The Songlines

by Bruce Chatwin

  ‘But if you took him blindfold to another country,’ she said, ‘he might end up lost and starving.’

  ‘Because he’d lost his bearings?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re saying that man “makes” his territory by naming the “things” in it?’

  ‘Yes, I am!’ Her face lit up.

  ‘So the basis for a universal language can never have existed?’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’

  Wendy said that, even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the ‘things’ of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth.

  The child, at its mother’s breast, will toy with the ‘thing’, talk to it, test its teeth on it, learn its name, repeat its name – and finally chuck it aside.

  ‘We give our children guns and computer games,’ Wendy said. ‘They gave their children the land.’

  THE MOST SUBLIME labour of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons . . . This philological-philosophical axiom proves to us that in the world’s childhood men were by nature sublime poets . . .

  Giambattista Vico, The New Science, XXXVII

  Men vent great passions by breaking into song, as we observe in the most grief-stricken and the most joyful.

  Vico, The New Science, LIX

  The Ancient Egyptians believed the seat of the soul was in the tongue: the tongue was a rudder or steering-oar with which a man steered his course through the world.

  ‘Primitive’ languages consist of very long words, full of difficult sounds and sung rather than spoken . . . The early words must have been to present ones what the plesiosaurus and gigantosaurus are to present-day reptiles.

  O. Jespersen, Language

  Poetry is the mother tongue of the human race as the garden is older than the field, painting than writing, singing than declaiming, parables than inferences, bartering than commerce . . .

  J. G. Hamann, Aesthetica in Nuce

  All passionate language does of itself become musical – with a finer music than the mere accent; the speech of a man even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song.

  Thomas Carlyle, quoted in Jespersen, Language

  Words well voluntarily from the breast without need or intent, and there has probably not been in any desert waste a migratory horde that did not possess its own songs. As an animal species, the human being is a singing creature, but he combines ideals with the musical sounds involved.

  Wilhelm von Humboldt, Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development

  According to Strehlow, the Aranda word tnakama means ‘to call by name’ and also ‘to trust’ and ‘to believe’.

  Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode (melos) of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer.

  Martin Heidegger, ‘Language’

  Richard Lee calculated that a Bushman child will be carried a distance of 4,900 miles before he begins to walk on his own. Since, during this rhythmic phase, he will be forever naming the contents of his territory, it is impossible he will not become a poet.

  Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the ‘walks’ of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence:

  The flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers. The Méséglise Way with its lilacs, its hawthorns, its cornflowers, its poppies, the Guermantes Way with its river full of tadpoles, its water-lilies, and its buttercups have constituted for me for all time the picture of the land in which I would fain pass my life . . . the cornflowers, the hawthorns, the apple-trees, which I happen, when I go out walking, to encounter in the fields, because at the same depth, on the level of my past life, at once established contact with my heart.

  As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less ‘aggressive’ than sedentary ones.

  There is one obvious reason why this should be so. The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey: a ‘leveller’ on which the ‘fit’ survive and stragglers fall by the wayside.

  The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The ‘dictators’ of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the ‘gentlemen of the road’.

  What can we do? We were born with the Great Unrest. Our father taught us that life is one long journey on which only the unfit are left behind.

  Caribou Eskimo to Dr Knud Rassmussen

  The above reminds me of the two undeniable fossils of Homo habilis which had been dragged into the Swartkrans Cave and eaten: one, the boy with a brain tumour; the other, an old and arthritic woman.

  Among the papers Elizabeth Vrba recommended was one entitled ‘Competition or Peaceful Coexistence?’ by John Wiens.

  Wiens, an ornithologist who works in New Mexico, has been studying the behaviour of the migratory songbirds – the dirkcissels, sage sparrows, sage thrashers – that return each summer to nest in the arid brush of the Western Plains.

  Here, where years of famine may be followed by a sudden onrush of plenty, the birds show no signs of increasing their numbers to match the abundance of food: nor of stepping up competition with their neighbours. Rather, he concluded, the migrants must have some internal mechanism which favours co-operation and co-existence.

  He goes on to claim that the great Darwinian ‘struggle for life’ may, paradoxically, be more relevant to stable climates than volatile ones. In regions of assured abundance, animals will stake out and defend their lot with shows of aggressive display. In the badlands, where nature is rarely kind – yet there is usually room to move – they make their meagre resources serve them and so find their way without fighting.

  In Aranda Traditions Strehlow contrasts two Central Australian peoples: one sedentary, one mobile.

  The Aranda, living in a country of safe waterholes and plentiful game, were arch-conservatives whose ceremonies were unchangeable, initiations brutal, and whose penalty for sacrilege was death. They looked on themselves as a ‘pure’ race, and rarely thought of leaving their land.

  The Western Desert People, on the other hand, were as open-minded as the Aranda were closed. They borrowed songs and dances freely, loving their land no less and yet forever on the move. ‘The most striking thing about these people’, Strehlow writes, ‘was their ready laughter. They were a cheerful laughing people, who bore themselves as though they had never known a care in the world. Aranda men, civilised on sheep stations, used to say, “They are always laughing. They can’t help it.”’

  A late summer evening in Manhattan, the crowds out of town, cycling down lower Park Avenue with the light slanting in from the cross-streets and a stream of monarch butterflies, alternately brown in the shadow and golden in the sun, coming round the Pan Am Building, descending from the statue of Mercury on Grand Central Station and continuing downtown towards the Caribbean.

  In the course of my reading on animal migration, I learned about the journeys of the cod, the eel, the herring, the sardine and the suicidal exodus of lemmings.

  I weighed up the pros and cons for the existence of a ‘sixth sense’ – a magnetic sense of direction – within the human central nervous system. I saw the march of wildebeeste across the Serengeti. I read of birds that ‘learn’ their journeys from their parents; and of the fledgling cuckoo that never knew its parents and so must have had the journey in its genes.

  All animal migrations have been conditioned by shifting zones of climate, and, in the case of the green turtle, by the shift of the continents themselves.

  There were theories of how birds fix their position by the height of the sun, the phases of the moon, and the rising and setting of stars; and of how they make navigational adjustments if blown off course by
a storm. Certain ducks and geese can ‘record’ the choruses of frogs beneath them, and ‘know’ that they are flying over marsh. Other night-fliers bounce their calls on to the ground below, and, catching the echo, fix their altitude and the nature of the terrain.

  The howls of migrating fish can pass through the sides of a ship, and wake up sailors from their bunks. A salmon knows the taste of its ancestral river. Dolphins flash echo-locating clicks on to submarine reefs, in order to steer a safe passage through . . . It has even occurred to me that, when a dolphin ‘triangulates’ to determine its position, its behaviour is analogous to our own, as we name and compare the ‘things’ encountered in our daily lives, and so establish our place in the world.

  Every book I consulted had, as a matter of course, an account of the most spectacular of bird migrations: the flight of the Arctic tern, a bird which nests in the tundra; winters in Antarctic waters, and then flies back to the north.

  I slammed the book shut. The leather armchairs in the London Library made me feel drowsy. The man sitting next to me was snoring with a literary journal spread over his stomach. To hell with migration! I said to myself. I put the stack of books on the table. I was hungry.

  Outside, it was a cold, sunny December day. I was hoping to cadge lunch from a friend. On St James’s Street, I was walking abreast of White’s Club when a cab drew up and a man in a velvet-collared coat got out. He flourished a pair of pound notes at the cabbie and advanced towards the steps. He had thick grey hair and a mesh of burst blood-vessels, as though a transparent red stocking had been pulled over his cheeks. He was – I knew him from photographs – a Duke.

  At the same moment, a second man, in an ex-army greatcoat, sockless, and in boots tied up with twine, pressed forward with an ingratiating smile.

  ‘Er . . . Forgive me for troubling you, Sir,’ he said, in a thick Irish accent. ‘I was wondering if by any chance . . .’

  The Duke pressed on through the door.

  I looked at the tramp, who gave me a knowing wink. Some wisps of reddish hair floated above a blotchy scalp. He had watery willing-you-to-believe eyes, focused a short way in front of his nose. He must have been in his late sixties. From my appearance, he did not think it worthwhile to urge a claim on my pocket.

  ‘I’ve got an idea,’ I said to him.

  ‘Yes, guv’nor.’

  ‘You’re a travelling man, right?’

  ‘All over the world, guv’nor.’

  ‘Well, if you’d like to tell me about your travels, I’d like to buy you lunch.’

  ‘And I’d be pleased to accept.’

  We went round the corner into Jermyn Street to a crowded, inexpensive Italian restaurant. There was one small table left.

  I didn’t suggest he take off his coat for fear of what lay underneath. The smell was incredible. Two smart secretaries edged away from us, tucking in their skirts as though expecting an invasion of fleas.

  ‘What’ll you have?’ I asked.

  ‘Er . . . and what’ll you be having?’

  ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Order anything you like.’

  He scanned the menu, holding it upside down with the assurance of a regular customer who feels duty-bound to check the plat du jour.

  ‘Steak and chips!’ he said.

  The waitress stopped chewing the butt of her pencil and aimed a long-suffering glance at the secretaries.

  ‘Rump or sirloin?’ she asked.

  ‘As you like,’ he said.

  ‘Two sirloins,’ I said. ‘One medium. One medium-rare.’

  He slaked his thirst with a beer, but his mind was mesmerised by the thought of food and dribbles of saliva appeared at the corner of his mouth.

  I knew that tramps are systematic in their methods of scavenging, and will return again and again to a favourite set of dustbins. What, I asked him, was his method with the London clubs?

  He thought for a moment and said the best bet was always the Athenaeum. There were still religious gentlemen among its members.

  ‘Yes,’ he ruminated. ‘You can usually bum a bob off a Bishop.’

  The next best, in the old days, used to be the Travellers’. Those gentlemen, like himself, had seen the world.

  ‘A meeting of minds, you might say,’ he said. ‘But nowadays . . . no . . . no.’

  The Travellers’ was not what it was. Taken over by another class of persons.

  ‘Advertising people,’ he said grimly. ‘Very tight, I can assure you.’

  He added that Brooks’s, Boodle’s and White’s all fell into the same category. High risk! Generosity . . . or nothing!

  His steak, when it came, completely inhibited his powers of conversation. He attacked it with dull ferocity, raised the plate to his face, licked off the juices, and then, remembering where he was, set it back on the table.

  ‘Have another?’ I said.

  ‘I wouldn’t say no, guv’nor,’ he said. ‘Very civil of you!’

  I ordered a second steak, and he launched into his life story. It was worth it. The tale, as it expanded, was exactly what I wanted to hear: the croft in County Galway, the mother’s death, Liverpool, the Atlantic, the meat-yards in Chicago, Australia, the Depression, the South Sea Islands . . .

  ‘Oooh! That’s the place for you, my boy! Ta-hiti! Va-hines!’

  He laid his tongue along his lower lip.

  ‘Vahines!’ he repeated. ‘That’s the word for women . . . Oooh! Love-ely! Did it standing up under a waterfall!’

  The secretaries called for the bill and left. I looked up and saw the thick jowls of the head waiter, who eyed us with a hostile stare. I was afraid we were going to get kicked out.

  ‘Now,’ I said, ‘I’d like to know something else.’

  ‘Yes, guv’nor,’ he said. ‘All ears.’

  ‘Would you ever go back to Ireland?’

  ‘No,’ he closed his eyes. ‘No, I wouldn’t care to. Too many bad memories.’

  ‘Well, do you think of anywhere as “home”?’

  ‘I most certainly do,’ he jerked his head back and grinned. ‘The Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Ever heard o’ that?’

  ‘I have,’ I said.

  One summer night on the Promenade, he had engaged a well-spoken French gentleman in conversation. For an hour they had discussed the world situation, in English. The gentleman had then unfolded from his wallet a 10,000 franc note – ‘The old francs, mind you!’ – and, after handing him his card, had wished him a pleasant stay.

  ‘Bloody Hell!’ he shouted. ‘He was the Chief of Police!’

  He had tried, whenever possible, to revisit the scene of this, the most moving moment of his career.

  ‘Yes,’ he chuckled. ‘I bummed the Chief of Police . . . in Nice!’

  The restaurant was now less crowded. I ordered him a double helping of apple pie. He declined a cup of coffee which, he said, made his tummy feel poorly. He belched. I paid.

  ‘Thank you, Sir,’ he said, with the air of an interviewee who has a string of afternoon engagements. ‘I hope I have been of assistance.’

  ‘You certainly have,’ I thanked him.

  He got to his feet, but sat down again and stared at me intently. Having described the externals of his life, he was not going to go without some comment on its inner motivation.

  He then said, slowly and with great seriousness:

  ‘It’s like the tides was pulling you along the highway. I’m like the Arctic tern, guv’nor. That’s a bird. A beautiful white bird what flies from the North Pole to the South Pole and back again.’

  36

  IT RAINED AGAIN in the night and in the morning, when I looked out of the window, the sun was up and clouds of purple vapour appeared to be peeling off the flank of Mount Liebler.

  At ten, Rolf and I went over to look for Limpy. A message had come from Arkady, three weeks overdue, to expect him on the mail-plane. It was important . . . repeat, ‘very important’ that Limpy and Titus were available.

  The medicinal smell from eucalyptus fir
es drifted across the valley. The dog howled at our approach. People were drying their blankets.

  ‘Limpy?’ Rolf called, and a faint voice echoed from a ramshackle caravan some way uphill.

  ‘So that’s where they are!’ he said.

  The caravan had been optimistically painted with the words ‘Recreation Centre’. It contained a wobbly ping-pong table, minus the net, which was covered with a film of red dust.

  The three grand old men were sitting on the floor: Limpy, Alex and Joshua – in hats. Limpy had on a stetson, Joshua, a Yankee baseball cap, and Alex wore a magnificent frayed-out bushwhacker.

  ‘Is Titus out at the bore?’ Rolf asked.

  ‘Sure he’s there!’ said Limpy.

  ‘He’s not going anywhere?’

  ‘Nah!’ he shook his head. ‘Stay right there.’

  ‘How d’you know?’ Rolf asked.

  ‘I know,’ said Limpy, and brought the conversation to an end.

  Rolf told me earlier that Alex owned one of the pearl oyster-shell pendants from the Timor Sea, which had been traded across Australia from time immemorial. They were used in rain-making ceremonies: Alex’s had plainly done its work for this year. He then surprised us by plunging his hand between the buttons of the velvet coat and pulled out the pendant on the end of a string.

  It was engraved with a zigzag meander pattern, rubbed with red ochre: it must have been dangling between his legs.

  Superficially, these pendants resemble a tjuringa; but, as far as strangers are concerned, they are not necessarily secret.