The Pillars of Hercules

“No conditions. I will not accept a passport with conditions,” Munif said, and that was the end of the discussion.

I liked him from the first. He was laconic, kindly, generous, hospitable. If there was anything I wished to see or do, he was at my disposal. Was there anything I wanted to buy? I had no desire to buy anything, I said. Did I wish him to drive me to Beirut? I said I had been told it might be dangerous. But what suggestions did he have?

“Ma’aloula,” he said. “Saydnaya. These are lovely and very historic places you should see before you leave Syria.”

One of the curious features of Ma’aloula was that Aramaic was still spoken there by three-quarters of the population, who are Christians. Jesus spoke Aramaic. When he said, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” it was in Aramaic. When he said, “God is love,” it was in Aramaic. In the Bible, Jesus’ cry on the cross, “Eloi Eloi, lama sabacthani,” is Aramaic.

It was hard to find a person in Ma’aloula who spoke English, but Father Faez Freijate spoke it well. He was a plump cheery soul with tiny eyes and a white tufty beard and side-whiskers, like a comical old Chaucerian friar. He wore a brown robe and carried a staff. His face was pink-cheeked and English-looking, but he roared with laughter when I mentioned that to him. “I am Arab and my family is Arab for three thousand years!” He was from Hauran, in south Syria, and was the pastor of the Ma’aloula church of St. Sergius and St. Bacchus, soldiers in the Roman army who had been martyred in A.D. 300. The church was built in 320.

“Do you speak Aramaic?” I asked.

“Yes, listen. Abounah—” He clasped his hands and began muttering very fast. At the end he blessed himself with the sign of the cross and said, “That was the Lord’s Prayer.”

“How do you say, ‘God is love,’ in Aramaic?”

“I do not know.”

I wanted very much to hear Christ’s words as they were originally spoken. I said, “How about, ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone at her.’ ”

“I do not know.”

“‘I am the light of the world.’ ”

“I just know a few prayers. Ask someone in town,” Father Freijate said with an air of exasperation. Then he said, “Have you seen the altar?”

Small and horseshoe-shaped, it looked like a shallow sink from which the drain has been omitted. It was the proudest ornament of the church, though it looked to me unprepossessing, until the priest explained it.

It was made of marble that had been quarried in Antioch. Its design had been adapted from the pagan altars of the animistic desert faiths—worshipers of bulls and cats and snakes. Such altars had been used for animal sacrifices, which was why their sides were necessary; and the pagan altars had a hole in the center for draining away the animal’s blood. This altar was made before the year 325, Father Freijate said, because that was the year that the Council of Nicea said that all altars had to be flat. It was unique. There was not another one to be seen anywhere else in Christendom.

“Why are there so many caves in Ma’aloula, Father?” All over the mountainside and in the passages and corners of the cliffs there were carved holes and shelves and caverns.

“The peoples were troglodeeties!”

“They lived in them?”

“Yes! And they had necropoleese and antik toombis!” He laughed at my ignorance and hurried away to help another visitor.

We went to Saydnaya. Saydnaya had two sides. One was a political prison, the other a church and convent. The prison, another bunker, was built on a hill but was mostly underground and surrounded by three perimeter fences of barbed wire. It had watchtowers but it hardly needed them, for the prison was absolutely escape-proof, but more than that, its dampness and its windowless cells shortened the prisoners’ lives by causing pneumonia and arthritis. There were said to be thousands of political prisoners at Saydnaya. A Syrian political prisoner was simply an enemy of Assad—sorry, Friend Assad.

The cathedral of Saydnaya was some distance from the prison, at the top of the hillside village. It was a happier place. It contained a convent and an orphanage—smiling nuns doing laundry, yelling children scampering in the back precincts. The nuns dressed like Muslim women in black draped gowns and black headdresses.

The history of the church was given in a set of old paintings, which could be read like a strip cartoon. A malik—king—out hunting, saw a gazelle. He drew his bow, but before he could shoot it, the creature turned into the Virgin. The king prayed. Afterwards, the king won a great battle. He returned to the spot where he had seen the Virgin and built this church.

I was about to enter a chapel when a friendly but firm little man insisted I take my shoes off. Surely that was done in mosques and temples but not in Christian churches? No, he said, I should read Exodus 3:5, the injunction “Put off thy shoes.”

This was Mr. Nicholas Fakouri, from Beirut, who had come with his wife, Rose, to bring a sacrifice.

“What sort of sacrifice?”

“A sheep.”

Munif’s daughter Azza translated my specific questions. The Fakouris had come by road from Beirut and had stopped in the bazaar in Damascus and bought a hundred-pound sheep for the equivalent of about ninety dollars. They had taken it here and presented it to the nuns at the church.

“They will kill it and eat it at Easter.”

“That is a present, not a sacrifice.”

“It is a sacrifice,” he insisted, using the Arabic word.

Rose Fakouri said, “I was very sick. I prayed to the Virgin. When I got better, I came here with my husband to give thanks.”

Driving out of Saydnaya, we passed the prison again, and I imagined all the men in those dungeons who had been locked up for their beliefs. Munif said that they allowed some of them out, but only after they had been physically wrecked by their imprisonment. He said, “They are sick, they are finished, they are ready to die.”

“Writing is difficult in a police state.”

He laughed and shouted, “Living is difficult!”

We returned to Damascus. He asked me to wait while he removed something from the trunk of his car. It was a large flat parcel, one of the limited-edition prints that I had admired in his apartment the first day we had met.

Standing at the juice stall, drinking my last glass of Damascus carrot juice, I realized that I liked this dusty, lively, rotting, uncertain, lovely-ugly place, and that I was sorry to leave, especially sorry that I was not heading the sixty miles to Beirut, but instead through the desert, the back way, through Jordan to Israel again. That was my fallback position—a ship that was leaving Haifa in a few days. Like a surrealistic farewell, a bus went by while I sipped the carrot juice, and on its side was lettered HAPPY JERNY!

16

The Ferry Sea Harmony to Greece

Down Moussallam Baroudy Road, past the blue To Beirut arrow and the lovely semi-derelict Hejaz Railway Station to Choukri Kouwatli Avenue and following the arrow To Jordan. Instead of the short trip to Lebanon I had to take a much longer one, around its back, south into Jordan and hang a right into Israel, and keep on going to the coast and the waiting Sea Harmony that was sailing in a few days. It sounds like an epic, but in fact if I had made an early start, I could have had breakfast in Damascus (Syria), lunch in Amman (Jordan), tea in Jerusalem (Palestine; disputed) and dinner in Haifa (Israel).

These countries were so small! One of the more marvelous atrocities of our time was the way in which the self-created problems of these countries, and their arrogant way of dealing with them, made them seem larger, like an angry child standing on its tiptoes. They were expensive to operate, too: they had vast armies; they indulged in loud and ridiculously long-winded denunciations of their neighbors. All this contributed to the illusion that they were massive. But, no, they were tiny, irritating, shameless and vindictive; and they occupied the world’s attention way out of proportion to their size or their importance. They had been magnified by lobbyists and busybody groups. Inflation was the theme here, and it was just another tactic for these quarrelsome people to avoid making peace.

Lovely roads, though. That was how I managed to cover so much ground. I was thinking: Why isn’t Route 6 as good as this—why can’t I get to Provincetown this fast? And then I reflected: We paid for those roads and bridges from Jordan to Jerusalem and on to Tel Aviv, and they are a hell of a lot better than ours!

After the last shrine to Basil, a triumphal arch at Der’a (where T. E. Lawrence was captured, fondled by a Turkish commander and then abused and whipped—one of the great chapters of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, ending “in Deraa that night the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost”), and Syrian customs, I was held up by a car of Arab smugglers. Cartons of Marlboros, about fifty of them, had been crammed into the car’s chassis, and they were being removed and stacked at Jordanian customs, under the eyes of the suspects. Then, the green hills of Jordan, the queer Taco Bell architecture of the repulsively spick-and-span city of Amman and—since Jordan does not have a Mediterranean coast—a ten-dollar taxi ride from there to the Jordanian-Israeli frontier at the Allenby Bridge (thirty feet from end to end, another bit of Middle Eastern magnification) into the West Bank, real desert under brooding mountains and Israeli fortresses and gun emplacements; a bus to the Israeli checkpoint, and another ten-dollar taxi to the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem.

All the way from Syria through Jordan and well into Israel, the truth of this expensive farce was evident in the sight of the tent camps of Palestinians—shepherds with their animals, displaced, hardly tolerated, snotty-nosed children and their ragged elders, despised by Jordanians and Israelis alike, who roar past them in Jeeps and buses, sending up clouds of dust, making a vivid frontispiece for the diabolical next edition of the Bad News Bible.

I stayed in Arab East Jerusalem and made a circuit of the old city again. It was another average day in Zion. Israeli police were in the process of arresting three Arabs near the entrance to the Damascus Gate, and a Jewish protester was being dragged away for holding a “pray-in” at the Temple Mount. At the sacred sites people assumed all the odd postures of piety, on their knees, in their stocking feet, bowing, sobbing, and—at the Western Wall—hundreds, carefully segregated by sex, men here, women there, separated by a steel crowd-barrier, gabbled over their paraphernalia of scrolls and books, men wearing shawls on their heads like the Haurani crones of south Syria, and others had paper yarmulkes, like squashed Chinese take-away cartons, on their heads.

On a blocked back lane an hysterical Lubavitcher in a black hat and black frock coat and billowing black pants hoisted his orange mountain bike in order to squeeze past a van and, struggling through the narrow gap, knocked over an Arab’s stack of cabbages. The men began a futile argument in different languages.

On the Via Dolorosa, near the Flagellation Chapel, I heard a man say to a woman, “So now we do everything you say and you make all the decisions!”

And around the Fifth Station, where the Via Dolorosa ascends steeply to Golgotha, a woman was saying to a man, “Are you sure it’s this way? You’re not sure, are you? You’re just too embarrassed to ask someone directions.”

And farther down the Via Dolorosa, a child screaming, “But you said I could have one!”

Near the Lion Gate there was some Intifada graffiti, which a young mujahideen helpfully translated: Long Live Fatah (Arafat’s Palestinian organization), This Land of Flowing Blood, and In Memory of the Hero and Martyr Amjad Shaheen! (shot by Israeli soldiers).

Politicians tended to simplify the sides into Jews and Arabs, but such designations were totally misleading. A Jew might be a Moroccan, fluent in Arabic and Hebrew and French, raised in Marrakech and educated in Tel Aviv; or a Russian from Odessa now living in a settler village in Gaza, or a monoglot girl in pigtails from south Florida. An Arab might be as complex and interesting as the man I met over coffee in east Jerusalem—a Christian named Michel, born in Jaffa in 1933, his father Palestinian, his mother Italian. “Many Italians used to come and stay here, because it was a holy land for them, too.” He said that since 1948 there had been nothing but trouble. The influx of militant Jews had made it impossible for him to go on living in Jaffa, so he had had to come here to Jerusalem, where there was safety in numbers. He had been married in the Church of St. Anne in the Old City and believed (as I did) that Jerusalem should be an open city, internationalized, and not an Israeli stronghold. The Israelis had knocked down walls and put up offices and rearranged and rebuilt Jerusalem to suit their political ends.

His twenty-year-old son was in Iraq, studying engineering.

“Because I have no money,” he said. “And Saddam Hussein gives scholarships to Palestinians.”

There were some Palestinians at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and there was a Palestinian university at Beir Zeit in Nablus. But in general Israel took no responsibility for educating the underclass of Palestinians any more than they saw the Palestinians as having a right to their own portion of the country. Not much was being asked—at most about twenty percent of what was rightfully theirs. Without partition there will be no peace, but in the present atmosphere peace was a long way off.

It was an atmosphere of conflict, a joyless unrestful place in which from the simplest transactions like being ripped off for a taxi fare, to the highest levels of government, there was no finesse. It was all sour looks, the suspicion, the sharp elbows, the silences, the soldiers, and fundamentalists of all descriptions. Both sides were fearful, racialistic, intolerant and paranoid. Israelis ignored the fact that they snatched and settled land that was not theirs. Their usual reply to any complaints was: You hate Jews.

The worst turn of events was the recent rash of suicide bombers. Ironically, it was an Israeli, Baruch Goldstein, who initiated this new form of warfare, when he killed twenty-nine Muslims at prayer at a mosque in Hebron. He knew when he opened fire that he would never leave the mosque alive; he was beaten to death. Soon after him there were three Palestinian suicide bombers, in separate incidents, who managed to bring Israelis down with them, and this has become the principal tactic, and the most violent so far, in the war between the extreme Palestinian groups (Hamas and Hezbollah) and the Israelis. There are few defenses against the person who is willing to sacrifice his life to kill others.

There was always a violent reply. The Israelis, obsessively retributive, had an absolutely unforgiving rule of retaliation, and always with greater force. It assured a continuing hopelessness and an impasse.

A new development was that their dislike and fear of Palestinians had reached such a pitch that their answer now to Palestinian demands was the hiring of immigrant laborers and field hands from Thailand, the Philippines, and Poland—desperate so-called guest workers—to bring in the harvest. In the absence of Jews willing to perform the menial tasks that had been assigned to Palestinians, there were now seventy thousand such immigrants, a new element in the society, and a new underclass of non-Jews.

In a crowded almost silent bus, jammed with passengers, I rode to Haifa. Only one person spoke, an old Ethiopian Jew—a patriarch, traveling with his large family. He carried a fly whisk and called out loudly in Amharic when he saw anything unusual. It was very easy to translate his exclamations. We passed the airport. Look at the planes! he cried. We passed the railway line. Look at the train! We were stuck in traffic. Look at all the cars! and nearer Haifa, traveling along the coast, the old man was delighted. The sea! The sea!

The blue water lapped at the low shore of tumbled dunes.

Intending to be early, in order to catch the Sea Harmony, I went directly from the station to the pier. In the event, I very nearly missed it.

“Come with me,” an Israeli security officer said to me as he leafed through my passport.

I was then subjected to the most intense and prolonged interrogation and suitcase search it has been my experience to receive in thirty-four years of traveling. This time I was not rescued by a helpful bookworm who knew my name. Instead, I was made to wait. And then I was questioned. Why had I gone to Turkey? Whom did I know there? Whom did I visit there? Where had I stayed? These specifics were noted. The same questions were asked of my time in Syria and Jordan. Then I was taken to a side room. My suitcase was gone through a third time, by a new official. He pointed to a plastic chair.

“Sit down.”

“If you say please.”

“Sit down!”

“I find this very unpleasant,” I said after two hours in the chair, when the man returned with my passport.

Another man began trawling through my little bag. I stood up to stretch.

“Sit down!”

I was then summoned to receive my passport. I said, “What do you think?”

“I don’t sink nossing.”

“Know what I think?” I said. “I don’t like being treated like this.”

“No one likes,” he said sourly. He hated me for my impertinence. He hated his job. He hated the Palestinians. He hated his life in a country where everyone is a possible terrorist and where life in this state of siege is a turbulent and terrifying nuisance.

The disgust and pessimism is so palpable that after a dose of it, the Sea Harmony shipload of shouting boasting Greeks, swaggering on deck and plucking at their private parts and smoking and guzzling ouzo and snarling at each other, was peaceful by comparison.

The Mediterranean War Report: Fighting in Turkey—Turks against Kurds; fighting in Bosnia—Serbs against Bosnian Muslims; fighting in Algeria—most recent death toll, forty thousand in the past three years, ten thousand of them since I had started my trip. The Israelis were shelling south Lebanon and continuing a blockade of south Lebanese ports and fishing grounds; the terrorists of Hamas were continuing their suicide missions against Israelis in Hebron and Gaza—and Israelis were answering each attack with one of their own. And a standoff between Greeks and Turks in Cyprus.

The Sea Harmony was headed to Greek Cyprus, steaming out of Haifa and its hill of lights. I was sitting at the stern, with my feet jammed against the rail. A man approached and stood a bit too close to me.

“Excuse me,” the man inquired. “Are you Guy Lupowsky?”

He had a plump pink face and a potbelly, and he stood awkwardly, his short arms hanging. He wore a gray suit, but it was rumpled; and a shirt and tie, but they were soup-stained. He said “Lupowsky” in a slurping and delicious lisp, all spittle and slush.

I said no, I was not Guy Lupowsky.

“I am sorry. I see you and I fink you is him. Classical guitarist from Belgium. I am a musician. I play Jewish.” He said the words “musician” and “Jewish” as though he were masticating the wet pulpy segment of a juicy orange.

After every few words he swallowed. His English reflected the way he was dressed. It was well intentioned and almost formal in many respects, like his suit and tie, but also like his suit and tie it was mangled and at times comic.

He introduced himself as Sam—that is, Shmuel—Spillman. He said he divided his time equally between Belgium and Israel, going back and forth, nearly always on the Sea Harmony on this leg, and the rest by Italian ferries and trains. He did not have a home in either country, nor even an apartment. “I get a room, just a small one. A big one confuses me. I rent a room by the week in Tel Aviv, and another one in Brussels. I cannot own a place. That would confuse me.”

In a sense he was the ultimate voyager, shuttling across the Mediterranean from Brussels to Tel Aviv and back. He had no permanent home—he did not want one. He had few possessions, he said; they rattled him. What to do with them? He had his music and his mother. That was enough, said Spillman.

“I cannot stay with my mother, or there will be trouble. She is very rich but we quarrel. She makes problems. Is better that I get a room and visit her. I have some presents for her.” He thought a moment. And he slurped and lisped the spattering word, “Chocolates.”

“How do you decide when to stay and when to go?” I asked.

“It is the sunshine,” he said.

“You like sunny weather?”

“I need sunshine,” he said, and the word on his tongue was like a gum-drop. “For my depression.”

“I see.”

“I need to come here.”

But “here” was far astern to the east, for we had plunged seaward, and the lights of Haifa were just a little row of lighted dots that made a yellow horizontal line across the night. Israel was that perforation in the darkness.

“For my depression I need the sunshine, and I need the Jews,” Spillman said. “I am very Jewish.” He swallowed and went on, “I am very, very Jewish.”

“So you visit Israel when you get depressed in Brussels?” I said. “But when do you visit Brussels?”

“When I get depression in Israel,” he said. “When it feels dark to me. I take medication but the real medication is to leave. Every six months or less I feel it, and it gets bad, and I see my doctor. He prescribes medication and I come.”

“Isn’t it sunny most of the time in Israel?”

“Sometimes it is dark,” he said. “I am not speaking of the sunshine. I wanted to settle in Israel but I did not want to give up my Belgian residency. It was such a big decision and it was giving me depression. My psychiatrist said to me, ‘Don’t decide, go back and forth, as you wish. It is better.’ So I do that.”

“That’s a wise doctor,” I said.

“He is my friend.”

He hesitated.

“He knows I am a gay people,” Spillman said. He looked at me sadly. “But I have no more desires. I had a friend but now I have no friend. Are you going to eat?”

“Is it time?”

“From six-thirty to seven-thirty they serve dinner. Then it is closed. You can buy coffee or biscuits or sweets but not foods. In the morning at seven—”

After so many voyages, Spillman knew the whole routine of the ship. He knew some of the crew, and they knew him. He knew every feature of the ship, that they did not do laundry, that the coffee was good, that the food was expensive, that the deck chairs were always dirty, that the crew smoked too much. He knew the arrival and departure times. More than that, he knew the high points of each port of call—the fruit market in Limassol, specific hotels where you could get an inexpensive shower (Spillman had a seat, not a cabin, on the ship and had nowhere on board to have a bath), the best eating places en route, a particular cafe in Rhodes that sold roast chicken. Spillman said the word “chicken” with a gasping and slushy hunger.

All this I learned over dinner, spaghetti and cabbage salad, glopped onto plates by the five Burmese who served in the cafeteria. It was prison food.

The stewards, the waiters, the menials, nearly all the underlings on this Greek ship were either Burmese or Indian. They spoke no Greek. Orders were always given in English and carried out by their efficient, muttering flunkies. They swept, they painted, they mopped, they cooked and served. A Burmese made the moussaka, another Burmese shoveled it onto plates, an Indian handed it over, a Burmese rang the cash register. It was not their fault that the ship served prison food. And none of them had been on the ship long—a year at most. The Burmese were from Rangoon, the Indians from Bombay. They were desperate for employment. They were also loners on the ship, men without women.

Greece, like Israel and Italy, had high unemployment, around ten percent. It interested me that Burmese were making moussaka on this Greek ship, and Filipinos were picking oranges outside Tel Aviv, and West Africans were harvesting tomatoes near Salerno, in Italy. It was the Third World in the Mediterranean, proving that there were even poorer and needier countries than Tunisia and Egypt and Morocco. These people and others had come from halfway around the world to help these developed countries, members of the European Union, to scrub its floors and harvest its crops. The Burmese and Indians lent the ship a melancholy air and made the Greek crewmen seem like overlords, as they loudly issued orders in badly pronounced English. They made the class system explicit by giving it a color. The Mediterranean had always had an underclass of remote or provincial people, but they had never come from so far away.

“Maybe you’ll meet someone,” I said to Spillman over lunch the next day. Speaking of his marriage, he had begun to slip into another depression.

“Yes?”

He stopped eating. The thought of meeting someone seemed not to have occurred to him. He became reflective, a problem clouding his face, taking some of the pinkness from it.

“Perhaps.”

“What’s the problem with your mother?”

“My marriage, also. I made such a great scandal with my marriage. It was a big catastrophe, mamma mia. You know Jewish women? No sex before marriage! Don’t touch me!” He dabbed a balled-up hanky at the spaghetti sauce on his lips. “On our wedding night it was such a disaster.” He was silent for quite a long time. Months, perhaps years, were passing in his mind. Events, too. He was nodding, reviewing these events as great and small they passed before him. At last he winced and said, “We got a divorce.”

He followed me on deck afterwards. Having just left Israel for his health, he was in a particular mood, one of rejection, as he headed to his other home.

“Israel is no more a Jewish country,” Spillman said disgustedly. “It was special before, but now it is like all other countries. Just wanting money. Everyone talks about money.”

He was speaking into the darkness. Israel was somewhere in that darkness.

“I think there will be civil war,” he said. “Jews against Jews, the orthodox ones against the others, the settlers against the others. The Arabs will just watch us fighting.”

Spillman was in the cheap seats in the big smoky lounge at the center of C Deck, surrounded by his heap of bags—shopping bags mostly, in which he carried all his possessions. One of them was an instrument he called a “melodeon”—a fat flute with a keyboard which made a kazoolike sound. Goodhearted man that he was, he spent part of the day serenading the others in the cheap seats. Jewish songs, Gypsy songs, and old favorites such as “Blue Moon” and “O Solo Mio.”

There was a bald toothless Israeli with a dog on his lap in the cheap seats, and a German family with a small baby, and some backpackers, and some Greek Cypriots, and part of a group of pilgrims to the Holy Land, and a Dutch couple which had just been on a kibbutz. There were some Arabs, too. The Israeli with the dog said that he had been a soldier his whole life. “I have fought in three wars!” The German family had set up a field kitchen in some spare seats and were forever dishing up food for their baby and themselves. The Slovakian pilgrims traveled with a small bearded friar who said mass in one of the lounges every day. The prettiest pilgrim was a girl in her twenties who carried a wooden cross as tall as she was. Tacked to it was a holy card, the size of a baseball card, with a saint’s picture on it. She heaved the cross in a slightly defiant way, the winsome Slovak, smiling, carrying this enormous cross among the querulous passengers.

There were other passengers, too, in the cabins. Some of them had strange stories to tell, but I met them later. The Sea Harmony was an unusual ship for the way people were thrown together. The bad weather did not help either—it was cold and windy, the sea unsettled. It was not a cruise, but rather a way for these people to get from one side of the Mediterranean to the other, or to stop along the way.

I had paid a little extra to have my own cabin. That was my only luxury. The food was awful. The weather was grim. The Greek crew was truculent and unhelpful, and the Greek passengers even worse—two of them sat in the lounge shouting into cellular phones, making interminable calls. They smoked. They demanded that the Burmese play tapes of Greek music very loudly. Because the decks were cold and windswept, there was no refuge anywhere. But I had my cabin.

The wind was blowing the rain sideways on our approach to Limassol, and the weather continued cold and rainy, such a novelty, after the parched landscapes of Syria and Israel, all these muddy sidewalks and puddled streets and weeping trees. I had been eager to see the Republic of Cyprus, after having traversed Turkish Cyprus. It had been impossible for me to go directly from one to the other, and so this thousand-mile detour had been necessary. But had it been worth it? Yes, I thought so, because I had seen how Turkish Cyprus had been lifeless and deprived; and now I saw that it hardly mattered, for Limassol, with its tourists and its Royal Air Force base at nearby Akrotiri and its embittered Greeks, was unattractive and seedy. Turkish Cyprus was like a Third World island of soldiers and self-help; Greek Cyprus was a rather ugly and bungaloid coastline, the most distant outpost of the European Community, another welfare case.

The larger islands in the Mediterranean are miniature continents, the French historian Fernand Braudel said. He cited Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and Cyprus as good examples of this. I could see how this might be so. A single island might have many microclimates, and regions and dialects if not separate languages; and a mountain range that was like a continental divide, and a wild or sparsely settled interior. They were so complex they seemed vast, and each section of coast was different. But the partition of Cyprus made it smaller. It had broken into two mean fragments, a pair of true islands, each with its own culture and language. The large complex island of Cyprus had become two simpler and much less interesting places, in the twenty years since the Turks had asserted themselves in the north and the Greeks in the south.

I walked from the port to the town, buying my breakfast on the way, fruit here, juice there, and at last bought a copy of the day-before-yesterday’s Daily Telegraph and read it over a cup of coffee in a cafe across from Limassol’s front, while the wind whipped the waves onto the promenade.

Limassol was as unlike a town in Turkish Cyprus as it was possible to be, and yet if anything it seemed more hollow and dreary. It was, I suppose, the cheesy fun-fair atmosphere that tourism had forced upon it, and the weird jauntiness, the forced high spirits and fake geniality that can make a visitor lonely to the point of depression. Spillman had told me he was going fruit shopping at his favorite market and then straight back to the ship. There was nothing else to buy, only horrendous souvenirs, unpainted plaster statues, mostly nude women, but also animals, busts of anonymous Greeks; paperweights made of varnished stones, copper saltcellars, toy windmills, dishcloths depicting Cypriot costumes and maps, dolls in traditional dress, doilies, tablecloths, egg timers, letter openers, ashtrays labeled Limassol, and every souvenir plate imaginable. There were many images, in plaster, on dishes, modeled in plastic, of the goddess Aphrodite. Legend had it that Aphrodite had risen from the waves off the west coast of Cyprus. The Golden Bough: “The sanctuary of Aphrodite at Old Paphos was one of the most celebrated shrines in the ancient world.” The images on sale depicted a sulky and misshapen Barbie doll rather than the goddess of love.

The day before yesterday’s Mirror, the Sun, the Daily Mail and other British papers were available. Bus tours were advertised to various parts of the island. Signs said “Traditional English Pub,” and “Full English Breakfast,” “Fish and Chips,” and “Afternoon Tea.” There were bleak hotels on the promenade and some derelict mosques on the backstreets. There was something old-fashioned and fifties-ish about Limassol, as though like the newspapers the town too had an air of the day before yesterday.

The Greek Cypriots I spoke to were friendly and forthcoming, and as angry with the Turks as the Turks I had met on the north side of the island had been with them. Each side expressed its anger in the same words.

“I have a lot of property in the north, but I have no idea what happened to it,” a Greek woman told me. I had heard something similar from a Turkish woman, her exact counterpart, in the north, on a street in Lefkosa, who had fled from Limassol.

And there was Mrs. Evzonas. Twenty years ago, in Famagusta (now Gazimagosa), she said to her husband, “Let’s get out of here.” There were Turkish planes flying overhead, and Turkish ships in the harbor. They took a two-hour drive to Limassol and hunkered down. “We’ll go back when it’s safer.”

She told me, “We thought it would end soon. How did we know that it would last this long?”

In two decades the Evzonases had not been back, nor had any of their friends. But this is a legitimate republic, recognized by other countries. I made phone calls to the United States from the public phone booths. And because of the brisk tourist trade it was possible to make a living here in a way that in Turkish Northern Cyprus was out of the question.

“I would like to go back, but how can I?” Mrs. Evzonas said. “With my passport it is impossible.” She shrugged. “We are stuck here.”

“This was once a small town,” a man named Giorgio said to me in Limassol. “In 1974 it was nothing. But so many refugees made businesses, so it began to get bigger.”

I told him I had been to the town he knew as Famagusta.

“They say it is a ghost town,” he said.

He wanted me to agree, and he was right of course, but how could I tell him that in its ghostly way the town was more weirdly attractive than this?

The Sea Harmony was not leaving until late that night. The driving rain had discouraged me from leaving town, and so I hung around, and when the rain slowed to a thin drizzle I walked east along the coast, working up an appetite, and then returned and had a traditional English beer in a traditional English pub and met Mr. Reg MacNicol from North London who was on a two-week holiday (“We come for the weather”) and when I asked too many questions he exploded and his florid face grew redder and he said, “You Yanks give me the pip! Life’s a compromise! Utopia doesn’t exist!”

I took a bus back to the ship, where the Slovakians were kneeling in the midst of another solemn mass in the lounge bar.

“I bought these for you,” Spillman said, handing me some Cyprus tangerines.

A woman nearby said, “I know you. I saw them interrogating you in Haifa. They took you away.”

“You’re very observant,” I said.

“I was afraid for you,” she said. “Hi. I’m Melva. From Australia. I’ve lived a really cloistered life. All this is new to me.”

She was another loner on this ship of loners, a solitary traveler, and she was as pleasant and as odd as the others. Tall, calm, observant, she shared a cabin with two other women, strangers to her. She had been cheated in Turkey and ill with suspected pneumonia in Egypt and spent two days in an Israeli hospital. “They threw me out. I had a temperature of a hundred and two and they said, ‘You must go now.’ I went to one of those grotty hotels and nearly died.” But she was game. I asked how she was now. “I’m coming good!”

“Want to play cards?” she asked.

She taught me an Australian card game called “Crappy Joe,” which was a version of two-handed whist that had interminable variations. Each successive game became more complicated in terms of the combinations needed to win. Her parents had played it almost every night for years in the western Sydney suburb of Emu Plains.

“Aw, I was married for twenty-six years myself, but my husband and I just went in different directions. I had to get away.”

She was dealing the cards for another hand of Crappy Joe.

“You make it sound urgent,” I said.

“He was stalking me,” she said. “At night I’d look out the window and there he’d be, staring in, his face so frightening. I’d be driving somewhere and look in the rearview mirror and he’d be behind me. I went out with a chap—a very nice man. My ex-husband went to his office and threatened him. ‘Don’t you dare go out with my wife.’ ”

“He sounds dangerous,” I said.

“That’s what I told the police. That he was obsessed. He’s got three rifles. But they said, ‘He hasn’t done anything, has he?’ ‘He keeps stalking me and staring at me through the window,’ I said. But that wasn’t enough. I couldn’t prove anything. He hadn’t done anything physical, see.”

In the rain and wind the ship pulled out of Limassol harbor, and I was glad I was here and not there.

“I got so worried I decided to leave,” she said. “I went to India, to Egypt, to Greece. Maybe he’ll leave me alone when I get back.”

She won the hand, gathered the cards, let me cut them, shuffled them and leaned over.

“Maybe I’ll never go back,” she said.

The ship was rolling as it sailed around the coast of western Cyprus, past Aphrodite’s birthplace and Cape Drepanon and the last horned cape on this island of hornlike capes, Arnaoutis, and then into the darkness towards Rhodes.

Rhodes—Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, a giant bronze figure: was this my compelling interest on this island? No, it was not. How could it be? It was just an old story. The thing had been erected twenty-three hundred years ago, it had been knocked down sixty-five years later and sold off as scrap. So much for the Colossus of Rhodes.

But not far from where this monstrous statue once stood, Spillman the Belgian was saying to me, “I will buy a chicken. I will drink some water. I will play music for the people in the town square. After one cup of tea I will return to the ship. At six o’clock I will take food. Some fruit. Some cheese.”

“You are very well organized, Mr. Spillman.”

“I do make planations of my daily life,” he said, his English faltering, “so I do not make a depression.”

As he walked along, distracted—perhaps hungry—his English became a sort of homage to Hercule Poirot.

“You can tell by my visage that I am a Jewish? Attention, I buy some parfum for my muzzah!”

This and more was my experience of Rhodes. The old walled city of Rhodes was one of the most beautiful I had seen in the Mediterranean, the Palace and Hospital of the Crusader Knights were graceful as well as powerful. The water was brilliantly blue, and mainland Turkey was visible just across the channel. But all this was a backdrop for my walk with pigeon-toed Spillman. I admired him for having ingeniously compensated for his spells of depression. He liked his life, and providing he did not deviate from this route through the Mediterranean in which fruit markets and cheese stalls loomed larger than ruins, his life was happy. I began to reflect on how in the way I was traveling there was an unusual and apparently disjointed process at work. There was something immensely more interesting to me in hearing about Melva and Ted’s divorce, and the spooky behavior of her crazed ex-husband, than in hearing a story of—well, as we had just left Limassol, let us say the tale of Richard the Lionhearted’s marriage to Berengaria of Navarre in 1191, at Limassol Castle, a building which had been practically demolished.

I could not deny that the setting mattered. The Rock of Gibraltar to me was a French tourist on a ledge at the top pinching an ape. I remembered Van Gogh’s Arles because I was almost run down by a high-speed train at Arles Station, while entranced by almond blossoms. In Olbia, Sardinia, a Senegalese scrounger told me in Italian how in Africa (which he visited regularly) he had two wives and six children: “Not many.” In Durrell’s Kyrenia, Fikret the Turk suffered over his bean soup and said, “I have been thinking about marriage … Please tell me what to do.” I could not now think of Jerusalem without seeing a Lubavitcher Jew in a black hat and coat hoisting his orange mountain bike into an angry Arab’s cabbages. My lasting impression of Dubrovnik was not its glorious city, but rather its bomb craters and broken roofs and the Croat Ivo saying, “I came home. Because home is home.”

Places had voices that were not their own; they were backdrops to a greater drama, or else to something astonishingly ordinary, like the ragged laundry hung from the nave of a plundered Crusader church in Tartus, on the Syrian coast. Most of the time, traveling, I had no idea where I was going. I was not even quite sure why. I was no historian. I was not a geographer. I hated politics. What I liked most was having space and time; getting up in the morning and setting off for a destination which, at any moment—if something better compelled my attention—I could abandon. I had no theme. I did not want one. I had set out to be on the Mediterranean, without a fixed program. I was not writing a book—I was living my life, and had found an agreeable way to do it.

In this way I was exactly like the others on the Sea Harmony. We only looked like lost souls, but we had our achievements. Spillman who had solved the problem of his depression, Melva who was free of her husband’s threats, the Bratislava pilgrims for whom prayer was a way of life, the German Heinz who traveled with his little family. And more.

Delayed in Rhodes, I ran into Yegor, the bald and toothless Israeli who was always boasting how he had fought in three wars. He wore old tattered clothes and his only luggage was a small canvas bag. He slept in the cheap seats, where Spillman played, and sometimes he spoke French to Spillman. On board the first day he had said to me, “You have a cabin? I want to sleep with you!” And he laughed a loud toothless laugh, his lips flapping at me. He was obviously excitable. So I had not encouraged conversation.

But he ambushed me. I left Spillman looking for his chicken restaurant and his fruit stand; I had headed out of the walled city to the windy bay on the fringes of which tourist-resort Rhodes lay as new and ugly as every other new Greek seaside town. The Greek genius for tacky construction surpassed anything I had seen—surprising in people who claimed the Parthenon as part of their heritage.

Even Yegor remarked on the flimsy construction. It was the strong wind, battering the hotel signs and tearing at the power lines. None of the hotels were open and, absent of people, they looked abandoned and vulnerable.

“I think the wind will make them crash down!” Yegor said. His whinnying laugh was bad, but the sight of his toothless mouth was worse. I also thought: Why do apparently weak-minded people take such delight in disasters?

His dog, young and strong, tugged him along on its rope leash.

“What’s your dog’s name?”

“Johnny Halliday.”

Hearing his name, the dog hesitated and glanced back at his master. Then he trotted on.

“But I call him Johnny.”

Again the dog turned its soulful eyes on Yegor.

“I take it you’re a soldier, Yegor,” I said.

“Three wars,” he said. “In ’67, the Egyptians had swords and tried to cut us”—he flailed his arms—“like this, our heads off! But we beat them! I was given a free apartment. I pay only forty shekels for one month.”

“You’re lucky.”

“But I have a big problem,” Yegor said. “I drink.”

“You get drunk?”

“I get drunk. I go to jail.”

“What are Israeli jails like?”

“Jews in one room, Arabs in another room. In each room, twenty men,” Yegor said. “One toilet only.”

“That’s not very nice.”

“Horrible. And they fight, the prisoners.”

“What do they fight about?”

“On your first day, they take your food, to make you frightened. So you have to fight. What else can you do?”

We were walking down Papanikolaou in the new part of Rhodes City, a block or so from where waves were being blown on to the bright deserted shore. We had passed the edge of Mandraki Harbor, where on one corner—so it was thought—the Colossus had stood. But speculating on this Wonder of the World meant a great deal less than the reality of Yegor’s saying, On your first day, they take your food, to make you frightened.

“The police arrested you because you were drunk?”

“Because I broke a table,” Yegor said.

“An expensive table?”

“Not expensive, and not big. Made out of glass.”

“How did you break it?”

“I used a man to break it,” Yegor said.

“You used a man?”

“I took him and crashed him down, so I broke the man, too. Ha! Ha! Ha!” That laugh again, those gums, those lips. “I was drunk, so they arrested me.”

“Were you in prison long?”

“Some months,” Yegor said. “But I have been seventeen times in prison. I can’t help it—I drink too much!”

He jerked his dog’s leash, the dog made a strangled noise, and they walked on, the dog yapping in a sharp imitation of his master’s laugh.

Later that day, back inside the old castellated city, I was admiring the medieval walls and the carved escutcheons, when Yegor accosted me.

“I told you lies,” he said. “Ha!”

“About going to prison?”

“If you go to prison in Israel they take your passport, and I have a passport, so how could I go to prison? Ha! You believed me!”

The problem with a liar is not his frank admission of lying but rather when he robustly asserts that he is telling the truth.

Another of the loners was leaving the ship in Rhodes. This was a young fellow named Pinky, who congregated with the Germans and Spillman and Melva and others in the cheap seats. The name Pinky was short for Pinsker. He made a living in Canada working as a teacher in settlements of the Ojibway and Ojib-Cree people. The villages were in remote parts of Canada. The job was well-paid but stressful. Burned-out, was the way he put it.

“For example, the kids are real delinquents sometimes.”

“How does an Ojibway teenager express his delinquency?”

“You wake up in the morning and you see that they’ve covered your house in graffiti—names and swear words and everything. And they go nuts with snowmobiles. You’re a writer, aren’t you?”

I smiled at him in what I hoped was an enigmatic way.

“I can tell by the way you’re always asking questions. And you’re the only one who listens to Spillman.”

Pinsker told me he was rather lonely. It was about time he found someone to share his life. He had not found much romance in the Ojibway settlements of northern Canada, and so he had set out on an extended trip, hoping to meet someone. His month working on a kibbutz had not improved his situation, and it had surprised him in other ways. As a Jew he had been shocked by some of what he had seen.

“The kids knew nothing about Judaism. Can you imagine that in Israel?” he said. “A lot of them had never been to a synagogue. They were pre-Bar Mitzvah age, but they didn’t study. I’ve never seen Jews like that—I was surprised by their ignorance.”

“But better behaved than the Ojibway kids?”

“Not really. Some of them were really obnoxious—always fooling,” he said. “What do you think of Israel?”

“The land of contradictions,” I said. I mentioned some of what I had seen. Small land, big contradictions.

“When I was on the kibbutz someone told me a really interesting theory,” Pinsker said. “It’s like this. In the Diaspora, Jews realize that non-Jews are always looking at them and so they strive to be religious. They work, they study difficult subjects, they try to get ahead in the community—they want to excel, and they usually succeed. They know they are seen as Jews and that it’s important that they succeed. Don’t you think that part of it is true?”

“If you say so.”

Pinsker said, “But when they get to Israel they consider that they’ve arrived. They don’t have to prove anything to anyone. They sit around and complain—there’s no need to do anything. Who’s looking? Who cares? They abandon their ambitions and get lazy. That’s why Israel is the way it is, and why it doesn’t seem Jewish.”

Pinsker was staying in Rhodes, hoping to catch a ferry to the Turkish town of Marmaris in the morning. He said good-bye and wandered away to look for a hotel, while I went back to the ship, thinking how little I had learned of the island. But it had been importantly a backdrop for the lives of these travelers, and as a gorgeous location it gave their stories an exoticism that made them memorable. There was, as always, a poignant interplay between the melancholy banalities of the travelers’ tales and the locale of this lovely island.

We were at sea, making for Piraeus all the next day, through the Cyclades—never out of sight of an island, and usually within sight of a half a dozen. On the bridge the captain dreamed of invading Turkey and reclaiming land that he felt was rightly Greece’s. There was bouzouki music inside and cold raw weather outside. There was nowhere to sit on deck. The twenty-eight Slovakians from Bratislava were on their knees in one lounge, praying. The Greeks in another, smoking. The squalor in the cheap seats became remarkable, a piling-up of bags and garbage and supine bodies.

Three nights in a row I had the same dream. I was an actor in a Shakespearean play that might have been Hamlet. I was the main actor, probably Hamlet. This was unclear in the dream because although it was a large and elaborate production I did not know any of my lines—not even one. I did not know the names of the other characters. It was all a muddle and mystery, especially as I had never been in a play in my life. Perhaps it was an anxiety dream about being unprepared and having to improvise. My method of travel was all about improvisation.

Each time I had the dream I was arriving at the theater—a sort of open-air affair, with many people in the audience, and lots of actors and stagehands, most of them greeting me with high hopes. None of them had the slightest idea that I did not know my lines. I would covertly pick up a copy of the play and leaf through its several hundred pages and realize that there was no way that I could learn my part between now and ten minutes from now when the curtain was going up on the first act. I experienced a sense of absurd humiliation and panic, as people greeted me and congratulated me, telling me how they were looking forward to my performance.

Most dreams are merciful. Each night, just before the curtain rose, I awoke.

I continued to play games of “Crappy Joe” with Melva. She was feeling optimistic and fitter than she had in Egypt and Israel, though still on antibiotics. “I’m coming good!” she said. She wanted to be independent. “I’m not a bludger,” she said. “Don’t look back!”

When we arrived at Piraeus we announced where we were going and realized that we were all going to a different place—Melva was staying in Athens, hoping to meet some Australians; the Germans were going to Crete, Spillman to Brindisi, Yegor was vague, Pinsker was gone. The Israelis whose names I never learned were speeding away in their car, heading for Croatia, they would not say why. Spillman said he was depressed—it was cloudy, and cloudy days were awful for him. And then Yegor handed his dog’s rope leash to him. The Greeks laughed. Spillman grew furious as the dog, agitated and confused, nipped other passengers. Then “Johnny Halliday” bit Spillman on the groin. Spillman’s fly was usually open—it was open this morning. He clasped himself and sat down and began to cry, and at that moment someone turned up the bouzouki music.

I hurried to a train, and a bus and a ferry; to Bari, and more trains. All the while I heard Spillman’s shout of hurt and complaint, as Yegor’s dog yapped. But I had not hesitated on the quay. I had been there before.

17

The Ferry El Loud III to Kerkennah

Tunisia is another Mediterranean island, surrounded on one side by water and on the other by pariah states: fanatic Libya on the southeast, blood-drenched Algeria on the west, and the blue Mediterranean on its long irregular coast, scalloped by gulfs and bays. Foreigners do not enter Tunisia by road. There are planes, of course, and there are ferries to France and Italy. I sailed into Tunis on a ferry from slap-happy Trapani in Sicily, entering the harbor at La Goulette in the late afternoon and passing Carthage, the little that remained of it, just a rubble pile of marble where the glorious city had once stood.

I had now been on enough Mediterranean islands to sense that Tunisia was deeply insular. People said that Turkey and Syria were isolated, but that was not strictly true—there were buses from Turkey to Egypt, and from Syria to Jordan and Lebanon. Even poor miserable Albania had road and ferry access to Greece and Macedonia. My road and rail trip from Istanbul to Haifa had been slow and fairly awful at times—six border crossings and lots of irritation, but I had been safe; no one attempted to cut my throat.

Islamic militants in Algeria had carried out their vow to kill foreigners. Their aim was to destabilize the country by frightening foreigners, who were Algeria’s mainstay in running their oil-based economy. Seven Italian sailors—the entire crew of the ship Lucina—had recently had their throats slit as they slept in their bunks in the Algerian port of Jijel, not far from the Tunisian frontier; and a few months before that, twelve Croats had been found dead on their ship, their throats cut. Visitors to Libya sometimes simply disappeared. Such stories were a strong inducement to treat Tunisia as an island, and even Tunisians treated it that way. They never suggested crossing one of these borders, they seldom did so themselves—when they left Tunisia it was to go to France or Italy, to work at menial jobs.

Walking through the small pleasant city of Tunis to shake off the effects of my sedentary trip here I was reminded by the street names of its events. There was Rue 18 Janvier 1952 and Boulevard du 9 Avril 1938, and Rue du 2 Mars 1934, and Place 3 Aout 1903, and many others. I noticed that the sky was full of birds. They were like dark, madly twittering sparrows or swifts, and they swooped and roosted in enormous noisy flocks, blackening the sky and wheeling back and forth. As they rose in the air, they shat in tremendous squirts that splashed on virtually everyone strolling on the Avenue Habib Bourguiba. These pestiferous birds are called asfour zitoun by the Tunisians—“olive birds,” for their habit of snatching the olives from the great coastal crop.

I felt pleased with myself: I had arrived slowly by sea; I had discovered there was a railway network throughout the country; I was now resident in a thirty-five-dollar hotel. I liked the food, Tunis was the right size—not much more than a big town—and the people were approachable. Already I had met the Taoufiks—Mr. was Tunisian, Mrs. was from Birmingham—and their sixteen-year-old son. After seventeen years in the country none of them had been to either Algeria or Libya. “And nothing has changed here in seventeen years!”

Another man, Ahmed, had lived and worked in New York City for three years, at Forty-second between Seventh and Eighth. “I was working in a shop selling smoking things, like water pipes and souvenirs.” He had a Green Card. So why was he back in Tunisia? He hated New York City: “Too many people and too dangerous, because,” he said pointedly, “of black people and white people.” I met Mr. Salah, who had gone to college in Baltimore. “I was there, like, four and a half years, studying business management. It was a neat place.” Most of all, he missed basketball—the heroes, Jordan, Ewing, Rodman, O’Neal.

Tunisians seemed to me hospitable and pleasant, especially Ali, whom I bumped into at the railway station. He asked in Italian, “You’re Italian?”

This was another country, like Malta and Albania and Croatia, within range of Italian TV broadcasts, so that many of the people who owned televisions also spoke Italian. But Ali had also worked in Rome for a while. Then he came back, got married and now had three lovely children—he showed me their pictures.

We were walking along, chatting in Italian. He spoke it well. This was not some tout who wanted an English lesson, or a loan, or to offer me a deal on some local merchandise. He spoke about his children—three girls. He had an enlightened view of women and was eager, he said, for his girls to have the same chance as a boy in Tunisia.

He looked up and pointed ahead, beyond the people crowding the sidewalk. “The Medina is at the end of this street,” he said. “Incredible place—you’ve seen it?”

“I just arrived yesterday.”

“You’re in luck. There’s a big event this morning—the Berber carpet sellers’ market. You’ve heard of the Berbers? I’m a Berber myself, from a village near Gafsa.”

He unfolded my map of Tunisia and showed me the exact location of his village. I really ought to visit him there sometime, he said. He would introduce me to the elders and take me around. Berber culture was real Tunisian culture, and carpets were their masterpieces.

“But we haven’t got much time at the moment. This Berber market closes at noon and look—it’s eleven-fifteen. Berber carpets are lovely—but then I am biased, being a Berber myself. Right through here.”

It was a classic entrance to a bazaar, narrow, with fabrics hung up and fluttering like flags, and all sort of brassware and carvings stacked near it, and a beckoning fragrance of perfume and spices. Entering it reminded me of the souk at Aleppo—once I stepped out of the city heat and dust I was in the humid shadows of this labyrinth, in the passageways, where men in gowns sipped coffee at the entrance to their tiny shops.

Ali moved so fast through the crowd I had to hurry to keep up with him, dodging some people and squeezing past others. Fortunately, he was a tall fellow, and so much bigger than the other Tunisians that I could see him above the crowd of shoppers.

“I don’t want you to be late,” he called out, glancing back and moving a bit faster. “The Berbers will all be going home with their carpets pretty soon.”

We passed a shop selling books and papers.

“I need to buy a notebook.”

“Later,” he said, stepping up his pace. “When you have time to look calmly you will be able to buy many good things.”

He used a nice Italian phrase, tante belle cose, and I was reassured once again. He seemed the most sensible and helpful person I had met on my whole trip—not just in Tunisia but in the Mediterranean; he had the right priorities, he was the perfect host.

Fifteen minutes later, we were in the middle of the souk and I was utterly lost. Following Ali, I had not paid any attention to landmarks, and so I stayed as close to him as I could. We passed carpenters and barbershops and shops selling bolts of silk and finished clothes, bakeries, jewelers, tourist curio shops selling dead scorpions (“for good luck”), amber beads, crimson coral made into beads and necklaces, old muskets, brassware, inlaid boxes, carved boars’ tusks and more.

Seeing these robes, the Benedictine monk garb of the Berber, covering body and head, like a monk’s cowl, I contemplated going into Algeria as Sir Richard Burton would have done—as he did do in Mecca, totally in disguise, in the forbidden place that was dangerous to any unbeliever. But Burton spoke fluent Arabic, and he would have learned Maghrebi Arabic for such a venture, and his cojónes were of a legendary size.

“We’re almost there,” Ali said, turning a corner.

Just around the corner was a colorful shop, larger than any other, and stacked with carpets. Ali greeted the smiling man in the doorway.

“You’re just in time,” the man said in Italian—he spoke it even better than Ali. “Everything closes in twenty minutes.”

We hurried upstairs and I was offered a soft drink. I said no thanks, since I knew that accepting any sort of gift in a carpet shop would obligate me—a cup of coffee, a drink, food; anything.

“Where are the Berbers?” I asked. Somehow I had been expecting a compound where scores of men in robes were muttering encouragement for me to examine their carpets.

“There—there.”

He motioned me past a bed. Very large, with inset mirrors and ivory carvings, it stood against one wall, like a museum piece.

“The king’s bed. Why is it so large?” the manager said. “He slept there with his four wives. But when Tunisia became modern and got rid of kings they also got rid of polygamy, and we bought the bed. As you can see, it is very beautiful and very expensive. Fine work.”

“Please sit down,” Ali said. “Time is short.”

But it was only noon and we were in a carpet shop. I said, “I don’t understand why time is short.”

“The promotion—the carpet sale,” the manager said.

“What promotion? I thought the Berbers were going home with their carpets. Where are the Berbers?”

“Please look,” the manager said, growing irritable.

Small nimble men began unrolling carpets—lots of them, and the carpets were tumbling at my feet, being flapped apart and stacked. They were all colors, all patterns and sizes, rugs, prayer mats, kilims, runners. The manager was narrating this business, saying that this carpet was red because it was a marriage carpet, and this one was blue because blue was a favorite Berber color, and this was a kilim that was the same on both sides—see? And this carpet had a design to ward off the evil eye.

“Is there an evil eye in Tunisia?” I asked.

“There is evil eye in the whole world,” the manager said. “Which one do you like?”

“The red one, the blue one, this one—they’re all nice.”

“This is five hundred dollars. This is nine hundred dollars. This is—”

“Never mind.”

“You want to buy this one?”

“No.”

“Four hundred—what do you say? Go on, make me an offer.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“You can’t think. You have to buy it by noon. When the promotion ends.”

Now, much too late, I realized that I had been hustled; so I resisted.

“I’ll come back.”

“You can’t come back. What do you offer me?”

“Nothing right now. Maybe tomorrow.”

“No! No!” he said. “There is no time. Just say a number!”

Just say a number? Hearing that, I laughed. The manager got angry and muttered harshly to Ali, who whispered back at him, and they began bickering in whispers, and every so often the manager howled, “Not much time!”

I thought: I am a fool. I am sitting here with one man howling and the other whispering and a third and fourth still unrolling carpets. I got up to leave. I said I would come back.

“You can’t come back—you can never come back!” the manager screamed at me, still in Italian—Mai, mai! Never, never!

Back in the twisting passageways of the bazaar, Ali—who was somewhat subdued—said, “Let’s say hello to my father,” and stopped in front of a perfume shop. There was no one in the shop. Ali snatched a vial of perfume.

“Jasmine! Special to the Berbers!”

“Not today.” I wondered whether he would persist.

“This is a present. No money! Take it!”

“I am afraid it will spill in my pocket,” I said, and defied him to answer this.

He shrugged and turned as the perfume seller, who was not old enough to be Ali’s father, entered the shop and exchanged greetings with him.

I walked away, but Ali was next to me. He said, “So, how much will you give me for taking you around?”

“I don’t want to be taken around.”

“I just took you around. What about baksheesh for everything that I showed you.”

“For everything that you showed me?” I said, thinking: Here is another pair of mammoth cojónes. “Nothing.”

He left, grumbling, yet I did not dislike him really. I hated myself for falling for the line We don’t have much time! But it was a brilliant gimmick. In the souk, in the street, at the station, the faces of Tunis were the faces of the Mediterranean in a much more remarkable way than anywhere else I had been on the shores of this sea. The Arab face predominated, but Arab faces ranged from pasty, freckled and pale-eyed to utterly dusty, almost Dravidian masks. The faces of Tunis could have been Italian, Spanish, Greek, Sardinian, Turkish, Albanian—and probably were. In Tunisia, Europe and all its colors met North Africa and all its colors, and one blended into the other. With its great ports, and its easy proximity to Italy—the country had always been a crossroads. When the Vandals conquered Spain and North Africa they sacked Carthage, reentered Europe by hopping over from here to Italy. It was an easy distance, for which Sicily was the stepping-stone.

Racially it was not monochromatic, and the clothes too were still reminiscent of orientalist paintings, the shrouded women, the veils, the shawls, as well as pale pouty girls in blue jeans and big bossy women in sunglasses and frilly dresses.

I went by train to Al Marsa via Goulette, Salambo, Carthage (Hannibal), Carthage (Amilcar), Sidi Bou Said and the Corniche. At Sidi Bou, a small town on a hill overlooking the sea, all whitewashed houses, I hiked around. The houses had blue shutters, blue doors, blue porches: the blue was supposed to keep the mosquitoes away. Down by the sea, the shore was littered—as bad here as it had been a thousand miles away on the Syrian beaches. In the thin woods beside the shore there were Tunisian lovers—couples smooching in the oleanders—and a profusion of stray cats.

There seemed to be nothing else at Sidi Bou. The vestiges of Carthage’s memory were remote conquests of the Phoenicians, Hannibal’s battles, the Punic Wars, St. Augustine (he had been a student there), and the Barbary pirates. The traditional date of the founding of Carthage was 814 B.C. But there were more recent memories. Robert Fox writes how, after the mysterious deaths of three Israelis in Cyprus, in 1985, Israeli planes appeared in the skies on this part of the coast and bombed the PLO compound, intending to kill Yassir Arafat. Seventy-two people died in this Israeli bombing. Arafat was not one of them. Fox goes on, “Two years later Israeli raiding parties landed from the sea at the village of Sidi Bou Said, the Saint Tropez of Tunis, to murder a senior PLO figure, Khalil al-Wazir, whose nom de guerre was Abu Jihad, in his bungalow; the Israeli government believed, erroneously, that he had organised the Intifada in the Occupied Territories.”

Black, yellow streaked clouds loomed over Carthage (Baedeker in 1911: “… the beauty of the scenery and the wealth of historical memories amply compensate for the deplorable state of the ruins”); soon the rain began. It was as strong as monsoon rain, and as sudden and as overwhelming, casting a twilight shadow over the coast and hammering straight down with a powerful sound, the water beating on the earth, smacking the street. At once the gutters were awash. Then the streets were flooded. The train halted, the traffic was snarled. Look, it’s like a dam! a woman cried out in French, at the sight of a field. There was a kind of hysteria, as the rain came down. People were gabbling, they were confused. The city began to drown, and then it simply failed.

It was a turning point, though I did not realize it until quite a while afterwards. From this moment onward in my trip the weather deteriorated. It went bad. It thwarted me. It frustrated my plans. Short periods of sunshine were separated by long spells of low cloud and wind, until the wind became a spectacular Levanter. The low pressure and all the damp rooms and shut windows and stale air also seemed to make me ill. Within a few days I had a severe cold—a sore throat, stomach trouble, achy muscles.

Deciding to leave Tunis, I solicited advice from Tunisians. See the desert! they said. See the cave dwellers at Matmata! Go to Tozeur and Djerba. There are Jews in Djerba! See the nomads and the camel sellers and the weavers! See the mystics who fondle scorpions! Go to Sousse—tourists love Sousse! Whatever you do, don’t go to Sfax. There is nothing in Sfax.

So I bought a ticket to Sfax. The ticket was ten dollars, for First Class, and another dollar for the Comfort Section of First Class. Sfax was about two hundred miles away, down the coast, where I hoped the weather was better. My idea was to go there and convalesce until I felt well enough to continue my traveling.

I would have preferred to take the train west to the Algerian border, to Bizerte, then Jendouba and on to Annaba (Bône) on the Algerian coast. In a more peaceful time it would have been a wonderful trip, from Tunis to Tangiers, along the coast. Before I started traveling in the Mediterranean it had been my intention to take this route. But then I had discovered that Tunisia was an island. Some other time I would return, and go to Beirut and Algeria and perhaps to Libya. It was impossible to be exhaustive on any trip—even living in another country had not allowed me enough time to go everywhere, to see everything. After eighteen years in Britain, much of it was unknown to me. For example, I never went to Shropshire, and I had always wanted to go there. After a year’s travel in China I had failed to get to Hainan Island. In the Pacific I never achieved my goal of sailing to Pitcairn Island. I was not dismayed. I turned them into ambitions. It was something to dream about, for unvisited places inspired greater dreams than places I had seen. The existence of the unknown was the wellspring of my dreams. And I also thought, I’ll be back.

The train was almost empty. The only people in the Comfort Section were a Vietnamese woman and a chain-smoking Tunisian man who was trying to woo a young Tunisian woman traveling on her own.

We were out of Tunis, beyond the slums, the suburbs, the refuse heaps and scavengers in shacks, in a matter of minutes, and then it was all olive groves for sixty miles. Like so many other parts of the Mediterranean shore, olive trees predominated. There were more here, and they were more orderly and fruitful, than in Greece. They were organized on terraces, with cactuses and spiky century plants arranged around them as perimeter fences, and with so much space between the trees the olives could be picked mechanically.

I saw an old woman riding a donkey through a herd of goats, I saw shepherds strolling behind flocks of sheep, and stumbling lambs, and in the geometric settlements there were low square houses on grids of streets. I had known nothing about Tunisia before I had gotten off the Sicilian ferry, and so I was pleased to see how orderly and apparently self-sufficient it was. And it was another secular place—at least there was no state religion, either theological or political.

Greener and tidier as we continued south, the countryside was flat and agricultural. It seemed a very peaceful land, in spite of the stormy weather. Passing through Sousse—the railway line went right down Sousse’s main street, along the promenade, around the port—I was reminded of how it had been recommended as a nice place to visit. It was clearly a tourist town.

Thirty or forty miles south of Sousse we came to El Djem. The town was insignificant, but the Roman amphitheater in El Djem was impressive.

“It’s in better shape and there’s more of it than the one in Rome,” an American man said to me, at El Djem. He was Mike from Louisiana.

Mike’s friend Steve said, “This thing is real old.”

They could appreciate the handiwork in El Djem because they were in construction themselves. They had been living in Sfax for almost two months, living alone in hotel rooms—going slightly crazy, they said—supervising the building of an oil-drilling platform offshore.

Steve went on. “It was built in something like 1720.”

“Isn’t it Roman?” I said.

“The guy didn’t say, but I’ll tell you one thing. This sucker is well built.”

“That’s for sure,” Steve said, and leaned way back to admire the complex arrangement of arches.

“Is this A.D. or B.C.?” Mike said.

“What’s the difference?” Steve replied.

Exactly, I thought. Surely the point was that it was about a thousand years older than any other building in the town and yet was stronger, more handsome and symmetrical and would probably outlast all the rest of them.

I got a later train onward to Sfax, and was at first alarmed by the ugly suburbs and tenements, and at last reassured. It was a more somber and quieter place than Tunis, with just a few main streets, and a boulevard and a harbor. Mike and Steve told me that the medina—the bazaar—was worth seeing. There were some islands fifteen or twenty miles offshore but they had not been there. It’s kind of a quiet place, they said. And they added, We’re going nuts here.

It was right for me. There was no traffic. There was a sea breeze. The hotels cost almost nothing. There were no tourists here, because the town supposedly lacked color. Yet people lived here, and they worked and prospered. They traded in salt and fish and phosphate and sulfur, as well as in the products of the poorer inland places—spices and handmade goods from Kairouan and Gafsa. On this cool damp night there was a crowd of milling men along the main boulevard of Sfax that resembled the passeggiata of Sicily and Calabria. I felt that I was outside the mainstream, on the sea. I liked the briny odor of the breeze, and the great clammy blankness at the shore that was like a black wall at night.

I did not feel well. I went through the medina the next day and had to ask permission of a carpet seller to sit in his shop for a while—I was dizzy and weak. While I sat and perspired, feeling ghastly, he unwrapped a Berber kilim. It was striped, vividly colored, handwoven of wool.

“I’ll wrap it for you, so you can carry it.”

“I am too ill to carry anything.”

But three days later I went back and bought it, for sixty dollars. It was ten feet by six feet. In a year and a half of travel on the shores of the Mediterranean, it was the only thing I bought; indeed, it was the only thing I saw that I wished to buy.

In those three days I vowed to get better. I knew I had a bad cold and some sort of low-grade infection in my lungs. I took aspirin. I tried to clear my lungs by eating spicy food, the soup they called h’lalem and couscous with hot pepper sauce and glasses of Tunisian mint tea.

Reading about the anniversary of Nietzsche’s birth, I had a context for examining my own bad state of health at the moment. I had become interested in him since reading about him in the Oliver Sacks book. “Fritz,” as his sister called him, had been born 150 years ago, in Rocken, Germany. He wrote Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spake Zarathustra. He loved music. Somewhat unfairly, he had been taken up by the Nazis, who admired his saying, “What fails to kill me makes me stronger.” He went insane in 1889 and returned home to live with his mother and sister. He spent his last seven years as a vegetable, and died in 1900 at the age of fifty-six. But some years before the end, there were signs of eccentricity.

“He was fond of playing the piano, splashing in the bathtub and occasionally carefully removing his shoes and urinating in them.”

This strange case history had the effect of making me feel that I was perhaps not so ill after all.

All my life I have hated being asked to explain what I am doing. I hate the question because I very seldom know the answer.

It was Sunday in Sfax, and everything was closed. After three days supine in the seedy grandeur of the Hotel des Oliviers I was feeling slightly better, though I was far from well. I woke thinking, What about Djerba? It was a whole day’s traveling south by train. Gabès was halfway. What about Gabès? But I hesitated when I realized there was a ferry this morning to Kerkennah. The two islands of Kerkennah were about fifteen miles offshore from Sfax. It took an hour and a half. It cost fifty cents. The ferry was leaving shortly and it was called El Loud III. All these details, especially the name, helped me make up my mind to go to Kerkennah.

I grabbed my bag and hurried to the ferry port. How would I have explained this apparently indecisive behavior to a traveling companion, who would ask the reasonable question, Where are we going? I would have to answer, I’m not sure.

Traveling in a general direction, without a specific destination, it was necessary for me to be alone. It wasn’t fair to expect anyone to put up with that much indecision or suspense. I was not sure why I had come to Sfax, until I got there. This may be another difference between a traveler and a tourist: the traveler is vague, the tourist is certain. But I was vindicated in my ignorant decision. My two-day trip to Kerkennah was pleasant.

There were about three hundred passengers on the ferry, all Tunisian, many of them returning to their island home for the day, some of them picnickers, a few going along for the ride. Being Tunisians, they were all sorts, but this was also a feature of the Mediterranean coast. There was no place that I had seen on my entire trip that was one thing—a single people, the same face, the same religion, all dressed the same. One of the pleasures of the Mediterranean was the way in which the complex cultures had intermingled, though what was true of the shoreline was not the case in the inland villages.

The passengers were all sorts, old, young, light, dark, orthodox, liberated, some in shawls, some in fezzes, others in baseball hats. One of the youths had a saxophone, and with a drummer he improvised Arabic melodies on the open deck. It was a good-humored and friendly crowd. They treated each other with courtesy, didn’t push, and were easygoing, high-spirited and respectful. One man had a sprig of jasmine stuck over his ear, like a Tahitian wearing a blossom.

There were cormorants diving into flat sea and there were distant fishing boats, but there was nothing else for almost an hour. It was not the distance of the island that made them hard to see; it was that they were low-lying, the highest one just a few feet above sea level. They came into view as smudges on the sea, and then looking like atolls, Gharbi first and then the edges of its sister island, Chergui.

Some old buses and taxis were parked in the dust at the ferry landing, waiting for passengers. The drivers sat on stacks of palm fronds that had been trimmed of their stalks. These palms were the only vegetation on the islands.

“Where do you want to go?” a driver asked me in French.

“To the town.”

“No town. Only villages.”

“Is there a hotel?”

“Get in.”

Where are we going, Paulie?

There were five of us in the taxi. Kerkennah was too small to show as anything but a dot on my map and so I really had no idea where we might be going, or what places existed on the islands. The only landscape I could see was perfectly flat and arid, stony yellow ground and dying palms with ratty fronds.

“Where are you going?” I asked the other passengers. “Remla.”

“Is that a nice place?”

“Very nice,” they said.

“I want to go to Remla,” I said to the driver.

“No,” he said.

“Oh, all right,” I said.

We passed two or three settlements of small square houses, some with flat roofs and some with domes, and scattered shops and chickens in the road. It was the simplest place I had seen so far on the Mediterranean coastline. The land was flat, the trees were few, the houses were small. It was not run-down, just silent, empty, lonely, one-dimensional. There were no power lines, apparently no lights.

What I took to be a village was a cemetery, with hutlike tombs, each one with the face of the deceased painted on the side, the size of a political poster, the same empty gaze.

We came to a crossroads, took a left, a right, a left. There were no signs. We were on gravel roads now. Then there were no villages at all, just those battered, withered palm trees. There were no people. We drove on for half an hour and then came to a sign, Grand Hotel, with an arrow. A high wall, a gate, a plaster building, a man.

“Welcome.” It was a Tunisian in his pajamas, speaking English.

There was no one else around. After the taxi left there was silence, like dust sifting down, a bird’s chirp that was so slight I realized that only this tremendous silence made it possible for me to hear it.

“Very quiet today.”

“No people.”

“Are they coming?”

“Later.”

“Today?”

He frowned. “No. Two months, three months from now.”

“But I am here.”

“You are welcome, sir.”

This was not the first time on my trip that I had achieved the distinction of being the only guest in a hotel, but it was the first time I had managed it in a hotel this large.

“This way, sir.”

I was taken through the hotel to the dining room and shown to table 23. I counted the other tables: there were seventy-two.

“I am Wahid Number One,” the waiter said, bowing.

“From Kerkennah?”

“From Kerkennah, sir. Is nice.”

In this utterly empty place I felt optimistic. I thought: I’ll stay here until I get well.

Wahid Number One served me brik, which was thin fried pastry, with canned tuna fish and a fried egg. That night’s dinner was turkey. It was a pressed slab of old turkey parts, with gravy. The next day it was brik again, and spaghetti, and French fries made of bad fat. They were disgusting, ocherous meals, with cold wobbly desserts.

“Is there another hotel nearby?” I asked Wahid Number One.

“Farhat Hotel.”

“Nice place?”

He shrugged. “Farhat Hotel they come French.”

“And Grand Hotel?”

“They come English.”

“In a few months,” I said.

“Two or three months,” he said.

Instead of retreating I decided to find out as much as I could about Kerkennah—give it a few days and then move on. In the meantime, two days here in this empty place was an experience unlike any I’d had on my trip. The ocean was gray in this threatening weather, the sandy narrow foreshore of the island was stacked with weed. I walked for several miles. Much of the shore was used as a dump—rusty cans, old cars, plastic bottles, trash. There were some houses, there was an old ruin. There were some date palms on the flat desertlike land. They had short orange fronds with clusters of dates. The dates had fallen and rotted, and so there were masses of buzzing flies.

Oleanders, and date palms, and a green stagnant swimming pool. Except for the flies and the chirp of birds, not a single sound. Except for the manager and Wahid Number One, not another person. The houses a mile up the beach were empty. Amazingly, I was on the Mediterranean—the emptiest part I had so far seen, emptier than the emptiest part of Albania. There had been people here; they had come and gone. It was like a colony that had gone bust, an experiment that had failed.

All that I worked out on my first day. On my second day I went bird-watching. For all the reasons it had seemed dead and abandoned it was attractive to birds, and amounted to a bird sanctuary the like of which I had not seen anywhere on the Mediterranean shores, many different birds in great profusion. A number of them must have been migrants, since this had to be one of the stopping-off places for birds in their seasonal transit between Africa and northern Europe; others I took to be resident shore birds. The largest was a gray heron, about four feet tall and looking patient and important in its slow-motion strutting at the shoreline. I saw a little egret, and a quail that called out “Wet my lips!” Farther on I spotted a wader that turned out to be a curlew, some plovers, a crested lark, a linnet, a red-rumped swallow. A whitish bird with a black mask and a gray cap and black wing-marks was definitely a great gray shrike. I had no bird book. I sketched them and wrote descriptions of their peculiar marks and later identified them. In this way, by spotting birds, I have given the flattest days of travel some meaning and a sense of discovery.

Later that second day I went to Remla, in the old bus that passed by the Grand. Remla was like a town at the end of the world. Apart from the subsistence fishing there was nothing else. The soil was too poor to support vegetable gardens. There were no lights. The town itself was a huddle of square huts set in a maze of damp passageways.

“What about water?”

“We have fountains.”

The brackish undrinkable water came from wells. On the road, there was a bar, Al Jezira, where the local people congregated. When a motorbike crepitated past the bar, the boys and old men looked up. These were the men who owned the fishing boats. The boats had lateen sails, but the fishing was no good, the men told me. The desolation here surpassed anything I had so far seen. Taking it in my stride I regarded it as a personal achievement. And on the third day, wishing greatly to leave Kerkennah, I told myself I felt much better. I said good-bye to Wahid Number One and left the empty hotel on the deserted beach and took the bus to the ferry landing. There I met Mourad, who was heading to Sfax to visit his wife, who was ill in the hospital there.

My first impression of Kerkennah had been of a great emptiness—hot gravelly earth and dying trees and poor huts. But that appearance of nothingness was misleading. Everything here had a name. Remla was an important town, and without realizing—without knowing it—I had also been to El Attala and Oulad Kacem and Melita. This ferry landing was not just a ferry landing. The three decrepit houses here and the rutted road constituted the settlement of Sidi Yousef.

“What do you think of these islands?”

“This is my home,” Mourad said.

Like most other Tunisians he had an air of uncorrupted courtesy.

And so we sailed back to Sfax on El Loud III, and the morning light floated a russet color across the surface of the sea, while lambs bleated on the trucks belowdecks.

In Sfax I tried to solve the problem of traveling from Tunisia to Morocco, without stopping in Algeria. I was given the name of a company in Tunis which acted as the agent for a Libyan ship, the Garyounis. This ship took both passengers and cargo and sailed from Tripoli to Tunis to Casablanca. I did not really want to leave Tunisia. I liked it here, and now I was ready to follow all the advice I had been given, about seeing the desert and the cave dwellers at Matmata, and Tozeur, and the Jews in Djerba, and the nomads, and the camel sellers, and the weavers, and the mystics who fondled scorpions. I called the agent. He said the Garyounis would be leaving in a few days for Casablanca.

I picked up my sixty-dollar kilim from Ahmed Khlif in the medina of Sfax, in his narrow shop at the Souk des Etoffes. I took the train back to Tunis.

Tunis was busy with two important events—the Carthage Film Festival and a decisive soccer match, Tunisia against Togo, to determine which country would qualify to play in the Africa Cup. I watched the match on television at the cafe in a backstreet, with about two hundred people, men and boys. They were attentive, there were no outbursts, only murmurs. Tunisia was ahead, one to nothing for most of the match, and towards the end, when Togo kicked the equalizer, not a word was spoken. The only interruption came when the strangled cry of a muezzin gave his call to prayers. A number of people got down, faced east, and prayed—five minutes of this—then back to the match, which ended in a draw.

The Carthage Film Festival was promoted under the slogan “A Hundred Years of Tunisian Cinema!” This seemed to me as unlikely a claim as the centenary of Israeli railways that was being celebrated when I was in Haifa. Never mind. I pretended to be a movie critic and went to two of the movies. In spite of the name of the festival, the movies were shown in Tunis. Most had been made in the Mediterranean; France, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Egypt and Palestine were represented. There were ten films from Turkey. The rest were from places as distant as Brazil and China.

My interest was the Mediterranean. I chose two films about places I had been. But I had not been able to penetrate the countries to this extent. Couvre Feu (Curfew), directed by a Palestinian, Raschid Masharaoui, was an insider’s account of simple bravery and defiance against great odds, the stone throwers of the Intifada facing machine guns of the Israeli soldiers.

Throughout the Mediterranean, the most-quoted atrocity of Bosnia was not a list of the number dead but rather the deliberate shelling by the Serbs of the ancient bridge over the river at Mostar. The destruction of the bridge symbolized everything that was wicked about the war—the stupidity and meanness in the conflict, and all the atavistic cruelty that was still present in the Mediterranean. In Bosna (Bosnia) directed by Bernard Henry I saw the bridge destroyed—and much else. This documentary showed the carnage of the war, the pitiful merciless slaughter, the inert corpses by the roadside, the blood and broken glass and decapitations; the mass graves, weeping children, terrified adults and brutalized soldiers—snow, rain and ruin. But no atrocity in the film stirred the audience more than the shells—about a dozen of them altogether—falling on the bridge itself, which had stood for five hundred years, finally falling to pieces into the river. The people in the theater gasped, there were pitiful groans, and when the lights came up there were tears in their eyes.

I went back to my hotel after the film about Bosnia and listened to the news on my shortwave radio. “Serbian forces are advancing on Bihac to reclaim territory they lost to the Bosnians in the past two weeks,” I heard. The casualty figures for the dead and wounded and missing were given, and the news that Sarajevo (which I had seen shelled in the year-old documentary Bosna just an hour ago) was being shelled again.

The weather was rainy and cold. I was eager to move on. I returned to Mr. Habib, the agent for the shipping lines.

“We are waiting for notification,” the agent said. He was friendly. He spoke English well. He said that it would be an interesting voyage.

I said, “As it’s a Libyan ship I think I should tell you that I am an American.”

“No problem. I’ll talk to the captain, just in case anyone thinks of doing something stupid to you.”

I kept trying. But three days later Mr. Habib was still waiting for notification, and there was no word about the Garyounis.

18

To Morocco on the Ferry Boughaz

This lakelike sea with such a tame coast had so habituated me to sunshine and mediocre weather that it did not occur to me to stick my face into the wind today and fathom its force. Surely the whole point about picturesque landscapes was that they were not dangerous? But if I had simply wetted my finger and held it up I would have known a great deal. As the rain and wind increased, I waited for the Garyounis to take me to Morocco. I saw only that the wind was lifting the flags higher and straighter than normal. A seasoned Mediterranean sailor would have seen more muscle in that wind than I had, sensed something darker and chillier, a turbulence from the Levant, a dolphin-torn and gong-tormented sea. It was the weather we had been having for a week. Mediterranean weather usually came and went. But this did not go.

One day, Mr. Habib said, “The Garyounis was put into dry dock. The Libyans are sending a different ship. It does not take passengers. Therefore, you will have to go some other time.”

I muttered an insincere curse. This was not good weather for the three-day voyage to the far side of Morocco. It was not good for the short voyage to Sicily. There were no other ships to Morocco, and I had vowed not to take any planes. The Marseilles ferry was leaving next week. I decided to make my way by train through Italy to France, where I might find a ferry to Morocco. It was a very long detour, but what was the hurry?

My travels soon became what an exasperated English person would call a bugger’s muddle. Refusing to leave the ground, I traveled from Sicily to Naples again, to Rome; and north by train to Livorno and Pisa. Crossing from Nice to Corsica I had missed this section of coast, which was dramatic, and dignified by rocky cliffs and blasted by the wind. This was one of the loveliest coastlines in the entire Mediterranean. It was another place that I would be happy to return to. I consoled myself by thinking that on the Garyounis I would have missed it—the houses clustered on the great plunging rock cliffs of seaside Cinqueterre, the villas and precipices south of Antignano, the enormous blocks of marble piled at the station of Massa, near Carrara, which had supplied raw material to almost every Italian sculptor.

On the coast, all the way from Chiavari—where I was proud to have relatives—to Portofino and Rapallo and Genoa, the cliffs were too rugged to be vulgarly modernized, too sharply angled to serve as the foundations for condominiums. They had that in common with the cliffs of the Costa Brava in Spain, and the seaside heights of Croatia, and sections of the Turkish coast, and North Cyprus. But wherever the Mediterranean coast was flat it was overbuilt; the low-lying shores had been deemed suitable for hotels and mass tourism, and had been destroyed.

The rarest sight in the Mediterranean was surf, but at Imperia, Porto Maurízio, approaching Ventimiglia, I saw six-foot rollers dumping foam onto the beach. Something unusual was happening in the Mediterranean this week; and still the wind was blowing from the east.

There were six older American couples in the train, bewildered by the weather, burdened by seventeen heavy suitcases. They were from Jackson, Mississippi, and they soon became embroiled with some Spanish students in a fuss about seats. The blustering turned to abuse. It was a blessing that these gentle people were not aware of what was being said to them in Spanish. They were the sort of patient Americans whom I had seen being taken advantage of and overcharged all over the Mediterranean. It did not matter that they said Antibes as though it rhymed with “rib-eyes,” and pressed their faces to the window and chanted “Monny Carla.” After all, no one else here could have pronounced the grand Mississippi name Yoknapatawpha.

“You’re a yella-dog Democrat,” Billy Mounger said to me, concluding—correctly—that I would vote for a yellow dog before I’d vote for a Republican.

I said, “I think I’d vote for a yellow dog before I’d vote for a Democrat, too.”

He laughed at that. He said, “We’re yella-dog Republicans. We’re probably the most right-wing people you probably ever met.”

“Go on, then, shock me, Billy,” I said.

“I’m chairman of the Phil Gramm for President Committee.”

“That is pretty shocking.” Mr. Gramm claimed to be the most conservative candidate of all the Republicans.

“That ain’t the story,” Mounger said. “One of our guys back there is against Phil Gramm. Says to me, ‘I don’t want no oriental damn woman as the First Lady in the White House.’ ”

Mrs. Gramm, born and raised in Hawaii, was of Korean descent.

“You said it, Billy, he’s one of your guys.”

They all got off at Cannes, rhyming it with “pans,” and I stayed aboard, rattled down the track to Marseilles, where I was told there were no ferries to Morocco. I got into my berth and slept until Port-Bou, the frontier, changed trains at dawn, and at Barcelona got another train to Valencia. Twenty-six hours ago I had left Rome.

Gently rocking around the edge of the Mediterranean once again, in the opposite direction, this Spanish train stopped at the town of Tortosa. It was exactly opposite—that is to say, at the far end of the Mediterranean—from the Syrian town of Tartus, where I had been over a month ago. Tartus had once been given the name of Tortosa by the Crusader Knights. We passed Xilxes, which, printed boldly on its station signboard, had the appearance of an obscure Roman numeral. I stayed only long enough at the lovely station at Valencia to buy some oranges and a ticket through the fields of fruit trees, past a small chapellike building lettered Urinario, to Alicante. I would have continued, but I was too late for the Málaga train, so I slept there and went to Málaga the next day.

At Málaga I bought a ticket on the ferry to Melilla, the Spanish enclave in Morocco; then I went out and had dinner of local pickled eels.

“Where are you from in America?” the bartender asked me.

“Boston.”

“The Boston Strangler.” El Estrangulador del Boston.

“That’s me.”

The ferry Ciudad de Badajoz left Málaga at one in the afternoon for Melilla. It was a gray windy day, and only about twenty of us were making the trip. Most of them were Moroccans, the men looking like Smurfs in djellabas, the women like nuns in habits and hoods, traveling with gunnysacks for luggage. A handful of Spaniards had cars or trucks down below. It was a large ferry, five stories from its Plimsoll line to its top deck. I regretted that I had not been able to take one like it from Tunisia, but anyway I would be in Melilla in seven hours.

Leaving Málaga’s outer harbor, the ferry pitched and began sailing aslant the wind, the shoulder of the easterly hard against its port beam. Seasickness bags were distributed by the crew. The Moroccans used theirs, and some of them could be seen tottering along, bearing these little sacks to the deck where they were jettisoned over the rail. This was a lesson to me. After a year and a half of glaring at the Mediterranean and writing “tame,” “lakelike,” “a vast pond,” “sloshing waves,” “almost featureless,” “wearing a dumb green look of stagnation,” and so forth—heaping abuse on the Mediterranean the way you might insult someone lazily snoring on a sofa—the sea had come alive and was howling in my face, the way someone lazily snoring in a sofa would react if unfairly abused.

It was not a long swell and a distant fetch between waves, but rough irregular waves and a strong wind—a sea that was more confused and noisy than many oceans I had seen. The storm was not an illusion. This large ferry was tossing in it like a chamber pot.

“Windy,” I said to a man at the rail.

The seasick passengers inside had made me feel queasy and had driven me outdoors.

“It is the Levanter,” he said. I had not heard that word spoken before, though I had read it in books about the Mediterranean. It was the weather-changing wind from the east that could blow at gale force. But I had only known sunny or gray or rainy weather; no storms, nothing to interrupt my plans.

“Going to Melilla?”

“I hope so.”

“Why ‘hope’?”

“Because this weather is very bad.”

He looked worried. It had not occurred to me that the wind was anything but a nuisance. How could it be a danger? This was the Mediterranean, after all. Yes, I had read of the severe storms in The Odyssey, but that epic was famous for its hyperbole.

“This is a large ship,” I said.

“Some ships are not large enough for the Levanter,” he said.

To change the subject I said, “Isn’t Melilla a bit like Gibraltar? It is a little piece of Spain in Morocco, the way Gibraltar is a little piece of Britain in Spain.”

“That is true. It is the same. But we still want Gibraltar.”

“Maybe the Moroccans want Melilla.”

“Yes, but so do we. And Gibraltar too.”

He laughed, seeing the contradiction, but refusing to concede.

It was cold on deck, and though there was wind but no rain the deck was wet with spray and spoondrift. The wind had raised the sea and lowered the sky. The visibility was poor. The smack of the waves against the ship was as loud and violent as though the hull were being struck with metal, the sound like the clapper in a cracked bell.

The man’s name was Antonio. He was from Mijas. I told him that I had been to a bullfight in Mijas over a year ago. I had found the whole thing generally disgusting and brutal, but in the hope of eliciting an opinion about bull fever I refrained from telling him my true feelings. Besides, this storm did not create an atmosphere that was conducive to the free flow of ideas.

“Mijas is becoming very famous,” he said. “The young matadors start there, like the ones you saw, and they soon make a reputation.”

“But the most famous matador in Spain is from Colombia, isn’t that so?”

“No. The best one now—the real hero—is Jesulín de Ubrique. Every man and woman loves him—every girl wants to meet him.”

“Ubrique is near here, isn’t it?”

“Down the coast,” Antonio said. He gasped and clutched the rail as a wave crashed against the deck below. He raised his voice. “And another one is the son of the famous El Cordobes, though El Cordobes refuses to say that he is his son.”

“What’s the son’s name?” I shouted over the wind.

“Manuel Diaz el Cordobes, and he is crazy like his father. More crazy! His father used to play with the bull, but this Manuel Diaz puts his face against the bull’s face. He is double crazy!”

“I have a theory that Spanish people prefer football to the corrida.”

“Not true. We love the corrida more.”

“But it’s not a sport.”

“No. It is a spectacle,” Antonio said.

In the course of our little conversation the weather had grown much worse. Spray flew into the windows and salt grains frosted the glass. Sea-water ran across the upper decks, and the lower decks were awash. Now and then you hear about a storm sinking a ferry, because they are not built for storms. But you don’t remember those news items until you are on a ferry, in a serious storm.

“I have lived around here my whole life. I cross to Morocco a lot. I have never seen it this bad,” Antonio said.

“We ought to be there soon.”

“No. It’s many hours away.”

“It’s only a seven-hour trip, and we’ve been sailing for five.”

“Going slowly,” he said.

“Maybe the weather is better in Melilla.”

“With the wind in this direction it will be worse. The Levanter blows against it.”

The fury of the sea, the height of the waves, the screaming wind—they all defied me, author of the words “junk waves,” “mush-burgers,” “slop and plop of the Mediterranean.” It was a maddened sea and this huge ferry was having trouble negotiating it. From the hold came the sound of clanking chains, the creak of cars and trucks, the rolling clatter of steel barrels and the rattle of loose bolts on the steel gangways.

Antonio said, “I am afraid about my car. I think it will crash into another one.”

I stayed on deck. True, it was cold and windy on deck. But it was stifling in the cargo hold. It was nauseating in the lounges. Now and then someone would stagger out to the deck to practice projectile vomiting. I held on, pressed into a corner, tried to read an old fluttering copy of the Guardian I had found in Málaga.

I thought: When we get to Melilla this will just seem like a bad dream.

Soon after, as it was growing dark, the captain made an announcement: “Because of the wind and the poor conditions we are not proceeding to Melilla. We are returning to Málaga.”

The vast squarish bulk of the ferry turned clumsily into the wind, twisting as it went, the sea-spray flying, and then the vessel was in full retreat from the storm.

The phlegmatic Spaniards, used to bad news, took this well. The Muslim Moroccans, contrary to all the teachings of Islam, took the announcement badly and shouted and threw things and argued and slammed the hatchways. Their children cried. The menfolk ranted. The women sulked. They did not want to go back to Spain.

Hours later, in darkness, we were back in Málaga. I was frustrated by the return, but I was also relieved. The captain knew these seas; he would not willingly abandon the voyage if he had confidence in his ship. So he had feared for the ship. The port was closed. All further ferries were canceled.

Antonio gave me a lift to the bus station. He said, “These Levanters usually last three days.”

Perhaps there would be more of it. My response was to go in full retreat myself, back to where I had begun my trip. It was only an hour and a half from Algeciras to Ceuta, the southern Pillar of Hercules. I was disappointed that I had not been able to sail from Tunisia, but it was interesting, was it not, that I had been forced to go all the way back to the Straits of Gibraltar to make my crossing? It had not really spoiled my plans, because—always improvising—I had never had much of a plan.

The coast was stormy all the way to Algeciras. This time Torremolinos was wild and windblown, and so was Torreblanca, the sea gray and the heavy surf smashing thick suds onto the deserted beach. I was heading back to where I had begun, and the signs went from Spanish, to bilingual, to English as we traveled south. Then it was Liquor Shop, Property Brokers, Video Rental, Hairdresser, Music Cafe, Insurance Broker, Real English Breakfast, the Sun on the newspaper racks, Iron Monger’s Shop, Legal Advice.

This was the sort of coast that had inspired the witty last line in Harry Ritchie’s book about the Costa del Sol, Here We Go. Looking up from the deranged coast of hooligans and package tourists, and seeing the sunset on the mountains, the author reflects, “Spain. It looked a beautiful country. Someday, I thought, I really must go there.”

To Fuengirola again—Everything for Your Pets, Real British Pub—and then on to Marbella via trailer parks and the hills of white condos, beside the white raging Mediterranean, reminding every frail dwelling on shore that this old sea, the actual water that had been described on the first page of the Bible, was not to be underestimated, and nature was greater than anything man-made. Good-bye to your beach umbrellas and your ridiculous signs and your awnings and your gimcrack fences; good-bye to your condos and your haciendas; good-bye to the very shoreline of fragile soil. Nature was also the Sunderer of Delights and the Destroyer of Dreams.

The storm gave the sea a symmetry I had never seen in it before, the order of sets advancing on the shore from the horizon. These waves pounded the beaches and the promenades, and scoured the dark sand, and dragged trash away.

Seventeen months after leaving Algeciras in sunshine, on the road to Morocco the long way, I arrived back, in a high wind. There is something about a seaside town on a stormy night. This was not any old wind, this was the Levanter, and the official weather station in the port of Algeciras clocked its gusts at ninety-three miles per hour (150 kilometers per hour). On the Beaufort scale seventy-two miles per hour is the strongest wind for which there is a designation. It is a hurricane, number 12. Most of the time the Levanter was blowing in the 50s and 60s—gale force, occasionally rising to storm force, number 11. This was the third day of the storm. The hurricane gusts had knocked over light poles and put Algeciras in darkness.

The wind was news. Like Málaga and Melilla, the port of Algeciras had shut down. So had Tangier. So had Ceuta. This entire end of the Mediterranean was closed. In Algeciras, traffic had accumulated at the ferry landing. People were sleeping in the lobbies of the terminal, they picnicked beside their cars. There were few vacant rooms to be had at the hotels, and this normally quiet town was full of people, waiting for the ferries to leave.

Just down the coast at Tarifa the loose sand and gravel had blown off the beach, leaving a hard smooth packed-down surface. One of the proverbs relating to the violent Levanter wind was that of the Portuguese sailors: “When the Levanter blows, the stones move” (Quando con Levante chiove, las pedras muove). Along the coast road plastic bags were plastered against the sheep fences; billboards had blown down, so had some trees and power lines. In the narrow backstreets of Algeciras obscure objects rose up and smacked me in the face. The palms on the promenade were noisy, their fronds smashing. Large metal signs were knocked from buildings and clattered into the street.

The other thing about constant wind, which is one of the worst forms of bad weather, is that it can drive you mental. It is more deranging than rain, a greater nuisance than snow; it is invisible, it pushes, it pulls, it snatches your clothes, it twists your head, and finally your mind. That night and the next day passed. The wind did not cease. It seemed odd to go to sleep hearing the wind blowing hard, and to wake up with it still blowing. On my second day in Algeciras it seemed to be blowing harder.

“I’ve been to Morocco twenty-three times,” a bird-watcher named Gullick told me. “That’s forty-six crossings. Only one of them was canceled—New Year’s Eve, out of Tangier.”

Gullick was conducting a birding expedition to Morocco. His Range Rover was hung up on the quay, his passengers were becoming agitated.

“We’re all birders,” the only woman in the group told me.

Her name was Debbie Shearwater.

“That’s an amazing coincidence, for a bird-watcher to have a bird’s name.”

“I changed it, from Millichap, for personal reasons,” she said. “But also I hated having to spell Millichap all the time.”

“Everyone spells Shearwater right, then?”

She laughed. “No! They call me Clearwater, Stillwater, Sharewater—”

“That flag’s not flapping as strong as it was yesterday,” one of the other bird-watchers said, looking up at the flag on the Boughaz (“The Straits”).

But it was, it was whipping hard.

“Where I come from,” Debbie Shearwater said, “a wind like this would be news. It would be on the front page.”

Later that day, Gullick proudly passed around an item from El Pais about the Levanter. The facts were that the port had been closed for two and half days. The gusts had been clocked at 150 kilometers per hour. There were fifteen-foot waves in the gong-tormented Straits. Some fishing boats had been lost. The other news concerned the large number of people waiting in Algeciras—travelers, truckers, Moroccans, Spaniards. These travelers milled in the town like displaced people, unable to move on.

One hotel in Algeciras was fairly empty—it was the best one, located at the edge of town, the Hotel Reina Cristina. I was staying near the ferry landing, so that I could watch the progress of the ships as well as the storm, but one day I walked out to the Reina Cristina to kill time. This hotel had a pool, and gardens, and was surrounded by trees, and was more like a villa in the country than a hotel in this port town. On the lobby wall were the bronzed signatures of some of the hotel’s more illustrious guests: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, July 20, 1937; Cole Porter, 1956; Lord Halifax; Estes Kefauver, 1957; Alfonso XIII; Orson Welles.

W. B. Yeats spent the winter of 1927–28 at the Reina Cristina. He had gone to Spain to recover from a bad cold. While nursing his cold, Yeats wrote a poem, “At Algeciras—A Meditation upon Death,” which begins with a pretty portrait of the straits:

The heron-billed pale cattle-birds

That feed on some foul parasite

Of the Moroccan flocks and herds

Cross the narrow Straits to light

In the rich midnight of the garden trees

Till the dawn break upon those mingled seas.

Back in town my more optimistic bird-watcher was saying again, “I don’t think that flag is flapping as hard as it was this morning.”

Gypsies, Germans, Moroccans, Africans, sailors, families, small children, motorcyclists, dogs, truck drivers, bus passengers—everyone was waiting. Some were drunk. Many slept in their vehicles. Backpackers lay on the floor of the terminal in their sleeping bags. And people were still arriving by car in Algeciras to take the ferry to Tangier or Ceuta.

It was just over an hour to Ceuta, about two hours to Tangier. But now three days had passed without any ferries. And still the wind blew. I took the bus to Tarifa, to kill time. It was a pleasant little town buffeted by wind. Spray blew from one side of the harbor to the other, drenching the bronze statue erected to “Men of the Sea.”

The wind gave me a headache that would not go away. It made me irritable. It woke me in the middle of the night and made me listen to it damaging the town and scraping at the window. During the day it made me feel grubby. It hurt my eyes. It exhausted me.

Algeciras was such a small town and I was there such a long time that I kept seeing the same people. I got to know some of them. The ceramic seller with the terra-cotta piggy banks, the many Moroccans selling leather jackets. The dwarf selling lottery tickets. The scores of agencies selling ferry tickets; the fruit sellers and market butchers and fishmongers. Some born-again Christians who had once been hippies ran a cafe that offered Bible study with its sandwiches; I got to know them. The Indian watch salesman who had lived in Spain for ten years, “and no Spanish person ever said to me, ‘You fucking Indian,’ like they did to me in London—or four or five men come up to me in the tube train and say things. Spanish are good people”—I met him, too.

And there was Juana. She stood on the sidewalk near Bar El Vino. She was twenty, or perhaps younger. But a serious drug habit made her look much older—haggard, red-eyed, wild-haired. The wind tore at her hair and snatched at her skirt as she clutched her jacket and searched passersby with her pockmarked and pleading face. She was cold and impatient, and sometimes plainly desperate.

“Señor—hola!”

Most of them hurried past. She was harmless, but there was something dangerous and witchlike about her appearing from the shadows beside Bar El Vino in this wind.

Juana became a familiar face, and so I usually said hello to her.

This friendliness encouraged her. “Fucky-fucky?”

“No, thank you.”

“Three thousand.” That was twenty-five dollars.

“No, thank you.”

“Anything you want to do, I will do.”

“No, thank you.”

“The money includes the room at the hotel!”

“No, thank you.”

“It is cheap!”

And following me down the street, bucking the wind, she would be summoned back by a big growly-voiced woman, calling out, “Juana!”

It was too windy for me to read. I couldn’t think in this wind. Listening to music was out of the question, and so was conversation. After dinner I watched TV in the neighborhood bar, and it seemed as though I had begun to live the life of a lower-middle-class resident of Algeciras. Crocodile Dundee was on one night, dubbed in Spanish. We watched that. We watched wrestling and football. One night there was a bullfight. A matador mounted on a horse wounded a bull, then rode back and forth poking the bleeding animal with a pikestaff. The bull turned and gored the horse, then flipped the horse and rider and trampled them. The matador lay motionless, next to the crumpled horse, until the bull was distracted and run through with a sword. It was possible that this ten-minute corrida produced the death of the bull, the horse and the matador.

We watched cartoons. That was what I had been reduced to by five days of Levanter wind: a middle-aged mental case sitting on a wobbly chair in the filthy Foreign Legion Bar, watching Tom and Jerry cartoons.

The Levanter was as strong on the sixth day as it had been on the first day. But there was nothing new about this. In 1854, in a book called The Mediterranean, Rear Admiral William Henry Smyth wrote, “The hardest gale of the neighborhood is the Solano or Levanter of the Gibraltar pilots … That the winds in the Straits of Gibraltar blow either from the east points or west points of the horizon (technically termed down or up) in general has been immemorially remarked; and the conformation of its coasts on both sides renders the reason palpable. Of these winds, the east is the most violent, being often the cause of much inconvenience in the bay, from its gusty flaws and eddies, besides its always being found raw and disagreeable on shore: hence Señor Ayala, Historian of Gibraltar, terms the east wind ‘The Tyrant of the Straits’ and the west their ‘Liberator.’ ”

The morning of my sixth day sickly yellow-gray clouds with shafts of dawn appeared over Gibraltar. Though from La Linea the Rock had the appearance of the Matterhorn, and from the heights of Algeciras Gibraltar seemed like a fortress, glimpsed from the port here the complicated rock looked like a mutt snuffling on a hearth rug.

“I think that flag’s starting to droop a bit,” the bird-watcher said.

He was wrong again, but that afternoon the wind did abate, and by evening it had slackened enough for the port authority to give the order to start loading the ferries. After that, everything happened quickly. The whole port came awake, people began running to their cars, gathering their children and dogs. The truckers started their engines. And Algeciras, which had been scoured by wind for six days, just slumped and lost its look of defiance. The storm was over. The town was as limp as its flag and it reassumed its guidebook description: “An ugly town of very slight interest.”

After all this, the ferry trip was an anticlimax; from Algeciras to Ceuta, the southern Pillar of Hercules, took just one hour. The pillar stood at right angles to Gibraltar. Hardly more than a hill, it was said to be Gibraltar’s “rival in antiquity if not in splendor.” Neither photogenic nor remarkable, it was upstaged by its geraniums, another two-star relic that made me reflect again that what matters is the journey, not the arrival.

That glimpse of the other Pillar of Hercules should have meant the end of my grand tour. But I had waited so long to get to Morocco I decided to stay in Tangier. Besides, David Herbert had just died, at the age of eighty-six. “End of an era,” the obituaries said, writing of his frivolity: “He became the toast of Tangerine society. In that ‘oriental Cheltenham’ (as Beaton called it) he was often to be found arranging flowers for one of Barbara Hutton’s rooftop parties in the casbah.” I had been urged to look him up. “He’s awful—you’ll love him.” He was colorful, he wore a wig, his sister was lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mum, he had known everyone who lived in or had ever visited the place, and every pasha and pederast in Sodom-sur-Mer.

David Herbert’s father was Lord Herbert, elder son of the fifteenth earl of Pembroke and twelfth Earl of Montgomery—he was also bankrupt. The old man had inherited Wilton, “perhaps the most beautiful house in England.” As second son, David Herbert had no title, though to irritate his brother he called himself Lord Herbert. He was known as the “Uncrowned Queen of Tangier.”

I rode from Ceuta to Tangier with a pair of terrified tourists, a husband and wife, in a busload of Moroccans. “I’m a surgeon and my wife is an attorney,” the man said, with uncalled-for pomposity. They were from Minneapolis.

“Both those professions will come in handy here,” I said.

It was raining very hard when we entered the city, and at the Avenue d’Espagne, where it met the Rue de la Plage, the pelting drops turned the puddles mirroring the bright piled-up Medina into its own glittering reflection.

Almost at once I was set upon by four men.

“Big welcome, my friend—”

“Listen, I not a guide. I want to practice my English—”

“I am student. I show you what you want—”

“I take you to hotel—”

They followed, haranguing me, and it was hard to shake them off; but I walked resolutely in the rain as though I knew where I was going, and they dropped by the wayside. Farther on I was accosted by beggars, but the street grew steeper—Tangier is spread across several hills—and soon there was no one except the Moroccan men and women, Smurfs and nuns, their pointed hoods up against the rain and cold. I passed the Medina. Medina in Arabic means the city, and is usually the walled city in any Arab settlement; Casbah means citadel. The most convenient definition is: A medina is a walled city with many gates, both exits and entrances; a Casbah, being a fortress, has only two, an entrance and an exit.

I was headed for the Hotel El Muniria, the hotel in which William Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch, and where Jack Kerouac and others had stayed. On the way, as I stepped out of the rain into a lighted doorway to read my map, a man appeared and asked me what I was looking for. When I told him he said, “This is a hotel.” He showed me a room. It was pleasant enough and cost fifteen dollars (140 dihran), and besides my feet were wet and I really did not want to go any farther.

From the beginning of my trip I had hoped to drop in on Paul Bowles, who was as important to the cultural life of Tangier as Naguib Mahfouz was in Cairo. David Herbert had been no more than a colorful character, but Bowles had written novels that I had admired—The Sheltering Sky, and Let It Come Down and The Spider’s House. Many of his short stories I regarded as brilliant. Some of the strangest and best writers of the twentieth century had come to Tangier; Bowles had known them all, Bowles represented the city. He had known Gertrude Stein and William Burroughs and Gore Vidal and Kerouac and all the rest; he was a writer and a composer. He had translated books from Spanish and Maghrebi Arabic. Most of the world had visited. Everyone had left. Bowles remained, apparently still writing. In a world of jet travel and simple transitions, he refused to budge. He seemed to me the last exile.

“Mister Bowles is very ill,” a Moroccan told me.

It was not surprising. Bowles was in his mid-eighties. The weather was terrible—first the six-day Levanter, and now this rain. It was cold enough for me to be wearing a jacket and a sweater. I needed the radiator in my hotel room. But I dreaded Bowles’s illness too, his being sick. I did not want to pester a sick man, and it also seemed to me that any illness in this damp cold city could have serious consequences. Besides, I had no introduction to him. I did not know where he lived.

This Moroccan, Mohammed, who claimed to know Bowles, said, “He has no telephone.”

Would he deliver a letter for me? He said yes. I wrote a note, telling him that I was in Tangier, and asking him whether he was well enough to have a visitor. I handed it over to Mohammed for delivery.

“We meet tomorrow at three o’clock,” Mohammed said. “I will tell you the answer.”

The rain continued to crackle all night on the cobblestones, blackening the narrow streets of the Kasbah, and emptying the Medina of pedestrians or else forcing them to shelter in doorways, and giving the city an air of mystery: in the rain Tangier was gleaming and unreadable. In such bad weather all Moroccans pulled their hood up over their head and it looked like a city of monks.

I could understand why certain foreigners might gravitate to Tangier. It was full of appealing paradoxes. The greatest was that it seemed so lawless and yet was so safe. It was also superficially exotic but not at all distant (I could see solid, hardworking Spain from the top floor of my hotel). Tangier had an air of the sinister and the illicit, yet it was actually rather sedate. Except for the touts, the local people were tolerant towards strangers, not to say utterly indifferent. Almost everything was inexpensive, and significantly, everything was available—not just the smuggled comforts of Europe but the more rarefied pleasures of this in-between place, that was neither Africa nor Europe.

If you decided to stay in Tangier there were other people just like you, writing books, composing music, chasing local boys or foreign girls. The city was visually interesting but undemanding. I realized that as I waited for a response from Paul Bowles. It was an easy city to kill time in. Its religion was relaxed and its history was anecdotal. The rough real Morocco was behind it, beyond the Rif Mountains. A foreigner might have to be careful there. But everyone belonged in Tangier. “Cosmopolitan, frowsy, familiar Tangier,” Edith Wharton wrote in her travel book In Morocco (1925), “that every tourist has visited for the last forty years.”

From 1923 until 1956 Tangier had been officially an International Zone, run by the local representatives of nine countries, including the USA. But even its absorption into Morocco at independence in 1956 did not change Tangerine attitudes nor its louche culture. In addition to the Casbah and the drugs, and the catamites that hung around the cafes, Tangier had the lovely Anglican cathedral of St. Andrews and the Grand Mosque. It seemed to me not Moroccan but Mediterranean—a place that had closer links to the other cities on the Mediterranean than it did to its own country. The great Mediterranean cities had much in common, Alexandria and Venice, Marseilles and Tunis, and even smaller places like Cagliari and Palma and Split. Their spirit was mongrel and Mediterranean.

I met Mohammed at the Hotel El-Minzah, one of the landmarks of Tangiers, an elegant place but untypical in being rather expensive.

“Mr. Paul Bowles is ill,” he said.

“You told me that yesterday. Is he sicker now?”

“Perhaps,” Mohammed said.

“Did you deliver my letter?”

“Yes.”

“No answer?”

“You can ask Mr. Paul Bowles.”

“And how will I do that?”

“You can meet him.”

The problem was finding him. And it was odd that everyone knew him and yet no one could say exactly where he lived. Even odder was the fact that he had been living in the same apartment block for almost forty years. He did not get out much. He had sought exile in Tangier; he had also sought exile in his apartment. Mohammed knew the name of the building in which Bowles lived, and the street, but no one seemed to recognize these names. My taxi driver had to ask directions. The street had been renamed—it was no longer Imam Kastellani. The building had no number. It was about a mile from the center of Tangier, in what counted as a suburb. And it was not much of a building—four nondescript stories, you entered by the back, and the ground floor was occupied by two shops.

A small girl playing in the foyer told me in French, “The American Bowles is upstairs in number twenty—the fourth floor.”

I went up and rang the bell and waited. I rang it four times, standing in the semidarkness of the hallway. Except for the jangling of the bell, there was no other sound inside. The afternoon was cold and damp, the building smelled gloomily of stewed meat. I thought: If I am spared, if I attain the age of eighty-five, I do not want to live in a place like this. Give me sunshine.

“One time I visited Bowles and when I entered his apartment he was being thrown into the air by an Arab,” my friend Ted Morgan had told me.

Historian and biographer (Maugham, Churchill and FDR, as well as William Burroughs), Morgan had lived in Tangier in his previous incarnation as Sanche de Gramont. His descriptions of Tangier in his Burroughs biography, Literary Outlaw, had rekindled my desire to visit the city, which he regarded as lurid but fun. But what was this about Bowles being thrown into the air?

“The Arab was muscular and had a very serious expression, and he was bouncing Bowles the way you might throw a baby in the air to make it laugh. That was what struck me. Bowles was giggling madly as he went up and down.”

But there was no answer from Bowles’s apartment. I turned to buzz the elevator when the door of number twenty opened and a dark and rather tough-looking Moroccan in a black leather jacket stood facing me.

“Yes?”

I said, “I would like to see Mr. Bowles.”

The Arab stared at me. Why had it taken so long for him to answer the door?

I said, “I want to ask him if he received my letter.”

It seemed a lame excuse, but the man nodded. “Wait here. I will ask him.”

He had left the door ajar, so I could see into the shadowy apartment, to a room with cushions and low chairs, a sort of Moroccan parlor, with shelves but not many books. There was a small kitchen to the right, a stove with a blackened kettle on it; but it was cold—nothing cooking. I nudged the door with my foot, and as I did so the Arab returned.

“You can go in,” he said. He was abrupt, neither polite nor rude. And he was strong. I could just imagine this Arab as the man in Ted Morgan’s story, tossing the distinguished writer in the air and making him giggle. The Arab vanished, leaving me to find my own way.

The parlor was dark—I could not read the titles of the few books on the shelves. Another small room beyond it was darker still, but its shadows were an effect of the brightness in the last room, where Paul Bowles lay in a brown bathrobe, on a low pallet against one wall, propped up, like a monk in a cell.

My first impression of the room was that it was very warm and very cluttered. The heat came from a hissing blowtorch attached to a gas bottle, a primitive heater shooting a bluey-orange flame at Bowles from a few feet away. The litter of small objects included notebooks and pens, as well as medicine bottles and pills, and tissues. There was an odor of camphor and eucalyptus in the air that gave it the atmosphere of a sickroom.

“Come in, come in,” Bowles said. “Yes, I know your books. Take that chair.”

He had a genteel American voice, rather soft, with one of those patrician East Coast accents that is both New York and New England—but in fact placeless, more a prep school than a regional accent.

“I’m not well at the moment. I had a blocked artery in my leg. The doctor operated immediately, and I think it worked. But here I am. I can’t walk. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to.”

Yet, apart from lying there on his pallet, he did not look ill and he certainly did not seem elderly. His face was almost boyish, his hair was white but there was a lot of it—he had the look of a parson or a schoolmaster. What he had just said was precise. He spoke carefully, sometimes ironically, and was responsive. His hearing was excellent, his mind was sharp. Only his posture—supine—and his thinness, indicated that he might be ill. Otherwise he looked like someone whom I had disturbed in his nap, which was possibly the case.

Everything he might need was within reach. He was surrounded by books and papers and medicine, by a teapot and spoons and matches; and the wall facing him was divided into shelves and cubbyholes, in which there were stacks of sweaters and scarves and manuscripts. Some of the manuscripts were typed, and others were musical scores.

On the low table near where Bowles lay there was a large metronome, and bottles of capsules and tubes of ointment, and cassette tapes and a tin of Nesquik and cough drops and a partly eaten candy bar and a crumpled letter from the William Morris Agency and another note folded and jammed into an envelope scribbled, Paul Bowles, Tanger, Maroc, a vague address but it had obviously found him, as I had, with little more information than that.

That metronome reminded me of something Bowles said in a letter to Henry Miller. The letter is in his collection In Touch, and it relates to his choosing to live in Tangier. “I agree with you about doing things slowly,” he wrote. “Now that I think of it, it’s one of the reasons why I’m still here. One can set one’s life metronome at the speed that seems convenient for living. In the States the constant reminder that time is passing, that one must be quick, removes all the savor of being in the midst of living.”

Blackout curtains covered the window. That impressed me. You would not know in this small back room whether it was night or day, nor what country you were in.

“I am very sorry to disturb you,” I said. “It was kind of you to see me. I won’t stay long.”

He had blue piercing eyes. His thin hands were folded over his brown robe, and some papers lay on his lap. The blowtorch hissed and fizzed.

“I’m glad you came,” he said.

“But I can see you’re working. I know I’m interrupting.”

“I wish I could get up,” Bowles said. “I’m doing a translation—Roderigo Rey Rosa, a Guatemalan. And I have some work to do on a piece of music. What brings you to Tangier?”

“I’ve been traveling in the Mediterranean, trying to make some sense of it. Going to places I’ve never been before,” I said. “But you’ve been here since—when?”

“I first came here in 1931,” Bowles said, tugging his robe closer to his throat. “I was planning to go to Villefranche. Gertrude Stein said, ‘Go to Tangier.’ I didn’t know Tangier from Algiers. She had been here. She was very interested in a local painter.”

Gertrude Stein—hadn’t she also sent Sir Francis Rose and Dorothy Carrington to Corsica? And Robert Graves to Mallorca? And Hemingway to Spain? My impression of her now was of a big bossy lesbian, queening it in her salon in Paris, directing literary traffic, sending writers to unlikely destinations in the Mediterranean.

“I came with Aaron Copland,” Bowles said. “He hated it. There is often drumming at night here—you must have heard it. Aaron couldn’t sleep. He used to hear these drums and say, ‘The natives are on the warpath.’ He was very worried. He went away, but I stayed.”

“But you must have traveled a great deal. I love your Mexican stories, especially ‘Pastor Dow at Tacaté.’ Pastor Dow and his wind-up phonograph, playing jazz so that the Indians will stay and listen to his sermon.”

“I was in Mexico from ’36 until—when was Pearl Harbor?”—I reminded him—“Yes, until 1941,” he said. And he smiled. “My favorite part of ‘Pastor Dow’ is the little girl with the small alligator dressed up as a doll.”

“Have you done any traveling lately?”

“I went to Madrid last June to hear a performance of my music.”

“What about the United States—do you have a hometown?”

“New York is my hometown, if New York can be called a hometown,” Bowles said. “But I haven’t been back to America for twenty-seven years. I’m not afraid of flying. It’s just that it’s a lot of trouble—all the delays and waiting. And you can only bring one suitcase. I liked traveling in the great days, by ship, when I could bring half a dozen trunks—two of them might be filled with books. Now that is impossible.”

“How long has this been home for you?”

“I moved to this apartment in 1957, if that’s what you mean.”

“I meant Tangier.”

“Years,” Bowles said. “I had a house in Sri Lanka for a while. But I like it here. I like Islamic countries. It’s very corrupt here, but not as corrupt as some of these Central American countries.”

“Has it changed you, living here so long?”

“Living here, among Muslims, I suppose I’ve become more patient and fatalistic,” Bowles said. “You have no control over things, so what can you do? Muslims live their faith, they are seldom hypocrites. But hypocrisy is part of Christianity.”

“What is it about Tangier that attracts so many foreigners?”

He shrugged. The question did not provoke him. He had perhaps heard it ten thousand times. He said, “They don’t stay. The Beats came here twice, first in ’57, and then in ’61. Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg.”

“And William Burroughs?” I said, prompting him.

“Burroughs was here,” Bowles said. “For a long time he didn’t know where he was. Then he was writing Naked Lunch. He’d finish a sheet of foolscap and drop it on the floor. Allen gathered them and put them in order.”

It was well known that Bowles kept his distance from the Beats. These people were simply passing through. But Bowles was a respectable exile—superficially, at least. He was married, for one thing. Jane Bowles was another famous figure of Tangier. Her novel Two Serious Ladies was one of the strangest books I had ever read; accomplished, but odd. They kept an alligator as a pet. They had no children. Jane was frankly lesbian and towards the end of her life had been confined to a wheelchair. Daniel Farson wrote in his biography of Francis Bacon, “She drank; he preferred drugs like majoun. She called herself, with self-lacerating cruelty, ‘Crippie the Kike dyke.’ ” Bacon said Jane “died in a madhouse in Málaga, it must have been the worst thing in the world. Looked after by nuns, can you imagine anything more horrible?”

“Sex, for Bowles, appears to have been an embarrassment rather than a relief or a consummation of more delicate feelings,” the poet Iain Finlayson was quoted as saying in Farson’s book. “His fondness for young men can perhaps be better viewed as somewhat pedagogic and paternal.”

But that was obviously the past—and probably the distant past. He seemed to me a man who masked all his feelings; he had a glittering eye, but a cold gaze. He seemed at once preoccupied, knowledgeable, worldly, remote, detached, vain, skeptical, eccentric, self-sufficient, indestructible, egomaniacal, and hospitable to praise. He was like almost every other writer I had known in my life.

Talking about the Beats, Bowles mentioned Allen Ginsberg. “Ginsberg is a rabbi manqué,” he said. “He looks like a professor of chemistry. I read Howl. I didn’t love it. I read Kaddish, his next, and liked it more.”

“What about Naked Lunch?”

“Burroughs had a sense of humor,” Bowles said. “No jokes in the others.”

“What do you read for pleasure?”

“Recently I reread Victory. It is very sinister when those three men show up. And Passage to India. I reread that. I didn’t like it as much as the first time.”

“You said a moment ago that you had a place in Sri Lanka,” I said.

“It was an island,” Bowles said. “I loved it. I happened to be visiting the Duke of Pembroke at Wilton—”

“David Herbert’s father,” I said.

“Yes, and I met Sybil Colfax. I told them I wanted to go somewhere warm. They suggested Ceylon. It was an awful trip on a Polish ship. I went to Colombo and then down to Galle and then on to this island. It was small, not more than an acre, but covered with wonderful plants that a Frenchman had brought from all over the world. When the island was put up for sale I wired my bank and bought it.”

And now in this small hot room, with the shades drawn, he was on another island. No living space could have been smaller than this back room where he obviously lived and worked; he ate here, he wrote here, he slept here. His books, his music, his medicine. His world had shrunk to these walls. But that was merely the way it seemed. It was another illusion. His world was within his mind, and his imagination was vast.

I said I ought to be going. He said, “You’re welcome to stay,” and opened a flat tobacco can and took out a hand-rolled cigarette and offered me one.

“Go on. It’s a kif cigarette,” he said. Kif was marijuana, majoun was hashish jam. He added, “I always have my tea at four. And look, it’s almost five-thirty.”

We puffed away, Bowles and I, and now I recognized one of the odors in the room that earlier I had not been able to put a name to. We smoked in silence for a while, and then my scalp tightened and a glow came on in my brain and behind my eyes.

“I take it for health effect,” Bowles said. “They should legalize it, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. “I was going to bring you a bottle of wine.”

“I don’t drink. Next time bring me chocolates.”

We kept puffing, companionably, saying nothing. Then I saw what Bowles’s real strength was: he was stubborn. People came and went. Bowles stayed. People started and abandoned their symphonies and novels. Bowles finished his own. People got sick and neglected their work. Bowles took to his bed and kept working. His life was a masterpiece of non-attachment, of a stubborn refusal to become involved in anyone else’s passions. I could just imagine his blue eyes narrowing and his thin lips saying, I’m not moving.

Bowles said, “People come every day. There are film and TV people. The équipe take over. Some Germans stayed for eleven days and dropped food and sandwiches everywhere. Some people want me to sign their books. The ones with the most chutzpah say to me, ‘Since we were in Tangier we didn’t want to leave until we saw what you looked like.’ ”

“I suppose because you keep to yourself, people seek you out.”

But another reason that people sought him out was that he had no telephone.

“I work all the time,” Bowles said. “Malraux said to me, ‘Never let yourself become a public monument. If you do, people will piss on you.’ ”

“That’s good.”

Bowles leaned over, snatched at the blackout curtains, missed, and then gathered his bathrobe again.

“Is it dark?”

“It must be—it’s after seven,” I said. “I ought to be going.”

“I don’t know whether I’ll go anywhere with this leg,” he said, staring at his thin shanks under the blanket. He looked up at me. “We’ll meet again, Inshallah. Are you staying in Tangier?”

“I might leave tomorrow.”

He took a puff on his kif cigarette and kept the smoke in his lungs.

“Everyone is always leaving tomorrow.”

Darkness had fallen. I had to grope my way out of Bowles’s apartment, and I stumbled down the stairs—the elevator was not working. But I was elated. I had met Bowles, he had been friendly and he seemed to typify a place that had been something of a riddle to me.

Pleased with myself for this pleasant encounter, I kept walking, down Bowles’s road, that had once been called Imam Kastellani, up to the main road and past the Spanish consulate, and into town, about a twenty-minute walk. I needed to find a quiet place to write everything down, the whole conversation. I entered a bar, The Negresco, and ordered a glass of beer and began writing.

“You’re a writer,” the bartender said. His name was Hassan. He asked to see the page, and smiled at my handwriting. “Do you know Mohammed Choukri? He is a writer. He is over there.”

I was introduced to a small smiling man with a big mustache. He was slightly drunk, but he was alert and voluble. His books, he said, had been translated by Bowles. His best-known novel was For Bread Alone. But he had published other books, in Arabic and French. One was a diaristic account of his meetings with Jean Genet.

“Genet preferred me to Bowles,” Choukri said, a twinkle in his eye, as though defying me to guess the reason. He was small, fine-featured, smoking heavily, in his late fifties or early sixties. He wore a tweed jacket and a tie and seemed almost professorial.

“Why?”

“Because I am marginal,” Choukri said. “Bowles is from a great family. He has money. He has position. But I am a Berber, from a little village, Nador. Until I was twenty I was illiterate.” He licked his thumb and pretended to stamp a document with it. “I had thirteen brothers and sisters. Nine of them died of poverty—tuberculosis and other diseases.”

“How long have you known Bowles?”

“Twenty-one years,” Choukri said. “He is a miser. In twenty-one years he has not bought me even one cup of coffee.”

You’re not difficult; you’re simply mean, a friend of Bowles once said to him. Bowles reflected: I’ve thought about it for some years, and have decided he was probably right. The meanness however is not personal; it’s just New England parsimony, and I’ve never questioned its correctness.

“Do you think he’s happy here?”

“You can’t ask that question now,” Choukri said. “You should have asked him that thirty years ago.”

We stood at the bar, drinking beer. The beer slopped on my little notebook. I had been interrupted writing about Bowles. Now there was more—this sudden encounter with one of Bowles’s oldest friends in Morocco. It was dreamlike, too. All those names: Gertrude Stein, Aaron Copland, the Duke of Pembroke, William Burroughs, Jean Genet—familiar and intrusive and unreal in this smoky Tangerine bar, another unlikely interlude in the hello-good-bye of travel.

“He is a nihilist,” Choukri said.

That seemed to sum him up, the man who had once owned an island and visited Wilton Manor; who now stubbornly lived in one room, warmed by a blowtorch.

“Did Tangier do that to him?”

“Tangier is a mysterious city,” Choukri said. “When you solve the mystery it is time to leave.”

I could not have imagined a better exit line to serve my departure—from Tangier, from Morocco, from the Mediterranean. But the line vanished from my mind the next morning as I boarded the ferry Boughaz for the trip across the Straits.

I was thinking of how there was an aspect of Mediterranean travel that was like museum-going, the shuffling, the squinting, the echoes, the dust, the dubious treasures. You were supposed to be reverential. But even in the greatest museums I had been distracted, and found myself gazing out of museum windows at traffic or trees, or at other museum-goers; places like that were always the haunt of lovers on rainy Sundays. Instead of pictures, I often looked at the guards, the men or women in chairs at the entrances to rooms, the way they stifled yawns, their watchful eyes, their badges. No museum guard ever resembles a museum-goer, and my Mediterranean was like that.

Herculean was a word I kept wanting to use but never did. The only Herculean part of my trip was every night having to describe how I had spent the day, without leaving anything out; turning all my actions into words. It was like a labor in a myth or an old story. I could not sleep until the work was done. Mediterranean travel for me—for many people—was sometimes ancestor worship and sometimes its opposite. This was unlike any other trip I had taken, because although the journey was over, the experience wasn’t. Travel was so often a cure; I was cured of China and Peru, by going; I was cured of Fiji and Sri Lanka. Cured of Kenya and Pakistan. Cured of England, after many years. But my trip had not cured me of the Mediterranean, and I knew I would go back, the way you went back to a museum, to look—at pictures or out the window—and think; back to some Mediterranean places I saw, and more that I missed.

The mooring lines of the Boughaz were hauled aboard just as dawn broke. I thought of what Bowles had said. Don’t become a monument or people will piss on you. There was no danger of my becoming a monument, but Gibraltar was another story. Perhaps that explained why I had been so flippant when I had seen it the first time, and maybe so many monuments explained the mood of my Mediterranean travel, or some of it.

The darkness in the sky dissolved, as though rinsed in light. Into that eastern sky leaked yellow-orange, pinking to paleness, a whole illuminated day ahead, looming behind the Rock to the northeast, grander at this distance, and then the pair of pillars big and small on the facing shores. The sea was calm, and glittered under limitless sky—it was going to be a wonderful morning, the sort of restful brilliance you get, the sky exhausted of clouds, after days of storms. The light grew brighter, revealing the day, and it just got better, as this rosy dawn became a sunset in reverse.

About the Author

PAUL THEROUX was born in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1941 and published his first novel, Waldo, in 1967. His subsequent novels include The Black House, The Family Arsenal, Picture Palace (winner of the Whitbread Prize for fiction), O-Zone, The Mosquito Coast, which was made into a hit movie starring Harrison Ford, the critically acclaimed My Secret History, and Chicago Loop. His bestselling and highly successful travel books include The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, Riding the Iron Rooster, To the Ends of the Earth, and The Happy Isles of Oceania.

Table of Contents

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Contents

Epigraph

1. The Cable Car to the Rock of Gibraltar

2. The “Mare Nostrum” Express to Alicante

3. The M.V. Punta Europa to Mallorca

4. The “Virgen De Guadalupe” Express to Barcelona and Beyond

5. “Le Grand Sud” to Nice

6. The Ferry ÎLe De Beauté to Corsica

7. The Ferry Ichnusa to Sardinia

8. The Ferry Torres to Sicily

9. The Ferry Villa to Calabria

10. The Ferry Clodia from Chioggia

11. The Ferry Liburnija to Zadar

12. The Ferry Venezia to Albania

13. The Seabourn Spirit to Istanbul

14. The M.V. Akdeniz: Through the Levant

15. The 7:20 Express to Latakia

16. The Ferry Sea Harmony to Greece

17. The Ferry El Loud III to Kerkennah

18. To Morocco on the Ferry Boughaz

About the Author