To the Ends of the Earth

I walked over to the soldier filling the tank.

“Where are we?”

“This is Wudaoliang.”

Names look so grand on a map. But this place hardly justified being on a map. How could a gas station, some barracks, and a barbed-wire fence even deserve a name? And the name was bad news, because Wudaoliang was not even halfway to our destination, which was Amdo.

As if to make the moment operatic, the weather suddenly changed. A wind sprang up, clouds tumbled across the sun, and the day grew very dark and cold. My map was flapping against the car roof. It would be night soon.

“When will we get to Amdo, Mr. Fu?”

“About six o’clock.”

Wrong, of course. Mr. Fu’s calculations were wildly inaccurate. I had stopped believing that he had ever been on this road before. It was possible that my map was misleading—it had shown roads that didn’t exist, and settlements that were no more than ruins and blowing sand.

Mr. Fu had no map. He had a scrap of paper with seven towns scribbled on it, the stops between Golmud and Lhasa. The scrap of paper had become filthy from his repeatedly consulting it. He consulted it again.

“The next town is Yanshiping.”

We set off. I drove; Mr. Fu dozed.

Miss Sun played “I Am a Disco Dancer.”

After an hour we passed a hut, some yaks, and a ferocious dog.

“Yanshiping?”

“No.”

In the fading light and freezing air this plateau no longer seemed romantic. “This country makes the Gobi seem fertile in comparison,” a French traveler once wrote. It was true. Moonscape is the word most often applied to such a place, but this was beyond a moonscape—it was another universe entirely.

There were more settlements ahead. They were all small and all the same: huts with stained whitewashed square walls, flat roofs, and red, blue, and green pennants and flags with mantras written on them, flying from propped-up bush branches. As these prayer flags flapped, so the mantras reverberated in the air, and grace abounded around them. There were more yaks, more fierce dogs.

“Yanshiping?”

“No.”

It was nearly dark when we came to it. Yanshiping was twenty houses standing in mud on a curve in the road. There were children and dogs, yaks and goats. Several of the dogs were the biggest and fiercest I had ever seen in my life. They were Tibetan mastiffs—their Tibetan name means simply “watchdogs.” They lolloped and slavered and barked horribly.

“There is nowhere to stay here,” Mr. Fu said, before I could ask—I was slowing down.

“What’s the next town?”

He produced his filthy scrap of paper.

“Amdo. There is a hotel at Amdo.”

“How far is Amdo?”

He was silent. He didn’t know. After a moment, he said, “A few hours.”

Hotel is a nice word, but China had taught me to distrust it. The more usual Chinese expression was “guest house.” It was the sort of place I could never identify properly. It was a hospital, a madhouse, a house, a school, a prison. It was seldom a hotel. But, whatever, I longed to be there. It was now seven-thirty. We had been on the road for ten hours.

We continued in the dark. It was snowier here, higher and colder, on a winding road that was icy in places. There was another pass, choked with ice that never melts at any time in the year because of the altitude, another seventeen-thousand-footer.

Mr. Fu woke and saw the snow.

“Road! Watch the road!” he yelled. “Lu! Lu! Looooooo!”

The altitude put him to sleep, but each time he woke he became a terrible nag. I began to think that perhaps many Chinese in authority were nags and bores. He kept telling me to watch the road, because he was frightened. I wanted to say, You almost got us killed, Jack, but to save his face I didn’t.

I often mistook the lights of distant trucks on the far side of this defile for the lights of Amdo. There was no vegetation at this altitude, and the freezing air was clear. In the darkness I saw these pinpricks of light.

“Is that Amdo?”

“Watch the road!” Mr. Fu’s voice from the back seat set my teeth on edge. “Lu! Loooo!”

Now and then he would tap me on the shoulder and cry, “Toilet!”

That was the greatest euphemism of all. It was usually Miss Sun who needed to have a slash. I watched her totter to the roadside and creep into a ditch, and there just out of the wind—and it was too dark even for the yaks to see her—she found relief.

Three more hours passed in this way. I wondered whether we might not be better off just pulling off the road and sleeping in the car. Midnight on the Tibetan Plateau, in the darkness and ice and wind, was not a good time to be driving. But the problem was the narrowness of the road. There was nowhere to pull off. There was a ditch on either side. If we stopped we would be rammed by one of the big army trucks that traveled by night.

Toward midnight I saw the sign saying Amdo. In the darkness it seemed a bleak and dangerous place. I did not know then that it would look much worse in daylight.

“We are staying at the army camp,” Mr. Fu said.

To save face, Mr. Fu changed places with me and drove the last twenty feet to the sentry post. Then he got out and argued with the sentry.

He returned to the car trembling.

“They are full,” he said.

“What now?”

“The guest house.”

Miss Sun was sobbing quietly.

We drove across a rocky field. There was no road. We came to a boarded-up house, but before we could get out, a mastiff bounded into the car lights. It had a big square head and a meaty tongue, and it was slavering and barking. It was as big as a pony, something like the Hound of the Baskervilles, but vastly more sinister.

“Are you getting out?”

“No,” Mr. Fu said, hoarse with fear.

Beyond the crazed and leaping dog there were yaks sleeping, standing up.

There were more dogs. I could take the yak-meat diet; I could understand why the Tibetans didn’t wash; I found the cold and the high altitude just about bearable; I could negotiate the roads. But I could not stand those fierce dogs. I was not angry or impatient. I was scared shitless.

“There is a guest house,” Mr. Fu said, grinning at some dim lights ahead.

It was a dirty two-story building with bars on the windows. I guessed it was a prison, but that was all right. We checked for dogs, and while Miss Sun threw up next to the car, we went inside. A Tibetan sat on a ragged quilt on the floor, gnawing raw flesh off a yak bone. He was black with dirt, his hair was matted, he was barefoot in spite of the cold. He looked exactly like a cannibal, tearing shreds of red meat off a shank.

“We need a room,” Mr. Fu said in Chinese.

The Tibetan laughed and said there was no room. He chewed with his mouth open, showing his teeth, and then with aggressive hospitality he pushed the bone into my face and demanded I take a bite.

I took out my “List of Useful Tibetan Phrases.”

“Hello. I am not hungry,” I said in Tibetan. “My name is Paul. What is your name? I am from America. Where are you from?”

“Bod,” the cannibal said, giving me the Tibetan name for Tibet. He was grinning at my gloves. I was cold—it was way below freezing in this room. He gestured for me to sit with him on his quilt, and in the same motion he waved Mr. Fu away.

It is a Tibetan belief that all Tibetans are descended from a sexually insatiable ogress who had six children after copulating with a submissive monkey. It is just a pretty tale, of course, but looking at this man it was easy to see how the myth might have originated.

He batted away Mr. Fu’s identity card, but he took a great interest in my passport. Then he put his juicy bone down and fingered the pages, leaving bloodstains on them. He laughed at my passport picture. He compared the picture with my gray, frozen face and the wound under my eye. He laughed again.

“I agree. It’s not a very good likeness.”

He became very attentive, hearing English spoken, like a dog listening to footsteps in the driveway.

“Do you have rooms?” I asked. I held out a picture of the Dalai Lama.

He mumbled a reply. His shaven head and big jaw made him look ape-like. I switched to Chinese, because I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He took the picture gently.

“One person—six yuan,” he said, clutching the portrait.

“Oh, thank you, thank you,” Mr. Fu said, abasing himself.

“Tea, tea,” the cannibal said, offering me a tin kettle.

I drank some salty, buttery tea, and as I did, a truck pulled up outside. Twelve Tibetans, women and children, entered the room, went into the corridor, threw quilts on the floor, and fell on them.

I paid my money, got my bag from the car, and found an empty room on the second floor. The light on the stairwell had shown me what sort of place it was. Someone had vomited on the landing. The vomit was frozen. There was worse farther on, against the wall. It was all icy, and so the smell wasn’t bad. It was very dirty, a bare cement interior that was grimmer than any prison I had ever seen. But the real prison touch was that all the lights were on—not many of them, but all bare bulbs. There were no light switches. There were howls and murmurs from the other rooms. There was no water, and no bathroom. No toilet except the stairwell.

Not far away I heard Miss Sun berating Mr. Fu in an exasperated and whining sick person’s voice. I closed the door. There was no lock. I jammed an iron bed against it. There were three iron bedsteads in the room, and some reeking quilts.

I realized that I was shivering. I was cold, but I was also hungry. I ate half a jar of Ma Ling orange segments, and a banana, and I made tea from the hot water in the jug I had brought. I was light-headed and somewhat breathless from the altitude, and also nauseated from the frosty vomit in the corridors. Just as I finished eating, all the lights went out: midnight.

I put on my gloves, my hat, my extra sweater, my coat, and my third pair of socks and thermal-lined shoes, and went to bed. I had been cold in my life, but I had never worn a hat with earmuffs to bed before. I had a quilt over me and a quilt under me. Even so, I could not get warm. I could not understand why. My heart palpitated. My toes were numb. I tried to imagine what it must be like to be Chris Bonington, climbing Menlungtse near Everest. After a while I could see moonlight behind the thick frost on the window.

In the middle of the night I got up to piss. I used an enamel basin that I guessed was a chamber pot. In the morning the piss was frozen solid. So were the rest of my orange segments. So were my quails’ eggs. Everything that I had that could freeze had frozen.

I had hardly slept, but I was gladdened by the sunlight. I found some peanuts and ate them. I ate my frozen banana. I visited the cannibal (he looked even dirtier in daylight) and drank some of my own tea with him. He did not want Chinese tea. He made a face as if to say, Disgusting stuff! How can you drink it?

The frail warmth of the morning sun only made the place worse by wakening the stinks on the stairs and in the corridors. There were dark clumps and little twists of human shit throughout the building. In this heavenly country, this toilet.

Mr. Fu was up and fussing. He said Miss Sun was not at all well. And he felt sick, too.

“Then let’s go,” I said.

“Breakfast first.”

“Oh, God!”

Another late start. But this time I did calculations on my map, estimated the distances between towns, figured an average speed, and felt much better until I remembered the tire.

“Did you get the spare tire fixed, Mr. Fu?”

He had said that he would do it this morning, before breakfast. Although Amdo was a dump, there were garages here, and it was the only place of any size for miles.

“No. Better to get the tire fixed in Nagqu.”

That was over a hundred miles away.

Mr. Fu took the wheel. A few miles down the road he stopped the car and clawed at his face.

“I cannot do it!” he shrieked. In Chinese it sounded like a pitiful surrender.

It was another attack of the wobblies. I welcomed it; I soothed Mr. Fu as he crept into the back seat. I slotted Brahms into the cassette player and drove south, under sunny skies.

I was feeling wonky myself. I had a bump on my head, a neck ache, and a deep cut on my face from the car crash. My right wrist hurt, probably a sprain, from my holding on during our careering. And the altitude affected me, too—I felt light-headed and nauseated, and my short walk in Amdo had given me heart palpitations. But this was nothing compared with Mr. Fu’s agony. The color had drained from his face, his mouth gaped, and after a while he simply swooned. Miss Sun also went to sleep. Crumpled together on the seat, they looked like poisoned lovers in a suicide pact.

There were no more settlements until Nagqu, nothing except the windswept tableland, and it was so cold that even the drongs, the wild yaks, were squinting and the herds of wild asses did nothing but raise their heads and stare at the badly damaged Mitsubishi Galant. After a few hours the road ran out and was no more than loose rocks and boulders, and more wild asses. The boulders clunked against the chassis and hammered the tires. We had no spare tire. We were ridiculously unprepared for Tibet, but I did not mind very much. I felt, having survived that crash, that we had come through the worst of it. There is something about the very fact of survival that produces a greater vitality. And I knew I was much safer as long as I was driving. Mr. Fu was not really very good at all, and as a nervous new driver, he had no business to be in Tibet.

On some hillsides there were huts flying colored prayer flags. I was cheered by them, by the whiteness of whitewashed huts, by the smoke coming out of the chimneys, and by the clothes that people wore—fox-fur hats, silver buckles, sheepskin coats, big warm boots. Miles from anywhere I saw a mother and daughter in bright, blowing skirts and bonnets climbing a cliffside path, and a handsome herdsman sitting among his yaks, wearing a wonderful red hat with huge earflaps.

Mr. Fu was very annoyed that there was nowhere to eat at Nagqu. He was stiff and cranky from the altitude, and reluctant to stay, but I pestered him into finding someone to fix the spare. This was done in a shed, with fires and chisels; and while this primitive vulcanizing went on, I walked around the town. John Avedon’s In Exile from the Land of Snows (1984), which is mainly an anti-Chinese account of the recent turmoil in Tibet, and pleasantly passionate on the subject of the Dalai Lama, claims that Nagqu is the center of the Chinese nuclear industry. The gaseous diffusion plants, the warhead assembly plants, and the research labs have been moved here from the Lop Nor Desert. Somewhere in this vicinity—though you’d never know it from looking at it—there was a large repository of medium-range and intermediate-range nuclear missiles. But all I saw were yaks.

Mr. Fu drove us out of Nagqu—perhaps a face-saving gesture, because a mile outside town he stopped the car and clutched his eyes.

“I cannot do it!”

And he slumped in the back seat.

I was happier than I had been since starting this trip on the Iron Rooster. I was driving, I was in charge, I was taking my time, and Tibet was empty. The weather was dramatic—snow on the hills, a high wind, and black clouds, piled up on the mountains ahead.

Today, below the snowy and majestic Nyenchen Tanglha Range, nomads rode among their herds of yak, and the road was straight through the yellow plain. That tame road contributed to my feeling of well-being—it was wonderful to be in such a remote place and yet to feel so secure. Mr. Fu and Miss Sun were asleep in the back seat. There were no other cars on the road. I drove at a sensible speed toward Lhasa and watched the birds—hawks and plovers and crows. There were more gazelles, and once a pale yellow fox bounded across the road.

There was a sudden snowstorm. I went from a dry sunny valley, around a corner, into a black slushy one, the large cottony flakes whipping sideways. Mr. Fu, who was terrified of snow, mercifully did not wake. The snow eased; it became a dry flurry in a valley farther ahead, and then the sun came out again. Tibetans call their country “Land of Snows,” but in fact it doesn’t snow much and it never rains. The gales pass quickly. The Tibetans are not bothered by any of this. I saw children playing in the sudden storm.

I had wanted at the outset to reach Lhasa quickly. But now I didn’t mind a delay. I would gladly have spent more nights on the road, provided it was not in a place like the dump at Amdo.

Damxung looked promising. It was at a bend in the road; there was an army camp nearby, and half a dozen one-room restaurants. We stopped and had four dishes, which included wood-ear fungus and yak meat, and Mr. Fu revived enough to accuse the serving girl of overcharging him—or rather me, since I paid the bill.

There were six soldiers in the kitchen, wanning themselves, but they fluttered away when I tried to talk with them. Travelers in China had sometimes told me that they were harassed by soldiers or officials. This was never my experience. When I approached them they always backed away.

I found Mr. Fu spitting on the wheel to see whether it was overheated. He was kneeling, spitting, smearing, examining.

“I think we should stay here,” I said.

We were watched by a small boy who had a playing-card-sized picture of the Dalai Lama tucked into the front of his fur hat. When I peered at him he ran away and returned without the picture.

“We cannot stay here. Miss Sun is sick. Lhasa is only one hundred and seventy kilometers.”

“Do you feel well enough to drive?”

“I am fine!”

But he looked terrible. His face was gray. He had not eaten much. He had told me he had a pain in his heart. He also said that his eyes hurt.

“This wheel is not hot,” he said. “That is good.”

He gasped and gave up at a place called Baicang, saying he could not do it. I took over, and in a pretty place on a riverbank called Yangbajain, we entered a narrow, rocky valley. It was the sort of valley I had been expecting ever since Golmud. I had not realized that this part of Tibet was open country, with flat, straight roads and distant snowy peaks. But this valley was steep and cold, and half in darkness it was so deep. A river ran swiftly through it, with birds darting from one wet boulder to another. I saw from my bird book that they were thrushes, and the commonest was the White-winged Redstart.

When we emerged from this valley we were higher, and among steep mountainsides and bluer, snowier peaks. We traveled along this riverside in a burst of evening sunshine. Farther south, this little river became the mighty Brahmaputra. The valley opened wider, became sunnier and very dry; and beyond the beautiful bare hills of twinkling scree there were mountains covered with frothy snow.

Ahead was a small town. I took it to be another garrison town, but it was Lhasa, for sure. In the distance was a red and white building with sloping sides—the Potala, so lovely, somewhat like a mountain and somewhat like a music box with a hammered gold lid.

I had never felt happier, rolling into a town. I decided to pay off Mr. Fu. I gave him my thermos bottle and the remainder of my provisions. He seemed embarrassed. He lingered a little. Then he reached out and put his fingers on my cheek, where there was the wound from the crash. It was scabby, the blood had dried, it looked awful, but it didn’t hurt.

“I am sorry,” Mr. Fu said. He laughed. It was an abject apology. His laughter said, Forgive me!

Lhasa

IT IS IMMEDIATELY OBVIOUS THAT LHASA IS NOT A CITY. IT IS a small friendly-looking town on a high plain surrounded by even higher mountains. There is very little traffic. There are no pavements. Everyone walks in the street. No one runs. These streets are at twelve thousand feet. You can hear children yelling and dogs barking and bells being rung, and so it seems a quiet place. It is rather dirty and very sunny. Just a few years ago the Chinese bulldozed the Chorten, a stupa which formed the entrance to the city. It was their way of violating Lhasa, which had always been forbidden to foreigners. Even so, it is not crowded. The Chinese badly damaged Lhasa and hoped to yank the whole thing down and build a city of fine ugly factories. But they did not succeed in destroying it. Much of it, and some of its finest shrines, were made out of mud bricks—easily broken but cheap to replace, like the Buddhist statues that were made anew every few years, or the yak butter sculptures that were expected to go rancid or melt in order for new ones to be fashioned. The whole of Buddhism prepared the Tibetans for cycles of destruction and rebirth: it is a religion that brilliantly teaches continuity. You can easily see the violence of the Chinese intention in Lhasa, but it was a failure, because the Tibetans are indestructible.

Lhasa is a holy place, so it is populated by pilgrims. They give it color, and because they are strangers themselves to Lhasa they don’t object to foreign travelers—in fact, they welcome them and try to sell them beads and trinkets. Chinese cities are notorious for their noise and crowds. Lhasa has a small population, and because it is flat it is full of cyclists. To me that was a complete surprise. I had expected a dark, craggy city of steepnesses and fortifications overrun by Chinese and hung with slogans. I found a bright little war-torn town full of jolly monks and friendly pilgrims and dominated by the Potala, which is an ingenious and distracting shape.

Half the population of Lhasa is Chinese, but those who are not soldiers tend to stay indoors, and even the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army keep a low profile. They know that Tibet is essentially a gigantic army camp—the roads, the airports, and all the communications were a military effort—and they know that the Tibetans resent it. The Chinese feel insecure in Tibet, and so they retreat into a sort of officiousness; they look like commissars and imperialists but their swagger is mostly bravado. They know they are in a foreign country. They don’t speak the language and they have not managed to teach Chinese to the Tibetans. For over thirty years they maintained the fiction that the official language of Tibet was Chinese, but then in 1987 they caved in and changed it to Tibetan.

The Chinese imply that they have a moral right to run the Tibetans’ lives, but since the late seventies, when they began to despair of political solutions to Chinese problems, they have felt more uneasy about being in Tibet. They have no right to be there at all. The Tibetans themselves would probably have found a way to tax the rich families, get rid of exploiters and raise up the Ragyaba—the scavenging class and corpse handlers—and free the slaves (slavery persisted into the 1950s). But the bossy ideology of the Chinese compelled them to invade and so thoroughly meddle with the country that they alienated the majority of the population. They did not stop there. They annexed Tibet and made it part of China, and however much the Chinese talk about liberalizing their policies it is clear that they have no intention of ever allowing Tibet to become a sovereign state again.

“It feels like a foreign country,” Chinese friends of mine confided to me. They were bewildered by the old-fashioned habits and clothes, and by the incomprehensible rituals of Tibetan Buddhism, celebrating the sexual mysticism of the tantric rites, and the hugging and fornicating statues illustrating the mother-father principle of yabyum, and the big, toothy, goggling demons that Tibetans see as protectors. Even with the Chinese watching closely and issuing decrees and building schools and initiating public works, Lhasa is a medieval-seeming place, just like Europe in the Middle Ages, complete with grinning monks and grubby peasants and open-air festivals and jugglers and tumblers. Lhasa is holy, but it is also a market town, with pushcarts and stacked-up vegetables and dirty, air-dried cuts of yak that will keep for a year (grain keeps for fifty years in the dry Tibetan climate). The most medieval touch of all is that Tibet has almost no plumbing.

The pilgrims hunker and prostrate themselves all over Lhasa, and they shuffle clockwise around every shrine. They flatten themselves on stair landings, outside the Jokhang, and all around the Potala. They do it on the road, the riverbank, the hillsides. Being Tibetan Buddhists they are good-humored, and because they are from all over Tibet, Lhasa is their meeting place—they enrich the life of the town and fill its markets. They come out of a devotion to the Dalai Lama, the incarnation of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. They pray, they throw themselves to the ground, they strew tiny one-miao notes and barley grains at the shrines, and they empty blobs of yak butter into the lamps. The very pious ones blow horns made from human thigh bones—a femur like an oboe—or carry water in bowls made from the lopped-off top of a human skull. They venerate the various thrones and couches of the Dalai Lama in the Potala, and even his narrow Art Deco bed, his bathtub and toilet, his tape recorder (a gift from Nehru), and his radio. The Dalai Lama is worshipped as the Living God, but the pilgrims also pay homage to the images of Zong Kapa—founder of the Yellow Sect, and of the Lord Buddha, and other Dalai Lamas, notably the Fifth, whose great buildings dignify Lhasa. Pilgrims have made Lhasa a town of visitors who are not exactly strangers, and so even a real foreigner feels a sense of belonging there. Its chaos and dirt and its jangling bells make it seem hospitable.

Lhasa was the one place in China I eagerly entered, and enjoyed being in, and was reluctant to leave. I liked its smallness, its friendliness, the absence of traffic, the flat streets—and every street had a vista of tremendous Tibetan mountains. I liked the clear air and sunshine, the markets, the brisk trade in scarce antiques. It fascinated me to see a place for which the Chinese had no solution. They admitted that they had made grave mistakes in Tibet, but they also admitted that they did not know what to do next. They had not counted on the tenacious faith of the Tibetans, and perhaps they found it hard to believe that such dark, grinning people, who never washed, could be so passionate. The visiting party officials strolled around looking smug and hard to please. They were mostly on junkets. Tibet is a junketer’s paradise: a subject people, two fairly good hotels, plenty of ceremonial functions, and so far from Peking that anything goes. The Chinese reward each other with junkets and official trips—they often take the place of bonuses—and Tibet is the ultimate junket. But it is for sight-seeing. Tibet has made no economic gains at all. It is entirely dependent on Chinese financial aid. These Chinese nearly always look physically uncomfortable in Lhasa—it is the altitude, the strange food, and the climate, but it is also the boisterous Tibetans, who seem to the Chinese a bit savage and unpredictable—superstitious primitives if not outright subhuman.

The other aspect of Lhasa—and Tibet, too—is that like Yunnan it has become the refuge of hippies. They are not the dropouts I met years ago in Afghanistan and India, but mostly middle-class, well-heeled hippies whose parents gave them the air fare to China. Some of them come by bus from Nepal. They seemed harmless to me, and they were a great deal more desirable than the rich tourists for whom Lhasa was building expensive hotels and importing ridiculous delicacies—and providing brand-new Japanese buses so that groups of tourists could set out at dawn and photograph such rituals as the Sky Burial (Tibetans deal with their dead by placing them outside for vultures to eat). As Lynn Pan remarks in her analysis of recent Chinese history, The New Chinese Revolution, “it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tibetan culture, which has survived the worst that Maoism and force could do to stamp it out, has been left to be killed by tourism.” But I had my doubts. Tibet seemed too vast and inaccessible and strange for anyone to possess it. It looked wonderful to me, like the last place on earth; like a polar ice cap, but emptier.

Down the Yangtze

Trackers

IT WAS NEAR CHANG SHOU, ABOUT NOON ON THAT FIRST DAY, that I saw a sailing junk steered to the bank, and the sail struck, and five men leaping onto the shore with towlines around their waists. They ran ahead, then jerked like dogs on a leash, and immediately began towing the junk against the current. These are trackers. They are mentioned by the earliest travelers on the Yangtze. They strain, leaning forward, and almost imperceptibly the sixty-foot junk begins to move upstream. There is no level towpath. The trackers are rock climbers: they scamper from boulder to boulder, moving higher until the boulders give out, and then dropping down, pulling and climbing until there is a reach on the river where the junk can sail again. The only difference—but it is a fairly large one—between trackers long ago and trackers today is that they are no longer whipped. “Often our men have to climb or jump like monkeys,” wrote a Yangtze traveler, in the middle of the last century, of his trackers, “and their backs are lashed by the two chiefs, to urge them to work at critical moments. This new spectacle at first revolts and angers us, but when we see that the men do not complain about the lashings we realize that it is the custom of the country, justified by the exceptional difficulties along the route.” Captain Little saw a tracker chief strip his clothes off, jump into the river, then roll himself in sand until he looked half-human, like a gritty ape; then he did a demon dance, and howled, and whipped the trackers, who—scared out of their wits—willingly pulled a junk off a sandbank.

The trackers sing or chant. There are garbled versions of what they say. Some travelers have them grunting and groaning, others are more specific and report the trackers yelling, “Chor! Chor!”—slang for “Shang-chia” or “Put your shoulder to it.” I asked a boatman what the trackers were chanting. He said that they cried out, “Hai tzo! Hai tzo!” over and over again, which means “Number! Number!” in Szechuanese, and is uttered by trackers and oarsmen alike.

“When we institute the Four Modernizations,” he added—this man was one of the minuscule number who are members of the Chinese Communist party—“there will be no more junks or trackers.”

One day I was standing at the ship’s rail with a man who encouraged us to call him Big Bob Brantman. We saw some trackers, six of them, pulling a junk. The men skipped from rock to rock, they climbed, they hauled the lines attached to the junk, and they struggled along the steep rocky towpath. They were barefoot.

Brantman winced. It was a wince of sagacity, of understanding: Yes, it said, I now see what this is all about. Then he spoke, still wincing a little.

“The profound cultural difference between people!”

I looked at him. He was nodding at the trackers scampering among the rocks on the shore.

“They don’t care about television,” he said.

I said, “That’s true.”

“Huh?” He was encouraged. He was smiling now. He said, “I mean, they couldn’t care less if the Rams are playing tomorrow.”

The Los Angeles Rams were Big Bob’s favorite football team.

“Am I right, or not?”

“You’re right, Bob,” I said. “They don’t care about television or the Rams.”

The junks and these trackers will be on the river for some time to come. Stare for five minutes at any point on the Yangtze and you will see a junk, sailing upstream with its ragged, ribbed sail; or being towed by yelling, tethered men; or slipping downstream with a skinny man clinging to its rudder. There are many newfangled ships and boats on the river, but I should say that the Yangtze is a river of junks and sampans, fueled by human sweat. Still, there is nothing lovelier than a junk with a following wind (the wind blows upstream, from east to west—a piece of great meteorological luck and a shaper of Chinese history), sailing so well that the clumsy vessel looks as light as a waterbird paddling and foraging in the muddy current.

The Yangtze Gorges

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, WE PASSED THROUGH THE gorges. Many people come to the Yangtze for the gorges alone: they excite themselves on these marvels and skip the rest of the river. The gorges are wonderful, and it is almost impossible to exaggerate their splendor, but the river is long and complicated, and much greater than its gorges, just as the Thames is more than what lies between Westminster and Greenwich.

The great gorges lie below Bai De (“White King City”), the lesser gorges just above Yichang. Bai De was as poisonous-looking as any of the other cities, but as soon as we left it the mountains rose—enormous limestone cliffs on each side of the river. There is no shore: the sheer cliffs plunge straight into the water. They were formed at the dawn of the world, when the vast inland sea in western China began to drain east and wear the mountains away. But limestone is a curious substance. It occurs in blocks, it has cracks and corners; and so the flow zigzagged, controlled by the stone, and made right angles in the river. Looking ahead through the gorges you see no exit, only the end of what looks like a blind canyon.

After seeing the great gorges of the Upper Yangtze, it is easy to believe in gods and demons and giants.

There are graffiti on the gorges. Some are political (“Mankind Unite to Smash Capitalism”), some are poetic (“Bamboos, flowers and rain purify the traveler”), while other scribbled characters give the gorge’s name or its history, or they indicate a notable feature in the gorge. “Wind Box Gorge” is labeled on the limestone, and the wind boxes have painted captions. “Meng-liang’s Ladder,” it says, at the appropriate place. These are the zigzag holes that Captain Williamson mentioned in his notes; and they have a curious history. In the second century A.D. the Shu army was encamped on the heights of the gorge. The Hupeh general, Meng-liang, had set out to conquer this army, but they were faced with this vertical gorge wall, over seven hundred feet high. Meng-liang had his men cut the ladder holes in the stone, all the way to the top of the gorge, and his army ascended this way, and they surprised the enemy camp and overwhelmed them, ending the domination of Shu. (In 1887 Archibald Little wrote, “The days are long past since the now effeminate Chinese were capable of such exertions.…”)

The wind blows fiercely through the gorges, as it does in New York between skyscrapers; and it is a good thing, too, because the junks can sail upstream—there is little room here for trackers. On the day I passed through, the sky was leaden, and the wind was tearing the clouds to pieces, and the river itself was yellow-brown or viscous and black, a kind of eel color. It is not only the height of the gorges but also the narrowness of the river—less than a hundred yards in places—which makes it swift, sixty meters per second in the narrower places. The scale gives it this look of strangeness, and fills it with an atmosphere of ominous splendor—the majestic cliffs, the thousand-foot gorge walls, the dagger-like pinnacles, and the dark foaming river below, and the skinny boatmen on their vessels of splinters and rags.

Archibald Little wrote, “I rejoiced that it had been my good fortune to visit the Yangtze Gorges before the coming stream of European tourists, with the inevitable introduction of Western innovation in their train, should have destroyed all their old world charm.” The cities, certainly, are black and horrific, but the gorges are changeless and completely unlike anything I had ever seen before. In other landscapes I have had a sense of deterioration—the Grand Canyon looks as if it is wearing away and being sluiced, stone by orange stone, down the Colorado River. But the gorges look powerful and permanent, and make every person and artifact look puny. They will be here long after Man has destroyed himself with bombs.

It is said that every rock and cliff has a name. “The Seated Woman and the Pouncing Lion,” “The Fairy Princess,” and—less lyrically—“The Ox-Liver and Horse-Lung Gorge” (the organs are boulder formations, high on the cliff face). The Yangtze is a river of precise nomenclature. Only simple, wild places, like the volcanic hills of southwest Uganda, are full of nameless topography; naming is one of the features of Chinese civilization and settlement. I asked the pilot of our ship if it was so that every rock in the Yangtze had a name. He said yes.

“What is the name of that one?” I asked quickly, pointing out of the window.

“That is Pearl Number Three. Over there is Pearl Number Two. We shall be coming to Pearl Number One in a few minutes.” He had not hesitated. And what was interesting was that these rocks looked rather insignificant to me.

One of the passengers said, “These gorges come up to expectations. Very few things do. The Taj Mahal did. The Pyramids didn’t. But these gorges!”

We passed Wushan. There was a funeral procession making its way through the empty streets, beating drums and gongs, and at the front of the procession three people in white shrouds—white is the Chinese color of mourning—and others carrying round paper wreaths, like archery targets. And now we were in the longest gorge, twenty-five miles of cliffs and peaks, and beneath them rain-spattered junks battling the current.

At one time, this part of the Yangtze was filled with rapids. Captain Williamson’s list of landmarks noted all of them. They were still in the river, breaking ships apart, in 1937. But the worst have been dynamited away. The most notorious was the Hsin Lung Tan, a low-level rapid caused by a terrific landslide in 1896. It was wild water, eighty feet wide, but blasting opened it to four hundred feet, and deepened it. Thirty years ago, only the smallest boats could travel on the river during the winter months; now it is navigable by even the largest throughout the year.

Our ship drew in below Yellow Cat Gorge, at a place called Dou Shan Tuo (“Steep Hill Village”). We walked to the road and took a bus to the top of the hill. Looking across the river at the pinnacles called “The Three Daggers,” and at the sun pouring honey into the deep cliffs, one of the passengers said with gusto, “What a place for a condominium!”

Sunrise with Seamonsters

The Edge of the Great Rift

THERE IS A CRACK IN THE EARTH THAT EXTENDS FROM THE Sea of Galilee to the coast of Mozambique, and I am living on the edge of it, in Nyasaland. This crack is the Great Rift Valley. It seems to be swallowing most of East Africa. In Nyasaland it is replacing the fishing village, the flowers, and the anthills with a nearly bottomless lake, and it shows itself in rough escarpments and troughs up and down this huge continent. It is thought that this valley was born amid great volcanic activity. The period of vulcanism had not ended in Africa. It shows itself not only in the Great Rift Valley itself, but in the people, burning, the lava of masses, the turbulence of the humans themselves who live in the Great Rift.

My schoolroom is on the Great Rift, and in this schoolroom there is a line of children, heads shaved like prisoners, muscles showing through their rags. They are waiting to peer through the tiny lens of a cheap microscope so they can see the cells in a flower petal.

Later they will ask, “Is fire alive? Is water?”

The children appear in the morning out of the slowly drifting hoops of fog wisp. It is chilly, almost cold. There is no visibility at six in the morning; only a fierce white-out where earth is the patch of dirt under their bare feet, a platform, and the sky is everything else. It becomes Africa at noon when there are no clouds and the heat is like a blazing rug thrown over everything to suffocate and scorch.

In the afternoon there are clouds, big ones, like war declared in the stratosphere. It starts to get gray as the children leave the school and begin padding down the dirt road.

There is a hill near the school. The sun approaches it by sneaking behind the clouds until it emerges to crash into the hill and explode yellow and pink, to paint everything in its violent fire.

At night, if there is a moon, the school, the Great Rift, become a seascape of luminescent trees and grass, whispering, silver. If there is no moon you walk from a lighted house to an infinity of space, packed with darkness.

Yesterday I ducked out of a heavy downpour and waited in a small shed for the rain to let up. The rain was far too heavy for my spidery umbrella. I waited in the shed; thunder and close bursts of lightning charged all around me; the rain spat through the palm-leaf walls of the shed.

Down the road I spotted a small African child. I could not tell whether it was a boy or a girl, since it was wearing a long shirt, a yellow one, which drooped sodden to the ground. The child was carrying nothing, so I assumed it was a boy.

He dashed in and out of the puddles, hopping from side to side of the forest path, his yellow shirt bulging as he twisted under it. When he came closer I could see the look of absolute fear on his face. His only defense against the thunder and the smacking of rain were his fingers stuck firmly into his ears. He held them there as he ran.

He ran into my shed, but when he saw me he shivered into a corner where he stood shuddering under his soaked shirt. We eyed each other. There were raindrops beaded on his face. I leaned on my umbrella and fumbled a Bantu greeting. He moved against a palm leaf. After a few moments he reinserted a finger in each ear, carefully, one at a time. Then he darted out into the rain and thunder. And his dancing yellow shirt disappeared.

I stand on the grassy edge of the Great Rift. I feel it under me and I expect soon a mighty heave to send us all sprawling. The Great Rift. And whom does this rift concern? Is it perhaps a rift with the stars? Is it between earth and man, or man and man? Is there something under this African ground seething still?

We like to believe that we are riding it and that it is nothing more than an imperfection in the crust of the earth. We do not want to be captive to this rift, as if we barely belong, as if we were scrawled on the landscape by a piece of chalk.

Curfew

IT WAS NOT ODD THAT THE FIRST FEW DAYS OF OUR CURFEW were enjoyed by most people. It was a welcome change for us, like the noisy downpour that comes suddenly in January and makes a watery crackle on the street and ends the dry season. The parties, though these were now held in the afternoon, had a new topic of conversation. There were many rumors, and repeating these rumors made a kind of tennis match, a serve and return, each hit slightly more savage than the last. And the landscape of the city outside the fence of our compound was fascinating to watch. During these first days we stood in our brightly flowered shirts on our hill; we could see the palace burning, the soldiers assembling and making people scatter, and we could hear the bursts of gunfire and some shouts just outside our fence. We were teachers, all of us young, and we were in Africa. There were well-educated ones among us. One of them told me that, during the Roman Empire under the reign of Claudius, rich people and scholars could be carried in litters by lecticarii, usually slaves, to camp with servants at a safe distance from battles; these were curious Romans, men of high station, who, if they so wished, could be present and, between feasts, witness the slaughter.

But the curfew continued, and what were diversions for the first few days and weeks became habits. Although people usually showed up for work in the mornings, work in the afternoons almost ceased. There were too many things to be done before the curfew began at nightfall: buses had to be caught, provisions found, and some people had to collect children. We visited the bars so that we could get drunk in the company of other people; we played the slot machines and talked about the curfew, but after two weeks it was a very boring subject.

The people who never went out at night before the curfew was imposed—some Indians with large families used to matinees at the local movie houses, the Africans who did manual labor, and some settlers—felt none of the curfew’s effects. And there were steady ones who refused to let the curfew get to them; they were impatient with our daily hangovers, our inefficiency, our nervous comments. Our classes were not well attended. One day I asked casually where our Congolese student was—a dashing figure, he wore a silk scarf and rode a large old motorcycle. I was told that he had been pulled off his motorcycle by a soldier and had been beaten to death with a rifle butt.

We left work early. In the afternoons it was as if everyone was on leave but couldn’t afford to go to Nairobi or Mombasa, as if everyone had decided to while away his time at the local bars. At the end of the month no one was paid because the ministry was short-staffed. Some of us ran out of money. The bar owners said they were earning less and less: it was no longer possible for people to drink in bars after dark. They would only have been making the same amount as before, they said, if all the people started drinking in the middle of the morning and kept it up all day. The drinking crowd was a relatively small one, and there were no casual drinkers. Most people in the city stayed at home. They were afraid to stay out after five or so. I tried to get drunk by five-thirty. My memory is of going home drunk, with the dazzling horizontal rays of the sun in my eyes.

The dwindling of time was a strange thing. During the first weeks of the curfew we took chances; we arrived home just as the soldiers were drifting into the streets. Then we began to give ourselves more time, leaving an hour or more for going home. It might have been because we were drunker and needed more time, but we were also more worried: more people were found dead in the streets each morning when the curfew lifted. For many of us the curfew began in the middle of the afternoon when we hurried to a bar; and it was the drinkers who, soaked into a state of slow motion, took the most chances.

Different prostitutes appeared in the bars. Before the curfew there were ten or fifteen in each bar, most of them young and from the outskirts of Kampala. But the curfew was imposed after two tribes fought; most of the prostitutes had been from these tribes and so went into hiding. Others took their places. Now there were ones from the Coast, there were half-castes, Rwandans, Somalis. I remember the Somalis. There was said to be an Ethiopian at the Crested Crane, but I never saw her; in any case, she would have been very popular. All these women were old and hard, and there were fewer than before. They sat in the bars, futile and left alone, slumped on the broken chairs, waiting, as they had been waiting ever since the curfew started. Whatever other talents a prostitute may have she is still unmatched by any other person in her genius for killing time and staying on the alert for customers. The girls held their glasses in two hands and followed the stumbling drinkers with their eyes. Most of us were not interested in complicating the curfew further by taking one of these girls home. I am sure they never had to wait so long with such dull men.

One afternoon a girl put her hand on mine. Her palm was very rough; she rubbed it on my wrist and when I did not turn away she put it on my leg and asked me if I wanted to go in the back. I said I didn’t mind, and she led me out past the toilets to the back of the bar where there was a little shed. She scuffed across the shed’s dirt floor, then stood in a corner and lifted her skirt. Here, she said, come here. I asked her if we had to remain standing up. She said yes. I started to embrace her; she let her head fall back until it touched the wood wall. She still held the hem of her skirt in her hand. Then I said no, I couldn’t nail her against the wall. I saw that the door was still open. She argued for a while and said in Swahili, “Talk, talk, we could have finished by now!” I stepped away, but gave her ten shillings just the same. She spat on it and looked at me fiercely.

Rats in Rangoon

IN ASIA A CITY SHOULD BE JUDGED NOT BY THE NUMBER OF rats scuttling in its streets but on the rats’ cunning and condition. In Singapore the rats are potbellied and as sleek as housepets; they crouch patiently near noodle stalls, certain of a feed; they are quick, with bright eyes, and hard to trap.

In Rangoon I sat in an outdoor café toying with a glass of beer and heard the hedge near me rustle; four enfeebled, scabby rats, straight off the pages of La Peste, tottered out and looked around. I stamped my foot. They moved back into the hedge; and now everyone in the café was staring at me. It happened twice. I drank quickly and left, and glancing back saw the rats emerge once more and sniff at the legs of the chair where I had been sitting.

At five-thirty one morning in Rangoon, I dozed in the hot, dark compartment of a crowded train, waiting for it to pull out of the station. A person entered the toilet; there was a splash outside; the door banged. Another entered. This went on for twenty minutes, until dawn, and I saw that outside splashing and pools of excrement had stained the tracks and a litter of crumpled newspapers—The Working Peoples Daily—a bright yellow. A rat crept over to the splashed paper and nibbled, then tugged; two more rats, mottled with mange, licked, tugged, and hopped in the muck. Another splash, and the rats withdrew; they returned, gnawing. There was a hawker’s voice, a man selling Burmese books with bright covers. He shouted and walked briskly, not stopping to sell, simply walking alongside the train, crying out. The rats withdrew again; the hawker, glancing down, lengthened his stride and walked on, his heel yellow. Then the rats returned.

Cheroots are handy in such a situation. Around me in the compartment smiling Burmese puffed away on thick green cheroots and didn’t seem to notice the stink of the growing yellow pool just outside. At the Shwe Dagon Pagoda I saw a very old lady, hands clasped in prayer. She knelt near a begging leper whose disease had withered his feet and abraded his body and given him a bat’s face. He had a terrible smell, but the granny prayed with a Churchillian-sized cheroot in her mouth. On Mandalay Hill, doorless outhouses stand beside the rising steps, and next to the outhouses are fruit stalls. The stink of piss is powerful, but the fruitseller, who squats all day in that stink, is wreathed in smoke from his cheroot.

Writing in the Tropics

THE BEST JOB FOR A WRITER, A JOB WITH THE FEWEST HOURS, is in the tropics. But books are hard to write in the tropics. It is not only the heat; it is the lack of privacy, the open windows, the noise. Tropical cities are deafening. In Lagos and Accra and Kampala two people walking down a city street will find they are shouting to each other to be heard over the sound of traffic and the howls of residents and radios. V. S. Naipaul is the only writer I know of who has mentioned the abrading of the nerves by tropical noise (the chapter on Trinidad in The Middle Passage). Shouting is the Singaporean’s expression of friendliness; the Chinese shout is like a bark, sharp enough to make you jump. And if you are unfortunate enough to live near a Chinese cemetery—only foreigners live near cemeteries, the Chinese consider it unlucky to occupy those houses—you will hear them mourning with firecrackers, scattering cherry bombs over the gravestones.

Sit in a room in Singapore and try to write. Every sound is an interruption, and your mind blurs each time a motorcycle or a plane or a funeral passes. If you live near a main road, as I do, there will be three funerals a day (Chinese funerals are truckloads of gong orchestras and brass bands playing familiar songs like “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”). The day the Bengali gardener mows the grass is a day wasted. Hawkers cycle or drive by and each stops; you learn their individual yells, the bean-curd man with his transistor and sidecar, the fish-ball man on his bike, the ice-cream seller with his town crier’s bell (a midaftemoon interruption), the breadman in his Austin van, leaning on the horn; the elderly Chinese lady crouching in her sam foo and crying, “Yeggs!” through the door, the Tamil newsboy, a toddy alcoholic, muttering, “Baybah, baybah.” Before the British forces left there was a fish-and-chip van; it didn’t beep, but there were yells. The Singaporean doesn’t stir from his house. He waits in the coolness of his parlor for the deliverers to arrive. The yells and gongs, at first far off, then closer, console him. It is four-thirty, and here comes the coconut seller ringing his bicycle bell. He has a monkey, a macaque the size of a four-year-old, on the crossbar. The coconut seller is crazy; the buyers make him linger and they laugh at him. A crowd gathers to jeer him; he chases some children and then goes away. After dark the grocery truck parks in front of your house; the grocer has a basket of fish, a slaughtered pig, and the whole range of Ma-Ling canned goods (“Tripe in Duck Grease,” “Chicken Feet,” “Lychees in Syrup”), and for an hour you will hear the yelp and gargle of bartering. You have written nothing.

The heat and light; you asked for those in coming so far, but it is hotter, though less bright, than you imagined—Singapore is usually cloudy, averaging only six hours of sunshine a day. That persistent banging and screeching is an annoyance that makes you hotter still. You are squinting at the pen which is slipping out of your slick fingers and wondering why you bothered to come.

Natives and Expatriates

THE ENGLISH SENSE OF ORDER, THE RESULT OF AN HABITUAL reflex rather than a systematic decree, gives the impression of a tremendous solidity and balance. It was carried abroad and it reassured those who could enter into it. English attitudes traveled without changing much, and to a large extent this accounts for some of the Englishman’s isolation. The English overseas are accused of living a rather narrow existence, but the point is that they associate themselves deeply with a locality: in this sense all Englishmen are villagers. It shows in the special phrases they use when they are away, among “natives” or “locals.”

“We’ve lived here for donkey’s years, but we’ve never been invited to one of their houses,” says the Englishman, adding, “though we had them around to tea.”

“They’re very secretive and awfully suspicious,” says his wife.

“They seem very friendly, but they’re not interested in us. They lack curiosity.”

“They keep to themselves.”

“An odd lot. I can’t say I understand them.”

You might think they are talking about Kikuyus or Malays, but they aren’t. They are Londoners who moved to Dorset eight years ago and they are talking about ordinary folk in the village. I knew the locals: I was neutral—just passing through, stopping for five months. The locals had strong opinions on outsiders who had settled in that part of Dorset.

“They come down here and all the prices go up,” one old man said. He might have been a Kenyan, speaking of settlers. There were other objections: the outsiders didn’t bother to understand the village life, they kept to themselves, acted superior, and anyway were mostly retired people and not much use.

Expatriates and natives: the colonial pattern repeated in England. There was a scheme afoot to drill for oil on a beautiful hill near a picturesque village. The expatriates started a campaign against it; the natives said very little. I raised the subject in a pub one night with some natives of the area, asking them where they stood on the oil-drilling issue.

“That bugger——,” one said, mentioning the name of a well-known man who had lived there for some years and was leading the campaign. “I’d like to talk to him.”

“What would you say to him?” I asked.

“I’d tell him to pack his bags and go back where he came from.”

So one understands the linguistic variations in England, the dialect that thickens among the natives when an expatriate enters a pub. No one recognizes him; the publican chats with him; the talk around the fireplace is of a broken fence or a road accident. The expatriate is discussed only after he leaves the room: Where does he live? What does he do? The natives know the answers, and later when he buys a round of drinks they will warn him about the weather (“We’ll pay for these warm days!”). It is a form of village gratitude, the effort at small talk. But in England a village is a state of mind. “Are you new in the village?” a friend of mine was asked by a newsagent. This was in Notting Hill.

His Highness

THERE IS A SULTAN IN MALAYSIA WHOSE NICKNAME IS “BUFFLES” and who in his old age divides his time between watching polo and designing his own uniforms. His uniforms are very grand and resemble the outfit of a Shriner or thirty-second-degree Mason, but he was wearing a silk sports shirt the day I met him on the polo ground. The interview began badly, because his first question, on hearing I was a writer, was “Then you must know Beverley Nichols!” When I laughed, the sultan said, “Somerset Maugham came to my coronation. And next week Lord Somebody’s coming—who is it?”

“Lewisham, Your Highness,” said an Englishwoman on his left.

“Lewisham’s coming—yes, Lewisham. Do you know him? No?” The sultan adjusted his sunglasses. “I just got a letter from him.”

The conversation turned quite easily to big-game hunting. “A very rich American once told me that he had shot grizzly bears in Russia and elephants in Africa and tigers in India. He said that bear meat is the best, but the second best is horse meat. He said that. Yes!”

We discussed the merits of horse meat.

The sultan said, “My father said horse meat was good to eat. Yes, indeed. But it’s very heating.” The sultan placed his hands on his shirt and found his paunch and tugged it. “You can’t eat too much of it. It’s too heating.”

“Have you ever eaten horse meat, Your Highness?”

“No, never. But the syces eat it all the time.”

The match began with great vigor. The opposing team galloped up to the sultan’s goal with their sticks flailing.

The sultan said, “Was that a goal?”

“No, Your Highness,” said the woman, “but very nearly.”

“Very nearly, yes! I saw that,” said the sultan.

“Missed by a foot, Your Highness.”

“Missed by a foot, yes!”

After that chukka, I asked the sultan what the Malay name of the opposing team meant in English.

The sultan shook his head. “I have no idea. I’ll have to ask Zayid. It’s Malay, you see. I don’t speak it terribly well.”

The Hotel in No-Man’s-Land

“CUSTOMS OVER THERE,” SAID THE MOTIONING AFGHAN. But the Customs Office was closed for the night. We could not go back to the Iranian frontier at Tayebad, we could not proceed into Herat. So we remained on a strip of earth, neither Afghanistan nor Iran. It was the sort of bedraggled oasis that features in Foreign Legion films: a few square stucco buildings, several parched trees, a dusty road. It was getting dark. I said, “What do we do now?”

“There’s the No-Man’s-Land Hotel,” said a tall hippie, with pajamas and bangles. His name was Lopez. “I stayed there once before. With a chick. The manager turned me on.”

In fact the hotel was nameless, nor did it deserve a name. It was the only hotel in the place. The manager saw us and screamed, “Restaurant!” He herded us into a candlelit room with a long table on which there was a small dish of salt and a fork with twisted tines. The manager’s name was Abdul; he was clearly hysterical, suffering the effects of his Ramadan fasting. He began to argue with Lopez, who called him “a scumbag.”

There was no electricity in this hotel; there was only enough water for one cup of tea apiece. There was no toilet, there was no place to wash—neither was there any water. There was no food, and there seemed to be a shortage of candles. Bobby and Lopez grumbled about this, but then became frightfully happy when Abdul told them their beds would cost thirty-five cents each.

I had bought an egg in Tayebad, but it had smashed in my jacket pocket, leaked into the material, and hardened in a stiff stain. I had drunk half my gin on the Night Mail to Meshed; I finished the bottle over a game of Hearts with Lopez, Bobby, and a tribesman who was similarly stranded at the hotel.

As we were playing cards (and the chiefs played in an unnecessarily cutthroat fashion), Abdul wandered in and said, “Nice, clean. But no light. No water for wash. No water for tea.”

“Turn us on, then,” said Lopez. “Hubble-bubble.”

“Hash,” said Bobby.

Abdul became friendly. He had eaten: his hysteria had passed. He got a piece of hashish, like a small mudpie, and presented it to Lopez, who burned a bit of it and sniffed the smoke.

“This is shit,” said Lopez. “Third-quality.” He prepared a cigarette. “In Europe, sure, this is good shit. But you don’t come all the way to Afghanistan to smoke third-quality shit like this.”

“The first time I came here, in ’68,” said Bobby, “the passport officer said, ‘You want nice hash?’ I thought it was the biggest put-on I’d ever heard. I mean, a passport officer! I said, ‘No, no—it gives me big headache.’ ‘You no want hash?’ he says. I told him no. He looks at me and shakes his head: ‘So why you come to Afghanistan?’ ”

“Far out,” said Lopez.

“So I let him turn me on.”

“It’s a groovy country,” said Lopez. “They’re all crazy here.” He looked at me. “You digging it?”

“Up to a point,” I said.

“You freaking out?” Bobby sucked on the hashish cigarette and passed it to me. I took a puff and gulped it and felt a light twanging on the nerves behind my eyes.

“He is, look. I saw him on the train to Meshed,” said Lopez. “His head was together, but I think he’s loose now.”

Lopez laughed at the egg stain on my pocket. The jacket was dirty, my shirt was dirty, and so were my hands; there was a film of dust on my face.

“He’s loose,” said Bobby.

“He’s liquefying,” said Lopez. “It’s a goofy place.”

“I could hang out here,” said Bobby.

“I could too, but they won’t let me,” said Lopez. “That scumbag passport shit only gave me eight days. He didn’t like my passport—I admit it’s shitty. I got olive oil on it in Greece. I know what I should do—really goop it up with more olive oil and get another one.”

“Yeah,” said Bobby. He smoked the last of the joint and made another.

With the third joint the conversation moved quickly to a discussion of time, reality, and the spiritual refuge ashrams provided. Both Lopez and Bobby had spent long periods in ashrams; once, as long as six months.

“Meditating?” I asked.

“Well, yeah, meditating and also hanging out.”

“We were waiting for this chick to come back from the States.”

Lopez was thirty-one. After graduation from a Brooklyn high school, he got a job as a salesman in a plastic firm. “Not really a salesman, I mean, I was the boss’s right-hand man. I pick up a phone and say, ‘Danny’s out of town,’ I pick up another one and say, ‘Danny’ll meet you at three-thirty.’ That kind of job, you know?” He was earning a good salary; he had his own apartment, he was engaged to be married. Then one day he had a revelation: “I’m on my way to work. I get off the bus and I’m standing in front of the office. I get these flashes, a real anxiety trip: doing a job I hate, engaged to a plastic chick, all the traffic’s pounding. Jesus. So I go to Hollywood. It was okay. Then I went to Mexico. Five years I was in Mexico. That’s where I got the name Lopez. My name ain’t Lopez, it’s Morris. Mexico was good, then it turned me off. I went to Florida, Portugal, Morocco. One day I’m in Morocco. I meet a guy. He says, ‘Katmandu is where it’s happening.’ So I take my things, my chick, and we start going. There was no train in those days. Twelve days it took me to get to Erzurum. I was sick. It was muddy and cold, and snow—snow in Turkey! I nearly died in Erzurum, and then again in Teheran. But I knew a guy. Anyway, I made it.”

I asked him to try to imagine what he would be doing at the age of sixty.

“So I’m sixty, so what? I see myself, sure, I’m sitting right here—right here—and probably rolling a joint.” Which seemed a rash prophecy, since we were in the No-Man’s-Land Hotel, in a candlelit room, without either food or water.

Somewhere at the front of the hotel a telephone rang.

“If it’s for me,” Lopez shouted, but he had already begun to cackle, “if it’s for me, I’m not here!”

The Pathan Camp

THE CENTER OF KABUL IS NOT THE BAZAAR, BUT THE RIVER. It is black and seems bottomless, but it is only one foot deep. Some people drink from it, others shit beside it or do their washing in it. Bathers can be seen soaping themselves not far from where two buses have been driven into it to be washed. Garbage, sewage, and dirt go in; drinking water comes out. The Afghans don’t mind dying this way; it’s no trouble. Near the bus depot on the south bank bearded Afghans crouch at the side of a cart, three abreast, their faces against metal binoculars. This is a peep show. For about a penny they watch 8mm movies of Indian dancers.

Further up the Kabul River, in the rocky outskirts of the city, I found a Pathan camp. It was large, perhaps thirty ragged white tents, many goats and donkeys and a number of camels. Cooking fires were smoldering and children were running between the tents. I was eager to snap a picture of the place, and had raised my camera, when a stone thudded a few feet away. An old woman had thrown it. She made a threatening gesture and picked up another stone. But she did not throw it. She turned and looked behind her.

A great commotion had started in the center of the camp. A camel had collapsed; it was lying in the dust, kicking its legs and trying to raise its head. The children gave up their game, the women left their cooking pots, men crept out of tents, and all of them ran in the direction of the camel. The old woman ran, too, but when she saw I was following, she stopped and threw her stone at me.

There were shouts. A tall robed figure, brandishing a knife, ran into the crowd. The crowd made way for him and stood some distance from the camel, giving him room and allowing me to see the man raise his knife over the neck of the struggling camel and bring it down hard, making three slashes in the camel’s neck. It was as if he had punctured a large toy. Immediately, the camel’s head dropped to the ground, his legs ceased to kick, and blood poured out, covering a large triangle of ground and flowing five or six feet from the body, draining into the sand.

I went closer. The old woman screamed, and a half a dozen people ran toward her. They had knives and baskets. The old woman pointed at me, but I did not pause. I sprinted away in the direction of the road, and when I felt I was safe I looked back. No one had chased me. The people with the knives surrounded the camel—the whole camp had descended on it—and they had already started cutting and skinning the poor beast.

Dingle

THE NEAREST THING TO WRITING A NOVEL IS TRAVELING IN A strange country. Travel is a creative act—not simply loafing and inviting your soul, but feeding the imagination, accounting for each fresh wonder, memorizing, and moving on. The discoveries the traveler makes in broad daylight—the curious problems of the eye he solves—resemble those that thrill and sustain a novelist in his solitude. It is fatal to know too much at the outset: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot. And the best landscapes, apparently dense or featureless, hold surprises if they are studied patiently, in the kind of discomfort one can savor afterward. Only a fool blames his bad vacation on the rain.

A strange country—but how strange? One where the sun bursts through the clouds at ten in the evening and makes a sunset as full and promising as dawn. An island which on close inspection appears to be composed entirely of rabbit droppings. Gloomy gypsies camped in hilarious clutter. People who greet you with “Nice day” in a pelting storm. Miles of fuchsia hedges, seven feet tall, with purple hanging blossoms like Chinese lanterns. Ancient perfect castles that are not inhabited; hovels that are. And dangers: hills and beach cliffs so steep you either hug them or fall off. Stone altars that were last visited by Druids, storms that break and pass in minutes, and a local language that sounds like Russian being whispered and so incomprehensible that the attentive traveler feels, in the words of a native writer, “like a dog listening to music.”

It sounds as distant and bizarre as The Land Where the Jumblies Live, and yet it is the part of Europe that is closest in miles to America, the thirty-mile sausage of land on the southwest coast of Ireland that is known as the Dingle Peninsula. Beyond it is Boston and New York, where many of its people have fled. The land is not particularly fertile. Fishing is dangerous and difficult. Food is expensive, and if the Irish government did not offer financial inducements to the natives they would probably shrink inland, like the people of Great Blasket Island, who simply dropped everything and went ashore to the Dingle, deserting their huts and fields and leaving them to the rabbits and the ravens.

It is easy for the casual traveler to prettify the place with romantic hyperbole, to see in Dingle’s hard weather and exhausted ground the Celtic Twilight, and in its stubborn hopeful people a version of Irishness that is to be cherished. That is the patronage of pity—the metropolitan’s contempt for the peasant. The Irish coast, so enchanting for the man with the camera, is murder for the fisherman. For five of the eight days I was there the fishing boats remained anchored in Dingle Harbor, because it was too wild to set sail. The dead seagulls, splayed out like oldfangled ladies’ hats below Clogher Head, testify to the furious winds; and never have I seen so many sheep skulls bleaching on hillsides, so many cracked bones beneath bushes.

Farming is done in the most clumsily primitive way, with horses and donkeys, wagons and blunt plows. The methods are traditional by necessity—modernity is expensive, gas costs more than Guinness. The stereotype of the Irishman is a person who spends every night at the local pub, jigging and swilling; in the villages of this peninsula only Sunday night is festive and the rest are observed with tea and early supper.

“I don’t blame anyone for leaving here,” said a farmer in Dunquin. “There’s nothing for young people. There’s no work, and it’s getting worse.”

After the talk of the high deeds of Finn MacCool and the fairies and leprechauns, the conversation turns to the price of spare parts, the cost of grain, the value of the Irish pound, which has sunk below the British one. Such an atmosphere of isolation is intensified and circumscribed by the language—there are many who speak only Gaelic. Such remoteness breeds political indifference. There is little talk of the guerrilla war in Northern Ireland, and the few people I tried to draw out on the subject said simply that Ulster should become part of Eire.

But no one mentions religion. The only indication I had of the faith was the valediction of a lady in a bar in Ballyferriter, who shouted, “God bless ye!” when I emptied my pint of Guinness.

On the rainiest day we climbed down into the cove at Coumeenoole, where—because of its unusual shape, like a ruined cathedral—there was no rain. I sent the children off for driftwood and at the mouth of a dry cave built a fire. It is the bumpkin who sees travel in terms of dancing girls and candlelight dinners on the terrace; the city slicker’s triumphant holiday is finding the right mountaintop or building a fire in the rain or recognizing the wildflowers in Dingle: foxglove, heather, bluebells.

And it is the city slicker’s conceit to look for untrodden ground, the five miles of unpeopled beach at Stradbally Strand, the flat magnificence of Inch Strand, or the most distant frontier of Ireland, the island off Dunquin called Great Blasket.

Each day, she and her sister islands looked different. We had seen them from the cliffside of Slea Head, and on that day they had the appearance of seamonsters—high-backed creatures making for the open sea. Like all offshore islands, seen from the mainland, their aspect changed with the light: they were lizard-like, then muscular, turned from gray to green, acquired highlights that might have been huts. At dawn they seemed small, but they grew all day into huge and fairly fierce-seeming mountains in the water, diminishing at dusk into pink beasts and finally only hindquarters disappearing in the mist.

Nudists in Corsica

CORSICA IS FRANCE, BUT IT IS NOT FRENCH. IT IS A mountain range moored like a great ship with a cargo of crags a hundred miles off the Riviera. In its three climates it combines the high Alps, the ruggedness of North Africa, and the choicest landscapes of Italy, but most dramatic are the peaks, which are never out of view and show in the upheaval of rock a culture that is violent and heroic. The landscape, which furnished some of the imagery for Dante’s Inferno, has known heroes. The Latin playwright Seneca was exiled there, Napoleon was born there, and so—if local history is to be believed—was Christopher Columbus (there is a plaque in Calvi); part of the Odyssey takes place there—Ulysses lost most of his crew to the cannibalistic Laestrygonians in Bonifacio—and two hundred years ago, the lecherous Scot (and biographer of Dr. Johnson) James Boswell visited and reported, “I had got upon a rock in Corsica and jumped into the middle of life.”

The landscape is just weird enough to be beautiful and too large to be pretty. On the west are cliffs that drop straight and red into the sea; on the south there is a true fjord; on the east a long, flat, and formerly malarial coast with the island’s only straight road; on the north a populous cape; and in the center the gothic steeples of mountains, fringed by forests where wild boar are hunted. There are sandy beaches, pebbly beaches, boulder-strewn beaches; beaches with enormous waves breaking over them, and beaches that are little more than mud flats, beaches with hotels and beaches that have never known the pressure of a tourist’s footprint. There are five-star hotels and hotels that are unfit for human habitation. All the roads are dangerous, many are simply the last mile to an early grave. “There are no bad drivers in Corsica,” a Corsican told me. “All the bad drivers die very quickly.” But he was wrong—I saw many and I still have damp palms to prove it.

On one of those terrible coast roads—bumper-scraping ruts, bottomless puddles, rocks in the middle as threatening and significant as Marxist statuary—I saw a hitchhiker. She was about eighteen, very dark and lovely, in a loose gown, barefoot, and carrying a basket. She might have been modeling the gown and awaiting the approach of a Vogue photographer. My car seemed to stop of its own accord, and I heard myself urging the girl to get in, which she did, thanking me first in French and then, sizing me up, in halting English. Was I going to Chiappa? I wasn’t, but I agreed to take her part of the way: “And what are you going to do in Chiappa?”

“I am a naturiste,” she said, and smiled.

“A nudist?”

She nodded and answered the rest of my questions. She had been a nudist for about five years. Her mother had been running around naked for eleven years. And Papa? No, he wasn’t a nudist; he’d left home—clothed—about six years ago. She liked the nudist camp (there are nine hundred nudists at Chiappa); it was a pleasant, healthy pastime, though of course when the weather got chilly they put some clothes on. Sooner than I wished, she told me we had arrived, and she bounded toward the camp to fling her clothes off.

At Palombaggia, the tourist beach a few miles away, I hid behind a pine tree and put on my bathing trunks. I need hardly have bothered—the beach was nearly deserted. Rocks had tumbled into the sea, making natural jetties, and I decided to tramp over a dune and a rocky headland to get a view of the whole bay. There were, as far as the eye could see, groups of bathers, families, couples, children, people putting up windbreaks, strollers, rock collectors, sandcastle makers—and all of them naked. Naked mommy, naked daddy, naked kiddies, naked grandparents. Aside from the usual beach equipment, it was a happy little scene from idealized prehistory, naked Europeans amusing themselves, Cro-Magnon man at play. It was not a nudist camp. These were Germans, as bare as noodles, and apart from the absence of swimming togs, the beach resembled many I have seen on Cape Cod, even to the discarded Coke cans and candy wrappers. I stayed until rain clouds gathered and the sun was obscured. This drove the Germans behind their windbreaks and one woman put on a short jersey—no more than that—and paced the beach, squinting at the clouds and then leering at me. I suppose it was my fancy bathing trunks.

New York Subway

NEW YORKERS SAY SOME TERRIBLE THINGS ABOUT THE subway—that they hate it, or are scared stiff of it, or that it deserves to go broke. For tourists it seems just another dangerous aspect of New York, though most don’t know it exists. “I haven’t been down there in years” is a common enough remark from a city dweller. Even people who ride it seem to agree that there is more Original Sin among subway passengers. And more desperation, too, making you think of choruses of “O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark.…”

“Subway” is not its name, because strictly speaking more than half of it is elevated. But which person who has ridden it lately is going to call it by its right name, “The Rapid Transit”? You can wait a long time for some trains and, as in the section of T. S. Eliot’s “East Coker,” often

… an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about …

It is also frightful-looking. It has paint and signatures all over its aged face. People who don’t take it, who never ride the subway and have no use for it, say that these junky pictures are folk art, a protest against the metropolitan grayness, and what a wonderful sense of color these scribblers have—which is complete nonsense. The graffiti are bad, violent, and destructive, and the people who praise them are either malicious or lazy-minded. The graffiti are so extensive and so dreadful it is hard to believe that the perpetrators are not the recipients of some enormous foundation grant. The subway has been vandalized from end to end. It smells so hideous you want to put a clothespin on your nose, and it is so noisy the sound actually hurts. Is it dangerous? Ask anyone and he will tell you there are about two murders a day on the subway (though this is not true). It really is the pits, people say.

You have to ride it for a while to find out what it is and who takes it and who gets killed on it.

It is full of surprises. Three and a half million fares a day pass through it, and in 1981 the total number of murder victims on the subway amounted to thirteen. This baker’s dozen does not include suicides (one a week), “man under” incidents (one a day), or “space cases”—people who quite often get themselves jammed between the train and the platform. Certainly the subway is very ugly and extremely noisy, but it only looks like a death trap. People ride it looking stunned and holding their breath. It’s not at all like the BART system in San Francisco, where people are constantly chattering, saying, “I’m going to my father’s wedding” or “I’m looking after my Mom’s children” or “I’ve got a date with my fiancée’s boyfriend.” In New York, the subway is a serious matter—the rackety train, the silent passengers, the occasional scream.

* * *

WE WERE AT FLUSHING AVENUE, ON THE GG LINE, TALKING about rules for riding the subway. You need rules: the subway is like a complex—and diseased—circulatory system. Some people liken it to a sewer and others hunch their shoulders and mutter about being in the bowels of the earth. It is full of suspicious-looking people.

I said, “Keep away from isolated cars, I suppose,” and my friend, a police officer, said, “Never display jewelry.”

Just then, a man walked by, and he had Chinese coins—the old ones with a hole through the middle—woven somehow into his hair. There were enough coins in that man’s hair for a swell night out in old Shanghai, but robbing him would have involved scalping him. There was a woman at the station, too. She was clearly crazy, and she lived in the subway the way people live in railway stations in India, with stacks of dirty bags. The police in New York call such people “skells” and are seldom harsh with them. “Wolfman Jack” is a skell, living underground at Hoyt-Schermerhorn, also on the GG line; the police in that station give him food and clothes, and if you ask him how he is, he says, “I’m getting some calls.” Call them colorful characters and they don’t look so dangerous or pathetic.

This crazy old lady at Flushing Avenue was saying, “I’m a member of the medical profession.” She had no teeth, and plastic bags were taped around her feet. I glanced at her and made sure she kept her distance. The previous day, a crazy old lady just like her came at me and shrieked, “Ahm goon cut you up!” This was at Pelham Parkway, on the IRT-2 line in the Bronx. I left the car at the next stop, Bronx Park East, where the zoo is, though who could be blamed for thinking that, in New York City, the zoo is everywhere?

Then a Muslim unflapped his prayer mat—while we were at Flushing Avenue, talking about Rules—and spread it on the platform and knelt on it, just like that, and was soon on all fours, beseeching Allah and praising the Prophet Mohammed. This is not remarkable. You see people praying, or reading the Bible, or selling religion on the subway all the time. “Hallelujah, brothers and sisters,” the man with the leaflets says on the BMT-RR line at Prospect Avenue in Brooklyn. “I love Jesus! I used to be a wino!” And Muslims beg and push their green plastic cups at passengers, and try to sell them copies of something called Arabic Religious Classics. It is December and Brooklyn, and the men are dressed for the Great Nafud Desert, or Jiddah or Medina—skullcap, gallabieh, sandals.

“And don’t sit next to the door,” the second police officer said. We were still talking about Rules. “A lot of these snatchers like to play the doors.”

The first officer said, “It’s a good idea to keep near the conductor. He’s got a telephone. So does the man in the token booth. At night, stick around the token booth until the train comes in.”

“Although, token booths …” the second officer said. “A few years ago, some kids filled a fire extinguisher with gasoline and pumped it into a token booth at Broad Channel. There were two ladies inside, but before they could get out the kids set the gas on fire. The booth just exploded like a bomb, and the ladies died. It was a revenge thing. One of the kids had gotten a summons for Theft of Service—not paying his fare.”

Just below us, at Flushing Avenue, there was a stream running between the tracks. It gurgled and glugged down the whole length of the long platform. It gave the station the atmosphere of a sewer—dampness and a powerful smell. The water was flowing toward Myrtle and Willoughby. And there was a rat. It was only my third rat in a week of riding the subway, but this one was twice the size of rats I’ve seen elsewhere. I thought: Rats as big as cats.

“Stay with the crowds. Keep away from quiet stairways. The stairways at Forty-first and Forty-third are usually quiet, but Forty-second is always busy—that’s the one to use.”

So many rules! It’s not like taking a subway at all; it’s like walking through the woods—through dangerous jungle, rather: Do this, Don’t do that …

“It reminds me,” the first officer said. “The burning of that token booth at Broad Channel. Last May, six guys attempted to murder someone at Forest Parkway, on the J line. It was a whole gang against this one guy. Then they tried to burn the station down with Molotov cocktails. We stopped that, too.”

The man who said this was six feet four, 281 pounds. He carried a .38 in a shoulder holster and wore a bulletproof vest. He had a radio, a can of Mace, and a blackjack. He was a plainclothesman.

The funny thing is that, one day, a boy—five feet six, 135 pounds—tried to mug him. The boy slapped him across the face while the plainclothesman was seated on a train. The boy said, “Give me your money,” and then threatened the man in a vulgar way. The boy still punched at the man when the man stood up; he still said, “Give me all your money!” The plainclothesman then took out his badge and his pistol and said, “I’m a police officer and you’re under arrest.” “I was just kidding!” the boy said, but it was too late.

I laughed at the thought of someone trying to mug this well-armed giant.

“Rule one for the subway,” he said. “Want to know what it is?” He looked up and down the Flushing Avenue platform, at the old lady and the Muslim and the running water and the vandalized signs. “Rule one is—don’t ride the subway if you don’t have to.”

Rowing Around the Cape

THE BOAT SLID DOWN THE BANK AND WITHOUT A SPLASH into the creek, which was gray this summer morning. The air was woolly with mist. The tide had turned, but just a moment ago, so there was still no motion on the water—no current, not a ripple. The marsh grass was a deeper green for there being no sun. It was as if—this early and this dark—the day had not yet begun to breathe.

I straightened the boat and took my first stroke: the gurgle of the spoon blades and the sigh of the twisting oarlock were the only sounds. I set off, moving like a water bug through the marsh and down the bendy creek to the sea. When my strokes were regular and I was rowing at a good clip, my mind started to work, and I thought: I’m not coming back tonight. And so the day seemed long enough and full of possibilities. I had no plans except to keep on harbor-hopping around the Cape, and it was easy now going out with the tide.

This was Scorton Creek, in East Sandwich, and our hill—one of the few on the low, lumpy terminal moraine of the Cape—was once an Indian fort. Wampanoags. The local farmers plowed this hill until recently, when the houses went up, and their plow blades always struck flints and ax heads and beads. I splashed past a boathouse the size of a garage. When they dug the foundation for that boathouse less than twenty years ago, they unearthed a large male Wampanoag who had been buried in a sitting position, his skin turned to leather and his bones sticking through. They slung him out and put the boathouse there.

Three more bends in the creek and I could see the current stirring more strongly around me. A quarter of a mile away in the marsh was a Great Blue Heron—five feet high and moving in a slow prayerful way, like a narrow-shouldered priest in gray vestments. The boat slipped along, carrying itself between strokes. Up ahead on the beach was a person with a dog—one of those energetic early risers who boasts, “I only need four hours’ sleep!” and is probably hell to live with. Nothing else around—only the terns screeching over their eggs, and a few boats motionless at their moorings, and a rather crummy clutter of beach houses and NO TRESPASSING signs, and the ghosts of dead Indians. The current was so swift in the creek I couldn’t have gone back if I tried, and as I approached the shore it shot me into the sea. And now light was dazzling in the mist, as on the magnificent Turner Sunrise with Seamonsters.

AFTER AN HOUR I WAS AT SANDY NECK PUBLIC BEACH—about four miles. This bay side of the upper Cape has a low duney shore and notoriously shallow water in places. The half a dozen harbors are spread over seventy miles and most have dangerous bars. It is not a coast for easy cruising and in many areas there is hardly enough water for windsurfing. There are sand bars in the oddest places. Most sailboats can’t approach any of the harbors unless the tide is high. So the little boats stay near shore and watch the tides, and the deep draft boats stay miles offshore. I was in between and I was alone. In two months of this I never saw another rowboat more than fifty yards from the shore. Indeed, I seldom saw anyone rowing at all.

Sandy Neck proper, an eight-mile peninsula of Arabian-style dunes, was today a panorama of empty beach; the only life stirring was the gulls and more distantly the hovering marsh hawks. A breeze had come up; it had freshened; it was now a light wind. I got stuck on a sand bar, then hopped out and dragged the boat into deeper water. I was trying to get around Beach Point to have my lunch in Barnstable Harbor—my forward locker contained provisions. I was frustrated by the shoals. But I should have known—there were seagulls all over the ocean here and they were not swimming but standing. I grew to recognize low water from the posture of seagulls.

When I drew level with Barnstable Harbor I was spun around by the strong current. I had to fight it for half an hour before I got ashore. Even then I was only at Beach Point. This was the channel into the harbor, and the water in it was narrow and swiftly moving—a deep river flowing through a shallow sea, its banks just submerged.

I tied the boat to a rock, and while I rested a Ranger drove up in his Chevy Bronco.

He said, “That wind’s picking up. I think we’re in for a storm.” He pointed toward Barnstable Harbor. “See the clouds building up over there? The forecast said showers but that looks like more than showers. Might be a thunderstorm. Where are you headed?”

“Just up the coast.”

He nodded at the swiftly rushing channel and said, “You’ll have to get across that thing first.”

“Why is it so choppy?”

His explanation was simple, and it accounted for a great deal of the rough water I was to see in the weeks to come. He said that when the wind was blowing in the opposite direction to a tide, a chop of hard, irregular waves was whipped up. It could become very fierce very quickly.

Then he pointed across the harbor mouth toward Bass Hole and told me to look at how the ebbing tide had uncovered a mile of sand flats. “At low tide people just walk around over there,” he said. So, beyond the vicious channel the sea was slipping down—white water here, none there.

After the Ranger drove off, I made myself a cheese sandwich, swigged some coffee from my thermos bottle, and decided to rush the channel. My skiff’s sides were lapstrake—like clapboards—and rounded, which stabilized the boat in high waves, but this short breaking chop was a different matter. Instead of rowing at right angles to the current I turned the bow against it, and steadied the skiff by rowing. The skiff rocked wildly—the current slicing the bow, the wind-driven chop smacking the stern. A few minutes later I was across. And then I ran aground. After the channel were miles of watery shore; but it was only a few inches deep—and the tide was still dropping.

The wind was blowing, the sky was dark, the shoreline was distant; and now the water was not deep enough for this rowboat. I got out and—watched by strolling seagulls—dragged the boat through the shallow water that lay over the sand bar. The boat skidded and sometimes floated, but it was not really buoyant until I had splashed along for about an hour. To anyone on the beach I must have seemed a bizarre figure—alone, far from shore, walking on the water.

It was midafternoon by the time I had dragged the boat to deeper water, and I got in and began to row. The wind seemed to be blowing now from the west; it gathered at the stern and gave me a following sea, lifting me in the direction I wanted to go. I rowed past Chapin Beach and the bluffs, and around the black rocks at Nobscusset Harbor, marking my progress on my flapping chart by glancing again and again at a water tower like a stovepipe in Dennis.

At about five o’clock I turned into Sesuit Harbor, still pulling hard. I had rowed about sixteen miles. My hands were blistered but I had made a good start. And I had made a discovery: the sea was unpredictable, and the shore looked foreign. I was used to finding familiar things in exotic places, but the unfamiliar at home was new to me. It had been a disorienting day. At times I had been afraid. It was a taste of something strange in a place I had known my whole life. It was a shock and a satisfaction.

Mrs. Coffin at Sesuit Harbor advised me not to go out the next day. Anyone with a name out of Moby-Dick is worth listening to on the subject of the sea. The wind was blowing from the northeast, making Mrs. Coffin’s flag snap and beating the sea into whitecaps.

I said, “I’m only going to Rock Harbor.”

It was about nine miles.

She said, “You’ll be pulling your guts out.”

I decided to go, thinking: I would rather struggle in a heavy sea and get wet than sit in the harbor and wait for the weather to improve.

But as soon as I had rowed beyond the breakwater I was hit hard by the waves and tipped by the wind. I unscrewed my sliding seat and jammed the thwart into place; and I tried again. I couldn’t maneuver the boat. I changed oars, lashing the long ones down and using the seven-and-a-half-foot ones. I made some progress, but the wind was punching me toward shore. This was West Brewster, off Quivett Neck. The chart showed church spires. I rowed for another few hours and saw that I had gone hardly any distance at all. But there was no point in turning back. I didn’t need a harbor. I knew I could beach the boat anywhere—pull it up over there at that ramp, or between those rocks, or at that public beach. I had plenty of time and I felt all right. This was like walking uphill, but so what?

So I struggled all day. I hated the banging waves, and the way they leaped over the sides when the wind pushed me sideways into the troughs of the swell. There was a few inches of water sloshing in the bottom, and my chart was soaked. At noon a motorboat came near me and asked me if I was in trouble. I said no and told him where I was going. The man said, “Rock Harbor’s real far!” and pointed east. Some of the seawater dried on the boat, leaving the lace of crystallized salt shimmering on the mahogany. I pulled on, passing a sailboat in the middle of the afternoon.

“Where’s Rock Harbor?” I asked.

“Look for the trees!”

But I looked in the wrong place. The trees weren’t on shore, they were in the water, about twelve of them planted in two rows—tall dead limbless pines—like lampposts. They marked the harbor entrance; they also marked the Brewster Flats, for at low tide there was no water here at all, and Rock Harbor was just a creek draining into a desert of sand. You could drive a car across the harbor mouth at low tide.

I had arranged to meet my father here. My brother Joseph was with him. He had just arrived from the Pacific islands of Samoa. I showed him the boat.

He touched the oarlocks. He said, “They’re all tarnished.” Then he frowned at the salt-smeared wood and his gaze made the boat seem small and rather puny.

I said, “I just rowed from Sesuit with the wind against me. It took me the whole goddamned day!”

He said, “Don’t get excited.”

“What do you know about boats?” I said.

He went silent. We got into the car—two boys and their father. I had not seen Joe for several years. Perhaps he was sulking because I hadn’t asked about Samoa. But had he asked about my rowing? It didn’t seem like much, because it was travel at home. Yet I felt the day had been full of risks.

“How the hell,” I said, “can you live in Samoa for eight years and not know anything about boats?”

“Sah-moa,” he said, correcting my pronunciation. It was a family joke.

My brother Alex was waiting with my mother, and he smiled as I entered the house.

“Here he comes,” Alex said.

My face was burned, the blisters had broken on my hands and left them raw, my back ached, and so did the muscle strings in my forearm; there was sea salt in my eyes.

“Ishmael,” Alex said. He was sitting compactly on a chair glancing narrowly at me and smoking. “ ‘And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.’ ”

My mother said, “We’re almost ready to eat—you must be starving! God, look at you!”

Alex was behind her. He made a face at me, then silently mimicked a laugh at the absurdity of a forty-two-year-old man taking consolation from his mother.

“Home is the sailor, home from the sea,” Alex said and imitated my voice, “Pass the spaghetti, Mom!”

Joe had started to relax. Now he had an ally, and I was being mocked. We were not writers, husbands, or fathers. We were three big boys fooling in front of their parents. Home is so often the simple past.

“What’s he been telling you, Joe?” Alex asked.

I went to wash my face.

“He said I don’t know anything about boats.”

Just before we sat down to eat, I said, “It’s pretty rough out there.”

Alex seized on this, looking delighted. He made the sound of a strong wind, by whistling and clearing his throat. He squinted and in a harsh whisper said, “Aye, it’s rough out there, and you can hardly”—he stood up, banging the dining table with his thigh—“you can hardly see the bowsprit. Aye, and the wind’s shifting, too. But never mind, Mr. Christian! Give him twenty lashes—that’ll take the strut out of him! And hoist the mainsail—we’re miles from anywhere. None of you swabbies knows anything about boats. But I know, because I’ve sailed from Pitcairn Island to Rock Harbor by dead reckoning—in the roughest water known to man. Just me against the elements, with the waves threatening to pitch-pole my frail craft …”

“Your supper’s getting cold,” Father said.

“How long did it take you?” Mother said to me.

“All day,” I said.

“Aye, captain,” Alex said. “Aw, it’s pretty rough out there, what with the wind and the rising sea.”

“What will you write about?” my father asked.

“He’ll write about ocean’s roar and how he just went around the Horn. You’re looking at Francis Chichester! The foam beating against the wheelhouse, the mainsheet screaming, the wind and the rising waves. Hark! Thunder and lightning over The Gypsy Moth!”

Declaiming made Alex imaginative, and stirred his memory. He had an actor’s gift for sudden shouts and whispers and for giving himself wholly to the speech. It was as if he was on an instant touched with lucid insanity, the exalted chaos of creation. He was triumphant.

“But look at him now—Peter Freuchen of the seven seas, the old tar in his clinker-built boat. He’s home asking his mother to pass the spaghetti! ‘Thanks, Mom, I’d love another helping, Mom.’ After a day in the deep sea, he’s with his mother and father, reaching for the meatballs!”

Joseph was laughing hard, his whole body swelling as he tried to suppress it.

“He’s not going to write about that. No, nothing about the spaghetti. It’ll just be Captain Bligh, all alone, bending at his oars, and picking oakum through the long tumultuous nights at sea. And the wind and the murderous waves …”

“Dry up,” Father said, still eating.

Then they all turned their big sympathetic faces at me across the cluttered dining table. Alex looked slightly sheepish, and the others apprehensive, fearing that I might be offended, that Alex had gone too far.

“What will you write about?” Mother asked.

I shook my head and tried not to smile—because I was thinking: That.