The Ends of the Earth

by Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;

  The two pillars were reputed to hold up the sky. But what did that mean? As Grillparzer once said, ‘If anyone believed that trees were there to support the sky, then they’d all strike him as being too short.’

  The Pillars of Hercules are also mentioned in one of Pindar’s Odes, and in the Book of Job; the verse where God is setting the limits of the oceans run:

  ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further/ And here shall thy proud waves be stayed.’

  After all her research into prophesies about the end of the world, Christa was well acquainted with the myths surrounding the limits of the earth.

  ‘Plato places his Atlantis on the far side of the pillars,’ she said, ‘maybe in order to underline their mythical character.’

  ‘But there were also some authors who thought the pillars were situated in Frisia, or even on Heligoland. They’re pictured on the Spanish coat of arms, and even the two vertical bars in the dollar sign – which was originally a symbol for a Spanish gold weight – are thought to derive from the Pillars of Hercules.’

  ‘But if you say ‘Thus far and no further’,’ Christa objected, ‘then you’ve set a limit, for sure, but at the same time, you’ve drawn everyone’s attention to what might lie beyond that limit. So all you’ve succeeded in doing is making its transgression conceivable, right?’

  ‘More than that, you’ve actually compelled people’s fantasies to focus on the magical act of transgressing the border. In succession, Socrates, Tertullian and Epicures all had the following maxim ascribed to them: Quae supra nos, nihil ad nos: “What lies above us does not concern us”.’

  ‘So, that effectively made the geographical boundary of the perceptible world also the boundary of our perception.’

  ‘A frontier for all curiosity,’ I say.

  We were drawing near to Gibraltar and to our crossing to Tangier, to that multilingual, multifaceted, multi-ethnic city. But dusk settled so pinkly over the southernmost province of Spain that we couldn’t help getting off the train once more. This was our fifth day on the move. The hotel, an old half-timbered postal guesthouse with heavy dark beams in the bedrooms, was located at the head of the marketplace. I leant out of the window. My eye was drawn to a woman down on the square. At first I couldn’t work out why, then it suddenly struck me: she was the only one sauntering along.

  The following midday saw us standing on the Rock of Gibraltar, in sight of the African continent. The small site on the peak, which was once the haunt of fishermen, hermits and clovenhoofed animals, was now fated to belong on the itinerary of international day trippers, and consists of a monument with a sea view. The monument itself is a cheap bit of ground cover and has spread to take over the peak of the hill so completely that you can only catch occasional glimpses of the original limestone bedrock among the gaudy plastic, the painted corrugated iron and the woven folk art souvenirs. Pity, it would be a sight to behold. But even the sea breaking against the base of the monument has once more taken on the dingy colour of an embroidered sofa cushion.

  Travellers from all four corners of the earth come to Gibraltar and pay an entrance fee to visit the nature reserve on the eastern slope of the rock, or go to the western side to scoop up souvenirs. Finally, they like to abandon themselves to the universal human satiety with material goods that can set in when you sit yourself down in a chair facing the sea. And as the Apocalyptic Horseman of Boredom ascends the cloudless sky, in the mass catering establishments stomach and bowel upsets begin to stir into life thousands of times over; the tourist sneaks out to acquire himself a souvenir that will remind him of nothing except the purchase of said souvenir, a little ship, say, emblazoned with the buyer’s name; or a doll in national costume; or a stuffed Barbary ape; or a wind-up matador, who moves across the ground like creeping constipation. Yes, Gibraltar is a place where the souvenirs either remind you of themselves or of failed attempts to disappear.

  In the glaring midday light, then, we really are standing on the legendary rock itself and looking at the coast of Africa, just a couple of kilometres away, at the far side of the Ne plus ultra, and experiencing our freedom. Ancient man did not dare venture any further here. A borderline had been drawn, a ban imposed on the almost sinful yearning to set foot on virgin territory. More than this, a warning had been issued against the bold ambition of seeking to shoulder the attendant risk. After all, beyond this frontier, all manner of unforeseen categories of danger might be lurking.

  In this moment it felt as though my journey, which had begun in Tokyo, had reached its end. But this destination had shifted, not unlike that change that also overtook journeys in the past: formerly, a traveller’s inquisitiveness was characterized by an unfocussed desire for knowledge, the urge to follow a scent without really knowing what was leading him on. This, then, was the confident motion of the questioner; confident in that it permitted the questioner to go off on a wild goose chase. Precisely at this borderline to the forbidden, unknown world his thirst for knowledge must have been piqued. Alongside all other dangers, the traveller also has to overcome his scepticism when faced with a welter of pointlessness. Curiosity keeps running up against this. It’s vital that it should turn away from its own self and face the world, even without knowing what it will find. Even so, it can happen that it ultimately broadens the horizon, an achievement pioneered by navigation and astronomy.

  I remembered seeing an image on the title page of a work by Francis Bacon of Odysseus’s ship on the far side of the Pillars of Hercules. Odysseus, whom Dante places on the lowest circle of his Inferno, and who is the only person not to recant his past, appears thereafter as an emblematic figure symbolizing curiosity and exploring beyond the bounds of the known world.

  ‘Fascinating, isn’t it?’

  ‘But that means that the demarcation line of the Ne plus ultra has already been crossed,’ Christa objected.

  ‘Precisely, and that’s why Emperor Charles V’s motto was ‘Plus ultra!’. He did that once it became clear that the Ne plus ultra did not signify the end of the geographical world. So: Plus Ultra!’ I cried once more and clicked my tongue.

  ‘So, this would be the right moment to tell you that I’m going to turn back now,’ she replied, looking at my astonished face like some museum exhibit.

  ‘Run out of curiosity, then?’

  ‘No, you exhausted it for me. But don’t take it personally.’

  A few hours later, she was on the train back to Madrid, where she could stay the night with friends. I walked her to the platform, where we gallantly kissed each other goodbye on the mouth, so as not to bring it all to too tame an end. The next day I left the Pillars of Hercules behind, crossed to Tangier and set foot in the world beyond all on my own. But it was only when I heard Julio Iglesias singing in the lift of the hotel there that sadness overtook me. There’s no Ne plus ultra. It’s impossible to leave the known world behind.

  The Himalayas

  In the Fog of the Prithvi Highway

  Today the clouds were no less of an imposing sight than the mountains. Staring at them, I chilled out in my hotel room until I got hungry. But by that time it was four in the morning, the whole place was asleep, and I had to grope my way down the corridors. At half past six, a woman staggered out of the lift into my path, giddy from the fumes of insect spray. I held her in my arms for a moment. It was clear we only felt so euphoric in that instant because the smell of the insect repellent was so overwhelming.

  Then came that brief early morning flurry of activity: the sound of splashing water, the rasp of twig brooms on the pavement, the cawing of crows and the shuffle of flip-flops on stone floors. An old man rambling away to himself, and the exuberant twitter of birds in the hedgerows. The hotel owner comes out into the garden and surveys his domain. Suddenly, he spots the guest sitting in the courtyard sipping his coffee. Faced with the choice of saying nothing or initiating a pointless little morning conversation, he opts for initiating a pointless little morning conversation.

  ‘How are you tod
ay?’

  Fact is, the air-conditioning unit exhaled a damp, muggy stream of air over the bed, all the while emitting a loud rattle that sounded like its housing was about to fall off. The light bulb cast a dim glow. The mattress was resting on a slat that had been broken twice already, while the duvet seemed to be filled with an assortment of rags. The unwashed synthetic bedsheet alone attracted swarms of mosquitoes. Sleep was out of the question.

  ‘Thank you, fine.’

  Kathmandu waits behind the Himalayas’ back. This city derives its aura not from its own interior, but primarily from the presence of the mountains that surround it. It’s a city in the shadows, a collection of dwellings tolerated by nature, as provisional as it is cultic, and all the while gazing at the presence of a higher being. Provisional because what is its architecture when measured against that of a rocky massif? And cultic because the power of nature is ever present as both a sensual and spiritual dimension. The clay brick buildings are surrounded by bamboo scaffolding, with steps running up the external façades. Everything is multilayered, ambiguous, with rooms behind other rooms, shading off into the hidden and the secret. And in stolen glances from behind barred windows, questions brood over the dust-shrouded street.

  The façades sweat out this dust like the perspiration of the overheated planet. People flood from the villages into these walls. Representatives of fifty ethnicities, some of them already dying out, come here to eke out a living. They bring monkeys with them and bales of cloth on their handcarts. Leaning against the rusty iron stanchions supporting the bamboo scaffolds, the women – with their olive-skinned complexions, black mothers’ mouths, and colour-saturated saris – peddle deep-fried snacks and mouldy fermented drinks, specialities of their native regions. A beggar woman supporting herself on crutches, haggles up the price. Behind the bars of the windows, faces appear and disappear; there are silent witnesses all around.

  The heart of the city is a temple complex that sprawls over the entire centre. The frowsty odour given off when doves flap their wings fills the air; it smells of dusty fur. Now and again there’s the sound of a bell, a tinkling noise piercing the haze like some memento mori. Then comes the shuffle of the women in their flip-flops, and chanting and murmuring.

  The roof supports, the carved skeletons of the houses, rear up palely above the street. This could be a model village, a film set or an open-air museum, but in actual fact it’s a living environment: people dwell in the temples and fill the spaces between them with markets. They’re the haunts of the soothsayers and beggars. From a chain of buckets hanging from a swaying bamboo scaffold, workers lob up onto the roofs clods made from a mixture of clay and elephant dung, where they are used to hold the tiles in place. At the foot of the scaffold sits a man blowing a flute, while another’s staring fixedly out from behind a barred window, the lover in the crickets’ cage. All around, houses are being put up, top-heavy and labyrinthine, like someone’s trying to recreate Schloß Neuschwanstein, with all these pointed roofs groaning with gables, pillars, oriels, friezes, grilles, lunettes and curlicues.

  A country’s character can also be represented through its relationship to what’s secret and hidden, be it in its pomp and circumstance, its rituals, its architecture or in relations between people. Here, I can only ever penetrate just a few centimetres into the dark looks of the women with their golden jewellery. Beyond this, everything grows black. No, I can’t even understand what keeps these people rooted to the earth or why they keep their eyes fixed on the heavens. The beautiful old ladies in their shawls gob out the red juice of the betel nuts onto the ground – just one more colour – and the beggars keep rattling their empty tin bowls as though trying to prove that hunger really exists.

  Already, hundreds of bright plastic containers had been placed right outside the temple to the white rain god: that was how soon they were expecting him, in the form of the longawaited monsoon. The rainy season had begun once already, a few weeks ago. The farmers rushed to buy their seed in at inflated prices, so great was the demand, and prepared their fields – only then to look on helplessly as everything shrivelled and died when the monsoon suddenly and capriciously stopped. Now lots of farmers don’t have the wherewithal for a second sowing.

  The mugginess gets trapped between the walls. The women sway like lanterns at an open window, a man goes by carrying three flower-pattern pillows on his shoulders, and rouged children clutch with painted hands at the milk-white complexions of the women. Where everything is bizarre, it’s perfectly possible for the bizarre to seem unremarkable.

  With its temple complexes, flights of steps, bridges, canals, hearths, and stepped pagodas, the Hindu shrine at Pashupatinath is a sacred site of solemn ritual. The smoke that rises up from the cremation of the dead drifts over the site, colouring and impregnating the air. That taste on your tongue is the sweet, smoky tang of cadaver.

  There are six of us, a mixed party of aid organization workers and their local guides, and when we realize what we’re breathing in and suddenly clasp handkerchiefs to our mouths, the sadhus smirk at us from the pagodas, conscious of their photogenic attractiveness, but at the same time as decadent and spoilt as the little monkeys that run through the maze of alleys in the temple area, constantly preening themselves.

  Hanuman Baba is also sitting there, dressed in glowing orange. He’s now 103, the oldest of the local ascetics. But the money that tourists give him in return for taking a photo is usually snatched away by the younger, more worldly sadhus.

  ‘No matter, I have no need of it,’ he’ll say, and as the only truly selfless person among profiteers, he really does mean it.

  As we’re talking, plumes of smoke, sometimes light blue, sometimes darker, billow up from the cremations taking place in the background as the flames lick around some body fat or gnaw on a bone. Hanuman Baba’s been sitting here long enough that he can read every different wisp of smoke as it wafts its way up to heaven. He’s been living like this for the past fifty-five years, the last sixteen of them in the four square metres of his tabernacle, smoking hash and praying, for nowhere, he claims, can he find such inner peace as here.

  ‘What good do your prayers do?’

  ‘I see everything when I’m praying. Some things are hard to make out and sometimes I see things that have long since passed. The best things I’ve ever experienced have been in my dreams.’

  ‘Were you always like this?’

  ‘No, I was quite different once. But when I was fifteen, I saw a dead boy. That’s when it dawned on me: children are something man-made and material, too. The soul’s a different matter, though. So I wanted to get away from this life of corporeal things.’

  The eccentric seer: looking at the dead boy, he realizes that he’s man-made, born from flesh into flesh. In his former life, everywhere he looks all he can see are material things. And what about beauty, grace and harmony? But where the eye can see nothing, namely in the soul, there he recognizes something divine, and now he can see it in a breath, a mere exhalation; the man’s a positive Neoplatonist.

  ‘So did you have an epiphany?’

  ‘A conversation. In the Indian town of Assam I had a conver-sation with God.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘People warned me not to go to that place. They said a spirit lived there. But there are good and evil spirits, so I told them: Why shouldn’t I go there, maybe it’s a good spirit? So I did just that, and settled down to pray. Suddenly there was this noise, and a voice said: You can stop praying now, your prayers have been heard. I opened my eyes, but there was nothing there, nothing in the undergrowth. I could only see God with my eyes closed. That’s when I realized: I have to be there for God. That’s the most important thing of all. And ever since I’ve been living like this.’

  And saying this, he screws up his eyes like they’ve seen something disgraceful, beyond the realm of appearances. You can’t tell on what plane of phenomena this old man’s gaze is resting.

  ‘Do you see evil things, too
?’

  ‘When I’m at prayer, I’m in a kind of force field. Evil things can’t penetrate it, but I can see them. I see demons who bring death and pain. They frighten me. But I cling to the truth. It stops me from being intimidated.’

  All religions recognize this state of higher truth, of grace, of ‘vision’, yet it appears as some egocentric phenomenon, and is celebrated within the confines of the self; it seems the stairway to heaven is peopled with nothing but soloists.

  ‘Does the state of the world concern you?’

  ‘Yes, it really does. I pray for its happiness. I’ve dedicated my life and my soul to that end. But the soul is not just resident here in my body. It moves around, it can even fly – and it sees everything.’

  ‘Is your soul younger or older than your body?’

  ‘You can’t call a soul “younger” or “older”. It just is. That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘Have you foreseen the end of the world?’

  ‘I’m afraid that the end is drawing nigh. But if people would only listen to their souls, things would be different. After all, the demons find it hard destroying us, because we have the power of prayer.’

  ‘So you’re at war with the demons?’

  ‘Yes, I’m trying to multiply our defences against the demons.’

  Looking at him, at those impassive eyes, at his economy of expressions and gestures, at his diffident smile that seeps off into his face and trickles away somewhere, I’m thinking: all our questions to him have just as far to travel to get an answer.

  ‘You’re a wise man, so tell me: how should I lead my life from now on?’

  ‘We are nothing, mere bodies. The rest belongs to God. If we plant something in this field, we have no way of knowing what we’ll reap. Which plant will wither, or which will yield more than we expected. That’s why we should just focus on the here and now.’