by Paul Theroux
I had almost persuaded myself that I was conditioned to starvation, indifferent to it. After all, I had been hungry for weeks … Certainly I thought and talked incessantly of food, but as a prisoner talks of freedom, for I realized that the joints of meat, the piles of rice, and the bowls of steaming gravy which tantalized me could have no reality outside my mind …
For the first day my hunger was only a more insistent feeling of familiar emptiness; something which, like a toothache, I could partly overcome by an effort of will. I woke in the grey dawn craving for food, but by lying on my stomach and pressing down I could achieve a semblance of relief …
I faced another night, and the nights were worse than the days. Now I was cold and could not even sleep except in snatches …
In the morning I watched Mikhail turn the camels out to graze, and as they shuffled off, spared for a while from the toil which we imposed upon them, I found I could only think of them as food. I was glad when they were out of sight … I lay with my eyes shut, insisting to myself, “If I were in London I would give anything to be here” … No, I would rather be here starving as I was than sitting in a chair, replete with food, listening to the wireless, and dependent upon cars to take me through Arabia. I clung desperately to this conviction. It seemed infinitely important. Even to doubt it was to admit defeat, to forswear everything to which I held.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard: The Worst Journey in the World (1922)
CHERRY-GARRARD WAS ONLY twenty-four when he joined Robert Falcon Scott’s Antarctic expedition in 1910. Scott and four of his men died on the way back from the pole. But before that, in the winter of 1911, Cherry-Garrard trudged through the polar darkness and cold (minus 79°F) to find a rookery of emperor penguins. This was “the Worst Journey”. After returning to Britain Cherry-Garrard fought in World War I at the Battle of the Somme, where almost a million men died. But he said, “The Somme was a relative picnic compared to the Antarctic.” He also said, “Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion.”
In this magnificent book, in a chapter titled “Never Again”, he wrote:
And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing; if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, “What’s the use?” For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin’s egg.
Jon Krakauer: Into Thin Air (1999)
IN THE SPRING of 1996, Jon Krakauer, forty-two, on an assignment for Outside magazine, joined a guided expedition to Mount Everest. Just a story about guided climbing, but he found himself in the deadliest Everest season since climbing began there seventy-five years before, on Sagarmatha, Mother Goddess of the World.
Like all ordeal books, this one contains many lessons. The central issue is that you can buy your way up Everest, but to what extent is the hubristic motive in guided climbing an invitation to disaster? A person pays $70,000 (the going rate in 1996) to an expert, on the understanding that the client will successfully reach the summit. The client may be reasonably fit and experienced, or may be (as some clients Krakauer describes) first-timers at high altitudes, with a minimum of know-how. In the latter case, the client might be “short-roped” and yanked up the mountain, photographed at the top, and then dragged down.
Krakauer had dreamed from childhood of climbing Everest, yet was new to bottled oxygen, new to the Himalayas, and had never been anywhere near this height (29,000 feet). But he followed instructions, acclimatized himself, practised for weeks in workout climbs from base camp, and finally made it to the top. During his descent, he suffered from hypoxia, hallucinations, extreme fatigue, and cold.
The story could have ended there. But there were many others on the mountain (he lists sixteen teams, two of them with more than twenty guides, clients, and sherpas), impatient to get to the top. So Krakauer’s difficult but successful climb was only the beginning of the ordeal.
As Krakauer descended, twenty people lined up to climb the narrow ridges that led to the summit. Like Krakauer, they were worn down by oxygen deprivation, disorientation, hunger, thirst, and fatigue— and a storm was approaching. The climbers, undeterred, running late, pushed for the top; and in the thunderstorm that hit, accompanied by lightning, high winds, and blinding snow, chaos ensued. In the cold and the blowing snow, climbers got lost, fell, froze, hesitated, and panicked. Some guides stood by their clients, others abandoned them.
“With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill,” Rob Hall, one of the guides, had told his clients early on. “The trick is to get back down alive.” Struggling to save a faltering client, Hall died on the mountain, and so did the client, and ten others.
Everest does not inspire prudent people to climb its flanks, Krakauer writes: “Unfortunately, the sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger as well. This forms the nub of a dilemma that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you are too driven, you’re likely to die. Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses.”
William Burroughs: The Yage Letters (1963)
DOES THE BURROUGHS book belong here? I think so, as the narrative of a comic ordeal. These funny, informative, even scabrous letters, written to Allen Ginsberg, his lover at the time, were sent from various places in Latin America — Panama, Colombia, and Peru — and seem to be dispatches from a distant land. But I see them as mad memoranda, the ordeal of a man going in ever-narrowing circles. Burroughs hates travel, he hates foreigners, he mocks them unmercifully. What he craves is the ultimate high, and hearing it is to be found in the drug ayahuasca, a potion made from a jungle vine, he goes in search of it and relates his findings in these letters.
The landscape is insignificant, and the details of the trip — the people, the places — are almost beneath notice. He wants to try this drug; he is a man who needs a particular fix. If there were a progression, a sense of time, a mounting idea of discovery, an episodic enlightenment, this might rank as one of the great books about a quest. But it is deflationary and self-mocking, and he makes light of his ordeal.
“The Upper Amazon jungle has fewer disagreeable features than the Mid-West stateside woods in the summer,” Burroughs writes in a typically dismissive way. And later, “Sure you think it’s romantic at first but wait til you sit there five days onna sore ass sleeping in Indian shacks and eating hoka and some hunka nameless meat like the smoked pancreas of a two-toed sloth.”
Burroughs did find the ayahuasca, and he had his visions, but the rest of the time he was chasing boys, many of whom (he says) stole from him. He took it in stride. “Trouble is,” he writes in this cheery anti-travel book, “I share with the late Father Flanagan — he of Boys Town — the deep conviction that there is no such thing as a bad boy.”
11
English Travellers on Escaping England
MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT ENGLISH travellers. Why so many? Why do they tend to seek out tropical regions, or the Costa del Sol, or anywhere but England? Even a short residence in England is enough to convince anyone that it is the class system that drives the English to places where class doesn’t matter (as long as you’re a bwana or a sahib). And for those who have status, it is the dreary climate that does the rest, sending the English looking for better weather. Generally, the history of English travel is
the history of people in search of sunshine. D. H. Lawrence was unequivocal, and so was Robert Louis Stevenson, but the rest tend not to admit it.
At the beginning of her Travels in West Africa (1897), Mary Kingsley summed up the hypocrisy of such travellers: “If you were to take many of the men [in Africa] who most energetically assert that they wish they were home in England, ‘and see if they would ever come to the etc., etc., place again’, and if you were to bring them home, and let them stay there a little while, I am pretty sure that — in the absence of attractions other than those of merely being home in England, notwithstanding its glorious joys of omnibuses, underground railways, and evening newspapers — these same men, in terms varying with individual cases, will be found sneaking back apologetically to the [African] Coast.”
Here are seven travellers who made no bones about it.
Lady Hester Stanhope: Toward the end of her life, in her house in Djoun (in present-day Lebanon, where she lived for twenty-three years), she was visited by the English painter William Bartlett, who wrote, “She conducted us to an arbour in the gardens, quite English in appearance. I made this observation, when she replied, ‘Oh, don’t say so; I hate everything English’” (James C. Simmons, Passionate Pilgrims, 1987).
D. H. Lawrence: From wartime Sussex, April 30, 1915: “How dark my soul is! I stumble and grope and don’t get much further. I suppose it must be so. All the beauty and light of the days seems [sic] like a [sic] iridescence on a very black flood … I wish I were going to Thibet — or Kamschatka — or Tahiti — to the Ultima ultima ultima Thule. I feel sometimes, I shall go mad, because there is nowhere to go, no ‘new world’. One of these days, unless I watch myself, I shall be departing in some rash fashion, to some foolish place” (Letters, vol. 2, 1913–1916, edited by George Zytaruk and James Boulton, 1981).
T. E. Lawrence: “We export two chief kinds of Englishmen,” he wrote in the Introduction to Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta,
who in foreign parts divide themselves into two opposed classes. Some feel deeply the influence of native people, and try to adjust themselves to its atmosphere and spirit. To fit themselves modestly into the picture they suppress all in them that would be discordant with local habits and colours. They imitate the native, and so avoid friction in their daily life. However, they cannot avoid the consequences of imitation, a hollow, worthless thing. They are like the people but not of the people, and their half-perceptible differences give them a sham influence often greater than their merit. They urge the people among whom they live into strange, unnatural courses by imitating them so well that they are imitated back again.
The other class of Englishmen is the larger class. In the same circumstances of exile they reinforce their character by memories of the life they have left. In reaction against foreign surroundings they take refuge in the England that was theirs. They assert their aloofness, their immunity, the more vividly for their loneliness and weakness. They impress the peoples among whom they live by reaction, by giving them an ensample of the complete Englishman, the foreigner intact.
Doughty is a great member of the second, the cleaner class.
And T. E. Lawrence was a member of the first, the gone-native class.
W. Somerset Maugham: “To me England has been a country where I had obligations that I did not want to fulfil and responsibilities that irked me. I have never felt entirely myself till I had put at least the Channel between my native country and me” (The Summing Up, 1938).
W. H. Auden: “England is terribly provincial — it’s all this family business. I know exactly why Guy Burgess went to Moscow. It wasn’t enough to be queer and a drunk. He had to revolt still more to break away from it all. That’s just what I’ve done by becoming an American citizen … I also find criticism in England very provincial. In the literary world in England, you have to know who’s married to whom, and who’s slept with whom and who hasn’t. It’s a tiny jungle. America’s so much larger. Critics may live in New York, but the writers don’t” (quoted in Charles Osborne, W. H. Auden, 1980).
Gerald Brenan: “It will naturally be asked how I came to make my home in such a remote spot” — the tiny village of Yegen, in the Sierra Nevada of Andalusia, Spain, in 1920. “The shortest explanation would be that I was rebelling against English middle-class life … The England I knew was petrified by class feeling and by rigid conventions, as well as, in my case, poisoned by memories of my public school, so that as soon as the war was over and I was out of uniform I set off to discover new and more breathable atmospheres” (South from Granada, 1957).
Bruce Chatwin: “I’ve decided to leave England. As Richard Burton said: ‘The only country in which I do not feel at home’” (Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin, edited by Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare, 2010).
12
When You’re Strange
A TRAVELLER IS A STRANGER. ONE OF THE delusions of the tourist, usually buffered from reality, is that he or she is a friend and even perhaps a benefactor of the locals. “We’re putting money into the economy,” is a common tourist observation. The traveller, ever the outsider, always moving on, would never say that. “Tourism is a mortal sin,” said the film director Werner Herzog. And yet it is the rough traveller, not the tidy tourist, who confronts — and needs the goodwill of — the native of the land. This is often a recapitulation of a recurrent human event in history that has always fascinated me — First Contact, meeting The Other. The most vivid examples come from the history of exploration and discovery. Usually, First Contact is construed as Columbus meeting his first Arawak and calling him an Indian, because Columbus believed he had reached the coast of India. But consider the opposite: the Arawak meeting a fat little Italian clutching a copy of Marco Polo’s Travels on the deck of a caravel.
In the year of contact, 1778, the Hawaiians believed Captain James Cook to be the god Lono. The Aztecs, in 1517, took the Spaniards to be avatars of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, god of learning and of wind. The polar Inuit assumed that they were the only people in the world, so when they saw their first white stranger, the explorer Sir William Parry, in 1821, they said to him, “Are you from the sun or the moon?”
Until I went to live in Africa, I had not known that most people in the world believe that they are the People, and their language is the Word, and strangers are not fully human — at least not human in the way the People are — nor is a stranger’s language anything but the gabbling of incoherent and inspissated felicities. In most languages, the name of a people means “the Original People”, or simply “the People”. “Inuit” means “the People”, and most Native American names of so-called tribes mean “the People”. For example, the Ojibwe, or Chippewa, call themselves Anishinaabe, “the Original People”, and the Cherokee (the name is not theirs but a Creek word) call themselves Ani Yun Wiya, meaning “Real People”, and Hawaiians refer to themselves as Kanaka Maoli, “Original People”.
As recently as the 1930s, Australian gold prospectors and New Guinea Highlanders encountered each other for the first time. The grasping, world-weary Aussies took the Highlanders to be savages, while the Highlanders, assuming that the Aussies were the ghosts of their own dead ancestors, on a visit, felt a kinship and gave them food, thinking (as they reported later), “They are like people you see in a dream.” But the Australians were looking for gold and killed the Highlanders who were uncooperative. The Lakota, who called white men washichus, Nathaniel Philbrick writes in The Last Stand, “believed that the first white men had come from the sea, which they called mniwoncha, meaning ‘water all over’.” In an echo of this accurate characterization, and at about the same time, the historian Fernand Braudel tells us, “To West Africans, the white men were murdele, men from the sea.”
Otherness can be like an illness; being a stranger can be analogous to experiencing a form of madness — those same intimations of the unreal and the irrational, when everything that has been familiar is stripped aw
ay.
It is hard to be a stranger. A traveller has no power, no influence, no known identity. That is why a traveller needs optimism and heart, because without confidence travel is misery. Generally, the traveller is anonymous, ignorant, easy to deceive, at the mercy of the people he or she travels among. The traveller might be known as “the American” or “the Foreigner”, and there is no power in that.
A traveller is often conspicuous, and consequently is vulnerable. But in my travelling, I whistled in the dark and assumed all would be well. I depended on people being civil and observing a few basic rules. I did not expect preferential treatment. I did not care about power or respectability. This was the condition of a liberated soul, of course, but also the condition of a bum.
Among the Batelela in the Sankuru region of central Congo the word for stranger is ongendagenda. It is also one of the most common names for a male child. The reasoning is that when a child is born — and males matter most among the Batelela — he appears from nowhere and is unknown, so he is usually called Stranger, and this name stays with him throughout his life — Stranger is the “John” of the Sankuru region.