‘It’s six o’clock. We’re closing.’
In actual fact, it isn’t yet six, but the point is it could get to six and we might fail to make it back here in time. We try to negotiate the non-negotiable. Our rights are forfeited. The man has the tip of an entire continent under his control.
‘But you opened too late this morning. Can’t we simply recoup the time lost then at this end of the day?’
‘No.’
Ultimately, then, this end of the world remains closed off to us. Nevertheless, from a favourable vantage point, at a curve on the road heading west, we caught sight of the fateful promontory. It didn’t appear to have anything in common with the continent; rather, it just seemed to be some kind of knoll on some chance hill, a one-off disclaimer, a belvedere or bella vista, Land’s End and Finisterre. We’d saved ourselves the embarrassment tourists must feel when faced with this vista.
So we pulled over at the curve and experienced the drama of the traveller, who is forced to conclude that nothing really moves him and that he can find no point to his trip and consequently none to his day-to-day working existence either, which he only put up with so he could afford to come on the trip. When speaking about his future, he refers to ‘great expectations’; regarding the weather or the stock market, it’s ‘a fine outlook’; and when describing his illusions, it’s ‘rosy prospects’. But if all these should fail to transpire, he will lapse into black pessimism.
But in one particular context, these ‘prospects’ occur in the singular form: the lovely view, the bella vista. That kind of outlook is genuinely thrilling, which is why guesthouses are often called this, places with fine views of a coastline, or a mountain range, or a tower. The visitor slows down, pauses a while, and feasts his eyes on the view. It tells him that he’s reached the right altitude, precisely the appropriate angle of incidence, and that ‘The Great Whatever’ has only just finished dabbling in nature, his breath still wafting over it. A view, then, is always beautiful when, confronted by it, the viewer feels small; then it becomes sublime, and the viewer is reduced to the status of an insignificant nothing.
Yet the true magic of the moment occurs when an individual’s personal prospects converge with a grandiose view: in such cases, you enjoy the beautiful view over the landscape in a symbolic way. Only by forgetting yourself in the contemplation of such a view can space and time commingle. All of a sudden, the future appears in this panoramic view into the far distance, putting the observer in a peaceful and pious frame of mind. Then he snaps a photo; it captures the view, but never the future.
As a result, there are plenty of travellers who never get further than the first step. They follow their impulse to disappear. But in this façade, they penetrate neither to a state of joy nor to a fulfilment of their own needs, but merely get caught up in photographs, in their own country, in their origins, or in analogies to things they find familiar. And consequently never get away from themselves.
The opposite case is that of the happy person who only truly comes to his senses on the summit, like that man who had climbed all the highest elevations in Europe and responded to my question as to whether he’d also reached high-points of experience in doing so as follows:
Yes, absolutely, with every peak I ascend, however small. I find I’m instilled with a feeling of elitism because I know I’m the only person doing this kind of thing. Mixed with gratitude that I’m able to do so. As I’m approaching a peak, I tell myself that no one can take it away from me, and soon enough, I’m up there on the summit. Then I need at least an hour to celebrate what I can only call a kind of personal act of devotion. Sometimes, I’m overcome by fits of sobbing on peaks that hardly warrant such a reaction, because they’re really nothing special. Then again, I’m nothing special either.
The Cape of Good Hope may be a stubby little promontory, an unimpressive hill, but in truth foreign places everywhere reveal something familiar to the traveller – the sweep of a twig broom over the floor of the railway station, the broken hook on the toilet door, a beam of light with motes of dust dancing in it, or the sight of a person yawning as they read the paper. At the obvious ends of the earth there are often no man’s lands, occupied by shacks. They turn their back on the sight of nothingness and towards the people who wash up here – all those people, all those expectations. Tourists are always looking for a route into the moment that can be authenticated with a souvenir.
‘I’ll take you somewhere where the world really does come to an end,’ Pierre says. ‘It’s called God’s Window, and it’s over in Mpumalanga province in the east, not far from the Kruger National Park.’
So, we set off. Sometimes, the rainforest closes in over the track, while at other times the villages lining the roads sit there like they’re in the savanna. Then again, sometimes the cattle farmers have protected their compounds and huts with palisades against free-roaming big cats, while in other places a steppeland opens up, a landscape of barren, sandy plains dotted with adobe-brick huts exhaling the heat and glare of the sun. The ground is blotchy, like some pigmentation disorder marking the earth’s skin.
We eat on a veranda at a bend in the road. Along with our food, the waiter serves up the following story: a woman gets mauled by a lion while she’s on safari. Her grieving husband sprinkles the corpse with rat poison, so that if the lions return, their hunger will be the death of them.
The roads start climbing again. High above the ‘lowveld’, as the land stretched out one thousand metres below the Panorama Route is known, the ancient primary forests lie stunned and dense. The newly forested islands of trees curl next to the woods like florets of broccoli. At the places where the water plunges into the ravines, the crags with their shattered anatomy soar into the sky like hollowed out vertebrae. But no sooner have you passed such a river bed than the wood is free to stretch out once more and finally make way for fields, and presently nothing is as astonishing as the fact that nature in these idyllic circumstances is really quite nondescript.
The place we have travelled all this way to see ultimately turns out to be a balcony measuring six metres squared, floored with natural stone flagstones and marked off by a balustrade coated with peeling, rusty-orange coloured paint. The balustrade has been put here to prevent the trippers in their brightly patterned leisurewear from plunging into the abyss along with their handbags and binoculars. The fact is that summer visitors, after making the long trek up here, are so entranced by the sight of the abyss that they have to be physically restrained from plummeting to their deaths by wooden posts and crossbeams. Indeed, their behaviour up here in general clearly has less to do with the landscape than with these dark temptations – the only sinister dimension to many a tripper’s life.
So the traveller likes nothing better than to have himself photographed at this dizzying altitude, captured not just in an instant of imperious sovereignty over the panoramic landscape but also striking a self-possessed pose. As if teasing the vertiginous drop, he likes to stand with just one hand resting on the balustrade. At the same time, this lends the pose a studied insouciance, which only serves to heighten the sublime nature of the moment. The man leaning on the balustrade becomes a monument, while his horizons open out into the infinite distance.
‘God’s Window’ is a balcony perched over a steeply plunging ravine, which is around 1,000 metres deep, formed from shining rock walls overgrown in places with vegetation; the ravine is washed with falling spring water and echoes to the sound of chirping crickets and twittering birds. It’s a chasm whose walls seem to be straining towards one another, as though a rock curtain were about to close over the view into the depths, across the woods and streams, and over the distant prospect of Mozambique.
The deciduous trees wear their crowns like umbels and sway gently in the odour of mint. Sprouting directly out of the cliffs, long-stemmed saplings grow askew, teetering precariously as swallows wheel around them. An endless succession of rocky outcrops, covered with climbing plants, stretches into the distance. Li
lies dazzle ostentatiously in white and orange. The branches point, gesticulating into the landscape in which, at least from this elevation, there is not the slightest sign of a human presence. The wind creates a parting in the forest canopy. You could easily imagine you’re standing at the back entrance to the Garden of Eden or some equally inaccessible tract of land where everything is just as it always has been, since time immemorial.
The wood here isn’t just any old ground cover, but rather a living entity, and full of surprises. Right now, the sap-oozing vegetation is filling the air with an aroma of curry and jasmine, followed by the scents of carrion and wet stone. What appeared to us to be a mountain when we were down below, now turns out to be just a hillock, domed like a hand grasping a doorknob, while the arteries of the wood, the streams and rivulets, run off into the distance, growing ever more tiny as they do so. A landscape drama is being played out here, to which humans are just chance observers.
The evening mist descends in swathes on the valley. Then the wind suddenly picks up amid the twitter and shriek of flocks of birds as they pass through a late rust-red shaft of sunlight; briefly illuminated by its glow, they soon vanish above the network of meandering lakes. And the landscape, left to its own devices with its armpit hair, its furrows, warts, clefts and scars, scabby and overgrown as it is, slowly disappears in the darkness.
But then comes the entrance of Fuji dot.com, huge, with its red and green livery, climate control and roaring engine. Its doors hiss open to disgorge its contents: the women chattering like mockingbirds and the men, with their shaved necks and open mouths, already pulling out their cameras.
With my back to this hubbub, I sit on a crag, a thousand metres above the forest, above the ravine where the waters meet and the rock of the cliffs pile up in their different strata. Immense ferns push out into the haze of spray created by the waterfalls. In the gloaming, the great columns of rock facing one another look like sketched, deeply indented bodies. The water gushes down into the valley and washes up and down at the foot of the cliff, as the cries of bats begin to assert themselves over the roar and chirp of the waterfall.
The night nests in the hollows of the rock clefts, where total darkness already reigns, and into which the first animals are withdrawing to sleep. Tinged with yellow and red, the receding hill brows line up in front of their rocky amphitheatre like so many puffballs. Clouds hang over the arena, and shadows play across the rock faces, which are flecked with tenacious sulphur-yellow lichens. Anyone who spends time here, inhabitants and visitors alike, wear this landscape like a poncho. Everyone feels folded in, enclosed, even by the magnetic pull of the abyss. Indeed, the chasm seems to have its own gravitational field, which draws you in inexorably, and which has a single goal: ‘The Void’. Emptiness.
‘Buses Only,’ shouts one of the tour guides, no one knows why, and is answered by staccato bursts of Morse code from the ravens overhead. Down below is a forest that’s still permitted to remain a mystery, where unconquered nature may still spread, and beyond it broods Mozambique.
‘Oh my Lord, this is awesome!’
The first of the coach party set foot on the platform.
‘Oh man, Oh Lord, Oh wow, isn’t this beautiful?’
One of these endomorphs is content just to stand there breathing in the atmosphere. The rest stand around and feel the urge to name the landscape they’re looking at: What’s the name of that mountain, what’s that river called … There then follows a kind of rising chorus of adulation, almost a litany:
‘Oh shit, isn’t this beautiful?’
‘Oh look at this, for Christ’s sake, this is fuckin’ beautiful!’ And they get it all down on film, while clenching the temple arms of their sunglasses in their teeth. Then they have pictures of themselves taken in front of God’s Window.
‘Beautiful background!’
Plumes of smoke drift through the evening air.
‘God’s burning incense,’ says a Swiss woman in German, pausing for a moment to savour the poetry of her metaphor. ‘But why’s this place called God’s Widow?’
Small, shameful settlements lie down in the valley. They have gathered their huts together as though they knew full well that it wasn’t right for them to be there. A washed-out light stagnates in the young plantations. Some tree trunks stand naked on the hillsides or are perched over the abyss. The birds don’t fly up as high as this, but they do rise some way from the valley floor, and we can look down from above on their outer plumage, stretched out perfectly to catch the wind … Seeing here is inhaling, and as the mood takes hold of her, the tour guide with the booming voice steps onto the platform, turns to her group and intones in a fortissimo of pure zeal:
‘Now! Let’s have a silent conversation with God here!’
I slip the washed out passbook from the sea under a rock and leave God to his interlocutors.
Minsk
The Stranger in the Bed
The airport at Minsk looks as if it’s been welded together from a pile of air-conditioning cowls. Beyond its gates lies the monumental architecture of Belarus in all its bombastic grandeur and, as in the old Soviet empire, there are still those endless sets of railings, just as I’d imagined. You need to be led and guided, orders must be anticipated and followed, and proscriptions have to be imposed. And yet, in amongst all these restrictions there arises a desire to transgress the boundaries, accompanied by sheer craziness and subversive thoughts. You feel you’ve just got to break out, scream and shout, commit some outrage.
But instead people bow their heads and keep their eyes firmly fixed on the green and red lines on the airport floor, which mark the prescribed pathways you’re expected to follow. Shuffling along these, in line, are a woman with peroxide-blonde hair done up in a bun, an elderly man with a reptilian face, and an office wag dressed in a wrestler’s singlet. They don’t even dare to strut their stuff. Their compliance is provocative. No sooner have they passed by, as introverted as female Pietists, than the soldiers on guard duty checking their documents resume their sullen expressions. But a foreigner approaches them and enquires:
‘Might you have a toilet for me?’
This clumsy formulation rebounds firstly off the uniforms and then the demeanour of the soldiers. Only their walkie- talkies keep on twittering.
Once outside, waiting is the order of the day. There’s no avoiding it. People wait in large throngs for buses, drivers, wives. Some of them even manage to stay happy in this perpetual state of waiting. They’re the lucky ones. It’s like they’re saying: as long as we live, we’ll be grateful for everything that’s also alive. It’s the elderly who feel the rigours of the arduous journey more deeply, yet it’s they who still wait more patiently, more self-sufficiently than others, just trembling in their exhaustion. Business travellers, on the other hand, are always a step ahead of the current situation. One of these White Russian bundles of energy has started to make conversation with me:
‘Have you seen your Paris Hilton on the poster there?’
We both turn to look at the woman on the advertisement, lounging there drinking canned prosecco. Seen from Minsk, it would appear she belongs to my world.
‘Stunning woman,’ the businessman tells me appreciatively, like I was responsible for creating her. For my part, I search in vain for anything stunning in that entirely vacuous face.
‘And you know what’s really stunning about her?’
‘The prosecco, maybe?’
‘Her composure.’
So, this guy’s lust is of a more refined type. Even so, I’d rather retreat into my own sense of composure by gazing at the blank walls between the posters. The soldiers continue to cast a beady eye over the new arrivals as they stagger helplessly out of the airport terminal.
A white-faced Goth wearing a miniskirt and woollen tights is led aside by a policeman. She looks flattered by the attention. On her thigh, there’s a badge with the number 23 on it; from where she’s pinned it, a ladder has started to run up her tights, which soon b
ends purposefully inwards towards her inner thigh. Suddenly, the heel of her left shoe gives way, sending her sprawling onto the tarmac, a monstrous apparition composed of black and white clothing and face powder. As the policeman tries to drag her to her feet again, she makes like she’s disabled, theatrically spreading her legs, showing everything to passers-by. That’s how she wants it. Evidently her shame isn’t at a premium.
Hours later, and I’m already on the streets of the capital. Where is the city centre? I’d enquired, and the taxi driver replied with a gesture like he was trying to mock me: Up there, down there, it runs for kilometres all the way to the horizon, it’s all the city centre. So now I’m standing bang in the middle of it. A man with neurodermatitis is leafing through a rotating stand holding reproduction posters from the Soviet era, groaning with pleasure like it’s a sexual experience.
Certain places like Amman, Kabul or Bombay are cities at high tide. But Minsk is a city decidedly on the ebb. Only survivors emerge from it, grimacing as they do so like people who’ve escaped by the skin of their teeth, and blinking in the bright light.
In truth I’m enjoying the possibility of being in a city and yet being unable to truly locate it. The streets are so wide it seems they’re trying to burst their banks. The settlement must lie at their confluence, the city sea churning in the swell of the high-rise buildings. The façades are smooth and impermeable.
Somewhere out back, in their courtyards, urban life must be going on. The park is almost deserted, with just a few dull-looking types sitting under the trees, chatting. Between the trunks, uniformed men stand around like peeping Toms or exhibitionists. The palaces impose themselves as colossal monuments of a feudal age. They render people superfluous, and people duly walk around as if they feel themselves to be so.
The Ends of the Earth Page 8