The Tao of Travel

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Qualifications for a Traveller.—If you have health, a great craving for adventure, at least a moderate fortune, and can set your heart on a definite object, which old travellers do not think impracticable, then—travel by all means. If, in addition to these qualifications, you have scientific taste and knowledge, I believe that no career, in time of peace, can offer to you more advantages than that of a traveller. If you have not independent means, you may still turn travelling to excellent account; for experience shows it often leads to promotion, nay, some men support themselves by travel. They explore pasture land in Australia, they hunt for ivory in Africa, they collect specimens of natural history for sale, or they wander as artists.

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Powerful men do not necessarily make the most eminent travellers; it is rather those who take the most interest in their work that succeed the best; as a huntsman says, "it is the nose that gives speed to the hound."

Tedious journeys are apt to make companions irritable one to another; but under hard circumstances, a traveller does his duty best who doubles his kindliness of manner to those about him, and takes harsh words gently, and without retort. He should make it a point of duty to do so. It is at those times very superfluous to show too much punctiliousness about keeping up one's dignity, and so forth; since the difficulty lies not in taking up quarrels, but in avoiding them.

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Advantages of Travel.—It is no slight advantage to a young man, to have the opportunity for distinction which travel affords. If he plans his journey among scenes and places likely to interest the stay-at-home public, he will probably achieve a reputation that might well be envied by wiser men who have not had his opportunities.

10. Travel as an Ordeal

IF A VACATION REPRESENTS A TRAVELER'S DREAM, the ordeal is the traveler's nightmare. Yet the travel book that recounts an ordeal is the sort that interests me most, because it tests the elemental human qualities needed for survival: determination, calmness, rationality, physical and mental strength. Such books, with their torments, are also more fun: they were among the first travel books I read as a child. No ordeal book is without instances of near madness, hallucinatory episodes, weird fugues, and near-death experiences. ¶ When I was a boy, Donn Fendler was my role model. Later I was enthralled by the accounts of Moorhouse in the Sahara and Thesiger in Arabia, and I had a whole shelf of books about boat sinkings in the Pacific, disasters that ended in many days spent in a rubber dinghy. Dougal Robertson's is the best such account.

Some ordeals bring out the wit in a traveler. The last person you'd expect to find traveling on his own in the Colombian jungle is the needy, addicted, and urbane William Burroughs. But Burroughs was determined to go through hell to find the rare Amazonian drug ayahuasca (or yage), purported to be the ultimate high. He succeeded, as he recounted in The Yage Letters.

An instance or two of ordeal is an element in most great travel books. That is, having a bad time sets such a book apart from the jolly travel romp, giving it a seriousness and depth; as a consequence we begin to understand the person traveling, the real nature of the writer of the book, tested to his or her limit.

Geoffrey Moorhouse: The Fearful Void (1974)

NO ONE HAD ever crossed (or at least written about crossing) the Sahara from west to east, an almost four-thousand-mile journey from the Atlantic to the Nile. Moorhouse decided to do it, less to be the first person to achieve it than to examine "the bases of fear, to explore the extremity of human experience."

"I was a man who had lived with fear for nearly forty years," he writes. Fear of the unknown, of emptiness, of death. And he wants to find a way—a journey—to conquer it. "The Sahara fulfilled the required conditions perfectly. Not only did the hazards of the desert represent ultimate forms of my fears, but I was almost a stranger to it."

Setting off in October 1972, Moorhouse traveled with various nomad guides, but most dropped away or were exposed as rogues. His sextant broke, he became seriously ill, and death by thirst threatened when he missed an oasis in a sandstorm. With the help of his guide Sid'Ahmed, Moorhouse reached Tamanrasset, in Algeria, in March 1973, where, exhausted and sick, he abandoned the trip. He had traveled two thousand miles, most of it on foot, through sand and gravel and howling wind.

In the empty eastern desert in Mali he runs out of water. He recalls that twenty-four hours without water in severe temperatures is the limit of human endurance. Half a day passes—no water. Night falls—and twelve hours pass—no water. They set off at six A.M. and walk and ride most of the morning. Following some camel tracks, they come upon a group of nomads. Fainting with thirst and weakness, Moorhouse is offered a cooking pot.

"There was all manner of filth floating on top of that water; morsels of rice from the dirty pot, strands of hair from the guerba [waterbag], fragments of dung from the bottom of some well. But the water itself was clear, and I could sense the coolness of it even as its level tipped in the cooking pot before touching my lips. It was the most wonderful thing that had happened to me in my life."

After he wrote The Fearful Void, he told an English interviewer for the Guardian, "Doing this journey was a piece of propaganda in a way. It seems to me that every writer's a propagandist, in that he's trying to advance a point of view he believes; and my own point of view is that we're all essentially like each other. We all suffer the same things, we all laugh at the same things, and we all have to recognize this interdependence."

Valerian Albanov: In the Land of White Death (1917)

THE BOOK TELLS of the three-month ordeal in 1914 of Albanov and thirteen crewmen, who left the ice-bound ship Saint Anna in Franz Josef Land in the Arctic and traveled 235 miles, sledging across snow and ice and open water (in homemade kayaks). This is essentially Albanov's diary of the terrible journey. Frostbite, desertion, sudden death, attacks by walruses and polar bears (they shot forty-seven bears), near drownings, and hallucinations: "Aromas of tropical fruit fill the air with their fragrance. Peaches, oranges, apricots, raisins, cloves, and pepper all give off their wonderful scents."

Later: "We have not washed now for two months. Catching a chance glimpse of my face in the sextant's mirror the other day gave me a terrible fright. I am so disfigured that I am unrecognizable, covered as I am with a thick layer of filth. And we all look like this. We have tried to rub off some of this dirt, but without much success. As a result we look even more frightening, almost as if we were tattooed! Our underclothes and outer garments are unspeakable. And since these underclothes are swarming with 'game' [lice], I am sure that if we put one of our infested jerseys on the ground, it would crawl away all by itself!"

Dougal Robertson: Survive the Savage Sea (1973)

OF THE MANY accounts of sudden sinkings, and survival at sea in a raft, this book stands out as coolly observed, detailed, and eloquent in its stoicism. After a year of sailing, the Lucette, a well-made but fifty-year-old yacht, is rammed by a pod of killer whales just west of the Galápagos Islands. It sinks in a minute, and Captain Robertson has only enough time to launch a dinghy and an inflatable to save himself, his wife, their twin sons, their daughter, and a teenage friend.

This is the beginning of a 37-day, 750-mile voyage, and after the dinghy sinks, they are crammed into the leaky inflatable, living on rations for a short time and then on fish that they catch and the occasional turtle, battling storms and twenty-foot waves and huge ocean swells. The group also endures bickering between husband and wife, the fear and weakness of the children, sharks, sores, boils, heavy rain, and near capsizes. Robertson, who had been a farmer in rural England, is resourceful in fashioning tools and catching fish and turtles. Many pages describe the catching and butchering of turtles on the tiny raft; the drying and preparation of meat; the manner by which rainwater is trapped and kept.

One is convinced, before the book ends, that the Robertsons could have made it to land on their own—they were spotted by a Japanese fishing boat 290 miles off the coast of Costa Rica.

"'Our ordeal is over,' I said quietly. Lyn and the twins were crying with happiness ... I put my arms about Lyn feeling the tears stinging my own eyes. 'We'll get these boys to land after all.' As we shared our happiness and watched the fishing boat close with us, death could have taken me quite easily just then, for I knew that I would never experience another such pinnacle of contentment."

Donn Fendler: Lost on a Mountain in Maine (1939)

HIKING WITH HIS family high on Maine's Mount Katahdin in the summer of 1939, twelve-year-old Donn Fendler became separated from the others, then lost in a low cloud. For the next nine days, until he stumbled upon some campers in a remote cabin, he wandered down the mountain, following the course of a stream. At one point he loses his shoes and has to continue barefoot. On the sixth day he faints in the middle of the day.

The next thing I knew I woke up and it was getting dark.

I was sitting on a rock looking at my feet. They didn't seem to belong to me at first. They were the feet of someone else. The toenails were all broken and bleeding and there were thorns in the middle of the soles. I cried a little as I tried to get out those thorns. They were in deep and broken off. I wondered why they didn't hurt more, but when I felt my toes, I knew—those toes were hard and stiff and hardly any feeling in them. The part next to the big toe was like leather. I tried to pinch it, but I couldn't feel anything.

My head ached and I didn't want to move, but night was falling and I had to go on, at least as far as some big tree. I got to my feet. Was that hard! I could scarcely bend my knees, and my head was so dizzy I staggered. I had to go across an open space to the stream, and as I went along I saw a big bear, just ahead of me. Christmas, he was big—big as a house, I thought—but I wasn't a bit scared—not a single bit. I was glad to see him.

Wilfred Thesiger: Arabian Sands (1959)

THESIGER, WHO DIED in 2003 at the age of ninety-three, is often thought to have been the last real explorer, someone who traveled in remote regions and made significant discoveries—in essence a mapmaker, in the spirit of Richard Burton and H. M. Stanley. Fluent in Arabic, a rider of camels, with a deep sympathy for traditional cultures, Thesiger fought in Ethiopia during World War II and after the war made scientific and personal expeditions in Arabia. He also lived for long periods among the Madan people in the marshes of southern Iraq, an experience he recounts in The Marsh Arabs (1964). That book has great historical value, because the people were displaced by Saddam Hussein in one of his persecutions. Even an average day among the Marsh Arabs seems like an ordeal, but nothing in Thesiger's work compares with his starving in the Empty Quarter of Arabia:

I had almost persuaded myself that I was conditioned to starvation, indifferent to it. After all, I had been hungry for weeks ... Certainly I thought and talked incessantly of food, but as a prisoner talks of freedom, for I realized that the joints of meat, the piles of rice, and the bowls of steaming gravy which tantalized me could have no reality outside my mind...

For the first day my hunger was only a more insistent feeling of familiar emptiness; something which, like a toothache, I could partly overcome by an effort of will. I woke in the gray dawn craving for food, but by lying on my stomach and pressing down I could achieve a semblance of relief...

I faced another night, and the nights were worse than the days. Now I was cold and could not even sleep except in snatches...

In the morning I watched Mikhail turn the camels out to graze, and as they shuffled off, spared for a while from the toil which we imposed upon them, I found I could only think of them as food. I was glad when they were out of sight ... I lay with my eyes shut, insisting to myself, "If I were in London I would give anything to be here"...No, I would rather be here starving as I was than sitting in a chair, replete with food, listening to the wireless, and dependent upon cars to take me through Arabia. I clung desperately to this conviction. It seemed infinitely important. Even to doubt it was to admit defeat, to forswear everything to which I held.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard: The Worst Journey in the World (1922)

CHERRY-GARRARD WAS ONLY twenty-three when he joined Robert Falcon Scott's Antarctic expedition in 1912. Scott and four of his men died on the way back from the pole. But before that, in the winter of 1912-13, Cherry-Garrard trudged through the polar darkness and cold (minus 79°F) to find a rookery of emperor penguins. This was "the Worst Journey." After returning to Britain Cherry-Garrard fought in World War I at the Battle of the Somme, where almost a million men died. But he said, "The Somme was a relative picnic compared to the Antarctic." He also said, "Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion."

In this magnificent book, in a chapter titled "Never Again," he wrote:

And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing; if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, "What's the use?" For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg.

Jon Krakauer: Into Thin Air (1999)

IN THE SPRING of 1996, Jon Krakauer, forty-two, on an assignment for Outside magazine, joined a guided expedition to Mount Everest. Just a story about guided climbing, but he found himself in the deadliest Everest season since climbing began there seventy-five years before, on Sagarmatha, Mother Goddess of the World.

Like all ordeal books, this one contains many lessons. The central issue is that you can buy your way up Everest, but to what extent is the hubristic motive in guided climbing an invitation to disaster? A person pays $70,000 (the going rate in 1996) to an expert, on the understanding that the client will successfully reach the summit. The client may be reasonably fit and experienced, or may be (as some clients Krakauer describes) first-timers at high altitudes, with a minimum of know-how. In the latter case, the client might be "short-roped" and yanked up the mountain, photographed at the top, and then dragged down.

Krakauer had dreamed from childhood of climbing Everest, yet was new to bottled oxygen, new to the Himalayas, and had never been anywhere near this height (29,000 feet). But he followed instructions, acclimatized himself, practiced for weeks in workout climbs from base camp, and finally made it to the top. During his descent, he suffered from hypoxia, hallucinations, extreme fatigue, and cold.

The story could have ended there. But there were many others on the mountain (he lists sixteen teams, two of them with more than twenty guides, clients, and sherpas), impatient to get to the top. So Krakauer's difficult but successful climb was only the beginning of the ordeal.

As Krakauer descended, twenty people lined up to climb the narrow ridges that led to the summit. Like Krakauer, they were worn down by oxygen deprivation, disorientation, hunger, thirst, and fatigue—and a storm was approaching. The climbers, undeterred, running late, pushed for the top; and in the thunderstorm that hit, accompanied by lightning, high winds, and blinding snow, chaos ensued. In the cold and the blowing snow, climbers got lost, fell, froze, hesitated, and panicked. Some guides stood by their clients, others abandoned them.

"With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill," Rob Hall, one of the guides, had told his clients early on. "The trick is to get back down alive." Struggling to save a faltering client, Hall died on the mountain, and so did the client, and ten others.

Everest does not inspire prudent people to climb its flanks, Krakauer writes: "Unfortunately, the sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger as well. This forms the nub of a dilemma that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you are too driven, you're likely to die. Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses."

William Burroughs: The Yage Letters (1963)

DOES THE BURROUGHS book belong here? I think so, as the narrative of a comic ordeal. These funny, informative, even scabrous letters, written to Allen Ginsberg, his lover at the time, were sent from various places in Latin America—Panama, Colombia, and Peru—and seem to be dispatches from a distant land. But I see them as mad memoranda, the ordeal of a man going in ever-narrowing circles. Burroughs hates travel, he hates foreigners, he mocks them unmercifully. What he craves is the ultimate high, and hearing it is to be found in the drug ayahuasca, a potion made from a jungle vine, he goes in search of it and relates his findings in these letters.

The landscape is insignificant, and the details of the trip—the people, the places—are almost beneath notice. He wants to try this drug; he is a man who needs a particular fix. If there were a progression, a sense of time, a mounting idea of discovery, an episodic enlightenment, this might rank as one of the great books about a quest. But it is deflationary and self-mocking, and he makes light of his ordeal.

"The Upper Amazon jungle has fewer disagreeable features than the Mid-West stateside woods in the summer," Burroughs writes in a typically dismissive way. And later, "Sure you think it's romantic at first but wait til you sit there five days onna sore ass sleeping in Indian shacks and eating hoka and some hunka nameless meat like the smoked pancreas of a two-toed sloth."

Burroughs did find the ayahuasca, and he had his visions, but the rest of the time he was chasing boys, many of whom (he says) stole from him. He took it in stride. "Trouble is," he writes in this cheery anti-travel book, "I share with the late Father Flanagan—he of Boys Town—the deep conviction that there is no such thing as a bad boy."

11. English Travelers on Escaping England

MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT ENGLISH travelers. Why so many? Why do they tend to seek out tropical regions, or the Costa del Sol, or anywhere but England? Even a short residence in England is enough to convince anyone that it is the class system that drives the English to places where class doesn't matter (as long as you're a bwana or a sahib). And for those who have status, it is the dreary climate that does the rest, sending the English looking for better weather. Generally, the history of English travel is the history of people in search of sunshine. D. H. Lawrence was unequivocal, and so was Robert Louis Stevenson, but the rest tend not to admit it.

At the beginning of her Travels in West Africa (1897), Mary Kingsley summed up the hypocrisy of such travelers: "If you were to take many of the men [in Africa] who most energetically assert that they wish they were home in England, 'and see if they would ever come to the etc., etc., place again,' and if you were to bring them home, and let them stay there a little while, I am pretty sure that—in the absence of attractions other than those of merely being home in England, notwithstanding its glorious joys of omnibuses, underground railways, and evening newspapers—these same men, in terms varying with individual cases, will be found sneaking back apologetically to the [African] Coast."

Here are seven travelers who made no bones about it.

Lady Hester Stanhope: Toward the end of her life, in her house in Djoun (in present-day Lebanon, where she lived for twenty-three years), she was visited by the English painter William Bartlett, who wrote, "She conducted us to an arbor in the gardens, quite English in appearance. I made this observation, when she replied, 'Oh, don't say so; I hate everything English'" (James C. Simmons, Passionate Pilgrims, 1987).

D. H. Lawrence: From wartime Sussex, April 30, 1915: "How dark my soul is! I stumble and grope and don't get much further. I suppose it must be so. All the beauty and light of the days seems [sic] like a [sic] iridescence on a very black flood ... I wish I were going to Thibet—or Kamschatka—or Tahiti—to the Ultima ultima ultima Thule. I feel sometimes, I shall go mad, because there is nowhere to go, no 'new world.' One of these days, unless I watch myself, I shall be departing in some rash fashion, to some foolish place" (Letters, vol. 2, 1913–1916, edited by George Zytaruk and James Boulton, 1981).

T. E. Lawrence: "We export two chief kinds of Englishmen," he wrote in the Introduction to Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta,

who in foreign parts divide themselves into two opposed classes. Some feel deeply the influence of native people, and try to adjust themselves to its atmosphere and spirit. To fit themselves modestly into the picture they suppress all in them that would be discordant with local habits and colours. They imitate the native, and so avoid friction in their daily life. However, they cannot avoid the consequences of imitation, a hollow, worthless thing. They are like the people but not of the people, and their half-perceptible differences give them a sham influence often greater than their merit. They urge the people among whom they live into strange, unnatural courses by imitating them so well that they are imitated back again.

The other class of Englishmen is the larger class. In the same circumstances of exile they reinforce their character by memories of the life they have left. In reaction against foreign surroundings they take refuge in the England that was theirs. They assert their aloofness, their immunity, the more vividly for their loneliness and weakness. They impress the peoples among whom they live by reaction, by giving them an ensample of the complete Englishman, the foreigner intact.

Doughty is a great member of the second, the cleaner class.

And T. E. Lawrence was a member of the first, the gone-native class.

W. Somerset Maugham: "To me England has been a country where I had obligations that I did not want to fulfill and responsibilities that irked me. I have never felt entirely myself till I had put at least the Channel between my native country and me" (The Summing Up, 1938).

W. H. Auden: "England is terribly provincial—it's all this family business. I know exactly why Guy Burgess went to Moscow. It wasn't enough to be queer and a drunk. He had to revolt still more to break away from it all. That's just what I've done by becoming an American citizen ... I also find criticism in England very provincial. In the literary world in England, you have to know who's married to whom, and who's slept with whom and who hasn't. It's a tiny jungle. America's so much larger. Critics may live in New York, but the writers don't" (quoted in Charles Osborne, W. H. Auden, 1980).

GeraldBrenan: "It will naturally be asked how I came to make my home in such a remote spot"—the tiny village of Yegen, in the Sierra Nevada of Andalusia, Spain, in 1920. "The shortest explanation would be that I was rebelling against English middle-class life ... The England I knew was petrified by class feeling and by rigid conventions, as well as, in my case, poisoned by memories of my public school, so that as soon as the war was over and I was out of uniform I set off to discover new and more breathable atmospheres" (South from Granada, 1957).

Bruce Chatwin: "I've decided to leave England. As Richard Burton said: 'The only country in which I do not feel at home'" (Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin, edited by Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare, 2010).

12. When You're Strange

A TRAVELER IS A STRANGER. ONE OF THE DELUsions of the tourist, usually buffered from reality, is that he or she is a friend and even perhaps a benefactor of the locals. "We're putting money into the economy," is a common tourist observation. The traveler, ever the outsider, always moving on, would never say that. "Tourism is a mortal sin," said the film director Werner Herzog. And yet it is the rough traveler, not the tidy tourist, who confronts—and needs the goodwill of—the native of the land. This is often a recapitulation of a recurrent human event in history that has always fascinated me—First Contact, meeting The Other. The most vivid examples come from the history of exploration and discovery. Usually, First Contact is construed as Columbus meeting his first Arawak and calling him an Indian, because Columbus believed he had reached the coast of India. But consider the opposite: the Arawak meeting a fat little Italian clutching a copy of Marco Polo's Travels on the deck of a caravel.

In the year of contact, 1778, the Hawaiians believed Captain James Cook to be the god Lono. The Aztecs, in 1517, took the Spaniards to be avatars of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, god of learning and of wind. The polar Inuit assumed that they were the only people in the world, so when they saw their first white stranger, the explorer Sir William Parry, in 1821, they said to him, "Are you from the sun or the moon?"

Until I went to live in Africa, I had not known that most people in the world believe that they are the People, and their language is the Word, and strangers are not fully human—at least not human in the way the People are—nor is a stranger's language anything but the gabbling of incoherent and inspissated felicities. In most languages, the name of a people means "the Original People," or simply "the People." "Inuit" means "the People," and most Native American names of so-called tribes mean "the People." For example, the Ojibwe, or Chippewa, call themselves Anishinaabe, "the Original People," and the Cherokee (the name is not theirs but a Creek word) call themselves Ani Yun Wiya, meaning "Real People," and Hawaiians refer to themselves as Kanaka Maoli, "Original People."

As recently as the 1930s, Australian gold prospectors and New Guinea Highlanders encountered each other for the first time. The grasping, world-weary Aussies took the Highlanders to be savages, while the Highlanders, assuming that the Aussies were the ghosts of their own dead ancestors, on a visit, felt a kinship and gave them food, thinking (as they reported later), "They are like people you see in a dream." But the Australians were looking for gold and killed the Highlanders who were uncooperative. The Lakota, who called white men washichus, Nathaniel Philbrick writes in The Last Stand, "believed that the first white men had come from the sea, which they called mniwoncha, meaning 'water all over.'" In an echo of this accurate characterization, and at about the same time, the historian Fernand Braudel tells us, "To West Africans, the white men were murdele, men from the sea."

Otherness can be like an illness; being a stranger can be analogous to experiencing a form of madness—those same intimations of the unreal and the irrational, when everything that has been familiar is stripped away.

It is hard to be a stranger. A traveler has no power, no influence, no known identity. That is why a traveler needs optimism and heart, because without confidence travel is misery. Generally, the traveler is anonymous, ignorant, easy to deceive, at the mercy of the people he or she travels among. The traveler might be known as "the American" or "the Foreigner," and there is no power in that.

A traveler is often conspicuous, and consequently is vulnerable. But in my traveling, I whistled in the dark and assumed all would be well. I depended on people being civil and observing a few basic rules. I did not expect preferential treatment. I did not care about power or respectability. This was the condition of a liberated soul, of course, but also the condition of a bum.

Among the Batelela in the Sankuru region of central Congo the word for stranger is ongendagenda. It is also one of the most common names for a male child. The reasoning is that when a child is born—and males matter most among the Batelela—he appears from nowhere and is unknown, so he is usually called Stranger, and this name stays with him throughout his life—Stranger is the "John" of the Sankuru region.

Bruce Chatwin, in The Songlines, quotes an Old English proverb: "The stranger, if he be not a trader, is an enemy." In The Valleys of the Assassins, Freya Stark wrote of the nomads in Luristan: "The laws of hospitality are based on the axiom that a stranger is an enemy until he has entered the sanctuary of someone's tent."

Some words for stranger have the meaning of a spirit, as in the case of the New Guinea Highlanders, who could not conceive of the white Australians as anything but spectral ancestors. In Swahili, the word mu-zungu (plural, wazungu) has its root in the word for ghost or spirit, and cognates of the word— mzungu in Chichewa and murungu in Shona and other Bantu languages—have the meaning of a powerful spirit, even a god. Foreigners had once seemed godlike when they first appeared in some places.

The word for foreigner in Easter Island, in Rapa Nui speech, is popaa —so I was told there. But this is a neologism. In an earlier time the Rapa Nui word for foreigner (according to William Churchill's Easter Island, 1915) was etua, which also means god or spirit. It is related to the Hawaiian word atua, though the Hawaiian word for stranger is haole, meaning "of another breath."

Here is a list of countries and languages and their words for stranger.

Maori—pakeha, white man, foreigner.

Fiji—kai valagi (pronounced valangi), white person, foreigner, "person from the sky," as opposed to kai India for Indians and kai China for Chinese.

Tonga—papalangi, a cognate of Samoanpalangi, meaning "sky burster," a person who comes from the clouds, not a terrestrial creature.

Samoa—palangi, "from the sky," related to the Fijian kai valangi.

Trobriand Islands—dim-dim, for foreigner or white-skinned person; koyakoya for dark-skinned non-Trobriander. Koya is the word for mountain. But there are no mountains in the Trobriand Islands. So a koyakoya is a mountain person—that is, from mainland New Guinea, or simply an off-islander.

HongKong—gweilo, "ghost man," a prettier way of saying "foreign devil," since a ghost is menacing, something to fear.

Japan—gaijin. The word is composed of two characters, gai, meaning outside, and jin, person. This appears to be a contraction for gai-kokujin, "outside-country person," thus an outsider in the most literal sense—racially, ethnically, geographically.

China—wei-guo ren is the neutral term, a person from a foreign country. But yanguize, "foreign devil," is also common, and there are words for "red-haired devil," "white devil," and "big nose."

Arabic—ajnabi, "people to avoid"; also ajami, meaning foreigner, barbarian, bad Arabic speaker, Persian; also gharib, stranger, "from the west."

Kiribati—I-matang. Traveling by kayak within the huge atoll of Christmas Island (Kiritimati), I heard this word often. I-matang is generally used to mean foreigner (there were four such people on Christmas Island), but etymologically it is "the person from Matang," said to be the ancestral home of the I-Kiribati, the original fatherland, a place of fair-skinned people. The word implies kinship. By the way, it is an actual place—Madang, on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea, thought by historians to be the origin of these Micronesian people.

Mexico—gringo. The word seems to have come from griego, a Spanish term for a Greek. The Diccionario Castellano (1787) defines gringo as a word used in Málaga for "anyone who spoke Spanish badly," and in Madrid for "the Irish." It implies gibberish. The many popular theories (among them, that it may be derived from hearing the disenchanted Irish soldiers who'd joined the Mexicans singing "Green Grow the Rushes Oh!" during the Mexican-American War in the mid-1840s) are fanciful and unconvincing. The earliest recorded use of gringo in print is in the Western Journal (1849–1850) of John Woodhouse Audubon (son of John James, and also an artist), who traveled by horseback through northern Mexico on his way from New York to witness the Gold Rush in California. In Cerro Gordo ("a miserable den of vagabonds") Audubon and his fellow travelers were abused: "We were hooted and shouted as we passed through, and called 'Grin-goes' etc., but that did not prevent us from enjoying their delicious spring water."

Being Frank

I HEARD THE word faranji, for foreigner, in Ethiopia when I was on my Dark Star Safari trip, and remembered farang in Thailand, ferangi in Iran, and firringhi in India and Malaysia (though orang-puteh, for white person, is more common in Malaysia). What's the connection?

When Richard Burton took his first trip to Abyssinia—recounted in First Footsteps in East Africa— he wrote, "I heard frequently muttered by the red-headed spearmen the ominous term 'Faranj.'" Burton went on to say that the Bedouin in Arabia "apply this term to all but themselves." In his time, even Indian traders in Africa were called faranji if they happened to be wearing trousers (shalwar), since trouser-wearing was associated with outsiders. In his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1853), he wrote, "The convert [in Arabia] is always watched with Argus eyes, and men do not willingly give information to a 'new Moslem,' especially a Frank."

In The Valleys of the Assassins (1934), Freya Stark says, "The aim of the Persian government is to have [the people of Luristan] dressed á la Ferangi in a year's time." Later on, in a valley "stood the castle of Nevisar Shah to which no Frank, so they told me, had ever climbed."

These words, all related to farang, are cognates of "Frank," though the people who use the word don't know beans about Franks. The Franks were a Germanic tribe who peregrinated western Europe in the third and fourth centuries. But the name, of which "French" is a cognate, probably gained currency from the Crusades of the twelfth century, when Europeans plundered Islamic holy sites and massacred Muslims in the name of God. In the Levant and ultimately as far as East Africa and Southeast Asia, a Frank was any Westerner.

Even in Albania: "Immense crowds collected to witness the strange Frank and his doings," wrote Edward Lear about himself, in his Albanian journal in 1848. A form offaranji, the word afrangi is regarded as obsolete in Egypt, though it is still occasionally used, especially in combination. In Egypt, a kabinet afrangi is a Western, sit-down toilet.

Almost the entire time I spent in Harar, Ethiopia—where the poet Rimbaud had lived—I was followed by children chanting, "Faranji! Faranji! Faranji!" Sometimes older people bellowed it at me, and now and then as I was driving slowly down the road a crazed-looking Harari would rush from his doorstep to the window of my car and stand, spitting and screaming the word into my face.

Travel Wisdom of Robert Louis Stevenson

In spite of being weak and tubercular—wraith like in his John 0/ Singer Sargent portrait—Stevenson traveled widely. Mostly he traveled for his health, searching for clement weather to ease his infected lungs, but also for the romance of the experience:

I would like to rise and go

Where the golden apples grow.

He rambled on the Continent, crisscrossed the United States, sailed around the Pacific, and ended up in Samoa, where he died (1894) and is buried. He was well read and undoubtedly knew Montaigne, who wrote in his essay "Of Vanity": "But, at such an age, you will never return from so long a journey. What care I for that? I neither undertake it to return, nor to finish it: my business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me; I only walk for the walk's sake." Stevenson seems to paraphrase this in his first quotation:

***

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life a little more nearly, to get down off this feather-bed of civilization, and to find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

—

Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes

(1879)

***

A voyage is a piece of autobiography at best.

—

The Cévennes Journal:

Notes on a Journey Through the French Highlands

(1978)

***

Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.

—"Virginibus Puerisque"

***

Herein, I think, is the chief attraction of railway travel. The speed is so easy, the train disturbs so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country; and while the body is being borne forward in the flying chain of carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humor moves them, at unfrequented stations.

—"Ordered South"

***

There lie scattered thickly various lengths of petrified trunk ... It is very curious, ofcourse, and ancient enough, if that were all. Doubtless, the heart of the geologist beats quicker at the sight; but, for my part, I was mightily unmoved. Sightseeing is the art of disappointment.

—"The Silverado Squatters"

***

There's nothing under heaven so blue,

That's fairly worth the traveling to.

But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many agreeable

prospects and adventures by the way.

—"The Silverado Squatters"

13. It Is Solved by Walking

ALL SERIOUS PILGRIMS GO ON FOOT TO THEIR holy destination—Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims stand for so many others. Walking is a spiritual act; walking on one's own induces meditation. The Chinese characters for pilgrimage mean "paying one's respect to a mountain" (ch'ao-shan chin-hsiang). As I saw on my Riding the Iron Rooster trip, many Taoists make a point of visiting the five holy mountains they regard as pillars of China, the cardinal compass points as well as the center, separating Heaven and Earth. And there are four other mountains, sacred to Buddhism and associated with a particular bodhisattva. "Paying respect" means climbing the mountains—though this often involves walking up stairs, since steps have been cut into most of the mountainsides. Ambrose Bierce defined a pilgrim as "a traveler that is taken seriously."

In his essay "Walking," in the posthumous collection Excursions (1863), Thoreau spoke of the word "saunter" as having been derived from the French expression "going to the Holy Land": "I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going 'à la Sainte Terre,' to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, 'There goes a Sainte-Terrer,' a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean." And later in this long paragraph he says, "For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels."

The Spanish word sendereando, for hiking, is compact and pretty (sen-dero is path), but the wisest phrase for this activity is the Latin solvitur ambulando ("it is solved by walking"), attributed to Saint Augustine. The phrase was mentioned by the long-distance walker Patrick Leigh-Fermor to Bruce Chatwin. "Hearing it, immediately Bruce whipped out his notebook," Chatwin's biographer wrote. Walking to ease the mind is also an objective of the pilgrim. There is a spiritual dimension too: the walk itself is part of a process of purification. Walking is the age-old form of travel, the most fundamental, perhaps the most revealing.

Chatwin regarded walking in an almost mystical way. His predecessors, beginning with the great Japanese poet Bashö, felt the same. Walking inspired the poets Whitman and Wordsworth, and Rousseau based a series of philosophical essays on walks. Stanley walked across Africa twice. When David Livingstone wished to get into shape, and to invoke the traveling mood, he walked for weeks at a time in the African bush, "until my muscles were hard as boards."

Some walks are those of the flâneur, an almost untranslatable French word meaning stroller, saunterer, drifter—the essence of a traveler—but in this case usually one in a city, perhaps the very word to describe someone trying to solve a problem. Some walks by travelers border on stunts or bids for the record book—two obvious examples are Ewart Grogan tramping from Cape Town to Cairo in 1898, and more recently Ffyona Campbell, who in her way walked around the world (see Chapter 14, "Travel Feats").

But it is the committed walker, the thoughtful walker, who interests me the most.

Xuanzang (603–664): The Ultimate Pilgrim

A MONK AND a scholar, the young Xuanzang (Hsüan-tsang in some renderings) felt that the Buddhist texts in China were badly translated, debased versions of the originals, so he decided to travel to India to verify them and to bring back as many texts as possible. He hoped also to see the holy places associated with Buddha's life and enlightenment. In some old illustrations he is shown accompanied by a pony—he certainly brought back the manuscripts on packhorses. But in his account of his seventeen years of travels he frequently refers to walking on narrow and difficult trails, and he appears to have traveled alone.

"At a time when the country was most prosperous, and equipped with unparalleled virtue, he started his journey to the remote lands carrying his pewter staff and whisked the dust with his robes," wrote Yu Zhining, Duke of Yanguo, in the original preface to The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions. In a postscript to the book, Xuanzang is eulogized: "With the prestige of the emperor, he made his way, and under the protection of deities, he traveled in solitude."

Xuanzang left from the Tang Dynasty capital, Changan—Xian today, site of the terracotta warriors, imperial tombs, and glorious pagodas—and kept going, through Qinghai and across Xingjiang to Bokhara, Samarkand, and into present-day Afghanistan. All the while he made notes on the state of Buddhism, the condition of monasteries, the number of monks. He was awestruck by the giant carved Buddha statues at Bamiyan (dynamited and destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, to the cries of "Allah is great!"). He crossed Peshawar and Taxila in what is now Pakistan, describing the ruins of Gandhara, where "there were more than a thousand monasteries but they are now dilapidated and deserted, and in desolate condition." He wandered all over India. The fastidiousness of the early manifestations of the caste system fascinated him: "Butchers, fishermen, harlots, actors, executioners, and scavengers mark their houses with banners and are not allowed to live inside the cities," he wrote of the walled towns of northern India.

Throughout, he chronicled the presence of dragons, some protective, others menacing. He succeeded in his mission to find copies of ancient Buddhist texts, to visit the sacred places associated with Buddha: Gaya, Sarnath, Lumpini Gardens, and at last Kushinagara, where Buddha died. He stayed for years at a time in monasteries, learned Sanskrit, kept traveling, and returned to China with 657 texts, carried by twenty packhorses. At the suggestion of the emperor, he dictated The Great Tang Dynasty Record, finishing it in 646. When it was translated into French and English in the nineteenth century, other travelers (Aurel Stein for one) were able to find the lost cities and forgotten ruins that Xuanzang had so meticulously described. A new edition of Xuanzang's travels appeared in 1996, translated by Li Rongxi.

Matsuo Bashö (1644–1694): Narrow Road to the Deep North

BASHÖ WAS A nickname—it means banana tree: one was planted at the hut of the poet by an admirer, and the poet adopted the name. Bashö is said to be one of the greatest writers of haiku, the highly distilled, rigorously syllabic, and allusive Japanese three-line poem.

A Zen practitioner, Bashö also wrote haibun, a compressed and sometimes staticky prose that resembles the starkness of haiku. An admirer of the mendicant monks, he spent his life alternating spells of meditative living, usually in a remote hut, with walks (occasionally resorting to horseback), some short, several of them quite lengthy, which he re-counted in books that combined prose with poems. He acknowledged Kamo-no-Chōmei (see [>]) as an inspiration in the writing of travel journals. His first, a quest for spiritual wisdom, was The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton (1685). One passage is heart-rending:

On a road along the Fuji River we came upon an abandoned child, about two years of age and crying pathetically. Apparently his parents, finding the waves of this floating world as uncontrollable as the turbulent rapids of this river, had decided to leave him there until his life vanished like a dewdrop. He looked like a tiny bush-clover blossom that would fall any time tonight or tomorrow beneath the blow of an autumn gust. I tossed him some food from my sleeve pocket, and mused as I passed by:

Poets who sang of monkey's wailing:

How would they feel about this child forsaken

In the autumn wind?

(translated by Makoto Ueda,

Matsuo Bashö,

1977)

In 1689 Bashö took his most ambitious trip, nine months of walking that resulted in his best-known work, his masterpiece, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (or Back Roads to Far Towns), at the time a remote and forgotten part of Honshu, the main island of Japan. Bashö was accompanied by his friend Sora, and both dressed as pilgrims. On this long walk Bashö describes the enlightenment he seeks:

Spent night at Iizuka, bathed at hot-springs there, found lodgings but only thin mats over bare earth, ramshackle sort of place. No lamp, bedded down by shadowy light of fireplace and tried getting some rest. All night, thunder, pouring buckets, roof leaking, fleas, mosquitoes in droves: no sleep. To cap it off the usual trouble cropped up [illness], almost passed out. The short night sky at last broke, and again picked up and went on. But the night's traces dragged, mind balked. Hired horses, got to post town of Ko-ori. Future seemed farther off than ever, and recurring illness nagged, but what a pilgrimage to far places calls for: willingness to let world go, its momentariness to die on the road, human destiny, which lifted spirit a little, finding foot again here and there, crossing the Okido Barrier in Date.

—

Back Roads to Far Towns,

translated by

Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu (1968)

The Nomadism of Bruce Chatwin

CHATWIN WAS DELIBERATELY enigmatic, but a relentless explainer in the excitable way of a self-taught and widely read person, fond of theorizing. His work has this same excitable, distracted quality, with flashes of true brilliance in description. He was greatly influenced by Robert Byron's Road to Oxiana, and this admiration shows in his own work, in his idealizing oddity of description and a love of the grotesque or unexpected. His self-assurance showed, as Augustus Hare said of Mrs. Grote in his autobiography, as the stating of every belief "with the manner and tone of one laying down the laws of Athens."

Chatwin was just as unambiguous in his belief in the value of walking. Walking defined him. And he felt that walking defined the human race—the best of it. His earliest work was on nomads; he lived his life on the move. Chatwin scoffed at the term "travel writer" and even "travel book." He claimed that much of what he wrote, sold as "travel," was fiction. "The Songlines is a novel," he said, though most readers regard it as Bruce's own adventures in the Australian outback. Some of In Patagonia was made up or fudged. He was contradictory, intense, unreliable, elusive, a compulsive exaggerator, almost a Munchhausen, and also secretive. "Hate confessional mode" he wrote in one of his notebooks.

Chatwin could seem at times frivolous, or so intense and demanding as to be exhausting. But without question he was an imaginative writer and one of the great walkers in travel literature.

This is not plain in the text of In Patagonia, where a typical sentence is "I left the Rio Negro and went on south to Port Madryn"—a trek of two hundred miles, but he doesn't say how he got there. Or "I crossed over into Fireland" or "I passed through three boring towns" or "I went to the southernmost town in the world." He is an insubstantial presence in his books ("I am not interested in the traveler"), but in his letters home he was explicit. "Dying of tiredness. Have just walked 150 odd miles," he wrote to his wife.

The walker sees things clearly: the sun on the walker's head, the wind in the walker's face, the country under the walker's feet: "I walked out of town to the petrified forest," he wrote in The Songlines. "Wind pumps whirled insanely. A steel-blue heron lay paralyzed under an electric cable. A dribble of blood ran along its beak. The tongue was missing. The trunks of extinct monkey-puzzles were broken clean as if in a sawmill."

If The Songlines is a novel, as Chatwin said, it is a very patchy piece of fiction. I think he meant that he invented much of it, and this may be true; but making things up in a travel book is not the same as writing a novel. The Songlines is a book arguing the case for nomadism: "The more I read, the more convinced I became that nomads had been the crankhandle of history, if for no other reason than the great monotheisms had, all of them, surfaced from the pastoral milieu."

This, on Chatwin's part, is bad history. The historian Fernand Braudel, in his study of global shifts in culture, The Structure of Everyday Life, writes that nomads were "horse- and camel-men" who "represented speed and surprise at a period when everything moved slowly." Chatwin seems not to have known this. Later in The Songlines, he asserts, "Natural Selection has designed us—from the structure of our brain cells to the structure of our big toe—for a career of seasonal journeys on foot through a blistering land of thorn-scrub or desert."

Chatwin spent some weeks in an SUV in Australia, visiting Aboriginals. But what one remembers of these visits, and the stops in the outback, are the many instances of racism and mindless abuse from Australian whites (he was traveling in the mid-1980s). When he is on foot his prose is sharper:

I walked over a plateau of sandhills and crumbly red rock, broken by gulches which were difficult to cross. The bushes had been burnt for game-drives, and bright green shoots were sprouting from the stumps. [Then I climbed the plateau to find] Old Alex, naked, his spears along the ground and his velvet coat wrapped in a bundle. I nodded and he nodded.

"Hello," I said. "What brings you here?"

He smiled, bashful at his nakedness, and barely opening his lips, said, "Footwalking all the time all over the world."

—The Songlines

Werner Herzog: Walking on Foot Is a Virtue

ON HIS DEATHBED, "Bruce summoned Herzog because he thought the director had healing powers," Nicholas Shakespeare wrote in his biography Bruce Chatwin. "When they first met in Melbourne in 1984 ... their talks had begun with a discussion on the restorative powers of walking. 'He had an almost immediate rapport with me,' says Herzog, 'when I explained to him that tourism is a mortal sin, but walking on foot is a virtue, and that whatever went wrong and makes our civilization something doomed is the departure from the nomadic life.'"

Herzog's belief in solvitur ambulando is unshakable. In an interview he said, "I personally would rather do the existentially essential things in life on foot. If you live in England and your girlfriend is in Sicily, and it is clear you want to marry her, then you should walk to Sicily to propose. For these things travel by car or aeroplane is not the right thing."

And he walked the walk. In 1974, hearing that the German film director Lotte Eisner was dying in Paris, Herzog decided to walk the five hundred miles there from Munich, "believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot." He added, as passionate walkers often do, "Besides, I wanted to be alone with myself." He was thirty-two. It was the winter of 1974. He described the journey in Of Walking in Ice (1980).

Herzog traveled almost as a mendicant. He rarely stayed in hotels, preferring to break into unoccupied houses and sleep in them, or sneak into barns and sleep in haystacks. He was frequently taken to be a tramp or an outlaw—he was indeed a trespasser, but that too is often the role of a walker. He was sent away from inns and restaurants for his sinister appearance.

His route was as the crow flies ("a direct imaginary line"), taking him through cities and slums and garbage dumps and past motorways; this is anything but pastoral, and yet his mood is reflective. His prose is cinematic, composed ofheaped-up images, like a long panning shot of a young man trudging through snow and rain, across bleak landscapes, never making a friend, never ingratiating himself. His legs ache, his feet are so blistered and sore he limps. He writes, "Why is walking so full of woe?"

He records his dreams, he recalls his past, his childhood, and his prose becomes more and more hallucinatory. Nearer Paris, where he will find that Lotte Eisner has not died, he is strengthened by the sight of a rainbow: "A rainbow before me all at once fills me with the greatest confidence. What a sign it is, over and in front of he who walks. Everyone should Walk."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Reveries of the Solitary Walker

THE TITLE SAYS everything of this posthumous book. Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire is the last thing Rousseau wrote; he worked on it until a few weeks before he died, in 1778. The word "walk" is a specific activity in the book, but it also implies an essay, the word Montaigne used to mean a try, or an attempt.

"I am now alone on earth," Rousseau writes in the first line of the "First Walk," and announces that this sequence of walks will take the form of self-examination. Detached from everything and everyone for fifteen years (because of exile, condemnation, and harassment), utterly alone, he asks, "What am I?"

His serene condition, which he calls renunciation, is like that of the mendicant saddhu who wanders in India. "Everything is finished for me on earth. People can no longer do good or evil to me here. I have nothing more to hope for or to fear in this world; and here I am, tranquil at the bottom of the abyss, a poor unfortunate mortal, but unperturbed, like God himself."

Through walking, Rousseau remembers events, interprets his actions, and recalls embarrassments—a key one in the "Fourth Walk" when, asked about his children, he claims he doesn't have any. It is, as he writes, a lie. Rousseau had five children, who, for their own good (so he claimed in his Confessions and here too), he stuck in a foundling home. But this memory provokes a reverie about being untruthful.

His meditation on happiness in the "Fifth Walk" produces one of the many bittersweet reflections on the transitory nature of joy: "Happiness [is] a fleeting state which leaves our heart still worried and empty."

In later walks he speaks of how a country ramble can be spoiled or overpowered by certain conditions, how "memory of the company I had left followed me into solitude," and how particular itineraries had put him into contact with people he found upsetting. A tone of resignation permeates the Reveries. Rousseau was through trying to persuade anyone that he was worthy. Intensely autobiographical, it is a set of excursions that become reflections on life and death, for a man who is about to die.

Wordsworth: A Nature Poet with "Serviceable Legs"

WORDSWORTH'S PASSION FOR walking inspired his poems, which often praise the joyful activity of walking. At the age of seventy-three, reflecting on one of his earliest poems, "An Evening Walk," he wrote that he was an "eye-witness" to the features of the countryside that he put into the poem. Speaking of a particular couplet, he wrote, "I recollect distinctly the very spot where this first struck me. It was in the way between Hawkshead and Ambleside, and gave me extreme pleasure. The moment was important in my poetical history; for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as I was acquainted with them; and I made a resolution to supply, in some degree, the deficiency."

His life was shaped by walking. Walking home after a party, while in his teens, overcome by a sunrise and a glimpse of mountains, he felt he was witnessing a revelation, and was so moved he decided that his role in life would be a "Dedicated Spirit."

Walking became part of his routine, living with his sister Dorothy at Dove Cottage in Grasmere. Dorothy remarked on how he walked for hours, even in the rain, and that "he generally composes his verses out of doors."

"He was, upon the whole, not a well-made man. His legs were pointedly condemned by all female connoisseurs in legs," Thomas De Quincey wrote waspishly, yet his legs were "serviceable," adding, "I calculate, upon good data, that with those identical legs Wordsworth must have traveled a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English miles."

Wordsworth ambled around Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. In his fifties he toured the Continent, walking up and down France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and elsewhere, writing the whole time. Even in his sixties he was able to walk twenty miles a day. Dorothy wrote, "And as to climbing of mountains, the hardiest & the youngest are yet hardly a match for him." At seventy he climbed Helvellyn, at over three thousand feet the third-highest peak in the Lake District.

He died at the age of eighty, a few weeks after being taken ill on a walk. One of the oddities of Wordsworth as a lover of flowers and fresh air is that (so everyone who knew him testified) he had no sense of smell.

Thoreau's "Walking

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, who made a sacrament of walking, was a relentless analyzer of his experience and a constant refiner of his prose style, as his voluminous journals attest. And Thoreau was never happier than when he was robustly explaining the crochets of his life. His essay "Walking," which appeared in his posthumous volume Excursions, is one of his happiest pieces. It is also one of the best essays on the subject of perambulation. Thoreau lived near enough to nature in Concord that he did not have to go far to feel he was surrounded by wilderness, even when he could hear train whistles.

He is specific about miles—he walked as much as twenty a day, he says—and about hours too: "I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least, and it is commonly more than that, sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements."

This sacramental walking must not be confused with mere physical exercise, he says, but is more akin to yoga or a spiritual activity. "The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours, as the swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man's swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!" Since walking cannot be separated from the process of thought, "you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wordsworth's servant to show him her master's study, she answered, 'Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.'"

In "Walking" Thoreau writes, "Two or three hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey." This is a classic Thoreau conceit, the isolated farmhouse every bit as satisfying as distant Dahomey. In fact, Thoreau was a wide reader of travel books, and though Sir Richard Burton's Mission to Gelele, King of Dahomey came out the year after Thoreau died, he was familiar with Burton's travels in the lake regions of central Africa and elsewhere—twelve of Burton's books of travel and discovery were published in Thoreau's lifetime, including Wanderings in West Africa.

He invokes Burton in this essay, saying, "Give me the ocean, the desert or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveler Burton says of it, 'Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded ... In the desert, spirituous liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence.'"

But Thoreau, who avoided traveling on ocean, in desert, or through wilderness, belittled foreign travel, persuasively insisting it was not necessary to the serious walker. It is this persuasiveness—the triumph of his prose style—that made him far more influential than men and women who lived heroic lives of travel. Never mind counting the cats in Zanzibar, Thoreau says: "There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you."

John Muir: "Fond of Everything That Was Wild"

LATE IN HIS life, when he was seventy-five and had only a year more to live, John Muir, one of the greatest of walkers, wrote The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913), beginning it with this sentence: "When I was a boy in Scotland I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I've been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures."

The large family (Muir was one of eight children) emigrated from Scotland to America, settling first in a shack, then on a farm in Wisconsin. Muir's father, Daniel, was a severe disciplinarian: "The old Scotch fashion of whipping for every act of disobedience or of simple playful forgetfulness was still kept up in the wilderness, and of course many of those whippings fell upon me."

A combination of his strict religious upbringing and a love for nature seems to have driven Muir from home and given him a mystical love for the natural world and a way of understanding wilderness. He lost his faith in organized religion but never failed to see something spiritual in nature.

A tinkerer and an inventor, he dreamed of exploring the Amazon jungles, like Alexander von Humboldt, one of his heroes. But apart from a short spell in Cuba he remained in the United States and became an early advocate for the preservation of wilderness areas, a cofounder of the Sierra Club, and the moving force behind the creation of America's national parks.

He was by nature a wanderer, and even as a fairly young man he was as bearded and bright-eyed as an Old Testament prophet. In 1867, at the age of twenty-nine, restless after a series of setbacks, he decided to walk from Indianapolis to Florida. His diary from this journey was published after his death as A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf. "My plan," he wrote, "was simply to push on in a general southward direction by the wildest, leafiest, least-trodden way I could find, promising the greatest extent of virgin forest."

The forests of this great walk are lovely, but many of the people are distinctly menacing, for in the aftermath of the Civil War (unconscripted, Muir spent most of the war years sauntering in Canada), the South was in a state of derangement. He meets robbers, though he carries nothing worth stealing; he is confronted by "guerrillas" on horseback, ten of them at one point; and he encounters desperate former slaves. He stumbles upon a cotton plantation, three years after the war ended, still being run by a man known as "massa" whose field hands are "large bands of slaves."

What Muir had intended as a long walk through America was marked by hunger, danger, and uncertainty. Two years later he was in San Francisco, unhappy as always among crowds of people and eager to leave the city. He asks for the nearest way out.

"But where do you want to go?" a stranger responds.

"To any place that is wild," Muir says.

Directed to the Oakland ferry, he sets off for the wilderness on the first of April 1868, a walk that would change his life. He described his trek as slow, enchanted, easterly, toward the Yosemite Valley.

Muir was eloquent in his descriptions of landscape. He was also, like many other nature writers, something of a misanthrope, a trait noted in Driving Home by Jonathan Raban, who is a persuasive dissident on the subject of Muir's style. (Raban deconstructs Muir's sublime language as misleading, even subversive, the origin of today's "cult of 'pristine' wilderness.") Muir's charismatic personality aided his evangelism in the cause that wilderness must be preserved: Teddy Roosevelt became an important supporter after going on a journey with him. But it was Muir's prose, perhaps overegged, and his evocations of the Sierra that made his case and gave us the national parks as well as his shelf of distinguished books.

From his first glimpse of Yosemite, as he reminisced in

The Yosemite

(1912), his vision was apparent.

Looking eastward from the summit of the Pacheco Pass one shining morning, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most beautiful I have ever beheld. At my feet lay the Great Central Valley of California, level and flowery, like a lake of pure sunshine, forty or fifty miles wide, five hundred miles long, one rich furred garden of yellow compositae. And from the eastern boundary of this vast golden flower-bed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height and so gloriously colored and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with light, but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city. Along the top and extending a good way down, was a rich pearl-gray belt of snow; below it a belt of blue and dark purple, marking the extension of the forests; and stretching along the base of the range a broad belt of rose-purple; all these colors, from the blue sky to the yellow valley smoothly blending as they do in a rainbow, making a wall of light ineffably fine. Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the Range of Light.

Peter Matthiessen: "All the Way to Heaven Is Heaven

PETER MATTHIESSEN (BORN 1927) is a happy combination of fine writer, courageous traveler, scrupulous naturalist, and spiritual soul—he has his own Buddhist dojo at his home on Long Island. A committed walker, he has traveled and written about Asia, New Guinea, Africa, and Antarctica. His The Snow Leopard is one of the great accounts of someone "paying respects to a mountain." Toward the end of the book, suffused with the spirit of the trip, exhausted but uplifted, Matthiessen writes: "I lower my gaze from the snow peaks to the glistening thorns, the snow patches, the lichens. Though I am blind to it, the Truth is near, in the reality of what I sit on—rocks. These hard rocks instruct my bones in what my brain could never grasp in the Heart Sutra, that 'form is emptiness and emptiness is form'—the Void, the emptiness of blue-black space, contained in everything. Sometimes when I meditate, the big rocks dance."

This is also an example of someone solving philosophical problems by walking, a deeply felt, subtly written, and arduously tramped-out account of Matthiessen's search for the elusive snow leopard of the Himalayas—in essence a search for his own peace of mind.

"In late September of 1973," he explains at the beginning, "I set out with GS [George Schaller] on a journey to the Crystal Mountain, walking west under Annapurna and north along the Kali Gandaki River, then west and north again, around the Dhaulagiri peaks and across the Kanjiroba, two hundred and fifty miles or more to the Land of Dolpo, on the Tibetan Plateau."

The snow leopard, the "most beautiful of the great cats," had been sighted by only two Westerners in the previous twenty-five years. To get a glimpse of one of these "near-mythic" beasts was the formal reason for the trip, but in effect this is Matthiessen's pilgrimage: a search for healing after the death of his wife, a search for the sources of Buddhism, and a contemplation of a landscape regarded as holy by the Nepalese who live in the region. If there is a journey that is the opposite of the expensive, breathless guided climbs up Everest that Jon Krakauer writes about, it is this book, which has much more in common with Bashö, whom Matthiessen quotes with approval.

In ten- and eleven-hour treks, Matthiessen and Schaller rise higher and higher into the mountains, suffering from the cold and the altitude and the difficult trail, creeping on narrow traverses above deep and precipitous valleys. Such obstacles are inevitable, as Matthiessen writes: "Tibetans say that obstacles in a hard journey, such as hailstones, wind, and unrelenting rains, are the work of demons, anxious to test the sincerity of the pilgrims and eliminate the fainthearted among them."

One of the more terrifying obstacles—this, at eleven thousand feet—are the fierce guard dogs of the Tibetan refugees who inhabit their heights. "In Tibet, where wolves and brigands prosper, the nomad's camps and remote villages are guarded by big black or brindle mastiffs. Such dogs are also found in northern Nepal." Matthiessen successfully fights off an attack by a slavering mastiff and pushes on.

The book is a self-portrait of Matthiessen the pilgrim, but also a portrait of George Schaller, a scientist, skeptic, and part-time misanthrope whom Matthiessen takes pains to enlighten. He teaches him the tenets of Zen Buddhism, and then "I tell GS of the Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhardt and Saint Francis, Saint Augustine, and Saint Catherine of Siena, who spent three years in silent meditation: 'All the way to Heaven is Heaven,' Saint Catherine said, and that is the very breath of Zen, which does not elevate divinity above the common miracles of every day."

In a treacherous part of the mountains he reflects on the possibility of dying in this dangerous place—and he accepts the idea: "Between clinging and letting go, I feel a terrific struggle. This is a fine chance to let go, to 'win my life by losing it,' which means not recklessness but acceptance, not passivity but nonattachment."

Toward the end of the journey, the snow leopard unglimpsed yet still inspiring his pilgrimage, missing his family and friends, Matthiessen receives a batch of mail from home. Wishing to be at one with the landscape and people around him, he deliberately does not open them; he puts them in his pack, to be opened when this journey is over. If the news is bad, he says, there is nothing he can do to leave any earlier from this remote place. "And good news, too, would be intrusive, spoiling this chance to live moment by moment in the present by stirring up the past, the future, and encouraging delusions of continuity and permanence just when I am trying to let go, to blow away, like that white down feather on the mountain."

In our present overconnected, hyperactive age, this is a salutary book and worthy of its predecessors: Bashö, Wordsworth, Thoreau.

14. Travel Feats

SPEAKING OF "THE WINTER JOURNEY"—SIX weeks of complete darkness and low temperatures (minus 79°F) and gale-force winds—an experience of which gave him the title for his book The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard reflected on dangerous feats in travel. "Why do some human beings desire with such urgency to do such things regardless of the consequences, voluntarily, conscripted by no one but themselves? No one knows. There is a strong urge to conquer the dreadful forces of nature, and perhaps to get consciousness of ourselves, of life, and of the shadowy workings of our human minds. Physical capacity is the only limit. I have tried to tell how, and when, and where. But why? That is a mystery."

Maybe there is an answer. When I was preparing to write the introduction to the American edition of Alone, Gérard d'Aboville's account of his single-handed journey rowing across the Pacific, I pressed d'Aboville on his reasons for making this dangerous voyage. He became silent. After a long while he said, "Only an animal does useful things. An animal gets food, finds a place to sleep, tries to keep comfortable. But I wanted to do something that was not useful—not like an animal at all. Something only a human being would do."

What separates some feats from others is the way the tale is told. Sir Richard Burton's book about how he, an infidel, traveled to Mecca in disguise is a classic. After Joshua Slocum sailed around the world alone, he wrote a good book about the experience; so did Tschifelly, in Tschifelly's Ride, the story of his trip on horseback from Argentina to New York. Breaking out of a POW camp in Kenya and climbing Mount Kenya would have been a hilarious anecdote, but Felice Benuzzi wrote a detailed account of the feat, and so did Gérard D'Aboville after he rowed across the Pacific Ocean.

Now and then a great feat is forced upon the traveler, as with Captain Bligh's open-boat voyage of 4,000 miles with eighteen men after the mutiny on the Bounty, or Shackleton's heroic rescue of his men, which necessitated his traveling almost a thousand miles through the Southern Ocean in a freezing lifeboat. But these epics of survival were unintentional.

There are many other notable travel feats: a man windsurfed across the Atlantic (M. Christian Marty, in February 1982); a woman windsurfed across the Indian Ocean (Raphaeila Le Gouvello, sixty days in 2006, 3,900 miles, from Exmouth in Western Australia to the island of Réunion); a man skied down Everest in 2000 (the Slovenian Davo Karnicar), and a woman did it in 2006—Kit DesLauriers, who has also skied down the highest peaks on every continent, including Antarctica. Kayakers have gone everywhere, across oceans, around Cape Horn, and made ambitious circumnavigations (Japan, Australia, New Zealand). Some of these are admirable, even heroic journeys, and some are stunts; I am mainly interested in travel feats that have resulted in memorable books.

A Disguised Infidel Penetrates Mecca

IN HIS Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1853), Sir Richard Burton claimed he was "the only living European who has found his way to the Head Quarters of the Moslem Faith."

He did it for a reason common to travelers setting off: he was, among other things, "thoroughly tired of 'progress' and of 'civilization'; curious to see with my eyes what others are content to 'hear with ears,' namely Moslem inner life in a really Mohammedan country; and longing, if truth be told, to set foot on that mysterious spot which no vacation tourist has yet described, measured, sketched and photographed."

As with his long trips through Africa and the American West, Burton was happiest when he was in a remote place. "Believe me, when once your tastes have conformed to the tranquility of [desert] travel, you will suffer real pain in returning to the turmoil of civilization. The air of the cities will suffocate you, and the care-worn and cadaverous countenances of citizens will haunt you like a vision of judgment."

The trip, Burton says, took nine months, but in reality it took much longer, because he needed to be fluent in Arabic, knowledgeable in all aspects of Islam, and well versed in the Koran. This had taken years, while he had been a soldier in India from 1842 to 1849. He also needed to be circumcised. This he accomplished, probably in India, before the trip, when he was about thirty. He said that "external" physical evidence that he was a Muslim was essential.

One of the pleasures of the book is that Burton delights in his disguise, as the Afghan dervish Mirza Abdullah. "Little did he suspect who his interrogator was," he remarks of a slave dealer. And he flirts with a pretty slave girl, telling her how beautiful she is. ("They were average specimens of the steatopygous Abyssinian breed, broad-shouldered, thin-flanked, fine-limbed, and with haunches of prodigious size.")

She says, "Then why don't you buy me?"

So as to make himself seem a humble haji (pilgrim), Burton travels in the lowest class on the ship, quietly mocking his fellow passengers. Though he speaks of the rigors of the trip, the discomforts and the heat, he seldom complains. He is on a mission. Three months after he sets out, in the month of July ("sickening heat"), he arrives in Medina and visits the Prophet's tomb.

He moves on to Mecca with the other pilgrims, and achieves the objective of the trip, pretending to pray while examining the enormous stone known as the Kaaba, the heart and soul of Islam, forbidden to the unbeliever.

I may truly say that, of all the worshippers who clung weeping to the curtain, or who pressed their beating hearts to the stone, none felt for the moment a deeper emotion than did the Haji from the far-north. It was as if the poetical legends of the Arab spoke truth, and that the waving wings of angels, not the sweet breeze of morning, were agitating and swelling the black covering of the shrine. But, to confess humbling truth, theirs was the high feeling of religious enthusiasm, mine was the ecstasy of gratified pride.

Being Burton, though, another ecstatic experience is his glimpse of a flirtatious pilgrim, a girl he calls Flirtilla.

Close to us sat a party of fair Meccans, apparently belonging to the higher classes, and one of these I had already several times remarked. She was a tall girl, about eighteen years old, with regular features, a skin somewhat citrine-coloured, but soft and clear, symmetrical eyebrows, the most beautiful eyes, and a figure all grace. There was no head thrown back, no straightened neck, no flat shoulders, nor toes turned out—in fact, no "elegant" barbarisms: the shape was what the Arabs love, soft, bending, and relaxed, as a woman's figure ought to be. Unhappily she wore, instead of the usual veil, a "Yashmak" of transparent muslin, bound round the face; and the chaperone, mother, or duenna, by whose side she stood, was apparently a very unsuspicious or complaisant old person. Flirtilla fixed a glance of admiration upon my cashmere. I directed a reply with interest at her eyes. She then by the usual coquettish gesture, threw back an inch or two of head-veil, disclosing broad bands of jetty hair, crowning a lovely oval. My palpable admiration of the new charm was rewarded by a partial removal of the Yashmak, when a dimpled mouth and a rounded chin stood out from the envious muslin. Seeing that my companions were safely employed, I entered upon the dangerous ground of raising hand to forehead. She smiled almost imperceptibly, and turned away. The pilgrim was in ecstasy.

No non-Muslim since Burton has made the pilgrimage to Mecca and lived to tell the tale.

Sailing Alone Around the World

JOSHUA SLOCUM DECIDED to be the first man to sail single-handedly around the world. He was an experienced sailor—and restless from the time of his youth in Canada, where he had been an inveterate runaway. He found an old thirty-seven-foot sloop, rebuilt and refitted her, named her Spray, and left in 1895 on his voyage, without a chronometer but using dead reckoning. The trip, which took three years and covered forty-six thousand miles, was full of incident, and Slocum's account of the voyage, Sailing Alone Around the World (1899), is a well-told book—vivid, detailed, and very funny, right from the beginning, where he says, "I was born in a cold spot, on coldest North Mountain, on a cold February 20, though I am a citizen of the United States—a naturalized Yankee."

Slocum, self-educated, wrote that "my books were always my friends"—in his library he had Darwin, Twain's Life on the Mississippi, Don Quixote, R. L. Stevenson, and Shakespeare. His book made him famous, and he continued voyaging, as well as lecturing about his exploits. He also spent forty-two days in jail on a charge of molestation (see Chapter 8, "Fears, Neuroses, and Other Mental Conditions"). In the fall of 1909, he left Martha's Vineyard, intending to sail the Spray to the Amazon. Nothing was heard from him after that—he was lost at sea, presumed to have been sunk after having been hit by a steamer, though he (as always using his self-steering device) was snug in his cabin, reading a book, his normal practice when sailing.

In The Cruise of the Snark (1911), which was inspired by Slocum's voyage, Jack London wrote:

Joshua Slocum sailed around the world a few years ago in a thirty-seven-foot boat all by himself. I shall never forget, in his narrative of the voyage, where he heartily indorsed the idea of young men, in similar small boats, making similar voyage. I promptly indorsed his idea, and so heartily that I took my wife along. While it certainly makes a Cook's tour look like thirty cents, on top of that, and on top of the fun and pleasure, it is a splendid education for a young man—oh, not a mere education in the things of the world outside, of lands, and peoples, and climates, but an education in the world inside, an education in one's self, a chance to learn one's own self, to get on speaking terms with one's soul.

No Picnic on Mount Kenya

THE UNUSUAL ITINERARY in this book clearly illustrates one of the principal motives in travel: the wish to escape from boring, nagging, pestiferous people. That wish can inspire long journeys and ambitious travel feats.

In 1943, Felice Benuzzi (1910–1988) was bored and irritated with confinement and his annoying fellow Italians in a British prisoner of war camp outside the town of Nanyuki in Kenya. He was surrounded by "every kind of person ... old and young, sick and healthy, crazy and sensible." He says that the lunacies and achievements of the other prisoners could fill a book, and he proves this with examples. But his mind was on other things. From behind the barbed wire of the camp Benuzzi had a view of majestic Mount Kenya: "An ethereal mountain emerging from a tossing sea of clouds framed between two dark barracks—a massive blue-black tooth of sheer rock inlaid with azure glaciers, austere, yet floating fairylike on the near horizon. It was the first 17,000-foot peak I had ever seen."

A junior colonial officer in Italian-controlled Ethiopia, he had been captured by British soldiers along with thousands of other Italians and imprisoned in the British colony of Kenya. (Benuzzi does not mention that other Italian prisoners, as forced laborers, helped build the western road out of Nairobi that traverses the Great Rift Valley, as well as a lovely chapel in one of the bends in the road.)

More than a year of imprisonment passed before he was able to choose two fellow prisoners, Giuan and Enzo, for his team. With great ingenuity they made ice-climbing equipment (crampons, axes) out of scrap metal, and they stockpiled warm clothes and food. "Life [in prison] took on another rhythm because it had a purpose." With a copied key and an attitude, they bamboozled the camp guards and broke out, leaving a letter behind for the prison authorities stating their intention and apologizing for the bother they might be causing.

Their climb took them through the lairs of leopards and lions, through dense bamboo forests and fields of lobelia. Enzo was ill; rations were often short; the cold and the necessity to avoid detection were also problems. Yet given the circumstances, they were equipped for the assault on the summit. Without a map, they used their judgment and experience of other climbs. They struggled upward, at times in deep snow, blazing their own trail. On one of their climbs they were in the snow and cold for eighteen hours. Although they were defeated in their attempt to reach Batian, the highest peak, they summited Point Lenana, 16,300 feet, where they left an Italian flag that was later found.

After their arduous climb they descended the mountain, returned to the prison camp, and surrendered. The punishment for escaping was twenty-eight days in solitary confinement, but the British camp commandant, saying he "appreciated our sporting effort," gave them seven days.

Yes, a sporting effort. But it was something else—a disgust with confinement and a wish, as herded-together prisoners, to reclaim their humanity. "Forced to endure the milieu [of the camp]," Benuzzi says early in the book, "we seemed almost afraid of losing our individuality." Thus Benuzzi and his comrades saw a kind of salvation in the climb, as many people see liberation in travel and the triumph of the will in a singular travel feat.

After the war, Benuzzi wrote his book, Fuga sul Kenya: 17 Giorni di Libertà, which was translated under the less-than-gripping title No Picnic on Mount Kenya (1952).

Benuzzi's experience parallels that of the German Heinrich Harrar, who was captured in India in 1939 when he was on his way to climb Nanga Parbat. Harrer was interned near Dehra Dun, in sight of the Himalayan foothills, the heights of which (as in the case of Benuzzi's glimpse of Mount Kenya) inspired him to escape. After repeated attempts he succeeded, in 1944, making his way to Tibet, a tale he recounted in Seven Years in Tibet (1953).

Rowing Across the Pacific

GÉRARD D' ABOVILLE ROWED a twenty-five-foot boat from Japan to Oregon in 1991 and wrote about it in Alone. He had previously rowed a boat across the Atlantic ten years earlier, from Cape Cod to Brittany. This had been done before, but no one had succeeded in rowing across the Pacific alone. He set out late in the season and was pummeled by heavy weather, tumultuous storms, and forty-six-foot waves. There are no islands in the North Pacific. A Russian freighter offered to rescue him. "I was not even tempted," d'Aboville says. But he repeatedly overturned in the high waves and nearly drowned on his final approach to the coast of Oregon.

After he completed his journey he quietly returned to teaching survival skills in his Outward Bound school in Brittany.

Riding a Horse from Buenos Aires to New York City

AIMÉ TSCHIFFELY (1895–1954), a Swiss, rode ten thousand miles by horseback to New York. He had two horses, Mancha and Gato, and it took him three years, from 1925 to 1928. He crossed the Andes, the Darien Gap, and the length of Mexico, but not until he got to the United States did he have a serious problem: he barely survived being deliberately sideswiped by a lunatic motorist. The whole story is told in his best-selling book, Tschiffely's Ride (1933).

Swimming the Panama Canal

RICHARD HALLIBURTON (1900-1939) described his swimming the Panama Canal in his second book of travel, New Worlds to Conquer (1929). He had swum the Hellespont in his first book, The Royal Road to Romance (1925). He specialized in travel feats—the first documented winter ascent of Mount Fuji, sneaking into the Taj Mahal at night and bathing in the tank by moonlight, and other efforts—some actual feats, some silly stunts. In Seven League Boots (1935) he traveled through Arabia and Ethiopia, where he met and dined with Emperor Haile Selassie. He has been described as a tormented homosexual and an imaginative traveler and thinker. In his last effort, attempting to cross the Pacific in a Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, he was lost at sea and declared dead some months later.

His exuberant books, his purple prose, inspired a generation of youngsters to become travelers. In The Royal Road to Romance he wrote, "Youth—nothing else worth having in the world ... and I had youth, the transitory, the fugitive, now, completely and abundantly. Yet what was I going to do with it? Certainly not squander its gold on the commonplace quest for riches and respectability, and then secretly lament the price that had to be paid for these futile ideals. Let those who wish have their respectability—I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous and the romantic."

Circling the Poles

BETWEEN 1979 AND 1982, Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes (aka Ran Fiennes) traveled fifty-two thousand miles around the world on a polar axis, the Transglobe Expedition, with a partner, Charles Burton; the trip was mostly over land. Fiennes also attempted a solo expedition to the North Pole, but crashed through the ice and took his frostbitten self away, abandoning the Arctic. Other Fiennes feats: by hovercraft up the Nile to discover the lost city of Ubar in Oman, and running seven marathons in seven days, after undergoing double bypass heart surgery. His memoir Living Dangerously (1987) is highly hubristic but a readable account of his exploits.

The Ultimate Everest Experience

GÖRAN KROPP (1966–2002) biked seven thousand miles from Stockholm to Nepal (via Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan) and then climbed Everest, making an unsuccessful assault (without oxygen) and finally a successful summiting (at the same time as the Into Thin Air disaster, described by Jon Krakauer; see Chapter 10, "Travel as an Ordeal"). Afterward Kropp biked back to Sweden, being assaulted on the way by xenophobes and stone-throwing people. All the details are in his account of the trip, Ultimate High: My Everest Odyssey (1997). Kropp died from a fall while rock climbing in Washington in 2002.

Walking from Cape Town to Cairo

EWART GROGAN TREKKED from Cape Town to Beira, Mozambique, in 1898, and continued from Beira north through Nyasaland, Tanganyika, Uganda, and Sudan, and reached Cairo in early 1900. His account of the journey is From the Cape to Cairo: The First Traverse of Africa from South to North (1900). He was said to have done this in order to impress the father of Gertrude Coleman-Watt with his manliness and determination. He later married her.

Walking Around the World

FFYONA CAMPBELL (BORN 1967), restless, despised by her father, needing approval, feeling rejected, walked the length of Britain from John o' Groats to Land's End at the age of sixteen. She followed this up by walking across the United States, coast to coast, becoming pregnant on the way by a member of her backup team; before getting an abortion in New Mexico, she accepted lifts and lied about that to the press. Later she came clean. She also walked across Australia, and through Africa, Cape Town to Tangiers. An amazing, contrary, opinionated, and admirable woman, Campbell recounted her experiences in three books: The Whole Story, On Foot Through Africa, and Feet of Clay. She recently described herself (in Outside magazine) as "a retired pedestrian."

Youngest to Sail Around the World Nonstop

PERHAPS THE FUTURE of the travel book is the travel blog, with all its elisions, colloquial tropes, and chatty stream of consciousness. It is obvious from the circumnavigation of the Australian Jessica Watson that the great advantage of the travel blog—especially one reporting a feat-in-progress—is the way in which anyone with a computer can be in touch. The highs and lows of such a trip can be experienced and shared by the world in real time. What this trip demonstrated was the exuberance, resilience, and modesty of this sixteen-year-old sailor and her successful voyage.

Jessica Watson (born 1993) is the youngest person to have sailed nonstop, alone, and unassisted around the world. She left Sydney, Australia, on October 18, 2009, on Ella's Pink Lady, a thirty-four-foot sailboat, and arrived back on May 15, 2010. Had her trip taken four more days, she would have turned seventeen.

The 24,000-mile trip was very difficult and eventful—six knockdowns (the mast underwater), towering seas (35-foot waves), 70-knot winds, engine failure, torn sails, and occasionally dampened spirits. But Jessica was never out of touch, posting messages most days, and after each of the blog entries she usually received well over a thousand replies from well-wishers. The followers of her blog grew dramatically as she neared her home port. She posted videos, updates, photos, and news; her website even sold merchandise (caps, posters, etc.) online to fund her trip. In the manner of blogging, her circumnavigation had an interactive element, as she chatted back and forth with the people monitoring her progress.

The tone of her blog is so sunny, it is obvious that such a difficult feat can best be achieved by someone with a positive frame of mind, reminding me that difficult travel is essentially a mental challenge.

Here is Jessica, halfway through her trip, in January 2010: "The picture below is of my very cool new t-shirt which was a present from Mum in my latest food bag. I had to share it with you guys as my crew aren't doing a very good job of sharing my excitement!" And the accompanying photo shows her wearing a T-shirt with the message "One Tough Cookie."

On her arrival home, she was greeted by tens of thousands of people, including the prime minister, who called her a hero. Likable to the last, she disagreed, saying she wasn't a hero, "just an ordinary girl who had a dream and worked hard at it and proved that anything is possible."

15. Staying home

THE NONTRAVELER SEEMS TO ME TO EXIST IN suspended animation, if not the living death of a homely routine or the vegetative stupor known to the couch potato. From an early age I longed to leave home and to keep going. I cannot imagine not traveling—stuck home all the time, in the confinement of a house or a community or a city. ¶; Yet some people never leave—distinguished writers and thinkers, chained to their desks, their towns, making a virtue of it. In his entire eighty-year life, Immanuel Kant never traveled more than a hundred miles from his birthplace, Königs-berg (now Kaliningrad), where he died. Philip Larkin, who hardly stirred from his home in Hull on the English coast, said, "I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back home the same day." Needless to say, he lived for much of his life with his mother.

Thomas Merton, who traveled widely in his early life, entered a Trappist monastery at the age of twenty-six, and for the next twenty-seven years seldom uttered an audible word, having taken a vow of silence. He did not leave his monastery in Kentucky until 1968. Invited to a conference in Bangkok, on this first encounter with the wider world after all those years of seclusion, he accidentally electrocuted himself in his hotel room. Edgar Allan Poe spent a few youthful years in Britain. Thoreau never left the United States. Emily Dickinson was more or less housebound. Yet all these people wrote brilliantly of other lands. Something about staying home, staying inside, or going in circles can stimulate a mind in the manner of conventional travel.

In fiction, the character with the most convincing philosophical objection to travel is the decadent Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, in Huysmans's Against Nature (1884). He makes an elaborate plan for a trip to London, but overcome with sloth, satiated (and "somewhat stupefied") with the Dickensian atmosphere of the English-style pub in Paris, he reflects on the tedium of the Channel crossing and decides to stay put: "After all, what was the good of moving, when a fellow could travel so magnificently sitting in a chair? Wasn't he already in London, whose smells, weather, citizenry, and even cutlery, were all about him? What could he expect to find over there, save fresh disappointments?"

Henry Fielding's Voyage to Lisbon

FIELDING, LOOKING FOR a rest cure and a mild climate, sets out from London for Lisbon toward the end of June 1754; and after hundreds of pages, toward the end of August, he is still off the coast of England, becalmed. In the delay and idleness he grows irritable and confides his irritation to his journal. He called himself a "great, tattered bard," and was highly skeptical of "voyage-writers," as he explains in his long preface to the published Journal.

This seems a superb Fielding farce, the absurdity of setting out and going nowhere—he'll never make it! Much of the book is satirical, ironic, blustering, and his ailments so numerous and debilitating, it is like self-satire, or at least comic exaggeration. Only forty-seven, he is plagued by "lingering imperfect gout...[and] besides being lame, I was very ill with great fatigues I had lately undergone added to my distemper ... My health now reduced to the last extremity ... I went into the country [Bath] in a very weak and deplorable condition, with no fewer or less diseases than a jaundice, a dropsy [edema], and an asthma, altogether uniting their forces in the destruction of a body so entirely emaciated, that it had lost all muscular flesh ... I was now, in the opinion of all men, dying of a complication of disorders."

Still in England, he recovers with a regimen of tar-water treatments and then, with "the first dawnings of my recovery I had conceived of removing to a warmer climate." He rejects Avignon and decides on Lisbon for convalescence, leaving home in a lugubrious frame of mind. "On this day, the most melancholy sun I ever beheld arose and found me awake at my house at Fordhook. By the light of this sun, I was, in my own opinion, last to behold and take leave of some of those creatures on whom I doated with a motherlike fondness."

His book is a chronicle of delay and frustration. It's true that Fielding ultimately arrives in Lisbon, but the greater part of the voyage is spent at various anchorages and moorings on the English coast, the winds too light to bear the ship away, so Fielding and his party go ashore and stay in public houses and inns to pass the time. The contentious and tyrannical captain cruises back and forth from Ryde to Portland to Spithead, awaiting a favorable wind and complaining.

"The captain now grew outrageous, and declaring open war with the wind, took a resolution, rather more bold than wise, of sailing in defiance of it, and in its teeth." This tactic fails; they are soon back on the English coast. Fielding fills his journal with reflections on eating, on the difference between seamen and landlubbers, on tyranny and officialdom, on his quarrels with the captain and the customs officers, on mythology. He writes that if his disquisitions can serve as a remedy for "the most inveterate evils, at least, I have obtained my whole desire, and shall have lain so long wind-bound in the ports of this kingdom to some purpose."

Never less than adversarial, the captain believes that he is "under the spell of witchcraft" and spends less and less time on his ship, going ashore or to other ships to socialize, as Fielding—fading again—is attended by doctors.

Toward the end of August, the wind picks up and proves helpful, and a full two months after setting off, Fielding is at last on his way, at sea. The rest of the voyage is brisk. Four days later they are "thirty miles to the westward of Plymouth," the next day in the Bay of Biscay, and becalmed, then in a gale: "Our voyage was retarded." Several days after the gale they are off the Portuguese coast and soon at Lisbon. The actual voyage is so abbreviated as to seem an anticlimax: "About seven in the evening I got into a chaise on shore, and was driven through the nastiest city in the world, tho' at the same time one of the most populous, to a kind of coffeehouse, which is very pleasantly situated on the brow of a hill, about a mile from the city, and hath a very fine prospect of the river Tajo from Lisbon to the sea."

He hoped to regain his health in Lisbon, but the last lines of the Journal are ominous, and seem like a premonition of his own death. Horace: "This is the end of the story, and the journey" (Hic finis chartaeque, viaeque).

Fielding died in Lisbon a little over a month after arriving, in October 1754. The book was published posthumously in 1755.

Xavier de Maistre: Traveling Around His Room

A JOURNEY ROUND My Room is one of the curiosities of travel literature. De Maistre (1763–1852), born in Savoy, peripatetic as a soldier and landscape painter, ended his life as a naturalized Russian subject. Arrested in Italy while serving in the Austro-Russian army, he was put under house arrest in Turin for forty-two days, where he wrote this book of forty-two chapters. He hadn't planned to publish it, but when his brother Joseph, a political philosopher, read it, he persuaded Xavier to do so, and the book appeared in 1794. It has been described as "a delightful chat with the reader, filled with delicate observations, in which an artless grace, humor, and spontaneous wit are wedded to a gentle and somewhat dreamy philosophy." In fact, it is parody, self-mockery, and willfully eccentric, a deliberate attempt to stave off the boredom of confinement, calling this a "new mode of traveling I introduce into the world." Hyperbolic (one chapter describes "Latitude and Topography"), it is also a disquisition on the meaning of ordinary things.

"The voyages of Cook and the observations of his fellow-travelers ... are nothing compared with my adventures in this one district." He anatomizes the pictures on the walls, his furniture, his bed: "A bed sees us born and sees us die. It is the ever changing scene upon which the human race play by turns interesting dramas, laughable farces, and fearful tragedies. It is a cradle decked with flowers. A throne of love. A sepulcher."

Kamo-no-ChŌmei: Recluse in a Remote and Tiny Hut

THE TEN FOOT Square Hut, a brief account of the withdrawal of a man from public life to a tiny hut, where he ended his days, is often compared with Thoreau's Walden. The work is attributed to Kamo-no-Chōmei, a twelfth-century Japanese aristocrat who, disappointed at being passed over for the post of warden of the shrine of Kamo in Kyoto, simply retreated, rusticating himself to the mountains, living alone, "a friend of the moon and the wind."

He was in his fifties when he forsook the world, first for a hut near Mount Hiei, and after five years he moved into greater seclusion in Hino, near Tokyo, for a hut that was hardly ten feet square and seven feet high. Like Thoreau, he describes his simple furnishings (baskets, a brazier, his straw mat, his desk). It is the ultimate in simplicity. Altogether he was a recluse for eight years, and his writing shows the effects of his retreat and renunciation and his nonattachment, achieving a Buddhist ideal. Calmly, he lists the catastrophes of all sorts—acts of God, acts of man—that have befallen Japan. And he sums up his existence in the tiny hut: "Since I forsook the world and broke off all its ties, I have felt neither fear nor resentment. I commit my life to fate without special wish to live or desire to die. Like a drifting cloud I rely on none and have no attachments. My only luxury is a sound sleep and all I look forward to is the beauty of the changing seasons."

Thoreau: Home Is the Heavenly Way

HENRY DAVID THOREAU was so emotionally attached to his home in Concord that he found it almost impossible to leave. In fact, after 1837 he did so only for short periods—thirteen days on the Concord and Merrimack rivers, some visits to Cape Cod, three trips to the Maine woods, brief spells in Staten Island and Minnesota. He was never alone on these excursions; he always went with a friend or relative. Although he philosophized constantly about travel (he was widely read in the travel books of his time), he is a much better example of someone who really didn't go anywhere. The Maine trip was a team effort, and Thoreau was a follower. A Yankee in Canada is about a one-week train trip with several hundred tourists, what we would call a package tour today. He made no bones about not being a traveler. He boasted of staying home; indeed, he made a virtue of it: "Live at home like a traveler." Homesick on Staten Island, he wrote, "My thoughts revert to those dear hills ... Others may say, 'Are there not the cities of Asia?' But what are they? Staying at home is the heavenly way" (letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson).

Travel in your head, Thoreau preached in Walden: "Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade but of thought." He went on to say that it is "easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals ... than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone."

A frequent hyperbolic flourish in a Thoreau book or essay is his comparing an aspect of his neighborhood with an exotic place. And these deflations are often paradoxes. Why leave Concord when, as he wrote in a poem,

Our village shows a rural Venice,

Its broad lagoons where yonder fen is;

As lovely as the Bay of Naples

Yon placid cove amid the maples;

And in my neighbor's field of corn

I recognize the Golden Horn.

In 1853, as the explorer Paul Du Chaillu (whom Thoreau would later read) is preparing to return to Equatorial Africa, Thoreau is confiding to his journal, "I cannot but regard it as a kindness in those who have the steering of me—that by the want of pecuniary wealth I have been nailed down to this my native region so long & steadily—and made to love and study this spot of earth more and more—What would signify in comparison a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering?—The traveler's is but a barren and comfortless condition."

Though his friend and literary mentor Emerson went to England in search of inspiration, and other contemporaries traveled around the globe—Hawthorne to England, Washington Irving to Spain, Melville to the Pacific—Thoreau was not impressed. The reports of such peregrinations roused him to be defiant and sometimes condescending. He was self-consciously a contrarian. He cultivated his eccentricity and talked it up in his writing, but his personality was a great deal stranger than he knew, and perhaps beyond cultivation.

Thoreau's three Maine trips from 1846 to 1857 overlap the publication of Melville's greatest works. There is no proof that Thoreau read Moby-Dick, but there is ample evidence that he read Typee, which appeared at the time of his first visit to Maine, and which he discussed in a discarded early version of "Ktaadn." Somewhat combative in comparing wildernesses, Thoreau argued that he experienced deeper wilderness in Maine than Melville had as a castaway in the high volcanic archipelago of the remote Marquesas, among the lovely maiden Fayaway and the anthropophagous islanders. It seems a stretch, but there it is.

Emily Dickinson: The Argument for Staying Home

"TO SHUT OUR eyes is Travel," Emily Dickinson wrote to a Mrs. Holland in 1870. By then, at age forty, she had been housebound for almost ten years, and she had another fifteen reclusive years to live. She had begun her studies at Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, about ten miles from Amherst, but lasted only a year and, homesick, returned to the family house.

Agoraphobic? Probably not. She made a trip to Boston in 1865, without the fantods, but after that she did not set foot out of the house. Was she lovesick? "Neurasthenic"? One of her recent biographers suggests that Emily might have been epileptic: some of her family suffered from seizures, and she apparently took a drug that was then regarded as efficacious for epilepsy. But Edward Lear, an exact contemporary, was epileptic and a wide traveler—Corsica, Egypt, the Middle East, and India. Like Dickinson, Lear was a loner, craving solitude, because the affliction was regarded as shameful; perhaps that is the key.

Like many other shut-ins, Dickinson made a virtue of her confinement, and denigrated travel in both her poetry and her letters, extolled the joy of being home, and was prolific as a letter writer and a poet—almost two thousand poems. A mere dozen were published in her lifetime, but anonymously.

Like Thoreau, she placed a high value on simplicity and austerity, even deprivation. Also like Thoreau, she was a passionate reader—of novels, poems, essays: Dickens, Emerson, De Quincey, George Eliot, Thoreau's Walden. Her library survives, with all her scratchings on the pages. The English critic Michael Meyer shrewdly wrote, in Thinking and Writing About Literature, "She simplified her life so that doing without was a means of being within. In a sense, she redefined the meaning of deprivation, because being denied something—whether it was faith, love, literary recognition, or some other desire—provided a sharper, more intense understanding than she would have experienced had she achieved what she wanted."

Consider this poem:

Water is taught by thirst.

Land—by the Oceans passed.

Transport—by throe—

Peace—by its battles told—

Love—by Memorial Mold—

Birds, by the snow.

The intensity of vision comes from meditation and expectation, by "throe"—a pang. This view of existence borders on the mystical. Denial, fantasy, imagination, eager anticipation, expectation, all these mattered more to her than the thing itself. Another of her denial poems contains the line "sumptuous Destitution."

She does not say: Stay home and the world seems wonderful. "Home is a holy thing—nothing of doubt or distrust can enter its blessed portals," she wrote in an 1851 letter to her brother. And "Duty is black and brown—home is bright and shining." And again, home "is brighter than all the world beside."

Travel Wisdom of Freya Stark

English by nationality but born in Italy (in 1893), where she died a hundred years later, Freya Stark was conflicted by nature, though good-humored and appreciative in her travel. An accomplished linguist and a wonderful descriptive writer, she traveled throughout the Middle East, Turkey, and Arabia. Her books include The Valleys of the Assassins (1934), The Southern Gates of Arabia (1935), and Winter in Arabia (1940). She wrote, "I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn't got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don't believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs." Stark herself was famous for her hats, which she wore to cover a disfigurement of scalp and ear, resulting from a painful accident in childhood. ¶ She was one of the singular discoverers (and photographers) of traditional cultures and old ways. In her first book, The Valleys of the Assassins, she speaks of "the old days how bad and how pleasant, the new how good and how dull."

***

Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.

—

Riding to the Tigris

(1959)

***

One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy private pattern of one's own and I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism.

—Riding to the Tigris

***

The Turks, with the most splendid, varied and interesting country in the world, are naturally anxious to obtain tourists, and their difficulties in this respect are caused chiefly by the quite phenomenal badness of their hotels.

—Riding to the Tigris

***

We English rely for success almost desperately on the breaking of rules, and it will be a poor day when we forget to do so, for this idiosyncrasy may rescue us in a deluge of the second-rate. It incidentally gives us an advantage in the understanding of traditions other than our own which more logical nations find difficult to master.

—Riding to the Tigris

***

"How can I know what I think till I hear what I say?" The quotation came into my mind, and another one from Mr. Gladstone, who is supposed to have remarked that he never met anyone from whom he couldn't learn something, but it was not always worth while to find out what it was. Perhaps to find out what one thinks is one of the reasons for travel and for writing, too.

—Riding to the Tigris

***

Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or a penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles. The fear of an unbroken tête-à-tête for the rest of his life should, you would think, prevent any man from getting married ... Modern education ignores the need for solitude: hence a decline in religion, in poetry, in all the deeper affections of the spirit: a disease to be

doing

something always, as if one could never sit quietly and let the puppet show unroll itself before one: an inability to lose oneself in mystery and wonder while, like a wave lifting us into new seas, the history of the world develops around us. I was thinking these thoughts when Husein, out of breath and beating the grey mare for all he was worth with the plaited rein, came up behind me, and asked how I could bear to go on alone for over an hour, with everyone anxious behind me.

—The Valleys of the Assassins

***

The great and almost only comfort about being a woman [traveler] is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised. When the police stopped our car at Bedrah and enquired where we were staying, the chauffeur, who did not know, told him to ask the lady.

"That is no good," said the policeman. "She's a woman."...To be treated with consideration is, in the case of female travelers, too often synonymous with being prevented from doing what one wants.

—The Valleys of the Assassins

16. Imaginary Journeys

WHAT IS STRIKING ABOUT MANY NARRATIVES of imaginary journeys is the great number written by actual travelers who know the world. In most cases such elaborate fictions are created by writers who have ranged widely. Samuel Butler sailed from Britain to New Zealand and back, Henri Michaux traveled through South America and extensively in Asia, Jan Morris has been practically everywhere on earth. Italo Calvino, born in Cuba, raised in Italy, traveled to the United States and returned to Cuba for a while, lived in Paris, and ended up in Italy. As travelers they were better able to invent journeys and create imaginary countries that were wholly credible, and their fictional travel is clearly based on their own travel.

"A Christian culture could more easily believe in the existence of the monstrous than of the perfect or near perfect," Susan Sontag wrote in "Questions of Travel," in the collection Where the Stress Falls. "Thus, while the kingdoms of freaks appear century after century on maps, exemplary races figure mostly in books of travel to utopia; that is, nowhere."

Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels are obvious choices for this chapter, since Crusoe's desert island was imagined by the widely read Daniel Defoe, who had traveled throughout Europe but never to the landscapes of his masterpiece—Brazil or the Caribbean. Jonathan Swift sailed back and forth from Ireland to England, and created Brobdignagian giants as well as tiny Lilliputians and Yahoos for Gulliver's various voyages. But these books are so well known I decided to omit them.

None of the fictions I've chosen are utopias. I find there is always something bloodless and unbelievable about a utopia. Its contrary, dystopian fiction, with its messy lives and its decaying buildings, more often has the ring of truth. What these books of imaginary places have in common is an element of satire—often a characteristic, or even the whole point, when the subject is an imaginary journey.

Samuel Butler: Erewhon: or, Over the Range

SAMUEL BUTLER, WELL educated, clear-thinking, oppressed by his father, had been heading for a career as a clergyman, but between his life at home and his work in a London parish after university, he lost his faith. Later, he was to write in his Notebooks, "As an instrument of warfare against vice, or as a tool for making virtue, Christianity is a mere flint implement."

And something of his attitude toward family life can be deduced from a notebook entry on the family: "I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other—I mean from the attempt to prolong family connection unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so."

Not surprisingly, Butler fled from his family to New Zealand in 1859. His four-year spell running a sheep ranch there gave him time to read (Darwin among others) and think about the world he had left. When he returned to England in 1864 and wrote about his imagined world of Erewhon, he included details from the New Zealand he had seen: landscape, manners, aspects of the native population—the people of Erewhon are superficially reminiscent of the Maori.

One of the virtues of Erewhon is its evocation of landscape, its powerful and persuasive sense of place. It opens, and proceeds, like a classic Victorian travel book, describing a once empty land that although colonized still has a great unknown and mountainous hinterland, which exists as a temptation: "I could not help speculating upon what might be farther up the river and behind the second range." With the help of a native, Chowbok, the narrator, Higgs, sets off for the ranges, discovering a material culture and a dark-skinned population who he speculates might be part of the lost tribes of Israel. Before he can decide on anything concrete, he is brought before a magistrate and some others who are disturbed by the appearance of his pocket watch. Some broken machinery in the town's museum indicates that the people have a horror of anything mechanical. Higgs is put in prison.

The inhabitants seem to him no further advanced than "Europeans of the twelfth or thirteenth century." He learns the language. He makes friends. Later he mentions that he has a cold—a mistake: "illness of any sort was considered in Erewhon to be highly criminal and immoral," and he is punished.

After three months in prison Higgs is released, to visit the metropolis and its College of Unreason, where he learns that one of the professors has written a book warning of the possibility that "machines were ultimately destined to supplant the race of man." There also exists a class of men "trained in soul-craft." They are called "straighteners." But what Butler goes on to describe is a society much like that of the Victorian England he knew, yet without a tyrannizing religious sense.

"The Book of the Machines," which Higgs quotes extensively, warns against "the ultimate development of animal consciousness"—what we would call artificial intelligence. The rights of animals are also described: animal rights are protected.

At last Higgs escapes in a hot-air balloon, and we are left to reflect on the fact that his descriptions of machines, banks, criminality, and animals have echoes in Darwinism, the church, and Victorian law; that the "straighteners" have their counterparts in doctors and priests; that the seemingly distant place he has described is not so distant.

Henri Michaux: Voyage to Great Garaban

HENRI MICHAUX, WHO was born in Belgium in 1899 and lived most of his life in France, where he died in 1984, is an obscure figure at the fringes of surrealism, known for his poems, his odd short stories, his hectic journeys, his strange paintings and drawings, and most of all for his experiments with practically every drug known to man. He probably had more acid in his body than the average car battery. Hallucinatory experiences and drug dreams were his chosen recreation as well as his access to a higher consciousness and a heightening of his imagination.

Because of the intensity of his vision, and his humor, it is hard to sort out his actual travels from his drug trips. He spent a decade on the move, from 1927 to 1937. His travels in China, Japan, and Malaysia in the thirties resulted in A Barbarian in Asia, little more than a travel diary. Ecuador, which appeared in France in 1968, is also diaristic but more personal and relentless—angry, impatient, cranky, highly readable, and still relevant. Michaux's books are hard to find; he is obscure now as he was in his lifetime; in spite of his achievement, he never enjoyed any fame or material success, but he said he didn't care.

"There exists a banality of the visionary world," he wrote in The Major Ordeals of the Mind, and the Countless Minor Ones, first published in French in 1966. (Michaux's titles are superb.) This suggests to me that his imaginary travels are based more on his actual travels than on his drug trips. Even so, it is impossible to tell from some of his works whether he is describing a lived experience or a dream state.

In three books, gathered under the one title Ailleurs (Elsewhere), he wrote about three imaginary countries. The works are Voyage to Great Garaban, In the Land of Magic, and Here Is Poddema. One of the pieces in his book Spaced, Displaced is called "Journey That Keeps at a Distance," the sort of trip that is so full of frustrations, incomplete encounters, and half-baked impressions that it resembles that of the travel writer who arrives in a place and finds nothing to write about except frustration—one of the less readable sorts of travel books.

Voyage to Great Garaban, first published in 1936, illustrates another feature of imaginary travels: the detailed sociology and anthropology of such places; the politics, the history. When a traveler invents a place, he or she usually describes more of the place and its people than if it were real. So the land of the Hacs, in Garaban, is described as a set of brutal spectacles, each with a number, and growing in violence. There is hand-to-hand combat (vicious street fighting, families battling in muddy swamps), animals attacking humans (an entertainment), and animal fights ("caterpillars that were ferocious, and demon canaries"). Some Hacs make an attempt to kill their king for the sole purpose of being arrested and condemned to death, and for the splendor of being executed in style—"Spectacle Number 30 which is called 'Receiving one's death in the Palace courtyard.'"

Though the anonymous traveler doesn't condemn these outrages, he flees the Hacs and moves on to the Emanglons. He describes the Emanglons as an anthropologist would, even using the heading "Manners and Customs." We learn of their death rituals, the implications of sickness, their contempt for work and its danger ("After a few days of sustained labor an Emanglon will be unable to sleep"), their odor ("a complex perfume"), their tendency to weep for no reason, their aversion to flies: "Emanglons cannot endure living in the same room with a fly. In their eyes the cohabitation has something monstrous about it."

The Hivinizikis, the last group in Great Garaban, are manic, furiously rushing about, praying madly and prostrating themselves. Unbalanced, in a froth, they are "always outdoors. If you see someone inside, he doesn't live there. No doubt about it, he's visiting a friend." Everything about the Hivinizikis is hectic—religion, politics, the theater, all is rough-and-tumble.

Michaux had traveled fairly widely in the world before he wrote his imaginary travels, so these tales are both satires of actual travel and comic fantasies. As a surrealist Michaux is keenly aware of the necessity for satire to be absurd; even when a narrative is not understood, it must bring a smile to the reader's lips. In a scholarly introduction to Michaux's Selected Writings (1944), Richard Ellmann quotes André Gide, a supporter of Michaux, saying that Michaux "excels in making us feel intuitively both the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of strange things."

Miguel de Unamuno: "Mecanópolis"

YOU COULD PUT this short story, written in 1913, down to science fiction or speculative fiction were it not for the fact that the author says he was directly inspired by the satire of Samuel Butler's Erewhon. Unamuno (1864–1936), who depicts the same horror of technology in this intense and compressed tale, was a distinguished philosopher and the author of a work on man's ambiguous relationship with God, The Tragic Sense ofLife.

"There sprang to mind the memory of a traveler's tale told me by an explorer friend who had been to Mechanopolis, the city of machines," begins Unamuno's story (translated by Patricia Hart).

Lost in the desert, dying from thirst and weakness, the traveler "began sucking at the nearly black blood that was oozing from his fingers raw from clawing about in the arid soil." He sees something in the distance. A mirage? No, an oasis. He recovers, sleeps, and when he wakes discovers a railway station with an empty train at the platform—no engineer, no other passengers. He gets in, the train departs, and later deposits him at a fabulous city. No people can been seen in the city, nor any life. "Not one dog crossed the street, nor one swallow the sky." But there are streetcars and automobiles, which stop at a given signal. He goes to a museum, which is full of paintings but sterile in mood, and then to a concert hall "where the instruments played themselves."

That he is the only person in the city is a news item in the Mechanopolis Echo: "Yesterday afternoon—and we do not know how it came about—a man arrived at our city, a man of the sort there used to be out there. We predict unhappy days for him."

Among the machines, without any human company, the traveler begins to go mad. This too is an item in the daily paper. "But all of a sudden a terrible idea struck me: what if those machines had souls, mechanical souls, and it were the machines themselves that felt sorry for me?"

In a panic, he attempts suicide by leaping in front of a streetcar, and he awakes at the oasis where he started out. He finds some Bedouins and celebrates his deliverance. "There was not one machine anywhere around us.

"And since then I have conceived a veritable hatred toward what we call progress, and even toward culture, and I am looking for a corner where I shall find a peer, a man like myself, who cries and laughs, as I cry and laugh, and where there is not a single machine and the days flow with the sweet, crystalline tameness of a street lost in a forest primeval."

This remarkable piece of fiction about an imaginary journey combines the rejection of technology that Samuel Butler satirized, the over-civilized life that Richard Burton deplored, the horror of a dehumanized urban world that Thoreau condemned, and the wish to find an unspoiled people in a remote place—an Edenic place of happy humans.

Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities

MOST OF CALVINO'S fictions could be included under the heading "Imaginary Journeys." But Invisible Cities is the most appropriate for an anthology of travel, since the narrator is Marco Polo—a variant Marco Polo, in an extended audience with a variant Kublai Khan—Khan in old age, impatient, combative, at the end of his rule. Marco Polo seems to be spinning out his description of the cities in the manner of Scheherezade, filling the time and diverting the fading emperor.

Dense, playful, paradoxical, and whimsical, the book has inspired a great deal of analysis and some pompous criticism. In general, Calvino's reputation suffers at the hands of his many well-wishers' special pleading. Much of his work is based on elaborate jokes, and the label of magical realism—which is often no more than whimsy writ large—is unhelpful. The structural flaw in the book is that it is a rather formless disquisition and a dialogue, not a narrative of discovery.

But as a set of imaginary journeys to strange cities, it is vastly enjoyable—and it must be enjoyed rather than analyzed or probed, or it will fall apart. The cities have themes—the cities representing memory, desire, signs, eyes; thin cities, trading cities, hidden cities; cities and the dead; continuous cities. Though the book is short, the 164 chapters keep repeating the cities' themes, with variations. Much could be made of the fact that all the cities, more than fifty of them, have women's names—Dorothea, Zenobia, Sophronia, Trude, and so forth. And perhaps these names stand for the siren song that the traveler hears, the romance of far-off places.

The wise observations, travelers' truths, relieve the repetitious narrative: "The more one lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth." Another: "Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places." This is ingenious and strikes me as true.

In another city, Adelma, Marco sees a vegetable vendor and recognizes his grandmother, and thinks: "You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask." That is an accurate expression of the traveler's imagination, and a polite way of illustrating Sir Richard Burton in Arabia seeing Maula Ali, "a burly savage, in whom I detected a ridiculous resemblance to the Rev. Charles Delafosse, an old and well-remembered schoolmaster."

It is misleading, I think, to look for echoes of Borges in Calvino's work. Borges creates new worlds, yet many of Calvino's cities, for all their exoticism, seem quite familiar. Here is the city of Chloe: "In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversation, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping." How is this city different from Chicago or Paris?

Other cities are purely satirical—cities where fashion is an obsession; cities that do not begin or end ("Only the name of the airport changes"); cities where memories are traded.

What does it add up to? Certainly it is a critique of travelers' tales and reminiscences about cities, litanies that are no more than variations on a theme. And perhaps these cities, apparently hermetic and separate and far-flung, are the same city, observed or remembered according to a particular mood.

The book—seeming more of a puzzle than it actually is—also tells us a great deal about how we live in cities, how we adapt to new cities, how even the most terrifying cities can be habitable. My own feeling (and it seems to be Calvino's too) is that city dwellers invent the cities they live in. The great cities are just too big to be comprehended as a whole, so they are invisible, or imaginary, existing mainly in the mind. A New Yorker lives in his or her version of New York, creating a city that is familiar and unthreatening, not the enormous, multilayered, and towering place but a particular set of friends, houses, shops, restaurants, theaters, and, crucially, a complex network of routes—streets, trains, and neighborhoods that are safe and supportive. In his book of apparently extravagant fables, Calvino shows us how we accommodate ourselves to the real world.

Jan Morris: Last Letters from Hav

HAVING TAKEN NUMEROUS journeys across the world—one of the most widely traveled of living writers—Jan Morris invented a country, gave it a history, art, religion, and literature, and was so scrupulous in her details that people earnestly asked her afterward where exactly it was and how they might visit.

The imaginary country of Hav seems to be in the eastern Mediterranean, and has not only a highly diverse population of Muslims and Christians, but also an ancient indigenous population, of troglodytes possibly of Celtic origin, who named Hav, their word (and the Welsh word) for summer. The troglodytes are called the Kretev, "thought to be etymologically related to the Welsh crwydwyr, wanderers."

One of the annual festivals is the Roof Race, where contestants leap from roof to roof across Hav.

Many distinguished visitors to Hav recorded their impressions: Chekhov, Lady Hester Stanhope, Ibn Battuta, and Marco Polo—the greatest and most literate of travelers. But also we learn that later visitors included Noël Coward, Coco Chanel, Thomas Mann, Winston Churchill, James Joyce, and Sir Richard Burton. Marco Polo remarked on Hav as "a place of strange buildings and rites, not like other places." The elaborate architecture is described, with quotations from Alexander Kinglake, Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, and others.

The narrator says, midway through the book, "The meaning of Hav is easy."

In terms of politics, art, war, and climate, Hav is the essence of the Mediterranean, a cultural confusion, layer upon layer, Greek, Turk, Italian, the great glittering talkative mass of conquerors and imperialists and evangelists—and writers: Edward Lear, James Joyce, Richard Burton, T. E. Lawrence.

"But then the advantage of going native in Hav is that nobody knows what native is ... you can take your choice!"

In this believable book, Jan Morris, the writer who has been everywhere, has created out of her travels and her reading a sunny, polyglot nation that is claimed by many nationalities, but in its very complexity is a fragility. It is, incidentally, also a way of showing how the somewhat despised Kretevs—those ancestors of the Welsh, of whose nation Jan Morris is a proud member—have been overwhelmed. Though the book is partly a satire on the multicultural Mediterranean, it is also a capriccio—one of the few successful ones I know in fiction—goodhearted, learned, and enlightening.

I asked Jan once what was going through her head as she was writing it. She said, "I wrote Last Letters from Hav because I had come to realize that I had never scratched more than the surface of any place or period I'd ever written about, and it was intended to be an allegory of civic and historical complexity—though nobody ever read it that way."

17. Everything Is Edible Somewhere

"YOU MUST HAVE EATEN SOME WEIRD STUFF," I am frequently told. I quite liked fufu (mashed yams) in Nigeria, and snake and turtle in China; I drew the line at owlet, because I felt sorry for those vexed-looking birds roosting in a cage, waiting to be chosen for a meal. One night I bought one at a restaurant, at the chef's suggestion. And I set it free, much to his consternation. Cow's tendon in soup, looking like shreds of Tupperware, was not tasty. ("If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an airplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it," Prince Philip once said, and was booed.) I ate some sparrows in Burma and reported on them in The Great Railway Bazaar. Alligator tail on the Zambezi was fairly common, served in stew or as steaks. "Carrion and garbage of every kind can be eaten without the stomach rejecting it," Francis Galton wrote in the chapter "Revolting Food That May Save the Lives of Starving Men" in The Art of Travel. "Life can certainly be maintained on a revolting diet."

I was prepared for a life of travel food by the cold lumpy oatmeal my mother served me on winter mornings. "You can't go to school until you finish it!" Tears of disgust sprang to my eyes as I sat, repelled by the sight, and I retched when I tried to swallow even a little bit. My Italian grandmother, who immigrated to America when she was a small girl, served us familiar-looking greens in salad, and when we asked about these slightly bitter leaves, she admitted that they were dandelions (soffione) she had dug up that morning. Many hard-up Italians in America foraged for dandelions.

"Objectively, nothing's more disgusting than eating milk or cheese," my son Marcel said to me one day when we were discussing this subject. Most Chinese agree, but nearly all are physically unable to digest the stuff, being lactose intolerant. (Many Chinese believe that the so-called white race has an odd cheesy smell.) The writer and traveler Ted Hoagland told me, "My exotic foods include bobcat, porcupine liver, and squirrel, but muskrat was the best." And my traveling friend Larry Mill-man has eaten dogs from Greenland to Micronesia, and remarked on the varieties of canine cuisine.

Sir John Mandeville's Travels is full of strange meals; the book was hugely popular for the culinary oddities it described. Given that Mandeville probably did not exist, and that his book was probably plagiarized, embellished with mostly outrageous lies and self-serving distortions, hardly mattered to a reading public eager for details of weird meals. Herman Melville must have been keenly aware of this fascination for exotic food when he included "The Whale as a Dish" as a chapter in Moby-Dick. In it, Ishmael discusses the cooking and eating of whale meat, as well as strips of fried blubber ("fritters") and the sperm whale's brains. As an aside, he adds that the whale is "a noble dish, were there not so much of him, but when you come to sit down before a meat pie one hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite."

The Japanese have gone to enormous lengths to continue killing whales so that they can dine on whale sashimi. Kujira (whale) is thinly sliced and served raw. The meat is marbled, looks like beef, has a briny, somewhat fishy taste, and can be tough. In order to go on hunting whales the Japanese have bribed Third World countries with development aid, to get them on their side, and have hidden behind their own indigenous people, the Ainu, who are otherwise despised for being primitive. The slaughter and eating of bottle-nosed dolphins is another Japanese pleasure. When this was revealed in a prize-winning documentary, The Cove, released in 2009, the mayor of the fishing village of Taiji, offended by the way his village was portrayed in the dolphin massacre, issued a statement saying that it was "important to respect and understand regional food cultures, which are based on traditions with long histories."

Other travelers sing the praises of balut, duck embryo, eaten in the Philippines; Thai duck-tongue soup; and finanziera, cockscomb stew, of the Italian Piedmont. Lutefisk, mocked by W. H. Auden in his travels in Iceland, is beloved there, along with hakuri, the putrefied shark. In Sicily and Sardinia you might be offered "maggot cheese," known as casu marzu, which you could mistake for squirmy rice. The dusky big-assed ant of the Colombian Amazon (hormigas culonas de Santander) is harvested by the indigenous Guane people and toasted and served as a "nutty snack." Korea is full of culinary specialties, besides dog: dalk bal is deep-fried chicken anus, and at the raw bar saeng nakji are octopus tentacles, simply prepared: a small, live octopus is knifed apart, each tentacle chopped off and, still wiggling, eaten raw, with a special sauce. Bull's testicles (criadillas) are standard fare in Spain, and lark pâté (pâté d'alouettes) is a popular spread in France. Caterpillar fungus (yartsa gunbu), an inch-long larva with a two-inch fungoid growth on its head, is a gustatory marvel, with medicinal properties, found in Bhutan, Tibet, and Nepal. Black-ant larvae (escamoles) are a part of the combination plate in parts of Mexico. And last, bear paw, which I was offered in Harbin, in Heilungjiang province. From the Ming Dynasty onward, cooked bear paw has been on the menu all over China. A widely advertised specialty, it is an "imperial tonic food" that supposedly enhances virility, like rhino horn and tiger's penis, also eaten when poachers are successful.

None of these, and nothing I have eaten in travel, can compare in revolting looks or taste with a meal I attempted one day in Glasgow. I ordered a hamburger and was treated to the sight of a man forming a mass of raw meat and gristle into a billiard-size ball, which he tossed into a wire basket and lowered into a frothy container of boiling yellow fat. After he deep-fried this now smaller and black-crusted ball, he clamped it between two pieces of bread and handed it over. He smiled when I said I couldn't eat it: "You Yanks."

The Eating Habits of the Tartars

And they eat hounds, lions, leopards, mares and foals, asses, rats and mice and all manner of beasts, great and small, save only swine and beasts that were defended by the old law. And they eat all the beasts without and within, without casting away of anything, save only the filth. And they eat but little bread, but if it be in courts of great lords. And they have not in many places, neither pease ne beans ne none other pottages but the broth of the flesh. For little eat they anything but flesh and the broth. And when they have eaten, they wipe their hands upon their skirts; for they use no napery ne towels.

—

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville,

first English translation, early fifteenth century

Strange Fruit of the Asian Kingdom of Caldilhe

And there groweth a manner of fruit, as though it were gourds. And when they be ripe, men cut them a-two, and men find within a little beast, in flesh, in bone, and blood, as though it were a little lamb without wool. And men eat both the fruit and the beast. And that is a great marvel. Of that fruit I have eaten, although it were wonderful, but that I know well that God is marvellous in his works.

—The Travels of Sir John Mandeville

Tartar Traveling Cuisine

When going on a long expedition, [the Tartars] carry no baggage with them. They each carry two leather flasks to hold the milk they drink and a small pot for cooking meat ... In case of need, they will ride a good ten days' journey without provisions and without making a fire, living only on the blood of their horses; for every rider pierces a vein of his horse and drinks the blood. They also have their dried milk, which is solid like paste; and this is how they dry it. First they bring the milk to the boil. At the appropriate moment they skim off the cream that floats on the surface and put it into another vessel to be made into butter, because so long as it remained the milk could not be dried. Then they stand the milk in the sun and leave it to dry. When they are going on an expedition, they take about ten pounds of this milk; and every morning they take out about half a pound of it and put it in a small leather flask, shaped like a gourd, with as much water as they please. Then, while they ride, the milk in the flask dissolves into a fluid, which they drink. And this is their breakfast.

—

The Travels of Marco Polo,

translated by Ronald Latham (1958)

A Morning Skalk in the Hebrides

Their fowls are not like those plumped for sale by the poulterers of London, but they are as good as other places commonly afford, except that the geese, by feeding in the sea, have universally a fishy rankness.

Their geese seem to be of a middle race, between the wild and domestick kinds. They are so tame as to own a home, and so wild as sometimes to fly away.

Their native bread is made of oats, or barley. Of oatmeal they spread very thin cakes, coarse and hard, to which unaccustomed palates are not easily reconciled. The barley cakes are thicker and softer; I began to eat them without unwillingness; the blackness of their color raises some dislike, but the taste is not disagreeable. In most houses there is wheat flower, with which we were sure to be treated, if we staid long enough to have it kneaded and baked. As neither yeast nor leaven are used among them, their bread of every kind is unfermented. They make only cakes, and never mould a loaf.

A man of the Hebrides, for of the women's diet I can give no account, as soon as he appears in the morning, swallows a glass of whisky; yet they are not a drunken race, at least I was never present at much intemperance; but no man is so abstemious as to refuse the morning dram, which they call a

skalk.

The word

whisky

signifies water, and is applied by way of eminence to

strong water,

or distilled liquor. The spirit drunk in the North is drawn from barley. I never tasted it, except once for experiment at the inn in Inverary, when I thought it preferable to any English malt brandy. It was strong but not pungent, and was free from the empyreumatick [burnt] taste or smell. What was the process I had no opportunity of inquiring, nor do I wish to improve the art of making poison pleasant.

Not long after the dram, may be expected the breakfast, a meal in which the Scots, whether of the lowlands or the mountains, must be confessed to excel us. The tea and coffee are accompanied not only with butter, but with honey, conserves, and marmalades. If an epicure could remove by a wish, in quest of sensual gratifications, wherever he had supped he would breakfast in Scotland.

In the islands however, they do what I found is not very easy to endure. They pollute the tea-table by plates piled with large slices of Cheshire cheese, which mingles its less grateful odors with the fragrance of the tea.

—Samuel Johnson,

A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

(1775)

The Raw Meat of the Druze

The Druze custom of eating raw meat fascinated [Lady Hester Stanhope, in 1812]. She recounted later, "I purchased of a Druze an immense sheep, the tail weighing eleven pounds, and desired it to be taken to a village, where I ordered the people assembled to eat. When I arrived, the sheep was alive; the moment it was killed it was skinned, and brought in raw upon a sort of dish made of matting, and in less than half an hour it was all devoured. The women ate of it as well as the men: the pieces of raw fat they swallowed were really frightful."

—James C. Simmons,

Passionate Pilgrims: English

Travelers to the World of the Desert Arabs

(1987)

Garlic, Food of the Fellah

Those skilled in simples [medicinal plants], Eastern as well as Western, praise garlic highly, declaring that it "strengthens the body, prepares the constitution for fatigue, brightens the sight, and, by increasing the digestive power, obviates the ill-effects arising from sudden change of air and water." The traveler inserts it into his dietary in some pleasant form, as "Provence butter," because he observes that, wherever fever and ague abound, the people ignorant of cause but observant of effect, make it a common article of food. The old Egyptians highly esteemed this vegetable, which, with onions and leeks, enters into the list of articles so much regretted by the Hebrews ... In Arabia, however, the stranger must use this vegetable sparingly. The city people despise it as the food of a Fellah—a boor. The Wahhabis have a prejudice against onions, leeks and garlic, because the Prophet disliked their strong smell.

—Sir Richard Burton,

Personal Narrative of a

Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1853)

A Slave in Gabon for His Evening Meal

Then [Remandji, king of the Apingi] said, "Be glad, oh spirit! And eat of the things we give thee."

Whereupon, to my astonishment, a slave was handed over to me bound, and Remandji said, "Kill him for your evening meal; he is tender and fat, and you must be hungry." It took me a moment to recover from my astonishment. Then I shook my head, spat violently on the ground, and made Minsho tell them that I abhorred the people who ate human flesh, and that I and my people never did so.

To which Remandji replied, "We always heard that you white people eat men. Why do you buy our people [as slaves]? Why do you come from nobody knows where, and carry off our men, and women, and children? Do you not fatten them in your far country and eat them? Therefore I give you this slave, that you might kill him and make your heart glad."

It was a difficult matter to explain to the king that he was much mistaken.

—Paul Du Chaillu,

Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa

(1861)

Many Eat the Hedgehog

S

COLDED BY

B

EDOUINS

at the Teyma oasis for eating "swine's flesh,"

C. M. Doughty lost his temper, and raged:

If God have commanded you anything, keep it; I see you eat crows and kites, and the lesser carrion eagle. Some of you eat owls, some eat serpents. The great lizard you all eat, and locusts, and the spring-rat; Many eat the hedgehog; in certain (Hejaz) villages they eat rats, you cannot deny it! You eat the wolf, too, and the fox and the foul hyena. In a word, there is nothing so vile that some of you will not eat it.

—

Travels in Arabia Deserta

(1888)

Cats, Camels, Foxes, Owls, and Others

Andalusians do not eat cats and dogs even when they are very hungry, but in Estremadura they're regarded as delicacies. A woman from Alcantara who is fond of cats and would never kill one herself, tells me that she has eaten cat stew and that it is tastier than either rabbit or hare. The Estremadurans also eat martens and weasels and foxes, and declare, though I do not believe it, that a fried leg of fox is the best thing imaginable. But then they are a race of cattlemen and hunters, ancestors of the Argentine gauchos, and put in a pot whatever the gun brings down. The only animal they bar is the wolf. Gypsies eat frogs, snakes and lizards as well as farmyard animals that have died a natural death, while there is a whole village nearJerez which till a few years ago spent its night hunting the camels that ran wild in the marshes at the mouth of the Guadalquivir. As for birds, they are all eaten in the south of Spain and the list includes eagles, owls and hawks. The only ones rejected are seagulls, crows and vultures, and the sacred swallow and stork.

—Gerald Brenan,

South from Granada

(1957)

Mr. Black, the Blood Drinker in Tangier

There was the somewhat sinister Mr. Black, whom I never met, but who, I am told, kept an outsize electric refrigerator in his sitting room, in which there was a collection of half-pint glass jars. Occasionally he would open the refrigerator door, inspect the labels on the bottles and select one. Then in front of his guests he would pour its contents into a glass and drink. A lady I know, who was present one day when he did this, innocently inquired if what he had in the glass were a combination of beet and tomato juice. "This is blood," he said. "Will you have some? It's delicious chilled, you know." The lady, who had lived in Tangier for many years, was thus determined to show no astonishment at anything, replied, "I don't think I will right now, thank you. But may I see the jar?" Mr. Black handed it to her. The label read

Mohammed.

"He's a Riffian boy," explained Mr. Black. "I see," she said, "and the other jars?" "Each one is from a different boy," her host explained. "I never take more than a half pint at a time from any one of them. That wouldn't do. Too debilitating for them."

—Paul Bowles, "Tangier,"

Gentleman's Quarterly

(1963) (Note: Bowles

based his 1985 short story "Hugh Harper" on this man's tastes.)

Evelyn Waugh on Tasso in British Guiana

Tasso

is prepared in this way. The killing of a beast [pig in this case] is an event of some importance in the immediate neighbourhood. Indians get news of it and appear mysteriously like gulls round a trawler when the catch is cleaned. A few choice morsels are cut away and cooked and eaten fresh. The Indians carry off the head and the entrails. The rest is sliced into thin slabs, rolled in salt and hung up to dry. A few days of sun and savannah wind reduce it to a black, leathery condition in which it will remain uncorrupt indefinitely. Even the normally omnivorous ants will not touch it. It is carried under the saddle above the blanket to keep it tender and protect the horse from galling. When the time comes to eat it, it is scrubbed fairly clean of dust and salt and boiled in water. It emerges softened but fibrous and tasteless.

I can conceive it might be possible for a newcomer to stomach a little

farine

with a rich and aromatic stew; or a little

tasso

with plenty of fresh vegetables and bread. The food of the savannah is

farine

and

tasso

and nothing else.

—

Ninety-two Days

(1934) (In

A Handful of Dust,

Waugh's

captive hero Tony is given "

tasso

at noon...

farine

and

tasso

and sometimes some fruit for supper.")

For a Sharecropper in Alabama, Hardly a Crumb

"Sometimes it don't seem possible that we're living at all, especially when I wake up in the morning and see the children getting up and dressing and walking around in the kitchen where there's hardly a crumb of food. They make a fire in the cook-stove and I scrape together a little corn meal, when there's any to scrape, and I cook it with salt and water. Once in a while we have some molasses, or maybe just some sugar-water to eat with it. When noontime comes, they start another fire, and I cook some more cornbread. A lot of times lately I've just sat and wondered if there's anything else in the world to eat. I know there must be other things in the world to eat, because the rich wouldn't eat cornbread, and I wouldn't if I could help it. Not just cornbread and nothing else. Once in a while we have some store-bought canned beans, just one or two cans among us, and that don't go far when there's nine hungry children besides me. The two oldest boys manage to earn a little money somehow, and they bring home all they make. Altogether, what money there is comes to two or three dollars a week. We eat on that, except for the twenty-five cents a week house rent I pay the landlord. We've been getting along somehow for three years since my husband died. Every time it rains hard all of us have to crawl under the house to keep from getting wet, because I don't reckon there's a landlord in the country who would patch a roof for only twenty-five cents a week rent."

—quoted in Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White,

You Have Seen Their Faces

(1937)

In Tibetan Cuisine, Meat Is a Rarity

The staple food in this region is tsampa. This is how they prepare it. You heat sand to a high temperature in an iron pan and then pour barley corns onto it. They burst with a slight pop, whereupon you put the corns and the sand in a fine meshed sieve through which the sand runs: after this you grind the corn very small. The resulting meal is stirred up into a paste with butter tea or milk or beer and then eaten. The Tibetans make a special cult of tsampa and have many ways of preparing it. We soon got accustomed to it, but never cared much for butter tea, which is usually made with rancid butter and is generally repugnant to Europeans. It is, however, universally drunk and appreciated by the Tibetans, who often drink as many as sixty cups in a day. The Tibetans of Kyirong, besides butter tea and tsampa, eat rice, buckwheat, maize, potatoes, turnips, onions, beans, and radishes. Meat is a rarity, for as Kyirong is a particularly holy place no animal is ever slaughtered there. Meat appeared on the table only when it had been brought in from another district or, more often, when bears or panthers left part of their prey uneaten.

—Heinrich Harrer,

Seven Years in Tibet

(1953)

Redmond O'Hanlon's Jungle Tuck

TURTLE BRAIN

Chimo and Culimacare joined us from Chimo's house for breakfast and Simon returned, silent, from his walk. We ate turtle (rich, chewy) and manioc (like sawdust). Simon, declining both, opened a tin of Spam and sat apart on a rock of his own. Galvis, intending to cheer up his new friend, went to sit beside him...

Galvis took a severed turtle head out of his mess tin, picked its brains out from the neck with a fork, ate them, and turned to Simon. He held the blackened head in his fingers in front of Simon's face and moved the jaws open and shut.

"Quack!" said Galvis. "Quack! Quack! Quack!"

—

In Trouble Again

(1988)

ARMADILLO RISOTTO

As night fell we unloaded our ordinary stores from Chimo's dugout and, leaving Valentine on guard, we set off downstream with the presents, with bowls of manioc, ready-cooked spaghetti, and—the centerpiece—our giant pot full to the brim with agouti and armadillo risotto.

—

In Trouble Again

MONKEY EYES

We cut steps up the high muddy bank and made camp. Chimo and Pablo spread palm fronds on the ground and began to prepare the Howler monkey, scalding it with boiling water and scraping off the fur. Its skin turned white, like a baby's.

That night, when Pablo had jointed the body and Galvis boiled it, Chimo handed me a suspiciously full mess tin. As I spooned out the soup the monkey's skull came into view, thinly covered in its red meat, the eyes still in their sockets.

"We gave it to you specially," said Chimo with great seriousness..."If you eat the eyes we will have good luck."

The skull bared its broken teeth at me. I picked it up, put my lips to the rim of each socket in turn, and sucked. The eyes came away from their soft stalks and slid down my throat.

—

In Trouble Again

ELEPHANT NOSE

"I give up," said Lary, scrutinizing the very tough, gristly, grey lumps of meat hiding among the fresh green manioc-leaf saka-saka in his mess-tin..."Marcellin," said Lary, chewing hard, "what is this stuff?"

"Elephant nose!"

Lary set down his mess-tin. He stood up, lurched slightly, held on to the corner of the hut, retched twice, and was sick onto the ground.

—

No Mercy

(1997)

Bread Famine in the Sierra

July 6 [1869]—Mr. Delaney has not arrived, and the bread famine is sore. We must eat mutton a while longer, though it seems hard to get accustomed to it. I have heard of Texas pioneers living without bread or anything made from the cereals for months without suffering, using the breast-meat of wild turkeys for bread. Of this kind they had plenty in the good old days when life, though considered less safe, was fussed over the less. The trappers and fur traders in the Rocky Mountain regions lived on bison and beaver meat for months. Salmon-eaters, too, there are among both Indians and whites who seem to suffer little or not at all from want of bread. Just at this moment mutton seems the least desirable of food, though of good quality. We pick out the leanest bits, and down they go, against heavy disgust, causing nausea and an effort to reject the offensive stuff. Tea makes matters worse, if possible. The stomach begins to assert itself as an independent creature with a will of its own. We should boil lupine leaves, clover, starchy petioles, and saxifrage rootstocks like the Indians ... We chew a few leaves of ceanothus by way of luncheon, and smell or chew the spicy monardella for the dull headache and stomach-ache that now lightens, now comes muffling down upon us and into us like fog. At night more mutton, flesh to flesh, down with it, not too much, and there are the stars shining through the Cedar plumes and branches above our beds.

July 7—Rather weak and sickish this morning, and all about a piece of bread.

—John Muir,

My First Summer in the Sierra

(1916)

Congolese Monkey Stew, Batetela Style

MY FRIEND DOUG Kelly, a widely traveled Foreign Service officer, served in the Peace Corps in Tshumbe, central Congo, in the 1980s. Over the course of two years there, he frequently observed the Batetela people prepare and eat monkey. Most of the Batetela inhabit an area in the Sankuru district of Kasai Oriental province. Their language, Otetela, is considered very difficult to learn by other Congolese. In fact, it is often referred to as "le Chinois du Congo."

The Batetela are fortunate in that their homeland is still relatively rich in wildlife. The most common wild game, and thus the cheapest, is monkey. Following is the recipe for a repast of monkey cooked a la Batetela, as Doug Kelly describes it in a letter to me:

Take a dead monkey and hack it up. Keep the hands intact, but you can slice the rest of the carcass any way you want. Don't leave the pieces too big, because they will take longer to cook and you want to eat it soon because you are hungry.

Place the hacked-up pieces, including the intact hands, in a pot of boiling water and boil away. Don't add any spices, because you don't have any, and don't use too much water, because you're going to want to drink the watery "gravy" and you want it to have a lot of undiluted monkey taste.

After the monkey has been boiled for quite a while, take it out of the water and serve it on a bed of rice or millet. (Note: The Batetela are the only people who grow rice in Congo. The Arabs taught them how in the nineteenth century, when the Batetela were raiding tribes to the south and selling the captives into slavery to the Arabs. Millet is the traditional Batetela grain and is still raised in the dry season. Other Congolese tribes prefer manioc, or "fu fu.") Pour some of the monkey-water gravy on the rice or millet. Eat the whole concoction with your hands, or a spoon if you feel formality is necessary.

Now comes the good part. Serve the intact hands to your guests. A monkey hand resting on a plate looks like pretty upscale dining, at least if you are sitting in a mud hut in Sankuru. If you are the favored guest, eat the whole hand—the Batetela never leave any bones when they are eating meat, unless it's a particularly big pig femur or something equivalent. For monkeys, ducks, and chickens, it's everything down the hatch. You are encouraged to gnaw the monkey knuckles, removing the meat before cracking them open with your teeth and sucking out the marrow. Yum.

Sampling Fried Sago Beetle in New Guinea

Stef cooked a dinner of fried catfish, along with a healthy portion of sago beetle. The larvae were fried brown in the pan. They were crisp and sort of fishy tasting on the outside, probably because they had been sauteed in fish oil. Inside, the larvae were the color and consistency of custard. They were unlike anything I had ever eaten before, and the closest I can come to describing the taste is to say creamy snail.

—Tim Cahill,

Pass the Butterworms

(1997)

Dog Meat in Asia

THE SMELL OF a skinned, sinewy dog, hung by its hind legs in a Chinese butcher shop, can been detected from many feet away. So their term "fragrant meat" is related to the sort of euphemism that identifies a garbage truck as a honey wagon. In the literal-minded Philippines the dish is unambiguously called dog stew (aso adobo), and the key ingredient in the Korean soup boshintang is always understood to be dog meat. Dogs are eaten in many parts of Asia and the high Arctic, and have been a staple in much of the Pacific: Captain James Cook mentioned that a dish of Tahitian dog was almost as tasty as lamb. It is only the Western prohibition against pet-eating that horrifies us, but the edible dog is never a pet.

While it is generally known by educated travelers that the Cantonese (and, for that matter, Dongbei Ren; that is, northeastern Chinese) love dog meat, it is not as well known that (1) it is seasonal—dog meat is considered warming for the blood, so is overwhelmingly eaten in the winter; and (2) a dog is considered good to eat only if its fur is black or, in a pinch, dark brown. I've never been given a good explanation for the second requirement, although it seems to be linked to the first, seasonal reason for eating dog meat—dogs with dark fur have the highest warming quality. I don't know what this theory is based on, but it's real—a Cantonese would be shocked if you suggested he eat a white poodle, and it would confirm his belief that you are, after all, a barbarian.

In Shenyang, in eastern China, the walls of the U.S. consulate are occasionally scaled by asylum seekers from North Korea, which is not far away. These refugees, weakened by their escape ordeal, often ask to be restored to health by the Chinese equivalent of fortifying chicken soup, which is dog-meat soup (xiang rou tang). Since the canteen in the consulate did not offer dog-meat soup, a consular official would send for takeout: "There are innumerable restaurants in Shenyang, as throughout the northeast of China, that do fine dog-meat soup," I was told by my informant. And he added, "To make dog-meat soup, simply chop up a dog with dark fur and boil the hunks of meat, with the bone in, in water flavored with green onions, red chilies, and soybean paste. You can also throw in noodles to make a heartier soup."

From the Eskimo Cookbook of Shishmaref, Alaska

IN 1952, IN order to raise money for the Alaska Crippled Children's Association, the students of Shishmaref Day School compiled a small cookbook. Shishmaref is on Sarichef Island in the Chukchi Sea—Russia is ninety-five miles to the west. Lately the island has been seriously threatened and impoverished by the effects of climate change. The students, living the traditional Inupiaq life, from foraging and fishing households, contributed recipes that were favorites at home, and sold the small booklet for fifty cents. Here are a few dishes.

WILLOW MEATS

Inside of barkbirch [birchbark] there is something that is yellowish. That is called the meat of the willows. They are very good to eat. People eat it with sugar and seal oil. First clean off the barkbirch from the meat of the willow. There is also soft green barkbirch inside of outside barkbirch. Never eat green stuff on willows. (Augustine Tocktoo)

PTARMIGAN

Take the feathers off the ptarmigan. Cut the meat and wash so they wont have dirt or feathers on. Put in a pot with water and salt. Sometimes some people make soup on it, I think they like them best without soup. (Pauline Tocktoo)

PTARMIGAN SMALL INTESTINE

Cook the small intestines about five seconds in boiling water. Old men and women always want to eat them. (Alma Nayokpuk)

SEALS' BARE FEET (SEAL FLIPPERS)

Put the seal's bare feet into a cooking pan. Cover them with blubber and keep in a hot place until the fur comes off. Then it is time to eat the seal's bare feet. You can cook them or eat them without cooking. (Pauline Tocktoo)

BEAR FEET (EE-TEE-YAIT')

Most of the people like the bear feet better than the meat. We cook them well, add salt. Four feet would take about one teaspoon salt. Take them out of the pot and let them get cool. Eat them with seal oil. (Nellie Okpowruk)

18. Rosenblum's Rules of Reporting

IN THE LOBBY OF THE SPEKE HOTEL IN KAMPALA, Uganda, in 1967, I saw a bushy-haired man holding a stenographic notebook and smiling wolfishly at a diplomat, demanding to know why he was killing people in Biafra. That was my first encounter with the foreign correspondent Mort Rosenblum. We were both covering the Nigeria-Biafra peace talks. I was a teacher at Makerere University but also moonlighting as the Time-Life stringer in Uganda. Mort was then the Associated Press bureau chief in Leopoldville (later Kinshasa), Congo. We have remained close friends ever since. I have marveled at his life as a traveler, writing home from the field.

A self-described "old guy from the road," he has had the longest, hardest, most successful career as a foreign correspondent of any I know. Fluent in Spanish, he was head of the AP bureau in Buenos Aires during a turbulent time there. He covered the Bangladesh war, and Southeast Asia, while he was based in Singapore. He was for a time editor in chief of the International Herald Tribune, and for many years was a special correspondent based in Paris. On his first day in Paris he interviewed President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, speaking in fluent French. He has been to virtually every country I can name, and many I have only trailed my fingers upon in atlases.

In addition, Mort has done what many journalists promise they will do but seldom succeed at—write books. His Olives: History of a Noble Fruit won the James Beard Award, and his Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light was a bestseller. He has also written books on journalism, ecology, and Africa, as well as (when he was living on a houseboat in Paris) a travel book, The Secret Life of the Seine. I asked him to provide me with some rules of the road that have served him well in over forty years of writing in distant places.

Always arrive at roadblocks before noon, because in the afternoon the soldiers manning them are invariably drunk and abusive.

Learn French and Spanish, and then some other foreign languages. And learn to say, "Don't shoot, I'm a reporter," in at least a dozen. This might help but is no guarantee of your safety.

Take lots of notes and reread them as soon as possible, before they're lost beyond any deciphering. Or maybe that's just me. Recorders are tiny and reliable now; carry one, and you'll be amazed at what you thought you didn't miss.

If you are left-handed, learn to eat with your right in Islamic and Hindu countries, especially when gathered around a common platter. The left hand is for postprandial hygiene, and you may lose it if you thrust it into someone's lunch.

Carry lots of cash, dollars and euros, but keep it somewhere sneak thieves, bandits, and customs officials are not likely to look. They know about socks and money belts. Get a tailor to sew secret pockets in pant legs or jackets.

It is often insulting to refuse someone's food or water. It can also be seriously painful to accept. If the proffered comestible is merely disgusting, suck it up; if not, find some tactful excuse not to partake. Do not make a face or say, "Eeeyeuw."

Despite certain novelists' do-it-the-hard-way approach, try to get a visa and cross at border posts. If you are a reporter or a spy or have overriding reasons to skip formalities, use your judgment. Just remember that some countries hang people.

Put together a medical kit, including a range of antibiotics, field dressings, and antiseptics. Take lots of Lomotil or Imodium; few miseries compete with a long plane or bus ride, rebellious bowels, and no WC.

Think carefully about your kit. Binoculars can be handy, but they suggest to authorities that you might be up to no good. Don't wear military khaki, designer camo, or anything bright that prevents your blending in. And forget weapons. You are unlikely to shoot your way out of trouble, especially the trouble you face when armed dudes find you are packing.

On arriving in any distant place, the first thing you should do is learn the quickest way out—times and frequency of buses, trains, or planes. You have to know in advance how to leave.

Travel of Wisdom claude LÉVI-STRAUSS

Lévi-Strauss memorably opened his travel book, Tristes Tropiques, with the line "I hate traveling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions." (An early translation of the book, with a variation of this opening, is A World on the Wane.) He was trained as a philosopher but was one of the great theorists of anthropology and linguistics, an explainer of mythologies, and a describer of structuralism. He began his travels in Brazil, made journeys in India and Pakistan, and taught in the United States. He was a member of the Académie Française and lived to over a hundred (he died in 2009). The following are excerpts from Tristes Tropiques.

***

Travel is usually thought of as a displacement in space. This is an inadequate conception. A journey occurs simultaneously in space, in time, and in the social hierarchy. Each impression can be defined only by being jointly related to these three axes, and since space is in itself three-dimensional, five axes are necessary if we are to have an adequate representation of any journey.

***

There was a time when traveling brought the traveler into contact with civilizations which were radically different from his own and impressed him in the first place by their strangeness. During the last few centuries such instances have become increasingly rare. Whether he is visiting India or America, the modern traveler is less surprised than he cares to admit.

***

Perhaps, then, this was what traveling was, an exploration of the deserts of my mind rather than those surrounding me.

19. Perverse Pleasures of the Inhospitable

UNWELCOMING PLACES ARE A GIFT TO THE traveling writer. They have always been so, an early example being Ibn Battuta's arrival in Tunis in 1325, at the beginning of his global wandering. He "wept bitterly" because he met with utter indifference: "not a soul greeted me and no one there was known to me." The winter darkness and killing cold of Cherry-Garrard's Antarctica; the cannibals, disease, and general hostility in Stanley's Congo; the devout Muslims tormenting Charles Doughty with howls of "Nasrani!" ("Christian!") in Arabia Deserta—these inhospitable situations gave us great books. Heartwarming interludes, lovable locals, and delicious meals have informed the most tedious travel accounts—the blissful vacation is desirable but not a fit subject for a book.

The early travelers in Africa always kept in mind that the cannibal was a better subject than the missionary. Even the high-minded Mary Kingsley knew that, and spent much more time writing about (and exaggerating) the anthropophagous Fon people in Gabon than the pleasures of her botanizing of the jungle, which (so she said) was the whole point of her West African trip. You don't want to hear about the traveler's fun; what keeps you reading is the traveler's misery, outrage, and near-death experience. Either that or a well-phrased dismissal, as when the English traveler Peter Fleming took a close look at São Paulo and wrote, "São Paulo is like Reading, only much farther away."

"Looking for Trouble" might be the subtitle of the most readable, most memorable travel books. When Redmond O'Hanlon published In Trouble Again, my hand leaped to the shelf. No Mercy promised more horror, and another delightful read. So I begin with him.

Making a Deal with the Chief of Boha

In his right hand [the Chief] gripped a spear against the inside of his right thigh, its end on the ground and its winged blade high above his head. His left hand lay on his left thigh, and from his right shoulder there hung a large liana-twine bag full, I presumed, of the royal fetishes...

Twelve spearmen stood at intervals in a circle before him, enclosing a line of three chairs; an old man in a brown shirt, torn gray trousers and red plastic sandals, standing on the Chief's left, tilted his spear towards us and then at the waiting seats...

The Chief inclined his head to his left: the old man, his

porte-parole,

his word carrier, bent down until his right ear was close to the royal lips; the Chief spoke softly. The audience over, the old man straightened his back, held his spear upright, strode into the center of the circle, filled his lungs, and sang out a speech in Bomitaba...

At the end of the pronouncement there were shouts from some of the spear-men and from other warriors around the square...

"The white man will pay 75,000 francs to the Chief of Boha," [the old man] shouted in French, "and 20,000 francs to the Vice-President of the People's Committee. Then if the Government come with soldiers to take our Chief to prison in Epena they must take their Vice-President away too. The white man will keep faith with our Customary Rights."

"It's far too much!" I said.

The old man nodded. The warrior to the right and behind me lowered his spear and pricked me gently between the shoulder-blades.

"It's a bargain!" I said.

—Redmond O'Hanlon,

No Mercy

(1997)

Fanny Trollope on American Hypocrisy

Had I, during my residence in the United States, observed any single feature in their national character that could justify their eternal boasts of liberality and the love of freedom, I might have respected them, however much my taste might have been offended by what was peculiar in their manners or customs. But it is impossible for any mind of common honesty not to be revolted by the contradictions in their principles and practice ... You will see them with one hand hoisting the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves. You will see them one hour lecturing their mob on the indefeasible rights of man, and the next driving from their homes the children of the soil, whom they have bound to protect by the most solemn treaties.

—

The Domestic Manners of Americans

(1832)

Elias Canetti: Unfathomable Prices in Marrakesh

In the souks, however, the price that is named first is an unfathomable riddle. No one knows in advance what it will be, not even the merchant, because in any case there are many prices. Each one relates to a different situation, a different customer, a different time of day, a different day of the week. There are prices for single objects and prices for two or more together. There are prices for foreigners visiting the city for a day and prices for foreigners who have been here for three weeks. There are prices for the poor and prices for the rich, those for the poor of course being the highest. One is tempted to think that there are more kinds of prices than there are kinds of people in the world.

—

The Voices of Marrakesh,

translated by J. A. Underwood (1978)

Edward Lear Being Pestered in Albania

No sooner had I settled to draw ... than forth came the populace of Elbassan; one by one and two by two to a mighty host they grew, and there were soon from eighty to a hundred spectators collected, with earnest curiosity in every look; and when I had sketched such of the principal buildings as they could recognize a universal shout of "Shaitan!" [Satan] burst from the crowd; and strange to relate, the greater part of the mob put their fingers into their mouths and whistled furiously, after the manner of butcher boys in England. Whether this was a sort of spell against my magic I do not know ... One of those tiresome Dervishes—in whom, with their green turbans, Elbassan is rich—soon came up, and yelled, "Shaitan scroo!—Shaitan!" [The Devil draws! The Devil!] in my ears with all his force; seizing my book also, with an awful frown shutting it, and pointing to the sky, as intimating that Heaven would not allow such impiety.

—

Journal of a Landscape Painter in Albania

(1851)

André Gide: Thoroughly Bored in Bosoum

The absence of individuality, of individualization—the impossibility of differentiating—which depressed me so much at the beginning of my journey, is what I suffer from too much of the landscape. (I experienced this sensation as early as Matadi on seeing the population of children all alike, all equally agreeable, etc.... and again on seeing the huts of the first villages, all alike, all containing droves of human cattle with the same looks, tastes, customs, possibilities, etc....) Bosoum is a place that looks over a wide stretch of country, and as I stand here on a kind of terrace, made of red ochre-colored laterite, gazing on the marvelous quality of the light and admiring the vast undulations of the ground, I ask myself what there is to attract me to any one point rather than to any other. Everything is uniform; there can be no possible predilection for any particular site. I stayed the whole day yesterday without the least desire to stir. From one end of the horizon to the other, wherever my eye settles, there is not a single point to which I wish to go.

—

Travels in the Congo

(1929)

Rimbaud Having a Bad Day in Harar, Abyssinia

I still get very bored. In fact, I've never known anyone who gets as bored as I do. It's a wretched life anyway, don't you think—no family, no intellectual activity, lost among negroes who try to exploit you and make it impossible to settle business quickly? Forced to speak their gibberish, to eat their filthy food and suffer a thousand aggravations caused by their idleness, treachery and stupidity!

And there's something even sadder than that—it's the fear of gradually turning into an idiot oneself, stranded as one is, far from intelligent company.

—letter to his mother, 1886, in Geoffrey Wall,

Rimbaud

V. S. Naipaul Disgusted by India

The point that one feels inescapable is the fact of India's poverty; and how deep is one's contempt for those Indians who, finding no difficulty in accepting one standard in India and another outside it, fail to realize this, and are failing to work night and day for the removal of this dreadful insult and humiliation ... I wonder, wonder if the shitting habits of Indians are not the key to all their attitudes. I wonder if the country will not be spiritually and morally regenerated if people were only made to adopt the standards of other nations in the business of shitting...

So goodbye to shit and sweepers; goodbye to people who

tolerate

everything; goodbye to all the refusal to act; goodbye to the absence of dignity; goodbye to the poverty; goodbye to caste and that curious

pettiness

which permeates that vast country; goodbye to people who, though consulting astrologers, have no sense of their destiny as

men

...It is an unbelievable, frightening, sad country. Probably it all has to change. Not only must caste go, but all those sloppy Indian garments; all those saris and lungis; all that squatting on the floor, to eat, to write, to serve in a shop, to piss.

—letter to Moni Malhoutra, 1963, in Patrick French,

The World Is What It Is

Umberto Eco, Hyperbolic in San Luis Obispo

The poor words with which natural human speech is provided cannot suffice to describe the Madonna Inn. To convey its external appearance, divided into a series of constructions, which you reach by way of a filling station carved from Dolomitic rock, or through the restaurant, the bar, and the cafeteria, we can only venture some analogies. Let's say that Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Gaudi, swallowed an overdose of LSD and began to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli. But that doesn't give you an idea. Let's say Arcimboldi builds the Sagrada Familia for Dolly Parton. Or: Carmen Miranda designs a Tiffany locale for the Jolly Hotel chain. Or D'Annunzio's Vittoriale imagined by Bob Cratchit, Calvino's Invisible Cities described by Judith Krantz and executed by Leonor Fini for the plush-doll industry. Chopin's Sonata in B flat minor sung by Perry Como in an arrangement by Liberace and accompanied by the Marine Band. No, that still isn't right. Let's try telling about the rest rooms. They are an immense underground cavern, something like Altamira and Luray, with Byzantine columns supporting plaster baroque cherubs. The basins are big imitation-mother-of-pearl shells, the urinal is a fireplace carved from rock, but when the jet of urine (sorry, but I have to explain) touches the bottom, water comes down from the wall of the hood, in a flushing cascade something like the Caves of the Planet Mongo.

— Travels in Hyperreality (1995)

Lord Byron on the Black Sea (the Euxine)

There's not a sea the passenger e'er pukes in, Turns up more dangerous breakers than the Euxine.

—Byron,

Don Juan

(1818–24)

20. Imaginary People

IT IS NOT FRIVOLOUS TO CONSIDER THE TRAVEL literature that describes men with tails, or one-eyed people, or dragons. Such marvels are the reasons the early travel books commanded attention. The Tang Dynasty traveler Xuanzang, who was meticulous in his topographical descriptions, often mentions the presence of dragons. ¶ The many varieties of travel narrative show what readers wish to find in travel—the strange, the sexy, the disgusting, the amazing, the Other. Susan Sontag analyzed this fascination (and gullibility) in her essay "Questions of Travel," where she wrote, "Books about travel to exotic places have always opposed an 'us' to a 'them'—a relation that yields a limited variety of appraisals. Classical and medieval literature is mostly of the 'us good, them bad'—typically, 'us good, them horrid'—sort. To be foreign was to be abnormal, often represented by physical abnormality; and the persistence of those accounts of monstrous peoples, of 'men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders' (Othello's winning tale), of anthropophagi."

Those men whom Othello mentions having seen appear in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, one of the most popular books of the Middle Ages. It was popular precisely because of the bizarre people and places it described. Mandeville claimed that he traveled the world from 1322 to 1356. The first known edition appeared in French in 1371, and in English translation in the early fifteenth century. It went through many editions, and was augmented and embellished as it was reprinted. Mandeville probably did not exist, or if he did exist as a fantasizing Frenchman of the fourteenth century, he may not have gone anywhere: many of Mandeville's strange tales also appeared in the books of other travelers of the time.

Such grotesque and outlandish accounts hold an enduring fascination, even though it was known (as Henry Fielding wrote) that there was a "vast pile of books which pass under the names of voyages, travels, adventures, lives, memoirs, histories, &c., some of which a single traveler sends into the world in many volumes, and others are, by judicious booksellers, collected into vast bodies in folio, and inscribed with their own names, as if they were indeed their own travels; thus unjustly attributing to themselves the merit of others."

We know from comparing parallel passages that Chaucer probably read Mandeville. Shakespeare certainly did. Some of the book represents accurate geography; other parts are distorted, fanciful, absurd, and freakish.

Mandeville's Marvels

THE ISLANDS NEAR JAVA

In that country and others thereabout there be wild geese that have two heads. And there be lions, all white and as great as oxen, and many other diverse beasts and fowls also that be not seen amongst us.

In one of these isles be folk of great stature, as giants. And they be hideous for to look upon. And they have but one eye, and that is in the middle of the front. And they eat nothing but raw flesh and raw fish.

And in another isle toward the south dwell folk of foul stature and of cursed kind that have no heads. And their eyen be in their shoulders.

And in another isle be folk that have the face all flat, all plain, without nose and without mouth. But they have two small holes, all round, instead of their eyes, and their mouth is flat also without lips.

And in another isle be folk of foul fashion and shape that have the lip above the mouth so great, that when they sleep in the sun they cover all the face with that lip...

And in another isle be folk that have horses' feet. And they be strong and mighty, and swift runners; for they take wild beasts with running, and eat them.

And in another isle be folk that go upon their hands and their feet as beasts. And they be all skinned and feathered, and they will leap as lightly into trees, and from tree to tree, as it were squirrels or apes.

And in another isle be folk that be both man and woman, and they have kind; of that one and of that other. And they have but one pap on the one side, and on that other none. And they have members of generation of man and woman, and they use both when they list, once that one, and another time that other. And they get children, when they use the member of man; and they bear children, when they use the member of woman.

And in another isle be folk that go always upon their knees full marvellously. And at every pace that they go, it seemeth that they would fall. And they have in every foot eight toes.

IN THE KINGDOM OF PRESTER JOHN

In that desert be many wild men, that be hideous to look on; for they be horned, and they speak nought, but they grunt, as pigs. And there is also great plenty of wild hounds. And there be many popinjays, that they clepe psittakes their language. And they speak of their proper nature, and salute men that go through the deserts, and speak to them as apertly as though it were a man. And they that speak well have a large tongue, and have five toes upon a foot. And there be also of another manner, that have but three toes upon a foot, and they speak not, or but little, for they can not but cry.

DEFLOWERING

Another isle is there, full fair and good and great, and full of people, where the custom is such, that the first night that they be married, they make another man to lie by their wives for to have their maidenhead: and therefore they take great hire and great thank. And there be certain men in every town that serve of none other thing; and they clepe them cadeberiz, that is to say, the fools of wanhope. For they of the country hold it so great a thing and so perilous for to have the maidenhead of a woman, that them seemeth that they that have first the maidenhead putteth him in adventure of his life.