The Pillars of Hercules

1 The Cable Car to the Rock of Gibraltar

People here in Western Civilization say that tourists are no different from apes, but on the Rock of Gibraltar, one of the Pillars of Hercules, I saw both tourists and apes together, and I learned to tell them apart. I had traveled past clumps of runty stunted trees and ugly houses (the person who just muttered, “Oh, there he goes again!” must read no further) to the heights of the Rock in a metal box suspended by a cable. Gibraltar is just a conspicuous pile of limestone, to which distance lends enchantment; a very small number of people cling to its lower slopes. Most of them are swarthy and bilingual, speaking intelligible English, and Spanish with an Andalusian accent. Mention Spain to them and they become very agitated, though they know that as sure as eggs are huevos the British will eventually hand them over to the King of Spain, just as they chucked Hong Kong into the horny hands of the dictator of China.

The Rock Apes of Gibraltar are Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus), the only native apes in Europe. The apes are still resident, and have lived there longer than most Gibraltarian families. There is a social order among the ape tribes, as well as ape rituals that are bizarre enough to be human. Ape corpses and skeletons are never found on the Rock. Somewhere in the recesses of this rock that looks like a mountain range there is said to be a secret mortuary established by the apes; ape funerals, ape mourning, ape burials. The apes are well established, but disadvantaged — unemployed, unwaged, destitute welfare recipients. The municipal government allocates money to feed them.

But there might be darker motive in this food aid. A powerful superstition, held by locals, suggests that if the apes vanish from Gibraltar, the Rock will cease to be British. For hundreds of years — since 1740, in fact — the apes have been mentioned by travelers — Grand Tourists, in whose footsteps I was following. Yet Gibraltar has been visited almost since Hercules, patron of human toil, flung it there on his journey to capture the Red Oxen of Geryones, the monster with three bodies (Labor Ten). He tossed another rock across the straits, Ceuta in Morocco. These two promontories, Cape and Abya to the Greeks — the Mediterranean bottleneck — are the twin Pillars of Hercules.

My idea was to travel from one pillar to the other, the long way, with the usual improvisations en route that are required of the impulsive traveler; all around the Mediterranean coast, the shores of light.

“The grand object of traveling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean,” Dr. Johnson said. “On those shores were the four great Empires of the world; the Assyrian, the Persian, the Grecian, and the Roman. All our religion, almost all our law, almost all our arts, almost all that sets us above savages, has come to us from the shores of the Mediterranean.”

“Our” of course is as questionable as “savages,” but you get the idea. A great deal happened on this coastline. It was not until the second century B.C. that the Romans sailed through the Pillars of Hercules. The reason for this late, if not timid, penetration of the straits was not the current, nor was it the inconvenient westerlies that blow through this narrow opening of the inland sea; it was the Mediterranean notion that nothing lay beyond the pillars except the Garden of the Hesperides and the lost continent of Atlantis, and hellish seas.

The pillars marked the limits of civilization, “the end of voyaging,” Euripides wrote; “the Ruler of Ocean no longer permits mariners to travel on the purple sea.” And later, in the second century B.C., Polybius wrote, “The channel at the Pillars of Herakles is seldom used, and by very few persons, owing to the lack of intercourse between the tribes inhabiting those remote parts … and to the scantiness of our knowledge of the outer ocean.”

Beyond the pillars were the chaos and darkness they associated with the underworld. Because these two rocks resembled the pillars at the temple to Melkarth in Tyre, the Phoenicians called them the Pillars of Melkarth. Melkarth was the Lord of the Underworld — god of darkness — and it was easy to believe that this chthonic figure prevailed over a sea with huge waves and powerful currents and ten-foot tides.

The point is not that the Mediterranean peoples had never ventured westward through the straits, but that they had dared it — the Phoenicians had reached Britain by a sea route — and verified that it had a wicked and destructive turbulence. From this they conceived the idea that nothing useful existed past the straits, only the spooky Mare Tenebrosum, the dark and dangerous ocean which lay beyond the Middle Sea, a purple river of furious water. The Greeks named this the Stream of Ocean. It circled the earth at which they were privileged to live at the center, its precise location at Delphi, where a stone like a toadstool marked the Navel of the World. Mediterranean, after all, means “middle of the earth.”

The surface current moves through the straits at a walking pace to the east, streaming through the fifteen-mile-wide pillars into the Mediterranean; but two hundred and fifty feet below this another sub-current rushes in the opposite direction, westward, into the Atlantic, pouring over the shallow sill of the straits, “that awful deepdown torrent,” Molly Bloom murmurs in her bedtime reverie. The unusual circular exchange of water at the straits is the only way this just-about-landlocked sea is kept refreshed and alive. Very few large rivers flow into it. For thousands of years, until the Suez Canal was opened, to the strains of Verdi’s Aïda, in 1869, the Straits of Gibraltar—“The Gut,” to the English sailors, “The Gate of the Narrow Entrance” (Bab el Zukak) to the Moors — was the only waterway to the world.

Even so, the Mediterranean has an odd character. It has almost no tides at all, and except for a whirlpool here and there (notably at Messina), an absence of distinct marine currents. It is dominated by winds rather than currents, and each wind has a name and a series of specific traits: the Vendaval, the steady westerly that blows through the Straits of Gibraltar, La Tramontana, the strong wind of the Spanish coast, La Bora, the cold wind of Trieste, le Mistral, the cold dry northwesterly of the Riviera, and so on, through the Khamsin, the Sirocco, the Levanter, and about six others (often the same wind, with a different name) to the Gregale, the northeast wind of Malta that blows in winter and was probably the wind that caused Saint Paul to be shipwrecked on the coast of Malta, as described in the Bible (Acts 27–28).

It is not a sea that is affected by the phases of the moon — it has moods rather than monthlies. Its nervous character has been mentioned by sailors, and its colors — purple, wine-dark, and its blueness in particular. The Mediterranean was the White Sea to the Greeks — the Turks still use that name for it: Akdeniz, “White Sea,” and the Arabs use a variant, “The White Central Sea.” If the oceans can be compared to vast symphonies, the German traveler Emil Ludwig has written, the Mediterranean “is subdued in a way that suggests chamber music.” It is tentative, and its waves with their short fetch, and its strange swells, are unlike any found in the great oceans.

All over the Rock of Gibraltar there were signs in six languages (English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Arabic, French) that said Do Not Feed the Apes! and Apes Might Bite! These signs were more frequent at the top, where one of the ape tribes — the friendlier of the two — lived.

Here at the top of the Rock, an ectoplasmic middle-aged woman, a French tourist, plump and pushy and grinning, picked up a pebble and approached an ape. It was a mother ape that was nuzzling her child, urging it against her pink nipple, with that serene and happy expression that mothers have when they breast-feed their young. The tourist’s name, I felt sure, was Grisette. She poked the pebble at the mother ape, giggling, while her three friends watched. One of the friends jerked the arm of her small boy, forcing him to watch Grisette tease the ape.

The mother ape took the pebble and considered it a moment before dropping it to the ground. Grisette laughed very hard and then went closer, making a hideous face. Grisette wore glasses with lenses so thick and distorting, her eyes swam and changed shape as she nodded at this cornered ape. The mother ape expressed concern, and when Grisette reached over and touched her young suckling baby the mother ape raised a cautioning hand — a shapely hand wonderfully pink, human in miniature, with fine nails. There were enough lines on the ape’s palm to occupy a fortune-teller for a whole session of palmistry.

Provoked and a bit irritated by the cautioning mother ape, Grisette poked the baby ape as though testing a doorjamb with a Wet Paint sign. Grisette’s friends laughed again. The ape mother raised her cautioning hand again, and when Grisette pinched the baby, the mother ape rapped Grisette’s knuckles. This went on, back and forth, for a minute or so. I thought that the ape was going to leap into Grisette’s face and bite and claw her — Apes Might Bite!

But the mother ape showed enormous patience, as though she knew she was dealing with someone simpleminded and unpredictable, a nuisance rather than a threat. She merely raised a hand and restrained the stupid woman, and when Grisette put her big googly-eyed face nearer — simpering and calling her friends as she tormented the mother and child — all the mother ape did was show her teeth and she crept away, off the little rail, out of the sunshine where she had been suckling her infant. And as she padded away, still graceful in the face of all that provocation, the mother ape growled, just audibly to me, “This is unconscionable.”

Grisette moved heavily over to her fellow tourists, one of whom was hitting her child and saying, “I’m not a millionaire!” and an English one — British Army spouse, I supposed—“Get off me before you get a smacked bottom!” Grisette was chattering and scratching herself and looking to her friends to praise her for having pinched the ape baby and maddened the mother ape and driven them away.

And I thought: Yes, the apes are better mannered than the tourists, and while the tourists brutalized and screamed at their kids, the apes were tender towards their young. The apes did not say, “I told you to stop it — I’ll give you a clout!” The tourists yakked and giggled, the apes were quiet and thoughtful. The tourists teased the apes, the apes never teased the tourists. When the apes played they rolled over and over on the steep slopes or on the walkways of the Rock; when the tourists’ children played they hurt each other and made noise and it always seemed to end in tears. And the apes never made faces unless the tourists made faces at them first. Ape funerals were held in pious secrecy, a tourist death or funeral was accompanied by howling grief and hysterics. The tourists were obstreperous, the apes were dignified and correct. Yet every year apes are shot and killed on the Rock of Gibraltar for biting tourists.

The woman might have been a tourist from any country in the Mediterranean. She fit the description of “the Mediterranean sub-racial group” I found in a textbook entitled Advanced Level Geography (1964): “brown-skinned, long-headed, wavy-haired, dark-eyed, slightly-built.” These people traveled back and forth, across this interesting stretch of water, all the time, keeping to their particular basin. But Mediterranean tourists were generally so offensive and ill-natured that I made a vow early in my trip to ignore them, the way I ignored the flies in Australia; to avoid writing about tourists at all. Far better to write about the apes.

“This ape is cruel,” the tourist says, and it is like an epitaph for the world’s animals. “When I pinch him he bites me.”

For years I was happy flopping along elsewhere, avoiding the Mediterranean. Such a trip had always been regarded as the Grand Tour, a search for wisdom and experience. Yet at the age of fifty I still had never been to Spain. All I had seen of Yugoslavia was the main line from Ljubljana to the Bulgarian border. Yugoslavia was now five separate nations. I had never been to Israel or Egypt or Morocco or Malta. Most people I met had been to many of these countries; everyone knew much more of the Mediterranean than I did. Everybody had been there. I suspected that from one end to the other it was nothing but urbanization and clip joints. James Joyce once wrote, “Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travelers his grandmother’s corpse.” I assumed the whole Mediterranean was like that, tourism as ancestor worship and the veneration of incoherent ruins.

Then I began to think that this was perhaps the best reason for going to see this part of the world, that it was so over-visited it was haunted and decrepit, totally changed. Change and decay had made it worth seeing and an urgent subject to record. I was the man for it. Half a lifetime of traveling had given me a taste for the macabre.

Some countries swallow the traveler; certainly in Africa and Polynesia and South America I found this to be true. But Europe, and the Mediterranean in particular, is like a stage set. It gives drama to a trip — it is a background.

You know this already. You have been to Italy — very likely to Sicily, perhaps to Siracusa, and you stayed at the same little hotel I found. Near the harbor? Run by a grumpy man who wrote poetry? About twenty-five dollars, with breakfast? And you might read this and say: It was not that way at all! Siracusa was delightful, the hotel was clean, the poet was a cheery soul. Or it might be somewhere else we both visited, in Spain or Greece or Egypt. Never mind.

That was your trip, that was your Italy. This book is about my trip, my Italy. This is my Mediterranean.

My idea was to begin in Gibraltar, and go to Spain, and keep going, hugging the coast, staying on the ground, no planes; to travel by train, bus, ferry, ship; to make a circuit of the sea from the Rock of Gibraltar all the way around to Ceuta, from one Pillar of Hercules to the other. To travel the whole shore, from the fish and chip shops of Torremolinos to the gun emplacements of Tel Aviv, by way of the war in Croatia and the nudist beaches of Crete.

The Mediterranean, this simple almost tideless sea, the size of thirty Lake Superiors, had everything: prosperity, poverty, tourism, terrorism, several wars in progress, ethnic strife, fascists, pollution, drift nets, private islands owned by billionaires, Gypsies, seventeen countries, fifty languages, oil drilling platforms, sponge fishermen, religious fanatics, drug smuggling, fine art, and warfare. It had Christians, Muslims, Jews; it had the Druzes, who are a strange farrago of all three religions; it had heathens, Zoroastrians and Copts and Baha’is. It is over two thousand miles from end to end. It is noted for being salty. It ranged from the shoals and shallows of the northern Adriatic to the almost sixteen-thousand-foot depths in the Ionian Basin, west of Crete. Although it is deficient in plankton, it is still the home of dolphins, and in the deeps around Mallorca sperm whales (some of them entangled in drift nets) are often sighted. Giant loggerhead turtles — an endangered species in the Mediterranean — return in diminishing numbers every year to the Greek island of Zákinthos, where they struggle among tourists and beachside restaurants for nesting sites.

One of the many strange facts about the Mediterranean people is that compared with the British and the Northern Europeans they are not great fish eaters. This is Emil Ludwig’s observation and it is generally true. One of the more anticlimactic experiences in a Mediterranean market is surveying the fish goggling on marble slabs. There are not many, they are rather small, and the larger proportion have been caught outside the Mediterranean. Tuna is the exception, because it makes an annual journey through the Pillars and across the Mediterranean to spawn in the Black Sea. Dolphins are protected. With the exception of illegal drift-net vessels that use nets up to ten miles long (for example, Greenpeace France detected and documented 137 illegal Italian drift-netters between April and June 1994), fishing is small-scale and unrewarding. Deep-sea fishing in the Mediterranean is almost unknown, apart from the illegal drift-netters and the competition for the migrating tuna.

It is not a fishy sea, but it is blessed with a beautiful climate, and though Mediterranean storms and high winds can be devastating, it has been noted for its calm waters. The very word Mediterranean signified sunny skies and balmy weather, and for thousands of years these shores had been a kind of Eden, fruitful with grapes and olives and lemons.

But soon after I set off, I mentioned my itinerary to a young French student on a train. Pointing to my map, I remarked on how it was so easy to travel around the Mediterranean.

“Croatia! Albania!” the student said. “And what about Algeria — are you going there?”

“Of course. I’ve always wanted to see the souk in Algiers, Albert Camus’ Oran, taking the night train from Tunis to Annaba.”

“In the past two years, twenty thousand people have been killed in fighting in Algeria, most of them on the coast,” he said. “You didn’t know that the most recent election was annulled and the Muslim fundamentalists have a policy of killing all foreigners?”

No, I did not know that.

“Maybe I’ll skip Algeria.” And I thought: Maybe they’ll stop killing each other before I get there.

Gibraltar is tiny, just two square miles of it, mostly uninhabited cliffs, and there are almost as many apes as there are humans. The name is from Tarik el Said, the Moorish conquerer who named it “Geb-el-Tarik” (Hill of Tarik). I arrived on a cheap flight from London sitting with Mr. Wong, from the People’s Republic. We looked at the rock.

“Like a small mountain,” Mr. Wong said.

Like a beheaded sphinx, I thought, all buttocks and trunk, crouching with its paws on the water, and the more impressive for there being no other monstrosities or mountains near it.

Mr. Wong told me he was planning to start a Chinese restaurant in the town. “And why did you come here?”

“Because I’ve never been here before,” I said.

I had never been to Spain either. Once I had been to the south of France, to see Graham Greene in Antibes. That tiny fishing port was all I knew of the Riviera. I had seen a little bit of Italy and had spent one day in Athens, but apart from that had not traveled in the Mediterranean, not even to the most obvious places. Israel, no. Lebanon, no. Egypt, no — had never seen the pyramids. Most English people I met had been to Mallorca; I had never been there. Because I had not been to any of these Mediterranean places I had vigorous and unshakable prejudices, and those prejudices amused me and kept me from wanting to visit the places.

And in the way that you don’t really understand great novels until you are older and experienced, you needed to be a certain age to appreciate the subtleties of the Mediterranean. I had reread Anna Karenina and felt that it was a different novel from the one I had read when I was twenty-one. I had also reread Tender Is the Night, and The Plague, and The Secret Agent. I wondered whether they would have the same impact. They did, but for different reasons; they were different books, because thirty-odd years later I was a different man.

By a happy coincidence these books all had Mediterranean connections. Dick and Nicole Diver single-handedly invent the Riviera by turning the sleepy fishing village of Juan-les-Pins into a fashionable resort. Anna Karenina and her lover Vronsky escape Russia, and the scandal of their liaison, and experience bliss in a romantic interlude in Venice, Rome, and Naples; but after an extended stay in a palazzo in a small Italian town, they are disillusioned with Mediterranean life, “and the German tourists became so wearisome, that a change became absolutely necessary. They decided to return to Russia.”

Joseph Conrad wrote the whole of his London novel in the south of France, in Montpellier, and Camus, who was born on the Algerian coast, set his novel in Oran. I had also recently read Hemingway (bullfighting in Spain), Naguib Mahfouz and Cavafy (both Alexandria), Flaubert (Salammbo in Carthage), Cyril Connolly (the Riviera again in The Rock Pool), and Evelyn Waugh’s Labels, which takes in almost the whole of the Mediterranean. One of the most neglected postwar American novels of the Mediterranean coast — in this case, southern Italy — is William Styron’s complex and brilliant Set This House on Fire. I reread it with renewed admiration for its portraits of expatriate artists and drunks and posers, their brains baking in the Amalfi sunlight. And I had finally got around to reading Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi. The miserable little village he writes about, which he called Gagliano, isn’t on the Mediterranean, but it is near enough; the real place, Aliano, is only about twenty miles from the sea, at the arch on the sole of Italy’s boot. These books fueled my desire to travel there. Perhaps unconsciously I had been doing homework.

There was a time when I wanted to see only wild places, and was reluctant to go to a place that had been written about extensively. But then — it is so funny about travel — I would go to a place that everyone had been written about and it was as though I was seeing something entirely new. I felt that when I was writing about Britain. My Britain was different from anything I had read. It made the going good because I was unprepared for what I saw. That was always the best part of travel, the sense of discovery. When there was none and it was all predictable I wanted to go home.

The Mediterranean was not one place, but many; and I was at last calm enough to venture into its complexity without the risk of getting lost. I was happier with love in my life. I was not looking for a new home, traveling hopefully down the road rejecting places as I passed through. I was traveling in the purest way, without envy or a spirit of acquisition. I was setting out on an extensive trip around the shores of the Mediterranean, Christian, Muslim, Jewish and heathen; to meet the people, eat the food, get rained on and shot at.

My idea was to see it out of season, when the tourists were back home, spending the fall and winter in the northern half, the spring and summer in the Levant and North Africa, going from one Pillar to the other; and to make a modern Grand Tour, seeking out wise people.

An inland sea is perfect for a journey, because the coastline determines the itinerary.

• • •

The day I arrived in Gibraltar, the Chief Minister of Gibraltar, Joe Bossano, was at the United Nations, explaining to the assembly why Gibraltar wanted to remain itself, autonomous. But Gibraltar has nothing but the rock and its strategic location. It makes nothing, it sells nothing, it imports everything it needs to sustain life; it is tiny in both land area and population (a mere twenty-eight thousand people, of which sixteen thousand are voters). It is just a few streets at the base of the rock, and on the lower slopes there are some luxury homes and gun emplacements. There is not enough room for an airport, and so when a plane is due the main road into Spain is closed — barriers swing shut — and traffic is halted until the plane has landed. The aircraft taxis across the road, and the portion of Gibraltar known as The Neck, and continues to the terminal. At the All Clear, the road reopens.

The Spanish dictator Franco, El Caudillo (his title is the Spanish equivalent of Hitler’s Führer or Mussolini’s Duce), with his iron hand in a chokehold on the throat of every Spaniard until just the other day, closed his border with Gibraltar in 1969.

“He died in 1975,” a Gibraltarian told me, “but it was another ten years before the border was opened again.”

That was ordered by Prime Minister Felipe Gonzales, in 1985. But Spain has never wavered in insisting that Gibraltar be given back to Spain.

So for sixteen years Gibraltar was hemmed in like a little penal colony. And it did no good for the people in Gibraltar to harangue the Spaniards with the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, which gave Britain sovereignty over the Rock in 1713. In this same treaty the island of Manhattan was swapped for Surinam. In the most casual conversation in Gibraltar, people quoted the relevant clause of the Treaty of Utrecht. I took a closer look at the Treaty and saw that the terms of Article 10 prevented “residence or entry into the town of Gibraltar by Jews and Moors.”

The anonymous author of How to Capture and Govern Gibraltar (1865) stated that Protestants ought to be encouraged and given low rents and hospitality. But “Papists, Moors and Jews” should be discouraged.

And in some ways this sentinel rock became a bigoted British island at the entrance to the Mediterranean. As a British garrison it could hardly fail to be reactionary, backward, philistine and drunken, as it upheld the Royal Navy tradition of rum, sodomy and the lash. For years it was noted for its vast number of taverns. But there is something so wonderful and stark about the rock — and it is the only grand work of nature for miles around — that its enchantment is transferred to the people who live on its lower slopes and at its base. It stands enormous and immutable, dwarfing everything and everyone nearby; and so Gibraltarians seem like a tribe of tiny idolaters, clinging to their mammoth limestone shrine.

It is pretty clear that shrunken bankrupt Britain finds Gibraltar too expensive to run, no more than an inconvenient relic of a former age. It even looks it. Apart from the Rock it looks like an English coastal town, much smaller but with the same seediness and damp glamour of, say, Weston-super-Mare; a little promenade, and tea-shops, and fish and chip shops, and ironmongers, and respectable-looking public houses, and bus shelters and twitching curtains. Its Englishness makes it safe, tidy, smug, community-minded.

Gibraltar’s historical notes satisfied my curiosity for meaningless facts and colorful atrocities. There was first the list of sieges, fourteen of them, going back to the year 410, when the Vandals overran the Roman Empire, and the later incursions of the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths. Franco’s closure of Spain’s frontier with Gibraltar is known as the fifteenth siege. In the seventh century King Sisebut persecuted Gibraltar’s Jews, tortured thousands, and forcibly baptized ninety thousand of them overall. Then there were seven hundred years of Moors in Gibraltar. And this: “In 1369, when Pedro the Cruel, who had succeeded Alfonso XI, was assassinated, the Count of Translamara seized the throne of Castile and became Henry II. The following year, 1370, Algeciras was destroyed by Mohammed V.” And on December 13, 1872, “the mystery derelict Marie Celeste arrived in Gibraltar.”

Lastly, Gibraltar is known as the scene of a sudden shocking multiple murder. The woman who told me where it had taken place described it in a whisper: “Walk down Winston Churchill Road, and just before the overpass, across from the Shell station, that’s where it happened.”

One Sunday in 1986, much to the horror of Gibraltarians, three civilians were shot dead by men wearing masks. Witnesses described the suddenness of it, all three cut down, and one masked man lingering over a supine wounded man and finishing him off. And then the masked men vanished. It was not hard for them to get away, since they were members of the British SAS sent on this deadly mission by Margaret Thatcher.

No one mourned the dead men. They were Irish. It was claimed that they were going to plant a bomb at The Convent, the Governor’s House, during a parade. That was not firmly established — the whole affair was obscured by official secrecy. Two years after the killings, a British minister in Mrs. Thatcher’s government blandly explained that the government briefings to journalists at the time of the incident had been inaccurate. The dead men had not been armed, as had been suggested. And the car parked in Gibraltar had not contained explosives. So why were these men killed?

The minister, Sir Geoffrey Howe, said, “They made movements which led the military personnel operating in support of Gibraltar police to conclude that their own lives and the lives of others were under threat.”

The official version stressed that a bomb would have been devastating. The blast would have damaged two schools and a Jewish home for old folks and the marchers and the spectators. It would have been on a par with the bomb hidden under the bandstand in Hyde Park, that killed eleven members of a military band, one of the nastiest IRA crimes; it is very easy to plant a bomb in a peaceful trusting place. But no one ever knew whether there had been any good reason for the murders of the three Irishmen that day.

Gibraltar is still a garrison, though greatly reduced in numbers of men, and the steep town looks severe but is actually rather friendly. In common with an English village the Gibraltarians are friendly to the point of nosiness. It is small enough so that everyone knows everyone else, except the Moroccans who come and go. The Gibraltarian family names are all known — the English, the Spanish, the Jewish ones, especially. The great thing in Gibraltar is to be able to date your ancestry to the Genoese who emigrated early in the eighteenth century.

Because Gibraltarians asked me questions I returned the compliment and pestered people about their origins.

“I’m a Gibraltarian,” a man named Joe told me. His real name was José, and his surname sounded Spanish too. I asked him about that.

He said, “I’m not Spanish, I’m not English.”

“What does your passport say?”

“Colony of Gibraltar,” he said. “But we would rather be an English colony than part of Spain. The majority of people here want autonomy.”

In other words, for Gibraltar to govern herself and for Britain to pay the bills.

“We want independence and to be part of the EC. The frontier was opened in 1985 only to satisfy the EC — the Spanish were trying to make friends.”

“What did you do all those years when it was impossible to go across the road to Spain?”

“I went to Morocco.” He shook his head. “It was not like anything I ever saw before.”

“Interesting?”

“Awful.”

We talked about the absence of any manufacturing in Gibraltar.

“But we have shipyards,” he said. “We can repair ships.”

“You speak Spanish?” I asked.

“And English.”

The idea in Gibraltar was that the Spaniards were vastly inferior to the Gibraltarians; they were despised for their passionate gesticulation, their forty years of Franco’s fascism, their twanging guitars, their provincialism and irrationality and bean-eating and bull-torturing. Prejudices in Gibraltar were quite similar to those I had encountered in English seaside resorts, an enjoyable mixture of bluster and wrongheadedness, the Little Englander in full spate. But these poor rock-hoppers were, it seemed to me, about to be abandoned. In the fullness of time, I could see this place handed over to the Spaniards just as ruthlessly as Hong Kong had been served up like a dim sum to whining Chinese plutocrats and executioners. Gibraltarians would soon discover how bankruptcy could make a nation unsentimental and self-serving.

I wanted to talk to someone in power about this — someone other than people I casually encountered in public houses and at bus stops; so I sent a note to the distinguished former Chief Minister, Sir Joshua Hassan, and waited for a reply.

It was rainy and cool these October days. I became fond of this weather for various reasons. It was good writing weather, and it kept the tourists away. In such grim weather there was always a place to stay and it was seldom necessary to make onward arrangements. I liked feeling that I could leave a town at a moment’s notice and be assured that I would find a hotel farther up the line. In the whole of the Mediterranean, all seventeen countries, traveling off-season, I never had a problem of that sort, showing up in a place that was full of No Vacancy signs. In fact, most hotel owners complained to me that there weren’t half enough tourists these days.

In the several days that I waited to hear from Sir Joshua, I climbed the Rock. There was a lovely view from a vantage point at 1,350 feet, at the top of the Rock. To the west was Algeciras on a sweep of bay; to the north the low brown hills of San Roque beyond The Neck; to the south, beyond the lighthouses at Europa Point, across the Straits, was Morocco — Ceuta, the other Pillar, and farther west, Tangier.

At that altitude, wandering among the tourists and apes, learning to distinguish between them, I concluded that because the apes were both intelligent and deprived they are quite like the homeless people in big cities, soft-voiced, panhandling, desperate and yet chastened creatures. They are, horribly, like the poor in Europe — ragged and dispossessed, tenacious and yet fatalistic, as they hang on, knowing they are despised; they have that resentful yet fatalistic look of natives who have been displaced by swindling latecomers. The apes on the Rock are one of the underclasses of Gibraltar. Another underclass are the Moroccans. Coincidentally, the apes also originated in Morocco, from which in 1740 a whole tribe of apes was imported.

There was a strong sense of community in Gibraltar, which made it much odder for me to reflect that I was in a place that was both a racial hodgepodge and also deeply paranoid about admitting aliens. It was partly a result of Gibraltar’s insularity — the Rock is significantly an island. But tribalism and xenophobia were also Mediterranean character traits. Never mind that the history of the Mediterranean is a history of mongrelization; these days the most common sound was the native mongrel yapping about his pedigree and driving off foreign mutts.

After I saw the French tourist taunting the mother ape I asked a Gibraltarian who worked on the Rock whether many people were attacked.

“Lots of people are bitten,” he said, “but the strange thing is that nine out of ten are women — the women get the bites. We had one yesterday — a woman — big bite on her arm.”

His name was Jerry. One of his jobs was operating the cable car. I asked him whether the apes had rabies.

“No. These apes are medically looked after. But we send the people to the hospital anyway.”

I told him what a policeman in New York had once told me, that a human bite is much more dangerous than an animal bite, and that a tourist who bit you would do more harm than an ape.

From the top of the Rock it was possible to see that Gibraltar was little more than a harbor and a cluster of tenements, and like many towns with hills nearby, the higher you live on the slopes, the posher your house. The cable car passed over swimming pools and hot tubs and foaming whirlpool baths attached to luxury homes. Later, I looked at an 1810 map of Gibraltar and it reminded me of a colonial map of Boston: fifteen batteries — Queen’s Battery, King’s, Norman’s, Cockaigne’s, Prince of Hesse’s, Mungo’s and so forth. Then The Neck and the Spanish lines and all the Papists on the Spanish side. It was as though Dorchester Heights remained British while the rest of America went its own way — just as odd and inconvenient and anachronistic.

Major Brian Cooper Tweedy of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers was posted in Gibraltar late in the last century. His daughter Marion, known to all as Molly, lost her virginity to one Harry Mulvey in Gibraltar. Later, particularly at bedtime, she ruminated on her sexual encounters in Gibraltar. This woman, literature’s earth mother, is of course Molly Bloom, and her girlhood in Gibraltar, being kissed under the Moorish Wall, is vividly recounted in her drowsy soliloquy at the end of Ulysses.

Molly remembers “those awful thunderbolts in Gibraltar as if the world was coming to an end,” and the obscene Gibraltarian graffiti that “used to be written up with a picture of a woman on that wall in Gibraltar with that word I couldnt find anywhere.” The rock in her memory is emblematic and powerful, “looking across the bay from Algeciras all the lights of the rock like fireflies.”

She ruminates on the weather: “the rain was lovely and refreshing just after my beauty sleep I thought it was going to get like Gibraltar my goodness the heat there before the levanter came on black as night and the glare of the rock standing up in it like a big giant.” And even the apes: “I told him it was struck by lightning and all about the old Barbary apes they sent to Clapham without a tail.”

Most of all, Molly’s remembrance is of her first sexual encounter, one of the most passionate in literature. She hardly remembers Mulvey’s name but the incident is vivid: “we lay over the firtree cove a wild place I suppose it must be the highest rock in existence the galleries and casemates and those frightful rocks and Saint Michaels cave with the icicles or whatever they call them hanging down.” And the moment itself: “he was the first man kissed me under the Moorish wall my sweetheart when a boy it never entered my head what kissing meant till he put his tongue in my mouth.” And the glorious Gibraltarian conclusion: “… I put my arms around him yes and drew down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

There could be a Molly Bloom Defloration Tour of the Rock, but there isn’t. James Joyce never visited Gibraltar; he was scribbling and studying maps in another corner of the Mediterranean — Trieste. But it is a testimony to his imaginative powers that it is impossible to be in Gibraltar and not hear Molly’s sensuous voice. The presence of Jews in Gibraltar interested Joyce greatly — after all, his Ulysses figure, Leopold Bloom, was a Dublin Jew. In spite of Gibraltar being associated with Jewish expulsions, its Jewish community has deep roots. There are five synagogues in the little town.

Still waiting for a reply from Sir Joshua Hassan, I met Stephen Leanse, a Jewish entrepreneur.

“I was born in the Bahamas,” he said, “but my wife’s family, the Serruyas, came here in 1728.”

The majority of Gibraltarians trace their origins to Genoa and are Catholic. Some others are Maltese. A few are British expatriates — shopkeepers, ex-servicemen. No one admits to being Spanish. Stephen was one of a thousand or so Jews in Gibraltar, members of about a hundred Jewish families. It was not a large number, but it was an influential — and cosmopolitan — segment of the population. They were all Sephardic Jews, some of them speaking Spanish — the word Sephardic means “of Spain.” Others were speaking Ladino — the Sephardic language, that combined Renaissance Spanish with elements of Hebrew.

Like most other people I met in Gibraltar Mr. Leanse told me that the place was small, perhaps too small; and business was poor; and the future was uncertain.

“I would love to live in Israel, but my family is here.”

“Are the Jews in Gibraltar associated with any particular business?”

“No. All sorts of businesses. We don’t manufacture anything. Some of us are in banking, or we have shops, or restaurants. Some are politicians.”

One of the Jewish restaurants was The Bomb House Lane Glatt Kosher Restaurant, where I heard Yiddish, Ladino, Spanish, English and Hebrew spoken, all at once, sometimes in the same sentence, under a picture of David Ben-Gurion and another of a girlish Queen Elizabeth II. Everyone in the place wore a yarmulke, even the funny little man depicted on the menu. Because this glatt kosher restaurant was in Gibraltar some of the dishes on the menu were Moroccan. The cook — along with most cooks, cleaners, bus drivers and waitresses in Gibraltar — was Moroccan. A good proportion of the Jewish diners had come from Morocco.

Glatt indicates a specific sort of kosherness in meat. The word glatt is Yiddish for “smooth” and signifies that after the animal was ritually slaughtered by a shochet, its lungs were examined and found to have no punctures. It also suggests that in life it had no imperfections on its skin: a cow with no spots, a calf an even shade of brown, a monochrome chicken, a fluffy little prancing lamb, a goat that was above reproach. The opposite of glatt is trayfe (or terefah), meaning “torn”—and that could be a creature with a punctured lung, or a fatal laceration, or a suppurating wound. All this was discussed in the Talmud (which advocated the eating of several species of locusts, providing they were not trayfe). It was also somehow related to the idea of sacrifice — that if a lamb was worthy to be slain, it had to be the sort of lamb that would win a blue ribbon at a county fair. God loved you for sacrificing your best, most impressive animal.

Dietary laws fascinate me for the way they mingle good sense with utter foolishness. But for me the glatt concept was purely academic. I told the waiter I was not a meat eater and ordered fish.

My sea bass was grilled. It was a kosher fish, no imperfections, with both fins and scales. (Every fish that has scales also has fins, but not vice versa.) But when I stuck my fork into it the middle was still frozen and tasted trayfe. When I sent it back to be thawed and recooked, they obliged me. The bill was nineteen dollars — twelve handsomely engraved Gibraltar pounds — and so I complained, but it was no use.

Soon they would have competition from Mr. Wong and his joint-venture Chinese restaurant.

In the Jewish Social and Cultural Club a leaflet on a notice board announced Hillel Tours’ “Annual Trip to Spain.” It sounded as though this destination was remote — a journey to a far-off land — when in fact, if you walked down Bomb House Lane and looked west you could see Algeciras, and after a ten-minute stroll north you could spit to La Línea, where once there had been bullfights (Molly Bloom: “the bullfight at La Linea when that matador Gomez was given the bulls ear”).

But because Gibraltar has turned its back on Spain, Spain seems remote; and the Gibraltarian’s face is averted from Morocco. It seems irrelevant that Gibraltar occupies one side of the Bay of Algeciras. It is an inward-looking place, and in spite of its majestic position on the Mediterranean, hardly anyone seems interested in the water.

The exception to this apparent hydrophobia are the members of the Mediterranean Rowing Club, who scull a thirty-foot four-man boat called a yola, a very beamy craft made in Florence.

I went to the club, hoping to go for a row, but the Gibraltarians who showed me around said that the day was too windy.

“The prevailing wind is a westerly — a fresh, cool one, like today,” said Alfie Brittenden, one of the club’s rowers. “The Levanter is an easterly that brings humidity. Sometimes the Levanter makes a cloud form on the Rock.”

“Do you ever row across the Straits?” I asked.

“Occasionally we row to Morocco, for an annual charity event. But it’s very hard. There’s a four-knot current and rough water.”

“I was wondering whether I might bring my kayak here.”

“It would be suicide to try it alone,” Alfie said.

But another man at the club told me that I should not be intimidated.

“Ees there, Morocco,” he said. “Ees eesie.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“You can’t loose eet.”

That night I went to the NAAFI at one of the military barracks near the harbor and watched a World Cup qualifying match, England versus Holland. The room was packed with hundreds of screaming, chanting England fans. At first England seemed to be holding its own. The whole room was united in its howling, but when Holland scored two goals in quick succession and England had no reply there was disappointment and then real anger among the soldiers who earlier had been screaming for blood. That loss cast a pall over Gibraltar, and the next day the Rock was in mourning for England’s interment by the Dutch.

Hearing nothing from Sir Joshua Hassan, I called his office and told him I was planning to leave soon. He apologized and said I could visit him that same afternoon.

He is the grand old man of the Rock, the father of modern Gibraltar. “Sir J. Hassan & Partners,” was on the top floor of a bank. On the wall of Sir Joshua’s office there was a large photograph of the man himself, at the time he was Chief Minister, addressing a vast crowd in Gibraltar’s main square. A framed charter signed by the queen. A gilded document: “We have inscribed your name in the Golden Book of Jewish Unity.” And a telegram from Prince Philip: “Congratulations on your well-deserved honour”—Sir Joshua’s knighthood.

He was dark and small and stout and lined, a kindly sloping presence, and he had the softest hands, and the limp handshake of an old woman. His Ladino accent and his solemn face made him seem at times not Jewish but Spanish, but his confidence and fits of sudden jollity transformed him into a Dickensian barrister. He was seventy-eight.

Realizing I did not have much time, I bluntly asked him about the status of Gibraltar.

“The person who says ‘I want Gibraltar to be Spanish’ does not exist in Gibraltar,” he said. “If Gibraltar is not my country, where is my country? Ha! We consider ourselves Gibraltarians irrespective of where we came from. We get along very well together.”

“So you are totally committed to Gibraltar,” I said.

Sir Joshua said, “Jews have a second loyalty — to Israel. But that is an emotional loyalty. My daughter lives there.”

His own people, he said, the Hassan family, had emigrated to the Rock in 1788, from Morocco — from a town just across the water, Tetouan. On his mother’s side, the Cansino family came from Minorca. “We’re all settlers here,” he said, “dating from roughly 1704.”

I said, “It amazes me how everyone quotes the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht when they talk about Gibraltar.”

“Because of the clause about Jews and Moors being forbidden to stay in Gibraltar more than a month. But they needed us. They had to look to Morocco for vittles. Because of realities they drove a coach and horses through the treaty.”

He shuffled some documents.

“I wrote a paper about it. My thesis was that Gibraltar developed despite the treaty.”

“Do you think the Chief Minister made any headway the other day at the U.N.?”

“Joe Bossano doesn’t know what he wants,” he said, and leaned towards me. “When people go berserk they ask for something they don’t understand. The idea of a colony smells bad.”

“So what’s the best solution?”

“It is very difficult! There are three choices for Gibraltar. Independence is one. Or, to be part of a state — but Spain is out of the question. Or free association, like the Cook Islands and New Zealand.”

“The Cook Islanders go fishing and New Zealand pays the bills. Something like that?”

This made Sir Joshua wince. He said, “The best solution would be the utmost autonomy in internal matters, and a treaty with Britain that would remove the wide powers of the governor.”

“What would Spain say to that?”

“Spain would never agree that Gibraltar should have its own government,” he said. “But I don’t want to be colonized by Spain. I was colonized already by Britain!”

“Weren’t you worried when Franco was in power?”

“Yes, because he had a tyrannical government. But just the other day the Spanish foreign minister made a speech demanding sovereignty over us and calling us ‘the last colony in Europe.’ The Spanish say, ‘It is a matter of honor!’ But we have honor too.”

“Isn’t Gibraltar a colony?”

“We call ourselves a dependent territory.”

“I have the impression that business is rather poor, with most of the British troops pulled out.”

“Business isn’t good. We get tourists, and some day-trippers from Spain”—the tormentors of the Rock apes, the souvenir hunters that arrived in buses from Torremolinos and Marbella. “We used to have day-trippers from Morocco, but because of French paranoia against North Africans the Moroccans now need visas to enter EC countries. It’s ridiculous and very bad for business.”

“Gibraltar’s in the EC?” This was news to me.

“Yes. We are a full member politically. But we are excluded from VAT and other taxes.”

I asked him, “Are you aware of being a sort of folk hero and father figure of Gibraltar?”

He smiled at this, as though agreeing with what I said but forbidden by modesty to say so.

“I am speaking to you candidly now,” he said. “I go to Spain every now and then. My wife shops for vegetables there. On one trip I said to a guard, ‘Why are the Spanish police and guards here so courteous to me, when they know that I want to keep Gibraltar independent from Spain?’ ”

The order in Sir Joshua’s office and the way he was dressed, with that excessive neatness that is common to morticians and lawyers, told me that he was fastidious. Perhaps this was why he pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes, as though an unpleasant thought was passing through his mind.

“The guard said to me, ‘Because you put sus cojónes sur la mesa—’ ”

“Your balls on the table,” I said.

“Yes. He continued, ‘And you haven’t offended anyone.’ ”

“That’s a pretty neat trick.”

“Oh, yes. I was flattered.”

It was time for me to go. I thanked him for seeing me and speaking frankly, and I told him sincerely that I had enjoyed myself in Gibraltar. Though I did not tell him this, fearing he would misunderstand, I liked it best because it was unexpected; the rain, the gusting wind, the dignified apes. It was not at all the Mediterranean port I had expected but more like an English seaside resort in autumn, full of plucky retirees and gasconading soldiers.

“The only thing wrong with us,” Sir Joshua said, ruefully rather than in anger, “is our bloody size!”