
swept across our path, driving frantic hens in all directions. In a dark corner of
the porch an old Indian woman bundled up in black sat spinning yarn, all her life
apparently concentrated in her fingers as the floss of wool flowed from her right
hand to the twirling bobbin in her left. There were a few younger men and women
moving or standing but I could not tell whether they had any purpose. The sense
of collapse was general and overwhelming.
The man with the spots asked me to wait a moment while he went into the
house. I wish I had gone in with him, for I never saw the inside, but my attention
was caught by a large blueprint pinned to the wall. It was a diagram headed ‘Co-
operativo del 24 Junio,’ and it set out the organization of the co-operative, with
the chairman and his council on top and the descending chain of command and
responsibility. It was sufficiently elaborate to be interesting, and simple enough
to be credible. In faraway Lima I imagined this piece of paper must have
impressed a number of people. ‘Now here we have our “veinte-cuatro Junto”. You
see, our reforms are going well. The people are really taking the land into their
own hands. They have a fine building there too, for their meetings and recreation.
The original landlord described it to me. He is a friend of mine, you know – a
friend of the revolution. He lives in Lima, of course, with his four perfect
daughters…’
I wondered whether the man with spots was the chairman. Then he came out
and asked me again to follow him. My cravings had subsided and I was in a much
happier state. My senses now were bristling with excitement at the sights and
sounds and smells that surrounded me. We walked around the main building past
sheels and outhouses, and plodded uphill across some fallow grassland.
Eventually we reached a cluster of huts like the ones I had seen from the road.
An Indian woman came out towards us, wiping her hands on her embroidered
apron. She had a nice, smiling face. I had the strange impression that we were
expected, as though she had had a telephone message that we were coming, a
ludicrous idea.
She wore her stiff-brimmed black hat set very square on her head, and her
long black hair hung in two braids. They talked awhile in the Indian language.
Then the man said to me:
‘This is my wife. She will show you the meat.’
She smiled at me again and led me into a smaller hut. The light outside was
already fading, and inside it was very dark. A barrel stood there, on end, open at
the top. She pointed to it and I saw it was full of raw meat encrusted with dried
blood. She pulled out the first lump and held it up for inspection. It was a
shapeless mass weighing many kilos. I could not guess which part of the animal
it was, only that it was cow.
‘Es muy grande,’ I said.
She gestured that I should look for myself. I laid my gloves aside on a crate
and plunged my hands into the gory mess. After a while I found a piece that I
liked better than the rest. None of it smelled bad, and I could not understand how
the meat stayed fresh in the heat of the day, with all the flies around, and no salt
or preservative. The problem fascinated me, but my Spanish was not good
enough to resolve it.
The piece of meat I had chosen looked quite gruesome and was still too
large. The man laid it on a tree stump and chopped it in half with a wood axe. His
wife brought a yard arm and weighed one of the halves. It came to just under two
kilos, and I paid the price, which was half the price in the butchers’ shops when
you could find one.
I carried the piece away in my bloodstained fingers, still convinced that it
would be inedible. I felt that I was living through part two of a complex and
inscrutable hoax, but by now I was a willing accomplice.
Antoine and Bruno did not, as I expected, turn pale with disgust when I held
out my trophy, so I got busy on the lump with my knife and their cutting board,
and found three fine big steaks inside. The bits and pieces, shorn of their crusts,
I put aside for soup stock. As I worked I discovered a possible reason why my
friends seemed so indifferent. When I held my head still a quivering cloud formed
in front of my eyes, a curtain of shimmering dots too close for focus. I put my
hand to my face and found blood on it, my own blood. The flies, for that is what
they were, were small, noiseless, numerous and avaricious beyond belief. Their
bodies, when you could see one, were custard yellow, but they were hardly bigger
than fruit flies. They seemed to chew their way into the skin so that the blood
welled out in gouts.
I have never been able to make my peace with mosquitoes, and they have
troubled me in most parts of the world. Some people I know have taught
themselves to be undisturbed. It used to impress me to watch Father Walsh in
Fortaleza, talking calmly or watching television while several of the huge hump-
backed mosquitoes they had there fed contentedly on his forehead. By
comparison I was as agitated as a scarecrow in a gale. He used to say that as
they were not Anopheles there was no danger of malaria and, furthermore, there
was no point in killing them once they got started, since the irritation came from
the anticoagulant they injected first. If you let them get on with it, the chances
were, he said, that they would suck most of the poison out again. It seemed a
most rational and saintly attitude, and represented exactly the style of pragmatic
holiness they all practised up there at São Raimundo.
One might have thought that travelling;constantly and knowing that any
irritations I met along the way would soon be left behind would make it easier to
bear these trifling inconveniences. Not so. At least, not for me. They could be
suffered, but not dismissed.
As for the anticoagulant theory, that did not work for me either. It was the
Buddhists who eventually made me realize that if you are waiting for a spot to
hurt, it will do its best to hurt you. When I allowed the insect to have its fill of me I
could never forget that I was conducting an experiment and in consequence it
always hurt. So I used my mosquito net and waved my arms, and came to a kind
of dynamic equilibrium with mosquitoes.
But not with the flies of Abancay. They were for me the insect equivalent of
the piranha fish, and I could almost see their saw-toothed jaws tearing into me. I
put up my net as fast as I could and prayed the mesh was fine enough to keep
them out. I am lucky enough not to share the common horror of slimy, creepy and
slippery things. Snakes, spiders, beetles and worms do not distress me, and
often I find them full of interest, but these silent devour-ers of my flesh filled me
with loathing. I swore never to stop anywhere again where there was one of the
tiny monsters to be seen, and said a prayer, in passing, for the Conquistadors.
Bruno said there was a similar black fly in Paraguay, and he seemed more
resigned to it, while Antoine showed no visible reaction at all that I can
remember.
While twilight lasted, two men came riding past towards the house, wearing
scarves and cowboy hats and broad leather chaps or pasa montes. At that
moment I remembered that I had left my gloves behind at the hut, and I called out
to them, saying I would come in the morning to collect them. At the back of my
mind was the idea that they would be less likely to disappear if it was known that
I was coming back for them. The next morning I discovered my mistake.
When I came to the hut I could not find my nice, smiling woman. There was a
strange couple there.
‘Yes,’ said the man, ‘Luis has your gloves, to give to you. Now he has gone
off into the mountains to hunt for cochineal, and it is impossible to find him. But
tonight or tomorrow morning, señor, have no fear, he will bring them to you.’
The long conversation that followed was merely to express my frustration. It
was clearly fruitless from the start. The meat had, after all, cost me dearly, for it
was a long time before I could find another pair of suitable gloves. I consoled
myself with the knowledge that the experience had been priceless, but still I
cursed myself and all Indians indiscriminately. Then we set off up the mountain.
 The van was no better than the day before. It was never out of first gear. As
soon as the sun appeared it began to overheat again, and they drove with the
bonnet open. Since Bruno could not see where he was going, Antoine had to
stand up and lean out of the open door calling directions to Bruno. In this unlikely
fashion they would creep up the mountain towards me as I sat on some pleasant
rock beside a river, watching and thinking. I spent a lot of time then, and later,
thinking about the meat buyer. Many days later I learned that it was forbidden by
decree for producers to sell meat privately. Also, every alternate week had been
declared ‘meatless’ to favour exports. I thought that explained some of it, but by
no means all. And I went on listening for the sounds that the man with the spots
seemed to hear. Perhaps, I thought, they also offered immunity to blood-sucking
flies.
The mountain got steeper, and there were dizzy drops from the road. The
views in these great valleys are unequalled anywhere, and I benefited from
Bruno’s snail’s pace to sit quietly and observe distant peaks and terraces, and
then all the small detail around me. Sometimes little goatherds peered at me
bashfully from behind trees, to disappear with a giggle and pop up again in
seconds in a quite different place. Their strength and agility must have been
extreme.
As we rose into the thinner air the van lost more and more power until at last
it was exhausted and could go no farther. Yet we felt that we must be near the
summit. Once there, it would be a hundred miles or more of level roads and steep
descent. We had to get to the top somehow.
‘I’ll give you a tow,’ I said. ‘Well, why not? You’ve almost got enough power.
The bit extra I can give you will make the difference.’
It worked for a while, but then the bike began to get unpleasantly hot, and I
was thinking we would have to find some other way when I saw some people
ahead of us on the narrow dirt road. It is a rarity, I am sure, to see a motorcycle
towing a car up a hill, but they were even more odd, I thought. They were walking,
but not at all the way one walks in order to get somewhere, or for the fun of
walking. They were in procession and had a religious air about them. There was
a man in the lead and he held an object in his hand, but I could not make out
what it was, and in any case he was not carrying it with reverence. Yet there was
an unmistakable aura of ecstasy about them all.
I stopped the bike, and the van stopped too. At last the leader of the
procession reached us, and the others stood behind him, a random group of
people enchanted by their fate. The object I had been unable to identify was the
fractured steering link of a bus. The driver and his passengers had just narrowly
escaped plunging thousands of feet down a mountainside. They were in a state
of bliss.
When we explained what we were doing, the driver approached the van like a
faith healer, and laid his hands on the distributor. With the minimum of fuss, the
engine power increased by fifty per cent and we sailed away to the top of the
mountain.
My greatest concern the next evening was to be out of range of the ‘yellow
peril’. Several times on the climb beyond And ahuaylas I stopped on some idyllic
campsite until, after a few minutes, the first flesh-eating fly homed in and I fled
farther up the mountain. Altitude was the only defence. That night we slept in a
high valley, moist and green and so intensely cultivated that there was scarcely
space for us. Bruno wanted to move into an empty barn, but the owner said he
put his pigs there when it rained. It looked 1ike rain, so we made do on a grass
verge.
Next day I planned to make Ayacucho, a long ride, and I left the others far
behind. They were much better equipped to travel in the dark and could afford to
arrive later. The road plunged again into a deep valley, a phenomenal drop to the
Rio Pampas, where I was once again among thorn and cactus. The climb on the
other side of the river was correspondingly high, and took me after several hours
to a plateau at fifteen thousand feet. I saw eagles and., for the first time, the
world’s biggest bird, the condor. It was soaring at some distance, and its size
was not noticeable until it flapped, just once, its twelve-foot wings. The shape
they made as they beat up and down left no doubt. It was an airborne monster, a
thrilling sight to see.
The road ran on across this high table of rock and scrub much farther than
the map indicated. Herds of llama and alpaca scattered at my arrival, a hazard
because instead of running away from danger isolated animals ran to the herd,
often across my path. I could feel the cold gathering, and worried that I did not
have enough fuel. The sun was almost down, hitting me in the eyes and dazzling
me as always happened when I was most concerned about making good time
and keeping out of potholes. Then I met a truck, the only vehicle I had seen, and
miraculously the driver had spare petrol.
I made the last long descent into Ayacucho in the dark. Aya-cucho is an
important town in Peruvian history. A great battle was fought in that valley and it
has interest for tourists. There was a simple but graceful hotel with patio and
fountains and tiled corridors. I was given a room to myself for seventy soles. The
usual price was eighty soles.
‘Por essos que liegen en coche, ochenta. Pero essos en moto son muy
hombre,’ said the clerk with a grin. In other words, car drivers pay the full rate but
there is a discount for heroes.
Attached to the hotel was a cafe-restaurant. It was built as an afterthought
and compared with the hotel it was shoddy and flyblown. It reflected the general
indifference to standards in food and drink, an indifference born of scarcity. It
was pointless to work up an appetite for steak, a cold beer or an egg fried in
butter. The chances were more than even that whatever you wanted you could
not have.
In South America the Spanish language is called Castillano and the two most
important words in Castillano say it with a brevity greater even than the Anglo-
Saxon:
No hay. There isn’t any.
‘Beer?’ I asked.
‘No hay cerveza.’
‘Steak?’
‘No hay.’
‘What do you have?’
‘Huevos con arroz.’
‘Can I have some butter with the eggs, please.’
‘Mantequilla no hay.’
‘All right, bring me a Coca-Cola and coffee.’
The waiter brought a Pepsi (which I like even less) and two jugs. One jug
contained hot water. The other jug, a small glass one, seemed to have an inch of
soya sauce in the bottom.
‘Where is the coffee?’
The waiter pointed scornfully at the black sauce:
‘Aqui es!’
It was liquid coffee essence, something I hadn’t seen since Hitler blockaded
the British Isles. I imagined it was pumped out of the ground in times of national
emergency.
I had not had a cup of real coffee since Argentina, but at least there had
been powdered coffee. Usually the tin was brought to the table in the futile
pretence that it was genuine Nescafé. In smart places they had little wickerwork
baskets made specially to cradle the Nescafé as though it were a precious wine.
In Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and even most of Colombia, real coffee no
hay. But in Ayacucho we sank to a new low.
I fell into conversation with an American real estate operator who had
decided to holiday through the American economic recession. He was quite
human until I asked what he did. Then he flew into a frenzy of phrases about
‘golf-course communities and high-density situations facilitating magnificent view-
orientation possibilities’. In the spartan circumstances of Ayacucho the unreality
of real estate was extreme.
Bruno and Antoine found me there later listening to speculations on the view-
orientation facilitation situation in late 1975 in the Florida area. They brought
more news from the land of No Hay. We were in a fuel starvation situation.
Ayacucho had run out of petrol.
In the morning we hung about the gas stations, hoping for a miracle, and
shortly before lunch we were granted one. A tanker got through. With it came the
news that the usual route to Huancayo was washed out by the flooded river
Mantaro. The other route was long and circuitous, and would take at least two
days.
Twenty-five miles beyond Ayacucho I took a nail through my rear tyre. There
were two holes in the tube and I spent an hour and a half repairing them with
great care, because once again I was stuck with unreliable patches and no spare
tube. A truck packed with Indian passengers passed by. I heard the usual shouts
of ‘gringo’ accompanied by mocking remarks in the Indian language. As I stood
up a clod of wet mud splattered against my shirt and fell into the open wallet at
my waist. It did not seem funny at the time.
The Peruvian Indians, on the whole, looked very apathetic and ground down
by their toil and dreary poverty. The colour and vitality of their weaving always
seemed in direct contradiction to their lives, as though the inspiration for it had
died centuries before and the fingers were simply reproducing it by some freak
genetic mutation. Sometimes the apathy gave way to resentment, directed mainly
at gringos. Though it was the Spaniards who had set their heels on the necks of
the Indians long ago, the yanqui was the enemy now. All European travellers took
the brunt of it.
Bruno and Antoine had been cooking while I worked, and I ate something with
them quickly. We were at a very high altitude and hoped to get a good deal lower
before stopping. When I took the bike off the stand, the tyre collapsed again. I
tried my last resort, an aerosol puncture-repair canister carried for emergencies.
It felt like an emergency.
I pumped in the latex foam, and we set off. Within fifteen minutes the tyre was
flat again. Life could be like that; one damn thing after another. I pumped it up
and rode another fifteen minutes. So we went on for two hours; fifteen minutes of
riding, six minutes of pumping, with me rushing ahead full tilt in the darkness trying
to keep up a decent average speed.
The air felt appreciably warmer when we came to Pilpichaca and a small
roadside cafe, and we stayed there enjoying the company of the owners and their
children, but we were still at fourteen thousand feet and I had a chilly night in the
tent.
In the morning the others went on ahead while I stuffed a nineteen-inch front-
wheel tube into my eighteen-inch rear tyre – the obvious solution to my problem.
Then I set off to catch them.
The road ran alongside a lake, with snow caps in the distance. The views
everywhere were quite extraordinary, and would have been unforgettable had
there not been so much of them. The dirt roads, though, were variable and
difficult, some loose and slippery, some wet, some stony and ridged, and many
sudden surprises on bends. On one of them, sure enough, I slid gently off into a
muddy hole. It took me a long time to work the bike out, with everything unpacked
and spread around me. Normally I might have been more stoical about it, but a
lorry was parked within shouting distance, and the driver saw me struggling. I
called to him but he ignored me, and it was plain he wanted me to stew in my
juice. My mood became bitter as I reflected on Indian behaviour and I spent a
good deal of the day immersed in unworthy hatred of them.
Finally, though, the glorious landscapes around Huncavelica lifted me out of
this depression. I lay for a while among rocks of bizarre and brilliant colours,
sculpted by wind into the shapes of mythical creatures, and felt some sort of
benign force enter me from the hillsides. It was a very long and exhausting ride to
Huancayo, with mile after mile and hour after hour of sharp descents. My arms
and knees ached with the effort of holding my body back in the saddle. The
brakes and gears fought to hold the bike at a reasonable speed on the stony
surfaces, but I was feeling strong and capable again and arrived before night
happy and full of the splendours of the Andes.
It was too late to find Bruno and Antoine, who had had an address to find
outside the town. I went instead to the Tourist Hotel, a rather grand place,
thinking I had earned the luxury. It was a mountain resort hotel for a clientele of
comfortable means seeking relief from Lima. The restaurant was roomy and
correct, with the right napery and settings, and a menu in French. A middle-aged
English couple entered, each with a bull mastiff on a leash. Their tweedy clothes
and manner advertised their nationality before they had even spoken and I waited
breathlessly for confirmation. The man glanced around the room, looked
questioningly at his consort and uttered two words straight from the trenches of
the first world war:
‘Same hole?’ he asked. It would be hard to imagine a more eloquent phrase,
provided you knew the code.
Bruno, Antoine and I joined together again for the final descent to Lima. It
began at a final high peak, and there, at Morococha, under a shower of grimy
sleet, I saw what must be the highest ecological disaster area in the world. The
worst Welsh mining town could not have competed even in its heyday. Pitiful rows
of slum cottages, squalid railway yards, factories belching acrid smoke, vast
slag heaps oozing lurid and poisonous wastes into stagnant pools where ragged
children splashed barefoot, and all among unmelted drifts of yellow snow and
bitter cold. The road was broken up and treacherous, and the image of that place
stayed with me as a supreme symbol of the way men’s lives can be degraded in
the midst of such rich natural beauty. To create so much filth at fourteen
thousand feet is a quite diabolical achievement.
The Lucas people received me very well in Lima, and pampered me with
hospitality, while Bruno went off to stay with some French embassy people. I
pulled on overalls and buried myself in minor repairs, and then wandered rather
aimlessly about the city.
For once my own private introductions failed me. One friend of friends said on
the telephone that unfortunately she could not speak to me since she was at
lunch. Others used their hospitality as a defensive weapon, in a way like saying
‘We’ve let you sit in our splendid home, we’ve given you all you can eat and drink,
so you have no further claim on us. Good-bye.’ It was not consciously intended,
but there was so much jealous pride in these Lima socialites that natural feeling
could find no place. Small wonder that I found them insular and snobbish, and felt
a wave of sympathy for the Indians after all, who had to bear the brunt of all this
arrogance.
 Bruno lost his passenger, Antoine, at Lima, and went on alone in the 4L. We
agreed to stay together. During the four weeks we had spent in the mountains we
seemed to have reached an almost perfect understanding. I no longer felt the
same fear of losing contact with the people around us. With such distinctly
different vehicles we spent most of the time travelling alone, and we had already
demonstrated several times that neither one was prepared to fuss about the
other. We were ready to take our chances, each of us in his own way, and we
came together to cook, or camp together, to buy food or sometimes to halve the
cost of a hotel room, and of course to talk. It was not the same as travelling
alone, but I had to admit that the dour indifference of the people I had
encountered so far made me glad of company. I found the people wearisome to
contemplate. Travelling with Bruno was like a holiday.
And we were going to travel along the Pacific coast.
There would be fish, more fish than we had ever seen. Every-body told us.
You had only to tie a safety pin to a piece of string; and you would catch one.
And crabs! The biggest, meatiest crabs, in abundance. Lobsters! Delicious,
fresh, cheap. And oysters! The oysters, they said, were as big as dinner plates.
They were extraordinary, juicy, full of flavour and each one as nourishing as a
steak.
There would be hundreds of miles of empty beach, where it never, ever
rained, and we were going to roll gently along the coast, sleeping out, living off
the sea, saving money and having a fantastic time.
It took us too long to find our way out of Lima and onto the PanAmerican
Highway. We had thought it best to get as far from the capital as possible on the
first day, before looking for a beach., but at dusk we had managed only a
hundred miles and, what was worse, we were on a part of the road that circled
away from the coast. There were dirt roads leading off to the sea, and we took
one hoping we might still find a beach in time, but we seemed to be crossing an
artificial wasteland or army training ground. It was crisscrossed with tracks, and
signposts with names and numbers that told us nothing, and in the gathering dark
we saw headlights sweeping over great distances, and heard the rumbling of
engines. We went as far as we could, but found no beach. Finding two solid
signposts near each other, we hitched our hammocks between the roof rack of
the 4L and the signposts, fed ourselves and went to sleep. During the night,
several big trucks ground slowly past, thrashing their gears, and in the morning
we saw we were in a great field of natural salt deposits. In fact we had come
within a few hundred yards of the sea, and we scrambled over a bluff and down
to the water. There was no real beach, but a lot of rocks tumbling into the ocean,
and a few patches of sand. All over the rocks we saw crabs, big red and black
crabs, but how were we to catch them! We had no net, or bait. We had not even
bought a fishing line yet. It seemed, though, that if we were stealthy enough in
coming over a rock we might catch one with a suitable weapon before it had
realized its danger.
Bruno had something closely resembling a spear, and for a while we
scrambled over the rocks, lashing at the crabs and missing them by a hair’s
breadth, but always missing. I could see Bruno was getting furious. He hated to
be beaten by a crab. It was pretty obvious to both of us by this time that these
were not the great, fat, juicy eating crabs we had been promised, but it had
become a desperate sport. Bruno rushed off to the van and came back with a
wild look and a tiny nickel-plated revolver in his hand. It was time for me to get
out of the way.
Looking more like a crab himself, he crept over the rocks, and fired several
times, but without success. Finally he managed to corner a big one in a cleft. We
both looked and saw this insolent monster sitting there, pointing at us with its
eyes and munching slowly and steadily. It was point-blank range. Bruno fired
again and again, and the crab went on munching until the magazine was
exhausted. Then the crab turned away contemptuously and vanished. It had not
been trapped at all, merely unconcerned.
That day we travelled two hundred miles, almost to Chimbote, but passed no
town big enough to sell fishing equipment. However, we did find a beach. It
stretched off straight to the horizon, at low tide, with a thick blanket of sea weed
defining the high-tide mark. The smell of it was invigorating beyond belief, a
special quality, I always thought, of the Pacific. A little grass hut with a chimney
stood alone and deserted on the beach, but there was otherwise no sign that the
beach was known to man. We found driftwood and made a fire but, failing fish,
we dined on eggs, rice and onions, tasty but prosaic.
In the morning we found that the van was stuck in the sand. As we worked to
extricate it with shovel, ropes and brushwood, a girl appeared unexpectedly from
behind a low ridge of sandstone. She looked rather dusty, and her sleeveless
black top did not quite register with her bra. She asked for a lift to Chimbote,
saying that a man had dumped her there when she refused to do it.
Bruno took her in the van, and she showed us where to buy fishing lines,
hooks and sinkers. Some boys sold us a handful of big grey grubs they were
digging up on the beach, and we set off to find fish.
Our first efforts were not a success. At Puerto Mori we had to pay a toll just
to get on the beach, and caught nothing. The following day, beyond Trujillo, we
were unlucky again. There were only pebble beaches. Both of us constantly
snagged our lines, and I lost mine altogether. However, this time we had
thoughtfully provided against failure by buying a big fish at the market. It weighed
a kilo and a half, and was like a mullet. Grilled, it was wonderful, and we gorged
ourselves into a stupor. I at least was getting used to the idea that fishing was
one thing, and eating fish another, but the taste spurred us on.
The following night we found a beach close to a fishing village and saw
crates of the fish being brought ashore. We had no difficulty buying one, but still
we could catch nothing. Absolutely determined to win some kind of free booty
from the sea, I turned my greedy eyes on the small crabs that were dashing about
all over the beach.
‘If we got enough of them,’ I said, ‘maybe they would make a soup.’
I saw the same mad glint kindle in Bruno’s eye.
‘Allons-y,’ he shouted. In the dark, with a hurricane lamp, we rounded up
dozens of the miserable, dazed creatures. The result of all this slaughter was
quite inedible. Full of shame, we swept up the litter of pathetic limbs strewn
around us and buried it. The collective unconscious of the crab world was not
slow to revenge itself though. The next day I stepped into the water and felt a
most excruciating crunch on my foot from an enormous pincer. For an hour I
suffered intense pain and thought I would probably die.
We decided then that it was time to try for some of the other delights of the
Pacific.
‘At Chiclayo,’ said Bruno, ‘is the Tourist Hotel, where we will eat oysters and
lobsters. It will be wonderful. I have been told about it. Oysters and lobsters with
cold white wine. Prepare yourself.’
I had to admit the hotel looked promising. The entrance was grand, the
waiters wore starched white coats. There were table cloths and, wonder of
wonders, white bread rolls.
‘Waiter,’ I said, as one approached with a menu, ‘we want oysters, oysters
as big as this plate.’
‘No hay,’ he said.
‘In that case,’ said Bruno grandly, ‘we will have lobster.’
‘No hay,’ said the waiter, and offered us prawns in batter.
We looked at the menu. We knew it was no good, but could not bear to admit
that the feast was cancelled. The prawns were very expensive. Almost certainly
they were frozen, but we ordered them.
‘And a bottle of white wine,’ said Bruno.
‘No hay vino,’ said the waiter snootily. ‘It is forbidden to sell vino during the
revolution.’
That was how we first heard about the revolution. We stared at each other in
amazement. It was a serious matter. The police in Lima and Callao had staged a
coup. Many had been killed. The tanks were out in the streets and the fate of the
country was in the balance. So far the government had managed to survive.
There were rumours of chaos and bloodshed in Lima, but the only noticeable
effect in Chiclayo was that you could not get wine with your prawns.
Anyway the prawns were no good. They were fried in bread dough, and the
chef had forgotten to put in the prawns.
We left poorer but little wiser. At the next traffic light a dozy Peruvian driver
ran into me from behind, ripping off one of my panniers, denting the oil tank and
throwing me to the ground. It was that kind of day. I made a tremendous row
about it and the crowd came over gradually to my side. Reluctantly the driver
peeled off a 100 sole note, gave it to me and rushed away. I tied my broken box
together and took my 100 soles into a wine shop where I got a bottle from a man
who had seen too many revolutions. So something good came of that day,
though it was not over yet, by any means.
We rode on to Paita, which surprised me by being a really graceful town of
old and elegant wood-frame buildings. Unhappily the hotel was the grubbiest of all
the buildings, and far too expensive, so we had a chicken dinner and decided to
sleep out again. I remembered the telegraph poles lined up along the road on our
way into town and we drove out to sling our hammocks between a suitable pole
and opposite ends of the van.
As I was dozing off a faint creaking sound disturbed me, but before I had time
even to identify it, the pole came crashing down. My head was towards the pole,
and Bruno was asleep with his head at the van end of the hammock. In the
moonlight I saw the pole fall directly onto Bruno and the porcelain insulation
strike his head. I was so horrified imagining the weight of the pole behind that
sharp glassy knob that I did not even notice that I had fallen to the ground.
For a second or two he was deathly still as I struggled up in alarm from the
tangle of bedding. Then he woke. He said he had felt nothing. Astonished but
relieved, I began to consider what the police in Paita might think if they found
their communications cut during a revolution, and we decided to leave the site
rapidly. Pausing only to pull on our trousers and bundle all our loose things into
the van, we rushed off for another five miles. Then the bike blew a fuse and
stopped, without warning, for the first time on the entire journey.
Hoping we were out of range of suspicion, we stopped and slept. I rode back
to the scene of our ‘crime’ next morning to recover a piece of cord that Bruno
was missing. I was puzzled by the incident, wondering why the pole had fallen,
and why Bruno’s head was not split open. The cord was there. The pole lay as
we had left it, and I touched one end of it. It was as light as cork, having been
entirely eaten away inside by termites, leaving only a thin shell.
We rode a long way north that day, and were approaching Ecuador, and still
the idyllic beach had eluded us. We came then into a surreal landscape of wind-
whipped sandstone shapes where petroleum wells glittered and nodded
mysteriously in the wilderness, like a colony of extraterrestrial beings. When the
road swung back to the ocean after Talara I looked down and saw it, a broad,
gently curving bay embraced by headlands, a fine beach rising up to a cliff face,
two small brightly painted fishing boats beached, two others at anchor in the bay
and no other sign of people or habitation.
I rode down to it and dissolved in its beauty. The sand was soft and
unspoiled up under the cliff face, and washed clean and smooth down by the
ocean, with no dividing line of seaweed to attract irritating insects. Along one
part of the beach some black stone thrust up through the sand. It had been
lapped and hollowed by the tide into elegant geometrical forms, lovely in
themselves but also so deliberate and precise that I could almost fancy nature
mocking ‘Fit a function to this then, if you please.’
Other bigger rocks stood out into the ocean and offered good platforms for
fishing. Squadrons of grey pelicans cruised complacently a few yards offshore,
falling now and again like feathered bombs to prove the fish were there. Frigate
birds hovered above, printing their primaeval black silhouettes on pure blue. The
Pacific stretched calm and glorious under the afternoon sun and the cliffs around
glowed rosy and warm.
Bruno followed me down and parked the Renault on a hard shelf, by the rock
face, resisting the temptation for once to rush in and sink the van irrevocably into
the sugary sand. I unpacked the bike and constructed a nest for myself in the
sand. It was quite unnecessary, I could have done it later or not at all, but I
needed to do something to mark my arrival and stake my claim.
Then we fished, I from the rocks, Bruno by swimming out to one of the
anchored boats. I caught nothing but was filled with peace and pleasure. After an
hour I looked up to see a police car crawl up behind the Renault, its red light still
twirling on its roof. Two policemen were standing by the van, looking fairly
relaxed, and Bruno was swimming in to shore. I decided to stay where I was. It
was a disturbance. I could not help connecting it with the news from Lima, even
the telegraph pole we had brought down, but I preferred not to speak to
policemen.
I sneaked an occasional glance. Bruno seemed to be talking to them quite
amicably. Two fishermen walked past me along the beach dangling several big
fish at their sides, and stopped to join the discussion for a while. The fishermen
walked on. The police climbed back into their car and drove off. Bruno went back
to the water and swam out again to the boats.
Later Bruno showed me his fish. It was a huge thing with golden discs shining
on a gun-metal skin, called a sierra. He had not caught it, however. The police
had requisitioned two of them from the fishermen and passed one over to us.
‘What did the police want?’ I asked.
‘Who knows,’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe they come every day for a free fish. They
warned me not to go out too far. Nada mas.’
It was an odd, meaningless event. Nothing ever came of it, and I never forgot
it either. The sierra was one of the most prized fish on that coast, and we must
have each eaten about two pounds of it, grilled to perfection. I lay back with tea
and cigarettes at exquisite peace with the world.
Even Bruno was unusually calm. He was a good traveller, tough and
inquisitive and (it must be said) unusually flexible for a Frenchman. But he was in
his mid-twenties with a lot of life ahead of him, and in a bit more of a hurry than I
was. That night he seemed willing to let time stand still.
‘Who wants to be in Paris in some shitty box?’ he said. ‘I wish I didn’t have to
go back.’
‘Why go then?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. It’s expected. It’s the system – and there’s the family farm to
sort out now that my father is dead.
‘But I don’t want to get fucked in that bloody machine, stuck in a box for the
rest of my days,’ he said angrily. The French call a business a box, one of their
better ideas.
‘There was a man in Paraguay, out in the Chaco, a Frenchman. I really
admired him. Self-made, self-taught, he lived in his own world, surrounded by
books and his farm. But his mind, it was extraordinary. He thought everything out
for himself, and his ideas were original, marvellous. That is a life I envy, but I
could never do it alone. I suppose I’m bound to get a job for a while…it’s not too
easy these days.’
Lying on that warm beach under the stars it seemed like the utmost folly even
to contemplate it.
We stayed there another day and a night. Some of the time I sat and studied
the crabs. They were small and lived in holes spaced about a foot apart. Around
the holes was a curious pattern like the footprints of many birds which first
attracted my attention. I waited to see what it was. After a while the crabs would
start to emerge, popping their brightly coloured periscope eyes over the top
before daring to climb out. Almost invariably each crab had a small ball of sand
tucked under one arm, reminding me of an American footballer about to make a
run. Some crabs kicked the ball, others walked a little way and then broke it up.
Either way they then went over the loose sand with their pincers, stamping it
down to leave those marks I had noticed.
In front of me were three holes set to form a triangle. One crab sat
confidently at the mouth of its hole watching the other two. When another crab
appeared the first crab made a rush for it, but always failed to get there before
the other had bunked down its hole again. After many unsuccessful attempts, the
aggressor decided on a final solution. It filled up both the other holes with sand,
stamping down on them until they had disappeared. I waited a long while to see if
either buried crab would reappear but did not see them again.
I had no idea what the game was but, for all its strangeness, the episode had
an uncomfortable familiarity.

From that beach the road led almost directly into Ecuador. Right up to the
frontier the country continued barren and rainless. Immediately beyond it we were
enveloped by lush wet vegetation, waist-high grass, marshy land, muddy roads
and mile upon mile of banana plantations.
In Quito we were accommodated by two Frenchmen seeing out their military
service as teachers attached to the legation. Of all their luxuries, we appreciated
most the hi-fi. For an entire afternoon we both lay in their living room with the
volume turned full on, playing, again and again, the same recording of Wagner’s
overture to Tannhäuser, until we were drunk and saturated with it.
The teachers themselves, for all their hospitality, were less satisfying. One of
them was particularly boorish. We all joked at times about the awkwardness of
South Americans, but he had no room for humour.
‘Il faut les supprimer,’ he said again and again. ‘They must be put down.’
When I realized that he was seriously thinking of exterminating them, like vermin, I
became rather uncomfortable and was glad to leave.
In Quito, at a crossroads, I encountered two Americans riding a Norton
Commando. We all stopped, on a whim, and talked for a while in a cafe. The
meeting led us to stay together for ten days in a hacienda that they were sharing
with some others near Otavalo. It was an enchanting experience, not least
because we were there long enough to know and talk to some of the Indian girls
who came to help with the house and garden. Even Bruno contained his
impatience well. The Americans, Bob and Annie, left a deep impression on me.
They were, at that moment, contemplating marriage. Indeed they made a valiant
attempt to achieve it in the next town, but were defeated by the residence
qualifications. So they were happy, of course, but their happiness had an
unusual quality of clarity and depth, like a clear pool that invited others to jump in
and share.
After a few days they spoke to me about a ranch somewhere north of San
Francisco, and some people they thought I would like to meet. I knew this was
significant to them, but they were being deliberately vague and so I asked no
questions. I had an address of friends where we could meet up again in
California, and I put it aside until then. It always seemed strange afterwards to
recall the apparently haphazard way in which we had met. It was one of those
meetings which, with all the hindsight in the world, must have been a pure chance
that changed my life.
The Andes resolutely refused to pall. North of the equator they became more
beautiful than ever, as they spread out across Colombia. From Ipiales to Pasto
to Popayán, I was prepared to swear that I would never see anything more
beautiful than these great mountainsides clad in greenery and bursting with
flowers and flame trees. The homes were developed, and built in the most
pleasing shape of all, around patios, with red-tiled roofs running out over
verandahs. Unlike Peru, Colombia was a soft, habitable country, with streams
and waterfalls, and good earth apparently everywhere.
It also had the reputation of being the most dangerous country on earth.
Throughout South America I had been accumulating stories of what happened to
travellers in Colombia. Armed robberies at night, tourists shot in hotel rooms,
fingers cut off for rings, watches ripped off wrists, every kind of daring hit-and-run
theft, and a tradition of murder and violence among themselves unparalleled in
modern history.
From the beginning of the journey friends had suggested that I should carry
some kind of weapon. Some had ideas, borrowed from political thrillers, of guns
that broke down into pieces that looked like motorcycle parts, or tent poles. At
least a small pistol like Bruno’s, they thought, could be hidden away somewhere.
Guns never made any sense to me. When I pictured myself fighting off bandits
with firearms I knew the idea was ridiculous.
For one thing, if I were to be attacked at all it would almost certainly be on
the road. Short of having rocket launchers slung under the handlebars it would be
impossible for me to defend myself while riding. By the time I stopped the bike and
got to my gun it would all be over.
But my revulsion for firearms went much deeper than that. I was convinced,
from the start, that merely to carry a gun invites attack. When there is a fear of
hostility my mind is torn between two kinds of response: to lick ’em or to join ’em.
With a gun in my pocket I would be thinking more about licking them, and I have
come to believe firmly that what is going on in my mind is reflected in a thousand
little ways by the way I behave towards others. I am not beyond believing that
just having that gun in my pocket would be enough to get me shot. Anyway, there
was a notion of manliness associated with weaponry that I could not
understand. Guns seemed to me to speak only of fear. I would prefer my chances
of walking empty-handed up to any bandit, rather than trying to shoot him first,
and all the accounts I later heard seemed to bear me out.
Even so, it was impossible not to be impressed by tales of highway robbery in
Colombia, and I decided at least to make life a bit more difficult for the robber. I
bought three padlocks and a chain to secure my leather tank bags.
The only robbery I suffered in Colombia was soon after we arrived there while
we were staying in Popayán. I was standing in a grocer’s shop with the contents
of my pocket on the counter, searching for loose change, when someone deftly
pocketed my keys. It was a quite senseless theft. The keys were surely useless
to the thief but I had lost the duplicates and before I could leave Popayán I had
to have my three padlocks sawn off with a hacksaw,
So much for paranoia, I thought, and tried never to be bothered with it any
more.
Bruno and I had come a long way together by then. We were two thousand
miles north of Lima and into our third month. He still hoped to reach Mexico with
his van. It was struggling valiantly and looked like getting there against all the
odds when we left Popayán for La Plata. The dirt road was winding and
mountainous as they all were, but it was narrower than most and, for the first
time, I had trouble with the lorries.
Normally the lorries and I co-existed. They swept along regardless of all other
traffic, indifferent to accidents, noisy, filthy, painted and repainted with wonderful
fairground colours, and brave mottos, spraying transistorized music and football
commentaries from their cabs. They never went for me, and I never duelled with
them. It was no part of my pride to fight battles with Colombian lorry drivers.
Where there was room, I slipped past. Where there wasn’t I got out of the way.
On the road to La Plata it was distinctly harder to get out of the way, though
it was really just a matter of going slower, and being ready for a lorry to appear
around every bend. Most of the bends were concealed and I had a lot of
anticipating to do, but that was all right. That also was what my journey was
about – a sort of Zen meditation on reality. I went more slowly and appreciated it
all the more.
Bruno’s case, however, was different. All the anticipation in the world could
not get him past a lorry where there was no room. I had been waiting a very long
time for him at a bare-boarded cafe next to a brothel in a mountaintop village
when a bus driver came through and said my friend was in trouble. I found him
with one wheel in a ditch and up against a concrete culvert. His half-shaft had
broken its joint. We found eventually that he could still crawl along and we crept
painfully back to Popayán. I was not sorry to be back. I had found Popayán to be
one of the finest cities, ranking with Cuzco and Ouro Prêto as places that
generated contentment. I think there must be happy occasions when the size of a
community, the appreciation of the people and the shape and disposition of their
dwellings all coincide at a point most favourable to the human spirit. These three
cities seem to have passed through that time, and the memory lingers on.
We moved into one of the most beautiful hotels in South America, El
Monasterio, and shared a room for $8.00, which we thought of as a lot of money,
having lost touch with the Western world. Bruno put on a virtuoso performance
for the Renault agent, and had his half-shaft replaced for pennies. We gorged
ourselves on the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of Popayán, and Bruno left
early next day, determined this time to drive as slowly as humanly possible, while
I went looking for someone to saw through my padlocks.
I left at lunchtime, in glorious weather, hoping to miss the regular afternoon
storm. Then a fuse blew again and I spent too long trying to trace the fault, with
the tank off and everything unpacked. I just had time to put in a temporary hot
line from the coils to the battery and get packed up before the storm broke over
me and made me very wet, but it was over soon enough. The sun came out, and
dried me through and through. There was so much natural beauty on that road
that I swung out of control and managed a thirty-foot skid on loose dirt across a
blind bend.
When I thought what a lorry would have done to me there, I had to chalk that
one up as a life lost.
But it was Bruno’s day of reckoning, not mine. Incredibly, he met another lorry
and this time there was not even a ditch to hide in. They both braked masterfully.
The impact was not enough to hurt either driver, but the Renault was converted
from a rectangle into a lozenge. I was not present at this sad scene. Bruno
spoke of it later with much emotion, although like a true gaucho of the highway he
did not allow grief to unbalance him. Many Colombian lorry drivers assembled at
the scene he said, and they were able, by force of numbers, to persuade Bruno
that the accident had been his fault and that he owed six hundred pesos for the
repair of a lorry fender and the repainting of several hearts and flowers. Leading
with his right wheel several inches ahead of his left, he was able to meander on
along the road to La Plata, and I overtook the pathetic pair later. The geometry
of the car was certainly peculiar, and his front tyres were almost bald after only
thirty miles.
We decided to make a camp and go on to La Plata in the morning, and I
found a green field leading down to a river. We drove in, and halfway down the
field sank into a bog. For half an hour or more Bruno laboured to bring his
crippled car back up to the gate. He could get speed up across the field but
always that last short stretch when he had to turn up the hill was too much, and
he slithered to a halt. Finally, in desperation, using every device we had learned
on the way, we heaved the van out. The field was a horrifying sight, denuded of
pasture, rutted and ripped to shreds. It seemed better to move on before the
owner came and shot us. So we came to La Plata after all and took a room at
the Residencias Berlin. There we made the acquaintance of Jesus and Domitila
Clavijo, their ten children and Roberto the parrot.
Domitila, the mother, was a woman of great vigour and good humour. She
bustled constantly, in the kitchen, the dining room, the many bedrooms scattered
around the yard, issuing instructions to her small army. Her children, boys and
girls ranging between eighteen and zero, seemed exceptionally bright and well
mannered. We played chess with the boys, talked to them all and admired the
way they supported their mother. They seemed alert and generous and sensitive
to feeling to a degree far beyond what I would consider normal in a European or
North American home. Something of this had already impressed me about
Colombia in general, as though the very hazards and cruelties of life there were
bound to generate their opposite qualities.
The father, Jesus, made a strong impression also, but of a quite different
kind. He sat generally on a chair in the dining area, a middle-aged man with a
spreading bulk, a lightly woven hat perched over an expressionless face and his
left hand in his pocket. The hand was so firmly in the pocket that I had the feeling
his sleeve was sewn to his trousers. He spoke softly and sibilantly, but he
exerted great authority over his family. They clearly feared and respected him as
much as they loved their mother. He did nothing in the hotel, though he had some
land outside La Plata which he supervised. On Saturdays he went to the billiard
saloon and drank with his cronies. The Saturday I was there he returned drunk,
accused one of his daughters of whoring in town, brought several of them to
tears and then went to sleep it off.
One of his sons explained this to us.
There had been a time, not long before, when Jesus’ family and friends had
been the kings of La Plata. They ran it, in every way. They decided what would be
built, what would be torn down, who could live there and who couldn’t, who
should pay what to whom, and who was guilty or innocent. There were no police.
Government agents were sent packing with bullets at their tails. La Plata, like
most small towns of the interior, was a law unto itself, and Jesus and his friends
were IT.
One day, at the billiard saloon where the weekly council meetings were held,
there was a disagreement. It was a trivial enough matter, something like whether
the bus should stop outside Manuel’s store or José’s barber shop. But feeling
was already running high between the Jesus faction and others. Jesus had his
hand on the wooden frame of a billiard table when a rival drew a machete and
sliced it off. Not satisfied with that, he chopped through the middle of Jesus’
brother’s hand as well.
When the brothers returned with their stumps sewn up, they murdered their
assailant and his uncle, and narrowly missed his wife. Those were the days!
They were over now, though. The government had finally found enough soldiers
to bring their own brand of law to La Plata, and Jesus now exercised his authority
less directly. It was later in the same conversation that I discovered that the field
we had ripped up and ruined almost certainly belonged to Jesus. I decided, in the
circumstances, to keep the matter to myself.
For Bruno it was a godsend that the police were back in La Plata. His van
was obviously undriveable. It had shredded two tyres in thirty miles. We were
already within a few days of the Caribbean coast, when the car would in any
case have to be shipped to Panama at great expense. It did not add up, and
after swallowing a few times, Bruno decided to let the van go.
Colombians are insane about buying things from abroad. They are convinced
that everything foreign is a bargain, and there would have been no difficulty
selling the van, wrecked as it was, but for the fact that it was quite illegal and the
buyer would have difficulty getting licence plates. A policeman solved the problem
by buying it for himself.
A closing-down auction was held in the courtyard of the Residencias Berlin.
Buyers came from all around. There was foam plastic, kitchenware, clothing,
even an oil painting, and I added my obsolete air mattress to the display. The
bargaining continued with animation through the day. Domitila and I fought well
into the night over the mattress, and eventually we all fell exhausted and satisfied
into our beds. Next day Bruno picked up his two leather grips and climbed onto a
bus, and my life with Bruno came to an end. Both of us agreed it had been
wonderful and unforgettable, and we had no problem about going our separate
ways. We would meet again. No doubt.

It was March when Bruno took the bus. I rode off the following day, first to
Bogotá, then to Medellin and on to the Caribbean port of Cartagena, up and
down across hundreds of miles of valleys and mountains, all bewitchingly
beautiful.
I bargained for space on an island trading vessel and sailed to San Andrés,
known to English pirates as St Andrews. From there, for the first and last time, I
took to the air. Honduras Airlines stuffed my bike onto the flight deck of a
Lockheed Electra, right behind the pilot, and flew me to Panama, looking down on
the canal. And Panama, I told myself, was only a hop skip and jump from the
USA. It was a silly mistake to deceive myself in this way, just laziness and wishful
thinking.
The lure and challenge of South America had always distracted me from that
string of ‘banana republics’ connecting it to North America, and I had paid no real
attention to its geography.
In Panama I had to face up to the fact that there were at least six distinct
countries to traverse, and five thousand miles to ride, before I reached
California. It made me sad to realize that what should have been an exciting
prospect left me rather dispirited.
The ten thousand miles since Fortaleza had been hard but I loved the
physical work of travelling and it was not that which exhausted me.
More difficult to sustain, I found, was the daily grind of contact with the Latin
American personality. It should not have come as a surprise. Where else in the
world is the male individual so insecure, divided as he is between the Latin and
Indian cultures, with the blood of both in his veins? The Latin American has no
tribe to fall back on, as the African does, no reliable judiciary to defend his rights
as the European does, no social ideal or sacred constitution to appeal to as the
North American does, no pervasive mythology to soften life as it does in Asia,
and not even an ideology to subscribe to, as does the Russian or Chinese.
Without wealth, what is there left to him but his manhood, to be flaunted and
defended at every occasion?
Travelling, you meet it again and again, the unspoken question:
‘How does this man threaten my virility?’
Every day, in some little way, I had had to damp down fears, still suspicions,
prove that I was not there to make a fool of anyone. All the more difficult when
people do not have the information you need, cannot supply the thing you want,
are reminded of their own ignorance and the chronic material shortages with
which they live.
People can say ‘No hay’ only so often before it changes to ‘Fuck off.’
In the land of No Hay, they play Hunt the Scapegoat, and every gringo
qualifies. It was a constant preoccupation to escape that label, and find a way
to meet with people in a more human and personal way.
Of course, where people live in one place and get used to each other they get
along fine, usually, just as they do everywhere else in the world. Nowhere could I
have found warmer or more generous friends than those I stayed amongst in Rio,
in Curitiba, Bariloche, Santiago, La Plata, Medellin and Cartagena. Once contact
is made and the intention is clear there is no shortage of trust and warmth.
And then there are also the exceptional people who make nonsense of all
generalizations. At the roadside in the southwest of Argentina I was struggling to
mend a puncture on a hot dry day when a man stopped and came over with the
sole purpose of encouraging me. I could see by his dress and the car he drove
that his means were limited, but he put his hand in his pocket and brought out a
bundle of paper pesos with several notes of a quite high denomination.
‘If you are short of money,’ he said, ‘please take what you need.’
I needed nothing, but I was overwhelmed by such spontaneous generosity,
and his single gesture helped me later to swallow a dozen rebuffs. Unfortunately
there were too few like him to absorb all the punishment, and by the time I got to
Panama I was feeling the cumulative effect of it.
There had been other pressures too. My relations with the Sunday Times
seemed to have gone sour. After a promising start in Brazil, Argentina and Chile,
none of my articles had been published and there were ominous signals about
money. Prices were rising constantly. Inflation had made a mockery of my original
budgets, and it was obvious that I would need more money, even though I was
living on the slenderest of shoestrings. As I struggled in and out of ditches and
became a connoisseur of cockroaches, 1 was bitterly aware that there were
people in London who thought my journey was a frivolous waste of funds.
I had hoped for news in Panama that would at least state the position
clearly. Panama was an important drop along my route, The Lucas Company had
a huge depot there in the Free Zone, and it was the first forwarding address since
Lima. There were tyres, brake linings and tubes waiting, but no mail, no answers
to questions, no news from anyone.
It was this uncertainty as much as anything, I suppose, that focussed my
mind on California, because I could not expect to have the future of my journey
resolved until I got to the States and was once more in easy communication with
England. Thinking about California, I could not resist anticipating the reception I
had been promised there by Triumph. The American market was vital to Triumph’s
sales, and their headquarters were in Los Angeles. There had been talk of a
hero’s welcome, and in my depressed state I thought about it more than was
healthy. So far, on my journey I had scrupulously resisted travelling as though to
a destination. My entire philosophy depended on making the journey for its own
sake, and rooting out expectations about the future. Travelling in this way, day
by day, hour by hour, trying always to be aware of what was present and to
hand, was what made the experience so richly rewarding. To travel with one’s
mind on some future event is futile and debilitating. Where concentration is
needed to stay alive, it could also be disastrous.
I was aware of the danger, and tried hard to recover my earlier spirit of
enjoyment and optimism about the journey. The squalor and steam heat of
Panama did not help. I tried to wring some interest out of the hotel where I was
staying. It was more of a boardinghouse, really, with guests, mostly single
women, staying for longish periods and doing contract jobs in the city. I met Pete
there, in the kitchen, cooking his lunch. One of the rules was that guests may not
cook in the kitchen, but Pete was granted a special dispensation, he said, on the
grounds that ‘if I can’t cook, I’m leaving’. The proprietor’s wife, a knotty white
lady wrapped in kimonos, took a realistic view because he lived there by the
month and paid the daily rate of $6.00.
He offered me a drink, and we sat sweating and almost naked under the fan
in his bedroom, drinking rum and Coke. He drank an awful lot of it. He was a
construction engineer, young and good-looking, but there were dark stains
spreading around his eyes like a kind of rot.
I put it down to the booze, but he swore that he could leave it alone. ‘Never
when I’m working,’ he said. ‘Only afterwards.’ He just happened not to be working.
In that case, I thought, it must be the screwing. Pete told me fairly quickly
that he had screwed every girl in the hotel. Without exception. It was important to
him to make no exceptions, though some were considerably less inviting than
others.
‘Staying here is like a licence to screw,’ he told me seriously. ‘The girls are all
very discreet, they never talk about it, but I don’t mind you knowing. That’s why I
don’t mind paying six dollars a day. It’s worth it.’
I was particularly interested in Pete because he had just ridden a three-
cylinder Kawasaki on almost the same route from Rio to Panama as I had taken.
I was fascinated but appalled by his account of it.
He hated it. He hated the country and the people. A lot of the time he rode at
night so that he would not have to look at things. Between rides he said he had
spent most of his time ‘fucking and drinking in bars’.
‘Remember that bridge coming into Ecuador?’ he asked.
There was only one bridge he could have meant. It was built like a railway
track, but with planks instead of rails to take the wheels of cars. The sleepers
were set about eighteen inches apart, and there was nothing between them but
air, and only river beneath. It might not have been so bad if the planks had not
kept changing direction, so that it was impossible to build up any momentum. I
had fallen halfway across and was lucky not to have gone through into the river.
Bob and Annie had also fallen on it with their Norton.
‘Sure I do,’ I said. ‘I fell on it.’
He howled, and grabbed my hand.
‘Me too, pal. Which way did you fall?’
‘Into the middle.’
‘Jesus, I only fell against the side. Boy, that was some ride. I’m really glad to
meet you, pal.’
The important thing for Pete was to have done it. The whole journey had
taken him two months, against my six, and he had spent $10,000 on the way. He
said there wasn’t anywhere where he would not rather have been in a car.
 The hotel did not help me out of my depression. Nor did the slight touch of
fever I felt now and then. When I was invited to stay with some people in the
Canal Zone, I accepted gratefully. They were exceptionally kind and considerate
people, US Navy Captain John Mallard and his wife, Anne, living in quarters on a
Marine base, and for two weeks they gave me total insulation from care or
responsibility in that strange, artificial world of the peacetime military
establishment.
Captain Mallard, a submariner, was second in command of the Canal Zone,
and among the most liberal and understanding men I have met. While
Panamanians were hurling insults at the USA he never allowed a prejudiced or
intolerant remark to pass his lips, and he seemed deeply concerned that the
American presence there should benefit Panamanians in every way possible. In
the year of Watergate, he was a fine and reassuring ambassador for his country.
So I tried to rebuild my morale, and to some extent succeeded, but still I
could not be rid of the thought of California as the promised land where I should
be able to shrug off all my cares and woes. I set off, finally, just before the rains
came, with the conflicting ambitions of seeing all the remarkable things there
were to see in Central America and, at the same time, to get through it all as fast
as possible. It was not a very propitious programme.
On my way out of Panama I ride up to Volcan at ten thousand feet for the
pleasure of feeling cool. I meet a man in the street who tells me I can sleep on
the porch of the motel that he manages. Free. There are two pillars under a roof
where I can sling my hammock. As I’m making myself coffee, my benefactor
comes across.
‘What a remarkable coincidence that we should meet,’ he says. ‘If you had
arrived a few minutes earlier, or later, we would have missed each other.’
I agree that this is true, though he is straining my sense of the miraculous.
He has come to save me with two naï ve religious tracts translated into
Spanish and distributed by a North American mission. One is called ‘Sospendido
Por Un Hilo’, the other ‘Pessadoy Hallado Falto’. The titles are literal translations
of the English idioms ‘Hanging By a Thread’ and ‘Weighed and Found Wanting’.
US advertising companies in South America also translate their domestic
slogans into Spanish, word for word.
Coca-Cola has Chispa de la Vida for the Spark of Life.
McDonald’s Su Clase de Lugar is Your Kind of Place.
Everywhere in South America I have seen these crude images imposed on the
Spanish culture, like a terrible revenge. What the Spaniards did to the Indians by
the force of arms is now being done to them by the mighty yanqui dollar.
 The border crossing from Panama to Costa Rica is quick and civilized. Soon
afterwards I find a small town with a small restaurant that looks irresistibly clean
and appetizing. Full of meat, eggs, rice, coffee and well-being I ride on taking a
rosy view of this nice country. When I run out of petrol, a laughing Indian woman
sells me a litre at a farmhouse door. It’s all she has, and it’s not enough to get
me to a pump, but some telephone repair people stop and siphon a gallon out of
their tank. There’s something not quite right with the bike. I change plugs, which
improves it, but there’s still a problem. In the early afternoon a mountain range
takes me by surprise, lifting me high up into a freezing fog. I wasn’t expecting
such dramatic features in such a small country, and have to laugh at my own
foolishness. On the other side of this range it is raining. On the way into San
José I stop for a coffee, feeling cold and a bit depressed. Two girls are sitting
nearby, and one of them is quite beautiful. She smiles at me and instantly I am
happy again. For the second time I have to laugh at myself, but this time with
more pleasure.
Outside the cafe a gringo is standing by the bike. He is called Lee, and he
came down with some friends on two Harley Sportsters and a truck from Boston.
They have opened a restaurant next door called La Fanega, where you can get
hamburgesas, qiitsoburgesas, pescadoburgesas, machoburgesas, draft beer and
music. They have a spare bed, so why don’t I stay the night?
Next day I look in my address book. Starting with friends in Argentina, I have
a chain of friends of friends stretching right through Central America, and there’s
one here, just handy to celebrate my birthday.
 Soon I am sitting at the poolside of a very swank country club with a
completely different set of people, listening to an impeccably turned-out honey
from Florida in tight white slacks and a ‘sweet American ass’. Her provocatively
buck-toothed cocktail sipper’s mouth is dispensing gossip about the Smiths, who,
it seems, are the world’s ugliest and most disagreeable couple. He is a rich
alcoholic, and she is a cosmetic surgery freak who has just had two inches of fat
removed from her abdomen.
‘She’ll drop her pants anywhere just to show off the scars. Ain’t she gross?
Last time he drank himself almost to death she hired a Lear jet and flew him to
Miami. It burns my stomach.’
Costa Rica is popular with the Lear jet set, and hospitable to gringos, but I
have to admit that life here seems more pleasant for just about everybody. I
could stay a long time, wandering between the sea and the mountains, but the
rains are close on my heels and it’s time to move on.

Nicaragua has a volcano called Santiago.

I have been sitting on the lip looking down into it for an hour, completely
mesmerized. Next to the Iguaçu Falls, it is the most impressive natural
phenomenon I have seen. First there is an enormous bowl, which funnels into an
even blacker cup. At the bottom of the cup is a pipe leading to the centre of the
earth, and in this pipe I can see molten rock surging and splashing. It is cherry
red and although it is a long way away, it seems to come very close as I stare at
it, so intense is the glow and so fascinating the thought of what it is, full of
mysterious implications, like a moon shot in reverse. I am told that the
government uses it as a good way to make political opponents disappear without
trace.

In Honduras the men seem to get a bit taller and slimmer again, and have a
tendency to wear cowboy hats and walk like Gary Cooper. There’s a quite
wonderful Mayan ruin at Copán where I spend a day. In the grassy clearings
sensuous bodies stand sculpted into stone slabs, birds sing thrilling songs and a
few adventurous sightseers make pleasant company, but I can’t stave off the
tiredness and loneliness that is creeping up on me more and more often now.
A dirt road takes me fifty miles or so through forest to the frontier of
Guatemala at a small border post. On the Honduras side I pay another dollar to
some nebulous authority called Transit, for what I don’t know. I paid them on the
way in, as well as customs and immigration. They all pretend it’s official, but you
are lucky to see a receipt, and though a dollar or two is not much, it adds up
when you’re scraping along. On the Guatemalan side the first thing I see is a
battered desk by the roadside and a little fat man who needs a shave and wears
something vaguely like a uniform. He says he is the army, and I have to pay him a
dollar.
‘How do you say in English,’ he says in English, ‘when you have too much in
the night?’
‘Hangover,’ I say.
‘Hamburger?’
‘No, hangover’ – and I write it out for him. I HAVE A HANGOVER.
‘I have a hamburger,’ he reads, entertaining us both. I begin to like him a little,
but I’m still pissed off about the dollar.
‘Can I have a receipt?’ I ask, trying to make a nuisance of myself.
He laughs happily. ‘Oh no, this is for me. So that tonight I can make another
hamburger.’
For once I don’t mind losing my dollar. That’s how I like my corruption –
honest.
There would be marvellous things to see and do in Guatemala, and I have
planned to take advantage of them, but the excitement has evaporated. It is
becoming terribly difficult for me now to get interested in anything except the
route north. The Pan-American Highway stretches out ahead of me, unbroken, all
the way to the USA, and I feel myself being swept along it, with no time, no
energy, for anything more. I see the fascination of these Central American
countries but can’t drive my imagination to take hold. Everything in me now cries
‘Enough. It’s time to stop. Give us a rest.’
The bike is tired also, but that is only a figure of speech. I do not credit the
bike with feelings. If it has a heart and soul of its own I have never found them.
People I meet are often disappointed that the bike does not even have a name.
They often suggest names (‘The Bug’ is top favourite) but none of them seem to
do anything for the bike or for me. For me it remains a machine, and every
attempt to turn it into something else strikes me as forced and silly.
But it is not just a machine, not by any means, and I respect it totally for the
very special thing it is. I know that all its idiosyncrasies, the things that make it
quite different from any other motorcycle, are the result of what we have gone
through together. The way I sit, my touch on the throttle, the speeds I travel at
and the mistakes I make are what fashioned it into something uniquely connected
with me. Like those intricately sculpted slabs of stone I have been looking at in
Copán, my bike records the passage of time and events. Its surface is richly
engraved by incidents of twenty months and twenty-five thousand miles. It bears
major inscriptions from Benghazi, the Nile ferry, the desert, the Zoe G, a front
wheel blow-out in Brazil, a bad fall in Argentina, a ditch in Colombia, and almost
every day has contributed some minor mark somewhere. It has been moulded by
me, and to a large extent it has really become an extension of myself.
When I talk to it, which I sometimes do in moments of concern or
exasperation, I am of course talking to myself. And when I say it is tired, I mean
that it reflects my own fatigue. For I am tired also of looking after it, and as we
approach Los Angeles, which is as much home for the Triumph as it is for me, I
spend less and less time fussing over it, telling myself that it can surely manage
the last four thousand miles on its own. I stop worrying about little faults, and
cure symptoms rather than look for causes.
I am spending less and less time on keeping up my own systems too. My
clothes are getting ragged, my boots leak badly. Since Honduras the strap on my
helmet has been broken, but I won’t do anything about it. My goggles are either
lost or scratched or without padding. My left-hand glove has most of the leather
missing on the palm, and two fingers are poking through. Only the flying jacket is
actually improved, because in Buenos Aires it became so dilapidated that I had
to sew a new skin over the sleeves and shoulders, equipped with glamorous-
looking fur cuffs and collar.
So the bike and I are both running down. In Costa Rica I was lucky to get a
new rear chain sprocket, for the old one would certainly not have lasted through,
but otherwise I am no longer the fussy owner I once was. As long as it goes, I’ll
not ask for more.
In Guatemala, passing Lake Atitlán, I ride into heavy rain. The highway is
broad and empty, but my goggles are misting up. I am so used to being in motion
on the bike that it never occurs to me to stop and I’m trying to wipe the inside of
the lenses with my fingers as I go along.
Suddenly I realize that I have wandered into the middle of the road, and look
up to find a huge truck bearing down on me out of the rainstorm. It is far too late
for me to react, and it is entirely by chance that the truck misses me, by a hair’s
breadth. As I realize what I did, how close I came to being literally wiped out,
obliterated, I feel that fearful rush of heat and cold sweat that makes the heart
nearly burst, and feel immensely grateful for the warning while wishing I knew to
whom to be grateful. A God would come in useful at times like that.
I can count only two other times when I came so close to an end.
I must be really tired at the back of my skull. I must be careful. I must never
let that happen again.

By the time I got to Mexico City one cylinder was smoking just as it had in
Alexandria, but this time I was better prepared. I had two spare pistons with me,
both oversize so that I could rebore if necessary. Was it necessary with only
three thousand miles to go? This time though, a friendly Triumph agent was there
with all the equipment and the will to help. It seemed silly not to take advantage.
Friends of Bruno put me up; Mr Cojuc, the agent, did the rebore; I put it together
again in his workshop and, if for no other reason, the close contact this gave me
with Mexican workers made the experience worthwhile.
The job itself unfortunately was only a partial success. As well as one
cylinder getting badly scored, the exhaust valve was pitted. I had no spare valve
and there was only just enough metal left to grind it in again. It should have been
all right, but it wasn’t.
 At Guanajuato, I began to suspect trouble, and as I pushed north it got
worse. Those June days riding up through bone-dry Mexico were probably the
hottest ever. Hotter than the Sudan, hotter even than the Argentine Chaco. My
face reddened in spite of all the weathering it had had, my forearms blistered and
the engine ran hotter and hotter.
Somewhere after Culiacán I lost the flying jacket. It had finally become
unwearable in the heat, and I had tied it on behind over the red bag, but the heat
must have dulled my senses for it was not tied as it should have been.
Somewhere among unnumbered kilometres of open road it blew away. I was
utterly distraught when I found out, perhaps abnormally so. I searched the road
for an age, finding no sign of it, and the searching intensified my grief until I had
to stop looking because I could bear it no longer. It had become something of
extraordinary significance to me, that jacket, closely connected as it was to the
love I had left behind me, and losing it broke an important link with the past. For
the first time I felt that I had gone too far ever to go back to what I had been
before, and I began to understand just how much unconscious effort I had been
putting into keeping my connections with the past alive. It left a bleak and empty
space.
Beyond Navojoa I realized that a valve was burning out. The left cylinder was
misfiring constantly, power was dropping off, fuel consumption going up.
Eventually I found that by riding with the choke fully in at fifty miles an hour I
could still get reasonable power. At other speeds it was pretty bad, and of course
it was not going to get any better. I was afraid that the bike might soon become
undriveable, and as I came closer to the U S A it felt as though some malign fate
was determined to keep me south of the border.
I last touched the coast at Guaymas, and swam in the ocean there knowing
that I would not see the Pacific again until Los Angeles. That southern Pacific
coast had come to mean a great deal to me. Ever since I first came to it in the
south of Chile, at that lovely stretch around Pucatrihue, I was powerfully drawn
to it, and my mind ranged over all the memories of sunsets and surf, salt and
seaweed, frigate birds, pelicans and sea gulls. There were those same pelicans
at Guaymas plunging into the waves around me, wearing the same self-satisfied
look on their faces. In the Gold Museum at Bogotá there had been a gold
necklace with a row of birds delicately fashioned from wire, and I had been
delighted to recognize them as ‘my’ pelicans, for some ancient Inca craftsman
had noticed in them that same happy complacency.
Inland from Guaymas the sun was even hotter, and the land was as arid and
featureless as desert. Long-distance buses roared by frequently at seventy miles
an hour, sometimes closing; in dangerously with their tail ends. One that had cut
in on me ruthlessly stopped farther up the road. I was able to overtake it before it
had picked up speed again, and I rode up alongside the driver’s seat. He looked
down at me with a contemptuous grin and I raised my hand to point it at his head
like a pistol, and then I shot him. His whole body jerked up as though struck by a
bullet and he looked very angry, but it was the only time I ever got satisfaction.
Buses and lorries all threw out quantities of unburnt diesel from their exhaust
systems because of a common superstition that the extra fuel would get them
there faster. In the still hot air the black smoke hovered over the highway like a
long coil of barbed wire and riding through it my face and clothes became black
with oily droplets. I fiddled frequently at the roadside, trying to get better
performance from the engine, and lost several tools through carelessness in the
heat. It was obvious to me that I was letting myself get close to my limits.
Those last days in Mexico were like the beginning of the journey in reverse.
Then my energy seemed to breed itself. The more I called on my resources, the
more they multiplied. Now the more effort I spared myself, the more tired I
became. As I left Guaymas at lunchtime for Hermosillo, I knew I would probably
cross the border the following day, but I became ridiculously fearful that I might
not make it. It was as though all the travelling I had done had taught me nothing.
On that last day in Latin America, between Hermosillo and Nogales, I could
not help noticing how much more prosperous the people were. Prices in
Hermosillo had been sky-high. There was nobody I would even have called a
peasant, let alone the ragged children and beggars I had been used to seeing for
most of the last thirteen months. Bars and restaurants were painted and clean,
nobody seemed to spit anymore, there were no old wrecks on the road, no
wandering animals. Men wore boots and cowboy hats, and clean pressed shirts
and even looked like Americans. I thought that by the time I crossed the border it
might be hard to tell the difference between Mexico and the USA.
So when I did get to Nogales the shock was stupefying. At the end of this
normal, prosperous Mexican street stood an edifice in glass and concrete that
seemed to my eyes so grandiose, so unnecessarily clean and modern and
bloated that I felt I must be stepping out of the Middle Ages into the year 2001.
Indeed I could not imagine that ordinary people would stand a chance of getting
through. I prepared myself for a very rough time. US border officials are not
famous for their cordial treatment of ragged travellers. With my last remaining
pesos I bought a giant paper cup of Orange Crush and studied the ramparts
wondering where to attack them.
There were no outgoing formalities at all, as though Mexico had simply given
up an unequal contest. I rolled warily into one of the customs bays. An agent
came out with a marble chin, trousers with honed creases and hair like moulded
plastic. I expected him to empty the petrol tank and drill out the crankshaft
looking for cocaine or peyote. He dangled one hand loosely into one of my side
boxes without even looking.
‘OΚ,’ he said.
What does he mean, ‘OΚ’?
He grinned. ‘That’s OK. Immigration’s over there. Glad to see you.’
Amazing.
The immigration man smiled at me too. I was impressed.
‘What can I do for you?’ he said.
‘You can let me into your fair country,’ I said. I hadn’t meant to put it that
way. It just came out.
‘That’s good to hear,’ he said. ‘We don’t hear that much these days. How
long would you like to stay?’
‘How long can I have?’
‘I asked you first.’
‘Well, three months should be fine.’
‘OΚ.’
I really didn’t mean to stay anything like that long.
He punched me into his computer terminal and it turned out that for once I
was not a prohibited person. So that was that, and I was in the United States.

Going to the United States from Latin America is like going to a movie, the
kind they like to call a Major Motion Picture.
I ride along the freeway waiting for the titles to show. All the well-known
images pop up: billboards, front lawns with mailboxes on sticks, cowboy hats
and blondes driving pickups. I don’t know the plot, but it’s bound to be a richly
satisfying and professional job. The realism is extraordinary, but I can’t believe
it’s real because everything looks so terribly relevant. All the dirty corners of life
that I have got so used to south of the border have been swept clean.
Another thing: there is this incredible sense of ease. The moment I crossed
the border I felt safe. Why? I didn’t feel unsafe before. Not at all. I think the
explanation is that here I don’t even need to think about it. I can afford to stop
thinking. Look at the road surface, for example. It is perfect. Not just this bit, but
the next bit too, and all the way to Los Angeles. I can count on it. I don’t have to
worry that around the corner it will turn suddenly to dirt, or drop me into a pothole.
I can almost afford to take my eyes off the road; only habit keeps them there, a
useful habit I shall need again later.
And everyone speaks my language. I don’t have to think about making myself
understood.
‘What’s the best way to LA? Is it through Tucson?’
‘That’s right.’
So easy!
Then there’s so much fat around. Everyone is prosperous, though they might
not know it, with a house and a refrigerator. There isn’t anyone who couldn’t
afford to help me if they wanted to, and they would want to, I know it, because
their minds can grasp what I am. Also I am not black or crippled or ugly, and I
have this cute English accent.
In Mexico the grass was brown, but in Arizona it’s green because it is
watered. It must be. Surely God would not be so discriminating. The air is clean.
Would you believe it? Not a wisp of exhaust do I see from any car, truck or bus.
That is a miracle in itself. And here, just where I want it, is a campsite. Rio Rica;
a broad grassy paddock under a clear dry sky. Clean lavatories, showers,
washing machines, a shop. Cold beer.
‘Five dollars.’
‘That’s too much, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh. OK. Sure. We’ll only charge you two dollars.’
I never doubted it. I sling my hammock between two trees. Some kids come
over, easy, cool, with beer. They talk to me; I don’t have to make it happen. We
all go off to spend the evening at a girl’s house in town, eating sandwiches,
listening to rock, talking.
One of the kids was in Vietnam. I hear the whole story in three sentences,
and he isn’t even talking about the war. In fact the words don’t say much, but the
meaning comes through like a meeting in space. I’m so tuned in to body language
and inflections that I hardly need words, but having the words too is so relaxing.
It goes on like that, through Tucson and Phoenix next day. Even the bike has
relaxed and runs better instead of worse. I see on my Esso map that there’s a
long stretch of road from Phoenix to Blythe with no town marked on it, but I am
so laid back that I don’t think to wonder why. Before I know it I’m in the middle of
another desert, totally unexpected, hotter even than Mexico, with a cross wind
blowing sand up my nose.
Well, that makes for a better movie but it doesn’t prick the bubble of credibility
because I’m still on a four-lane highway with plenty of gas in my tank and, sure
enough, happily placed in the middle of the desert is the big, green Colorado
River, and the KOA campsite with all the usual facilities and proud mobile
homeowners are lining up the cold cans of Coors beer just for adventurous chaps
like me.
Next day I battle my way against an even heavier head wind. The valve
trouble is so bad now that I’m down at times to twenty miles an hour, and in real
trouble with the big container trucks when they come past. The wind sandblasts
my arms and nose and makes me really quite tired, but as an ordeal it is still
completely fictional because, whatever happens inside the borders of this
country, you’re never more than a half-hour helicopter flip from the ultimate in
medical technology.
The thing could not have been scripted better. Only two hundred miles away
are Hollywood and the Triumph offices. Without any simulation or trickery
whatsoever I shall be able to arrive in the world’s most elaborate city as though I
had just come out of the Atbara Desert.
I have given some thought to what I would like to happen next. I see marching
bands, majorettes, a great arena of people rising spontaneously, irresistibly to
their feet, tears streaming down their cheeks; Governor Brown, arm outstretched,
apologizing for the President’s absence; my own succinct keynote speech
reminding the US of her responsibilities to her poorer neighbours followed by
rapturous applause and an intimate dinner with the Secretary of State.
This is beyond the resources of the Triumph Company to arrange on the spur
of the moment. I turn up at their rather plush offices on the edge of Los Angeles
like a bashful Battle of Britain pilot missing presumed dead.
‘Holy cow,’ they say. ‘It’s Ted Simon.’ And they all shake my hand and bring
me a beer.

I looked around Triumph’s prosperous offices with an optimistic eye,

anticipating some sort of unspecified ‘good time’. Sure I wanted a beer, and
shower and a chance to change my clothes and even to rest for a bit, but what I
really wanted was company, nice enthusiastic, appreciative company. As a Hero
I naturally assumed that people would be tumbling over themselves to
accompany me. All the keen athletic executives in the front office were extremely
cordial. All the pretty girls at their stylish mahogany veneer desks smiled very
nicely at me, but as the minutes passed my bright eyes glazed over. I wasn’t
making contact. In spite of all the niceness, I knew they couldn’t really grasp who
or what I was, and maybe, even, they were too preoccupied with other matters to
care.
I must have been a strange sight. The desert sun had burned me very dark
and printed a goggle pattern on my face. My shirt was threadbare, and my jeans
were shredded across the knees and awkwardly patched. My hair was
unfashionably short and dishevelled and I was a bit crazy at the thought of
having actually arrived. I imagined myself to look quite romantic. After all, it was
the real thing, but their nice orderly eyes gradually convinced me that I was a bit
of a mess, and the best thing I could do was go and clean up.
The credibility gap widened into a yawning chasm and never closed. They
were unfailingly nice to me, and materially generous. They took the bike into their
workshop and promised to give it all the care that could be lavished on it. They
gave me another bike, the same model, to use in the meanwhile. They took me to
a hotel about ten miles away and booked me in at their expense, and left me
there until the next day.
My hotel room was at ground level and had thick glass sliding doors instead
of windows, with two sets of curtains. I had a square double bed with freshly
laundered sheets every day. At the foot of the bed was a big colour television
set. There was a writing desk, itself quite a decent piece of furniture, and in the
drawer was a stack of stationery and leaflets describing all the hotel’s services
and telling romantic tales about its supposed history. I read them all avidly.
The bathroom had apparently been delivered by the manufacturer that
morning. Everything in it was still wrapped or sealed by a paper band
guaranteeing 100 per cent sterility. Not even the boys from Homicide could have
found a fingerprint in there.
In the bedroom everything was impeccable too. It was air conditioned, of
course. Not a breath ruffled my countenance. When my arm itched and I raised
my hand automatically to smash at a mosquito, there was never a mosquito.
There was only me.
I switched on the television, and it responded immediately with a picture of
surgeons and nurses in green conclave around an operating table. The camera
closed in on a human knee, and a scalpel opened it up before my very eyes.
Horrified, I switched channels to an advertisement for a film called The Bug. A
male voice promised that unless I saw this picture I would not know what horror
meant. A woman screamed at me, horrified, and showed her tonsils. ‘The Bug
eats human flesh,’ said the voice, and the woman screamed again.
With flesh-eating bugs I was already familiar. I switched off. There was still
only me. I had everything I had been dreaming of for months. Starched linen.
Room service. Steak, lobster, mutton, cold white wine, coffee, unlimited hot
water, not a cockroach to be seen.
Sitting there alone I found it all quite meaningless. I went for a walk around
the extensive premises, through lobby and patio, past: pool and fountain, bakery
and bookshop and saw that same nice smile everywhere I went, and written in the
eyes just as plainly the words ‘Otherwise Engaged’.
I looked in my address books. There were a few names and telephone
numbers. The friends of friends were all far too high-powered to be called on the
spur of the moment like that. There was one man, though, whom I had met in
England, a businessman I had found refreshingly interesting and intelligent. He
lived in Malibu and even answered the phone to me. I explained how I had arrived
in Los Angeles, and he asked me penetrating questions as though I were his
psychiatric patient. He promised to call me back, but never did.
The hotel was on the inland edge of Los Angeles and I thought maybe I was
among particularly stuffy and provincial people, so I set out on the bike to find
the real Los Angeles. I never found it. I rode forever on an astounding web of
freeways, four or eight lanes wide, laid out like a never-ending concrete waffle
over thousands of square miles, looking for somewhere to go, but found nothing.
These first days had a profound effect. I felt completely lost, as though I had
been whisked away from the earth in my sleep one night and deposited among
humanoids in a simulated earth city.
Alice was never so flummoxed in Wonderland, not even on that vast
chessboard. In all his travels, Gulliver was never more shocked, not even when
confronted by the giant Brobdingnagian nipple.
I arrived there still smelling the smell of sweat and stale urine, of unruly
growth and open decay. I was used to faces that showed the imprint of emotion,
the stamp of excess. I was accustomed to things being old, worn down, chipped,
scratched, scuffed and patched, but real. Where I had been, people and things
were forced to show the real stuff they were made of, because the superficial
could not survive the battering it got. I was used to the sound of life: roars of
laughter, shouts of anger, whistles, catcalls, bargaining, argument and domestic
squabble; to the sight and smell of animals; to old people sunning themselves.
Where I had been, children came running.
I looked into the cars that rode alongside me on the freeway. I saw men and
women staring blandly ahead with faint smiles on their carefully carefree faces.
No visible signs of life there. I looked around me for a genuine house. They were
all simulated. Some looked like ice cream. Some were simulated Spanish. Some
pretended to be factories, or monasteries, or farmhouse cottages. All fake.
Nothing original.
I saw a tiny girl, poised astonishingly at the edge of a highway, about to
wander out into the traffic. There was no adult in sight. She was toddling
aimlessly out into my lane, and there was no time for me to dismount and help
her, so I manoeuvred the bike to bar her way, hoping to change her mind. A car
screeched to a halt in front of me and a woman leapt out and snatched the infant
away. She looked up at me with a venomous expression and snarled: ‘Oh no you
don’t!’
After dark, police helicopters hovered above me on the freeway flashing their
epileptic blue lamps and scouring the ground with hungry beams of light.
For several days I remained a total alien, and out of this alienation grew a
feeling of tremendous outrage against the senseless extravagance of it all. It
was entirely a matter of perspective. To a Southern Californian, his life-style and
standard no doubt seemed like the least he could get by on. To me it seemed
preposterous and sick. I wandered through supermarkets and along ‘shopping
malls’ disgusted and obsessed by the naked drive to sell and consume frivolities.
When I eventually came to visit Disneyland I realized that the ultimate aim,
the logical conclusion for Los Angeles was that it should all become another
Disney creation, a completely simulated and totally controlled ‘fun environment’ in
which life was just one long, uninterrupted ride.
From the point of view of a Bolivian Indian chewing coca on the altiplano I
could see that it would already be pretty difficult to distinguish between the two.
The effect wore off as my tan subsided, my insect bites healed and the
goggle imprint faded. Finally I was an outcast no longer, because someone
invited me to his home. He was a motorcycle mechanic making a machine to beat
the world’s speed record. He was a gentle fellow with a slow, warm smile, and he
had come from Indiana with his girl friend, who was a gorgeous nurse. They lived
in a small place in Paramount and I went to stay there after a while. I discovered
that life did after all still go on in Los Angeles, in a clandestine way, lurking in the
corners of the waffle.
When I judged myself to be sufficiently civilized I risked launching myself on
my friends of friends who were very big in Hollywood, and so finally I got right up
against the Giant Nipple itself. My friend was Herbert Ross, director of a series of
immaculate comedies, and he had the idea as we sat munching chicken
sandwiches in his office at M-G-M of having me ride up on my motorcycle to a
party in Beverly Hills where he was going that evening.
His touch was as sure as ever. I rode up through Chandler country to a
house full of genuine movie superstars who not only thought my arrival a
pleasant surprise but actually grasped, far better than anyone at Triumph
seemed to, what my journey was all about.
There were other invitations, and after a while I stopped protesting about Los
Angeles and began to enjoy it, until it became difficult to recall just why I had
been making all that fuss.
There was a lot of work to be done on my bike. The forks were twisted, had
been since Argentina. The cylinder head turned out to be fractured. The oil
scavenge pipe had been knocked sideways in South Africa, so they had to get
inside the crankcase, and while they were there they replaced the crankshaft,
because the head had come off one of the flywheel retaining bolts. The
transmission had never given any trouble, but there were other minor irritations
that needed sorting out.
One man worked on it for a week. He seemed efficient but heartless, and I
could never find a way to talk about it with him. I wanted to ask, thinking that the
bike really could have been much more trouble-free than it was. In most of the
poorer countries Triumphs and British bikes in general had a tremendous
reputation for reliability. In the sophisticated countries like the USA it was just the
reverse. The story was that Triumphs were eccentric and troublesome, and you
had to buy German or Japanese if you wanted reliability.
It seemed to me that this was mostly the result of superior marketing and
propaganda from Japan in the richer markets. It had led to a situation in which
dealers and mechanics were involved most of the time with Japanese machines.
British bikes could only be a nuisance to them, with their archaic engineering,
requiring different tools and a different approach. It suited them that British bikes
had a bad reputation, because it excused the consequences of their own sloppy
work. I thought that if I had any obligation towards Triumph for the support they
were giving me, it was to demonstrate that their bike really could run clean and
trouble-free.
The attitude in Los Angeles was quite the opposite. They seemed ready to
swallow the unreliability story whole. Their remedy was simply to replace
everything and send me on my way.
‘You’ll never get more than ten thousand miles out of a set of pistons
anyway,’ they said. I found it disheartening but plainly things had gone too far for
it to be worthwhile objecting. The truth was that in spite of all the brisk
confidence in the front office, everybody was waiting for the place to crash about
their ears. And if my mechanic seemed to have lost heart, it was not surprising,
for he had already got himself a new job with Yamaha.
So I took what was offered and said thank you. They pretended to believe in
me, and I pretended to believe in them. I thought they were nice people, and I
think they liked me, but it was too late to do any good. Nobody wanted to know
any more.
I left Los Angeles eventually with a bike set up to carry much more stuff. Ken
Craven had written to me offering me new boxes and Dick Pierce in LA fitted me
out with a rack and a much bigger top box than I had had before. I had
abandoned the old rack in Johannesburg, and I had slung the side boxes directly
on the frame. I told Dick how the old rack had fractured on the way to Nairobi and
that the side struts had been too feeble, and he said they would reinforce the
system support for me and put on stronger struts. It was a very fine rig in the end,
offering a lot more capacity. I kept the single saddle, with the leather cover I had
made myself in Argentina, and the hole burned in the back of it by my petrol stove
when I had been cooking rice at Ipiales with Bruno.

The sun of California is like white wine and pine sap. It may be a temperate
sun, but it has an ardent nature. If lifted my heart with a heady buoyancy and
spiced the air with a resinous tang. It shone down on me loyally up the coast
road from Los Angeles, beating at me from the concrete freeways, beckoning me
from Pacific breakers, winking from wind-stirred leaves and grasses. It followed
me through San Francisco, bouncing off windowpanes and shining on long
golden hair. It warmed the terra-cotta ironwork of the Golden Gate Bridge,
flashed off the teeth of a toll collector, hurried me over the rain grooves and up
the highway until, a hundred miles farther on, it came into its own among the
forests and hills of northern California.
Where the hot cement gave way to cooler asphalt and the highway began to
rise and fall and curve against the hillsides, the bike transformed itself from a
running animal into a bird and leaned over to swoop and curl with the contours.
Somewhere there, where the highway meets the river, I wound off to the right and
flew in among the mountains, looping high up towards the sun and down again
into a bowl of fertile land and golden sunshine.
The air was heavily scented. I smelled blackberry and hay and resin. Waves
of vivid aroma reinforced my joy at being back on the land again, and I had to
recognize the craving I had created in myself for landscape and space. For a
while, absorbed in the mind-boggling materialism of Los Angeles, I had forgotten
those thirty thousand miles of plains, mountains, rivers, forests, deserts, skies
and stars, but they would never be erased from my subconscious. As with music,
they could be ignored for a while in pursuit of some short-term enthusiasm, but
the hunger would build up silently inside me until something as slight as a scent of
pine or a snatch of piano would warn me that I was perilously close to starvation.
I rode around a slithering curve onto a straight section. The land rose to a
high ridge on my left and fell away to the right in a more gentle slope that would
bring it eventually to the river winding among the rocks far below.
I crossed a cattle grid, and then the county line. The land here was sparsely
wooded with oak, young fir, madrone and manzanita. I saw open grassland
above me where the big timber had once stood. Near the road lay heaps of
rusting machinery, the leavings of a sawmill abandoned when the land had been
logged and sold. I knew about it from Bob and Annie. It was one of the signs that
told me I had arrived.
A yellow mailbox was planted on a post by the roadside announcing the name
of the ranch and I followed the track down the hill and alongside a big sunburned
meadow. The track took me past one wooden house and a newly erected barn to
another bigger house. It was early afternoon. I could see a horse on the meadow
but no people. The noise of the bike seemed inappro priate and I was glad to put
it to rest and let the sound fade into the silence. There were ducks on a small
pond. A goat stood facing away from me, obstinately refusing to recognize the
interruption.
I climbed some wooden steps to the verandah of the house and went inside.
A big man with unruly fair hair sat sprawled in a chair smoking a home-rolled
cigarette and staring straight at me with wide, lively eyes. I thought it odd that he
hadn’t got up to see who was making all the noise. He wasn’t busy.
‘I’m a friend of Annie’s,’ I said. Those were the words I was told to say, my
credentials.
‘Hi,’ he said. He continued to look at me with engaging curiosity, as though I
might turn into a rabbit.
‘I’m looking for Carol,’ I added.
‘Oh,’ he said, still gazing at me quizzically. The silence gathered again. I
waited. There was no hurry. A wasp buzzed against the windowpane. It was very
peaceful. I knew what he was doing and I was enjoying it, two strangers alone
together in a room, appraising each other, savouring each other like animals.
People talk too much at first, just making publicity. It was hardly more than a
significant pause. Then he got up, and walked to the window.
‘They’re down by the river, I guess,’ he said, pointing out over the meadow.
Then he smiled beatifically.
‘Heard about you,’ he said, and grabbed me in a bear hug and kissed me
solidly on the cheek. That did surprise me.
He told me how to get to the river, over the meadow, past a volleyball net and
then left by Suicide Rock. I walked over the meadow bubbling with joy. It’s that
damned sun, I thought, the same sun that was shining on Cape Town in the
autumn and on Rio in the spring. It gets inside me and bubbles like a leaky
champagne bottle. Pretty soon I shall be engulfed in ecstasy. I can feel it
coming.
At the other end of the meadow a girl was walking towards me, bare-breasted
and trailing her shirt through the long grass from her fingers. She saw me and put
on the shirt, holding it closed with her hand. When we met in the middle of the
meadow I said I was a friend of Annie’s and looking for Carol.
‘Oh. Hi,’ she said, and released the shirt. ‘I didn’t know. We get some pretty
creepy people come sometimes. Annie’s down at the swimming hole with Bob,
and yeah, Carol’s there too, with Josie, Christine and Frog.’
I found the way easily, and met Carol walking up from the river as I came
down. She was with two young girls, and my first impression was that she
resented me slightly. I had never met her before, but guessed who she was.
Perhaps I was feeling too pleased with myself. Perhaps I looked as though I
thought I was God’s gift to women. Whatever it was I felt a distance between us,
but it did not matter to me at the time. I felt no special attraction to her. She had
straight, dark hair tied with an elastic band, a narrow oval face and a funnily
shaped up-tilted nose reddened by sun. I thought she was too thin. Even so, two
things about her were striking. Her colouring was dramatic, russet as the ripest
apple, and her eyes were big and grey-blue. I noticed them without paying too
much attention.
Bob and Annie, it seemed, had gone up ahead to the campsite, whatever that
might be, and so I walked up with Carol and the two girls, who were Christine and
Josie.
‘And Frog?’ I asked. ‘Who or what is Frog?’
‘You’ll see,’ she said. ‘That’s a treat you have in store.’
I noticed her dazzling smile then, but it still didn’t mean anything special.
We walked up slowly, talking. We talked about Ecuador and Venezuela, and
gardens and marriages and rattlesnakes, and trees and Ohio, where she was
from. She had a warm voice, pitched a bit: low, and a powerful Middle West
accent that said ‘bahks’ for ‘box’, and made me want to laugh, but Josie got in
first with ‘Are you a limey man?’ and so we all laughed at my outrageous British
accent instead.
I learned that the ranch was a commune although they never called it that,
and that they had 670 acres of the most beautiful land in the world, bought cheap
after it had been logged. I learned that people who cut down trees
indiscriminately for profit were despicable, and that Carol worked the vegetable
garden where, with a little help from her friends, she produced enough to feed
twenty people. Also that someone we both knew in San Francisco was a nerble.
‘What,’ I asked, ‘is a nerble?’
‘A nerble,’ she said, ‘is one thing and a nonie is another. Ask Frog about
nerbles and nonies. Frog is in charge of naming.’
‘Who’s in charge of Frog?’
‘Honk shoes,’ she exclaimed mysteriously, ‘nobody is in charge of Prog. Frog
is in charge of the world.’
She said it as though she meant it, but I got no further with my questions
because we had climbed out of the river gorge and crossed a small clearing, and
we were at the campsite. Some rattan matting had been set up as screens
around a room-sized space in the shelter of a group of oaks. Inside were an old
stuffed sofa and some easy chairs, a low table, orange boxes set up as shelves
for food and things, and old carpets on the ground. An outdoor room.
‘No, it never rains in the summer, well hardly.’
Annie was there and embraced me fondly. Bob, too, and some other people.
Everybody looked very pleased. Frog, as I had guessed, was a small boy. He
stood on the edge of the circle and looked me over very thoroughly for a while. He
was only four, but very tough and self-contained, a force to be reckoned with.
They said I should sleep there at the campsite. Josie and Christine were
sleeping there too, and maybe others. Carol said we should go up to the cabin in
the morning and she would make pancakes for breakfast. She said she lived in a
wooden cabin up the hill on the other side of the county road, and I could find it
by listening for the sound of the piano.
‘A piano,’ I cried. ‘You must be joking.’
She smiled. I think it was the piano that made me begin to take it all seriously.
A piano is a distinctly permanent thing.
Six hundred and seventy acres is a lot of land, especially when it is all up and
down, laced with streams and studded with hillocks and humps of crumbling
stone. I ambled around it for some time in the morning, looking for the cabin. A
certain kind of countryside has always attracted me. I like streams of clear water
running at a gentle pace over smooth rocks and pebbles freckled and veined with
the browns and greens and yellows of mysterious minerals. I like grassy banks
tied to the roots of ancient trees, and rough-hewn hillsides scattered with live and
fallen timber, boulders and mosses, leaves and lichens, where creatures I have
never seen can go about their business undiscovered. I love land that rises and
dips, forever revealing and concealing secret places, intricate land with shelter
and food for all kinds of life, big and small.
The power of this attraction was heightened enormously by my long journey.
In Africa, Brazil, Chile and Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, so many places, I
saw countryside that drew me almost with the force of destiny. It became too
painful to be forever passing it by. I felt I had to stop somewhere and make some
lasting connection with this earth, to become involved with it in some way. The
power of the desire was overwhelming. I walked through the ranch, smelling the
earth and leaves, startling deer, being startled myself by the sudden screech of
peacocks roosting in a large oak, and thought, ‘This could be the place. This has
to be the place.’
I heard the piano, and found the cabin on a gently sloping shelf of land. A
stream ran along one side, lost under a thriving colony of blackberry bushes, and
tall trees provided shade on the other side.
It was a modest cabin, square and set on piles, made of planking wit;h a tar-
paper roof. The piano was in the front room, which overlooked the valley through
a large sheet of acrylic set into the wall. Also in the front room was a big, black,
cast-iron, wood-burning Franklin stove. At the back was a bed and a kitchen
range. Behind the cabin was a clear space with an outhouse, a hose rigged up
for a shower, and a chopping block. The water came in a tube from upstream.
 The heat was beginning to build up for the day. All the doors were open and
warm air moved through carrying all the scents of the woodland. Carol was alone
and we talked much as we had the day before. Nobody else came. I had to admit
that suited me, and Carol did not seem at all surprised. I played a few pieces,
clumsily through lack of practice, while she made breakfast. The aroma of coffee
(that old cliché) wafted through the cabin, followed by the smell of frying in hot
butter.
‘The butter is from Germany,’ she said. ‘Germany is one of our cows.’
‘Frog again,’ I said.
‘You know it,’ she said. ‘Really.’
We ate our way through mounds of little soft pancakes soaked in almost pure
maple syrup. The simplicity of the cabin, and the golden silence all around us was
affecting me profoundly. Halfway through the pancakes, I said:
‘I still don’t really know what you are all doing here.’
She looked up with a flash of anger in her eyes. Then she snorted.
‘I guess there are some people here who’d like to know too.’
She tried to tell me something about the ranch, how it had come about out of
the turmoil of Student Revolt, Flower Power, Civil Rights, the Women’s Movement,
the Vietnam War, all those waves of energy rushing across the face of America
promising a storm of change and liberation.
‘Some of us got together and found this land, after it had been ripped off by
the loggers. It was amazingly inexpensive. Some of the guys who were at school
together, they wanted to start a school here. One day we will. It’s still my dream.’
‘What happened?’
‘I guess when we got here we found we had too much to learn ourselves.’
I listened hard trying to understand, but every answer begged another
question, and I didn’t really want to ask questions. There were some people here,
living on some land. Why or how seemed less important than the fact that they
were doing it. In any case the only way to find out would be to do it with them.
Apparently there was this one annual crunch, the mortgage payment. Every
year they struggled to make money, selling produce, hauling hay for a neighbour,
maybe getting in money from jobs in the city, but they were not desperate. There
was money among them, already inherited or in a parent’s bank account. No
question, one way or another the payment would be met. The Annual Mortgage
Meeting was a symbolic crunch, when they looked at each other and estimated
how much energy they had in the bank, and what kind of energy it was.
The Annual was coming up soon. I gathered that this year the energy was
running low. There were fewer people living on the ranch than ever in its four-year
history, only half of the twenty or more who had built their own small houses on
various parts of the land.
‘We put all our energy into our relationships, and the results are totally
amazing. Really. You’d never find a more beautiful set of people anywhere. But, I
don’t know, we were on this big high, but it seems to be fading, which is fine but…
it’s really hard on the kids.’
‘Look, you know what surprised me most when I got here?’ I said, bravely.
‘The mess. I mean, all the stuff littered round the big house. I don’t understand
how you put up with that ugliness. Doesn’t anyone want to clear it up.’
‘I know,’ she said sadly. ‘It seems to be really hard for people to find that kind
of energy right now.’
There was no doubting Carol’s energy. She worked furiously in the garden. I
spent most of that day and the next with her, at the cabin or in the garden. She
told me things about herself which surprised and sometimes disturbed me. The
disturbing things were about love, different kinds of love for people and things. It
was alarmingly honest, but exhilarating too. Sometimes during those two days,
her grey-blue eyes got too big for me and swallowed me up. I forgot that I was
only intending to be there for a few days, that I was already booked on a ship for
Australia, and that I was only halfway around the world. The next day I rode the
bike up the trail to the cabin and moved in.
I don’t think I ever fell in love with Carol in the way I had fallen before. Love
simply wrapped itself around me. She was made of it, and the ranch, I
discovered, was full of it. It was what they had really come there for, and it was
what I wanted more than anything else: to be alive and in love on land like that. A
week or so later I rode into San Francisco and postponed my sailing from August
to November.
 I claimed that long summer, immersed in love and sunshine, as my reward for
two years of physical and emotional battering. Although I had stopped for a few
weeks at a time in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Rio and Santiago, though I had
even fallen in love once before, a part of me had always been unattached,
waiting to move on. The journey had never stopped, and all the while I was
soaking up information and sensation at an alarming rate.
I came to the ranch brimful of feelings and insights that had had no release
on the way. Like a cargo of perishable goods they were threatening to rot in me.
So I spilled my heart out on that land and among those people who had made it
their business to share feelings and dreams.
There was work to do, a chance to leave something that would survive my
passing. We built an extension to the cabin that widened it by a few feet towards
the blackberry bushes, and gave a sense of new space that was quite palatial.
We called it the East Wing, and moved the bed into it to receive the morning sun.
The blackberry bushes concealed a busy community of birds, frogs, rodents
and various species of snake. The largest inhabitant was the civet cat, a kind of
spotted skunk. For a while the entire wall of the cabin was down, and we lived as
though in an extension of the blackberry bush, open to the stars and the moon
and the cool night world. Then the civet cat took to visiting us.
I was wakened by the startling sound of someone running across the bare
wooden floor in small hobnailed boots. It did not stop. In short rushes the sound
traversed the cabin from end to end. There were snuffling noises. Sounds of
pleasure and excitement. Boxes toppled over. A broomstick clattered to the floor.
Whoever it was, was brazen beyond belief. To tell the truth I was delighted that
some small wild animal should want to live its life so close to mine but, even so,
there was a distinct lack of respect A lesson would have to be taught.
‘Hon,’ said Carol, ‘just be careful. If you scare it, it’ll stink the place out.’
I watched from the bed. The moon was bright. Something like a big white
shaving brush emerged from behind the chest and went bobbing jauntily across
the room. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat went the hobnails. I could just make out the
lustrous black fur of the body, polka dotted with white, but it was the flouncing
white tail that enticed the eye, and threatened the nose with doom.
I prowled around the cabin, naked in the moonlight, but the civet knew I was
powerless. It was utterly insolent, did exactly as it liked and left in its own good
time.
The second night I was bolder. Prodding it with the long handle of a mop, I
tried to guide it to the door. Failure. The civet actually seemed to enjoy the game
and stayed even longer. The noise it made was phenomenal.
‘They have these pads of toughened skin,’ Carol told me. ‘They signal by
thumping the ground.’ Under the civet’s hammer blows the planks of the cabin
resounded like a xylophone. Adorable as it was, we were losing sleep.
The third night I struck lucky. By chance I held the mop the right way around,
and brandished the mop head in a way that I imagined would be very frightening
to civets. The civet rushed up to the mop head and positively fawned on it, clearly
in love at first sight with what it took to be the ultimately handsome civet. I drew
it: cunningly across the floor and out through the open kitchen door. Then I
closed the door.
With the whole side of the cabin missing, that was a very thin gesture of
defiance, but the civet did not return. Hideously deceived, it joined the ranks of
heartbroken lovers and crept away into the bushes to pine.
Carol and I loved very deeply. It seemed inconceivable that it could come to
an end and I lived my life there as though it was forever. The ranch felt like home
and the people on it became my family.
I learned to know the land, walking around it and working on it. There were
many more encounters with animals, including a thrilling meeting with a
rattlesnake that was carried off with great dignity on both sides. The summer held
out right through to the end of October, cooling slowly as the days drew in, but
staying bright and clear. More and more ranchers were making trips to the city
and some were staying there longer than they expected. It was evident that some
new impulse would have to be found to bring everyone back, and as the numbers
diminished the prospect of a winter on the ranch became less tenable for those
who remained.
Eventually Frog’s mother also decided to move to San Francisco. Shortly
before she left, Frog stood on the wooden steps of the communal house and
declared that he was no longer Frog. His name, henceforth, would be T.A. Frog
was born with the ranch, and he seemed to have grasped with extraordinary
clarity that it was the end of an era.
During the last month I began to dig a drainage ditch across a hillside to
intercept spring water that was flooding the foundations of the big house. As I
dug it became a stream, a microcosmic river with cascades, bridges and grassy
banks which I imagined might one day blossom with spring flowers. It revealed
scores of forgotten memories of streams I had camped by, paddled in or simply
gazed into as a child. It led me (more than I led it) in a meandering curve around
the house, so that the clearing away of old junk and abandoned machinery
became part of something new and exciting.
I took the experience of the stream as a parable on life, believing that as long
as I did what I did wholeheartedly it could only go well, and if there was to be pain
then that also must lead to better things. There would have to be pain. The
journey had to be finished. I could not take the ranch with me, but I could at least
leave something, a part of myself, behind.
The sailing date was November 15.
I had seen the Ρ & O liner Oriana, all 42,000 tons of her, the day before when
I came over the Bay Bridge from Berkeley. She had a fairy-tale brilliance floating
there in the dark winter evening, and just looking made me feel thousands of miles
away and sad.
They loaded the bike in the morning. Carol and I were staying at a friend’s
house on Maple Street, and in the afternoon T.A.’s mother brought her
Volkswagen beetle over to take us all to the ship. She was enormously pregnant
and very happy about it, and I was allowed to put my hand on her big tummy and
listen for the baby inside. It was a heartbreaking thing to do in the circumstances.
The father of this as yet unborn wonder was also there with still another rancher,
and the five of us, with all my luggage, completely filled the VW’s egg-shaped
interior.
We drove along Clay to Gough, left and right to Van Ness, left and right again
past Stockton to Pier Thirty-five. I fastened on to all the details hungrily. We went
through an archway past a potbellied guard to the luggage reception, and I joined
a queue of passengers while the others made their way to my cabin. When I
arrived among them other ranchers and friends had arrived. Bob and Annie were
there with the biggest rolls of paper streamers I had ever seen, and Larry,
another close friend, had brought two bottles of champagne.
There was a tremendous air of excitement about us all. The ship was so
grand, and made such a powerful statement about romantic travel, that nobody
could be immune from it. We celebrated as though all of us were going along, and
it really began to feel like that. I grabbed one of the streamers and dodged crazily
around and between people until I had tied us all into a great knot, and the
emotional temperature rose far beyond anything I had ever known before in a
group. We kissed each other, all of us, men or women regardless. I felt a distinct
rush of love for every person there and knew that it was reciprocated, and I was
able to say a few things that were true.
It was a most moving experience created entirely by those marvellous people
out of their real warmth and affection for me, and it bound me to them forever.
Australia and Malaysia

I stepped off the ship at Sydney wondering what it would be like to arrive there
with no name, no past, nothing but a handful of cash and a new life to start from
scratch. Until they opened up the moon, Australia was still the farthest I could
get from the place I called home.
It was a continent I knew only as a caricature. Perhaps because it was so
far away, the only images that seemed to travel the distance were absurdly
overblown. Australians were the Ancient Gauls of the twentieth century, a good-
hearted people so untouched by the niceties of civilization that with one sweep of
their good intentions they could do more damage than an elephant in Harrods.
Australian women, I knew, were big and brazen and went about the streets
dressed and made up for the stage in the belief that the right way to catch a man
was to incite him to rape. The wounds sustained during this savage form of
courtship were soothed by swimming two hundred lengths before breakfast.
Australian men were big and bronzed and wore shorts and singlets from
which their muscled limbs extended like four strings of sausages. At the end of
one of the upper strings was attached either a tennis racket or a small bottle of
beer called a ‘stubbie’. They ambled about in hot sunshine being disgustingly
frank about their natural functions and waiting to be incited to rape. If one of
these King Kong figures appeared over the skyline the thing to do was run for
your life.
I came ashore determined to forget all the jokes and cartoons and ridiculous
stereotypes and to learn about Australia from scratch.
It was not easy. During the first days in Sydney, getting ready to ride up the
east coast, I looked around me with the freshest eye I could manage in the dusty
December heat. I saw men ambling in singlets and shorts. Their muscles looked
remarkably like sausages. I saw women who had apparently slipped offstage
during the interval of a matinee performance of Cabaret, They looked as though
anything less than rape might be mistaken for indifference. I noticed that many
men wore tailored shorts with cute little slits up the seams like cheongsams to
show a little extra flash of thigh, and the obscene thought crossed my mind that
maybe they were hoping to be raped as well.
I saw some men, still in their youth, with the grossest beer bellies it was
possible to imagine, cultivated at great expense, and I was overcome by the
noise people made and the difficulty they had in showing each other affection.
Then, one day, I set out to photograph these things I had noticed. Not one
revolting beer belly came my way; not one girl was dressed in such tasteless
revolting beer belly came my way; not one girl was dressed in such tasteless
extravagance as to be worth recording. To my annoyance I saw men and women
appearing to be softly and openly appreciative of each other. The truth bore in on
me that I had been seeing only extremes in the crowd; the most flamboyant, the
most threatening, the most crass, just as an Australian in London would see only
Poms in pin-striped suits and bowler hats.
The vast majority of Australians werenot like that, and yet my first
impressions had been correct too, and I wondered how a few examples of
extreme behaviour could so stamp and characterize a whole society. It became
one of my main preoccupations.
For an Englishman, especially one who can remember how things were in
England before the fifties, Australia has a disturbing familiarity. The streets
straggle out of Sydney much as they do out of London, and pass through
namesake suburbs. You see street furniture and municipal architecture that has
since been replaced in London by something newer; like old-style post offices and
libraries, and mechanics’ institutes. Or so it seemed to me, for the force of
nostalgia is so strong that one old lamppost can colour an entire street.
Out in the New South Wales countryside, too, there are glimpses of old
England. The railway system, seemingly with all its veins and arteries still intact,
and local puffer trains running between model stations, is a powerful time warper.
I rode up into the cosy Blue Mountains past village greens and orchards and vine-
covered cottages. The strange admixture of aboriginal names only seemed to
point up the quaintness of the English ones. Wentworth Fallsand Katoomba;
Mount Victoria, Bell and Bilpin; Kurrajong, Richmond and Windsor.
Past meadows and stables and ponds; butchers’ shops bursting with the
finest and cheapest meat in the world; languid pubs made glamorous with the
fancy Victorian ironwork which we, in England, melted down for scrap in the war.
At Wiseman’s Ferry a great, green river rolled by between steep-cut grassy
banks, and a country hotel founded in 1815 served a counter lunch for a dollar
sixty which made it seem cheap at the time, piled high with lamb chops and
brussels sprouts. It was hot, but not too hot. There were flies, but so far not too
many. The sun put creases around the eyes and seemed to be richer in ultraviolet
than any other sun I had known but it was tolerable and it was, after all,
midsummer. Riding through it like this, viewing it as an outsider, it was a rural
idyll, far away from the troubles of the world.
When I came back onto the coastal highway there was less to admire. All
Australia seemed to be moving up the coast in trailers, and campsites were
crowded. As I moved closer to people their prejudices showed through. The flies
grew thicker too, and I had to eat my steak with a handkerchief waving in my
hand to keep them from totally obscuring the meat. But the great green rivers kept
rolling down to the sea, and the beautiful beaches stretched out forever, and it
was still the best steak in the world.
The coast road north of Sydney is called the Pacific Highway for 650 miles
until it gets to Brisbane. Then it becomes the Bruce Highway. Another five
hundred miles north is Rockhampton, right on the Tropic of Capricorn. I crossed
the tropic (for the sixth time on my journey) four days before Christmas and
headed on for Mackay. Since Brisbane the arid summer of the south had been
giving way slowly to the tropical rainy season of Queensland. In the southern
droughts the cattle died of thirst. In the north they drowned and floated away on
the floods. Australia runs to extremes.
After Marlborough the road takes a long inland loop for 150 miles to Sarina,
to avoid floods. People had told me lurid tales about this part of the road. ‘You
want to watch out,’ they said. ‘There’s criminals on the lam from Sydney.’
Only a few weeks before a married couple had been mysteriously murdered in
their car on that lonely stretch. I was served the story several times with relish.
There was sometimes a ghostly quality about that land, but it was nothing to do
with criminals or even ghosts. Much of the land was covered by a light forest and
a high proportion of the trees were acacias called brigalow. Across broad areas
of the land the brigalow was dead, and the thousands of twisted grey trunks
seemed to haunt the forest. It was murder all right; they had all been slain by a
poisoned axe to clear the way for pasture.
I took on petrol at Marlborough and set off. It was monotonous country, and
empty, but not at all sinister. After eighty miles I came to Lotus Creek.
There was nothing much to distinguish Lotus Creek from the other small
rivers I had crossed. It ran in a shallow bed cosseted by reeds and ferns and
clumps of tall guinea grass. Several small species of gum tree, black butt, white
and stringy bark among them, grew alongside it.
The highway dipped gently to the bridge, which was simply made of huge
square-cut trunks of one of the bigger species of gum tree, for some gums grow
to well over three hundred feet. The trunks were surfaced with smaller wood and
tarred over. The bridge had no parapet but was more than wide enough for the
biggest trucks. Most of the smaller bridges were built in this way.
Beyond the bridge on the right was a roadhouse and petrol pump. I filled up,
on principle, and went in for a coffee. It was a small restaurant, neater and
cleaner than I had expected. Behind a well-stocked counter was a door open to
the kitchen. The man behind the counter was busy at something. He was a
stocky fellow in a neatly pressed blue bush jacket and matching shorts. He wore
woollen socks up to the knees and a cowboy hat.
‘How much is coffee?’I asked. I always asked. Australia was vastly more
expensive than I had expected and prices varied wildly from place to place.
‘Thirty cents,’ said the man without looking up. There was an edge to his
voice though, and a hint of Middle European accent. I guessed Polish. Thirty
cents was a high price.
‘Thirty cents ? ‘ – pretending mild astonishment.
Then he did look up. He had truculent blue eyes.
‘Is thirty cents too much ? ‘ he demanded. ‘ If it is, I’ll make it fifty cents. I’m
like that.’
A touch of panic assailed me. There was something funny going on, and I
could not figure it out. I made placatory noises and he let me have a cup for thirty
cents after all.
‘I’m up here to make money, that’s all,’ he said. ‘Why else would anyone come
and live up here in this wilderness. When you’re still here in a couple of days you’ll
be grateful I don’t put it up to a dollar.’
‘Well, it’s very nice here,’ I said, ‘but…’
‘If you’re thinking of going back to Rockhampton you’d better make it soon,
before Lotus comes up too,’ he said with a slight sneer, and then the message
began to filter through.
‘Too?’
There were two others in the restaurant, a man and a teenage girl at a table.
The man had got up and was walking over. He said :
‘When Connor’s comes up, Lotus ain’t far behind. Right, Andy?’
‘What’s Connor’s?’ I asked, though I had guessed by now. I just wanted them
to know that I hadn’t known.
‘You didn’t know ? Connor’s is the next creek along to Sarina, ten miles down
the road. I just came back from there. She’s seven feet over the bridge and still
rising. And to anticipate your next question, sometimes she’s up for a day,
sometimes for a week, and there’s no tellin’.’
I waited to see if there were any other questions I had planned to ask, but it
seemed not. His curly blond hair was greying and he wore steel-rimmed
spectacles. He looked old for the girl. I asked him what he was doing there,
nicely.
‘I’m based in Mackay,’ he said, ‘but I travel around a hell of a lot. I’m the most
knowledgeable journalist in Australia about the tropics.’
Between them, I thought, these two fellows could run Australia. They had the
confidence for the job. However, after a bit they became quite friendly and
interesting. It was just that first aggressive flash that got me. Like an Anglo-
Saxon version of Latin America. The comparison pleased me. Also, the coffee
when it came was very good.
I rode up to Connor’s to have a look before settling in for the week. The
queue was several hundred yards long, cars and trucks. It was very warm, with
sun striking down between the cumulus clouds, and people were all over the
place in their singlets and summer frocks, eating Fast Food and chucking the
plastic containers and empty bottles into the countryside. Four truckies were
playing an intense game of poker in the middle of the road. The bridge was
nowhere to be seen, but the top of the ‘Give Way ‘ sign was still visible. The
water was black and turbulent, and still rising.
I got back to Andy’s place to find four big refrigerated trucks had parked
outside, their engines thrumming away to keep the coolers working. The drivers
were already piling up empty beer bottles in the restaurant. There were five men,
a jolly red-headed woman and a boy. I decided to get my stuff unpacked and into
the tent before it started to rain, and rode the bike out to the trailer-and campsite
in the field.
I walked back to the restaurant to find that the drivers had moved outside to
some trestle tables under a waterproof canopy. I felt like joining them and asked
Andy to sell me some beer. I had a great knack for treading on Andy’s toes.
Either that, or his toes were a permanent mess.
‘I don’t sell beer,’ he said hotly. ‘I have never sold beer. I have applied for a
licence and you will never find sly grog sold on my premises.’
‘Oh well, I only thought…’ I said, sniffing the fumes that still hung around the
room, and went out to sit with the truckies. After five minutes, Andy came out with
a bottle of beer he wanted to give me, the sentimental fool. But by then I’d
already finished one and been given another.
Two of the truckies were doing most of the talking, and they were both
comedians in their way. One of them was a brisk tubby fellow who told
conventional jokes like a club comic. I could imagine him with a spotted bow tie
and a microphone going ‘I say I say, I say.’ That was Clive.
The poet among them was a man they all called Ferret. He was a slightly built
man with a daft little cloth hat on his head and an expression that managed to be
both sad and humorous at the same time, in the Celtic manner. He was the
acknowledged leader of the truckies and was famous throughout Australia for his
verse epic ‘Ode to a Truckie’. It was about a pal who had died overturning a truck
full of empty bottles outside Gladstone, having probably emptied a good few of
the bottles himself.
I liked Ferret immediately. He had a warm manner and a sympathetic way with
stories. The real humour ran all the way through them, between the punch lines,
and I thought them very funny and subtle and not a little astonishing. Travelling
with Ferret was a handsome, athletic fellow with a wistful manner called P.J. He
was going to see his mother in Sarina for Christmas. He hadn’t seen her, he said,
with a slight grin, since two and a half years ago when she was dying in hospital.
The fourth truckie was a chirpy little Tasmanian they called McCarthy. He had
rubber legs and a concave face and played’ fall guy’ when one was needed. He
enjoyed the role and encouraged it, and his tee-shirt showed a hand with two
fingers up, meaning ‘Peace’ or ‘Piss Off’, depending how you saw it.
The fifth man’s name I never knew. He was husband to the redhead and they
both made an appreciative audience for the others. Even before the beer warmed
them all in a deep amber glow, there was a great kinship and liking between them,
a quite tangible thing. They were mates, of course, which is a powerful enough
bond, but it was more than that. They were truckies, and in Australia that was
tantamount to being an outlaw.
I had heard about truckies from the outside, stories of reckless violence and
villainy. For respectable Australians, truckies ranked with drought, pestilence and
‘criminals on the lam’ as one of nature’s chief hazards. ‘No truck with a truckie’
was their motto, and they locked up their daughters when the big rigs rolled in.
Now from the inside I saw that they had many qualities I had missed badly on my
way up the coast, and the most surprising was sensitivity. The boorishness that I
had begun to accept as inevitable was absent, and in its place was a delicacy of
touch that seemed little short of amazing. Yet, thinking it over, it was natural.
They were all long-distance drivers, not short-haul cowboys. Anyone who spends
long hours alone with himself on the road has to have more in his head than a
stock of sterile prejudices.
Clive’s son made regular runs to the truck for more beer.
‘Are you trucking beer ? ‘ I asked Clive.
‘No, I’ve got general groceries. He’s got ice cream,’ he said, pointing at the
fifth man.
‘McCarthy’s got prime Victoria rump, and Ferret’s going empty.’
We talked and told stories. I learned about the roads in the interior and what I
heard convinced me that I must give up my idea of crossing the north in the rainy
season. The only way out of Cairns would be the way I had come. I heard chilling
tales of reckless driving over the roads of hell to get to the pub in time; of truckie
pride and the awful falls that followed. Then the boy brought the bad news. The
beer had run out.
Cars were still coming in over Lotus Creek, so without hesitation McCarthy
went out to his big truck, wheeled it round and roared off across the bridge.
Somewhere out there was a pub, and as long as there was a pub open in
Australia they would have beer at Lotus Creek that night. The sun was fading,
black clouds lowered all around. There were flashes of lightning off to the
northeast. The journalist came out looking worried, and walked oyer with an
expression that tried to look threatening but was just a bit silly.
‘Have you seen my daughter?’ he said. We all looked at McCarthy’s empty
seat and smiled at a nice thought, though none of us believed it. The journalist
sat in McCarthy’s seat and gazed at the sky.
‘She’ll be filling up tonight,’ he said. ‘It’s raining over the catchment area. We
won’t be out of here tomorrow.’ He was very authoritative, so I had no way of
knowing whether he knew what he was talking about. Nor did I really care.
Andy switched on the lights in the grounds and the bulb under the canopy
created a pleasing intimacy in the warm tropical evening. I heard the frogs
honking down by the river. Lotus was beginning to rise now. Two tour buses
came in and some cars. McCarthy was last over the bridge, with a crate of
Castlemain’s XXXX, the beer they all agreed was best, and with much relief they
set to drinking again.
The place was filling up fast now, and looking like a refugee camp. The
holidaymakers were sleeping in their buses, and made a big crush with their visits
to the bathrooms. The car travellers had filled all Andy’s annexed rooms, and
others were camped in the field, but all this activity swirled around the canopied
island of yellow light where the truckies sat drinking and murmuring with a low-key
energy that seemed inexhaustible. Hours later I left them and slept through a
heavy rainstorm.
I woke up to the sound of an old-fashioned hurdy-gurdy playing outside my
tent. The melody had been coded in a secret cipher, but all the notes were there,
creaking and squeaking rustily together. I looked out at what looked like a very
fat magpie, waddling about and making this cheerful but extraordinary music.
I saw Ferret approaching across the field with a stubbie in his hand, his feet
scarcely bending the blades of grass, his face rosy as the dawn.
‘What is this amazing bird ?’ I asked. In a steady, sober voice, he said it was
called a butcher bird, and I added it immediately to my list of top creatures.
‘Come and have some breakfast,’ he said. ‘We’re doing steak.’
Connor’s River had risen in the night to equal all previous records at thirteen
feet above the bridge and McCarthy was celebrating by breaking into a fifty-
pound carton of rump steak.
I wandered over to see a heap of timber blazing in the big barbecue stand
and Clive cutting the rump into slices an inch thick. There was no indication that
any of them had been to sleep or would ever sleep again. The refugees from the
buses had come out after a cramped night in their seats and were huddled at a
safe distance gazing in awe and envy at the terrible truckies. I was given half a
square foot of the most delicious steak I had ever had, or would ever have, and a
bottle of beer to start the day right.
The truckies were as contemptuous of the tourists as army men are of
civilians, and took pride in their fearsome reputation, but as men they were too
kindhearted to ignore the distress all around them. In Australia, meat eating is a
religion. P.J. and Ferret called over to them to come and get it if they wanted it.
Most of them shrank back in horror as though they had been offered a cup of
cyanide, but a few bold spirits risked coming in for a nip, like jackals around a
campsite.
Andy came out from his house stamping his boots hard in anger as he
walked.
‘If I see you taking money for that meat,’ he shouted at Ferret, ‘there’ll be
trouble. I’m not having people doing business on my property.’
He was so far out of line it was ridiculous. The truckies laughed and swore at
him, and he stomped back to his overcrowded restaurant.
‘He’s better than the bloke up the road,’ said P.J. philosophically. ‘They were
selling water at twenty cents a glass last flood.’
‘Who pays for this meat?’ I asked.
‘No worries,’ said Clive. ‘ In a situation like this, they expect us to break into
the load. They’re happy enough if the refrigeration equipment keeps going while
we’re standing here.
‘There should be several tons of strawberry ice cream running over the road
by nightfall,’ he added, jerking a thumb at the fifth man. ‘His cooler’s packed in.’
 It was true. The magnitude of this potential disaster fascinated me, and my
mind was linked by telepathy to those slowly liquefying tons of frozen yuck for the
rest of the day, hoping to be there when the first pink dribble appeared under the
doors.
We had steak for lunch and for tea, and then we had steak for supper. I tried
to talk to some of the bus crowd. There was a couple with a small boy who
seemed nice, on their way to their home in Townsville. They asked me to come
and stay on my way through. We hadn’t been talking long before they wanted to
tell me about the ‘abos’. I had had only one encounter with aboriginals up to then,
at a small town on the coast south of Brisbane. I had seen a couple standing
barefooted in the shallow water of a lagoon fishing with a line but no rod. They
were short dumpy figures, he with his trousers rolled up, she in a cotton frock. I
had taken a picture of them from the jetty and he had seen me. His reaction was
fierce and bitter.
‘I’ll fuckin’ toss yer in there,’ he screamed, pointing at the water. I thought it a
sad story and hoped these people would understand.
‘You don’t want to have anything to do with them,’ the woman said firmly.
‘Don’t you ever trust one. Never. They’ll lift anything off you. Good as the Arabs,
they are.’
‘You know Palm Island ? ‘ said the man. I shook my head. ‘ It’s an abo
reserve off the coast up here. Well, you know those flagons of cheap wine that
cost a dollar fifty. Take one over there and you can flog it for forty-five dollars.
They go crazy over grog.’
‘They’re not human beings really – they’re another species of animal,’ said
the woman. ‘ They live with animals, don’t they ? And it’s a medical fact that
every girl over three has been molested.’
‘If you hit them on the head,’ said the man, ‘ you can only injure yourself. But
they’re the only people with any money in Australia.’
It made me sick to listen to it. And they were really nice people. Several times
coming up the coast I had heard these outpourings of filth that seemed to
proceed from some deep hurt, like pus from a wound. I registered the fact that in
all the hours we had spent together, not one of the truckies had ever uttered a
single word of prejudice, and I was glad to get back among them as soon as I
could.
The journalist’s daughter came and stood by me for a while. She screeched a
lot but she didn’t have anything to say. The frilly bodice of her yellow cotton
dress held her breasts up for my inspection, and then she disappeared again. I
thought she was a disaster waiting to happen.
During the afternoon Connor’s started dropping. By evening it looked
promising. I was advised to be ready to cross, since it could easily start to rise
again. I packed up all my stuff and slept in the back of Ferret’s empty truck. P.J.
spent the night in the cab with the last bottle of beer. When he had finished it I
believe his eyes closed briefly. I woke to find him studying the centrefold of a
magazine called Overdrive, gazing lustfully at a big and luscious colour picture of
a new Mack truck.
Soon afterwards the first car came through from Mackay and we all got ready
to go. The pink ice cream was safe after all. I said good-bye and rode off to
Connor’s. There were still a few inches of water over the bridge, but I went
across all right. Farther along the road, Ferret’s big truck started hooting at me
from behind. I slowed and he swung it deftly onto the verge in front of me.
‘See you at the hotel in Sarina, Ted,’ he said. P.J. grinned, and I said OK. I
didn’t feel like hurrying, and when I arrived they were already at the bar. Ferret
was finishing one of his shorter stories.
‘So this fellow said: “Who did you see down there in Sydney, Dave?”
‘“Well, I was in the same room as Bishop Lennox.”
‘“Who’s that then?”
‘“He’s only the foremost Catholic in Australia. He’s so holy he’s most
probably got holy water in his toilet.”
‘“What’s a toilet, Dave?”
‘“How should I know. I’m not a bloody Catholic.”‘
We were drinking out of dainty seven-ounce glasses at the counter instead of
those stubby bottles. It didn’t seem right, but the fumes were stronger in the
enclosed space and Ferret and P. J. seemed to thrive in the atmosphere as
though it were pure oxygen. One day, I thought, they would be leaning against a
bar like this and they would just fade and dissolve into the atmosphere. I had got
to like them both very much.
I said I had to go, because I did not dare drink any more.
Ferret looked hard at me with that sad little smile on his face.
‘You’re a lovely person,’ he said. Ί knew straight away. Most people don’t do
anything for me. They can be nice – know what I mean ? I can be nice too. But it
doesn’t mean anything.’
I knew exactly what he meant.
‘You’ll be right,’ said P.J. cheerfully.
I often thought about them afterwards but when, weeks later, by a million-to-
one chance I met Clive in a pub in Victoria I didn’t know him at first.
‘You know what happened to Ferret?’ he said, grinning the way Australians
do when there’s bad news.
‘He turned his truck over outside Sarina that day.’
‘ Is he all right ? ‘ I asked anxiously.
‘Oh, yeah, he got away with it. Beer softened the fall.’
A man I had met in Nairobi two years before had given me four elephant-hair
bracelets to deliver to his sister. The hair was pulled from the elephant’s tail, and
was supposed to confer virility on men and fertility on women. His sister’s home
was in a small town near Cairns, and this romantic little mission gave my journey
to ‘Far North Queensland’ a nice human focus, but by the time I arrived the sister
had long since abandoned her husband and taken her children off to England.
The husband was very kind and said that it would probably not have made
any difference if I had got the bracelets there sooner. He gave me two of them to
keep, but they never did much for me either.
I learned that it was still possible to go a bit farther north, with the promise of
a unique rain forest to see at Cape Tribulation a hundred miles away. The first
seventy miles were tar. Then came a ferry across the Daintree River, and after
that, dirt. The real problem was Cooper’s Creek, which crossed the dirt road. If
the creek was up, ‘ no way ‘. If the creek was down, ‘ no worries ‘. We tried to get
Charlie the ferryman on the phone, but there was no reply. So I went anyway.
I found Charlie leaning against the ferry rail, waiting for customers. He was a
snub-nosed, fair-haired young fellow with a wispy beard and a saucy look. He
was leaning back at an easy angle but very alert and it was a moment before I
noticed that one of his legs was missing.
He eyed the mud-spattered bike with amusement, following the route I had
painted on one of the boxes.
‘How’s Cooper’s?’ I asked.
‘No idea,’ he said, offhand. ‘Haven’t had anyone through from that side.
Should be OK.’
As I rode off the other side he called : ‘ See ya later.’ He sold only return
tickets, he knew I had to come back that way.
I rode on over red rocks and mud, laced with rivulets, slippery at times, but
mostly steady going in third gear. I felt a vague thrill of apprehension thinking
about Cooper’s, and all the rivers I had already crossed. The worst had been in
Bolivia, on the altiplano between Potosi and La Paz. There were two rivers there,
and I fell in one of them, and stopped dead in the middle of the other. It was very
uncomfortable and made a terrible mess of my arrangements. I could easily
conjure up a picture of my hotel room in Oruro, papered from wall to wall with the
pages of the Triumph workshop manual laid out to dry. I was travelling alone on
that stretch. Some Germans in a taxi helped to pull me out of the second river
with a rope; it was all I could do to keep the bike upright against the force of the
current. But what a world that was up there on the roof of the Andes !
I forded a few minor creeks and then came Cooper’s. It was about twenty
feet across with a bed of pebbles and boulders, and I got off the bike to have a
good look. To go straight through was out of the question; there were at
least’three feet of water in the middle. A little farther downstream the creek
widened and became more shallow. The right course to follow was a wide
horseshoe shape, swinging downstream and then up again on the other side. The
last bit would be the worst, with the exhaust pipes submerged, trying to find the
power to clamber up the bank.
On the other hand there could be no real disaster, because some campers
from Cairns turned up in a small truck to give a hand if I made a muck of it. They
crossed first and I watched their wheels to gauge the depth. Then in I went,
managing all right until the last leg where I turned a bit too sharply against the
current. The engine faltered and stopped, but I had both boots planted firmly on
the river bed. The campers were already in the river, swimming, and we hauled the
bike ashore together. I poured the water from my boots, unbolted the pipes to
empty them too and then took my turn for a swim.
The forest is a covered maze of towering tree trunks and twenty-foot ferns,
knit together by massive trailing lianas and parasitic growths of all kinds.
At Noah’s Creek there was a clearing by the river, with gardens and thick
grasses, and a square tin-roofed house. Extravagant blue butterflies flickered
among the trees. At twilight insects chanted as though through amplifiers
concealed in the bushes. A paraffin lamp was set, hissing, on the verandah, and
suddenly into this circle of yellow light stumbled a dangerous and desperate
figure. His shirt was split from collar to waist and the right sleeve was in tatters.
He had four days’ worth of dense black stubble on his sweaty face, and a crazy
glint in his eye. In his right hand he swung a machete.
It was the proprietor, back from his daily chores. He had been hacking his
way, painfully, along a high ridge at the limit of his property, looking for the blazes
that were made to mark his boundaries in 1896. Among the picturesque obstacles
to progress through this undergrowth were the Wait-a-while, with its long tendrils
carrying fish-hook thorns at close intervals in sets of four, and the Stinging Bush,
which has a fur of fine needles on the underside of its broad leaves that break off
in the skin and hurt for a month, so I was told.
That night the rain drummed on the tin roof louder than I had ever heard it
before.
In the morning I volunteered to go to Cape Tribulation for some provisions. It
was a long walk through the forest along a track with glimpses here and there of
the green ocean. Forays into the undergrowth produced a fruit like a cobalt-blue
egg, and another purple one with red flesh and three stones. The cape was a
small, easygoing community with a lavishly stocked general store run by a middle-
aged couple and their children who had ‘emigrated’ from Sydney. They spoke of it
as of a different country, and it was true that Australia did not seem to reach up
this far. I had the impression of Sydney being huddled down there somewhere in
the southeast corner of the continent. The family were not only happy to be
there, they looked it. They went about helping each other and being openly warm
and affectionate. Until I saw it I had not realized how cramped and
undemonstrative other families had been. The father was kneading dough for the
bread oven. He told me that I reminded him of a copper on the Drug Squad at
Cairns.
‘Drug Squad?’ I asked, taken aback.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘They’re very active. Packets of heroin are always floating
ashore here. I’ve found some myself.’
Later I helped to load a small outboard dinghy onto the truck at Noah’s Creek
and went to the coast to find not heroin but mud crabs. We floated over thick
brown water at the edge of a mangrove swamp and put down two wire traps.
Within minutes we had a huge black crab with claws that can take off a finger.
The meat of the mud crab was more delicious than any I had eaten since
childhood. Obviously Australian coasts and rivers offered an abundance of good
food, and I started to think it was time I bought a rod and took up fishing.
Then the rain fell heavily all night and by morning it was clear that if I wanted
to get out across Cooper’s for a week or so I had better leave soon.
I fell once gently in a puddle of red clay on the way back, but at Cooper’s I
learned my lesson and got through with only my boots full.
Charlie was still leaning against the side of his ferry, his one leg thrust
forward just as I’d left him. This time we got talking and I asked if there were any
crocodiles.
‘Sure are,’ he said. ‘Used to be me livin’.’
A one-legged crocodile hunter ? Was he retired by one crocodile too many ?
‘Not a bit of it,’ he said. ‘ If they made it legal again, I’d be off in the morning
and no worries. ‘Course, they were right to close it down. There’s plenty of
freshies to build up the population now they’re protected, but there aren’t enough
salties left to keep a man in wages.’
Fresh and salt, he said, referred to the water they came in.
‘You might get twenty dollars for a freshie, double for a saltie. I got one saltie
that was sixteen foot. It brought two hundred and forty dollars for the skin, but I’d
never go after one of those again. It was too big to land in the boat. We had to
drag it into shallow water and skin it there. The blood brought shoals of small
shark in, and they lacerated our legs.
‘There were three of us that used to shoot together. Both the others are
dead. One was me wife’s brother. He died of septicaemia. The other one turned
out to be a convicted rapist who’d killed a man. We only found out after he’d killed
another man and was shot dead himself.
‘Happened over in Burketown. Been there ? Favourite place of mine. There
was a pub and very little else. The walls and the floor were all at an angle from
being hit by storms. When it flooded the clients had to row themselves to the
thunder-box at the bottom of the yard.
‘The host was a Yank. He was a bit “tropo”. He had periods of sanity, then
he’d become violent in a Wild West way. Used to punch his customers across the
bar and come down the stairs with guns blazing. They put him away in the end.
Then the pub was hit by a whirly-whirly.’
I asked him how he had lost his leg.
‘Cancer,’ he said. ‘But it got mashed up pretty badly first,’ he added
laconically. ‘Croc shooting isn’t that dangerous though. The shot is the important
thing. You’ve got a six-inch target, quite close to. If you know your job you won’t
often have to swim for the corpse. You don’t get rich either. You get wages and a
half. But you’re doing what you like best.’
Three weeks later I rode into Melbourne on the Dandenong road, and turned
left into St Kilda, then again left into Robertson Street and stopped outside
Number One. Dandenong is a big and busy highway, and the next road was like a
neighbourhood high street and Robertson Street was a quiet little backwater of
terraced houses, so it was like coming into harbour.
The house was rented by Graham and Cheryl, whom I had known in London,
and they shared it with Dave and Laurel and a small dog of uncertain temper. I
took up residence in the meditation room.
Graham had long brown hair and cool grey eyes and seemed always to have
just materialized out of a Nordic mist. He was a gardener in the grounds of a
lunatic asylum. Cheryl was quick and nervous and had frequent little rows with
herself in which Graham played his part patiently. She worked part-time behind
the bar of a private club. Laurel was a generous, wistful girl who wished that
Dave would be a bit more satisfied with life. She worked as a secretary at the
Musicians’ Union around the corner. Dave was eager and erratic and wished he
could be really good at something, but preferably the piano. At the time he was
loading cases of Melbourne Bitter beer into boxcars down at the railway goods
yards.
They were all within a few years of thirty, and there was much more to them
than this, but it gives an idea. They were very modest in their demands on life and
in several ways they failed to qualify as Australians at all. They hardly ever ate
meat, for one thing, and they drank very little alcohol. They were all slim and light
and did not try to conceal their anxieties under a mound of muscle turning to fat,
in the usual Australian way.
The girls sometimes wore ankle-length peasant skirts and blouses without
bras. Graham and Cheryl had travelled in the East, and the meditation room had
a mandala and a Buddha and was scented with joss sticks. They actually used it
for meditating. Their great ambition was to buy farmland and live on it. They had
already saved enough to start looking for good offers and we used to sit at the
kitchen table with mugs of tea and hear about the mouth-watering acres that had
been snapped up too quickly by someone else. I found their situation exciting and
enviable.
Every weekday morning for two weeks I went to work. I took the tram for St
Kilda to Flinders Street, where I changed onto the Coburg tram to Sydney Street.
I loved Melbourne and I loved its green single-deck trams. Generally I avoided the
rush hours since I was master of my own time, and I sat at ease in the tram,
cruising down the centre of the broad avenue that sweeps past the park and the
big boys’ school and the art gallery, and over the railway bridge to Flinders
Street.
Flinders Street Station was built in the prewar image of a London terminus,
even down to the framed spaces for advertisements and the newsboys shouting
the titles of the evening papers on the corner. All about was a bustle of traffic
and commerce, with crowds of office workers, shoppers and travellers from out
of town weaving their way across the intersecting tram lines under the pompous
façades of Victorian bank chambers and offices. It was London again in an
earlier, less self-conscious time, when business still made its presence felt in the
street and had not yet withdrawn behind the plate-glass doors and anonymous
concrete of the modern European office block.
The prosperous and the derelict rubbed shoulders on the pavements. You
could see that there were fortunes to be made and lost, and the pursuit of profit
was free of shame. There was a rich mixture of city life on the streets and I
lingered between trams to absorb it. For all that it was busy I never felt it was
frantic; exuberant, rather, and not a little ruthless, which gave it a slight whiff of
Dickensian days. The scale of the houses and streets still allowed human beings
their natural place. And I was always conscious of the great, lazy expanse of
Australia beyond the city, reminiscent perhaps of the empire that once lay beyond
the city of London.
The Coburg tram took me down Elizabeth Street and eventually brought me
out of the rectangular heart of Melbourne to pass through open parkland for a
while. It skirted the university and finally plunged into narrow, noisy Sydney
Street, a long ribbon of small businesses that wound on and on towards the
prison. Once I went out to see the prison, and stared with morbid fascination at
its high walls and old-fashioned Alcatraz look. It seemed very relevant somehow
to Australian life, which has more of a snakes-and-ladders feeling about it than
does life in England. I often heard talk about criminals. They were mentioned as a
fact of life, rather than in tones of dismay or moral outrage. They were there. If
they got you, then you went down. If they were got, then they went down.
On weekday mornings though I jumped off at the second stop down Sydney
Street, or if possible at the lights before that. This is where Frank Musset has his
motorcycle business. On one side of the road is the shop, where he presides
over the stock with his mournful white face and brown overalls, unless he can
escape into his own little workshop hidden round the back. On the other side is
the repair shop where my Triumph stood stripped down on a stand. I was
overhauling it, slowly, at my leisure. The barrel was being rebored. Some oversize
pistons were coming from England. There were new exhaust valves to grind with
the cylinder head. I was improving the supporting system for my tank panniers,
rebuilding the rear wheel, repairing the oil seals in the forks and doing a host of
other little things that I had thought of.
I was having a marvellous time in that shop. Perhaps it is not surprising that
after all the moving about I should relish spending a fortnight in a steady,
unvarying routine, but there was much more to it than that.
It was not a pretty shop maybe, but it was big and cool, and there was
almost everything I needed. But what gave it the character that stamped itself on
me so that I would never forget it was a transistor radio tuned in to a commercial
station called THREE-X-Y. In two weeks I became hopelessly addicted to this
radio station, something that had never happened to me before. The programme
could hardly have been more rudimentary. It consisted of the same ten songs
played over and over again, interspersed by advertisements. Three years later I
have completely forgotten the ads, but the songs are clear in my memory.
A tenor screamed ‘Who Is That Lady All Alone ? ‘ ending on a false note. Bob
Dylan sang about his wife in a Portuguese bar. David Essex did ‘ Hold Me Tight,
Don’t Let Me Go’. The Queen sang’Mama, I’ve Killed a Man…’Rod Stewart was
doing something surreal on Main Street. There was a horribly mawkish song
about being music and making the girls cry, and there were four or five others.
The company was congenial, I had a good mechanic working nearby who
showed me a lot of dogged enthusiasm and helped me over difficulties. But it was
the songs that got me. They drugged me. The radio was never switched off and I
was like a cow being lulled at milking time. Once I got into that shed in the
morning my day was complete, it was over before it began because I knew
nothing could break that mood or change it and I had ‘ no worries ‘ as they are so
fond of saying. Obviously the treatment was relieving me of some kind of burden.
I guessed it was that I had simply spent too long on my own thinking. For two
weeks I had my brain anaesthetized, and I revelled in it.
At midday I went out into the blinding sunshine and walked to the pub for a
‘counter lunch’. I learned to treat lunchtime beer with great caution in Australia. It
was drawn by the ounce in deceptively dainty glasses at a temperature that
numbed the throat and delayed the action. Dave’s alcoholic workmate down at
the yard said the need hit him hardest in the throat, and I knew what he meant.
Could see it coming.
Sometime after four in the afternoon I dipped my hands in the soap tin and
got ready to leave the great greasy canyon for home. The Queen followed me
into the street with a last poignant wail from the transistor ‘…put my gun up to his
head, pulled the trigger now he’s dead, Mama. I’m leaving now…I took my life and
threw it all away…’
Back on the tram, hot sun, hot upholstery, watching the girls in the street,
dreaming, taking the song over in my head where the radio left off. A prim-looking
woman sits opposite me. By accident, as I cross my legs, my foot touches her
leg just below the knee. I’m surprised to see an enormous dusty footprint on her
stocking, as though a man had climbed up under her skirt. I murmur an apology
but she draws herself up in disdain and pretends not to have noticed. She can’t
see it and of course I’m not going to tell her now.
‘Silly cow,’ I thought. ‘ She’ll walk around like that for the rest of the day.
Typical.’ Everything in Australia seemed typical. Déjà vu. Dreamlike. Couldn’t
work it out. Not at all like White South Africa, or Rhodesia. Nothing like America. I
gave up and settled back into the dream.
Often at St Kilda, on my way home, I went to the off-licence at the back of a
small pub and bought half a gallon of Angove’s white wine, the cheapest of the
nicer ones, for a knock-down price. I was a bad influence at Number One
Robertson Street. I brought alcohol and meat into the house in unprecedented
quantities. I could not help it. I was under a spell and the magic was most intense
in the house itself.
Until very recently all Australian buildings were made, as far as possible, in
the image of their British counterpart. Number One Robertson Street was the
epitome of the trend, just like any suburban semidetached villa in London, except
that it had only one floor rather than two. The roof was pitched and gabled in the
same way, the proportions were all familiar, the wainscoting and picture rails
were moulded in the same pattern and covered with the same number of layers of
the same thick paint in the same colours. The same linoleum covered the same
boards, and in the kitchen the doors of the built-in cupboards were even fastened
by the same pieces of paint-encrusted metal.
A low brick wall divided the pavement from the little front garden where
various shrubs struggled against each other, though some of the bushes were a
bit florid by conservative English standards. At the back was a kitchen porch and
a potting shed.
At least, that is how I saw it in 1976, and at least once a day I used to look
at all this and wonder whether, somewhere on my way across the Pacific Ocean,
I had unwittingly passed through a looking glass.
Naturally I had expected Australia to be influenced by English forms. What
gave it the power of an enchantment, though, was the feeling of period. This was
London suburbia of the thirties, not of the seventies. This same house, in New
Eltham say, would since have been changed out of all recognition with wall-to-
wall carpets, designer’s colours, formica kitchen units, bathroom improvements
and all the appurtenances of Mr and Mrs 1970. In Robertson Street I had the vivid
impression of having returned to New Eltham in the thirties, and since it was in
just such a house in New Eltham that I did, in fact, spend the first five years of
my life, the effect on me was hypnotic.
And to make any resistance impossible, there was the sun. Against all
reason I remember my childhood as having conducted itself exclusively in hot
sunshine. In the thirties there were no winters. Regardless of the meteorological
records the sun shone on New Eltham constantly, and though it may not have
been the happiest of times, in that respect it was a Golden Age. Picture then my
astonishment, after decades of disillusion, at finding myself back in the imagined
world of my childhood, bathed in that same eternal sun, but with the important
and tantalizing difference that this time it was ME in charge.
Just like my father in the thirties, I walked out of the house every weekday
morning through the swing gate, turned left down the road and went off to work.
Only where he took the 8.15 to London Bridge, I took the Flinders tram from St
Kilda.
I felt a great urge to spend the rest of my life there, lost in this fantasy come
true.
I sank deeper and deeper into the luxury of the illusion, which was like a balm
to ancient hurts. All the pains of growing and becoming which lingered in me like
the rheumatic twinges of old wounds seemed to be soothed away in hot
nostalgia. To hell with all the agonies of the Western conscience, the gropings
for awareness, the soul-wrenching efforts to root out unworthy prejudices. To
hell with the nuclear holocaust and the coming ecological cataclysm and
solidarity with the victims of totalitarian oppression.
I was in Australia, the Lucky Country, and its unofficial motto was ‘No
Worries’. A large infantile part of me grasped at this heaven-sent chance to wipe
the tapes and start again. I resented bitterly every reminder that I was not here to
stay, that there were plans to make.
There were enough sensitive, intelligent people in Melbourne to make the
prospect of staying acceptable even to my conscious adult self. We had
pleasant evenings and weekend lunches where I paid lip service to problems of
conscience, but there was no obligation to take an enlightened view of anything.
It was perfectly respectable in Australian society to say: Down with the Abos, Up
with the Uranium, Out with the Blacks, In with the Beer, and so on. Wit was
appreciated, but the maximum of vulgarity would do as well and qualified as
‘okker’, which is Australia’s revolutionary response to the tyranny of the
intelligentsia. Since Australians are equal, by definition, a point may be made by
quoting Virgil or by pissing on the carpet. The main difference is in the cleaning
bill.
The enigma that had bothered me in Sydney was beginning to resolve itself. If
Australians allowed themselves to be represented world-wide as a nation of beer-
sodden boors and hysterical Amazons it must be through sheer lack of
imagination. Like most people everywhere they spent most of their lives just
getting by, but there was no collective dream or mythology that told them what it
was they were supposed to be doing. In that respect they were far behind the
aboriginals they had decimated and despised.
Yet many signs indicated that the time might not be too far away when
Australians would agree on a better reason for living than to eat a pound of beef
a day. When that day came I thought this would become one of the world’s best
places to be.
The faces of the old men told me there had been something once that was
lost and could be found again.
On a hot, quiet pavement in Adelaide I saw an old sun-dried gent wearing
loose, tobacco-brown clothes, so accustomed to the brightness that he had
taken on the colour of his own shadow, bent and gnarled and resilient as a tree in
the desert; and passing in front of him a small boy, very conscious of his grown-
up little boy’s trousers, while the old voice steeped in loss and yearning said:
‘G’day, mate.’
The greeting was aimed at the little boy (who seemed not to hear it) but it
seemed to encompass the universe and it cracked my heart.
There is a silly sentimental dream alive in Australia, a potbellied
householder’s dream of security and Sunday lunch, but it is rooted in something
else much older and sadder and more powerful. Sometimes the old men seemed
to know what it was.
I rode the coast road from Melbourne through Geelong towards Adelaide.
Atone point I went inland towards Hamilton and spent a few days on a sheep
station visiting the parents of the Australian I had met in Ecuador. I did a little
work and bought a fishing rod, and in the Glénelg River I caught my first fish,
some redfin and a salmon trout that filled me with pride.
The foreman took me to the shearing shed and showed me how to kill and
slaughter a sheep, impressing me with his speed and precision. All those
thousands of acres were maintained by four people, father, mother, son and
foreman, but teams of men came in at crucial times to do the shearing,
drenching, dipping and a gruesome operation called mulesing, which involved
peeling the skin away under the tails of lambs.
In the shed, where every inch of wood had been polished by contact with
hands and sheep, it was easy to imagine all that furious labour amidst a river of
wool, but most of the time the broad paddocks and their great shady gum trees
slumbered peacefully, and the only sounds were made by flocks of parrots
scolding each other in the trees.
Going west it was getting drier. In Victoria State, fourteen inches of rain a
year, in South Australia seven or less. Sheep gave way to grain. Big gums to
smaller ones. Around Adelaide, high ground and a western-facing coast trapped
more moisture and there was a brief greening, perfect for the grapes of Maclaren
Vale and the Barrossa Valley, but beyond Adelaide the aridity gripped hard, drying
out the nostrils, gritting up my chain, burning everything the colour of tobacco.
All the way the coast was spectacular, empty, endlessly inviting. I dawdled
along from Port Augusta to catch whiting at Lucky Bay and Tommy Ruffs at Port
Neill, to go cockling in a cove at Coffin Bay and meet the pelicans at Venus Bay.
The land dried farther on, the settlements thinned and by the time I got to Ceduna
I could guess at the thousand miles of waterless waste that lay beyond : the
Nullarbor Plain, which divided the West from the East.
The Crossing of the Nullarbor was a legend that died hard. People had been
trying to frighten me with it for months.
‘ Watch out for the bulldust, mate ! ‘
‘The what?’
‘The bulldust. It’s a fine powder that fills the potholes. You can’t see them
until you’re in them.
‘And the ‘roos. They come leaping across the road in droves. You don’t want
to hit a kangaroo, mate. They’re a lot bigger than you.’
I thought of the aggressive young salesman who had entertained me in
Adelaide in one of those big, hermetically sealed lunch clubs that businessmen
patronize there. The walls were lined with slot machines, and men stood with
their backs to the room playing two machines at once to save time. My host was
crammed into a fashionable suit with yards of superfluous material at the cuffs
and lapels, and despite the air conditioning he glistened with the sweat of good
living. He listened to my plans, and declared ominously:
‘You can perish in Australia.’
Australians in cities love to shudder at the merciless hostility of their
continent. I wondered whether it was a sort of apology for betraying the national
ideal, an excuse for not being out there digging.
Truth to tell, the Nullarbor may have been rough once but now the road is
sealed and tarred all the way from Melbourne to Perth. I was privileged to ride the
last two hundred miles of dirt before the new section was opened, and they were
no more than ordinarily awful.
But the Nullarbor itself is a beautiful, mysterious land. A spry old gent called
Gurney showed me one of its secrets. He lived halfway along the dirt stretch in a
ramshackle bungalow, with a wife, a petrol pump, some emus, a wombat and
other more familiar animals. He said he owned 1,100 square miles of South
Australia but it did him no good because the only drinkable water on the whole
property came out of a cave a mile from his house.
It was the cave I wanted to see, and he didn’t usually allow visitors – ‘ not
since those three blokes with guns. They were sitting down there firing rifles at
the roof. Mad drunk or something.’
The Nullarbor is extremely flat, so you get into the cave by clambering down a
crater. Miraculously, at the bottom of the crater among rocks and boulders
Gurney had an orchard, the only place where fruit trees could survive the heat.
The cave is a series of great caverns, and an important experience, for it
suggests that the whole plain must be largely hollow. Indeed there’s a theory – or
fancy – that the Southern Ocean flows by subterranean passages to the interior
of Australia. At any rate, the hollowness seemed most significant there, because
you can feel the earth reverberate when you stamp on it, because emus call to
each other by inflating bladders under their croups and making a noise like the
underground echo of a steel drum, and because hollowness is a sign of great
age. So in the night, half asleep on the ground, listening to the emus drumming
and the clank of distant goat bells and not knowing what they were, I thought I
was hearing the sound of a great tribal celebration drifting across the plain.
 If the Nullarbor was not an ordeal, it was perhaps a last straw. Bouncing over
it was too much for the spokes of the rear wheel after all they had been through
in two and a half years. I had been warned. In Melbourne and again in Adelaide I
had replaced broken spokes, and every time I stopped for the day I checked
them.
At Eucla, where the dirt ended and the highway began they were still in order.
The smooth tar enticed me to greater speed. After five hundred miles, just before
Norseman, I noticed a growing vibration through the steering head. I stopped in
the absolute nick of time. Only four of the twenty spokes on one side of the wheel
were left, and the rim was a terrible twisted shape. A few seconds more and it
would certainly have collapsed. I shuddered to think of the mangled mess that
that would have left.
As it was I spent one of the nastiest hours of the journey rebuilding the wheel
in a twilight plagued by squadrons of vicious mosquitoes.
The following night I was within reach of Perth and saw the whole western
sky lit up like molten lava, with white lightning and black rain tracing fantastic
patterns over it. I arrived in Australia’s Windy City on the first day of the winter
rains, and four days later when I sailed for Singapore, it was still pouring and
blowing as though it would never stop.

The most natural way to leave Australia would have been from Darwin, in a
short hop across the Timor Sea and then up the islands of Indonesia to Bali. My
hopes were dashed in Melbourne.
Timor was at war. Darwin was still in ruins from the cyclone that destroyed it
in ’77. There was no known shipping out of Darwin at all. To go that far on the off
chance seemed out of the question.
Even from Perth the only escape was by cruise ship to Singapore. It was
outrageously expensive as well as being heavily booked. It would have been
cheaper to ship the bike and fly myself, but I would not let the bike travel
unaccompanied. And the bookings made it impossible to delay the decision.
I raved and cursed. Indonesia had tantalized me for so long. The thought of
paying so much money to sail right past it rankled in me. The whole thing was
cockeyed. I could not rid myself of the feeling that something had gone seriously
wrong, but in the end I had to accept it and put down my four hundred American
dollars. Sailing date was April 15.
I had come most of the way through Australia with my dream of California
intact, thinking of Carol and the ranch, anticipating the life I would begin when the
journey was over. As I sailed for Singapore I felt that dream slipping away. Time
passed. Distance increased. The pressure of everyday experiences piled up
relentlessly, and I found my concentration on past and future events was
interfering with the present.
I began to see my commitment to California as an obstacle to The Journey,
and I realized I would have to get free of it, just as I had had to get free of my
earlier commitment to Europe. The Journey was once more making its ravenous
demands on me.
‘You and your fucking mission,’ Carol had once shouted in a burst of
frustration. It felt just like that; as though I had entered a priesthood.
These thoughts were always most intense when my morale was low, and the
voyage to Singapore did not help. It was a disaster. The ship was called the Kota
Bali, but it was not going to Bali and the other half of the name reminded me of
sanitary napkins. I found myself with a shipload of Australian primitives goaded
by a fussy, waspish Welsh captain and ministered to by an unctuous Chinese
crew. The women changed their frocks four times a day, while the men poured
their holiday funds into the slot machines and over the bar counter. Had it not
been for the beer fumes thickening in the air and lending some support they would
have all fallen down. There was better company on the lower deck where several
hundred sheep were herded in pens, bound for Muslim slaughterhouses.
To dramatize my disappointment I managed to catch a virus and arrived in
Singapore in feverish cold sweats. I struggled through the formalities at the
docks and the shipping office feeling worse and worse, and it was perhaps no
wonder that I formed a poor impression of Singapore. It struck me as a crowded
metropolis entirely devoted to business and money and with no heart at all.
The streets were filled night and day with a torrent of traffic and only the most
expensive hotels could put their guests out of earshot of the noise. On
Bencoolen Street, where I stayed, the pavements were factory space for all the
carpenters, mechanics and other assorted artisans who spilled out of their lock-
up shops. The rivers were clogged with filth, and the huge storm drains that ran
into them down each side of the street were alive with rats.
Yet, even through my fever, I found all the startling variety and detail very
exciting after the barrenness of Australian life, and knew that when the culture
shock had subsided I would enjoy it.
Meanwhile, in my delirium I decided that I was carrying too much stuff on the
bike and decided to send a parcel home. Among the things I thought I would
never use was a spare stator for the alternator, a heavy luxury in spare parts. I
made up my package, wrapped and tied and sealed as the law demanded, and
sent it off to England before setting off myself up the Malaysian Peninsula.
It was from Ringit in the Cameron Highlands that I wrote to Carol to tell her
that the Journey was taking me over and that her Missionary would not be able to
keep all his promises.
It was ten miles farther along the road that the bike stopped. It took only a
little time to discover that the stator coils had burned out. I roared with hysterical
laughter, but thought it far from funny. It felt far too much like swift retribution to
be a joke.
The map told me I was only 180 miles from Penang, where I planned to stay
awhile anyhow. The first thirty miles ofthat were a nonstop descent to the main
highway from Kuala Lumpur. They could be done, if necessary, without running
the engine at all. I figured that an overnight charge in the battery would get me to
Penang, and as I was still lucky enough to have come to a stop just outside a
village, I found a small repair shop with a battery charger.
The night was not wasted. I spent it mingling with the crowd at a Chinese
funeral ceremony, attracted to it by the sound of drums and gongs. I saw a
coffin, massively constructed from beautiful woods, supported inside a room so
that it soared into the air like the prow of a vessel. Beneath it professional
mourners chanted and played strange music on even stranger instruments. Filial
delegations made ritual obeisances. Some wore sackcloth hats bound with straw
rope. Others had white head bands, red tabs sewn to their sleeves and carried
bamboo branches trailing paper streamers.
The noise on the verandah of the house was continuous and, as I learned,
was deliberately encouraged so that the deceased ancestor would know he had
good company. People ate and drank, played cards and mahjong, shouted and
laughed and banged happily on drums put there for the purpose. I rolled off a
flourish myself, to help them along, for they planned to keep it going nonstop for
four days and nights.
My plan to get to Penang worked well. The Lucas Company, which has
branches everywhere in the world, arranged for the stator to be flown from
England, and though my ears were burning and I still felt shaky inside, I settled
down to make the best of a bad job.
What I had already seen of Malaysia appealed to me. I liked the gracious
wooden houses set back from the roads in grassy clearings with decorated
shutters, window frames, verandah rails and eaves. The staircases that widened
towards the lower steps seemed to welcome visitors with an embrace. Always
there were tall green trees to provide shelter from the sun.
The variety of fruits rivalled Brazil. Many I knew, many I did not. Mangostin
and durian both took me by surprise. The durian was a special challenge, with its
pungent odour. It is highly prized in Malaysia, but it has also been compared with
‘french custard passed through drains’. There was fruit to suit any taste.
In the streets, food stalls sold food of all kinds. They carried pineapples
sculpted into wonderful spiral shapes, slices of mango, ginger, papaya on slivers
of bamboo, shiny mangles to crush the juice from sugar cane, and mobile
Chinese kitchens with compact and versatile charcoal stoves, where wizards of
the wok conjured up limitless arrays of rice, noodle and soup dishes which went
streaming out to purchasers up and down the street.
It was a manual civilization, everything guaranteed touched by hand, but
highly sophisticated and a powerful antidote to Western hygiene.
Penang is a polyglot place, but the main ingredients are Malay, Chinese and
Indian. In the city most of the Malays I saw were pedalling trishaws and usually
saw me first, shouting ‘Hey, Johnny, you want smack ? ‘ meaning heroin, not
punishment. The Indians too were also often pedalling, but on ancient bicycles
with large glass cases mounted behind the saddle containing bread and buns.
Sometimes a fleet of them would pass at one time, all ringing bells or tapping
pieces of metal.
But for all that there is no doubt that the life of Penang is Chinese, perhaps
even more traditionally Chinese than China itself.
I was well placed to study it. From my room on the second floor of the
Choong Thean Hotel, in Rope Walk, I looked down on a shop where five
generations of the same family had been engaged in the management of Chinese
funerals and celebrations. Every evening almost, on scooters and bicycles, they
were off to some part of the town to erect their stages and screens, to play their
instruments, perform their sword-swallowing and fire-breathing acts, to chant and
wail in their black gowns.
Next door to the hotel was a shop where palatial mansions were built of
paper and split bamboo, resplendent with the good life. They had terraces,
balconies, elaborate porches in gilt and scarlet, television in the sitting room, a
car in the garage, everything an ancestor might need to take his correct place in
the hereafter, and all to be consumed by flame so that it might follow his spirit
across the water.
In another shop incense sticks were made, some of them three or four feet
high and thick as a man’s thigh, entwined with dragons. At the other end of this
short street was a hall where, on certain nights, Kung Fu was taught or the ‘lion
dance’ rehearsed.
The shops themselves were impenetrable to the eye, so crammed were they
with divers objects, so crowded with people and furniture and so mysteriously lit
by shrines and candles. At night beds came out on the pavement in front of the
shop and those who didn’t fit inside slept out. At mealtimes, a space was cleared
on the counter or workable, a cloth was spread and the shop was turned into a
restaurant. Generations lived, ate, worked and slept in these confined spaces,
absorbed by the microscopic detail of their worlds. Their energy and dedication
appeared to me to be phenomenal and more foreign than anything I had yet seen.
T here were times, when I saw them flicking rice into their mouths with that
peculiarly frenzied motion of the chopsticks, that I thought I detected a kind of
madness. Why choose the slowest way of eating, and then become so
painstakingly proficient at doing it quickly ?
At the Temple of Heavenly Mercy I watched them park their motorcycles and
rush, with their candy-coloured metal-flake helmets still on their heads, to the
counters inside the temple where the incense sticks and bundles of paper money
were sold. The temple was full of acrid smoke from the burning paper, and they
raced through their ceremonies, eyes streaming, desperate to get outside again
with their smouldering offerings and fling them into the big iron incinerators that
stood waiting on the pavement. If there was a single thought of an ancestor in
any of them it was inscrutably hidden behind expressions of irritation and
impatience.
I was still not functioning well physically. The days were hot and humid. I was
drinking too much cold fizzy stuff, and could not get myself really excited about
doing anything. I worked at odd jobs on the bike, and one day, with the battery
charged, I took it round the island thinking I would go fishing.
It had rained heavily, the sky was clearer and the air drier than usual. It was
wonderful to be riding for pleasure again, on an unloaded bike. I passed over
small mountains, forested and populated by monkeys and brilliant birds. The
villages were quiet and unspoiled and nobody tried to sell me heroin. I watched
what looked like a Chinese pantomime. Only the stage was covered. The
audience, children and adults, were spread around a small area of grass, and I
was able to see it from the coffeehouse across the road. An extraordinary
woman appeared on the stage dressed like a Victorian huntress in bloomers and
carrying a bow. She shot an arrow in the air. It went about a yard and fell to the
boards, and a cloth goose came tumbling down from the ceiling. Everybody was
delighted, myself included.
In late afternoon I found a quiet spot on the shore, beyond a fishing village
where some men were burning the paint off their boat with bundles of flaming
grass. I caught nothing, but became impatient for success. That evening in town,
well after dark, I remembered that people usually went fishing off the esplanade
at night and I took my rod there with my highly corrupt prawn bait.
It was still very crowded along the promenade facing the park. Brightly lit
stalls selling fruit, soup, noodles and drinks made an almost uninterrupted line
along the kerb, and Chinese couples sat shoulder to shoulder along the sea wall
sipping dayglo drinks from plastic bags. In Malaysia technology seems to boil
down to three things : plastic bags, fluorescent tubes and two-stroke
motorcycles. The sea bed around Penang is already lined with plastic, and for my
first two catches I brought in two bags full of sea water.
Shortly before midnight the crowds thinned out, the stalls were wheeled off
and only dedicated fishermen were left on either side of me. I was very
inexperienced and had no real hope of catching anything, but for a moment when
I felt the tug on the line I did think I had a big fish. Then I saw it was a branch of
a palm. My line was a very strong one, bought in Australia for a quite different
purpose, and I was able to drag the branch into the strip of beach six feet below
me under the sea wall. Then I had the silly idea that I could hoist it up and
disentangle my line. I had a lead sinker on the line, my last one, and I wanted to
save it. I leaned over the wall, straining with all my might, and something hit me
very, very hard in the right eye.
I clapped my hand over my eye and gave some token gasps, waiting for the
pain to engulf me. No such thing happened. First there was a stunning shock.
Then a wave of nausea as I realized what I had done. The hook had broken
away, obviously, and the sinker, catapulted by a thirty-pound line under breaking
strain, had scored a direct hit on my eyeball. Like a bullet in a grape, I thought.
Even while shuddering with the horror of it, I was aware that the fisherman
alongside me was quite unperturbed. I danced about a bit to dramatize my injury,
to no effect. I dared to explore with my finger, dreading what I might feel, but the
eyeball did at least seem to be a ball. Experimentally I opened my eyelid. Pitch
blackness assailed me. It just seemed impossible that an eye could survive such
an injury. I gave some thought to the kind of eye patch I would wear, and to
whether it was possible to ride a motorcycle successfully with one eye.
‘I said to the fisherman: Ί have been hit in the eye.’
‘You want me to gather your things-ah ? ‘ he replied, unmoved.
Bewildered by his priorities, I declined the offer, got my own things together
with one hand (I could not, for some reason, take my hand away from my eye)
and left him my bait. Then I wandered off down the esplanade, and it came to me
that I should really do something about it. All the time a little voice was telling me:
‘You are blind in one eye,’ and I felt a bit unsteady.
Two policemen stood by the Town Hall.
‘I have had an accident,’ I said. ‘ Is there a hospital ? ‘
They didn’t speak much English.
‘Go to big police station,’ said one, pointing across the park into the
darkness.
‘No. No. Hospital,’ I said. By now I knew that’s what I had to do.
‘No car,’ said one, ‘but – ha! – here trishaw.’
The trishaw stopped and I said: ‘To the hospital how much ?’
‘Three dollar. OK,’he said.
‘Dollar fifty OK,’ I said, and off we went.
The history of Penang is all bound up with British naval history. I sat in the
little wooden cab between the two front wheels while the trishaw driver pedalled
behind me, and in the prow of our small craft, with my hand over my eye, I
imagined myself to be Nelson as we sailed through the night. A brilliantly
uniformed policeman on a flashing Motoguzzi tried to get us to make way for the
Prime Minister of Kedah State who was leaving an ornate mansion in his
limousine, but I pointed ahead imperiously and cried: ‘Hospital!’ He fell back
demoralized, and we swept past, raking him with a broadside.
At the hospital they put me in funny white pyjamas, taped gauze pads over
both my eyes and told me to hope for the best and above all not to move a
muscle.
I spent a week in total darkness, being manipulated for my own good and
hating it, discovering cups of cold tea on my locker hours after they had been put
there and learning about the other problems blind people have with the rest of us.
I spent much time contemplating the path that had led me to that bed. I could not
avoid the feeling that I was there because I had lost my grip on my situation and
purpose; that I was adrift here in Penang as I had been ever since I had allowed
the journey to change focus in California.
The degeneration followed, it seemed, when I gave away control, believing
the seductive Californian notion that only good things happen when you let it all
hang out. Maybe there was another trip to be made that way, but mine was not
open-ended like that. It had to be conceived and executed and completed; more
like a work of art than life. The instructions had to be uncompromisingly clear and
they had to be regenerated at every step, otherwise what could I expect but a
drift towards decay and chaos.
The bike itself was a model for the idea I was striving towards. Only a
continual desire to improve its performance, to make the systems more and more
efficient and trouble-free, would keep it going to the end. There was no steady
state. As soon as I lost interest, became tired of it, said that’s good enough and
I’m not going to bother with it for a while, things began to fall apart. I would start
losing things, a wrench, a pair of goggles, a useful piece of rope. Or something
would come unscrewed and fall off before I had noticed it, and I would have to do
some makeshift repair. Then, to realize that my pocket universe was running
down and fraying at the edges because of my own laziness made it harder to find
the extra energy and enthusiasm to pull it all together again. A lazy mistake saps
confidence and leads to the next mistake. I was in hospital in Penang because I
had misjudged my strength in California, or so it seemed to me then.
The chain of cause and effect had not yet run its course. A few days later
someone came into this ward full of sightless people and stole my wallet from my
bedside locker. When I knew it had happened it was as though the last support
had been kicked out from under me. The two passports, the papers, the wallet
itself were precious. The bulk of the money, thank heavens, was in traveller’s
cheques. But the address books…I felt as though the whole journey had been
stolen from me and I was in despair.
I came out after nine days with my sight only slightly impaired and a crazy
dwarf swinging a lantern in the corner of my right eye. I was grateful to have an
eye at all. I spent a lot of time at the coffeehouse opposite the Kung Fu hall,
dredging my memory for the names and addresses I had lost. Those were the
bitterest moments. I could have forgiven the thief everything but that.
A beautiful girl lived and worked there. She had the most delicious Chinese
rosebud mouth. In the morning, when I went there for a steamed cake, she came
down in a pink nightgown with the sleep still in her almond eyes. I wanted to
believe she was the proprietor’s sister, but she was probably his wife. In any
event she had no interest in me, and I had to satisfy myself with looking at her
when I could.
I was resigned to two weeks of outpatient treatment before it was safe for me
to travel on, and I sadly abandoned my plans to cross over to Sumatra. There
would be time for a short excursion into Thailand, and no more.
The British Embassy in Kuala Lumpur refused to send me a new passport
even though there was a consul in Penang who had checked me out. They
insisted that I drive the five hundred miles to Kuala Lumpur and back, a dirty and
expensive ride on the main highway, but they did not even look at me when I got
there. It was the kind of treatment I always heard tourists complain about. I was
unused to it, and it emphasized my sense of having lost my status. All over the
world tourists had their passports ripped off. In every bank there were tourists
claiming refunds on stolen traveller’s cheques. It was never going to happen to
me but now I was just another tourist after all, only fit to sign up for a package
tour. I had lost my immunity, and it hurt.
When the stator arrived from England with a new rear wheel as well my spirits
lifted a little. The cheques were replaced without difficulty. I had another cholera
shot and a smallpox scratch to get the necessary certificate. I bought some
leather and sewed a new wallet to replace the old one.
The owner of the Choong Thean Hotel spoke no English but was very kind
and showed real concern for me and for the safety of my things while I was in the
hospital. When I returned he made sure I had the same room, and he often asked
me, by gestures, to come and eat with him and his staff in the back.
He was not an old man but his face was battered and impassive. It was
difficult for him to express his feelings with it. He walked around all day in pyjama
trousers, sometimes with a singlet, sometimes without and scarcely ever left the
hotel. There was much to keep an eye on there. Several Indian prostitutes
worked in his front room looking out on the street, comfortable matronly ladies
with gold teeth, most of them. They did not have to solicit, for they had regular
Hindu gentlemen who called, at all times of day, usually with briefcases under
their arms. A room was set aside for them at the back, and they paid a dollar
twenty per customer to the house. Then there was the nightly mahjong game in
the kitchen below the hotel stairs. This appeared to be hired out on a franchise to
a man who also ate with us. He busied himself preparing the table with its thick
pad of clean white paper sheets, and was there to tear off the top sheet after
each game. It is a noisy game, played very fast and for a high stake. The clatter
of the tiles and shouts of Pong and Kong went on into the early hours and I was
glad my room was a long way away.
There was an old man working for the owner who spoke English, though he
was literally tongue-tied. He told me that he could have been a police inspector if
he had had an operation ‘ to cut the string’, but he was too frightened. When he
was not dozing in his chair he asked me questions about travelling and how much
things cost in France. Although he was almost destitute, he began to form the
idea that his luck would change and he would be able to travel the world and visit
me in France.
‘But I would not be able to go as you. When you are going through the jungle
and meeting dangerous animals I will not be able to run away, so it will cost me
fifty thousand dollars to go around the world.’ Not nearly, or about fifty thousand
dollars, but the precise sum, and he would of course put it all straight into
‘travelling cheques’.
India

India received me so well. I sat there smiling back at my own good fortune. At
best I had hoped to be received by friends of friends but here I had the friend
himself. Quite by chance I had come during the two weeks that he was visiting his
father, and so I had been able to.arrive out of the crush and confusion of the
Madras docks to a peaceful welcome.
I sat on a bench in the garden close to the door of the house. There was an
area of crazy paving and, rising from the middle of it, a big mature tree with fine
leaves called the neem tree. My friend’s father, a retired colonel, told me it was
sacred and I did not doubt him. In it lived small squirrels, chocolate brown with
light yellow stripes along their backs where, it was said, the fingers of Brahma
had caressed them. One of them came down to the paving in front of me to see
what else the hand of God might have provided.
Near the tree was a stone pedestal and on it stood a pot with a sacred plant
directly facing the door. On the flagstone outside the door a design was chalked
which was also sacred. It was renewed every morning by the housekeeper, and
there were several patterns she could choose from. They were quite complex and
were drawn in a continuous line around rows of dots with swift confidence. Inside
the front door was a small reception area, and on the wall, looking out to the
sacred plant, were portraits of Sai Baba, for the colonel was a devotee of Sai
Baba, the holy man. Between the plant and the pictures the daily pujas, or
services, were performed, and these few yards were the axis of the spiritual life
of the colonel’s household.
I sat in this shaded pool of faith under the neem looking along the path to the
garden gate and at two women who were standing there and talking about the
arrangements for a wedding. They wore saris of course, and it would not be
worth mentioning but that it was new to me and I was trying to decide what it was
about this garden, this light, these women that made the sari look so natural.
The women were the mother and the sister of the bride-to-be. The young
woman wore a pink bodice under her sari, but the older woman just draped the
loose folds of cotton over her breasts. The temperature was such that all clothes
were mere decoration.
Nothing changed. Time passed. The squirrel nibbled, ran up the tree, came
down again. The women talked, and I heard the rapid syllables of Tamil spurting
out, each spurt ending on a tantalizing drawn-out vowel sound. Behind the leaves
of the neem the sun broke into a thousand glittering fragments and moved slowly
towards evening.
 The colonel’s house was humble. Once the family had lived in a big house
and owned a sizeable piece of Madras, but times had changed and anyway the
colonel had found satisfaction in simplicity. The house was a bungalow with a
flat roof At one end was the colonel’s bedroom. At the other end was an office
cum spare room where I now slept. Between the two were the little hallway and
the kitchen.
The kitchen was mysterious and dark, with little furniture and a stone floor.
The housekeeper, a tubby determined woman, sat on the floor to chop food on a
board and grind the spices in a mortar. At night she slept on the floor behind the
front door. She was a very religious woman and sometimes went into a trance,
singing and dancing and twirling rather dangerously, and then it took the strength
of several men to restrain her.
There were a few smaller buildings around the garden. My friend was housed
in one. At the other end of the garden near the gate and beyond the women who
were still talking was another abode attached to a garage. That was where the
father of the bride-to-be lived. He was a Brahmin called Rajaram, who had
appeared by chance in the colonel’s life some years before and had stayed to
become the resident spiritual adviser.
He was coming towards me now, past the women and the neem tree, a small
thin figure, perfectly erect, with a striking head and prominent features. His eyes
were large and luminous, and his mouth was poised always on the brink of mirth,
for the world was to him a source of constant amusement.
He wore an open shirt revealing a string of brown beads and the knotted cord
of his caste. Around his waist was tied the usual cotton skirt called a lungi. His
chest was nut brown, hairless, very spare and scarcely wrinkled at all, though he
was certainly over seventy years old. There was a little wispy white hair on his
head, and rather more in his ears. He was almost deaf, and I got the impression
that he was quite glad to be spared from hearing so much nonsense. It certainly
saved him from a lot of the fuss to do with the wedding, and he joked about the
cost of it and the ceremony attached to it.
The guest list had grown to over a hundred and everyone had to be fed, with
many dishes served on banana leaves.
‘There are four thousand people coming,’ he said, spluttering with laughter.
‘Each one is getting a tamarind leaf with one grain of rice.’
His wife scolded him for not taking it seriously, but fortunately he could not
hear her. He came up to me now and greeted me gravely. Then, pointing to the
motorcycle standing near his room, he held his hands out in front of him as
though grasping the controls and pretended to roar off into the sky, grinning like a
child.
‘You are flying through the world,’ he said.’ You must be going at two hundred
miles an hour.’
I laughed to see his enchantment. It was wonderful that this tiny old man
could imagine himself rushing through the stratosphere, bow-legged and beads
flying, astride a great machine. The bike was so familiar to me, in its capacities
and limitations, that I was surprised when others saw it as a symbol of great
speed and power.
The colonel came out of the house carrying a silver platter. During the day he
wore English clothes. When going to town he put on his polished brown shoes
and his solar topee and carried a cane. Now he was wearing a lungi also, and the
Indian shirt. He came to me and showed me the grey powder on the plate.
‘This is vibuti’ he said. ‘ It is holy ash. It is the custom to put this on our
foreheads when we worship God.’ He put his finger in the ash and drew a line on
my forehead, like an exclamation mark. I shuddered slightly to the touch, and
then felt calmed by it. There is great power in such deliberate touching of another
human being, and I had been experimenting with it, trying to recognize the force
that lay in my hands.
Rajaram went through the ritual of the puja in front of me with the colonel
standing solemnly by. The plant and the tree were part of it, and then, still
chanting, the Brahmin walked to the pictures in the house and chanted in front of
them too, ‘Hare, Hare, Krishna, Krishna,’ and so on, the colonel following and
standing by. It was businesslike but not at all perfunctory, as so much Christian
ritual seems, and as the Chinese had seemed in their temples. My friend stood by
rather detached with his arms folded, looking as English here in India as he had
looked Indian in England.
 With no religion of my own, I had always been embarrassed when others tried
to draw me into their religious exercises, saying ‘grace’ for example at Lusaka,
even making a circle of hands at the ranch, which was the least of statements.
Yet here, I already felt that I was living as much in a temple as a house, and that
merely by being there I was engaged in some kind of worship, and it did not
offend me at all. What I objected to, what had always seemed awkward and
artificial, was the separation of God from the world. ‘And now, a brief word to our
sponsor…’–that kind of thing. If there was a god at all, then wherever he was
would have to be in everything all the time, especially in me. After only twenty-four
hours in India I could already feel that presence, in the tree, the plant, the
animals, in Rajaram. It was the living belief of others that conjured up this feeling
in me. I was excited and curious to see how it would affect me in the long run. As
faith, or superstition?
‘Sai Baba is quite a remarkable man,’ said the colonel. I could see his
problem. How do you talk about such things to an Englishman? The word
‘remarkable’ has a nice understated honesty about it. Might do the trick? He
looked at me through his dark brown eyes, trying to gauge whether it was worth
going on. The colonel was a very straightforward man, without guile. I tried to be
encouraging.
‘He does certain things which can only be described as miracles. For
instance this holy ash now, you see, this vibuti. He can produce it from his hand.
He will walk among his devotees and distribute the vibuti. In considerable
quantities. I myself have seen it literally pouring out.’
This is the turning point, I thought. He has committed himself now, by the
evidence of his own eyes. I nodded enthusiastically.
‘That is the sort of thing I have been looking for all along,’ I said. ‘In Brazil I
heard about something similar…’ I stopped. The colonel was listening politely but
I could see that he did not want to hear about Brazil.
‘Of course, many holy men can produce vibuti,’ he said. ‘That is nothing
special. Now Sai Baba does other things much more remarkable. He can produce
objects such as jewellery, and precious stones. There are recorded instances of
him taking a broken watch from a devotee and returning it in perfect order after
holding it in his hand. I will give you a book to read. There are many examples.
‘Sai Baba has encouraged me to do my own work here. I had the idea of
building a small temple devoted to him, and a hall where people may come to hear
about different religions. You see, there is only one God. Christ, Buddha,
Brahma, Mohammad, it is all the same.
‘I asked Sai Baba, and he gave me his blessing. Every year he produces a
lingam from his mouth. It is an important event at Whitelands, where he has his
headquarters. It is quite extraordinary. The lingam is very big. It is impossible to
see how it can pass through his throat.
‘There is always a great throng of devotees and Sai Baba passes among us,
talking to some, stepping over bodies to get past. At one point he stepped on my
back to pass across and you know, a quite remarkable thing, he was weightless.
He had his foot on my back but there was absolutely no weight at all.’
We walked through the gate and along the pavement, and then turned back
behind the garden wall to where the temple was, a simple square building with a
wooden floor, and at the back a shrine with two portraits of Sai Baba. In one he
was garlanded and smiling, and the picture was rather faded with brown marks at
the bottom edge. In the other he was standing at the top of a flight of stone
steps in a vivid crimson robe. He was a small dark-skinned man with a round face
appearing at the centre of a mass of fuzzy black hair. The portraits were in silver
frames. Beneath one was a silver bowl and beneath the other was a tray.
‘Now I have brought you here to see this,’ said the colonel,’ because it is
proof. From this portrait, you see, ash falls into the tray. The vibuti you have on
your forehead came out of this picture. Every morning there is more ash on the
tray. And from the other picture honey runs into the bowl. It is quite amazing.’
There was ash in the tray, but the bowl was empty.
‘During the last few days, the honey has stopped. I think it is a sign that
something is not right. There are certain problems. I am planning to ask Sai
Baba’s advice.’
Just suppose, I said to myself, that I crept out here at midnight, and hid.
Would I be likely to see old Rajaram slip through the window with a syringe and
inject honey into that photograph? Or would the colonel appear furtively in his
nightgown and shake ash into the tray? It was preposterous. I imagined myself
devoting a lifetime to experiments with carbon dating and isotope tagging,
infrared cameras and laser beams to prove that the colonel and the Brahmin were
true or false. And never would I know any better than I knew already after only
twenty-four hours that it could not be in them to deceive me in that way. Or even
if I showed them false today, what is to stop them being true tomorrow?
Let the ash pour, and the honey drip. What do they prove after all? That the
world is full of marvels which I don’t understand? I have known that for a long
time. There are subtleties here to be penetrated, but not by scientific experiments
on the composition of honey and the origins of ash.
Still, I thought, I shall go and see this Sai Baba. It would be something to be
present at a miracle.
My friend introduced me to the more mundane aspects of life in Madras. I
tasted again the strange pleasure to be had in visiting institutions created by the
British in another era, and maintained by the Indians in their original form for their
own use. There was squash and ginger beer at the Madras Cricket Club, for
example, and there was still a faint but original odour of mem-sahib drifting in the
air of Spencer’s store. All of it, though, was transformed for me by the calm of
the colonel’s garden and the aura of Rajaram. I was easy with the climate, hot as
it was, and happy with the food. After four days I felt rested and secure, and the
wounds of Penang seemed finally to have closed. I was ready to set off into
India, like a ship well rigged and provisioned with a rested crew, a good wind and
nothing but fair weather ahead. The blow fell that morning. A telegram arrived to
tell me that my stepfather had died suddenly and unexpectedly.
I wrestled with the problem for hours. Many times I had asked myself what I
would do if my mother were to die while I was away. The answer was always:
keep going. I was obsessed by the idea that to break the journey might somehow
destroy it. But it had never occurred to me that it might be Bill, who was so much
younger, who would die first. The very fact that I should have got the news in
Madras, where every day planes took off that could get me to England, seemed
significant. What if it had happened while I was on the altiplano? In my heart I
knew I could not leave my mother alone at such a time.
I asked Rajaram, writing my question down on a scrap of paper:

YESTERDAY MY STEPFATHER DIED. WHAT SHOULD I DO FOR MYMOTHER ? and

he replied in writing too:

⅛ or ⅕ your profit in come you may help her. It is bounden duty of human
being if she helpless.

MONEY IS NOT THE PROBLEM. I WANT TO COMFORT HER . There is a doctor

already to look after her.

BUT WHICH WAY SHALL I GO ?

(We are gifted a compus in our hart) your prayer will guide you, right
direction; for your all success in life.

Following my compass, it took me thirteen hours to fly back to the place that
I had spent three years travelling away from. I was sucked up by the silver tube
and spilled out on London Airport. Within no time I was standing next to my
mother at the crematorium chapel, as the remains of her husband were
consigned to the flames. I was so sickened by the soulless mechanics, the
hideous insensitivity of the whole affair, that his loss did not strike home to me
until weeks afterwards. With the feeling of India still strong in me I felt I would
rather be tossed out on a charnel ground for the vultures than be disposed of by
remote control behind nylon curtains in a gas oven, despatched by the rounded
insincerities of a mass-destruction priest.
Best of all would be to die somewhere where my friends could dig a hole for
me. I hoped that when I died I might still have friends who would do that for me.
The flight back to Madras was tedious. Police searched the 747 at Tel Aviv
and again at Teheran. I missed the connection at Bombay and had to spend a
night there in the monsoon. Next day the plane was delayed at takeoff. Engineers
rooted about on the flight deck while we roasted in the cabin.
I sat next to a professor at Madras University returning from a spell in
Germany. He was good company, but the remark I treasured most was about the
water in Frankfurt.
‘We always boiled the tap water,’ he said. ‘It is polluted and quite unsafe to
drink. Fortunately in Madras we don’t have this problem. Our river water is quite
pure.’
By coincidence, some ten days later the Bombay-Madras plane blew up,
killing everyone on board.
Madras, when I got back there, felt like a different place. I was plagued by
minor irritations and discomforts that I had not even noticed before, if indeed they
had existed. I was bothered by the heat, the humidity and the mosquitoes. I felt
weak and jet-lagged. My friend had long since left and I imagined myself less
welcome than I had been before. I found people ambiguous and inefficient,
waggling their heads in the absurd way they do as though the gesture alone
would make everything turn out fine.
Eating with my fingers was disagreeable, and forced me to wonder why I
should feel so vulnerable sitting at table with sloppy food all over my right hand. I
felt a craving for meat, thinking it might restore my morale, and I bought a chicken
and asked the housekeeper to cook it.
It was a bad mistake. The colonel liked meat, having been raised in an
English tradition, but he was now convinced that it was wrong to do so. Rajaram
would never touch it, though he sweetly ignored those who did. The housekeeper
was thoroughly disapproving and I could see I had made the colonel feel very
guilty. What was worse, when the chicken appeared on the table in a small bowl,
there seemed to be nothing left of it but the beak, neck, claws and ribs. I naturally
assumed that the thrifty housekeeper was planning to stretch it over several
meals, and in all innocence I asked in what way she planned to prepare the meat.
I thought Kali, the Goddess of Destruction, was going to leap at me from her
eyes when the colonel translated the message.
‘She says the chicken is all there,’ said the colonel. I was wise enough to
keep quiet, but I thought I had better leave their house soon before I blundered
into even deeper trouble. It was a classic example of the danger of flying between
different worlds and cultures.
Obviously it was I who had changed, and not India, and I longed to feel the
satisfaction and calm I had known before. Perhaps, I thought, I will find it in the
temples as I ride south to Sri Lanka. There was one only fifty miles away at
Kanchipuram. I said good-bye to the colonel, feeling very grateful to him and
miserable at having even doubted his hospitality. I feasted my eyes on Rajaram
one last time and, receiving his tranquil farewell, I rode into India.

Riding the Temple Trail is like riding into a Black Hole. Everything rushes in
squeezing, condensing, more of everything than you ever thought possible. You
have only to pronounce the names to know: Ekamboreswara temple at
Kanchipuram, Mahishisura-mordhini cave at Mahabalipuram, Arunachala temple
at Tiruvanamalai, Tiruchirapalli and Brihadeeswarer temple at Thanjavur, more
syllables per word than the Western tongue can roll around, more people per
tourist than the eye can see, more distance per mile, more surprises per minute,
more carvings per square yard. Everything in profusion and superfluity, and
somewhere in the middle of this crush they say is calm. So find it!
Not easy. A sign points down a narrow street of shops and stalls, a milling
confusion of people, animals, bicycles. The bazaar. Above the seething mass,
appearing to rise right out of it, a towering wedge of masonry completely
obliterated by carved figures, as though squeezed up and petrified by the
pressure of the bazaar itself. The temple. What causes these people to
compress themselves like this? I used to think, in my airy Western way, that it
was because there were so many of them. Every question about India was so
easily answered by ‘overpopulation’. Now I remember the insane knots of people
around the counter of an otherwise empty shop or post office, the steady
pressure of the man behind me in the queue, forcing his body against mine, drawn
by a mindless magnetism. I call it insane because my sanity flourishes with space
and distance. India seems like a giant condenser, everybody streaming towards
the centre to fuse.
I stop the bike to consider whether I can really hope to penetrate the bazaar.
A ring of bodies forms instantly, and begins to thicken. The crowd is crystallizing
out around me. I have to hold tight for a second, but there is no danger. I was
well trained in South America, and the crowd here is just a degree or two more
concentrated. I see that it is only partly curiosity that draws them, because much
of the time they are not even looking at me. It’s more that I might mean an
opportunity, a lucky chance. The instinct is to get close to the action, that’s all.

I’m not really thinking all this stuff now, though. I’m too busy making contact,
making sure they know I am a human being. Thank God I wear an open helmet so
that they can see my face. I take it off anyway and talk, looking out at the sea of
faces with the confidence of a superstar. It is something I learned to do, like
overcoming vertigo. First I was scared to death, then completely at ease. There
is no middle way. Now I am quite relaxed. There are easily a hundred people
gathered around me, but they are short and I can look down on them.
Where is the temple? Can I go through this way? A man in the foreground
answers:
‘Yes, you can go. You are coming from? Your native place is?’
A stream of questions, and as I answer I am trying to cultivate humility,
because it would be so easy to think I could play games with these people. I try
to remember that from their point of view, as well as being fascinating I might
also seem exceptionally foolish.
I kick the engine over and the crowd opens before me. At walking pace I ride
through to the outer gate of the temple. It is not a good way to arrive. There is no
logical place to park a bike, and it looks very vulnerable. I am hot and absurdly
overdressed in boots and jeans, and I have to carry the jacket and helmet,
because there is nowhere to leave them. On top of that, a camera and a long
lens.
I feel like a target, not a person. And here come the kids.
‘Hello, sir, what is your name? Where you are coming from? You are going? I
am collecting coins. You are having coins from your country? I am also collecting
stamps. You are having? Give me one rupee.’
And then the man with the sandals – and the postcards, and the beads, as I
walk towards the inner gate. On the right of the gate is a sanctuary like a cave
and in the doorway stands an extraordinary figure of a man with streaks of
coloured paint over his forehead and an expression of such solemnity that I want
to laugh. He is making weird gestures with his arms, and all I can think is that he
looks like a fake, like Charlton Heston acting a crazy Brahmin for Cecil B.
DeMille. He is beckoning to me; any second I expect to hear:
‘Hey, sport! Over here! Listen! Your soul’s slipping, feller. Don’t miss Siva’s
lingam, sport. Maybe your last chance this lifetime. See the greasy ghee pour
down over the supreme prick. Hurry! The Wisdom of the Orient awaits you.’
The kids are still on my trail, and I have been joined by a young man who
simply walks alongside me with an ineffably sweet smile, so sweet and sad that I
am sure he has been practising it for years. He asks for nothing, but as the
collectors of coins, stamps, ball pens and rupees launch yet another assault, he
says: ‘Ah, those boys,’ again and again.
Inside the gate the unofficial soliciting slackens off, the Wistful Smiler keeps
his distance (what does he want?) and I wander about looking for inspiration.
Under an enormous slab of stone supported by hundreds of carved pillars, a
small family is cooking in a brass pot over a fire. A bearded man approaches
making semaphore movements with his arms. He stares hotly into the middle of
my skull, and then turns away as if he’s got the message. I have not got the
message. My eyes are grabbing at everything, but I still don’t know what I’m doing
here. Either this whole gigantic affair is a fraud, or someone will have to come
and tell me the truth about something.
Looking for the heart of the temple, I find a cash desk with a man sitting
behind bars. There’s a board up with various prices: 30 paise, 75 paise, 1 rupee
25, 2 rupees 50, but the explanation is printed in Tamil. Eventually I discover that
this does not apply to me. As a non-Hindu I am a prohibited person, but a young
man takes my arm and says:’ Come. I will show you.’ As I hesitate, he says: ‘I am
not a guide. I am a priest.’
He draws me around a labyrinth of colonnaded passages, rattling away.
When I listen closely I realize he is speaking English, but the syllables are
colliding and leapfrogging over each other. Then we come to the Mango Tree.
Partitions have been built to shield it from any casual eye, and I am led inside
where a loquacious old gentleman takes over.
The Mango Tree, he says, is probably three thousand years old and has four
branches. Each branch bears a different quality of fruit; bitter, sweet, sour and
savoury. He walks me round the tree at a fair trot.
‘And now,’ he says grandly, arms outstretched, ‘you can offer something to
be shared among these friends.’
The friends, I see, include the priest and the Wistful Smiler.
‘Ten rupees is the least you can offer.’
I give two, with bad grace, and hurry off. As I emerge from the temple, the
priest, who has been keeping up with me, says: ‘I also am collecting coins…’
But the bike is untouched, and though the kids greet me in even greater
numbers I am able to keep my temper with them and even clown a bit, and all I
lose is my ball pen. The Wistful Smiler smiles on me again, in the bazaar, and I
have learned to do it differently next time. Anyway, the truth is waiting for me next
day on the road at Chingleput.
On the main road at Chingleput is a petrol and diesel station, and on the
opposite side of the road, a wooden teahouse. Trucks, buses and cars stop
here, and it is a busy area. One man has put himself in charge of it. How he has
done so I don’t know, but there is no doubt, as I watch him over a cup of milk tea,
that he is in command.
He is a handsome, powerfully built man in middle age with iron-grey hair close
cropped on a strong head. His face is particularly striking; it has the intelligence
and flair of a statesman or a soldier, lines deeply etched and showing great force
and passion, even I would say genius.
Both his legs are cut off halfway along the thigh, and he sits on the stumps
on a little wooden trolley, a couple of inches off the ground. He has leather pads
on his hands to push himself along. It seems to me that he has all the energy and
conviction it takes to run a country or command an army and he has put it into
being a crippled beggar. He skates back and forth across the tarmac with
immense skill, shouting his demands, roaring with laughter when he is refused,
slapping his stumps with mirth and defying fate with every gesture. There is not a
drop of pathos or self-pity in him anywhere. He is a blaze of vitality. When he
holds out his hand to me, and I hesitate, he grunts with impatience, laughs and
scoots off to the next arrival. There is no question that it was my loss, not his.
There is no one in sight who could even begin to challenge his authority, and
he is the best example I have ever seen of the power of the human spirit to
impose itself over fate. Is it pure coincidence, then, that I should see the next
day another man who achieved as much and in a quite different way?
From a distance he is no more than a black smudge on the pavement outside
the Continental Hotel in Pondicherry. When it becomes apparent that this blob
has a human head on it, my inclination is to hurry by, but two small boys prevent
me, and reluctantly I am drawn towards it.
The head is about eighteen inches above the pavement, and is not nearly as
handsome as the Churchill of Chingleput’s, but at least it is a complete head, and
it sits on shoulders. One shoulder is better developed than the other, and from it
a single strong arm reaches up past the head to grasp a stick. Below the
shoulders and under his shirt I can see the outline of an underdeveloped chest,
which seems to be resting directly on the pavement. Whatever else is there is
concealed by the shirt, but there is no room for anything much. It is utterly
improbable that this person could exist at all. It seems to lack room for the most
basic organs, just a head, shoulders and lungs hanging like a vine on a stick. But
I must stop this callous clinical naming of parts, because he says: ‘Good
afternoon.’
I crouch down on the pavement, and we have a conversation in English. His
English is limited but intelligible, and he speaks gently, with patience. He is forty
years old. This alone I find incredible. With his withered arm he brings out some
papers from beneath his shirt. Among them is an address book. He has friends
everywhere. He corresponds with Europe and America. For some months he lived
with some Germans in their rented rooms until their visas expired. There is an
exchange of letters also with a wheelchair firm in Calcutta and a scheme for
sponsoring the construction of a special device to wheel him around.
From this almost nonexistent being on a pavement in Pondicherry a field of
consciousness reaches out around the globe. As far as I know he is not a great
painter or poet or musician, though it would be wonderful if he were, but his
accomplishment is much greater than that. Against all the odds, he has refused
to disappear.

I’m riding awkwardly through a thicket of experience, still shaky from the flight
to Europe. After three years on the move I can’t mend my fences so fast. I hover
between confidence and a sense of great loss, trying to understand the meaning
of what has happened. It seems to me that my trials should have been over after
Penang. My first days in Madras should have been the beginning of a final and
marvellous chapter in India, full of discovery, significance and spiritual
satisfaction. That is how I would have written it, but I have lost the strength to
sustain the illusion and reality has tripped me up. I feel as foolish as if I had
slipped on a banana peel.
Have I really been on a long flight from reality, trying to give meaning to
something that was meaningless? Was it all just an escape that I have been
trying to turn into a legend? I’m teetering on a knife edge between faith and
despair. Was the purpose of that return to Europe just to show me that there was
no purpose? I arrived there full of wisdom, but nothing I had seen or done or
thought seemed to be relevant. I passed through pubs, offices, restaurants,
supermarkets, stifled by the boredom of it, but with nothing useful to say to
anyone. I felt the failure was mine, that if I had properly understood my
experience in Africa, America, Asia, I should be able to apply it to people in
trouble with the cost of living or career bottlenecks or sheer boredom. Some of
them even asked me, thinking I should know, but my answers seemed to offer no
solution. My advice always boiled down to the same thing. Don’t solve the
problem, just give it up.
They always assumed I was advising them to move to some tropical
paradise. I saw the disillusion growing in their eyes.
‘Well, frankly, old boy, we’d love to but, with the boys just in school and the
property market being what it is…’
I might just as well have smiled sadly and said: ‘Ah, those boys…’
In Pondicherry I spend a day drinking hot tea and sweating, to try to get rid of
a fever. Then some days at Auroville, a city of the future that exists in the dreams
of a scattered band of people, mostly Europeans and Americans, living on a
great sandy site near the coast. Where else in the world could there be so much
clarity amidst confusion, so much love amidst hostility, so much beauty in
squalor, so much faith against all the evidence? The pioneers of Auroville are at
war with their governing ashram in Pondicherry. Among themselves they hold
wildly different views about how the dream of their guiding spirit, Mother
Aurobindo, should be carried out. There are some French people living as though
on a luxury holiday in St Tropez, Australians farming like aboriginals in loincloths
on a diet of fermented Finger Millet, a Mexican running a market garden on the
lines of a Jesuit mission in Latin America, others living more or less orthodox
lives in other corners of this vast estate. Yet I feel the cohesion in all this
diversity, and it is symbolized by a huge, raw, ferroconcrete skeleton, unfinished
and hungry for labour, hand-built on the scale of a modern construction project,
which one day, God willing, will become a shimmering sixty-foot globe enshrining
the aspirations of them all. Meanwhile it is a demanding and practically useless
burden without which, I feel, the whole place will fall apart.
I am more at home in the temples now, less encumbered, and at Thanjavur I
find the one that sends my spirit soaring. It has a perfect form, as classical as
the Piazza San Marco in Venice, and should be called the Drawing Room of
India. My self-appointed guide is called Ravi. He has a fine address, very Indian,
worth recording: c/o V. Balasubramanian, Accountant, Pandyan Automobiles,
Tirunelveli 2. He is fourteen and very sharp. He claims that being a guide is his
hobby, and plays a neat trick on me by not taking anything, and so keeping my
suspicions alive all afternoon.
Later a literature student called Gopal catches me, like a fish, in a quiet
backwater of Thanjavur where I’m eating a curry. By thrashing the water all
around me he manages to guide me to his home where his friends come, one
after another, to see what he has brought.
He is in a fever of excitement about having hooked a writer, and is determined
that I must at least be Solzhenitsyn if not Shakespeare. When the expected
fountain of wisdom fails to spurt from my lips, his disappointment is manifest.
‘Does it not bother you that you have not made your name?’ he asks in a
hectoring manner; an odd question, since he does not yet know my name.
‘Would you know if I had?’ I reply.
‘I would certainly know if you were an important journalist or writer, for I am
reading always anything I can get my hands on. What about Ireland? Are the
British being fair to Irish Catholics? What about the Israeli hijack? What about
this inflation?’
Sitting on a bare iron bedframe in a cell-like room facing my inquisitor, I find I
have not a single useful opinion in my head. I have read none of the books he
mentions, know next to nothing about the authors he considers great. It is very
dispiriting. He does not seem to want to talk about things, only to name names
and list subjects and titles. Eventually I counterattack with a short lecture on
empiricism. It is extremely feeble, but his waspishness melts under a single hot
breath. Now he wants me for a godfather. I am to introduce his work to
publishers in London, offer criticism and enlightenment, foster his career. With
great difficulty I manage to disentangle myself without actually telling a lie.
How could I resent such opportunism, though. In this tide of humanity, where
an economics degree might just get you a job on a bus, it’s not good enough to
open the door to opportunity. You must lasso it on the doormat.
In the night I dream that I am losing all my friends. They are running off while I
am delayed, fumbling with something. I cannot catch them. There is a cat whose
affection I am eager to arouse, without success. I ask whether it wouldn’t be
content to live with me. It looks at me and judges me. I can feel its appraisal.
‘So, so,’ it says. ‘Comme ci, comme ça’ – and I am left feeling quite
worthless.
On to Tiruchirapalli, Dundigal, Madurai and Rameswaram. The humidity is so
great that every time I reach into my pocket I pull the lining out with my hand. The
soil is arid, and turns to sand. Goats nibble every struggling blade of grass.
Under a clear sky I hear a shower of rain and look behind me, but it is the patter
of goats’ hooves on asphalt. Strange. Reminds me of the time when I was
camped by the roadside in Brazil and thought I heard cartwheels approaching
over the gravel I turned to see a brush fire advancing to consume me.
The fever has returned, mild but bothersome, usually in the afternoon. It has
the effect of shaking my mind loose from my body, so that the meaning of things
is out of focus. I hope it will go away of its own accord.
The ferry to Sri Lanka crosses from Rameswaram to Talimannar. The
distance is twenty-five miles. I board it at ten in the morning and get off just after
midnight. It may be the world’s slowest boat. The same people keep turning up on
this trail south, and they are on the ferry. The four Hari Krishna disciples are on
my left, and one of them is dinging his tiny cymbals in my ear. A wild and nervous
Australian ‘bushie’ is here too. I am reading and have my helmet on the chair next
to me. I’m reading because I feel sticky and sick, and I am desperately anxious to
put my mind somewhere else just now, but the Australian is desperate to talk.
‘Are you tired of answering the same questions?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ I say, firmly, without looking up.
He perches on the bench opposite me, and stares fixedly to sea. I know he’s
uncomfortable, and so am I. At last I move my helmet and he sits beside me. He’s
trying not to talk, but he’s like a kettle on the boil, and he can’t help it.
‘Would you like to hear some communism?’ he says.
The sound of cymbals in one ear and communism in the other is too much.
That is probably what started the backache, agitating a muscle at the bottom of
my spine that goes berserk once or twice a year, at inconvenient moments.
Riding the bike I hardly feel it, but when I get off the bike it hurts like hell.
At 8.30 we touch against a jetty, in the darkness, but unaccountably the boat
sails off again. At ten we return, only to sail away again and return on the other
side.
For this twenty-five-mile ferry ride I have to undergo all the formalities of an
ocean crossing, a bill of lading, a handling charge, a port charge and a six-rupee
charge to maintain the floating wharf under the wear and tear of my motorcycle.
The paper work is voluminous and infuriating at each end, and I am not dealing
with it well. I should consider myself fortunate to get away at midnight. The
hordes of Indian passengers, I later hear, don’t get ashore until 4 a.m.
For ten days I ride around the island, appreciating the calm of it. The
pressure is off here, the people don’t swarm in the same way. It’s like a dropped-
out version of India. I have come as a rainmaker. For two years they have had
drought. The great reservoirs they call ‘tanks’ are nearly dry. They need water
very badly, and on my first day there the monsoon begins. I can find it in my heart
to be very glad for them, but it complicates my life, because it keeps me moving
when I would rather lie still. I meet many lovely people, see many beautiful things,
but all against a backdrop of ache and fever. As the backache improves, the
fever gets worse, and as it fluctuates I get two quite separate images of the
tropics. In the morning, clear-sighted and with a clean brain, I see everything in
bright and rapturous growth. The wet jungle smells fresh and exciting; the jungle
birds leave notes of unbearable beauty hanging on the air; the world bursts with
new forms and colours, and the people seem wisely content to accept what
nature offers and not worry about shortages and bureaucracy and their political
future. Later, as the heat accumulates, and the humidity thickens, as I get tired
and the fever comes to dislocate my senses, I see the other side of the tropics. I
see squalor and decay, smell the stench of corruption everywhere, feel the blind
force of the jungle reaching out to swallow me, and the people seem morose,
pathetic, sinking ever deeper into a putrefying slum.
 At Puttalam, a Tamil town on the west coast, this jaundiced view of life hits
bottom. As I walk along the shore of the lagoon everything I see seems fraught
with degradation. A puppy hovering around a fish stall, so eaten up by worms
that it is no more than a skull on matchsticks; a beach stinking with refuse; some
crows scrapping for morsels. One of the crows is obviously feeble, its feathers
scraggy. It can’t get to the food, and puts its claw pleadingly on the back of
another bird, twice. I would never have thought I could break my heart over a
crow. The healthy birds fly off, leaving it to stumble along on its own. Then I see,
among all the filth and plastic and shredded tyres, a dog, curled up and licking
something. It looks at me with red mournful eyes. I see it is a bitch with distended
udders, and between its front paws is the body of a dead puppy lying back on the
garbage and oozing blood.
These examples of misery and death depress me profoundly. Everything
seems a terrible mess. The buildings are mildewed wrecks; human effort seems
futile. The people just a succession of empty-headed bodies wrapped in sheets
with shirt tails flapping, facile smiles signifying nothing if not envy and
ingratiation. I notice only the stupidity, the inefficiency. Thinking of the early
European planters who were so prone to feverish illness, I am amazed at the
misery they must have endured. There are times when I would give almost
anything to feel a cold wind blow.
I value these insights but they are undermining me seriously, and I must get
rid of the fever. At the rest house I try again with massive doses of hot tea, and
sweat enough to believe I might have broken it, but on the way to Mannar it
returns to haunt me again. The rest house man at Mannar remembers me and
gives me the same room I had on my arrival. I liked it here and I have come early
to give myself an extra day before the ferry leaves. There is an old Portuguese
fort I want to look at and a bridge where I want to try fishing. I go straight out
with my rod, hoping to be left alone, but betel-chewing spectators gather around
me. Then I get a bite. It feels big, and it’s the first time I’ve felt that heavy pull on
the line. A stingray. Fantastic. I don’t care whether it’s edible or not, I just want
to look at it. My audience warns me to be careful. One of them shows me how to
remove the sting, which, to my amazement, is not at the end of the tail at all, but
close to the root, like a quill.
Proudly I carry my prize back to the rest house, and the cook says he will fry
it for me, but’ as a fish it is not famous’. Returning to the lounge, I see two men
come in and my heart sinks. They were on the bridge earlier and annoyed me
unreasonably with their questions.
‘Your native land, please? Are you a university graduate? How much does
this rod cost in your country? And this jacket? And these shoes?’ and on and on.
Now I have to sit and take tea with them. There is no escape. One is a
government clerk, and the other is the medical officer of Mannar. They have so
little to say, and understand even less of the little I have to offer, that it is just a
yawning ritual.
‘What are the principal illnesses here?’ I ask the MO.
Malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid…
‘What are the symptoms of typhoid?’
A fever building up slowly over a number of days, body aches, headache,
nausea…
When they have finally left I tell myself it can’t be typhoid because I don’t feel
nauseous. An hour later I am sick. The fever is in me again too. Thoroughly
alarmed, I tell the rest house manager that I must go to a doctor. The rain is
coming down with great force, but there is a car parked outside and the owner
says it can take me to the hospital.
A young doctor receives me with great amusement.
‘What do you want?’ he asks, chuckling. ‘Do you want medicine or to be
admitted?’
‘I want to know what’s wrong with me,’ I say, stiffly, irritated by his attitude.
Why can’t he stop grinning?
‘You’ve got a fever,’ he says.
It’s so ridiculous I have to smile too, though I don’t want to.
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘The climate,’ he says. ‘Take a Disprin and it will go.’
‘That’s what I’ve been doing for three weeks.’
He still thinks it’s a huge joke, and asks several questions but doesn’t listen
to the answers.
‘Cough,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Cough.’
I cough.
‘You see,’ he says. ‘You’ve got a cough.’
That alone almost cures me.
Back at the rest house, convinced at least that I don’t have typhoid, I bring
out the antibiotics for the first time to treat myself. Tetracycline might do it. I take
the dose, and go fishing again.
That night a tremendous storm blows up, with sounds like cannon firing.
There-are pools of water on the floors, the garden is a lake and the varnish on all
the furniture is as sticky as toffee. Between nine and midnight I rival the storm by
sweating a lake myself. Not just the sheets but the mattress also is soaked right
through, and I have to change beds. By morning I know the fever has broken.

I first thought of becoming a god as I was riding north from Madurai. The
fever was gone. I felt more than just healthy, I was bursting with life and joy,
floating as you do when you have put down a heavy load. Without exhaustion or
discomfort to blunt my senses, without the distorting effect of fever, I saw myself
to be in a paradise,
First there were the trees. Paradise would be unthinkable without trees. The
neem, the peepul, the tamarind, countless others, stood at stately intervals
alongside the roads and fields like giant witnesses from another age. By their
presence they transform everything, framing the landscape, giving it depth,
variety and freshness, making green-glowing caverns under the sun and casting
pools of dappled shade where people and animals can feel at peace.
The ox’s creamy hide is made to reflect this flickering light. Under a shade
tree a pair of pale oxen passed, yoked to their rumbling cart. The oxen tossed
their heads, brandishing their high crescent horns painted in red and blue bands
and tipped with glittering brass. The slack, velvety hide beneath their throats
rippled in the sun, and the image was printed on my memory for life. Only on my
memory? So intense was the image, is still, that I could not believe it was meant
only for me. I felt it burning into some larger consciousness than my own.
Small groups of women walked the roads carrying vast but apparently
weightless burdens of fodder, produce, pottery or household furniture. The
breeze swirled the hems of their saris into the classic mould of nymphs and
goddesses. Wrapped in those gauzy layers of lime green and rose red their
bodies were so poised and supple, all of them, that it was sometimes a shock to
see close up the deep wrinkles and grey hair of age.
From the road I saw fields of grain and paddy. Women worked in lines,
advancing across the mud, stooping and rising easily, brilliantly coloured against
the green rice shoots. The men worked almost naked, with just a triangle of cloth
between their long powerful thighs, black-skinned and gleaming. A team of six
oxen harnessed together and guided by one man was churning up a paddy field,
flying around at a tremendous rate. Everywhere people moved briskly and with
confidence. They and the land were part of each other and had shaped each
other. The harmony was so complete that it seemed to promise utter tranquillity.
As I rode through it I felt it reaching for me, as if I had only to stop and let myself
slide into it like a pebble into a lake.
I knew those Indians were most unlikely to share my vision. How could they,
since they were in it? How could a fish describe water? And when I stopped the
bike and stood idle by the roadside it faded for me too under the remorseless
glare of so-called reality. I would have to strip naked, go hungry, live with the
mosquitoes and the parasites in the paddy squelch and shed a large part of what
I liked to call my personality. The very part of me that could envisage such a life
would prevent me from living it. Did that make it an illusion?
Throughout the journey, as I rode through so many landscapes, passed
through so many lives, forming impressions, holding them and developing them,
had I just been wallowing in illusions? It seemed very extraordinary to me that,
riding through southern India, observing this life around me, I could at the same
time summon up vivid mental images of Africans working with sisal and sugar
cane, of Americans working among corn, cattle, bananas and oil palms, of Thais
and Malays working with rice, sago and pineapples. I could create living pictures
of people and places as remote from these Indians as they had once been from
me. If my head could only be wired to a coloured print-out terminal I could have
trailed a blizzard of picture postcards from the four corners of the earth.
Just to be carrying the consciousness of so much at the same time seemed
to me to be miraculous, as though I were observing the earth from some far-off
point, Mount Olympus, perhaps, or a planet. Riding a motorcycle at thirty miles an
hour on the road to Dundigal, among people deeply involved in manual skills, so
close to the earth and each other and so different from me, I could imagine
myself as a mythical being, a god in disguise that might pass their way only once
in a lifetime.
Memories of Madras, of ashes and honey, gods and temples, were strong in
me. In India it is quite plain that there is more to life than what the senses can
perceive. I was thinking about my plan to meet Sai Baba, the holy man,
wondering how it could happen.
‘There is no cause to bother,’ a devotee advised me. ‘He will know. Just go
there. He knows everything. If he wants to see you it will happen.’
Apparently he had a headquarters at a building called Whitelands, near
Bangalore. At certain times of day he appeared before his followers. I would go
there, but I would make no other attempt to get in touch with him. I had heard and
read about his miracles, but I knew that such things could, in certain
circumstances, be ‘arranged’. It seemed very important not to go there expecting
magic.
If he ‘knows’ then let him call me out. That will be miracle enough for me.
I smiled at the idea of it happening.
Just imagine that he does know, that he knows I am riding towards him now, still
several days away but coming closer all the time, until finally I ride up to this
Whitelands place and Sai Baba falls to his knees beside themotorcycle and says:
‘My God. You have come at last.’
That was how the notion of being a god came to me originally. As a joke.
After all, there were so many gods in India already, in such wild and wonderful
guises, why not a god on a motorcycle?
The southern hills were a great surprise, rising to nearly nine thousand feet
and demolishing my notion that India south of the Himalayas was a flat hot
triangle. I rode up to Kodaikanal, the more southerly hill station where log fires
roar in the grates at night as they did in the White Highlands of Kenya, and then
over the Cardamom Hills to Cochin to enjoy the splendour of the west coast and
the green tidiness of Kerala. Then up again to Ootaca-mund, which the British
nicknamed ‘Ooty’.
At the foot of the last big climb to Ooty were groves of areca palms, quite
improbably graceful and slender for their great height. It seemed incredible that
they could support the weight of the men who clambered up them to reap the
betel crop from below their feathery crowns, swinging from one to another like
monkeys. There were monkeys too, silvery grey ones with long furry limbs.
Halfway up the hill I stopped to contemplate them, my head light with thought,
recalling all the other times I had watched them in Africa, America, Malaysia and
most recently at the rest house in Mannar where I had played with one for hours.
They seemed so close to enlightenment, as though at any moment they might
stumble over it and explode into consciousness. Their curiosity is extreme. They
experiment with any unfamiliar object, a coin, a hat, a piece of paper, just as a
human baby does, pulling it, rubbing it, sticking it in their ears, hitting it against
other things. And nothing comes of it. To be so close, yet never to pierce the veil!
I looked at myself in the same light, as a monkey given my life to play with,
prodding it, trying to stretch it into different shapes, dropping it and picking it up
again, suspecting always that it must have some use and meaning, tantalized
and frustrated by it but always unable to make sense of it.
‘If I were a god that is how I would view myself,’ I thought. At times I felt
myself coming very close to that understanding, as though I might rise above
myself and see, at last, what it was all about. The feelings that had begun to
form in Sudan, in the Karoo and on the Zoe G and at other times seemed to be
coming to fruition in India. A latent power of perception was stirring in me.
I was astonished by my confidence with strangers. Often I was able to talk to
them immediately as though we had always known each other. For a long time I
had been training myself to want nothing from others; to accept what was offered
but to avoid expectation. I was far from perfect, but even the beginnings I had
made were richly rewarding. I could feel that people appreciated my presence and
even drew some strength from it, and in turn that feeling strengthened me. There
were the beginnings of a growth of power and I was determined to pursue it.
The journey continued, as it always had, with this close interweaving of
action and reflection. I ate, slept, cursed, smiled, rode, stopped for petrol,
argued, bargained, wrote and took pictures. I made friends with some Germans,
and some English, and some Indians. I learned about mushrooms, potatoes,
cabbages, golden nematodes, Indian farmers and elephants.
The thread connecting these random events was The Journey. For me it had
a separate meaning and existence; it was the warp on which the experiences of
each successive day were laid. For three years I had been weaving this single
tapestry. I could still recall where I had been and slept and what I had done on
every single day of travelling since The Journey began. There was an intensity
and a luminosity about my life during those years which sometimes shocked me. I
wondered whether it might be beyond my capacity to hold so much experience in
conscious awareness at one time and I was seriously afraid that I would see the
fabric of the tapestry beginning to rot before I had finished it. I thought I might be
guilty of some offence against nature for which I would be made to pay a terrible
price. Was it improper for a mere human to attempt to comprehend the world in
this way? For that was my intention. The circle I was describing around the earth
might be erratic but the fact remained, it was a real circle. The ends would meet
and it would enclose the earth. I would have laid my tracks around the surface of
this globe and at the end it would belong to me, in a way that it could never
belong to anyone else. I trembled a bit at the fates I might be tempting.
People who thought of my journey as a physical ordeal or an act: of courage,
like single-handed yachting, missed the point. Courage and physical endurance
were no more than useful items of equipment for me, like facility with languages
or immunity to hepatitis. The goal was comprehension, and the only way to
comprehend the world was by making myself vulnerable to it so that: it could
change me. The challenge was to lay myself open to everybody and everything
that came my way. The prize was to change and grow big enough to feel one with
the whole world. The real danger was death by exposure.
In India I was on the last and most significant leg, and during the long hours
of solitary riding my brain shuttled back and forth, delving into the past for new
connections and meanings, synthesizing, analysing, fantasizing, refining and
revising my ideas and observations. The pattern on the tapestry still eluded me,
though it shimmered somewhere on the edge of recognition. What must I do to
see it clearly? Must I, like Icarus, strap on wax wings and fly to the sun?
Whatever it was Ifelt ready to try because I had finally to admit it, I was in search
of immortality.
The vital instrument of change is detachment and travelling alone was an
immense advantage. At a time of change the two aspects of a person exist
simultaneously; as with a caterpillar turning into a butterfly there is the image of
what you were and the image of what you are about to be, but those who know
you well see you only as you were. They are unwilling to recognize change, By
their actions they try to draw you back into your familiar ways.
It would be hopeless to try to become a god among friends and relations, any
more than a man can become a hero to his valet. It was chilling to realize that
the sentimental qualities most valued between people, like loyalty, constancy and
affection, are the ones most likely to impede change. They are so obviously
designed to compensate for mortality. The old gods never had any truck with
them.
Kronos, the king of the ancient Greek gods, began his career by cutting off
his father’s penis with a sickle and tossing it into the ocean. He went on to
swallow his own children to make sure they did not unseat him. Zeus, the son
that got away, put his father in chains and had him guarded in exile by monsters.
There are endless tales of betrayal, bloody vengeance and fearful
dismemberment. Zeus, who became Jupiter in Roman times, adopted deceit-fill
disguises and committed rape as a cuckoo, a swan and a bull, and he reigned
over Olympus more by cunning than virtue.
The Indian gods seemed little different in their own behaviour but, reading the
Mahabharata, I saw that in Indian mythology they became more closely involved
with mankind than did the Greek gods. They allied themselves to various warring
factions and offered advice. The best-known example was when Lord Krishna
became the warrior Arjuna’s charioteer, drove him to battle and encouraged him
in words that have become known as the Bhagavad-Gita.
Arjuna, of course, was fighting for good against evil, but many good men had
found themselves compromised and were on the wrong side. It sickened Arjuna to
have to kill his own kith and kin, and he lost heart, thinking that it must be wrong
to do so. What Krishna told him was that his primary duty lay in being true to
what he was, a warrior, and not to be crippled by sentimental attachments to his
family. There is an elemental brutality about this advice which I found as thrilling
as it seemed cruel. When I read it every line struck home, and I relived episodes
of the journey vividly, recalling my own fears and confusions.
Heat, cold, pain, pleasure –
these spring from sensual contact, Arjuna.
They begin and they end.
They exist for the time being,
you must learn to put up with them.
The man whom these cannot distract,
the man who is steady in pain and pleasure,
is the man who achieves serenity.

The untrue never is,

the True never isn’t.

The knowers of Truth know this.
And the Self that pervades all things is imperishable.
Nothing corrupts this imperishable self.

Lucky are soldiers who strive in a just war;

for them it is an easy entrance into heaven.

Equate pain and pleasure, profit and loss,

victory and defeat.

And fight.

There is no blame this way.

There is no waste of half-done work in this,

no inconsistent results.
An iota of this removes a world of fear.
In this there is only single-minded consistency;
while the efforts of confused people
are many-branching and full of contradiction.

Your duty is to work, not to reap the fruits of work…

Wanting things breeds attachment,

from attachment springs covetousness,

and covetousness breeds anger.
Anger leads to confusion
and confusion kills the power of memory.

With the destruction of memory, choice is rendered impossible

and when moral choice fails, man is doomed.

The mind is the ape of the wayward senses;

they destroy discrimination as a storm scatters boats on a lake.

 The concept of the Self seemed to connect with my own thought in South
Africa, of being made of the stuff of the universe, allpervading and imperishable.
The Truth was in the stuff itself, revealed in the natural order of things. You have
only to merge with the world to know the Truth and find your Self.
There are shapes and forms which rise out of this natural order. Trees,
caves and animal architecture lead naturally to thatched roofs, stone houses
and mud walls. If you knew this you would not choose to put up a roof in
corrugated iron. Nor would you think of throwing a plastic bag in a stream, not
because of what you have been told about pollution, but because the idea of a
plastic bag in a stream is offensive in itself. Without this sense of what is
naturally fitting you can be cleaning up the world with one hand and spreading
poison with the other.
It surprised me to discover that this sense of Tightness does not appear
naturally in people, even though they live in the heart of nature. In my own village
in France the same people who fished the streams shoved every possible kind of
refuse and sewerage into them, even when offered convenient alternatives. In
Nepal, where not a single engine or power line disturbs the mediaeval rusticity of
the Himalayan valleys, people shit in their rivers with a dogmatic persistence
ensuring that every village is infected by what the people upstream have got.
The Truth obviously does not reveal itself unaided to humans. It has to be
uncovered by an effort of consciousness. Or, more likely, it exists only in human
consciousness. Without man around to recognize it, there is no Truth, no God.
Yet it is not consciousness that governs the world, nor even ideology, nor
religious principle nor national temperament. It is custom that rules the roost. In
Colombia it was the custom to do murder and violence. In a period of ten years
some 200,000 people were said to have been killed by acts of more or less
private violence. Yet I found the Colombians at least as hospitable, honourable
and humane as the Argentines, whose custom is merely to cheat. Arabs have the
custom of showing their emotions and hiding their women. Australians show their
women and hide their emotions. In Sudan it is customary to be honest. In
Thailand dishonesty is virtually a custom, but so is giving gifts to strangers.
Every possible variation of nudity and prudishness is the custom somewhere
as with eating habits, toilet practices, to spit or not to spit; and almost all of
these customs have become entirely arbitrary and self-perpetuating. Above all it
is customary to suspect and despise people in the next valley, or state, or
country, particularly if their colour or religion is different. And there are places
where it is customary to be at war, like Kurdistan or Vietnam.
Speaking of the more vicious customs, and of men who should have known
better, St Francis Xavier said a long time ago: ‘Custom is to them in the place of
law, and what they see done before them every day they persuade themselves
may be done without sin. For customs bad in themselves seem to these men to
acquire authority and prescription from the fact that they are commonly
practised.’
Custom is the enemy of awareness, in individuals as much as in societies. It
regularizes the fears and cravings of everyday life. I wanted to shake them off. I
wanted to use this journey to see things whole and clear, for I would never pass
this way again. I wanted to be rid of the conditioning of habit and custom. To be
the slave of custom, at any level, is much like being a monkey, an ‘ape of the
wayward senses’. To rise above it is already something like becoming a god.
With these elevating thoughts forming in my mind I rode along narrow country
roads among trees in a state bordering on ecstasy, and there did come a moment
when I was actually prepared to take seriously the possibility of some semidivine
status. At that very moment, which I recognized only in retrospect, I turned a
corner and came upon a travelling holy man, a saddhu, his forehead smeared with
the colours of his profession, dragging his bundles on to the next shrine. He
looked up at me as though he had expected me, and his face showed pure
distaste. Then he spat vigorously in my path as I passed him by.
The comment could not have been more appropriate. It had the same electric
connection with my thoughts that had so excited me about the flying fish on the
Zoe G.
Really, I told myself, you could hardly ask for a more convincing
demonstration, and I took the hint.
Even so I did go to see Sai Baba at Whitelands. There was a walled
compound the size of a football field, with a rain shelter in the middle that could
house a lot of people. The holy man apparently lived in an opulent villa at one end
of the garden, accessible by a flight of broad stone steps. Scattered around near
the villa were several keenly nonchalant young men of the kind you see working
for progressive candidates at American conventions. There was a new building
going up too, hand-made in the Asian tradition with women doing most of the
work. When you have seen women working a coal mine in saris, nothing in the
field of human labour seems improbable.
I sat on the ground among a mixed crowd of Indians and Europeans, and one
of the guru’s staff men asked me to take off my shoes. Eventually Sai Baba came
down the steps with a small group and inspected the building operations. Later he
came to look the rest of us over. He looked much as he had in the pictures, in his
ankle-length robe of crimson, and his great head of frizzy black hair, but he
seemed anxious and preoccupied. A thin red line of betel juice stained his lips.
There were no miracles, and he did not even smile. He looked at us in the way a
worried farmer might examine his crops for blight, and then he departed. I did not
form the impression that he was God, and he seems to have been equally
disappointed in me.

On my way up the coast from Mangalore I stopped at Karwar, a poor fishing

town on the estuary of the Kalinadi River. I felt like drinking a beer, but alcohol
had been banished to the edge of town, in a tumble-down eating house which I
remembered afterwards mainly for a priceless fragment of conversation. The
waiter brought fish and said:

‘Your native place? From?’

London.
‘Ah, London proper. You are going?’
I’m going to Goa.
‘Ah, Goa going. Nice place. My from is Goa.’
Goa is quite as beautiful as everybody says, but I found it chiefly interesting
for what I learned about pigs. It is the excellent custom in India, in the villages, to
go out in the morning to whichever field has been specially designated and leave
your daily shit where it is most needed to fertilize the ground. In Goa also this
custom is followed, but there is a special problem, because Goanese, unlike
most Indians, are carnivorous and keep pigs. And pigs, as one may or may not
know, eat shit. And the pigs of Goa are very hungry pigs so that many an unwary
person has been knocked off his toes by a charging porker before the completion
of his duties.
 This kind of information, which most people are sadly conditioned to think of
as disgusting, forms a basic element in the life of a traveller, just as its subject
matter is a basic element in life itself. The extraordinary taboos that we have
raised around the business of shitting has led to far more disgusting prejudices
among people, and also to quite serious health problems. To be free of that
sense of unreasoning distaste I found to be a major liberation, on a par with
freedom in sex.
I did not realize how advanced I was until I read a story in an illustrated
Indian magazine edited by Kushwant Singh. He had a little item, headed
‘Tailpiece’, about a famous Indian operatic soprano who had just died. Her
debut, many years earlier before a London audience, had failed rather miserably.
She had not been able to bring any conviction to her singing. When asked
afterwards what had gone wrong, she said she had not been able to get it out of
her head, as she looked out over her distinguished audience in the Wigmore Hall,
that all these people smeared their bottoms with pieces of dry paper.
Not only did I think it very funny, but I could sympathize entirely with her point
of view. Anyone brought up, as Indians are, to use water can see that the
Western method is quite barbarously inefficient, while on a long journey through
poor countries it becomes uncomfortable and offensive. I was often ashamed of
the mess that the civilized elite of the Western world left behind them on their trail
through South America and Asia, made all the worse through being forced to
spend most of their time running for the lavatory.
I was lucky to have very few problems with it myself. Only once in India did I
explode, and that was a clear-cut case of food poisoning in a restaurant in Bihar.
I stopped in several fields on my way to Calcutta, and composed a poem while
contemplating the landscape.

The food in Bihar is rather bizarre,

One should not stray far after lunch in Bihar,

Not even as far as the local bazaar,

For none can outrun the food in Bihar.

I went on through Bombay and north to Jaipur and Delhi, and from there I
turned east through Khanpur, Lucknow and Faiza-bad to Gorakhpur, where a
route runs north over the Himalayan foothills to Pokhara in Nepal.
Luckily I did not have to waste breath or energy on things that often give
visitors to India so much trouble and offence. I was used to poverty, to different
standards of hygiene, to the visible effects of disease and malnutrition. I knew
how to frame questions so that the other person would not know what answers I
expected. I did not assume that something was possible only because it seemed
easy to me. I stopped looking for objective truth and efficiency, and learned to
value other things instead. And I loved the food.
I became saturated with Indian attitudes, but always there were more
surprises. In Bombay I saw a newly released American film, full of violence and
shootings. In Europe I would have shrugged it off, but there it made me squirm
and choke with horror. What made the audience shudder most though was a
happy scene in which the cowboy hero marks his cattle with a branding iron.
I saw women making a highway, by hand, circulating in vast numbers like
beasts of burden with baskets of granite chips on their heads under the
indifferent eye of a male supervisor. It seemed dehumanizing, but at least they
had work of sorts.
I saw every kind of load carried. Every kind of procession came my way.
Every kind of animal drew every kind of cart, and every kind of vehicle either
passed me or lay in ruins by the roadside.
In Ahmedabad, two women came towards me towing a heavily loaded trolley
both dressed in the same saris and bodices of red and yellow, but both with their
heads and faces completely wrapped in saffron muslin. They were moving with
extraordinary vigour, and made an unforgettable sight. It was impossible to
believe, because of their very vitality, that they were suffering.
On the road from Gorakhpur to Nepal, a long, silent, empty country road,
came a sight I never thought to see in this half of the century: two wiry,
barefooted men in sky-blue turbans and shawls jogging along with a litter on their
shoulders. I stopped, transfixed as they went past. The plush red curtains of the
litter were drawn open. Inside a young man sat cross-legged, idly regarding the
countryside. He was dressed in English clothes and was wearing a blazer and an
old-school tie.
But I could not accept what I saw in Bombay, when I was taken past the
‘cages’. I stared goggle-eyed at prostitutes apparently enslaved behind great iron
grilles set into the doorways. I found the posturing women, the heavy iron bars,
the theatrical lighting inside these prisons so grotesque that my mind would not
grasp it as reality.
During those months I was exposed to such startling forms of life, in such
quantity and variety, that I was drenched with images.
In Khanpur (or Cawnpore as the British spelled it in the days of the Mutiny) I
stayed at the old Orient Hotel. It was in a disgraceful state of dilapidation. My
room was one of a number of cardboard boxes put up inside a once grand
ballroom, and I could hear the rats scampering across the dance floor. The
facilities were abysmal, but one feature of the old days had been kept intact. Two
beautifully maintained billiard tables gleamed under brilliant lights in a room behind
the bar, and some town swells were playing a highly affected game.
One of them looked as though he belonged in a cigarette advertisement of
the twenties. His black hair was plastered down flat. He wore a little patterned
bow tie. His check tweed jacket was square-shouldered and as immaculately
pressed as though it were on a shop-window dummy. He held himself absolutely
rigid above the waist, and glided back and forth like a tango dancer,
The other player wore more traditional Indian clothing: a long white shirt,
baggy trousers brought in tight above the knees, a long and luxurious camel-hair
waistcoat, all worn with such style and arrogance that I felt like applauding. In
fascination I watched as they swaggered and sported, sipping at barely
concealed illegal drinks, their faces busy with the nonstop ritual of knowing
glances. They spoke Hindi, but a masterful shot was acclaimed in English with
the quaint cry of ‘Well!’ They seemed to be trapped in their own creation of some
bygone sporting era, and I did not see how they would ever be able to escape.
Just before midnight I went out for a walk. The broad street was black and
empty, the alleyways impenetrable. A huge advertisement leered down from the
façade above my head, showing an Indian couple in swimming trunks and bikini,
and announcing:

Stomach GAS & SEX Problems. Consult Dr. Whosit.

A train of wagons was coming towards me. They were drays moving silently
on rubber tyres, each one drawn by two water buffalo. The drays were long flat
platforms without sides, and littered with sacking. There were eight of them,
making a very long train, and each one had a driver, almost invisible under cotton
wraps and headcloth. Only the first driver seemed to be truly awake, and his stick
made a regular dull thwack against the buffalo hide.
Heaven knows how far they had come or how far they were going. Among the
sacks I saw other peasants sleeping, and I guessed they were returning to their
villages after delivering produce. The buffaloes looked more than usually
mournful in the night, with their long necks straining out in front of them, heads
lolling hopelessly, heavy black bodies plodding low to the ground, making hardly
any sound on the tar.
The movement was as inexorable as it was slow, and I stood and watched
until the last of the long line had vanished into the cold December night. They
came into my life and left it like ghosts from the past and I was deeply moved.
On my walk back I saw a man, pathetic and shivering in threadbare cotton,
praying to a demonic red figure of Kali in a tiny stone temple next to a garage. A
little farther along a man with a distracted air and wearing a shirt attacked me
verbally with the story of his misery.
‘You have one recourse,’ he said, harshly. ‘To give me something for food. I
haven’t eaten all day.’ Something in what I had experienced that evening made it
impossible for me to give anything. His last shouted appeal – ‘For humanity’s
sake’ – and my desperate, dismal response – ‘You’ll have to sort yourselves out’
– stayed with me like twin echoes through the night.
It was important to me to give only when I felt like it. I tried never to let a
sense of guilt or conscience drive me to it, for then I would never know whether I
wanted to or not. Happily there were some occasions when I did want to give,
though not very many.
I was a beggar myself, of course, in the sense that I made myself very
obviously available to receive hospitality, and it was generously offered. The
prize, I suppose, must have been the two nights I spent in the palace of the
Maharajah of Baroda. My friend in Madras had known the maharajah (or strictly
speaking, the ex-maharajah, since the title was officially extinct) and suggested I
visit him in Baroda. I arrived full of curiosity, not knowing what to expect, and
was directed first to the wrong palace which was full of soldiers. However, they
sent me in the right direction, and I came to an apparently endless and towering
railing alongside a road, and at last a gate.
It seemed odd that the gate should be open and unguarded, but I went in,
down a potholed drive among trees and bushes until the palace came in sight. It
was quite an overwhelming sight, not simply because it was vast and seemed to
occupy my entire field of vision when I came upon it, but because of the
breathtaking detail that filled every part of the façade. There were so many wings,
even the wings had wings, that for a good while I could see no way to get at it.
Only later did I realize that I was looking at the back of the palace and that the
true and really impressive façade was around the other side.
As I rode and walked up and down the gravel, puzzled by the silence and the
apparent absence of a doorway, two figures appeared on one of a hundred
balconies overlooking the drive. They looked ragged and disreputable, and in
every way inappropriate to all the magnificence around them. In fact I thought at
first I had caught two housebreakers at work. They were probably having similar
thoughts about me. One of them shouted down: ‘What do you want?’ They
obviously were keen to keep their distance.
‘I want to see the maharajah,’ I shouted back. It felt quite ridiculous. They
looked like a couple of villains. I was a black and greasy biker after the long ride
from Bombay. I should have been at the back of a slum tenement shouting ‘ Tell
Bert the cops are onto him.’
‘Not here,’ the man replied. ‘His Highness not here.’
I went on at the top of my voice in great detail about my connections and
ambitions, knowing that he did not understand me but trying to entice him down.
Eventually it worked. My authentic English accent must have done the trick.
I saw there was nothing villainous about him at all. He was the Indian version
of a faithful retainer, and he managed to explain that the estate was now
managed from an office across the road, not far away. He gave me a glass of
water, and a note scribbled in Gujarati. I went off to find the office, and met the
maharajah’s brother and a young engineer called Ashwin Mehta. We talked
pleasantly for a while, and I learned that the maharajah, who was also an M.P.,
was in New Delhi, and that the palace was hardly used these days.
Ashwin said there was much to be seen in Baroda and that he would show
me, and the maharajah’s brother said I should stay at the palace meanwhile if I
liked. I had no difficulty accepting. In due course I went back to wash and
change, and went through the front entrance intoahall big enough tocontain most
houses. There was no door, for it was never needed. It was never cold, and
privacy began a long way away at the boundaries of the immense estate.
There were several bearers in white cotton livery with stylish cockades in their
hats, and bare feet, although it was a skeleton crew compared with what must
once have manned this monster. They padded ahead with my peculiar bits of
luggage while I clumped after them in dirty boots under the disapproving stares of
various ancestors. My suite had two rooms, both huge. One was the bedroom,
the other the bathroom. They overlooked one of several beautiful courtyards
trapped within the fabric of the building, crammed with palms and fountains.
My bed was a fourposter inside a little room of its own made of gauzy
mosquito netting. A bearer slept on the floor outside my bedroom door at night. It
would be pointless and unnecessary to pretend that I was enjoying the same
luxury that the princes once offered to guests at the height of their power. To
have tried to recreate or maintain that today would be absurd and impossible.
What I saw there in that short stay, the profusion of marble, bronze and mosaic,
the infinite corridors, the echoing halls, the huge audience room with chairs for
five hundred people, and the executioner’s sword hanging over them all, was
enough. My imagination could supply the rest.
 I sat there on my second night, midst all this magnificence, penning a letter
on the maharajah’s stationery and thinking that it was just as well that I had also
slept in a prison. It helped me to feel that I deserved it.
By the time I came out of Assam into West Bengal in February of 1977, my
experiences in India alone were beginning to overwhelm me. My mind was a
constantly changing kaleidoscope. A Royal Bengal Tiger seen stalking the long
grass at sunset. A religious procession winding down a mountainside. A wild
tribal dance. Men in loincloths hunting with bows and arrows. Tibetan traders
walking the trails from Mustang. A wildcat oil rig driving down into the rock on the
Burmese border. The sublime music of one of India’s greatest musicians playing
only five feet away from me in a private celebration. A night lost in a
rhododendron forest at eleven thousand feet. The astonishing open-cast coal
mine at Margherita. The period opulence of the tea estates. An incredible all-night
theatrical production by a touring company of Indian players in a tent. On and on
they went, and I was gradually becoming exhausted by the effort to retain it all
and still see what was new every day with a fresh eye.
What came every day was so startling, so interesting, always more than I
could ever hope to absorb.
I came out of Assam knowing that I should go to Benares. How could I
possibly not go to Benares? Yet I was actually going to Calcutta, and once in
Calcutta it would be twice as far to come back up to Benares and down again.
And still I wanted to go to Calcutta. I was tired. I wanted European company. But
somewhere along the road fate grabbed me and sent me to Benares anyway.
I surrendered, to India and to the multitude. That was something else I had
learned, to surrender. Vast crowds gathered around me when I stopped, but as
long as they gave me room to breathe I did not mind. I got used to considering my
life as public property.
‘Excuse me, sir? Your native place is? London proper, is it? May I introduce I.
J. Krishnan, currently completing Bachelor of Science at B.H.U. And your good
name, sir? You are married? I see, you are bachelor? Your age is please? Why
are you not married? Where is your family? What are your qualifications? How
are you able to leave you-family for so long? Your journey must be costing a lot
of money. Are you in government service? Then how please are you paying for all
this?’
When it got to the marriage question I was often tempted to plead impotence
or homosexuality, but the joke would certainly have failed. I let the waves wash
over me. Pointless to waste effort in trying to beat them back. But gradually they
wore me down anyway, and the waves grew stronger, the multitude thicker, as I
advanced into Bihar, one of the poorest and most populous states in the Indian
union.
But the magic was still working too, harder than ever. Why else should I have
been led to a hotel in Patna whose owner was a glider pilot, and who insisted on
taking me up with him? For breathless minutes I found my escape from India by
whirling above it in the company of those big brown birds called Kites. Why else
would I have been invited, by pure chance, to a party at which the heads of the
mighty Congress Party of Bihar revelled and revealed themselves so soon before
lurching into oblivion at the famous elections of’77? And why else should I find
myself now having my future told to me at a Rajput wedding?
‘You are Jupiter,’ he said.
Of all the gods in the pantheon, Jupiter is the one I fancy most. A lovely
name, Jupiter, like cream and honey in the mouth. And a sense of great distance
and closeness at the same time.
He was a rainmaker, and I have definitely made my share of rain. I rained all
over the Southern Hemisphere in unprecedented quantities. Then he was famous
for his thunder, which is appropriate too for a god on a motorcycle, and (if it’s fair
to mix him up a bit with Zeus) then I like the idea of appearing in all those
disguises. I have been changing my shape quite often as well.
All in all I would quite like to be Jupiter, if it is not too late…

‘You are Jupiter,’ he said, and for a flash I was, ‘but for seven years you have
been having conflict with Mars.’ Of course. It was just a misunderstanding. He
was talking about the planet.
‘This troubling influence will go on for two more years.’ His grip on my hand
remained firm and convincing, and I did not resist. I wanted it to be important.
‘During these two years, you will have two accidents. They will not be major
accidents, but they will not be minor either.’
Really, I thought, that’s stretching my credulity a bit. I hardly need a
fortuneteller to predict accidents, with ten thousand miles still to ride. But he did
say two. Not major? Not minor?
‘After this period, when you are no longer influenced by Mars, all will be well.
You will have great success and happiness.’
I absorbed the message. Two years of strife and accident, and then
prosperity and happiness ever after.
‘You owe everything to your mother,’ he said. Did I tell Raj I was the only son
of a divorced mother? I must have told someone.
‘You have a weak hold on the affections of women. She is the only one who
will give you whole-hearted support.’
I gazed hard then at this grave, composed man in the brown business suit
sitting next to me in the front seat of his car outside a wedding tent, trying to
penetrate his meaning. It sounded wrong, absolutely wrong, like the reverse side
of a familiar coin. Yet there was something very right hidden in it somewhere. I
was impressed by him, I felt he was really trying, and after all it was nothing to
him., None of them would ever see me again. He was just a businessman about
to leave for his office in Patna.
There were more pleasant remarks about my strength and determination. We
exchanged solemn compliments and he drove off.
Ten miles beyond Gaya is Boddhgaya, the place where Buddha preached his
first sermon under a tree. A tree stands on the spot now, though not, I think, the
same tree. Above and around the tree a great temple and stupa have been built.
Somewhere nearby every Buddhist nation is also represented by a temple and a
refuge for pilgrims. The refuges are austere and cheap to live in. They offer
shelter and tranquillity, and in the dry hot spring of Bihar that is all one needs.
The first of these refuges on the road from Gaya is the Burmese Vihar, and it
had been recommended to me. Two monks made me welcome and I took the bike
in through the big wrought-iron gate. The original building on my right faced a
square garden of rather straggly shrubs and vegetables, and along each side,
between the garden and the high walls that enclosed the Vihar, ran two rows of
small brick cubicles. It was very popular, and the place was full of people from
every continent, but a remarkable atmosphere of good-natured calm pervaded all
of it.
I had one of the cubicles to myself, which gave me room to put down my
things and cook for myself, and a wide plank to sleep on. It was all I needed. In
the area around the house was a table under a big shade tree, and I sat there
and wrote an article for the approaching elections in India. A Thai monk was
offering courses in yoga and meditation, and I took those too. There was time for
everything, and time to spare. Those were the last perfectly peaceful days I
spent on the journey and among the most promising of all.
I arrived in Calcutta slightly weakened by food poisoning, and went to ground
in Sudder Street, at the Salvation Army hostel, where so many poor travellers
stay. My health was easily restored but I had to acknowledge that my energy was
not replenishing itself anymore. The feeling, like the climate, was reminiscent of
Panama, two years earlier and thirty thousand miles back, but I had to recognize
that this time the lethargy was more deeply established.
There was no easy remedy, so I tried self-indulgence. In a corner of Sudder
Street facing the hostel stood, and no doubt will stand forever, a two-star
bastion of the Raj, the Fairlawn Hotel. By my standards it was far too expensive.
Even if I had thought it worth the price to stay there and confirm that the empire
was past its prime, I did not actually have the money.
However, I could afford to sit in the garden and drink a lemon soda. I
breached the big wooden gates and sat at an iron table under a spray of
blossom, alone in the grounds and soothingly remote from the city’s business. It
took the bearer a long time to find me among all the trees and trellises, though I
had seen eyes peering in my direction from the reception desk for some while.
Was I perhaps unsuitably dressed for the Fairlawn, I wondered. After all, I had
shaved, and the pattern of my shirt was still recognizable through the grime. And
I might be down on my luck but, dammit, I was still an Englishman.
‘Bring me a lemon juice and a bottle of soda,’ I said, almost adding, ‘And
make it snappy!’
The bearer returned with my order (what else could he do?) and opened the
bottle on the table. I waited for the cheerful sparkle, the gay effervescence that
would zestfully challenge Calcutta’s soggy noon. Nothing happened. One bubble
struggled wearily up through the liquid and lodged itself in the meniscus, lacking
the will to burst.
It was an unimportant matter, and I would have left it, except that it gave me
an opportunity for conversation and I was curious. I had already noticed an
elaborately coiffed head of hair bobbing about briskly in the reception area. I
knew the hotel belonged to an old Indian Army man, and I thought this must be
the mem-sahib herself. I thought she might be amused by my story and I
sauntered over with the bottle dangling from my fingertips.
She was dressed and made up in a manner that left no doubt about how she
saw her usefulness in this world. Here, I told myself, is a woman who likes to
maintain standards, and I resolved to help her. I mentioned the paucity of
bubbles in my soda water, and she flew into a rage.
I was amazed. My remark had been as light and debonair as I could manage
it, as if to say, ‘What’s in a bubble? After all, we’re British.’
Her rage was all the more violent for being fearfully controlled.
‘There has never been any sickness here from water,’ she cried. Never once
in living memory, not since the Mutiny, not since John Company first set foot on
this subcontinent, not once ever had anybody challenged the water at the
Fairlawn. ‘And you are not even staying with us!’
Useless to explain that the purity of the water was not in question; that I was
merely reporting a minor matter of bubble trouble. She shook and went livid and
puce by turns. I began to suspect other roots to her distress. Perhaps she had
detected a working-class inflection in one of my vowels. She gathered herself up
finally, in her full fury, to administer the blow that would send me reeling off the
premises.
‘All our water, I’ll have you know, comes directly from the Saturday Club.’ I
was rendered speechless, since I had never heard of it. It was the coup de grâce,
but she could not leave well alone.
‘And if that is not good enough,’ she went on, ‘you can speak to my husband.’
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘that’s a good idea. Where is the colonel?’
‘Upstairs,’ she said grimly. I got one foot on the first step, but her staff
surrounded me.
‘No, sir. Please. No. This way, sir, please come’ – and with a fresh bottle of
soda they enticed me back to my table.
I tried on another day to drink a beer in the garden, knowing that others had
succeeded, but the bearer informed me frigidly that it was a dry day at the bar. I
dared not approach the desk again. A dog with eyes like cartwheels I can face,
but an irate mem-sahib, never.
I could not get a grasp of Calcutta. It seemed to elude me. Only afterwards
did I wonder whether perhaps I had been misled by its reputation into expecting
something else. I visited that kindest of institutions, the Home for the Destitute
and Dying set up by Mother Theresa, but far from finding it shocking I thought it
was a good deal more pleasant and better ordered than an average Indian
railway platform. I dragged myself out across the awful Howrah Bridge into
various poor areas, but saw nothing that was conspicuously worse than what I
was already accustomed to.
I was not overcome by grisly sights or intolerable smells. Nobody fell dead at
my feet. When I came to read Freedom at Midnight and other dramatic Western
accounts of Indian life, with their constant emphasis on reek and stench and
teeming masses, death, disease and subhuman squalor, I was outraged by the
careless assumption that only the Western nose and eye can judge what is fit for
humans.
Several times on my way through India I had asked to be taken to the worst
slum, expecting the worst. Each time, as I entered among the colony of makeshift
shacks, I could see only individual families doing what they could with what they
had, and I became absorbed in the detail of their lives. It was a shock to recall
that thirty years before I had visited families in London in a North Kensington
slum area whose circumstances had certainly been much worse, for they had to
cope in addition with cold winters and living in underground basements.
But at the time in Calcutta, my spirits being a bit deflated, I assumed my own
judgement was at fault in not appreciating the epic quality of Calcutta’s miseries,
and I decided to get out.
The route I had planned took me back one more time to the Bay of Bengal at
Puri and at Konarak. Powerful winds were blowing in from the bay, and a thin veil
of sand particles hovered over the long beaches to give the light an unearthly
feeling. Through this eerie brightness I gazed at abandoned summer villas half
buried In dunes, turreted and crenellated, pastel-coloured Indian Gothic remains,
seemingly untouched for decades and in terminal decay, except that being in
India it would not have surprised me to see the family resume occupancy at any
time.
I fought brief battles with enormous waves, gazed at mildly erotic carvings
and slept a lot, gathering strength for the last curl in my spiral course through
India. I was deeply conscious of the fact that from here on I would be heading
directly to wards Europe, but first I had to cross to Nagpur, at the geographical
centre of India. These fifteen hundred miles from Puri to Delhi worried me. Already
on my way from Calcutta I had felt the heat in the air, greater than I had imagined
possible for April. In the heart of India, on the Deccan Plain, it would be hotter
still, much hotter.
Shortly after I set out the chain broke, a unique event in my experience. It
was nothing like the disaster I had always anticipated. No damage was done.
Anyway, it had broken on the joining link, which was easily replaced, but it drew
my attention again to the state of the rear sprocket. All the teeth were badly
blunted, worn down, as it were, almost to the gums, and some were broken off
altogether. Now I had something to worry about. Sprocketless-ness, like scurvy,
sounds funny, but in advanced stages it can prove fatal. As I repaired the chain I
recalled the two accidents I had been promised and added them to my anxieties.
Soon after, the heat became unbearable. It struck me as though from a blast
furnace, and for the first time I found that the faster I rode the hotter I got.
I took refuge in a roadside teahouse, and ate portions of curried peas and
spinach and dhal from chipped enamel plates, scooping it up with puri and
chapati. It was after four in the afternoon before the heat wavered and dipped. I
had never travelled by night before. It had seemed pointless and dangerous, but
now I realized that there was no other way, and I started with very real
misgivings.
The unfamiliarity was frightening at first. I had never liked to put faith in road
surfaces, and here it was unavoidable. One could not hope to pick up every
pothole in such poor light. There were many big trucks moving at night, and they
were as unpredictable at night as by day. In addition the roads were all under
reconstruction. For hundreds of miles they were regularly interrupted by culvert
constructions to channel flood water, and temporary diversions dived off into the
sand and stone of the surrounding countryside. It seemed to me that all this,
combined with an almost bald front tyre and a worn chain on a toothless
sprocket, must conspire to produce an accident somewhere.
Perhaps the clairvoyant saved me. I was damned if I was going to fulfill his
prophecy so quickly. As the hours passed I grew more adept at recognizing
hazards, and began to feel more confident. I was surprised to find I had covered
more than three hundred miles in the first leg, and the night journey developed into
a relaxed and interesting experience.
Life in the towns and villages continued far into the night, and I came out of
the dark flat scrubland into brilliant city streets or bustling village corners.
On the first day I found a room in the Inspection Bungalow at Pithora. The
other room was occupied by a CARE official. He said he was a doctor helping the
government of Maharashtra to set up a nutrition programme. And he was himself
a sleekly obese advertisement for nutrition.
‘You are from?’ he said.
‘You mean now,’ I asked, ‘or originally?’
‘No, no,’ he said, irritably. ‘You are from?’
After that he seemed to lose interest. I went to the back to cook breakfast
and found that a crow had broken and eaten one of my eggs. I slept through the
afternoon, and left at dusk, making a detour through Bagbhara to get petrol. At
Ghorari I stopped at a chai shop for tea and curry.
‘So, how do you like my India?’ enquired my neighbour, a retired tax inspector
with a wizened face and a patronizing manner. I tried to give some kind of answer
to his question, but it was neither expected nor wanted.
 ‘You will not be able to understand,’ he said with smug certainty, ‘ it will take
you too long.
‘In the course of my duties,’ he went on,’ I also have been travelling. I have
been to Australia. There are minor differences of custom naturally but otherwise I
would say we are the same. Yes, Indians and Australians are the same.’
It was an astonishing suggestion.
‘You must have been in Australia a long time to have known them so well,’ I
said, but of course he did not hear me.
At the pan stall next door I tried to buy cigarettes, but there was nobody to
serve me. I lingered a bit and then asked my new-found mentor whether I might
leave the money and take a packet. He threw up his hands.
‘Oh, no, good gentleman,’ he said. ‘This is India.’
I rode on to Raipur and found cigarettes at a shop outside a hotel. While
there I thought I might as well use the lavatory. The cubicle was already occupied
by a man aiming a jet of urine into the bowl. He had left the door open and looked
up as I approached.
‘I am making water,’ he told me solemnly. ‘You wish to do so?’
The whole of India suddenly struck me as wildly funny, and I went on laughing
most of the way to Nagpur.
The following evening at Jabalpur I met another Indian who had been to
Australia. I had no idea so many Indians had gone there. He was a prosperous-
looking fellow riding a scooter the way a merchant banker might sometimes
bicycle to the City. We had a beer together in an Indian honky-tonk behind a wine
store. He was very nostalgic about Australia, and had just bought a farm – ‘Just
as a hobby to remind me.’
‘I am going to train monkeys to shoo off the neighbour’s cattle,’ he told me.’
Well, why not? If dogs, why not monkeys?’
My surprise must have shown on my face.
Eventually I came to Agra by way of Khajurao. The Taj Mahal was entirely
worth visiting despite its reputation, and even more worth listening to. The sighs
of a million spirits drifted down inside from the echoing dome.
I watched young Indian couples come in, noisily alive, wanting to make their
mark on this sacred cow of architecture. If they could have carved their names
into the marble, they would have had the building in shreds very quickly. Instead
they flung their voices at the ceiling, young men drunk with power, young women
drunk with hope, wanting that moment of immortality when the Taj would speak
with their voice. But no sooner was the voice launched than everything that was
sharp, personal and assertive in it was lost and it became a mournful ghost to
mingle forever with the grey legions above.
I walked around the grounds, talked to some stonemasons and watched their
deft work on the big red slabs of stone they were decorating. In the arcade
outside, after three and a half years of thinking about it, I bought a pair of
sandals that I could actually wear, and walked in them to see the fort.
But the fort was closed to the public and surrounded by army.
‘A hundred and twenty ministers from foreign countries are visiting,’ an officer
told me. I walked on letting my annoyance dissolve in the melting pot of the
bazaar, among ox carts, horse carts, cabs, hand barrows, cycles and
rickshaws. Knowing that I would not be a part of this confusion for much longer, I
sat on a box in an open store with a bottle of lemonade and watched the street.
The bottle had a pinched neck and a glass marble as a valve? a brilliant device,
almost forgotten since my childhood. Indian life flowed past me, a feast of colour
and detail, wonderful in the sheer breadth of the spectrum of human
circumstance that is paraded there.
I walked on up the hill in the throng of vehicles and pedestrians. A portion of
noise slightly louder than the rest made me turn, and I saw a horse cab coming
up the rise.
The horse was a powerful white beast, full of nervous energy, thrashing in the
shafts and tossing its head. The driver too was young and flushed with energy
and excitement, urging the animal up the hill, a young Muslim in robe and turban,
sleeves swept back, rising up and reaching forward with his whip, eyes glowing
with pride. The cab was heavily loaded with passengers and sacks of grain, all
Muslims in turban and robe.
The components of the tragedy came together before my eyes. The cab was
going too fast, the horse was too wild. I saw three tiny girls, scarcely knee high,
though they were graded, one, two, three, a few inches apart, perhaps sisters
separated by a year, all identically dressed as miniature mothers in ankle-length
red dresses, voluminously pleated from the waist with machine embroidered
bodices, cheap dresses for they were clearly poor girls and barefooted, but
happily clutching each other and chattering madly together as they darted across
the road among the legs of the crowd, a few feet from where I had stood and
turned. The crowd parted, swiftly, to reveal the horse they had not heard and
they fell in a single bundle, as though their dresses were stitched together, one,
two, three, and I watched the wheel of the heavy cab rise slowly over their
bodies.
The moment froze. The big wooden-spoked, iron-tyred wheel bore down.
Then time flowed on and the wheel slipped back to the ground. Men started
forward to rescue the girls. The driver stumbled to the ground and horror
overwhelmed him. He clasped his hands and fell to his knees and raised his arms
and face to the sky shouting for mercy. His passengers slipped quietly from the
cab, pressed a few coins on the driver and discreetly disappeared, no expression
visible on their faces.
Two of the girls, miraculously, were able to stand. The third, the smallest of
them, lay in a shopkeeper’s arms. Bright blood appeared at her lips. He passed
the child to a boy of fifteen or so and gave him some instruction. The boy just
stood and grinned awkwardly as though embarrassed. The man shouted and
pushed the boy, and the boy turned reluctantly and walked up the street carrying
his unwanted bundle.
He had not very far to go. I saw him turn in to a doorway marked ‘Dipty X-ray
Clinic’. A man came out again a few moments later carrying the girl and got
astride the pillion of a scooter, which another man drove away.
The incident had an effect on me far beyond the merely shocking. There was
also something very familiar about the wheel. crushing those small bodies, as
though it were an ever-recurring theme of life, an accident that was made to
happen, that had already happened countless times over many thousands of
years, I even felt as though I had seen it myself often before.
For a few minutes I thought of finding out where they had gone and following
them; of learning everything there was to know about those three girls and their
family. Then I sighed at the impossibility of it, and walked on.
Although the Triumph behaved faultlessly all the way to Delhi, I knew that
there was no question of riding much farther without a new sprocket. I had long
ago written to England about it, and expected to find a new one waiting for me at
the Lucas depot. It was a great disappointment to find nothing there.
For all their charm and helpfulness, the Lucas people could not conjure a
sprocket out of thin air, and as I sat it out, waiting for packages that did not
arrive, sitting by telephones that did not ring, I fought a losing battle with my own
exhaustion. I had counted heavily on being able to get out of New Delhi and on
my way in a few days, before the heat came down, before I lost the momentum I
had built up.
The days stretched into weeks, and I became bogged down in delays and
absurd misunderstandings. Many good things happened to me while I was there,
but eventually they were all lost under the crushing weight of frustration. In the
muggy heat of a Delhi summer I began to feel India closing in on me, and I fought
furiously to escape from its cloying embrace. Indian friends indulged my antics as
if they were the tantrums of a spoilt child.
When the sprocket finally arrived at New Delhi airport, I had been waiting four
weeks. Nervously I sweated my way through the hours of rigmarole at customs,
where I was already well known. After their own fashion they were kind to me.
The sprocket passed into my hands the same day, and I paid neither tax nor
bribe nor fee. When I got it, I had only one ambition: to make a bolt for the
border, and home.
My fear of being trapped in India was not entirely fanciful. There was news of
great upheavals in Pakistan, and with the overthrow of Bhutto’s government,
martial law was declared. There were curfews and riots, and I feared that the
border might be closed at any time. All overland routes to Europe go across
Pakistan.
But I had other deeper fears, though I could not describe them. I was in an
advanced state of rootlessness and it was becoming plain to me that these were
not just words, but a real condition that threatened to break me down unless I
found some stability and peace soon. Meanwhile, just being on the move towards
Europe alleviated it.
The Prophecy Fulfilled

On May the fifth, with 26,300 miles on the clock since L.A., I left New Delhi. I shot
up the trunk road to Amritsar like an arrow from a bow, and had three narrow
escapes with buses before I was able to cool down sufficiently to ride with my
usual caution. In retrospect those seemed like the most dangerous miles of the
journey.
The urge to move westward was irresistible. I had to keep going. I had seen
and done more than enough.
The Pakistan border was open and I rode in an armed convoy of cars to
Lahore. The entire population of this great and crowded city had vanished and
the streets were deserted, and charged with unease. There were soldiers on
every street corner to enforce the stringent curfew at gunpoint, but the only other
life I saw was a herd of dairy buffalo making their own way with leisurely
condescension down the middle of the broad and empty avenue.
There was no reason to stay, for I would only have been incarcerated in an
expensive hotel, and I set offalone for Rawalpindi. In less than two hours I
arrived at the Jhelum River. Outside Lahore the atmosphere was much lighter,
and already I was experiencing a relief from India. I had stopped briefly to drink
some tea, and was struck immediately by the humour of the people around me.
They made jokes that I could laugh at. How long was it since I had heard a joke?
The Jhelum Bridge is a toll bridge. As I stopped at the booth a voice called to
me.
‘Sir. Sir. Please. Come and rest. Have a cup of tea.’
I saw a man at the roadside looking at me with a cheerful smile. He wore the
pale grey pyjama suit of northern Pakistan, long tunic with tails over trousers that
ballooned out and came in sharply at the ankles. His face was weathered and
creased with lines of mischief at the eyes and mouth.
His family had paid for the franchise on the toll bridge. They lived in quarters
on the riverbank, all males, brothers and cousins, and were Pathans from the
Kohat region not far from the Khyber Pass.
Hamid was the eldest of them, and therefore honoured though he was
otherwise the least qualified. He told me that he liked to offer comfort to foreign
travellers, and he set about comforting me with a will. He gave me tea, heated
water for my bath, laid out my bed and bedding, gave me supper and treated me
to a hundred courtesies which, in the context of my journey, were great luxuries.
All the while he entertained me with fragments of wit and wisdom garnered from all
corners of human life. He quoted Freud and Einstein and Shaw, and spoke
himself with such impish eloquence that I could close my eyes and imagine I was
with an Irishman. He even said ‘sorr’.
‘Now tell me, sorr, about the inert gases. I mean what is the use of them? Do
they lead us anywhere at all? And where would you say God is in all this?’
I said I thought God may well have been a nineteenth-century chemist.
‘Yes, sorr, well maybe now he is a psychologist. That would be my choice if I
were capable. It was a great misfortune for me, sorr, that in my childhood I was
hit many times on the head. It has damaged my brain. I am unable to remember
the first five years of my life.’
He produced a copy of The Psychologist for May 1952, a faded tomato-red
pamphlet, and wrote his name, ‘HAMID, ABDUL, Kohati’, on the cover above the
words ‘The Way to Get to the Root of Your Worries’.
‘Please keep this, sorr, as a remembrance. I get it every month. I also study
homeopathy and natural medicine. Would you not say, sorr, that modern
medicines are very dangerous?’
He showed me plants and herbs along the riverbank, including; the castor-oil
seed, which I had not noticed before, and offered to massage my arms and legs
before going to bed.
The beds, charpoys and quilts, were set out on the hillside. I had put my
mosquito net up, but the enemy was already within. Before I could get to sleep my
waist was a mass of fiery blisters. Hamid was equal to the situation. Instead of
wasting time on apologies and mortification, he fetched kerosene to soothe the
bites and deter the creatures. He insisted on changing beds because he said he
was impervious to bedbugs, and I fetched out my own sleeping bag. He sailed
through this contretemps with an aplomb that is the hallmark of ultimate
hospitality in my opinion. No fuss, no embarrassment, a minor problem solved
and forgotten. He lay under the mosquito net, a fine green nylon mesh made in
the USA. Before I went to sleep I heard him ask: ‘Where did you get this mosquito
net, sorr?’
I told him it came from San Francisco, and waited for the next, inevitable
question.
‘It is very marvellous,’ he whispered, almost to himself. ‘I have never seen the
moon in so many colours.’
The dreaded question, the one I had become so resigned to for so long,
never came. He did not ask me what it cost. Happily, I closed my eyes. Good-
bye, India.
Every day I climbed higher towards the mountains, leaving the multitudes of
India behind me. I had the impression of rising above a great bowl teeming with
life, a vast and vaporous swamp of fecundity. Up here in the colder air the crowd
thinned and resolved itself into individuals, aloof from each other, cherishing their
apartness.
I had no idea how far I had adjusted myself to the press of people in India
and the absence of privacy. Suddenly I felt space opening all around me and I
was afraid of exploding into a vacuum, like a diver in decompression. The feeling
became even more intense as I rode on through the Khyber Pass into
Afghanistan. In Kabul I felt I had to stop for a few days until I had regained
control of myself. I was in a sort of dizzy rapture and afraid it could lead to an
accident.
I hung around the curio shops dickering with samovar salesmen, amazed at
their toughness in bargaining. My greatest indulgence was to buy a loaf of real
bread, half a pound of cold imported butter, a large lump of cheese and a bottle
of Italian wine made in Afghanistan. With these I retired to my hotel room,
recently infested with bedbugs now lying dead on their backs all around the floor,
and consumed all my purchases in an orgiastic fantasy.
Only six thousand miles to home.
The road ran on through a thousand miles of barren and severe waste,
Kandahar, Herat, and into Iran. My thoughts turned in on themselves more and
more. I was so close to the end now. What had I to show for four years of my
life? What was it all about?
As my mind scratched restlessly back over the journey my dismay grew to
panic. I really didn’t seem to know anything anymore.
I remembered a snatch of conversation from the hotel at Kassala, when I
came out of the Atbara Desert on the way to Gondar. How strong I was feeling
then.
There was a tea boy with dreadful suppurating sores on his ankles. They
would not heal. He had shown them to a chemistry teacher who happened to be
sharing my dormitory.
‘Have you got anything to help this boy?’ he asked me.
Together we washed and dressed the sores, and I pulled a seven-day dose
of ampicillin from my battery of wonder drugs, glad to put them to some use.
‘You must take them all, or not at all,’ I said sternly, putting twenty-eight shiny
red and black capsules in the boy’s hand. They looked fearsomely potent in that
grubby palm. He gulped and promised. I told his employer to make sure, and he
brought us free tea for our trouble.
‘What are you doing this long journey for?’ the teacher asked me.
‘To find out,’ I answered, weary of my long-winded explanations.
‘But what is it you wish to find out?’ he persisted.
‘Why I am doing it.’
It was a frivolous reply, but I was so free and easy about it then, with most of
it still ahead of me.
Now, running for home across this bleak land, I had to face the same
question.
Did I find out, after all, why I was doing it?
It seemed to me that there were times during those four years when I did
know, and those were the times when the journey needed no justification.
When I was floating free.
Then I needed no better reason for the journey than to be exactly where I
was, knowing what I knew. Those were the times when I felt stuffed full of natural
wisdom, scratching at heaven’s; very door.
The days of Jupiter.
What had become of him since? Where was all that wonderful assurance and
enlightenment now? As I moved mechanically through the landscape,
undeviating, incurious, hugging my last reserves of energy, I felt bereft and
ignorant, cast down to the depths, no more than ‘a pair of ragged claws scuttling
across the floors of silent seas’.
Scuttling towards home. I called it home. I told myself: ‘Just another five
thousand miles to home. In only three weeks you can be there.’
I was drawn as if by a magnet past glittering mosques, perfumed bazaars,
mountain eyries and troglodytic retreats, all the ages and splendours of
civilization, hardly willing even to turn my head. In my mind’s eye the same picture
flashed again and again. A Mediterranean avenue, and myself on the Triumph
riding up it, with the sun flicking between the trunks of the plane trees, towards
my home. I played it over and over like a clip from an old black and white film. My
‘homecoming’.
It was an illusion, and I knew it. There was a house there still, of course, that
was mine, but it would never mean to me again what it once did. How many times
I had renounced it already! Only a year before I was sure I would return to
California and Carol. Now I was besotted by a nostalgic memory more than four
years old. All the fine freedom I had known since had evaporated. All the brilliant
and unrepeatable experience of four years was lifeless as ashes. I was burned
out, and I could think only of getting to my little stone castle and slamming the
door.
Rage could still kindle a fire of sorts, as I accused myself of stupidity,
betrayal, waste, weakness, every failing under the sun.
How could I have let it go? How could I have let it shrivel away like this? The
whole thing was preposterous and frightening. I must have something to say after
four years and sixty thousand miles, after all I had seen and done in forty
countries.
‘Excuse me, Mr Simon, but can you tell me please what message you will be
carrying back to your country when you return?’
I did not have a message. I seemed to have lost it on the way.
‘But surely, Mr Simon, you have learned something. What about death, for
example?’
Yes. True. I did learn something after all.
It was at the end of my two weeks at Boddhgaya that I packed a small bag,
hired a rickshaw to Gaya and took a train to Benares. I stayed there only one full
day and towards the end of that day I shared a small boat with a New Zealander
and floated on the Ganges, as everyone does, to the ghats where the bodies are
burned.
As we approached the ghats, going upstream, an unburned corpse drifted
slowly past us. I did not, at first, recognize it for what it was. It lay back in the
water as though in a very deep, soft armchair, with only the knees, toes, arms
and head above water. A crow was perched on its forehead, pecking.
Nobody in normal times could be indifferent to the sight of a dead human
body. I certainly was not, and to see it being ripped into by a bird was even more
shocking. Yet the shock lasted hardly a second. I had been preparing for this
sight a long time, and Benares itself gave my conditioning a last, powerful shove.
What was there to be shocked by? Nothing could suggest greater peace or
purity than the Ganges. To watch that broad body of shining water, so massive
and unruffled in the evening light, is like watching life itself slide past. No Indian
could wish a better fate on the poor clay of his body than that it should float
away on this river. Was I going to be shocked then by considerations of hygiene?
Hardly, knowing what is pumped regularly, if invisibly, into the world’s rivers.
Was it the bird then? By why should a bird be harder to contemplate than a
worm? So it must have been that I simply didn’t like being reminded of death.
In time that body floating down the river was transformed for me into an
image of great beauty and simplicity. It allowed me to think more calmly about the
prospect of death. Unless I could do that, I thought, how could I possibly hope to
appreciate without fear the pleasures of being alive.
‘Thank you, Mr Simon, but what about God? It is reported that at one time
you considered yourself to be God. Do you not consider that to be rather
blasphemous?’
No. I do think it is possible to be God for brief moments. I am certainly not God
now.
‘But surely, in your country, most people believe there is only one God?’
I think God is the composite creation of large numbers of people being good for
a moment – the way football fans keep a steady glow going in a stadium because
there is always someone lighting a match. If people stopped being good altogether
God would vanish.
‘This is all rather airy-fairy, isn’t it? Don’t you have anything more specific to
tell people?’
I could tell them to refuse to be afraid, and to try always to do what is right. It
comes with practice, but unfortunately it goes away again with preaching, as in my
own case. However, we are gifted with a compass in our hearts which will guide us
to all success in life.
‘Mr Simon, after your many experiences people will certainly want something
more concrete and pertinent to the world we live in. What can you suggest?’
They can always leave a tip for the starving millions on their way out.

The eastern border of Turkey was the halfway mark. Only three and a half
thousand miles to go. So far it had been easy. The worst I had to face were an
oil leak in Afghanistan and some filthy weather by the Caspian Sea. I had steered
my way safely between all the wrecked tankers and trucks littering the side of the
highway and, so far, had successfully outwitted the fate prophesied for me.
The entrance to Turkey was a yellow stucco gateway, built presumably for
horse-drawn traffic. In this wasteland between Turkey and Iran it stood as a
romantic relic of the Ottoman Empire, comprehensively stuck in an age of bound
ledgers entered by hand with scratchy nibs. Waiting to go past was a mile-long
queue of forty-ton TIR trucks parked two abreast in the hot sun. The drivers,
mostly Hungarians, Bulgarians, Yugoslavs, Englishmen and Scandinavians, were
out sunning themselves in singlets and shorts, and playing interminable games of
cards. They expected to be there for two days or more, but private traffic passed
through quite quickly and easily.
When I asked travellers about the Asian route they had always made a song
and dance about this part of the world. Australian bikies riding their ex-factory
BMW’s home from Berlin told me chilling tales about the high passes in eastern
Turkey.
‘And if they don’t freeze your balls off, then the locals will probably knock ’em
off for you,’ they said, referring to the belligerent and oppressed Kurds, who have
a reputation for stone throwing.
Now the crowds at the frontier and the familiar, old-fashioned architecture
made Europe seem comfortably close. Nobody threw stones. A restaurant in a
garden at the next small town served a delicious and civilized meal. The sun was
shining. I decided the rest of the story was exaggerated too.
For once the traveller’s tale was right and I was wrong. As the road rose up
into the mountains the cloud took the sun away and sent a fine drizzle down
through the cold air. I had expected to cross one or two high passes and then
come down again but the road stayed up on this broken and uninhabited plateau
and turned to dirt, and rock slides and mud, with snow-capped peaks all around
until I began to realize that this was becoming an ordeal. Astonished that I
should run into such extreme conditions so close to home, I rode on 150 miles
through the freezing drizzle without seeing so much as a house, and wondering
whether I would ever know the welcoming warmth of a tea shop again.
The cold struck deep into me, and my body stiffened. I tried every trick,
singing, flexing my muscles, thinking warm, not realizing how far gone I actually
was. When I did reach the petrol pump before Horasan it was just in time.
Hypothermia happens easily on a motorcycle. The body temperature sinks
before you know it.
In the wood-frame cafe there was a coke stove burning, and I sat by it
drinking glasses of hot tea one after another, shaking and laughing at my own
spectacle, but it was still half an hour before my teeth stopped chattering. I had
never been so cold before, and this was in spite of wearing a waxed and lined
Belstaff suit over a padded leather jacket.
I put on more underclothes for the last fifty miles to Erzerum and then it was
all downhill. The mountain range was the last major hazard of the journey, the
dog with the cartwheel eyes, and it caught me unawares.
If I was able to enjoy myself in Turkey the credit is due, mainly, to two fellows
and a girl who were going the same way on two bikes. We met in a restaurant in
Sivas. Perhaps they could see how close I was to the end of my tether. They
seemed to treat me gently and bore me along with them, so instead of taking the
shortest possible route I saw the extraordinary conical rocks of Cappadocia (like
a petrified rally of the Ku Klux Klan) and lingered for a few days on the warm
Mediterranean coast between Mersin and Antalya.
The ride up through the middle of Turkey to Istanbul took three days. Once
we camped out, and the second night we stayed at a small hotel. In the
teahouses I spoke German with Turkish men, admiring their opulent moustaches,
wondering at their baggy striped shirts with detachable collars and their heavy
old-style suits and flat hats that reminded me of the Depression years. Turkey
surprised me in many ways, by its size and by a culture which inspires a special
quality of nostalgia for the period one is just too young to remember. Turkey was
one country I knew I would have to come back to and see properly. Then I was in
Istanbul, and only two thousand miles from home.
My friends and I parted company and at this point I gave up all pretence of
being on a journey. I stayed in Istanbul just long enough to give the Triumph one
last, thorough overhaul, and then I rode as fast as I could for home, in the grip of
a kind of madness. It was lucky for me, perhaps, that the engine had begun to
vibrate badly, and it was too painful to ride over sixty miles an hour.
The roads were heavy with holiday traffic and big trucks, a dangerous
mixture. Most of the cars were German and I met them in an unending stream
flowing south through Yugoslavia to Greece, until I felt I must be in the new
German Empire. There were some obscene and terrible accidents on the
Yugoslav Auto-put, which must be a serious contender as the world’s worst road.
I felt fortunate to get through unscathed.
For three nights I camped by the roadside, and the fourth night I was in
Munich, staying with a friend. A day’s riding took me to another friend’s house in
Switzerland. There, only a day’s ride from my house, it felt safe to believe that I
was really going to make it.
One morning in June 1977, I rode over the Jura Mountains into France. The
Triumph had stopped protesting and was running freely. All my equipment was in
working order. I sat in the saddle with the same ease that others find in an
armchair, and could maintain that position comfortably for twelve hours or more.
I was very light, at 126 pounds I was some thirty pounds below the weight I set
out at four years earlier, but my body functioned better than ever except in one
respect: my right eye was less efficient after the accident in Penang. To read a
telephone directory in twilight I needed glasses. I still smoked cigarettes, and still
wished I didn’t.
I was carrying rice from Iran, raisins and dried mulberries from Afghanistan,
tea from Assam, curry spices from Calcutta, stock cubes from Greece, halva
from Turkey and some soya sauce from Penang.
In a polythene screw-top bottle bought from a shop in Kath-mandu was the
rest of the sesame-seed oil I had bought in Boddhgaya. The rice and raisins were
in plastic boxes from Guatemala. My teapot was bought at Victoria Falls, and my
enamel plates were made in China and inherited from Bruno at La Plata. A small
box of henna leaves from Sudan, a vial of rose water from Peshawar and some
silver ornaments from Ootaca-mund were all tucked into a Burmese lacquered
bowl. This in turn sat inside a Russian samovar from Kabul.
My leather tank bags and saddle cover were made in Argentina. The tent and
sleeping bag were original from London, but the bag had been refilled with down in
San Francisco. I had a blanket from Peru and a hammock from Brazil. I was still
wearing Lulu’s silver necklace and an elephant-hair bracelet from Kenya. The
Australian fishing rod was where the sword from Cairo had once sat,, and an
umbrella from Thailand replaced the one I had lost in Argentina.
By far the most valuable of all my things was a Kashmiri carpet, a lovely thing
smothered in birds and animals to a Shiraz design, but it would have been hard to
say which of my possessions was the most precious.
I came down through Lyons and stayed off the motorway, crossing the
Rhône at St Esprit and heading off for Nîmes. I was still playing that clip of film in
my head: the avenue, the plane trees, the sun flicking between the trunks and
leaves. Within hours, even within a modest number of minutes, the film would
merge with reality. I would be riding up that avenue, and by that single act I would
be sealing off forever the four most eventful years of my life.
Any minute now…The End.
It should have been intolerable. I should have turned and fled the other way.
It was after all a kind of death. The only Ted Simon I knew was the one who
moved on. The Hello-Good-bye Man. From person to person, country to country,
continent to continent. Half man, half bike; if not Jupiter, then Pegasus, perhaps,
or at least a centaur. At least that.
But soon, no more. I would take my things off the bike and put them away in
cupboards. I would wear ordinary clothes. And this bike, which had been 63,400
miles around the world, I would ride to the shops. And most of my days, from then
on, I would spend trying to remember. Yes, it would be a bit like death, but I
welcomed it. I rode on through the sunshine until I came to the avenue, and the
sun flickered through the plane trees exactly as I had remembered.
The end of the journey was even more confusing than the beginning. In fact it
was just as arbitrary and meaningless as any of the other milestones along the
way. Did it end in France, or in England? In my own way I had even ended it in
Istanbul, when I crossed the Bosporus into Europe.
My friends welcomed me back. I could feel their excitement, and I enjoyed it.
As long as I was in their company I could feel some satisfaction through them.
Alone, though, I was in great trouble, tossed on a storm of conflicting emotions. I
felt exactly as though I were at the mercy of great waves, without the strength to
hold on to anything firm. The one task which might have centred me on something
steady and reliable was the book I had to write, but I found it impossible. The
memories I had relied on refused to come to life, and I knew that to try to force
them into the open might cripple them. These things of the imagination are so
delicate, they can be strained and fractured just as easily as the muscles and
bones of one’s body. And they can grow old and lifeless too. I was afraid.
During this bad, mad time, the wedding prophecy came to my mind quite
often. I had never before been specially superstitious, but the experiences of the
journey had changed the way I viewed things. In particular, the incidents with the
flying fish and the saddhu had affected me profoundly. I saw that things could
happen in other ways than according to the physical laws I had been taught, and
I found the world a much richer and more satisfying place because of that.
All the same, astrology and fortunetelling did not fill me with confidence. They
seemed far too deliberate and much too vulnerable to ordinary wishful thinking to
have a firm place in my new mythology. If I thought about the prophecy it was
mainly because I had lost control over my own future so completely that there
was a vacuum which had to be filled with something.
The prophecy had promised me two years of trouble and internal conflict, and
I was certainly getting a full dose of that. It had promised me two accidents ‘not
major, not minor’, and I had not had either of those. It had promised me great
happiness and prosperity from 1979, and that was what I was looking forward to.
I allowed myself to believe that, however bad things felt now, happiness and
prosperity were on their way.
At the end of August I put all my bags and boxes back on the bike,
reassembled my gear and rode off to London to appear at the Motorcycle Show.
Once again, The End. Finally, I rode the bike up the motorway to Meriden and
was received by the factory work force assembled inside the gates. Although it
had been arranged for television and newspapers, this last arrival, which was
really the end of The End, was the one that moved me most.
While I had been riding their bike around the world, most of these men had
been fighting a bitter battle to keep their factory going, and had wound up as
proprietors of their own business. Triumph was now a workers’ co-operative, the
first in the motorcycle industry, and I was very proud to be representing them. I
had always hoped that they would understand that, and draw some value from
the publicity I was giving their motorcycle. When they gave me three old-
fashioned but rousing cheers, I thought they meant it, and the questions they
asked afterwards seemed to confirm my feeling. It was a·difficult time. The bike
would be theirs now. There was talk of putting it in a museum. I knew it was the
sensible thing to do, but I was immensely relieved to feel that it meant something
to them too.
They gave me an almost new Triumph 750, in its place. Craven gave me new
boxes and a windscreen to fit on it. It felt very strange, and I struggled to get
used to it. Most difficult of all was the switch of gear lever and brake pedal to
opposite sides of the bike. Four years of living with the old Triumph had made my
reflexes instinctive, and it was hard to relearn them. I put a thousand miles on the
bike before taking it back to France, and by then I felt more comfortable with it,
but I was riding with great care. It had always seemed to me that, having ridden
65,000 miles without a serious accident, the period after my return would be the
most dangerous of all.
In the South of France near Avignon, I came to a crossing. There were no
traffic lights, and I was on the minor road. I stopped the bike completely and
looked up and down the major road. I saw no traffic, and set out to cross it. I
could hardly have been doing five miles an hour when I saw myself within yards of
a big van coming straight for me very fast. It should have hit me side-on and I
would undoubtedly have been killed if it had, but I braked and the driver didn’t, and
so his van was just past my front wheel when I hit it. The bike was torn away
from underneath me, and the front end was smashed beyond repair. I fell on the
tarmac with all the bones in my body shaken in their sockets, but otherwise
unharmed.
The worst was having to face that I could look directly at a speeding van and
not see it. My confidence was more shattered even than the bike. After all that I
had done, with all the care I was taking, I could not explain how I could ride
blindly into such a disaster. If ever an accident qualified as ‘not major and not
minor’ that was it.
I felt positively glad that I would have no bike to ride for a while. It was time to
give it a rest. I borrowed a little open Citroën with a plastic body and a soft
canvas top, and drove around in that during the winter.
It was a very hard winter. Emotionally I was as disturbed as ever. The house
still did not feel like home, the book would not come, nothing was right. I took
shelter with friends and hoped for an early spring. Then Carol came to visit me.
One day we went to visit my house. The weather was very bright, winds were
tearing the clouds across the blue sky. While we were there I decided to bring the
Indian rug back with me for protection. We drove back up a steep road on a
stony hillside to rejoin the main road. I stopped the car at the crossing, to look
for traffic. A giant hand plucked the car off the ground, raised it four feet up in the
air, rolled it over and threw it down the hillside.
The violence was so great, so terrifying and unexpected, that I knew only
afterwards what had happened. At the time I had the impression of whirling in hell
and being hit. It seemed to go on for a long time, and I was sure I would die.
Carol had the same recollection. I was thrown from the car onto my head. Carol
fell into the back of the car. Fortunately the car did a complete roll in the air, for if
it had fallen upside down she would have been crushed. It fell with its front
wheels hooked over a big boulder some ten feet below the road. The boulder held
it, otherwise it might have bounced and rolled a long way down the mountainside.
Carol escaped with a bruised arm. I was drenched in blood from a scalp wound.
The only possible explanation was that a gust of wind had filled the car from
behind, through the open back, and whisked it away like a parachute. The
strength of the wind that would be capable of lifting a car four feet in the air was
beyond my ability to compute. It had an element of the supernatural about it, of
course.
There was one other strange coincidence. The Indian rug was never found.
Many people searched for it, but it had disappeared.
A week later Carol flew back to the ranch, and I went to work. Things
improved, gradually, and my confidence returned. The memories flooded back,
and the book got written. It is now the winter of 1978. The prospects for
prosperity in 1979 seem quite good. I have a letter from Carol saying that she is
thinking of getting married. Franziska, the policewoman in Fortaleza, has
qualified as a lawyer and is working in Brasilia. Bruno is a buyer for the French
tobacco monopoly, and travels to tobacco auctions all over the world. The
saddest news is that the Black Mountain Inn in Rhodesia is now a ruin of broken
brick walls and naked rafters. There is no news of the Van den Berghs.
The Triumph 500-cc model T100-P, known as XRW 964M, is in the Alfred
Herbert Museum in Coventry, and remains unwashed since Istanbul. Someday
soon I plan to visit it.
Meanwhile I dream a lot. Often I dream of riding over the hard red floor of a
great forest, beneath a high canopy of translucent green, spreading on and on.
An enchanted forest, perhaps, where men may still sometimes play at being
gods.
The loaded Triumph Tiger ioo in southern Chile after my first crossing of the
Andes. The bike was capable of carrying much more than its own weight and still
handling well, the secret being in the distribution of the load. The leather tank-
bags held tools and spares and brought much of the weight forward.

This sculptural form rising from chalky soil in southern Ethiopia was made by
termites. A road engineer told me that termite mounds are strong enough for
winching trucks out of mud.

A boy playing in the street in Palermo. I thought the smile and the braces made up
for the fuzzy picture.
Lazy days at Kibwezi Junction on the road from Nairobi to Mombasa. On the right
is Samson the policeman off-duty with a girl friend.

Delio Quiroz, saddlemaker at Villaguay in Argentina, sewing the leather tank-bags

which were my pride and joy. He worked nonstop through a weekend while I
hobbled round his shop after an accident making a leather saddle cover. The
original cover had been slashed by police in Brazil looking for explosives.

Bruno and his battered Renault van travelled with me through most of the Andes
from Bolivia to Colombia. He is trying his grandmother’s remedy of hot salt water
on a septic finger – hence the sour expression.
Brazilian fishermen on their sailing raft photographed in the bay at Fortaleza as I
arrived on the Zoe G. This craft is really the precursor of the wind-surfer. It is
cheap to make and efficient, but highly dangerous in a storm. Even so the
impoverished pesqueiros often stay at sea overnight, unwilling to return without a
catch.
Riding up the coast of Peru from Lima looking for beaches to camp on I found
this miserable fishing village where the dead overshadow the living. A few rows of
squalid brick shacks cower beneath the graveyard. A strong inshore wind sweeps
plastic refuse down the streets and tangles it amsng i:he crosses, while children
play on the funereal dunes. The flimsy roofs are adequate only because on this
part of the coast it never rains.

Two women peer out at me, suspicious of my dangerous-looking lenses. Poverty

alone does not explain the squalor. Further up the coast a community of equally
poor fishermen lived in clean, attractive huts and took an obvio jsly greater
pleasure in life.
This spectacular mountain, clothed in greenery, is seen from the he.ghts of
Macchu Picchu, the last stronghold of the Incas against the Spaniards in Peru.
There is no road here and I came on the slow train from Cuzco. The long journey
began with a half-hour battle between Indians and foreigners fighting for seats in
the stationary train. I saw a bulky Indian woman climb over the back of a row of
seats where an American tourist had grabbed a place. For a while she sat on the
helpless man’s neck and then, spreading her legs wide, she slid down behind him
and ejected hin from the bench by her superior weight. The railway is visible
curling-round the base of the mountain.
I and generations of other English children at boarding-school have always
loathed sago pudding. Perhaps I should not have been surprised to discover in
Malaysia that the starchy pellets, used to make the detested ‘frog spawn
pudding’, come out of a tree-trunk. People bring their trees to a roadside sago-
mill where they are shredded in a revolving tube. The sago is washed out and
settles in tanks (above left). More amazing still - sago pudding, properly prepared
with milk, is delicious.

A farmer’s wagon in Thailand, drawn by water buffalo, with a splendid curved

canopy.

Among the dunes and bushes of a camp-site at La Plata, south of Buenos Aires,
I searched for an elusive electrical fault. I never found it, but when I put
everything together again, furious and frustrated, the fault had disappeared. This
was not an uncommon experience.

In Nepal I deserted the Triumph for two weeks to walk in the Himalayas. On the
trail from Pokhara to Jomsum I passed this wedding-procession. Two great
curving horns preceded the bride.

I admire snakes. I expected them in Africa and saw none. I was promised snakes
in Brazil and saw none there either. At last, in California, I met this large
rattlesnake. It warned me politely but firmly of its presence and we studied each
other across five feet of undergrowth while I took its picture.

At Lotus Creek, on the road north from Brisbane, I ran into the monsoons and
was stranded between flooded rivers with a party of Australian truck-drivers. For
two days and nights they drank beer and ate steak virtually nonstop while I did my
best to keep up. On the left, the amiable ‘P.J.’ with a ‘stubbie’ in hand and, right,
a poker party across the double white lines that disappeared into thirteen feet of
flood water.

I was unable to get close to the Andea Indians of Bolivia and Peru. They seemed
eternally morose and weighed down by poverty and heavy work, inless stoned on
coca or drunk on chicha beer. In Ecuador the gloom lifted somewhat, and Indians
seemed more in charge of their own destinies. I stayed in a house near Otavalo
for a week and made friends with these grils, among others. Despite their high
spirits they were very shy of the camera. Their parents still believed the camera
could steal their souls. They may be right in a way.
Bruno took this picture soon after we crossed from Ecuador into Colombia. The
World War Two flying jacket was given a new lease of life with an extra layer of
Argentine leather, and I was proud of the fur cuffs and collar, but I lost it, alas, in
Mexico a month later. As a study in the use of wheels it makes an ironic contrast
with the picture above, taken in the streets of Penang. Perhaps the message is a
little overstated: while Western man roams the world in pursuit of truth and
destiny, Eastern man fusses over the home-made trolley that is his livelihood.
Even so, I was impressed in Asia i:o see so much time, effort and dedication
lavished on the simplest objects and whole lives lived out in the smallest spaces.

Just a part of the astonishing Iguacu Falls, between Brazil and Argentina. Water
cascades over a precipice that is one and a half miles wide, and drops 180 feet,
surpassing even Niagara and the Victoria Falls in its grandeur. When I stood in
front of it I felt quite certain that all the trcuble I had taken to get that far was
justified by this single, glorious experience.
Years of hard travelling amidst poverty protected me from the shock that
overwhelms most Western visitors to India. The average Indian family is at least
as straight-laced and materialistic as any other, but the extremes of life and
death intrude constantly. There is no quarter given to squeamishness or prudery.
Although the modern Hindu film scarcely permits even a kiss, the temple walls of
Khajarao (below) celebrate the joys of procreation with fanatical zeal. And in
Benares death entered into my life in the form of a corpse floating past me on the
Ganges with its attendant crow (above). Yet I was able to recall the image of this
body, resting in the arms of the river as though in a deep armchair, and find in it a
source of comfort. It diminished my fear of death and that, I find, is the only path
to peace in this world.