Voyager

by Russell Banks

  Seychelles, with just under seventy thousand people, is a micronation. Most of its citizens reside on the main island of Mahé and live and work in Victoria, the world’s smallest capital, a town, really, of fewer than thirty thousand. The 115 islands that make up Seychelles are scattered over 150,000 square miles of ocean; altogether they provide only 171.4 square miles of dry land. Mahé, the largest island in the group, is shaped like a bright green bow tie, about seventeen miles long and five wide with a spine of mountains running north and south and hundreds of cays and bays and tiny offshore islets. In the distance, as the plane landed, I could make out the profiles of several of the larger outlying islands—Praslin and La Digue and the mysterious Silhouette.

  I passed quickly through customs, and a short while later—after visiting a bank, a car-rental agency, and the Seychelles Tourist Office in downtown Victoria for pamphlets, maps, and trail guides—reconnoitered over a couple of SeyBrews, the excellent local beer, at the Pirates Arms. The café, a clean, well-lighted place with slow-turning overhead fans, was open to the busy street, a central spot where you can sit in the late afternoon and watch the small world of Victoria go by.

  Something happens when you have passed over one ocean, a large sea, three continents, and then traveled a thousand miles into a second ocean. You realize that you have gone to where no one can reach you. The past is spatially so far behind you that your future, the rest of your life, seems for a moment entirely of your own making. You briefly feel that you can invent your destiny. All too easily, you can imagine becoming a permanent expatriate.

  The denizens of the Pirates Arms were a heterogeneous mix of locals and tourists and a miscellany of Europeans and North Americans who looked like international adventurers or people who wanted one to think that that’s what they were. Retired CIA operatives and out-of-work soldiers of fortune and treasure hunters and smugglers—that sort of exotica. More likely, they were upscale vagrants and expatriates hiding behind their designer sunglasses from no one but themselves. But in a seaside international-crossroads town like this, one never knew.

  Posters on walls and huge orange-and-black banners strung across the streets proclaimed the presence of something called THE INDIAN OCEAN OIL PRODUCERS SEMINAR and kept me conscious of where I’d landed. But it wasn’t easy. The flavor of the town of Victoria was not quite Caribbean, though a lot of that (the neocolonial architecture, the cruise ship in the harbor); and not quite coastal East African, though some of that, too (the relentless equatorial heat and light and the easy, ancient blend of African, Indian, Asian, Arab, and European complexions and features); not Mediterranean, either, but somewhat (especially the sight of young, hip couples on lavish holiday smoking Gauloises and pouting over menus). Victoria was the country cousin to old Beirut, maybe, where histories and races and languages and cultures mingled indiscriminately. There were scattered pairs of pale tourists wearing clothes from Kanye West’s closet, and I noticed flocks of attractive local women, young, black, tan, and white women in chic blouses and skirts and high heels. I started to wonder if I myself, with a new pair of sunglasses, might not pass as exotic.

  I’d taken a room at the Northolme, near the village of Glacis. Stuck on a high seaside point on the northwest side of the island, it was one of the oldest hotels on Mahé, small and quiet with soothing views of the mountainous coast to the south and the sea to the west, a good place to use as a base for my peripatetic operations. Compton Mackenzie, Ian Fleming, and Alec Waugh had stayed there, which seemed recommendation enough. It was a bit too bourgeois, perhaps, for Graham Greene, but fine for me. The rooms were large and airy, and there was a small cove below the dining room where one could take a morning swim. Above all, the place was quiet—a quarter mile off the road that wound uphill from nearby Beau Vallon, with its long beach and string of bars, restaurants, and shops.

  Waking early the next morning, six thirty, on a biological clock that was eleven and a half hours earlier than my watch—or twelve and a half later, I couldn’t decide which—I went out for an hour’s walk along the road into Glacis, and the astonishing natural beauty of the island suddenly came home to me. This was how I imagine the Caribbean looked before it was discovered by tourism, the northeast coast of Jamaica before Errol Flynn sailed into Port Antonio. Kids were walking to school, fishermen were going out and coming back in small red pirogues, while beautiful young men and women waited for lumbering old buses to carry them to their jobs in town. Everywhere I looked, there were birds and glistening spiderwebs and morning glories and flamboyants and flowering trees—such an abundance of natural beauty that it almost frightened me. And it all came wrapped in endless, dense birdsong. I was hot and sweating in minutes, even this early in the day, and remembered that Seychelles is equatorial, whereas most of the Caribbean is merely subtropical.

  Back at the Northolme, the sole diner at breakfast in the large open-air restaurant, I watched Silhouette Island twelve miles to the west glow like a hot coal in the morning sunlight and listened to the surf explode against the huge slabs of red rock below, rocks that seemed natural to the coast of Maine or Nova Scotia, not the tropics. Blue-throated sunbirds and scarlet Madagascar fodies sang and darted through the trees, while down on the leaf-covered ground turtledoves chuckled and cooed, and out on the water terns and gulls cruised past in calligraphic arcs and swirls. I’d spent years traveling in the Caribbean, and compulsively, automatically, I kept comparing this place with that place, these people with those—but Seychelles was different somehow, different in ways that mattered. I couldn’t say how yet. It was a secret I knew existed but hadn’t been told.

  I had signed up the evening before for a demonstration scuba dive with a local dive master, Rick Howatson, a fast-talking, witty, barrel-chested Englishman around forty. Rick turned out to have a boat-dive scheduled with “some local bloke who’s getting PADI-qualified,” he explained, so I went out with his second-in-command, Tommy Tirant, a somber, wiry, coffee-colored Seychellois in his late twenties.

  We suited up and like a pair of bipedal frogs clumsily flapped down the long stone stairway to the short, rocky beach below the hotel and entered the water there. Freed of the land, empowered by the sea, we were suddenly graceful as porpoises and swam straight out to the reef, fifty or so yards from shore. Seconds later, we were diving in the reef, parting dense wedges of brilliantly marked and colored fish, hovering above a huge chalk-white manta ray, passing alongside steep Gothic walls of coral.

  The main dangers to divers and snorkelers in Seychelles are sea urchins, scorpion fish, and stonefish, the worst being the stonefish because it looks like a stone, not a fish. The others look as dangerous as they are and consequently are not so dangerous. There are at least two hundred species of fish in Seychelles waters, and first Tommy and then I passed through clouds of them: bright yellow and blue damselfish, striped sergeant majors, parrot fish grinding coral to sand, batfish, pipefish. And of the 150 species of coral, we saw brain coral and fan coral and mushroom coral that, growing an inch a year, require ten centuries to grow thirty-three feet. When you dive you fall through time; you watch eons pass before you.

  I had done a lot of snorkeling in the Caribbean and a little scuba, but I still felt fearful, especially at first, dropping down into this foreign, unknown world where surprising and dangerous thoughts could sweep over me and put me in serious physical danger. The warm, silent, shimmering undersea, like a deep dream of infancy, was seductive, inviting me to let go and descend still farther. I struggled with alternating fearful and soothing visions of the netherworld, gradually calming myself down, while Tommy swam ahead through beautiful blades of pale light, urging me to follow his disciplined lead, waving me back into line.

  Too soon, of course, the dive ended, and when we’d staggered back to the dive shack, unloaded tanks, weight belts, fins, and masks and became human again, Rick showed up, accompanied by his grinning, dripping, newly qualified diver, and gave me the hard sell for the full course. No time, I explained.
I was here to hike and see the country all over. Rick said fine and introduced me to the other man, Steve Ambrose—like him, British. Steve managed the casino at the Beau Vallon Bay Hotel just down the road. We chatted awhile and parted amiably, and I changed and headed into town in my rented Mini Moke, an open, low-slung, jeeplike car that, because of the narrow, winding mountainside roads, was the best means of transport on Mahé.

  Later that day, I wandered into the botanical gardens, a short way south of Victoria. Visiting a botanical garden is an easy and pleasant way to learn the names and faces of the local flora fast, and Seychelles has an especially elaborate flora, most of it unfamiliar to me. The garden was large, sprawling, with paths that looped through dense groves of cinnamon, jackfruit, clove trees, and sandragon, past stands of palm trees, huge ferns, mahogany, tacamahac, and white flowering begonia trees. And all the while, of course, there was that envelope of birdsong.

  Almost no other people were here, but deep inside the gardens, I ran into two mustachioed, dark-haired young men, Malaysians working as advisers to the Ministry of Agriculture. They were agronomists, they told me. They were gathering up prickly, dark green fruits that had fallen from a tall, broad-leaved tree. It was a durian, they said, whose fruit is a delicacy in Malaysia. It was brought over here for the personal pleasure of Sultan Abdullah Khan of Perak and his retinue in 1875.

  Under the British, the islands were used as a minimum-security political prison for generations, with King Prempeh of the Ashanti, Sa’d Zaghlul Pasha of Egypt, and Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus among their more illustrious prisoners. That Seychelles has long been home to exiles, and now expats and foreign advisers, is an important quirk of its history. Situated so far from all known sailing routes between Asian and African ports of call, the islands of Seychelles were among the last in the world to be settled. They were uninhabited, and except for rumored sixteenth-century Portuguese landings, were essentially unknown until the French sailed north in 1742 from their Mauritius colony, established a naval base, and used African slaves to set up a small number of struggling spice plantations in the 1770s. With the Treaty of Paris in 1814, Seychelles passed into British hands, the economy shifted over first to coconut oil and then copra, and the British started importing banished, deposed, and overcome politicians and leaders who had the effrontery to oppose the empire elsewhere. None of the exiles seems to have complained of his time in Seychelles. The last was Afif Didi, sent out in 1963 after leading a secessionist takeover of the southern Maldives. In 1976 Seychelles became an independent nation, and the official exiles ceased coming.

  I tasted the durian. Foul! Like an overripe brie marinated in vinegar. The taste wouldn’t go away. It clung to my palate for hours, and even today, many years later, leaps instantly, viscerally, back to memory. “We even make durian-flavored ice cream!” the Malaysians told me, laughing at my discomfort. “A delicacy!”

  The next day I set out on my first serious hike. I drove out Sans Souci Road from Victoria, past the U.S. embassy, the radio station, the forestry service headquarters, to the trail marker for the mountains called Trois Frères, where I parked the vehicle and began my climb. The trail led through a lovely section of the Morne Seychellois National Park. I found it helpful to have the Trois Frères Trail Guide, which I had purchased earlier in Victoria, and absolutely necessary to carry water, lots of it. The heat and humidity were of an intensity I had never before experienced. It was like climbing in full wet suit. The trail was nicely, intelligently marked and, like Adirondack or Appalachian trails, was deceptively easy at first, then very difficult. For several hours, I clambered up the mountain, crossing wide-open sheets of black granite, passing through fifteen-foot ferns and forests of cottonwood trees, thickets of cinnamon and wild vanilla and pineapple, mahogany groves and sisal, while mynah birds and bulbuls and sunbirds squawked and sang as I crossed below them. Not one person passed me. I was alone.

  After two hours of steady climbing, I reached the top, exhausted, and sat back against a chunk of blue-gray granite. Just as I was about to enjoy the wonderful 360-degree view of the entire island, a heavy white mist moved in, bringing light rain and blocking off the world entirely, and I was suddenly locked inside a small white room. I could have been anywhere; I could have been home in Princeton, New Jersey. Several long, cold, lonely moments passed, and then it suddenly cleared again, and now I saw how far from home I’d come. An Asiatic jungle spread out below, the famous tea plantation, terraced, like Cambodia, and beyond that Morne Blanc and the whole long spiny ridge of mountains all the way to the distant, pale green flatlands of the south. Sooty terns and kestrels and fairy terns cruised along the passes hundreds of feet below my crag. I peered down and saw the town of Victoria and its harbor and the four isles of the Ste. Anne Marine National Park below in the east, with Praslin, Cousin, Round Island, and La Digue farther in the distance near the horizon. I saw the sea as a huge glistening disk, with me situated exactly in its center, the sky a blue celestial bowl above, and the sun a cosmic eye. Propelled out of time, I felt in touch with something ancient and primal that I couldn’t name.

  The geology of most of these islands is as old as Gondwanaland, the mother of continents. They are a Precambrian granitic archipelago believed to have been left behind in midocean when India split off from Africa and headed for its fated collision with Asia. They are the only granite islands in the world not tied to a nearby continental shelf. Despite the palm trees, rain forests, and white sandy beaches, the Mahé group has little resemblance, geologically speaking, to the coral islands of the Lesser Antilles or the volcanic islands of the South Pacific. Here was an island experience of another order, I mused, sitting on my mountaintop.

  Later, after a shaky-legged descent and a long swim and shower at the Northolme, I drove down for a drink at the seaside bar of the Coral Strand Hotel, where sunset watchers off the Beau Vallon beach ritually gathered—the young and the restless, mostly. At the bar I ran into Steve Ambrose, the casino manager I’d met the other day. He came up and saved me from a dreary conversation with a young Australian settled in the south of Mahé, a thoughtful person, perhaps, but basically an idiot. We had been arguing politics. The average Seychellois’s monthly income after taxes is about $400, which the Australian thought was just fine, since they had free health care and free education and food falling off the trees and leaping from the seas into their pots. Never mind that prices for food, clothing, and shelter were about what they are in Westport, Connecticut.

  Steve offered to buy me dinner. We went to a place called La Perle Noire, and as we ate, Steve’s own story came out. He was a working-class Liverpudlian, a guitar-strumming boy who’d done lighting for rock groups. He’d found work early as a croupier in Liverpool, then had signed on for casinos in Baghdad, South Africa, and Liberia, moving up with each job and leaving each country just before war or revolution struck. Except for Las Vegas and Atlantic City, he said, all the casinos in the world are managed by Brits. Must be the way they look in tuxedos, he said and laughed. Adventures in the tropics, Steve went on, had been a hell of a lot more interesting than life in Maggie Thatcher’s England. He knew he was spoiled for normal life forever. Seychelles, especially, will do that to you, he said to me. Be careful, friend.

  Grousing about town the next morning, trying and failing to make arrangements to get across to Silhouette Island, I finally gave it up, and at nine thirty at the Marine Charter dock talked my way aboard a day-trip boat out to the Ste. Anne Marine National Park, an island and underwater reef preserve located at the mouth of the bay a short boat ride from Victoria.

  It was a hotel group, mostly Germans and some Italians, everyone loaded with cameras and video cameras. It cost me $73 for lunch on the beach, drinks, snorkeling, three island stops, fish feeding, and a glass-bottomed-boat tour that turned out to be in a glass-hulled boat, a brand-new Australian-built forty-seater, the Nautilus. The guide, who spoke as if he believed his audience was actually intelligent, which was a relief and a pl
easure, was named Jancy, a smart kid who asked the Germans if they wished him to speak English or French.

  The people of Seychelles, although generally shy and reticent and not at all worldly, seem linguistically gifted. They almost all speak fine French and better English, as well as their native Creole, a language vaguely resembling Haitian Creole but utterly incomprehensible to my ears, and many speak an additional language or two, depending on their off-island travels. The young guide’s ability to move easily, happily, among several European languages, none of which was native to him, was typical.

  The best part of the day trip was the stop at Moyenne Island, owned by Brendon Grimshaw, a man in his late sixties—another British expat, it turned out. Expatriates, most of them British and French, with a few Yanks, seemed to run the country. It’s difficult, if not impossible, for a nation with fewer than seventy thousand people and an economy dependent on tourism, fishing, and agriculture to train its own management.

  Grimshaw ran a small restaurant-bar and guesthouse geared to the party boats from Victoria. Over a cold beer he told me his story. He had been a journalist for the Financial Times of London and had bought his twenty-five-acre island in 1962 for ten thousand pounds. He was a past president of the local Rotary Club and for all intents and purposes a proper businessman, but he was also, like so many of the longtime expats, a rogue who’d settled in, a loud, somewhat theatrical fellow, very bright and energetic and wary. He was an old-time ward heeler whose ward was a tiny tropical islet in a bay, not an urban neighborhood. Like Rick, like Steve, the man had invented a life out here to suit his strange needs exactly. He’d survived thirty years on the island, while political movements and conspiracies and coups and palace revolutions whirled around him.