The Tao of Travel

SEXUAL HABITS ON "ANOTHER ISLE" NEARBY

In that country they take their daughters and their sisters to their wives, and their other kinswomen. And if there be ten men or twelve men or more dwelling in an house, the wife of everych of them shall be common to them all that dwell in that house; so that every man may lie with whom he will of them on one night, and with another, another night. And if she have any child, she may give it to what man that she list, that hath companied with her, so that no man knoweth there whether the child be his or another's. And if any man say to them, that they nourish other men's children, they answer that so do over men theirs ... And I asked them the cause why that they held such custom: and they said me, that of old time men had been dead for deflowering of maidens, that had serpents in their bodies that stung men upon their yards, that they died anon: and therefore they held that customs to make other men ordained therefore to lie by their wives, for dread of death, and to assay the passage by another [rather] than for to put them in that adventure.

Marco Polo's Human Oddities

Let me tell you next of the kingdom of Lambri [in present-day Sumatra], which also has a king of its own but professes allegiance to the Great Khan. The people are idolaters...

Now here is something really remarkable. I give you my word that in this kingdom there are men who have tails full a palm in length. They are not at all hairy. This is true of most of the men—that is, of those who live outside in the mountains, not of those in the city. Their tails are as thick as a dog's. There are also many unicorns [probably rhinos] and a profusion of wild game, both beast and bird.

—

The Travels of Marco Polo,

translated by Ronald Latham (1958)

Andaman is a very big island. The people have no king. They are idolaters and live like wild beasts. Now let me tell you of a race of men well worth describing in our book. You may take it for a fact that all the men of this island have heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes like dogs; for I assure you that the whole aspect of their faces is that of big mastiffs. They are a very cruel race: whenever they can get hold of a man who is not one of their kind, they devour him.

—

The Travels of Marco Polo

21. Writers and the Places They Never Visited

FOR A WRITER TO DESCRIBE A PLACE HE OR SHE has not bothered to visit is not only self-deluded but deeply insulting to the people living there and to those travelers who actually troubled to go there. Laziness, indifference, contempt, fear of the place, fear of travel, fear of being disillusioned, and the novelist's natural instinct to fantasize—all are factors in the decision of a writer to stay home and invent the exotic, as Saul Bellow did, conjuring up an Africa he had never seen while sitting in his book-lined study in Tivoli, New York, without ever having to swat a tsetse fly. Even so, you know a writer's mind, and especially his or her fantasies, from the fiction. You know what they think of themselves, and other people, and of the world.

The results of such leaps of imagination can be odd, and bad karma seems to blight the fiction of faked countries, because none of these works has remained popular or widely read. Kipling's imagined Mandalay is an exception, and seems to have displaced the real city. The writers cooking up a country tend to overdo it: look no further than Bellow's Henderson the Rain King or the Tarzan novels. Joseph Conrad, who piloted a river steamer up the Congo River, and afterward wrote Heart of Darkness, about a man piloting a river steamer up the Congo River, is subtle, understated, and powerful.

David Livingstone claimed to have been the first to put Lake Nyasa on the map in 1859, but this was accomplished in 1846 by a Portuguese trader, Candido de Costa Cardoso. In the search for the source of the Nile, the Welsh explorer John Petherick (1813–1882) produced a map of Bahr-el-Ghazal in 1858 and described his travels in his Egypt, the Soudan, and Central Africa three years later. But his fellow explorer John Speke publicly disputed the map and the book, claiming that Petherick had lied about his travels, had not been that far south or west, and had concocted both the map and the trip from hearsay. The Nile explorer Samuel Baker wrote in his diary, "Petherick's pretended journey published in England was entire fiction ... Petherick is a gross impostor."

Even the traveler, looking closely, often gets things wrong. Richard Henry Dana's Hawaiians in Two Years Before the Mast (1840), after months of sailing, mistook the island of Nantucket for the whole of the United States, because it was all they saw: the mainland is not visible from the island.

Here is another instance of travelers' ignorance, from Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa (1897). She writes, "Watch again a gang of natives trying to get a log of timber down into the river from the bank ... No idea of a lever, or anything of that sort—and remember that, unless under white supervision, the African has never made an even fourteenth-rate piece of cloth or pottery, or a machine, tool, picture, sculpture, and that he has never even risen to the level of picture-writing."

Never mind the masterpieces of Benin bronzes, the magnificent carvings of the Chokwe people, whom she would have known from her travels in Angola. A little research would have revealed the Amharic script of Abyssinia, two thousand years of Nok sculpture, the immense variety of African pottery, or ancient examples of terracotta statuary. Yet she seems not to have taken any notice even in the places she claimed to know well: Gabon with its Punu and Fang masks and carvings, or the masterpieces of carving—Bamileke and others, and indeed elaborate pots—from Cameroon.

Yet I am fascinated by imaginary landscapes, what Dr. Johnson called "romantick absurdities and incredible fictions," that are retailed as the real thing, especially landscapes I have seen. I do not recognize the fictional Africas, and Kafka's America is one of the weirdest countries of all. As for the outrageous George Psalmanazar—he fooled almost every reader (except Jonathan Swift) in early-eighteenth-century England with his book about Formosa.

George Psalmanazar's Travels in Formosa

THE AMAZING THING about this impostor of travel was the completeness and credibility of his book. Drawing on Dutch accounts, and fantasizing, he created a whole Formosan landscape and culture and made up an entire language of gobbledygook that even years later was taken by some scholars to be an actual Asiatic tongue. The book, published in London in 1704, was a huge success.

George Psalmanazar (or Psalmanaazaar) also managed to conceal his real identity under this outlandish name (perhaps a version of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser in 2 Kings): his birth name and birthplace are unknown. He was probably French, and he may have been born around 1689. For a while he claimed to be an Irish pilgrim. He also at various times said he was Japanese or Formosan. He claimed to worship the sun and the moon, and he slept sitting upright in a chair ("Formosan-style" he said), but he was more than the lovable eccentric who was later befriended by Dr. Johnson. "A great lover of penitents," Jeffrey Meyers writes in his biography Samuel Johnson: The Struggle, "Johnson reverenced Psalmanazar, who'd confessed his sins, reformed his character and become pious, endured prolonged hardship and—though an opium addict—died an exemplary Christian." But in his travel book, Psalmanazar played upon the anti-Jesuit animus current in the early eighteenth century; disparagements of Catholic missionaries are frequent in his book, something that would have found favor with the predominantly Catholic-hating English.

"The prevailing Reason for this my Undertaking was," he writes, "because the Jesuits I had found had imposed so many Stories, and such Gross Fallacies upon the Public, that they might the better excuse themselves from those base Actions, which brought upon them that fierce Persecution in Japan." The Japanese persecution of Catholics in the 1630s was a historical fact that was given a fictional retelling in Shusako Endo's 1966 masterpiece, Silence.

Psalmanazar's book is in two parts, the first, "An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, Giving an account of the Religion, Customs, & of the Inhabitants, Together with a Relation of what happen'd to the Author in his Travels; particularly his Conferences with the Jesuits, and others, in several Parts of Europe. Also the History and Reasons of his Conversion to Christianity, with his Objections against it (in defence of Paganism) and their Answers." The second part relates his travels: "An Account of the Travels of Mr. George Psalmanaazaar, a Native of the Isle Formosa, thro' several parts of Europe; with the reasons of his Conversion to the Christian Religion."

Discourses on religion aside, the book is highly readable, both for its narrative of abduction and its delineation of a colorful culture. George is taken, under protest, by Jesuits from his native land. He travels to the Philippines, then to Goa, then Gibraltar, where "very much indisposed by the change of Climates, Air and Diet," he needs to recuperate. Then on to Toulon, Marseille, and into Catholic Avignon and Lutheran Bonn and Calvinist Holland, where he becomes embroiled in theological arguments. He is ultimately converted to Christianity, becoming "a most faithful Member of the Church of England."

Having established his loyalty to his adopted country and rulers (William III, who ruled until 1702, when Queen Anne succeeded him), ingratiating himself with readers, he goes on to describe the island of Formosa, with occasional allusions to Japan. This country is "one of the most Pleasant and Excellent of the Asiatic Isles, whether we consider the convenient Situation, the healthful Air, the fruitful Soil, or the curious Springs and useful Rivers, and rich Mines of Gold and Silver wherewith it abounds."

He chronicles the history, the monarchy, how the island was invaded by the emperor of Tartary and subdued, the arrival of the Dutch and the English traders, mayhem, mutinies, government, the more colorful of the laws. "Every man may have as many Wives, as his estate is able to maintain," he says, because children are highly valued. Adultery is severely punished; a man may lawfully kill his wife if she is unfaithful. "But this Law does not extend to Foreigners, to whom the Natives are wont to offer Virgins or Whores, to be made use of at their Pleasure, with Impunity."

No mention is made of Buddhism, which flourished in Formosa except for the forty years when the Dutch tried to sideline it. Psalmanazar explains Formosan religion as sun and moon worship, and "idolatry" that requires the sacrifice of oxen, rams, and goats. If "their God is not appeased by other Sacrifices," infants are killed—their hearts cut out and burned in the thousands. Meticulous illustrations are included in the book, showing where these human sacrifices are performed, where priests cut babies' throats "and pluck out their Hearts."

Because nothing seems to be excluded, the book has a convincing verisimilitude: superstitions, diseases, weapons, musical instruments, and the food of the islanders—roots that they make into bread, fruit, pigs, and "they eat serpents also." Formosans are not allowed to eat pigeons or turtles. They breed "Elephants, Rhinocerots [sic], Camels" to use as beasts of burden; and for their amusement, "Sea-Horses." In the countryside there are "Lyons, Boars, Wolves, Leopards, Apes, Tygers, Crocodiles."

Not everyone was taken in by George Psalmanazar's hoax. He was mocked even in his own time (he died in 1763), but the book remained popular, perhaps for the reason that travel books have always been popular, because the traveler (like Psalmanazar) claims to be an eyewitness to amazing sights. And the very barbarities in the book's details seemed to prove that it was a truthful account of a distant land.

Poe's Believable Landscapes

EDGAR ALLAN POE'S life was short, and not a traveling one, yet his fiction is full of foreign landscapes, among them believable Paris, Switzerland, Holland, and Norway, as well as nameless gothic moorlands, and even unearthly ones, such as the cold regions at the end of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. I read Poe as a teenager and was transported from my humdrum existence to his world of horror and mystery and freakishness.

Poe was born in Boston in 1809 to parents who were actors. His father had disappeared and his mother was dead by the time he was two years old. Adopted by the Allan family, from whom he got his middle name, he was taken abroad, and before he turned eleven he had seen Scotland and England. But after 1820 he merely shuttled from one American city to another—New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond; and he was dead at forty. High-strung, quarrelsome, competitive, and alcoholic, Poe had an intensity and a belief in his own genius, which compelled his creation of real and imaginary worlds.

The gothic attracted him, as it attracts many, for its brooding landscape of crags and castles, haunted palaces, its "sense of insufferable gloom" and "shadowy fancies" ("The Fall of the House of Usher"), of moorland and howling wolves, plagues such as "the Red Death," crypts and catacombs ("A Cask of Amontillado"), and "gloomy gray hereditary halls" ("Berenice").

The gothic memory in "William Wilson" is emblematic: "My earliest recollections of a school-life, are connected with a large, rambling, Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking village of England, where were a vast number of gigantic and gnarled trees, and where all the houses were excessively ancient."

Or the lugubrious opening of "The Fall of the House of Usher": "During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher."

In his detective fiction, macabre stories, and even his early science fiction, Poe shows himself to be a reader of travel, history, and the arcane—the Red Death, the Spanish Inquisition ("the horrors at Toledo"), the devil in the belfry in the Dutch borough of Vondervotteimittiss; "The Assignation" takes place in a believable Venice.

Now and then there's a serious geographical lapse, as in "Silence—A Fable," which takes place in a "dreary region in Libya, by the borders of the river Zaire ... yellow ghastly river ... hippopotami." Elsewhere, his work is distinguished by its exactitude. Poe had never been to France, yet the French loved Poe in Baudelaire's translations. Detective Auguste Dupin appeared in "The Purloined Letter," "The Mystery of Marie Roget," and also in "Murders in the Rue Morgue," where he is here, walking with the narrator in Paris, part of a paragraph that is convincing in its precision:

You kept your eyes upon the ground—glancing, with a petulant expression, at the holes and ruts in the pavement (so that I saw you were still thinking of the stones), until we reached the little alley called Lamartine, which has been paved, by way of experiment, with the overlapping and riveted blocks. Here your countenance brightened up, and, perceiving your lips move, I could not doubt that you murmured the word "stereotomy," a term very affectedly applied to this species of pavement.

Some corpses are found to be horribly mutilated, and this leads to the Rue Morgue, "one of those miserable thoroughfares which intervene between the Rue Richelieu and the Rue St. Roch." It turns out that the murderer is an enraged orangutan with a razor, but Poe knows (as some other authors do not) that orangutans come from Borneo.

The opening of his terrifying story "The Descent into the Maelstrom" is Poe's most impressive fictional representation of an actual landscape:

"We are now," [the old man] continued, in that particularizing manner which distinguished him—"we are now close upon the Norwegian coast—iwn the sixty-eighth degree of latitude—in the great province of Nordland—and in the dreary district of Lofoden. The mountain upon whose top we sit is Helseggen, the Cloudy. Now raise yourself up a little higher—hold on to the grass if you feel giddy—so—and look out, beyond the belt of vapor beneath us, into the sea."

I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose waters wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian geographer's account of the Mare Tenebrarum. A panorama more deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive. To the right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay outstretched, like ramparts of the world, lines of horridly black and beetling cliff, whose character of gloom was but the more forcibly illustrated by the surf which reared high up against it, its white and ghastly crest, howling and shrieking for ever. Just opposite the promontory upon whose apex we were placed, and at a distance of some five or six miles out at sea, there was visible a small, bleak-looking island; or, more properly, its position was discernible through the wilderness of surge in which it was enveloped. About two miles nearer the land, arose another of smaller size, hideously craggy and barren, and encompassed at various intervals by a cluster of dark rocks.

The appearance of the ocean, in the space between the more distant island and the shore, had something very unusual about it. Although, at the time, so strong a gale was blowing landward that a brig in the remote offing lay to under a double-reefed trysail, and constantly plunged her whole hull out of sight, still there was here nothing like a regular swell, but only a short, quick, angry cross dashing of water in every direction—as well in the teeth of the wind as otherwise. Of foam there was little except in the immediate vicinity of the rocks.

This goes on for many more pages, with the revelation of the maelstrom, showing that Poe, a man who had hardly been anywhere—and certainly nowhere like this—was able to create a credible landscape out of his reading and his imagination.

Thomas Janvier, In the Sargasso Sea

JANVIER, WHO IS forgotten now, was born in 1849, educated in Philadelphia, lived in New York City, and traveled in Europe and Mexico. He wrote biography, history, and travel; he published a guidebook about Mexico and short stories set in France; and with one exception he wrote directly from experience, describing places he'd been—Provence and Mexico.

In the Sargasso Sea (1898) was recommended to me by the humorist S. J. Perelman, who told me that this depiction of a man struggling on a sea of weeds was like a version of living and writing in Hollywood. Perelman might have been introduced to the book by his friend Nathanael West, who mentions Janvier in his powerful Hollywood novel, The Day of the Locust. Todd, West's main character, gets a glimpse of the place where movie sets are disposed of.

He left the road and climbed across the spine of the hill to look down on the other side. From there he could see a ten-acre field of cockleburs, spotted with clumps of sunflowers and wild gum. In the center of the field was a gigantic pile of nets, flats and props. While he watched, a ten ton truck added another load to it. This was the final dumping ground. He thought of Janvier's "Sargasso Sea." Just as that imaginary body of water was a history of civilization in the form of a marine junkyard, the studio lot was one in the form of a dream dump.

The Sargasso Sea actually exists. It was first seen by Columbus, and described by Jules Verne (the Nautilus motored through it in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea). As a convergence of ocean currents, it is an elliptical "free-floating meadow of seaweed almost as large as a continent" (Encyclopedia Britannica), rotating slowly clockwise. Because it is adjacent to Bermuda it is part of the mystery associated with the Bermuda Triangle. A breeding place for eels, this sea within a sea is bordered by the Gulf Stream on the west. Its name is from the profusion of brown floating gulfweed (genus Sargassum) visible on its surface.

It was thought, mistakenly, that the Sargasso Sea trapped ships, and contributing to the vivid ship-swallowing myth, this is the conceit that Janvier uses to great effect in his novel.

I had come out from the wheel-house and was standing on the steamer's bridge—which rose right out of the water so that I looked down from it directly on the weed-laden sea. As far as my sight would carry through the soft golden haze I saw only weed-covered water, broken here and there by a bit of wreckage or by a little open space on which the pale sunshine gleamed. A very gentle swell was running, giving to the ocean the look of some strange sort of meadow with tall grass swaying evenly in an easy wind ... So far as the world was concerned I was dead already—being fairly caught in the slow eddying current which was carrying my hulk steadily and hopelessly into the dense wreck-filled centre of the Sargasso Sea.

And later:

I had before me what I think must be the strangest sight that the world has in it for the eyes of man. For what I looked at was the host of wrecked ships, the dross of wave and tempest, which through four centuries—from the time when sailors first pushed out upon the great western ocean—has been gathering slowly, and still more slowly wasting, in the central fastnesses of the Sargasso Sea.

Janvier, a traveler, was widely read in his time, which was just a century ago. On his death, the appreciative New York Times obituary praised Janvier for his "suave irony, gentle aloofness," and went on, "His varied books of travel had the same combination of qualities—keen and close observation, with a curious sympathy of understanding and vividness of presentation."

Edgar Rice Burroughs: "I Can Write Better About Places I've Never Seen"

MANY PEOPLE, OF whom I am one, formed their first notions of Africa from the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, specifically the Tarzan books—and films and illustrated comics. Even knowing this was fantasy adventure, readers, young ones especially, felt an incomparable thrill. Burroughs never set foot in Africa, though he knew something about roughing it—he'd been a cowboy, a soldier in the Seventh Cavalry, and a gold miner in Idaho.

He was one of those American writers who was so full of speculative schemes (Twain was another) that they worked their way into his fiction. Burroughs had been a poor student, a failed businessman, and somewhat desperate as a writer when, at the age of thirty-six, he published Tarzan of the Apes as a serial in All-Story magazine. He'd been fascinated by the ethnographic exhibits (native dances, grass skirts, African warriors) and zoo animals he'd seen in Chicago at the World's Columbian Exhibition in 1893. He'd read Burton and Stanley on Africa, as well as H. Rider Haggard adventures and Kipling's Jungle Book. He was asked many times how he came up with the idea of Tarzan. He claimed he didn't know (though Tarzan's upbringing can be compared with Mowgli's in Kipling, and Kipling mentions Tarzan approvingly in his own autobiography, Something of Myself), but said that the character helped him escape from the humdrum life he was leading. "My mind, in relaxation, preferred to roam in scenes and situations I'd never known. I find that I can write better about places I've never seen than those I have."

In Tarzan of the Apes (1914), Tarzan is John Clayton, the son of Lord Greystoke, whose wife has died while living in a remote cabin in West Africa. The female ape Kala, grieving for her own dead baby, kills Lord Greystoke and abducts young Clayton, whom she calls Tarzan ("white skin" in ape language), raising him as her own. Jane Porter, another castaway, also turns up in this first novel, along with a cast of sinister opportunists. Tarzan is not sure who he is, but his skills and his strength have made him Lord of the Jungle. The book was such a hit with readers that a year later he wrote The Return of Tarzan (featuring his marriage to Jane), and altogether twenty-five Tarzan books, other stories with an African setting, as well as a number of westerns and works of science fiction.

After a prolific career as a writer of adventure stories, quite wealthy, living in Hawaii and feeling neglected, Burroughs, at the age of sixty-six, witnessed the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He immediately signed up as a war correspondent and traveled throughout the Pacific. He remained in Hawaii until the end of the war.

It is obvious that as he continued to write the Tarzan books he mugged up on Africa. The setting for the Tarzan stories appears to be the Gabon of Du Chaillu's Exploration and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. He would have found Swahili in Burton, since Tarzan's Waziri people use accurate Swahili words, such as Mulungu for God, askari for soldier, and shifta for bandit. Tarzan becomes their chief after their own chief dies battling Arab slave traders. A lovely African girl in Tarzan: The Lost Adventure is named Nyama. This is the Swahili word for meat, as well as a generic word for game (and a slang word in East Africa for a low woman). But in all the books Africans are primitive (Tarzan usually mocks them) and not to be compared with the apes, Tarzan's real family. Civilized man is worse than any other—"more brutal than the brutes." The great apes, the Mangani, who are Tarzan's extended family, have a whole language to themselves, which Burroughs invented or contrived from travel book glossaries. One can easily see that Tarzan is the creation of an armchair traveler, a devourer of travel books.

Saul Bellow's Fairly Serious Fooling

BELLOW HAD NOT seen Africa before he wrote Henderson the Rain King (1959), his novel about the larger-than-life Eugene Henderson—war hero, pig farmer, ranter. Very tall and very strong and highly ingenious, Henderson describes himself as "a millionaire wanderer and wayfarer," and he adds, "A brutal and violent man driven into the world ... A fellow whose heart said, I want, I want."

This novel, Bellow's favorite, is his weakest, and perhaps because of that, his most revealing: slack writing is full of disclosure.

Bellow, henpecked, exasperated, in need of imaginative relief, felt cornered in an unhappy marriage when he conceived and wrote the book. The African setting, the freedom of Henderson to roam and rant, the transformation that fiction writing allows, were probably a consolation to Bellow. If he couldn't go to Africa and leave his miseries behind, at least he could fantasize about such an escape.

"I am just a traveler," Henderson says to King Dahfu. But to Chief Itelo he said, "Your Highness, I am really kind of on a quest." It seems to me that this is the crux of the matter: Bellow cannot imagine an Africa that is not full of marvels, odd customs, harems, wrestling matches, lion hunts, and the mystical rain ceremony that elevates Henderson to kingship among the Wariri, in the same way that Tarzan is elevated to chief of the similar-sounding Waziri in The Return of Tarzan.

In the imagined world of the nontraveling fiction writer there is usually a convergence of the grotesque and the stereotypical. A comparison of Henderson with Tarzan is not out of place. The difference is that Burroughs admitted he was writing pulp fiction, while the highly intelligent Bellow, self-conscious in this role as fabulist, often plays it for laughs. This novel—strained comedy, occasional farce, and sometimes outright clowning—is unconvincing to anyone who has lived in an African village, yet when Bellow won the Nobel Prize, Henderson was commended as his "most imaginative expedition."

Burton's First Footsteps in East Africa is invoked by Henderson. But the antiquated nature of the travel and Bellow's invented tribes make me think that (like Edgar Rice Burroughs) he was influenced more by Paul Du Chaillu's 1861 Exploration and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, in which Du Chaillu, an American of French descent, was made a king of the Apingi tribe in Gabon.

Du Chaillu wrote, "Remandji said, 'You are the spirit, whom we have never seen before. We are but poor people when we see you. You are of those whom we have often heard of, who come from nobody knows where, and whom we never hoped to see. You are our king and ruler; stay with us always. We love you and will do what you wish.' Whereupon ensued shouts and rejoicings; palm wine was introduced, and a general jollification took place, in the orthodox fashion at coronations. From this day, therefore, I may call myself Du Chaillu the First, King of the Apingi."

Henderson becomes the Rain King in a similar fashion. Challenged by an interviewer about the reality in his novel, Bellow replied, "Years ago, I studied African ethnography with the late Professor Herskovits. Later he scolded me for writing a book like Henderson. He said the subject was much too serious for such fooling. I felt that my fooling was fairly serious. Literalism, factualism, will smother the imagination altogether."

This seems to me a delusion on Bellow's part, yet another delusion of the nontraveling writer.

Arthur Waley: Not Madly Singing in the Mountains

DESPITE PUBLISHING MORE than twenty volumes of his translations from Chinese and Japanese, including The Way and the Power, Tao Te Ching, The Analects of Confucius, and Murasaki's Tale of Genji, Waley never traveled to China or Japan.

Waley claimed that he didn't want to risk being disappointed by seeing the real places so bewitchingly described in poetry and prose. Was this so? The Yale Sinologist Jonathan Spence wrote in the journal Renditions, "One can make all kinds of guesses concerning Waley's reasons for not going to Asia: that he didn't want to confuse the ideal with the real, or that he was interested in the ancient written languages and not the modern spoken ones, or that he simply could not afford the journey. Certainly we are safe in assuming that the trip would have been disconcerting."

Modern China would surely have disconcerted him. Waley was happier in his imagined Tang Dynasty. Here is one of his great translations, and a wonderful affirmation of nature, from the Tang poet Po Chu-i:

Madly Singing in the Mountains

There is no one among men that has not a special failing:

And my failing consists in writing verses.

I have broken away from the thousand ties of life:

But this infirmity still remains behind.

Each time that I look at a fine landscape,

Each time that I meet a loved friend,

I raise my voice and recite a stanza of poetry

And am glad as though a God had crossed my path.

Ever since the day I was banished to Hsun-yang

Half my time I have lived among hills.

And often, when I have finished a new poem,

Alone I climb the road to the Eastern Rock.

I lean my body on the banks of white stone:

I pull down with my hands a green cassia branch.

My mad singing startles the valleys and hills:

The apes and birds all come to peep.

Fearing to become a laughing-stock to the world,

I choose a place that is unfrequented by men.

V. S. Pritchett: A Lot of Verisimilitude, and a Howler

PRITCHETT WROTE DEAD Man Leading, a novel set in Brazil, in 1937, years before he finally traveled there. The novel describes the quest of some explorers who have been lost in the jungle. Pritchett said that he was inspired by the Fawcett expedition of 1925, which vanished (probably massacred) while searching for a lost city deep in the Mato Grosso.

One of the reasons Pritchett's book is persuasive is that he makes imagery so familiar. He speaks of the brown of a Brazilian river resembling strong tea, and a sky like a huge blue house; the forest is faint, like "a distant fence," and the jungle at another point is bedraggled and broken, "as if a lorry had crashed into it." There is a creek "like a sewage ditch" and a bad rainstorm making "the intolerable whine of machines" and a forest odor 'like the smell of spirits gone sour on the breath."

Much later, after he made a visit to Brazil, Pritchett concluded that he had invented the truth. But not entirely. One of the howlers in the book is the mention of "the gulping Lear-like laugh" of an orangutan. There are no orangutans in Brazil. They are found ten thousand miles away, in Borneo, and in any case they seldom make a sound.

A Truly Kafkaesque America

FRANZ KAFKA CANNOT be held accountable for the title of his novel Amerika. Left unfinished, it was published after his death by his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, who gave it this name. Kafka usually referred to it as Der Verschollene (The Missing Person or The Man Who Disappeared). The man in question went to America.

Though Kafka never got farther west from his home in Prague than France, in his letters to Brod he fantasized about traveling to distant places, among them South America, Spain, and the Azores. In affectionate letters he asked two women at the periphery of his life, Felice Bauer and Dora Diamant, to travel with him to Palestine, where he dreamed of abandoning writing, getting healthy, and landing a job as a waiter. This waiter fantasy occurred in 1923, the year before he died. Claiming that he suffered from "travel anxiety" (Reiseangst), Kafka did not go to any far-off places. His real fear was that by traveling—being away from his room, his desk, his books—he would put an end to his writing. His invented America is based on his reading, and he was said to have been influenced by Amerika Heute und Morgan (America Today and Tomorrow), by an itinerant Hungarian, Arthur Holitscher, who had traveled around the United States as a skeptical tourist. In this book, as in Kafka's Amerika, the misspelled name "Oklahama" occurs often.

The fictional result is surreal. In the first sonorous paragraph, the hero, Karl Rossmann, sails into New York harbor and sees the Statue of Liberty, "as if in a burst of sunlight. The arm with the sword now reached aloft, and about her figure blew the free winds." The sword instead of the torch is perhaps deliberate.

After the shock of a chaotic, unrecognizable New York City and an interlude with his uncle Edward Jakob, Karl spends some time with a wealthy Mr. Poll under at a labyrinthine mansion outside the city. Not much countryside is described, yet we don't expect daffodils and shady glens from Kafka. We expect anxiety dreams, and predictably the narrative becomes like an anxiety dream, even to Uncle Jakob's suddenly sending Karl away, for no apparent reason. Karl looks for a job, hooks up with two tramps, and hits the road. Just outside the city they look back and see a bridge: "The bridge connecting New York to Boston hung delicately over the Hudson and trembled if one narrowed one's eyes. It appeared to bear no traffic, and a long smooth lifeless strip of water stretched underneath."

Karl becomes an elevator operator at the Occidental Hotel, in a large, Middle European-seeming city, and eventually reconnects with the two tramps, who are living with, and looking after, a very fat diva-prostitute named Brunelda (one of their tasks is to bathe her). The novel remained incomplete but is full of tantalizing fragments, including a brothel named Enterprise No. 25 and the Nature Theater of Oklahama. In every sense, this America, the morbid dream of a tubercular genius in a room in Prague, is Kafkaesque.

Travel Wisdom of Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh knew better than most people that there is a great deal of pleasure to be derived from a travel book in which the traveler is having a bad time—even better if it is an ordeal. Travel gave him fame as a young man, and though he said (see below) he did not travel to collect material, his fiction was enriched by his travel, from Black Mischief at the beginning of his career to The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold near the end. Many theorists of travel have claimed that Waugh's travel writing represents the high-water mark of the genre; this is demonstrably untrue, yet Waugh's travel is personal and opinionated, with episodes of high comedy. It is surprising that a man who cared for comfort and high society risked deep discomfort and low company in Africa and South America, but that he was a much hardier, more diligent, and fairer-minded traveler than he let on.

One does not travel, any more than one falls in love, to collect material. It is simply part of one's life. For myself, and many better than I, there is a fascination in distant and barbarous places, and particularly in the borderlands of conflicting cultures and states of development, where ideas, uprooted from their traditions, become oddly changed in transplantation. It is here that I find the experiences vivid enough to demand translation into literary form.

—Ninety-two Days (1934)

***

To have traveled a lot, to have spent, as I have done, the first twelve years of adult life on the move, is to this extent a disadvantage. At the age of thirty-five one needs to go to the moon, or some such place, to recapture the excitement with which one first landed at Calais.

—When the Going Was Good (1947)

***

I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset; the mountain almost invisible in a blur of pastel grey, glowing on the top and then repeating its shape, as though reflected, in a wisp of grey smoke with the whole horizon behind radiant with pink light, fading gently into a grey pastel sky. Nothing I have seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting.

—Labels (1930)

***

My own traveling days are over, nor do I expect to see many travel books in the near future. When I was a reviewer, they used, I remember, to appear in batches of four or five a week, cram-full of charm and wit and enlarged Leica snapshots. There is no room for tourists in a world of "displaced persons." Never again, I suppose, shall we land on foreign soil with letter of credit and passport (itself the first faint shadow of the great cloud that envelopes us) and feel the world wide open before us.

—When the Going Was Good

***

When we have been home from abroad for a week or two, and time after time, in answer to our friends' polite inquiries, we have retold our experiences, letting phrase engender phrase, until we have quite made a good story of it all; when the unusual people we have encountered have, in retrospect, become fabulous and fantastic, and all the checks and uncertainties of travel had become very serious dangers; when the minor annoyances assume heroic proportions and have become, at the luncheon-table, barely endurable privations; even before that, when in the later stages of our journey we reread in our diaries the somewhat bald chronicle of the preceding months—how very little attention do we pay, among all these false frights and bogies, to the stark horrors of boredom.

— Remote People (1931)

22. Traveler's Bliss

BLISS IS RARE IN THE TRAVEL NARRATIVE, where the usual theme is hardship and sometimes horror. Our happiness in print in any case always seems boastful and improbable, quite far from the human condition. But now and then the traveler arrives at the Great Good Place, gives thanks for his luck, and shows the reader that the travail which gave the word "travel" its form can result in an epiphany, like Doughty's triple rainbow or Vikram Seth's sight of the Potala Palace. The first traveler is William Bartram, who spent four years among Native Americans in the South and, contradicting all the reports of pugnacity and savagery, found only hospitality, goodwill, and wisdom. He described the people who were later expelled from their native land to travel westward on the Trail of Tears.

The Good Manners of the Muscogulges of the Creek Nation

A [Muscogulge] man goes forth on business or avocations, he calls in at another town, if he wants victuals, rest or social conversation, he confidently approaches the door of the first house he chooses, saying, "I am come." The good man or woman replies, "You are; it's well." Immediately victuals and drink are ready; he eats and drinks a little, then smokes Tobacco, and converses either of private matters, public talks or the news of the town. He rises and says, "I go." The other answers, "You do!" He then proceeds again, and steps in at the next habitation he likes, or repairs to the public square, where are people always conversing by day, or dancing all night, or to some more private assembly, as he likes; he needs no one to introduce him, any more than the black-bird or the thrush, when he repairs to the fruitful groves, to regale on their luxuries, and entertain the fond female with evening songs.

It is astonishing, though a fact, as well as a sharp reproof to the white people, if they will allow themselves liberty to reflect and form a just estimate, and I must own elevates these people to the first rank among mankind.

—William Bartram,

Travels Through North and South Carolina

(1791)

C. M. Doughty Sees a Triple Rainbow in Arabia

Late in the afternoon there fell great drops from the lowering skies; then a driving rain fell suddenly, shrill and seething, upon the harsh gravel soil, and so heavily that in a few moments all the plain land was a streaming plash...

After half an hour the worst was past, and we mounted again. Little birds, before unseen, flitted cheerfully chittering over the wet wilderness. The low sun looked forth, and then appeared a blissful and surpassing spectacle! A triple rainbow painted in the air before us. Over two equal bows a third was reared upon the feet of the first; and like to it in the order of hues.—These were the celestial arches of the sun's building, a peace in heaven after the battle of the elements in the desert-land of Arabia

— Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888)

Vikram Seth on the Potala Palace in Lhasa

When I next look out we are already in the broad valley of the Lhasa River—with fields of wheat and barley, tall trees, buildings of cement, and, from far away, the dominating vertical plane of the Potala palace, monolithic and of immense grandeur, white and pale pink and red and gold.

In this late afternoon light it is so beautiful that I cannot speak at all. I get up and stare at it, holding onto one of the supports at the back of the truck, and looking forwards in the direction we are traveling. The hill on which it rests, and its own thick, slightly slanting walls, combine to give it a powerful sense of stability; and the white and gold add an almost unreal brilliance to the vast slab that is its structure.

—From Heaven Lake (1983)

Flaubert Blissed-Out on the Nile

When we arrived off Thebes our sailors were drumming on their darabukehs, the mate was playing his flute, Khalil was dancing with his castanets: they broke off to land.

It was then, as I was enjoying those things, and just as I was watching three wave-crests bending under the wind behind us, that I felt a surge of solemn happiness that reached out towards what I was seeing, and I thanked God in my heart for having made me capable of such a joy: I felt fortunate at the thought, and yet it seemed to me that I was thinking of nothing: it was a sensuous pleasure that pervaded my entire being.

— Flaubert in Egypt, translated by Francis Steegmuller (1972)

Freya Stark at Peace in Hakkiari, Turkey

It was still far from daylight. The high dome of heaven was revolving with peacock colors and secret constellations among the outlined rocks. There was, of course, no sign of the muleteers. I sat there for over an hour, watching the moonlight retreat from the rocky bastions, a process of infinite majesty and peace. I felt, as Firdausi says, like dust in the lion's paw.

— The Valleys of the Assassins (1934)

23. Classics of a Sense of Place

SOME TRAVEL BOOKS ARE LESS ABOUT TRAVEL (that is, a specific itinerary and perambulation) than about an intense experience of a particular place. It could be a wilderness area (Thoreau's Maine), a river (Moritz Thomsen's Amazon), an American state (John McPhee's Alaska), or part of a state (Jonathan Raban's "bad land" of eastern Montana)—or the whole of Wales (Jan Morris), the whole of Spain (Pritchett), or India for half a lifetime (Chaudhuri). Carlo Levi was banished to southern Italy, exiled in the hill town of Aliano in 1935, for his antifascist views. He rambled around the town for a year, tended the sick (he was a doctor), and later wrote with feeling about it, and he is buried there. That, too, was travel. He said it was like being on the moon. I think of this as both an inner and an outer journey: what is illuminated is the landscape and the people—the place rather than the traveler or the trip. In most of the following cases the writers are in residence.

The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau

IN 1846 IN Maine, only a matter of days from his home in Concord, Thoreau found the wild place he was looking for. In the chapter "Ktaadn" he defines the essence of wilderness. "It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man," he begins modestly. Then comes his hammer stroke:

Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever.

The book was published posthumously, and based on three pieces that Thoreau had written, about three fairly short trips to the hinterland of Maine. Thoreau made his last trip in 1857. He was forty then, and you can see by his prose style that he is a different sort of traveler: humbler, affronted by the changes he sees in the eleven years since his first visit, no longer a quoter of Milton, or a praiser of lumberjacks, or a hyperbolic observer of the mystical Indian. He is now a denouncer of the logging industry and a clear-sighted diarist. Native Americans fascinated Thoreau, and this third trip in Maine offered him his best opportunity to study them.

Once, when Joe had called again, and we were listening for moose, we heard come faintly echoing or creeping from far through the moss-clad aisles, a dull dry rushing sound, with a solid core to it, yet as if half-smothered under the grasp of the luxuriant and fungus-like forest, like the shutting of a door in some distant entry of the damp and shaggy wilderness. If we had not been there no mortal had heard it. When we asked Joe in a whisper what it was, he answered, "Tree fall."

Thoreau was assertively American, in a manner of conspicuous nonconformity inspired by Emerson. Thoreau's passion was for being local, and that included being a traveler in America—to show how to care about the country, what tone to use, what subjects to address. Along the way, in adopting and refining these postures, he became our first and subtlest environmentalist. In Maine his subjects were, as he listed them in a letter, "the Moose, the Pine Tree & the Indian." The last words he spoke on his deathbed were "Moose ... Indian."

The Spanish Temper by V. S. Pritchett

AS A TRAVELER in Spain, who hiked a large portion of it and wrote about it in his first book, Marching Spain (1928); as a journalist in the 1920s; and as a passionate reader of Spanish writing, V. S. Pritchett was well equipped to sum up this sunny, old-fashioned, and enigmatic country and its people. He was unhappy about his youthful book and so he wrote The Spanish Temper (1954) when he was middle-aged. It is to me the ultimate book about Spain—not a big book but a wise, enlightened one, epigrammatic and perceptive. As a short story writer (his story "The Evils of Spain" could be read along with this book), Pritchett was a master of compression. When writing on Spanish food, Franco, bullfighting, Don Quixote, and the many different landscapes of Spain, he is always original and challenging.

Speaking about the Spanish Civil War, he recounts the gore and violence and the mass executions. "The barbarian is strong in the Spanish people," he writes and immediately afterward alludes to the bullfight:

The most damaging criticism of the Spanish taste for bullfighting is rather different: the bullfight suffers from the monotony of sacrifices, and it is one more example of the peculiar addiction to the repetitive and the monotonous in the Spanish nature. Many foreigners who have known Spain well have noted this taste for monotony. The drama of the bullfight lies within the drama of a foregone conclusion ... The fate of the bull is certain.

In another place, at Guadix in southern Spain, he marvels at a panorama of rock and mountain:

It is a land for the connoisseur of landscape, for in no other European country is there such variety and originality. Here Nature has had vast Space, stupendous means, and no restraint of fancy. One might pass a lifetime gazing at the architecture of rock and its strange coloring, especially the coloring of iron, blue steel, violet and ochreous ores, metallic purples, and all the burned, vegetable pigments. These landscapes frighten by their scale and by the suggestion of furrowed age, geological madness, malevolence and grandeur.

The Matter of Wales by Jan Morris

A CULTURAL STUDY, a history, combining topography, language, national character, and travel, lovingly anatomized, Morris's 1984 book describes "not only a separate nation, but a distinctly separate and often vehement idea." Here is Morris's disquisition on Welsh rocks and stones:

The substance of Welsh nature is largely rock, for some four-fifths of the surface of Wales is hard upland, where the soil is so thin that stones seem always to be forcing their way restlessly through, and it feels as though a really heavy rain-storm would wash all the turf away. The softness of the valleys, the calm of the low farmlands are only subsidiary to the character of the country: the real thing, the dominant, is hard, bare, grey and stony.

This means that the truest Welsh places offer experiences as much tactile as visual, for everywhere there are stones that seem to invite your stroking, your rolling, your sitting upon or, if you happen to be a druid or a survivor from the Stone Age, your worshipping. There are thrilling clumps of jagged stones on hilltops, and stark solitary stones beside moorland roads, and stones gleaming perpetually with the splash of earth-dark streams, and stone walls which seem less like walls than masonry contour-lines, snaking away across the mountain elevations mile after mile as far as the eye can see.

The Saddest Pleasure by Moritz Thomsen

"IT HAS BEEN forty-five years since I took a trip whose object was pleasure," Moritz Thomsen writes before leaving his farm in the Ecuadorian coastal province of Esmeraldas (which he wrote about in The Farm on the River of Emeralds). He was an older Peace Corps volunteer—fifty when he joined—and a rare one: he never went home. He decided to travel down the Amazon, "because there is an emptiness in my life that needs to be filled with something fresh and moderately intense."

He makes rules for himself in the travel: "Dollar meals if I can find them; five dollar hotels, if they still exist. No guided tours, no visits to historical monuments or old churches. No taxis, no mixed drinks in fancy bars. No hanging around places where English might be spoken." He takes his time, floating from river to river, stopping at the Amazon ports of Manaus and Belém and finally reaching Bahia on the coast. After all the bad food and discomfort and illness, and his witnessing the distress and poverty and the fallen world that is Amazonia, he concludes, "There are no solutions anymore; the continent will never recover." In his oblique and humane and self-deprecating way, he is the ideal guide. Though he credits me as the source of his title (a line from my novel Picture Palace), the quotation is actually from Madame de Staël, in Corinne, ou l'Italie (1807): "Travel is one of the saddest pleasures of life."

Coming into the Country by John McPhee

FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1977, even thirty-odd years later this book about Alaska is still the best one ever written about that enormous piece of land and its tiny population. McPhee (b. 1931) was in the hinterland, paddling the rivers and streams, before trails were blazed and the road beside the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was open to the public. The book is part wilderness experience—McPhee traveling with a group of scientists and environmentalists—and part social experiment—his meeting new Alaskans and indigenous people, and examining the fantasies and contradictions. What is most impressive is how deeply McPhee penetrates to the heart of the country. Though he is always dour in manner, literal-minded, factual, resistant to any levity, allowing his narrative to sprawl, this is probably why the book has endured. McPhee's feet are always on the ground, even when faced by a grizzly bear (twelve pages of suspense and information).

Speaking of the provincialism of Alaska, he writes:

In Alaska, the conversation is Alaska. Alaskans, by and large, seem to know little and to say less about what is going on outside. They talk about their land, their bears, their fish, their rivers. They talk about subsistence hunting, forbidden hunting, and living in trespass. They have their own lexicon. A senior citizen is a pioneer, snow is termination dust, and the N.B.A. is the National Bank of Alaska. The names of Alaska are so beautiful they run like fountains all day in the mind. Mulchatna. Chilikadrotna. Unalaska. Unalak-leet. Kivalina. Kiska. Kodiak. Allakaket. The Aaniakchak Caldera. Nondalton. Anaktubvuk. Anchorage. Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans. Its languages extend to English. Its nature is its own.

Bad Land by Jonathan Raban

"WHAT I FELT all the way was like a scale model of immigrants to America," Raban once said, describing this book. "It was the story of America written in one particular landscape." In the beginning of Bad Land (1996) he describes himself as an emigrant, "trying to find my own place in the landscape and history of the West." He chose an unlikely and pretty much unwritten-about place, the dry, flat expanses of eastern Montana. This is a book about a part of America that no American could have written: we don't have Raban's objectivity, his passion, or his sense of alienation. He is also widely read and intensely curious—curious in the way of an intelligent foreigner in America: "Bred to looking at a landscape as if it were a picture, to the posted scenic viewpoint, I was responding to the prairie like a shut-in taking his first walk across a blinding city square. It was all periphery and no center."

Travel, history, biography, and autobiography, this highly original portrait of prairie America, published in 1996, is also about the people who traveled there and who learned to adapt to the rigors of the weather, the stubborn soil, the great oceanlike emptiness that inspires Raban to view the landscape as an inland sea, in which the emigrants are like solitary voyagers. Intensely observant, curious to the point of nosiness, Raban gets to know them, examines their family histories, their dreams, the images that have been painted of the land, the photographs, the guidebooks, and he describes the journey itself—the emigrant train, filled with distinct individuals, whom we come to know, confronted by a new climate.

Dreadful though the cold could be, it was not the most destructive element in Montana's repertoire of violent weather. In summer, the air over the northern plains is turbulent: it moves in swirls and gyres, with fierce rip currents and whirlpool-like tornadoes. Here the northwesterly air stream, blowing from Alaska and the Arctic Circle, collides with warm southeasterlies blowing from the Gulf of Mexico and the southern U.S. interior. The exposed, treeless prairie, baking in the sun by day and cooling rapidly during the afternoons, intensifies the aerial commotion.

This is magnificent thunderstorm territory. The only time in my life when I have been seriously afraid of lightning was in eastern Montana on a dirt road miles from anywhere ... The distant storm winked and winked again. Like photo-flashes going off in the face of some celebrity on the far side of a city square, these blips of white light seemed no business of mine, and I drove on ... Closer now, the lightning flashes were like the skeletal inverted leaves of ferns, and when the thunder came I took it for some gastro-enteritic flare-up in the car engine—a blown gasket or a fractured piston...

Then the lightning shafts were stabbing, arbitrarily, at the bare ground, and much too close for comfort ... A slight but audible interval opened up between the lightning strikes and the rockslides of thunder, and in the lee of the storm came hail, crackling against the windshield and sugaring the road. It lasted just a minute or two. Then the lost sun returned, the prairie was rinsed and green, tendrils of steam rose from the grass, and the dark thundercloud rolled away eastward into North Dakota.

The Traveller's Tree by Patrick Leigh Fermor

WHAT is IMPRESSIVE about this book is its completeness, its humane assessment of the Caribbean islands and their people, and its elegance—an evocative as well as droll appreciation of a vast area. The book is now sixty years old, and so it is also an album of pretty pictures about places that are different, some of them much changed, many of them no longer pretty at all. Haiti comes to mind. In Leigh Fermor's view, Haiti is old-fashioned and proud, lovable, beauteous, cultured, a bit severe—a far cry from the hellishly poor and devastated country of today, the victim of dictatorships, hurricanes, famine, disease, and most recently one of the worst earthquakes in human history.

So The Traveller's Tree is dated ("Negroes," "aerodrome," "luncheon"), but all the more valuable for that, because it is in the nature of a travel book, especially an expansive one like this, to serve as a history of a region, noting manners and customs, language and cuisine. He traveled in Trinidad in 1947–48, when V. S. Naipaul was a high school student, before Graham Greene went to Haiti, and around the time Ian Fleming became resident in Jamaica. For many travel writers, Patrick Leigh Fermor is everything a travel writer ought to be—urbane, well read, witty, forgiving, well traveled, and a meticulous observer. His writing is magical, his eye is unerring, and so is his ear—for human speech, for music, for the sound of the sea and birdsong, for the feel of a place. And his barbs tend to be elegant: "Hotel cooking in the island [Trinidad] is so appalling that a stretcher may profitably be ordered at the same time as dinner."

Here, having just landed in a Haiti that is no more, Leigh Fermor is traveling up the main road toward Port-au-Prince in an old wagon. "These black and obsolete vehicles are drawn by horses on the point of death and driven by very old men." He goes on:

The cane-field and savannah turned into the outskirts of the capital. Thatched cabins straggled into the country under the palm trees, and multiplied into a suburb, through which the road ran in a straight, interminable line. For the first mile or so, the town consisted entirely of rum shops and barbers' saloons and harness makers. Hundreds of saddles were piled up in the sunlight. Bits and bridles and saddlebags hung in festoons. There were horses everywhere. Our equipage churned its way upstream through a current of horses and mules ridden by Negroes who straddled among bulky packages, all heading to their villages with their purchases for Christmas. One or two were singing Haitian

meringues,

and several were carrying game cocks under their arms, lovingly stroking their feathers as they trotted past. Old women, puffing their pipes, jogged along side-saddle. They had scarlet and blue kerchiefs tied round their heads in a fortuitous, rather piratical fashion, half covered by broad-brimmed straw hats against the sun. The sides of the road pullulated with country people chattering, drinking rum, playing cards and throwing dice under the trees. The air was thick with dust, and ringing with incomprehensible and deafening Creole. I felt I might like Haiti.

Italian Hours by Henry James

"VENICE WAS ONE of the greatest topographical love affairs of James's life," Leon Edel, his biographer, wrote. For Henry James, Venice was everything he wished for in a distant city—villas facing onto the canals, churches crammed with Renaissance masterpieces, great food, voluble people, and in his time not expensive. He called it "the repository of consolations." A number of his fictions are set in Venice, The Aspern Papers among them, and he wrote several of his novels there, notably The Portrait of a Lady, which is set in England and in Rome and Florence. Italian Hours (1909) sums up James's love of Italy, and particularly Venice, as in this dense and appreciative paragraph:

One may doubtless be very happy in Venice without reading at all—without criticizing or analyzing or thinking a strenuous thought. It is a city in which, I suspect, there is very little strenuous thinking, and yet it is a city in which there must be almost as much happiness as misery. The misery of Venice stands there for all the world to see; it is part of the spectacle—a thoroughgoing devotee of local colour might consistently say it is part of the pleasure. The Venetian people have little to call their own—little more than the bare privilege of leading their lives in the most beautiful of towns. Their habitations are decayed; their taxes heavy; their pockets light; their opportunities few. One receives an impression, however, that life presents itself to them with attractions not accounted for in this meager train of advantages, and that they are on better terms with it than many people who have made a better bargain. They lie in the sunshine; they dabble in the sea; they wear bright rags; they fall into attitudes and harmonies; they assist at an eternal

conversazione.

It is not easy to say that one would have them other than they are, and it certainly would make an immense difference should they be better fed. The number of persons in Venice who evidently never have enough to eat is painfully large; but it would be more painful if we did not equally perceive that the rich Venetian temperament may bloom upon a dog's allowance. Nature has been kind to it, and sunshine and leisure and conversation and beautiful views form the greater part of its sustenance. It takes a great deal to make a successful American, but to make a happy Venetian takes only a handful of quick sensibility. The Italian people have at once the good and the evil fortune to be conscious of few wants; so that if the civilization of a society is measured by the number of its needs, as seems to be the common opinion to-day, it is to be feared that the children of the lagoon would make but a poor figure in a set of comparative tables. Not their misery, doubtless, but the way they elude their misery, is what pleases the sentimental tourist, who is gratified by the sight of a beautiful race that lives by the aid of its imagination. The way to enjoy Venice is to follow the example of these people and make the most of simple pleasures. Almost all the pleasures of the place are simple; this may be maintained even under the imputation of ingenious paradox. There is no simpler pleasure than looking at a fine Titian, unless it be looking at a fine Tintoretto or strolling into St. Mark's,—abominable the way one falls into the habit,—and resting one's light-wearied eyes upon the windowless gloom; or than floating in a gondola or than hanging over a balcony or than taking one's coffee at Florian's. It is of such superficial pastimes that a Venetian day is composed, and the pleasure of the matter is in the emotions to which they minister. These are fortunately of the finest—otherwise Venice would be insufferably dull. Reading Ruskin is good; reading the old records is perhaps better; but the best thing of all is simply staying on. The only way to care for Venice as she deserves it is to give her a chance to touch you often—to linger and remain and return.

The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian by Nirad C. Chaudhuri

AT THE AGE of fifty, a scriptwriter for All-India Radio, not having published any book, Chaudhuri was possessed by a revelation. "It came in this manner," he wrote. "As I lay awake in the night of May 4–5, 1947, an idea suddenly flashed into my mind. Why, instead of merely regretting the work of history you cannot write, I asked myself, do you not write the history you have passed through and seen enacted before your eyes?" That enlightenment came three months before India's independence. He set about immediately, struggled with some chapters, then hit his stride; and the result is a masterpiece, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951)—a man in a particular place and time.

No better book has been written about India. That Chaudhuri was from the town of Kishorganj, in East Bengal, makes it all the more valuable. He was born in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, and died in 1999, in England—a long life in which he was an eyewitness to the most dramatic changes in India. But the book is filled with the details of life—food, caste, religion (a shocking description of animal sacrifice at a Kali temple), life in the provinces and in the cities: Chaudhuri lived in both Calcutta and Delhi. Far from being a serene book, it is argumentative, critical, sometimes denunciatory, as Chaudhuri was in his subsequent books. But he was that rare bird, a traveler in his own country, with a feel for the people and the land and the seasons. Then, as now, East Bengal was famous for its rain and its floods.

If the picture on the river during the rainy season at Kishorganj was the Deluge and the Ark made homely, gregarious, and sociable, we were no less steeped in the spirit of water on land. Everything was wet to the marrow of the bone. Neither we nor our clothes were ever properly dry. When we were not slushy we were damp. The bark of the trees became so sodden that it seemed we could tear it up in handfuls like moss. We could not walk from the hut which was our bed- and living-room except on a line of bricks laid at intervals of about two feet or on a gangway made of bamboos, and the meals were more often than not held up by unseasonable showers. Little rills were running off the road, cutting miniature ravines in its side. Our servants were always wet, and their brown skins were always shining.

The tremendous drenching power of the rain was brought home to us by the dripping coming and going of our father and of our visitors, but above all by the sight of the birds. The ludicrously pitiable appearance of the crows in the rainy season is so notorious that the phrase "bedraggled crow" has become a figurative synonym in the Bengali language for an untidy and disheveled person...

But one of the most attractive and engaging sights of the season was to be seen in the inner courtyard of our house, when there was a heavy downpour. The rain came down in what looked like closely packed formations of enormously long pencils of glass and hit the bare ground. At first the pencils only pitted the sandy soil, but as soon as some water had collected all around they began to bounce off the surface of water and pop up and down in the form of minuscule puppets. Every square inch of ground seemed to receive one of the little things, and our water-logged yard was broken up into a pattern which was not only mobile but dizzily in motion. As we sat on the veranda, myriads of tiny watery marionettes, each with an expanding circlet of water at its feet, gave us such a dancing display as we had never dreamt of seeing in actual life.

Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi

THIS is ONE of those important books that, after I'd read it, compelled me to go and see the place for myself. I visited Aliano (Levi calls it Gagliano) in Lucania, in southern Italy, when I was on my around-the-shore-of-the-Mediterranean trip. It was a detour from the coast, but a memorable one. I wrote about it in The Pillars of Hercules. "He wasn't Italian," an old man told me in the town, speaking in Italian. "He was a foreigner—a Russian." I questioned this. " "'Breo," the man said. At first I didn't understand, and then I guessed at the word, Ebreo, a Jew. So everything Levi experienced in 1935, and wrote about in 1943, was still true in 1995: these people were remote, mentally and geographically, off the map in every sense.

The book describes the oddity of this educated Florentine among the peasants of a remote village in the deep south of Italy—a forgotten people, hardly Christian. Christ didn't get to Aliano, they explain to him; Christ stopped miles away, at Eboli. "We're not Christians," they say. They are superstitious, violent, passionate, mercurial, secretive, with a greater belief in dragons than in any saint.

I was struck by the peasants' build: they are short and swarthy with round heads, large eyes, and thin lips; their archaic faces do not stem from the Romans, Greeks, Etruscans, Normans, or any other invaders who have passed through their land, but recall the most ancient Italic types. They have led exactly the same life since the beginning of time, and History has swept over them without effect.

Among other things, this is one of the great studies of modern European peasant life, written by a highly intelligent and sympathetic alien, resident in a rural village. There is one toilet in the village, "and probably there was not another one within a radius of fifty miles." Werewolves lurk nearby, the villagers say. Unwritten but arcane laws govern the behavior of men and women. When Levi's sister visits, she is forbidden to live with him; no man can be left alone with a woman who is not his wife. Levi spends his time in the village painting, writing, and healing the sick.

Christ never came this far, nor did time, nor the individual soul, nor hope, nor the relation of cause to effect, nor reason, nor history. Christ never came, just as the Romans never came, content to garrison the highways without penetrating the mountains and forests, nor the Greeks ... No one has come to this land except as an enemy, a conqueror, or a visitor devoid of understanding. The seasons pass today over the toil of the peasants, just as they did three thousand years before Christ; no message, human or divine, has reached this stubborn poverty.

Before he died in 1975, Levi gave instructions that he be buried in the cemetery of Aliano. And there he rests, in the dust among the pines.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

THERE ARE TWO Moveable Feasts— the first one published in 1964, heavily edited and cobbled together by his widow, and fourth wife, Mary; the second, edited by his grandson Sean Hemingway, published in 2009, is truer to Ernest Hemingway's surviving manuscript (some pages are reproduced) and subtitled "The Restored Edition." It was the last book that Hemingway wrote; he committed suicide not long after finishing it. Both editions are worth reading. The first seems better structured and more organized—though this organization was imposed. The restored edition is longer, more ruminative, but kinder to various of the characters—Scott Fitzgerald especially, but also Hemingway's second wife, Pauline, who comes off badly in the 1964 edition.

The subject is Paris in the 1920s. Hemingway knew the city well—he arrived with wife Hadley late in 1921 and lived there off and on until 1928, when he left to take up residence in Key West with his new wife, Pauline. The themes of this memoir of Paris are being hard-up and happy, the love that Hemingway has for Hadley and his son, and his passion for writing. Being poor, hungry much of the time, Hemingway constantly reverts to the subject of food—flavors, aromas, simple food, good wine; the pleasures of eating and drinking. It is a book about physical sensation, and the intensity of such physicality in Paris.

"Then there was the bad weather," the book begins. "It would come in one day when the fall was over. You would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe."

Streets are mentioned so often they become familiar, as do parks and churches and people's apartments. The book is filled with restaurants, bistros, and bars, and their specialties in food and drink. The result is that, reading A Moveable Feast, especially the fuller version, we are able to make a map of Paris in our imagination and to follow the comings and goings of Hemingway and the literary lions who stalk its pages—James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others. Its fault and its virtue is that it is dated: Paris is no longer as Hemingway describes it, but this is a vivid portrait of the city as it looked and smelled and tasted in the twenties.

At one point, Hemingway, a close observer of the life of the city, takes on travel writers:

Travel writers wrote about the men fishing in the Seine as though they were crazy and never caught anything; but it was serious and productive fishing. Most of the fishermen were men who had small pensions, which they did not know then would become worthless with inflation, or keen fishermen who fished on their days or half-days off from work ... I followed it closely and it was interesting and good to know about, and it always made me happy that there were men fishing in the city itself, having sound, serious fishing and taking a few

fritures

home to their families.

With the fishermen and the lie on the river, the beautiful barges with their own life on board, the tugs with their smokestacks that folded back to pass under the bridges, pulling a tow of barges, the great plain trees on the stone banks of the river, the elms and sometimes the poplars, I knew that I could never be lonely along the river.

The End of the Game by Peter Beard

ALMOST FIFTY YEARS ago, Peter Beard went to Africa and found himself in a violated Eden. Africa possessed him as it does anyone who has wondered who we once were, as humans at our most heroic, thriving as hunters. The Africa he saw was the Africa that transformed me a few years later—and transformed many others. "Before the Congo I was a mere animal," Joseph Conrad wrote. Beard's landmark account of his awakening, The End of the Game (1965), with its unforgettable images, gives fresh meaning to the word "prescience," and it remains one of the classics of unambiguous warning about humans and animals occupying the same dramatic space: "The tragic paradox of the white man's encroachment. The deeper he went into Africa, the faster life flowed out of it, off the plains, and out of the bush and into the cities."

East Africa is not a pretty place in the usual sense of that twinkling word. The elemental and powerful landscape, ranging around the Rift Valley, is one of the earth's monuments to vulcanism, showing as great plains, steep escarpments, and deep lakes. The Africa Beard saw, even then, in the almost undetectable early stages of corruption, was teeming with animals, thinly populated, hardly urbanized, and self-sufficient. Years later, the pressures of human population on animal life and the land itself became apparent in an Africa faltering and fragile, as though after the Fall. Beard's improvisational safari to the edge of Somalia in 1960 was a piece of unrepeatable history. He understood very early that the "harmonies and balances" in East Africa had been deranged, and this dramatic crease in the greenest continent was on the wane.

Mingling personal history with African history, Beard vividly evoked the building of the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway. "A railroad through the Pleistocene," Teddy Roosevelt called it in his African Game Trails, playing up the primitive. Roosevelt, a sort of evil twin to the biblical Noah, hunted down and killed two (and sometimes as many as eighteen) of every species of animal that could be found from the Kenyan coast to the swamps of southern Sudan (total bag, 512 creatures). He wrote, "The land teems with beasts of the chase, infinite in number."

"Infinite" is the kind of hyperbole that affects many deluded travelers in Africa. The powerful message of The End of the Game was that the animals were finite, that urbanization was a creeping blight, that a free-for-all was imminent. Most of what Beard predicted came to pass, but even he could not have imagined what an abomination the cities of East Africa became—sprawling, dense with slums, so crime-ridden as to be almost uninhabitable.

The End of the Game is less a wildlife book than a book about human delusion, as important now as it was when it first appeared. Rare among visitors to Africa, Beard went simply to learn and grow. Because he was essentially an observer, patient and keen-sighted, not a ranter, with no agenda, he was able to see a process at work that many had missed, in the convergence of people and animals. One of his book's great virtues, and its lasting value, is that it takes no notice of politics. It is single-mindedly concerned with the living and the dead, predators and prey. Beard was true to what he saw—and the truth of it has made it prophetic.

The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

IN 1992, AS he tells us on the first page of his book, W. G. Sebald, a German teacher-writer living in England, decided to strap on his rucksack and circumambulate the flat, featureless, not very large county of Suffolk. The result was The Rings of Saturn, a ruminative work full of free association and arcane lore, with the subtext "Not a lot of people know this!" Sebald claims that the book was "prose fiction" (Chatwin made the same claim about his Songlines) and inspired by Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial, but though this is self-serving, the stitched-together anecdotes do have a point, perhaps unintentional, but forceful nevertheless.

To write about what one sees in Suffolk would be a work of topography or social history, but rambling describes what Sebald does—on foot and on the page. What do we find in Lowestoft? Not much. Joseph Conrad had a seafaring connection to Lowestoft, and from this slender link Sebald develops a whole historical reverie that involves Conrad, King Leopold of Belgium, the hellish Congo, Roger Casement, and Casement's sensational diaries. This is pretty much the structure of the book, except that a bigoted note occurs when he speaks of the Congo and Belgians, whom Germans (though Sebald doesn't say why) particularly abominate. "And, indeed, to this day one sees in Belgium a distinctive ugliness, dating from the time when the Congo colony was exploited."

Does he mean a metaphorical ugliness? No. "At all events, I well recall that on my first visit to Brussels in December 1964 I encountered more hunchbacks and lunatics than normally in a whole year. One evening in a bar in Rhode St Genèse I even watched a deformed billiard player who was racked with spastic contortions." And so forth.

He comes to Dunwich. Dunwich hardly exists, most of it having been overwhelmed by the sea. And so what Sebald provides is nothing less than the history of the town, the name of every sunken church, the monastery, and a detailed account of the storms that reduced Dunwich to a pathetic settlement.

But here is the point: the native of a place seldom sees what the alien sees, seldom remarks on what he or she takes for granted. Sebald describes how the passengers in the first train he takes, from Norfolk to Lowestoft, are so silent "that not a word might have passed their lips in the whole of their lives." This is empty hyperbole. English people, and in particular the provincial English, seldom yammer on public transport. Without saying so, the German is comparing the English to Germans. Still, the originality of the book arises from the remarks that only a foreigner would make, and such observations, even when they are misapprehensions and distortions, have value.

24. Evocative Name, Disappointing Place

A PLACE NAME CAN BEWITCH THE TRAVELER. The name "Singapore" cast a spell on me until I lived there for three years in the 1960s without air-conditioning. But the village of Birdsmoor Gate, in the west of England, near where I lived after Singapore, was just as lovely as its name. California names, such as Pacific Grove, Walnut Creek, and Thousand Palms, seemed to beckon. But in Philadelphia, the corner of Kensington Avenue and Somerset Street—music to the ears of the average Anglomaniac—is a dangerous slum area and the busiest drug-dealing site in an otherwise salubrious city. ¶ In Remote People, Evelyn Waugh talks about the deception of names. "How wrong I was, as things turned out," he says, "in all my preconceived notions about this journey. Zanzibar and the Congo, names pregnant with romantic suggestion, gave me nothing, while the places I found most full of interest were those I expected to detest—Kenya and Aden."

Here are some place names that have misled the credulous traveler.

Shepherds Bush: A gray, malodorous, overpopulated district, the opposite of its name, in west London. The traveler not wise to the truth of this squints and mutters, "Where is it?" gazing at the greasy cafés, kebab shops, Australian mega-pubs, cut-price emporiums, and honking traffic. Shepherds Bush is noted for its shopkeepers, who, when it's not raining, stand at their doorways voluptuously scratching themselves.

Casablanca: "Casablanca is an anonymous cluster of high-rises, and modern roads so straight and thin there'd be no room for Sidney Greenstreet there" (Pico Iyer).

Baghdad: "Celebrated as the city of the Arabian Nights," James Simmons writes in Passionate Pilgrims, "Baghdad 1,000 years before had been one of the great cities of Asia, a center of art, literature and learning. Richard Burton called it 'a Paris of the ninth century.'"

Simmons goes on: "Baghdad disappointed the Blunts, as it has virtually all modern travelers. Freya Stark called it 'a city of wicked dust.' And Robert Casey, who visited Baghdad in 1930, dismissed it as 'a dust heap—odorous, unattractive, and hot. Its monuments are few, its atmosphere that of squalor and poverty.'" And this was before the invasion, the fall of Saddam Hussein, and all the bombs.

Mandalay: An enormous grid of dusty streets occupied by dispirited and oppressed Burmese, and policed by a military tyranny.

Tahiti: A mildewed island of surly colonials, exasperated French soldiers, and indignant natives, with overpriced hotels, one of the world's worst traffic problems, and undrinkable water.

Timbuktu: Dust, hideous hotels, unreliable transport, freeloaders, pestering people, garbage heaps everywhere, poisonous food. Marseille: Just a short walk from the pretty harbor are sullen neighborhoods of public housing, tenements, refugees, and bewildered immigrants, with no one saying bienvenue.

Samarkand: Not the Silk Road fantasy of minarets and domes but a stinking industrial city in Uzbekistan, known for its chemical factories, fertilizer plants, and out-of-control drunkenness.

Guatemala City: A place that has continually been flattened by earthquakes and badly rebuilt. The majority of the population are slum dwellers, many of whom are eager to emigrate from their failed state.

Alexandria: Almost all my life I had dreamed of Alexandria. Most of life's disappointments begin in dreams. At one time, like the greatest cities in the world, Alexandria, Egypt, belonged to everyone who lived in it. And, as Lawrence Durrell wrote in Justine, it was shared by "five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbor bar. But there are more than five sexes." Yet today Alexandria is a monoglot city of one race, Arabic-speaking Arabs, and one creed, Islam, and is puritanical.

Kunming: Once a small, self-contained agricultural town in the rural south of China, ancient, visually bewitching, known for its serene parks, Kunming is now a huge horrendous city, overrun by cars and buses, concrete and tenements, and one of the main routes of the drug trade from Burma.

São Paulo: Like Bombay, Tokyo, and Los Angeles, which are known for their ugly buildings, their bad air, and their twenty-million-plus populations, São Paulo (lovely, saintly name) has to be seen and suffered through to be understood as one of the worst city-planning disasters on earth. Or rather, "No planning," the São Pauleano says, "just"—and lifts his hand and makes the money sign.

Biarritz: Apart from the tiny corniche and the picturesque—but grotesquely overpriced—Hotel du Palais, this is a crowded French city of cement bungalows, labyrinthine roads, mediocre restaurants, and a stony beach of cold and dangerous surf.

Travel Wisdom of Paul Bowles

The Paul Bowles (1910–1999) of stereotype is the golden man, the enigmatic exile, elegantly dressed, a cigarette holder between his fingers, luxuriating in the Moroccan sunshine, living on remittances, occasionally offering his alarming and highly polished fictions to the wider world. This portrait has a grain of truth, but there is much more to know. Certainly Bowles had style, and success with one book, The Sheltering Sky. But a single book, even a popular one, seldom guarantees a regular income. And, apart from money, Bowles's life was complicated emotionally, sexually, geographically, and without a doubt creatively. ¶ Aresourceful man—as the exile or expatriate tends to be—Bowles had many outlets for his imagination. He made a name for himself as a composer, writing the music for a number of films and stage plays. He was an ethnomusicologist, an early recorder of traditional songs and melodies in remote villages in Morocco and Mexico. He wrote novels and short stories and poems. He translated novels and poems from Spanish, French, and Arabic. So the louche, languid soul of the stereotype turns out to have been a busy man, highly productive, verging on a drudge. ¶ He was handsome and hard to impress, watchful and solitary, and he knew his own mind. His mood of acceptance, even of fatalism, made him an ideal traveler. He was not much of a gastronome—as his fiction shows, the disgusting meal (fur in the rabbit stew) interested him much more than haute cuisine. He was passionate about landscape and its effects on the traveler. Bowles was fortunate in writing at a time (not long ago, but now gone) when travel magazines still welcomed long, thoughtful essays. ¶ He wrote for the American Holiday, the frivolous name masking a serious literary mission. The English fiction writers V. S. Pritchett and Lawrence Durrell also traveled for this magazine; so did John Steinbeck after he won the Nobel Prize, when he crisscrossed the United States with his dog. Bowles wrote a piece for Holiday about hashish, another of his enthusiasms, since he was a lifelong stoner. ¶ He knew what he enjoyed in travel, and what bored him: "If I am faced with the decision of choosing between visiting a circus and a cathedral, a café and a public monument, or a fiesta and a museum, I am afraid I shall normally take the circus, the café, and the fiesta." The following quotations are from Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (1963).

***

Each time I go to a place I have not seen before, I hope it will be as different as possible from the places I already know. I assume it is natural for a traveler to seek diversity, and that it is the human element which makes him most aware of difference. If people and their manner of living were alike everywhere, there would not be much point in moving from one place to another.

***

There are probably few accessible places on the face of the globe where one can get less comfort for his money than the Sahara. It is still possible to find something flat to lie down on, several turnips and sand, noodles and jam, a few tendons of something euphemistically called chicken to eat, and the stub of a candle to undress by at night. Inasmuch as it is necessary to carry one's own food and stove, it sometimes seems scarcely worth while to bother with the "meals" provided by the hotels. But if one depends entirely on tinned goods, they give out too quickly. Everything disappears eventually—coffee, tea, sugar, cigarettes—and the traveler settles down to a life devoid of these superfluities, using a pile of soiled clothing as a pillow for his head at night and a burnous as a blanket.

Perhaps the logical question to ask at this point is: Why go? The answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude he can't help himself. Once he has been under the spell of the vast, luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatever the cost in comfort and money, for the absolute has no price.

25. Dangerous, happy, Alluring

Dangerous Places

"WHAT GIVES VALUE TO TRAVEL IS FEAR," Albert Camus wrote (Notebooks, 1935ߝ1942). "It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country ... we are seized by a vague fear, and the instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so that the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being. We come across a cascade of light, and there is eternity. This is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in traveling."

Stirring stuff, but the first thing to say to this is that Camus, a timid traveler, never traveled very far. Camus was afflicted with motorphobia, a morbid fear of riding in cars. The irony of this is that he died in a car crash. His publisher, Michel Gallimard, asked Camus to accompany him to Paris from Provence in his expensive sports car, a Facel Vega, insisting it would be the quickest way to get there. Speeding through the village of Villeblevin, Gallimard lost control of the car, killing himself and Camus, in whose pocket was his unused train ticket to Paris. Camus was that singular pedant, a theorist of travel, rather than a traveler. But his argument is a good one: a place's aura of danger can cast a spell.

I was once on a TV show with the self-appointed chronicler of such places, the Canadian traveler and journalist Robert Young Pelton, who made his name with his first book, The World's Most Dangerous Places. Quite different from his public image as Danger Man, in person he was likable and eager to please, though he wagged his finger as he told horror stories of his travels. Yet most of his stories were about places I'd been to and hadn't found horrible. I agreed that Algeria was somewhere to avoid for its frequent massacres, also Chechnya and Abkhazia—as though anyone would want to go to those bombed-out places. When he droned on about Cambodia, Colombia, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, and the Philippines ("Don't be fooled by the modern veneer of the Philippines. It is a have and have not country where outsiders are spared much of the brutality and injustice," he says on his website, ComeBackAlive.com), I said, "Robert, we are on the outskirts of Newark!"

Newark, with its adjacent and stagnant wetlands, seemed dank and cut off and ominous, like a city in a swamp. It was at the time advertised as "New Jersey's homicide capital" by its own newspaper, the Star-Ledger: more than a hundred murders a year. Pelton conceded that point, and my next one, which was that countries are not violent, people are, some more than others, and parts of Newark were possibly as dangerous as parts of Chechnya.

On Pelton's ominously titled "Could Be Your Last Trip" list are Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, Mexico, the whole of Russia, New Guinea, Burma, Sri Lanka, and Sudan.

I do not quibble with his listing Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which are war zones. Somalia has no government and exists in a state of anarchy managed by tribal chiefs, warlords, and pirates. But by taking care I have had a wonderful time in Cambodia, Mexico, Burma, Sri Lanka, Russia, and even Sudan (see my Dark Star Safari), which Pelton describes as "a big, bad, ugly place with a belligerent, extreme Islamic government hell-bent on choking the entire country under Islam's shroud." Yes, the Sudanese government is bad and ugly, but from village to village I met only friendly folk.

The Philippines is one of the world's most underrated travel destinations, hospitable and very beautiful. I would advise the traveler to be cautious in certain areas of Mindanao, in the way I would advise caution in certain areas of Camden, New Jersey, seventy-three miles from Newark, named the number one most dangerous city in the USA.

One list of the top ten most dangerous cities in the world, based on their murder rate (number of murders per 100,000), has Ciudad Juárez at the top (130 murders per 100,000). The other cities on this list include Caracas, New Orleans, Tijuana, Cape Town, San Salvador, Medellín, Baltimore, and Baghdad. Other lists include Mogadishu, Detroit, St. Louis, Rio de Janeiro, and Johannesburg.

I have had nothing but safe travel experiences in South Africa, and yet the official statistics are very scary. In a one-year period (the twelve months from April 2007 to March 2008) South Africa reported 18,148 murders, and many had presumably gone unreported. The number of reported sex crimes, including rapes and assaults (according to a New York Times report in 2009), was 70,514. The violence in South Africa is increasing. This news does not deter safari-goers, soccer fans, bird watchers, or the many oenophiles who seek to sample the dessert wines and Pinot Noirs of the Western Cape.

Apart from some obvious hellholes—Mogadishu, Baghdad, Kabul—every city has its high-risk neighborhoods. It is in the nature of a city to be alienating, the hunting ground of opportunists, rip-off artists, and muggers. I once asked a concierge in a large hotel near Union Square in San Francisco for directions to the Asian Arts Museum. Though it was within walking distance, he begged me to take a taxi, to speed me past the streets of panhandlers, homeless people, decompensating schizos, and drunks. In the event, I walked—briskly—and was not inconvenienced.

Afghanistan and Pakistan were—not even that long ago—delightful places to travel in. And they may be again. India is full of terrorist groups, not just the pro-Kashmiris who shot up Bombay, but the more violent Maoist Naxalites who regularly set off bombs, derail passenger trains, and have killed more than six thousand people in the past dozen years in the so-called Red Corridor, a stripe running along the right-hand side of India. But in spite of its violence and disorder, India is still one of the most attractive destinations in the world.

At various times in my life, soldiers or militiamen at roadblocks in parts of Africa have pointed rifles at me and demanded money. I have been shot at by shifta bandits in northern Kenya. But in these places I was off the map and expected to be hassled.

As for my own top ten dangerous places, I have felt conspicuously alien, vulnerable, unsafe, and tended to walk fast in

Port Moresby,Papua New Guinea: One of the most dangerous, crime-ridden cities in the world, inhabited by drifters and squatters, locally known as "rascals," and career criminals, many of whom, wearing woolly hats, come from the Highlands and are looking for prey.

Nairobi: Downtown, muggers galore, even in daylight.

East St. Louis, Illinois: One of the poorest, most beat-up, most menacing-looking cities in the United States.

Vladivostok: A clammy-cold harbor city of vandalized buildings, scrawled-upon walls, underpaid sailors, and confrontational drunks and skinheads.

England: On Saturday afternoons, among the hoodlums, after soccer matches.

Rio de Janeiro: At the reeking periphery of the Carnival mobs, among prowlers and drunks and aggressive celebrants.

Addis Ababa: In the Merkato bazaar, which abounds with pickpockets and thieves.

Solomon Islands: The smaller, hungrier islands, noted for their xenophobia, some of whose locals demand large sums of money from any outsider who lands on the beach.

Kabul: Just outside the city, at a village where walking alone, I was spotted by about a dozen women who, unprovoked by me, began throwing stones at my head.

Newark: Stuck overnight, having missed a plane, I had to walk in the evening from my dreary hotel to find a place to eat, and at one point, dodging traffic, stepping over a dead dog, I was confronted by hostile boys yelling abuse and heckling me.

Happy Places

Are there truly happy places? I tend to think that happiness is a particular time in a particular place, an epiphany that remains as a consolation and a regret. Fogies recall many a happy time, because fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. Ordering food in a restaurant in the 1950s, William Burroughs said, "What I want for dinner is a bass fished in Lake Huron in 1927."

There is a well-publicized list of happy places, which includes Denmark at the top, followed in descending order by Switzerland, Austria, Finland, Australia, Sweden, Canada, Guatemala, and Luxembourg.

With the exception of small, threadbare Guatemala, what do these countries have in common? They are the world's most developed, urbanized, bourgeois, and (so its seems) the smuggest and teeniest bit boring. I seriously doubt that they are as happy as advertised. Cold, dark Finland in January is not a place one associates with jollification. Finland, in fact, is quite high on the "Countries with the Most Suicides" list, and one doesn't think of Austria as the Land of Smiles.

Tonga's archipelago is informally known as the Friendly Isles. Captain Cook initiated the idea, but with the passing years this has seemed more and more like a frivolous sobriquet to beguile visitors, in the manner of bestowing the name Greenland on the land of snow and ice. Tongans are hierarchical, class-obsessed, rivalrous, and, like most islanders, territorial and rightly suspicious of strangers who wash ashore.

The very word "friendly" is loaded, and it is usually just a tourist-industry come-on. I wrote in Fresh Air Fiend, "In my experience, the friendliest people on Pacific islands are those who have the greatest assurance that you are going to leave soon."

"The real enemy, the destroyer of our happiness, is within ourselves," the Dalai Lama once said in a homily. Likewise, the true creator of our happiness is within us. There are contented people in the world, whose easy manner and good cheer persuade the traveler that he or she is in a happy land. Happy times are unforgettable, and sometimes they last for more than a moment. I have had joyful experiences in many places, at particular times. I agree with Burroughs's fish story: happiness is usually retrospective.

There is also another factor, not "I'd like to live here" but "I wouldn't mind dying here." Here are ten instances:

Bali:

I traveled there in the 1970s and after a week in Ubud wanted to quit my job, summon my wife and two children from Singapore, and spend the rest of my life on that fragrant island. My little family resisted.

Thailand:

My recurring fantasy is dropping out and spending the rest of my days in a rural village in northern Thailand, as a paying guest, among hospitable villagers.

Costa Rica:

On a bay in the rural northwestern province of Guanacaste I felt strongly: I will build a house with a veranda and sit there scribbling like O. Henry in Honduras.

The Orkney Islands:

Small, proud, remote, self-contained. Hard-working and well built, with Neolithic ruins and traditional pieties. I went there once and never stopped dreaming about these islands and their fresh fish.

Egypt:

Not Cairo but somewhere else. Maybe I'd live on a houseboat, moored on the upper Nile, toward Aswan.

The Trobriand Islands:

The people are uncompromising but I would make peace, settle on a small outer island, and sail around Milne Bay, as I did in the early 1990s.

Malawi:

I have rarely been happier than I was in the Shire Highlands of rural southern Malawi in 1964, the year of

ufulu,

independence. I had a little house, a satisfying job as a teacher, and the goodwill of my neighbors in nearby villages. Later, I thought, If everything goes wrong in my life, I can always return to Malawi.

Maine:

I think of the coast of Maine as coherent, lovely, well assembled by nature, populated by some of the most decent and reliable people I have ever known.

Hawaii:

Perhaps it really is the tourist paradise of the brochures. I have lived in Hawaii longer than anywhere else in my life, and often when I am with a local person, and it's a beautiful day—the pure air, the fragrance of flowers, the surf up, the usual rainbow arching in the sky—this person will smile and say, "Lucky we live Hawaii."

Alluring Places

In my mind is a list of places I have never seen and have always wanted to visit. I read about them, look at maps, collect guidebooks and picture books. My imagination is full of appealing images—a great thing. The idea of unvisited places, future travel, enlivens the mind and promises pleasure. Here are ten out of many.

Alaska: Huge and thinly populated, one of the last true wilderness areas in the world, with Denali National Park and North America's highest mountain, Denali, at 20,320 feet. I imagine paddling along the coast, taking ferries to the annual Great Aleutian Pumpkin Run, seeing the small towns and the empty places.

Scandinavia: I have never been to Norway, Sweden, or Finland. I'd like to see them in their winter darkness, at their gloomiest and most suicidal, and also go cross-country skiing. Then another trip in the summer, reliving Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night in Sweden, picking cloudberries in northern Norway, and visiting the Lapps.

Greenland: With widely scattered and diverse indigenous populations, many of whom have retained their traditional skills, Greenland (Ka-laallit Nunaat) is inviting. Fridtjof Nansen skied across it in 1883, the first recorded crossing. He stayed among the Greenlanders and recounted how, housebound in the depths of winter, they sat naked, perspiring around a fire. I would also like to see Scoresby Sund, the largest fjord in the world, and hear the patter of the drum made from a polar bear's bladder.

Timor: There is liberated, independent, and chaotic East Timor and the Indonesian province of West Timor. I want to see them both, go from one to the other, talk to people, eat their fermented rice and steamed fish, go bird watching.

Angola: The Portuguese landed in Angola in 1575, colonized it, converted some people, plundered it for minerals—diamonds in particular—settled the coast, and ignored the hinterland. The Chokwe people in the interior, who now have their own political party, are among Africa's finest artists, carvers, and dancers. For almost thirty years Angola was engaged in a civil war, but now it is rebuilding, and with its oil reserves it has the money to be independent and prosperous. I would like to see the country before prosperity takes hold.

New Britain Island: A large island off Papua New Guinea, with a small population of indigenous people, secret societies, rare birds, and balmy weather. And if that doesn't work out, I'd travel in the area, to Manus Island (written about by Margaret Mead) and New Ireland.

Sakhalin: I could just make it out, gray and flat, over the windswept channel, from the northernmost port in Japan, Wakkanai. I could have taken a ferry, but I had to travel south, so I filed this away in my mind as a place I wished to see. Once a prison colony, Sakhalin was visited in 1890 and written about by Chekhov. What's the attraction for me? The challenge of bleakness, no city to speak of, hardy people, and a railway.

The Darien Gap: I have traveled around but not overland through this section of jungle that lies between Panama and Colombia. The road is not reliable, and the fact that it is a geographical bottleneck, not to say a barrier, makes it inviting as a place in which I would happily disappear.

The Swat Valley: Once, long ago in Peshawar, I met some locals—tribals—who offered to take me upcountry into Swat, and to see the surrounding area—Taxila and ruined Buddhist monasteries, which comprised ancient Gandhara and its Hellenic art. I said, "Some other time." Now it is the haunt of the Taliban, but perhaps one day...

The American South: I have had the merest glimpse, a long drive around the entire Gulf Coast, from Florida to New Orleans. But that glimpse, and the people I met, made me want to take a trip of six months or so, in rural Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana, through Tennessee and the Carolinas—off the highways, into the pinewoods, down the red clay roads.

26. Five Travel Epiphanies

NOW AND THEN IN TRAVEL, SOMETHING UNexpected happens that transforms the whole nature of the trip and stays with the traveler. Burton traveled to Mecca in disguise, considering it a lark, but when at last he approached the Kaaba this skeptic was profoundly moved. It sometimes seems to me that if there is a fundamental quest in travel, it is the search for the unexpected. The discovery of an unanticipated pleasure can be life-changing. ¶ Here are five epiphanies that I have experienced in travel, unforgettable to me, and for that reason they have helped to guide me.

One

I WAS IN Palermo and had spent the last of my money on a ticket to New York aboard the Queen Frederica. This was in September 1963; I was going into the Peace Corps, training for a post in Africa. The farewell party my Italian friends gave me on the night of departure went on so long that when we got to the port, a Sicilian band was playing "Anchors Aweigh" and the Queen Frederica had just left the quayside. In that moment I lost all my vitality.

My friends bought me an air ticket to Naples so that I could catch up to the ship there the next day. Just before I boarded the plane, an airline official said I had not paid my departure tax. I told him I had no money. A man behind me in a brown suit and brown Borsalino said, "Here. You need some money?" and handed me twenty dollars.

That solved the problem. I said, "I'd like to pay you back."

The man shrugged. He said, "I'll probably see you again. The world's a small place."

Two

FOR THREE DAYS in August 1970 I had been on a small cargo vessel, the MV Keningau, which sailed from Singapore to North Borneo. I was going there to climb Mount Kinabalu. While aboard, I read and played cards, always the same game, with a Malay planter and a Eurasian woman who was traveling with her two children. The ship had an open steerage deck, where about a hundred passengers slept in hammocks.

It was the monsoon season. I cursed the rain, the heat, the ridiculous card games. One day the Malayan said, "The wife of one of my men had a baby last night." He explained that the rubber tappers were in steerage and that some had wives.

I said I wanted to see the baby. He took me below, and seeing that newborn, and the mother and father so radiant with pride, transformed the trip. Because the baby had been born on the ship, everything was changed for me and had a different meaning: the rain, the heat, the other people, even the card games and the book I was reading.

Three

THE COAST OF Wales around St. David's Head has very swift currents and sudden fogs. Four of us were paddling sea kayaks out to Ramsay Island. On our return to shore we found ourselves in fog so dense we could not see land. We were spun around by eddies and whirlpools.

"Where's north?" I asked the man who had the compass.

"Over there," he said, tapping it. Then he smacked it and said, "There," and hit it harder and said, "I don't know, this thing's broken."

Darkness was falling, the April day was cold, we were tired, and we could not see anything except the black deeps of St. George's Channel.

"Listen," someone said. "I hear Horse Rock." The current rushing against Horse Rock was a distinct sound. But he was wrong—it was the wind.

We kept together. Fear slowed our movements, and I felt sure that we had no hope of getting back that night—or ever. The cold and my fatigue were like premonitions of death. We went on paddling. A long time passed. We searched; no one spoke. This is what dying is like, I thought.

I strained my eyes to see and had a vision, a glimpse of cloud high up that was like a headland. When I looked harder, willing it to be land, it solidified to a great dark rock. I yelped, and we made for shore as though reborn.

Four

WE WERE DRIVING in western Kenya under the high African sky, my wife beside me, our two boys in the back seat. It was not far from here that I had met this pretty English woman and married her. Our elder son had been born in Kampala, the younger one in Singapore. We were still nomads, driving toward Eldoret. Years before, as a soon-to-be-married couple, we had spent a night there.

The boys were idly quarreling and fooling, laughing, distracting me. My wife was saying, "Are you sure this is the right road?" She had been traveling alone for three months in southern Africa. We were in an old rental car. Cattle dotted the hills, sheltering under the thorn trees. We were just a family on a trip, far away.

But we were traveling toward Eldoret, into the past and deeper into Africa, into the future. We were together, the sun slanting into our eyes, everything on earth was green, and I thought: I never want this trip to end.

Five

JUST BEFORE INDEPENDENCE Day in 1964, when Nyasaland became Malawi, the minister of education, Masauko Chipembere, planted a tree at the school where I was teaching in the south of the country. Soon after this, he conspired to depose the prime minister, Dr. Hastings Banda. But Chipembere himself was driven out.

Time passed, and when I heard that Chipembere had died in Los Angeles ("in exile," as a CIA pensioner), I thought of the little tree he had shoveled into the ground. Twenty-five years after I left the school, I traveled back to Malawi. Two things struck me about the country: most of the trees had been cut down—for fuel—and no one rode a bicycle anymore. Most buildings were decrepit too. Dr. Banda was still in power.

It took me a week to travel to my old school. It was larger now but ruinous, with broken windows and splintered desks. The students seemed unpleasant. The headmaster was rude to me. The library had no books. The tree was big and green, almost forty feet high.

27. The Essential Tao of Travel

Leave home

Go alone

Travel light

Bring a map

Go by land

Walk across a national frontier

Keep a journal

Read a novel that has no relation to the place you're in

If you must bring a cell phone avoid using it

Make a friend

Acknowledgments

FOR SUGGESTIONS, IMPROVEMENTS, and moral support, I would like to thank Jin Auh, Larry Cooper, Roger Ebert, Patrick French, Forrest Furman, Harvey Golden, Ted Hoagland, Pico Iyer, Tim Jeal, Joel Martin, Geoffrey Moorhouse, Jan Morris, Dervla Murphy, Jeffrey Meyers, Simon Prosser, Jonathan Raban, Mort Rosenblum, Oliver Sacks, Andrea Schulz, Nicholas Shakespeare, Alexander Theroux, Joseph Theroux, Louis Theroux, Marcel Theroux, Juliet Walker, and Andrew Wylie. And special thanks, with love, to my wife, Sheila.

Permissions and Credits

The author is grateful for permission to reproduce excerpts from the following works:

The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian by Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Pan Macmillan, London. Copyright © Nirad C. Chaudhuri, 1999. Reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan UK.

Bad Land: An American Romance by Jonathan Raban, copyright © 1996 by Jonathan Raban. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, copyright 1940, 1941, renewed © 1968, 1969 by Rebecca West. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Excerpts from Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt, translated by Francis Steegmuller. Copyright © Francis Steegmuller, 1972. Reprinted with permission of Mcintosh & Otis, Inc. All rights reserved.

"Happiness," translated by Stephen Kessler, copyright © 1999 by Maria Kodama; translation copyright © 1999 by Stephen Kessler, from Selected Poems by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Alexander Coleman. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., and of Stephen Kessler.

In Trouble Again, copyright © 1988 by Redmond O'Hanlon. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

"Madly Singing in the Mountains" by Po Chu-i. From Chinese Poems, Arthur Waley, translator. George Allen & Unwin, London, 1946. Copyright © by permission of the Arthur Waley Estate.

Shishmaref Day School Cookbook recipes are reprinted by kind permission of the Shishmaref School, Shishmaref, Alaska.

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen, copyright © 1978 by Peter Matthiessen. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

South from Granada: A Sojourn in Southern Spain by Gerald Brenan. Published in America by Farrar, Straus & Cudahy and Kodansha International. Copyright © 1957, 1985 by Gerald Brenan. Used by permission of the author's estate and his agent, Robin Straus Agency, Inc.

Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue by Paul Bowles. Copyright © 1957, 1963 by Paul Bowles. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

The Travels of Marco Polo, translated with an introduction by Ronald Lathem (Penguin Classics, 1958). Copyright © Ronald Lathem, 1958. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss. English translation © 1973 by Jonathan Cape, Ltd. Originally published in French as Tristes Tropiques, copyright © 1955 by Librairie Plon. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for Librairie Plon.

The Valley of the Assassins by Dame Freya Stark, Modern Library edition, Random House. Excerpts are reprinted by permission of John Murray Publishing.

"Water is taught by thirst" is reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

The following excerpts are reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, all rights reserved:

Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town by Paul Theroux. Copyright © 2003 by Paul Theroux.

Fresh Air Fiend: Travel Writings, 1985-2000 by Paul Theroux. Copyright © 2000 by Paul Theroux.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux. Copyright © 2008 by Paul Theroux.

The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux. Copyright © 1979 by Cape Cod Scriveners Co.

The following images were found through commons.wikimedia.org:

Bowles: Mt. Meredith Romani looking northwest, 1920, AWM B02979.

Fielding: Departure from Lisbon for Brazil, the East Indies and America, engraving, c. 1592, by Theodor de Bry (Flemish, 1528-1598), illustration in America Tertia Pars. Location: Service Historique de la Marine, Vincennes.

Johnson: Illustrations de Voyage autour du monde. Auteur: George Anson. Édi-teur: Henri-Albert Gosse et Compagnie (Genève), 1750.

Lévi-Strauss: Llamas traversing the Andes laden with silver. Exploration of the Valley of Amazon, vol. 2, by Lieutenant Lardner Gibbon, USN (1853).

Stark: Prise d'Alamût (1256). Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France. Départe-ment des Manuscrits. Division orientale. Author: Sayf al-Vâhidî. Hérât. Afghanistan. Date: 1430.

Stevenson: Robert Louis Stevenson's birthday fete in Samoa. Image from Talofa, Samoa: A Summer Sail to an Enchanted Isle (1896) by Charles S. Greene. San Francisco News Co.

Waugh: The Temple of Soleb, Ethiopia (1862?), Francis Frith. New York Public Library Digital Gallery. Image ID: 76483.

The following image was found through gutenberg.org:

Galton: From The Art of Travel, or Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries by Francis Galton. First published in Great Britain by John Murray, London, 1872.