Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

THE COASTAL LINE TO GALLE AND HAMBANTOTA

I STUMBLED INTO COLOMBO on my birthday. The winsome hotel clerk in the crimson sari knew this somehow. She said, "Happy birthday, sir. Please call us if you want us to come up and sing to you." That "us" made the offer sound either wickeder or more chaste.

To give the day a meaning I went for a walk, marveling at how thinly populated the city was compared to the ones I'd just left in India. The entire population of the Republic of Sri Lanka was the same as the population of the city of Mumbai: twenty million. And the placid and procrastinating Sinhalese were a reminder of how frenzied and loquacious the Indians had been, forever vexed and talkative. I found a barbershop and asked for a baldy and wound up with a crewcut. Then I had my picture taken by a sidewalk photographer. I bought a Sri Lankan notebook. The taxi driver who took me back to the hotel asked me whether I wanted to see anything special, and when I asked him what he meant by special, he gave me a fangy stare and said, "Vimmin" I said primly no. But the word stuck in my head. I remembered that Colombo had a reputation for debauchery. Perhaps I could find another taxi driver later on and indulge myself in birthday depravity among Sinhalese voluptuaries and lotus eaters.

Regarding my birthday as auspicious, and while it was still daylight, I sat in the garden of the hotel under a fragrant arbor, opened the new notebook, and began a story, "The Elephant God": something to occupy my evenings later on and a way of venting my feelings about India. Darkness fell as I was writing. The garden was empty, the hotel was empty; no one wanted to come to Sri Lanka these days. The Tamil Tiger offensive was in the news: a mine in Trincomalee the day before had exploded and killed seven people, shootings in the north had claimed four lives, and suicide bombers were expected in Colombo.

In my room, I saw that a small cake, a bottle of wine, and a birthday card were arranged on the coffee table. I yanked the cork on the wine and poured a glass. I sat down and sipped it. The room was still and hot and mostly dark. The wine was like purple ink. I drank some more of it and thought: Debauchery. Who would know? It's my birthday!

I ate a piece of the cake and was about to have more wine when my scalp shrank and my skull began to burn. I had a terrible headache from the first glass of wine. I fell asleep on the sofa, my own snores waking me around midnight, still snorting and drooling; then I pulled my clothes off and went to bed. In the morning, I woke up a year older and went in search of train tickets.

On my Railway Bazaar visit, I had wanted to see Sri Lanka's most celebrated alien, Arthur C. Clarke, who had settled here in 1956. But then, in the wake of his 2001 notoriety and the demands on his time, I hadn't managed it. Another lesson in the Tao of Travel is: wait long enough and all things are possible. This time I made a plan. I sent a message to him through a mutual friend and hoped for a favorable reply.

In the meantime, I went to the main railway station to buy a ticket to Galle, some way down the tsunami-ravaged coast.

"No advance booking," the clerk said through the barred window that made him seemed caged.

"How do I get a ticket?"

"Come before the train leaves."

"Any reserved seats?"

"No. Just push"

"How much does it cost to Galle?"

He made a face. "A hundred-something for any ticket."

A dollar to go anywhere on the train.

The next day, I had a message that Sir Arthur would meet me. His secretary said that he was not strong, that he was suffering from what she called post-polio syndrome, but that I could stop by tomorrow. This meant hanging around Colombo for another day. I was eager to meet him. Sir Arthur pops up in all sorts of contexts: sci-fi and real science, pulp magazines and scientific journals, astronomy and astrophysics and paranormal mumbo-jumbo, the earliest satellites, a pedophilia scandal (in which he was libeled), the space program, Stanley Kubrick, celebrities, as a booster of Sri Lankan culture, as an early ecologist, a maker of documentaries, and a TV pundit. He was a speechifier and a prognosticator and a prolific writer. He had been at it so long, many people (including ones I met in Sri Lanka) wondered whether he was still alive. But he was, nearing eighty-nine.

The Tamil Tiger secessionist war had had the effect of turning Colombo into a very quiet place, with few visitors and no tourists to speak of. There were not even many Sri Lankans on the sidewalks, except in the bazaar near the main railway station. A "speak only Sinhalese" policy, which had been established in schools by the government in the 1970s, meant that so few Sri Lankans spoke English, they were unemployable by foreign companies looking for cheap labor in the IT industries. (On one occasion in the 1990s, three thousand college-educated Sri Lankans showed up for call center jobs; fewer than one hundred spoke English.)

Rebuffed by the high-tech employers, they were instead hired to make polo shirts and jeans and T-shirts and sneakers in Sri Lankan sweatshops. The economy was in terrible shape, the war was picking up, the government was stumbling; but like many poverty-stricken tropical countries with an incompetent government and its army under fire in the provinces, Sri Lanka was old-fashioned and, except for the war zones, rather sedate, or at least quiet, like a place holding its breath.

I had lunch with a diplomat who filled me in on the Tamil Tigers. He told me that the secession-minded Tamils in Sri Lanka had been calling for their own state for the past thirty years. And not just giving speeches but fighting. The Tigers fought with single-minded savagery. At one time there had been dozens of Tamil organizations intent on secession — groups of all persuasions, some moderate, some conciliatory, and some not fighting at all, but open to debate and compromise.

One by one, the leaders of these groups had been killed by the Tigers, their members ambushed, huts burned, women raped, soldiers scattered; now only the Tigers remained. I had been told in Trichy by a boasting Tamil that the Tigers pioneered the suicide bomb.

My diplomat friend said this was true.

When I challenged him, he said, "Suicide bomb vest" — in other words, they invented the concealed bomb.

Not really. Just such a sinister device is described in Joseph Conrad's novel of London bombers, The Secret Agent (1907), in which a suicide bomb is worn by a cynical pest known as the Professor, who boasts that he can blow himself up whenever he feels like it. He regards it as a liberating contraption. He has a habit of "keeping his hand in the left pocket of his trousers, grasping lightly the India rubber ball, the supreme guarantee of his sinister freedom" — a hard squeeze and the bomb explodes and Paradise Now. As one of his terrorist colleagues says later in the novel, "You carry in your pocket enough stuff to send yourself and, say, twenty other people into eternity."

But (so I was told) the Tamil Tigers — or rather the Black Tiger Suicide Squad, its subgroup of zealots, wearers of the self-destructing vest — hold the world record for suicide bombings. The official figure is 1,680 in the twenty years between 1980 and 2000, far more than Hamas and Hezbollah combined. One of the better-known Tiger victims was Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was blown up in Chennai in 1991 by a young Black Tiger woman, one of many Tigers who objected to Indian soldiers' joining the Sri Lankan army in ridding Sri Lanka of this ethnic violence.

The Tigers were tenacious and disinclined to bargain; when their leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was described as "ruthless and elusive," I took this to mean stupid and stubborn, the sort of qualities that fuel the village fanatic's monomania. He was a grade school dropout with a fifth-grade education, famously unreasonable, impervious to logic, unmoved by sending children to their death. A more literate or imaginative man would have given up or compromised long ago. He almost never showed his face. He had emerged in 1972, when he was just eighteen, energized the Tigers, and committed his first murder in 1975—shooting a Tamil political leader for being too moderate. In the rare photographs of him, Prabhakaran was a tubby, mustached little man in too tight, too clean khaki fatigues who looked indistinguishable from any toothy bristling stallholder in the dry-goods section of the Chennai bazaar. All that was known of him was that he suffered from hypertension and high blood pressure, that he lived in an underground bunker in the north, and that he had never been to Colombo in his life.

"What are his beliefs?"

"Just Tamil, Tamil, Tamil," my friend said.

Prabakharan had no political philosophy, no economic ideas, and he stood for nothing except Tamil sovereignty and secession. The Tigers were well armed and well funded. The largest Tamil community outside India can be found in Toronto, and Canadian Tamils (and American and Australian Tamils too) are assessed a "liberation tax" by collectors from the old country. Some are coerced, with threats to their families, but most pay happily, in the same spirit that the Irish in America gave money to Noraid, to pay for the bombs that blew up women and children in Ulster in the 1970s and '80s.

The Tamil convulsion, and all the deaths, had occurred after I had last visited, and because the violence had retarded Sri Lanka, I instantly recognized the place. It had hardly changed. Colombo was a forgotten city with little foreign investment and a failing economy, so while it was visibly faltering, it was not cursed with meretricious modernity. Because of the indifference of the money men and the speculators, Colombo's colonial buildings remained intact. No one could afford to pull them down or replace them. The sculpted stone on the shop fronts and emporiums of timeworn Victorian and Edwardian Colombo still stood, the wooden floors inside still creaked, the dust-coated ceiling fans still turned. The city was pretty much the one I'd seen three decades ago, and I spent my days before meeting Arthur C. Clarke walking its streets and browsing its arcades and applying for onward visas.

I called Sir Arthur's secretary the following morning, as I'd been directed to.

"Sir Arthur will see you."

I easily found his house. I'd been near it the day before, looking for a visa to Myanmar — the Myanmar embassy was down a nearby lane, and Sir Arthur's neighbors were the Iraqi embassy and a Sai Baba ashram. This quiet district was distinguished by its high walls and well-patrolled gates and security cameras and the occasional splash of someone diving into a pool I could not see.

Sir Arthur lived behind ten-foot walls, with wire mesh on top of them, in a big squarish house that was comfortable and spacious rather than luxurious. I announced myself, the gate swung open, and I was directed to a stairwell, its windows playfully decorated with bumper stickers from NASA, and one with a large vertical arrow and the message Mars: 35,000,000 miles. I entered the working wing of the house, a lobby, the secretary's office with its file drawers and paraphernalia — fax machine, computer, phones. Documents framed and hung on the wall certified that Sir Arthur had become a member of one society or another, or had won a prize — lots of these; and plaques, trophies, ceremo nial knickknacks inscribed to him. His was a well-rewarded career. He was a serious scientist as well as an ambitious and imaginative writer, anticipating possible futures. It was an old tradition. Writing enthusiastically about Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, Borges claimed that Ludovico Ariosto and Johannes Kepler were early sci-fi dreamers and practitioners. In her memoirs, Doris Lessing (herself a science-fiction writer at times) praised science-fiction writers as visionaries.

"Hello!"

Sir Arthur appeared in a wheelchair, the familiar, smiling, bespectacled man; upright, balding, but rather frail, even in this heat with a blanket over his skinny legs. He looked like the sort of alien he had described in his prose fantasies. Men of a certain age, and some women too, often have the watchfulness, the pop-eyed almost reptilian stare, the glowing dome, and the bone structure we attribute to extraterrestrials.

He had that elderly and slightly unearthly appearance. The apparatus of his state-of-the-art wheelchair only emphasized his Martian look. He'd had polio about twelve years before and was suffering the serious aftermath that afflicts some polio victims years later — muscle weakness, poor breathing, cell degeneration. That too made him alien-looking, because he was cheery and welcoming.

"I'm feeling a bit cloud-nine-ish," he said as he was wheeled into his study, where there were many more plaques and trophies, framed letters from heads of state, and signed photographs — surely that beauty was Elizabeth Taylor, and wasn't that beaming fatty the late pope?

Sir Arthur's lopsided lips and slightly chewed pronunciation of the word "cloud" was from the west of England. I asked him if he was from those parts. He said he'd been born in Minehead, on the Somerset shore.

"A lovely coast — long beaches, very pretty," he said. He spoke slowly, a voice that was also whimsical and vague, with fluttery hands and an expressive frown that suggested memory loss. "How'd you get to Sri Lanka?" he asked.

"I traveled through India," I said, to spare him the details of Georgia and Turkmenistan. He didn't say anything, so I said, "Do you have any thoughts on India?"

"India. Reaching critical mass."

"Population, you mean?"

"Out of control. Too many," he said.

He pulled out a diary as wide as a ledger, opened to the day's date. April 12 was underlined, and beneath it, in a child's scrawl in big letters, Titanic sank 1912.

"Today is an important day," he said and tapped the page of the diary with the yellow nail of a skinny finger. The Titanic was on his mind. "Terrible thing! But is this the right day?"

"We can check," I said. But of course he was an expert on the sinking: fifteen years before, he'd written a novel, The Ghost from the Grand Banks, about two expeditions competing to raise the wreck.

"Look at this," he said and pushed a small silver tray across his desk. It was filled with little glass vials. He picked one up. "Look." The vial was labeled Moon Dust. "Can you see it?"

It was pale grit, like the residue of stale celery salt in a spice jar. He chose another one.

"Look." This one was labeled Rusticle — Titanic. A small dark scab of fungoid iron that had been scraped from the hull and presented to Sir Arthur.

"What is this?" he asked me, lifting another vial, containing a whitish blob.

"Looks like a piece of popcorn."

"It's a Styrofoam cup from the dive! Crushed by the pressure. Look how small it is."

He smiled at the silver tray and sorted the other vials and defied me to identify their contents. They were filled with rare gravel and floating organisms and crumbled souvenirs from expeditions.

"What are you writing, Sir Arthur?"

"Nothing. A few notes. I've destroyed enough trees."

"What about memoirs?"

"Done plenty of those," he said. "All my friends are gone. Look" — and he gestured to the wall of photographs.

This gave me a chance to rise and look at pictures and examine the signatures and inscriptions: a warm salutation from Liz Taylor, a scrawl from the pope, scribbles from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, from smooth-faced smilers who might have been actors, from Stanley Kubrick and others, including Darth Vader.

"Wernher von Braun," I said.

But he had gone back to tapping his diary. "You see, the Titanic represented triumph and disaster."

"Hubris, I suppose."

"What's that?"

When I repeated it, he said in a quoting and declamatory voice, "'Not even God can sink this ship!' Heh-heh-heh"

Now I could see the whole message on the T-shirt he was wearing under a warmer shirt. It said, I invented the satellite and all I got was this lousy T-shirt. It was true that he had envisaged and described satellites circling the Earth long before they were made and blasted into orbit.

"You know Metropolis? Lovely film," he said suddenly — by now I was getting used to his style of conversation, a kind of alienspeak: little bursts of talk, inspirational impulses, staticky delivery, and explosive memories. "What is it? 1930s? The image of a man holding the hands of a clock. Think of it — what that image says."

"Oh, yes, I remember," I said. I'd never seen it, but that didn't matter. He wasn't really listening; he kept talking. And he was still toying with the silver tray, squinting at the vials.

"One of the greatest films ever. I want to see it again."

"Were you influenced by any films when you wrote the script for 2001?"

"Loved films. Kubrick! I wrote the film, yes. Kubrick was all right."

"Wasn't he difficult?"

"I don't recall any blood on the carpet," he said. "We had disagreements, but they were amicable. Did he die? I can't remember."

"He died a few years ago."

"Is Conrad Hilton alive?" Now he was tapping the vial of moon dust.

"I believe Conrad Hilton is dead."

"Do you play table tennis? Table tennis is the one sport that I excel in. My greatest hobby, my only sport."

"I'll play you anytime, but I'm sure I'd lose."

"Look," he said. He had put the moon dust down and snatched up an old photograph. A woman with light hair and a pale dress, on a sunny day in a garden that was probably English, was surrounded by three androgynous children. "That's my mother. Which one is me?"

I chose the wrong one. He was the more girlish and subdued child in the frilly outfit.

"That was taken in Taunton or Minehead. I was about six." He smiled at this scene from the 1920s — the sunshine, the flowers, his beautiful mother.

I said, "Is there a film of Day After Tomorrow?"

"I think so. I think I walked out."

"Childhood's End is one of my favorites."

"'I Remember Babylon' is mine," he said. "Wonderful story. It won a prize in Best Ever. Where is it?" He fossicked in a stack of books and found a copy of his Collected Stories. "In here somewhere. 'Dog Star' is another one I like."

"Childhood's End could be a good film," I said.

"Should be a film, but it's too downbeat from the human point of view." He was trying to find "I Remember Babylon" in the thick book of stories. In front of him, in all the clutter, was a typed poem, Shelley's "Ozymandias."

"I love this poem," I said.

He put the Collected Stories down and picked up the poem. "I wanted to reread it." He looked closely and read, "'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' Heh-heh."

"Maybe the earth will end up like the scene in 'Ozymandias.'"

"If you wait long enough, oh, yes," he said. Then he looked directly at me and said, "Did I mention how I saved the life of the man who made the atom bomb? I'm trying to remember the details. And then there's this other matter." He pulled the diary out of the clutter. "When did the Titanic sink? Was it today? I think I wrote something about it."

We found a reference book and the facts: the Titanic hit the iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912, and sank early on the morning of the fifteenth.

As I was noting this, Sir Arthur said, "The plane came low down the runway" — he was describing how he had saved the life of the man who invented the A-bomb. After this scattered recollection, which I found hard to visualize, he said, "It should be in my biography. It's somewhere in my writings. It's very spooky. And the other film I'd like to see again is The Lost World, about 1930. First film I ever saw."

The hero of that Conan Doyle story and some others ("The Day the Earth Screamed") is Professor Challenger — bold scientist, man of action and adventure. It was easy to imagine an aged and infirm Professor Challenger as someone like Sir Arthur, surrounded by books and trophies, faltering and fugitive in his memories.

"Conan Doyle, well, he went nutty," Sir Arthur said. "It was spiritualism."

"Wasn't it the death of his wife that unhinged him?"

Sir Arthur was frowning. He said, "I'm trying to remember the name of the astronomer who said, 'Flying is impossible. I've proved it beyond all argument.' And the Wright brothers had already taken off! Heh-heh."

"What's the next big thing in science?"

He didn't hesitate. He said, "Matter transfer."

"'Travel by Wire' is one of your stories. That's matter transfer."

"Did I write that? I can't recall." He thumped the desk and became stern. "What I need is to draw up a chronology! The main events. The books. The places. People. Friends. The scripts. See," and now he leaned over and faced me, "scriptwriting is not very inspirational. It's a hard slog." He began trawling at the side of his desk. In a stack of books he found the one he was looking for. "Here it is. The Ghost from the Grand Banks. Titanic—all of it."

He turned the book over in his trembling hands.

"If she could be raised, what a tourist attraction!" he said.

I smiled at his sudden excitement. He was a scientist, but he was also a showman, and spectacle, the glamorous, the stupendous, the Professor Challenger exploits, were essential aspects of his literary imagination, and perhaps of his science too, wowing the reader, dreaming of the undreamed of, in the literature of astonishment.

Still holding his book, he said sadly, "I'm spooked by the man in the lifeboat handing over his child. 'Goodbye, my little son.'" He paused. He was tearful. He said, "Died of exposure! Sister ship came along. Too late! Disaster!" After swallowing a little, he said tentatively, "You wrote some books."

"Yes. In one of them, The Mosquito Coast, there's an unattributed quote from you about technology and magic."

"Clarke's Third Law!" he said and rubbed his hands. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

"What is Clarke's First Law?" I asked.

"First Law," he said, hardly hesitating. "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to go beyond the impossible."

"Second Law?"

"There is no Second Law, only first and third. Heh-heh" He became playful and animated. He began to recite a poem he said he'd written long ago. Perhaps his numbered laws put him in mind of it.

The two-legged lama's a priest,

The four-legged llama's a beast.

Alas, for cosmic melodrama

There isn't any three-legged lama.

"I didn't realize you were a poet."

"I write poetry occasionally," he said, and then an expression strained his features. I had seen this off and on during my visit, his trying to remember something. He said with difficulty, "Did I ever tell you the story of how I shared bed and breakfast with the czar of Russia?"

He was addressing me as though speaking to an old and valued friend. I said, "No. I'd love to hear it."

"Oh, yes." He smiled. "We were only a few weeks old! You see—" He gripped his head with his fingers like a soothsayer trying to force a vision, and then in a convulsive way said, "They were in exile in England in 1918. We had an English nanny, a Miss Hinckley, and she" — he paused and pressed his head again—"she'd been to Russia." His voice trailed off and he seemed out of breath. "Royal family, yes." He had lost the thread of the story and was murmuring Miss Hinckley's name. At last he said, "What stories she could tell."

He went silent, drifting into a private reverie. I sat wondering if I should excuse myself and leave, but Sir Arthur seemed content. I covertly made notes, a sort of inventory of the framed pictures and what trophies I could read. There was a shelf of model planes — jet planes, and toy rockets.

"You asked if I wrote poems," he said and brightened. "I wrote a poem when I was young. It ended, 'I rose and fled, afraid to be alone.'"

He became sad, seeming to remember. I said, "What were the circumstances?"

"I was being evacuated to America. Sent away." He was staring into space. With feeling, he quoted again, "I rose and fled, afraid to be alone."

His secretary knocked and opened the study door. "It's time," she said. To me, she said, "Sir Arthur's tired. He needs his lunch and his nap."

But Sir Arthur was still in his posture of recitation, his back straight, his head upright. I thought he was going to say some more lines of his poem. He said, "I dedicated it to the boy I was in love with."

His secretary winced. She had started wheeling him out, but Sir Arthur was smiling wistfully, and I felt I'd had a glimpse of his passion and sadness.*

* Sir Arthur died on March 22, 2008, as I was correcting these pages. He was buried in Colombo, his tombstone bearing an epitaph he wrote himself: "Here lies Arthur C. Clarke. He never grew up and never stop growing."

***

THE NEXT MORNING I WENT to Fort Station in Colombo. The station had not changed, except that it was very crowded because of Avurudu, the Sinhalese New Year, the occasion of the full moon. Paul Bowles, who spent time on this coast, once wrote, "New Years here is not a day but a season." True — even a week later there were rituals and high jinks and reduced service on buses and trains, most people regarding the holiday as a reason to stay home, eating the specified meals and obeying the astrological directives.

This also happened to be an auspicious day to travel (once the head was "anointed by the juice of the nuga leaves at 7:39 A.M. while standing on karanda leaves"), and the ticket line was so long I simply pushed myself onto the train and got a seat. No one asked for my ticket. The train had not changed in all that time. It pulled out and rolled through the Colombo outskirts and down the coast to where the tsunami had hit.

I remembered this as one of the most beautiful journeys I'd taken on the Railway Bazaar — one of the loveliest railway lines in the world, at sea level, right next to the beach, traveling along the glittering shore, the blue sea and the palm groves, all the windows open, the ocean breeze blowing through the coach. It could have been the same sunny day I spent on this train in October 1973: the same people, monks, nuns, families, children, old women in shawls, men in neckties, men in sarongs. "The recommended color of dress is blue," the Avurudu astrologers had announced.

On a morning like this, on December 26, 2004, on this coast, the tide had ebbed dramatically. The tide went out to the horizon, Sri Lankans told me. All we saw was mud and sand and distant rocks — no water at all.

The weird sight of the water sucked off the ocean floor, the exposed sand gleaming in the bright sun, had attracted the villagers who lived by the shore. They had, many of them, run onto the sand and into this new land. Big fishing boats sat helpless in the middle of the strange waterless place.

And then the tidal wave appeared as a high wall of foam rushing towards them, and soon it was on them, on everyone, crashing onto the land, crushing houses, sweeping huts away, drowning cattle and people, hitting a train just like this one and knocking it sideways off the rails, drowning 1,500 of the passengers, almost everyone in the coaches.

The tracks had been hammered apart, even brick and cement houses tumbled and destroyed, foot-thick walls smashed to pieces. Yet, a kind of miracle, most trees — the palms, the bunches of pandanus with great stalking roots, the sweeps of mangroves — were left undisturbed by the same wave that swept away fortress-like walls and paved roads. Because of these tenacious trees the coast retained a look of serenity, not the knocked-flat aftermath I associated with a hurricane.

Many houses had been rebuilt — bright bricks, fresh cement, newly woven thatch, and bamboo. There were new bridges and paved roads, and all along the rail line evidence of a massive rebuilding effort. The line itself had been repaired two months after the tsunami, but now, sixteen months later, I could see that many people still lived in emergency shelters, and here and there were signs with arrows saying Tsunami Camp. Hundreds of thousands of people had lost their homes.

The most poignant sight, very common, were the many grave markers along the shoreline, as though the people had drowned on that very spot — and perhaps they had — the gravestones in the shape of Buddhist stupas, big and small, clusters of them on the beach, under the palms, dozens in some places. I began to associate the big stupas with adults, the smaller ones with children, and even infant-sized stupas, as though these poor people had been turned to stone by the horror of the sudden slap of the wave, and remained there, petrified on the beach.

My coach was crowded, people sitting and standing, swaying as the train rounded the curvy shore, but freshened by the sea breeze.

"So glad to see you," said the man next to me. "Tourists are afraid to come here because of the troubles — the Tamil business, the tsunami, and what and what."

"I was here a long time ago," I said.

"It was different then," he said.

"I think it was the same."

"I mean, it was better."

"Maybe."

We were all headed to Galle this beautiful day, but all along the line was the evidence of tsunami damage. Where villages and houses had been rebuilt, roads repaved, bridges fixed, there were gravestones and stupas and plaques, with freshly chiseled inscriptions, commemorating the many thousands who had died.

After the clusters of palm trees and mangroves, Galle appeared suddenly, a town on a big blue bay, an old Dutch fort, and just outside the station, the market square. There were more people now, but the rest was as I'd remembered it: the bazaar, the ramparts, the scooter rickshaws, the hawkers' stalls selling cloth and kitchenware. In 1973 I bought an old dagger from one of these market traders, a nine-inch blade and an Asiatic lion's head carved on the bone handle. I carried it in my bag for the next two months, through Southeast Asia and Japan and onward through the Soviet Union. No one questioned it. I still have it. Over the years it became rusty and dull, but while working on this book I bought a whetstone and sharpened it, cleaned it, restored it, until it has become once again a glittering thing, good as new, a souvenir of another time.

"This was all underwater," one of the market women told me. I could see some damaged houses, but the seventeenth-century fort was untouched. Children were playing on the walls of the fort.

I had been told the name of an inexpensive guesthouse in Galle. A man on a scooter rickshaw took me to the top of a winding road on the tallest hill in town.

That evening I sat on the rooftop veranda of the small, quiet Lady Hill Hotel, writing about my visit with Sir Arthur, my melancholy at seeing him so frail, so vague, his mind drifting. The town's lights twinkled through the trees, the sky was full of stars; from this vantage I could see the lamps of the fishing boats in the harbor. The air was fragrant with night-blooming flowers.

I considered this one of the best evenings of my trip: the muted buzz of the small seaside town at night, the soft air, the perfume of the blossoms. No event, no drama, just contentment, as though I had set off from London and traveled for months to be here, at this moment, sitting under the full moon of the Sinhalese lunar New Year.

***

ALL THE TALK THE NEXT morning was of five more casualties of Tamil Tiger ambushes, and another land mine, and an assault on a Sri Lankan army position. For the previous three years, there had been a cease-fire, negotiated by the Norwegian government, but this agreement was clearly falling apart, as Tigers claimed more lives. The deaths were shocking, violent, and unnecessary. It was obvious that the Tamils would eventually possess part of the north of Sri Lanka. Already they had a de facto state, with their own Tamil schools and hospitals. And their army was notoriously full of child soldiers, kids between the ages of thirteen and seventeen (UNICEF put the figure at almost sixteen thousand), who had been forcibly recruited or abducted from Tamil villages. After the tsunami hit, many children, orphans of the storm, were given guns and press-ganged into the Tamil Tigers.

There had been a famine in Sri Lanka when I'd last been in Galle. The harvest had been disappointing, and food was scarce. I wrote then: "They had driven out the Tamils, who had done all the planting." I had also written: "But Galle was a beautiful place, garlanded with red hibiscus and smelling of the palm-scented ocean, possessing cool Dutch interiors and ringed by forests of bamboo. The sunset's luminous curtains patterned the sky in rufous gold for an hour and a half every evening, and all night the waves crashed on the ramparts of the fort." That part was still true.

Walking around Galle in the morning sunshine, I remembered that, when I was last here, I had wanted to go to Hambantota. I hadn't done it, but I could do it now.

Most of the fighting was in northern and north-central Sri Lanka and along the upper part of the east coast. I was on the southwestern coast; Hambantota was in a safe place, at the southern tip of the island. It was the last post of Leonard Woolf, who was a British colonial agent in the town and who was the subject of an unusual in-the-footsteps-of book, Woolf in Ceylon (2005), by Christopher Ondaatje. On my first trip I had read Woolf's somber masterpiece, The Village in the Jungle, and assuming it had been set somewhere down there, I had wanted to see that part of the island. Ondaatje, also an admirer of Woolf's, had the same idea. But he had better credentials. The older brother of the novelist Michael Ondaatje, he'd been born in Ceylon of a burgher family. His ancestors were among the earliest settlers of the island, many of them eminent. His father was a tea planter, and like many men isolated on tea estates, peculiar and bibulous. In his footsteps book, Ondaatje revisited the scenes of his own early life as well as the key places in Woolf's colonial career. Along the way he answered all the questions that had arisen in my mind about Woolf's knowledge of Sinhalese life, his seven years as an officer, and the background of his writing. The book is a leisurely ramble around Sri Lanka, literary, archeological, political, and autobiographical. He spared me from having to find the settings of Woolf's underrated novel and of many of the short stories.

Heading to Hambantota, I took the train from Galle to Matara, another line along the coast, so close to the shoreline that the spray flung by the heavy rollers from Africa reached the broken windows of the battered carriages. The tsunami aftermath, large-scale destruction and small-scale rebuilding, was visible all the way. The footprints of houses, the cement slab or a row of boulders, were all that remained of many buildings on the shore — nothing else left except the coconut palms that had fed the vanished family.

We came to Weligama, a cove with — just offshore — a small green island piled with sculpted rocks and feathery trees and an alluring villa with a white plaster veranda. I first heard the name Weligama from Paul Bowles, who told me that in the 1950s he had sailed from Tangier to Colombo, to live on that offshore island, named Taprobane.

"Taprobane was the ancient Greek and Roman name for Ceylon, but this modern Taprobane is an island once owned by Count de Mauny, a somewhat louche Frenchman who claimed that he had inherited his title from his grandmother, though many thought it bogus." This is from Ondaatje, who described the fraudulent count as a scandal-plagued pederast who'd found a happy refuge here in the 1920s.

But who wouldn't want to stay? The bay at Weligama is as lovely as any in the South Pacific and has the same limpid beauty, the blue sea and a white sand beach enclosed by groves of palms, clusters of bamboo huts, and a sense that the world is elsewhere. "The opportunities for happy living are greater in Ceylon than anywhere else I've been so far," Bowles wrote in a letter to Gore Vidal in 1950. And a month later he pronounced it "the best country to settle in, from all points of view." He praised the courtesy of the people, their cleanliness, their hospitality, and their skill as servants. He loved "the ever present triumphant vegetation of the coast." And he was bewitched by the notion of living on an island.

Bowles had glimpsed Taprobane first from this same train in 1949 and managed to buy it a few years later. He wrote his Tangier novel, The Spider's House, there, but not much else. And after an unhappy stay on the island in 1954, accompanied by his wife, Jane, and his Moroccan lover, he decided to sell it. Jane had hated it: large bats hung on the trees and flapped around, beating their wings, which were a yard wide. And Bowles needed the money.

About fifteen miles farther down the coast was the town of Matara, an old railway station and the end of the line. I got out and walked to the bus terminal for the bus to Hambantota.

"This is the bus. Leaving sometime soon," a man explained to me.

He was also going to Hambantota.

He said, "This is the worst time of the year to be traveling. Everyone's going home for the Avurudu festival."

It did seem that the train had been full, and this bus was filling up. I bought a bus ticket from the conductor — the fare was about 25 cents for the fifty-mile trip.

"You speak English," I said. "Not many people do."

"They don't teach English in schools anymore. But I studied it — older people speak it."

That had happened after I'd been here; the Tamil insurgency had also happened; and as I'd seen in Colombo, both had, in their way, stunted Sri Lanka, kept tourists and investors away, while giving the island the look and feel of bygone Ceylon. But the small population and the old-fangledness were a relief: because business was terrible, the country was spared foreign exploitation and kept its soul.

The bus driver tooted his horn. Everyone got on and the bus circled the Matara clock tower and headed south along the coast. The man I'd spoken to at the station had taken a seat beside me. His name was Takil; he asked me where I was from, and when I told him he said, "I've been to Miami."

"What doing?"

"I was working for a Saudi sheik," and he told me the sheik's name. The sheik was one of the thousand or so princes but was particularly well connected: his brother was a minister in the Saudi government.

This sheik had a $25 million mansion in Golden Beach, another estate in Los Angeles, and houses elsewhere. I had never heard of Golden Beach, but Takil assured me that it was a wealthy community at the northern edge of Miami and that only billionaires lived there. Bill Gates, for one.

"He lives in Seattle, surely?"

"He kept a house in Golden Beach, near my sheik."

I had to travel to Dikwella (which we were passing through) on an old Sri Lankan bus to find out these things about my country.

"He needed a big house," Takil said. "He had three wives and lots of children. He was only twenty-eight, though."

"What did you do for him?"

"I waited on him. I served him his food."

"You're a Muslim?"

"No. Buddhist. And I don't speak Arabic. Funny, eh? He spoke to me in English. This was back in the 1980s. I was only twenty myself. He trusted me, and I was good at my job. He kept me on for four years."

"Was he a playboy?"

"Not really. He had married an actress but divorced her. He was looking for another wife."

"In Florida?"

"Anywhere. He traveled a lot. He had lots of relatives living in America. He chartered a British Airways jet for his trips."

"Oil money?"

"Yes. Lots of it — lots. But no interests. He took his children to Disney World, he took them to Los Angeles, and sightseeing. He didn't work. He did nothing."

"Prayed, I suppose."

"No. He wasn't particularly religious."

I said, "People wonder why Osama bin Laden hates the Saudi royal family and wants to punish the United States for being its ally. That sheik and people like him are the reason, and we're all paying a horrible price for it."

We had passed Tangalla — its prison figures in Woolf's Village in the Jungle. We were coming to a river. Takil said it was the Ambalantota, and that we'd be in Hambantota pretty soon.

The land had flattened and become scrubbier and more thinly populated. It seemed to me that the tsunami had swept through and scoured it of its houses, but Takil said that we were looking at salt flats. For hundreds of years salt had been produced here by evaporation in the great flat enclosures and lagoons, called lewayas. Ondaatje explained that a century ago Leonard Woolf "revolutionized salt collection" here by introducing a payment scheme that was fair and regulated, and that was closely supervised by him.

We went down a road of overhanging trees, lined by small villages, and were soon in the town square of Hambantota. Takil headed home to celebrate Avuruda, and I looked for a place to stay. I found nothing, but it was still only the middle of the afternoon, so I looked at the boats in the harbor and strolled through the town, then got a scooter rickshaw to take me to Woolf's government bungalow that Ondaatje had found. Throughout his book, Ondaatje repeats that the country had changed very little in the nearly one hundred years that had passed since Woolf was a colonial officer, and he quotes a Sri Lankan who, in a 2002 newspaper article, discussing the grim events and the hardships of peasant life recounted in The Village in the Jungle, said, "It was an era when the jungle ruled the lives of the humble peasant as it does even now in remote villages scattered across the country."

What is unusual about the novel, what gives it a weird nobility, is that, written by a young Englishman and published in 1913, its main characters are Sinhalese peasants. Its plot hinges on village marriage customs, traditional rivalries, and peculiarly Sinhalese vindictiveness, passions, and satisfactions. Rape, multiple murder, and exploitation are central to the book, which stands out in my mind as having perhaps the most violent plot and depressing ending of any novel I've ever read. Just when you think that the last surviving character represents hope and possibility, she looks out of her hut one night and sees the glinting eyes of a pig — or demon — about to devour her.

For his pains, Leonard Woolf got very little for the novel. His friend Lytton Strachey said, "I was disappointed to see that it was about nothing but blacks — whom really I don't much care for." And although it was dedicated to her, Woolf's wife Virginia was indifferent to its merits.

As a despised and overworked expatriate employed by the Singapore government as a university lecturer in the 1960s, I found Woolf's five-volume autobiography in the college's library and read it all. The second volume, Growing, about his years as a despised and overworked colonial officer, gave me heart and helped me to become patient and sympa thetic. In that book he describes the necessity of being efficient — replying to letters on the day they are received, keeping accurate notes, learning to be methodical, developing an interest in the culture. Taking his advice, I followed his example and became productive and a little happier as an alien in Singapore.

"Where staying?" the scooter rickshaw driver asked me.

I had no idea. It was now late afternoon, and the light would soon be gone.

"Any hotels here?"

"Hotel there," he said and pointed up the road, east along the coast, the way I'd come.

That was how I found the small one-story hotel, salt-crusted, flecked with mildew, and sitting behind a sand dune, the pounding surf and a wild beach on the other side. A German tour group, just arrived, had already marked their territory, hogging the lounge chairs by draping towels on them — though all the chairs were unoccupied except for the towels. These Germans were perhaps the first tourists I'd seen on my trip — the first large group, anyway — and were on an Ayurvedic retreat. They were apparently unfazed by the news of land mines or talk of strife.

I stayed here a few days, made another trip into Hambantota, and continued my story "The Elephant God," writing one day about the main character:

She had come to understand what the solitary long-distance traveler eventually knows after months on the road — that, in the course of time, a trip stops being an interlude of distractions and detours, pursuing sights, looking for pleasures, and becomes a series of disconnections, giving up comfort, abandoning or being abandoned by friends, passing the time in obscure places, inured to the concept of delay, since the trip itself was a succession of delays.

Solving problems, finding meals, buying new clothes and giving away old ones, getting laundry done, buying tickets, scavenging for cheap hotels, studying maps, being alone but not lonely. It was not about happiness but safety, finding serenity, making discoveries in all this locomotion and an equal serenity when she had a place to roost, like a bird of passage migrating slowly in a sequence of flights.

"Nice and quiet," the hotel manager said, passing me one day. "You can relax here."

But I had not come all this way to relax. I told him I would be leaving the next day.

"Avurudu," he said and smiled. "Impossible. No buses."

"I'll find a car"

"No cars. Nothing. Everyone home with family. Not auspicious to travel."

He showed me a prominent item in that day's newspaper. Favorable Avurudu times were listed, including this one: "The auspicious time to leave home for work falls at 6:35 A.M. on Thursday, April 20…Wear gold colored clothing and set off facing the North, after consuming a meal of moru and rice."

That was three days away. The whole country was shut down until then. Nothing was running, no buses, no trains.

"Where you are going, sir?" the manager asked as I checked out the next morning.

When I said Colombo, he laughed, meaning "impossible."

I walked to the road and hitchhiked. An overcrowded van took me almost to Matara. I had to crouch in an uncomfortable position, with passengers' elbows in my kidneys. Finally, after more than four hours, I could stand it no longer. I got out, hitchhiking again, and after half an hour a man in a small car picked me up. Near Galle, at a bend in the road, I saw a large painted banner: Warm Welcome for US-Sri Lanka Friendship, and a great crowd of excited people awaiting their American visitors, on whom they would lavish Avurudu hospitality, garlands of flowers and baskets of fruit.

I saw no sign of the Americans nearby, but farther down the road I heard the unmistakable yak-yak-yak of a helicopter settling to earth, somewhere out of sight in the jungle. Later I found out that the helicopter contained three U.S. senators and their wives, who had come to visit a tsunami refugee camp. A junket: politicians picking up a family vacation, being personally thanked and rewarded for their country's generosity. There was no better example of official travel and unofficial travel: the swoop and buzz of the senatorial chopper overhead as I stood on the narrow road, bumming a ride.