Travels with Herodotus

by Ryszard Kapuscinski

  In the morning I overheard a conversation in the adjoining room and recognized Mario’s voice. I would find out later that it was a discussion about how to dress me, seeing as how I had arrived sporting fashions à la Warsaw Pact 1956. I had a suit of Cheviot wool in sharp, gray-blue stripes—a double-breasted jacket with protruding, angular shoulders and overly long, wide trousers with large cuffs. I had a pale-yellow nylon shirt with a green plaid tie. Finally, the shoes—massive loafers with thick, stiff soles.

  The confrontation between East and West took place not only in the military realm but in all other spheres of life as well. If the West dressed lightly, then the East, according to the law of opposites, dressed heavily; if the West wore closely fitting clothes, then the East did the reverse—everything had to stick out by a mile. One did not have to carry one’s passport around:—one could see at a distance who was from which side of the Iron Curtain.

  We started making rounds of the shops, accompanied by Mario’s wife. For me, these were expeditions of discovery. Three things dazzled me the most. First, that the stores were full of merchandise, were actually brimming with it, the goods weighing down shelves and counters, spilling out in towering, colorful streams onto sidewalks, streets, and squares. Second, that the salesladies did not sit, but stood, looking at the entrance doors. It was strange that they stood in silence, rather than sitting and talking to one another. Women, after all, have so many subjects in common. Troubles with their husbands, problems with the children. What to wear, one’s health, whether something burned on the stove yesterday. And here I had the impression that they did not know each other at all and had no desire to converse. The third shock was that the salesclerks answered the questions posed to them. They responded in complete sentences and then at the end added “Grazie!” Mario’s wife would ask about something and they would listen to her with sympathy and attention, so focused and inclined forward that they looked as if they were about to start in a race. And then one heard that oft-repeated, sacramental grazie!

  In the evening I summoned the courage to go out alone. I must have been living somewhere in the center, because Stazione Termini was nearby, and from there I walked along Via Cavour all the way to Piazza Venezia, and then through little streets and alleys back to Stazione Termini. I did not notice the architecture, the statues, the monuments; I was fascinated only by the cafés and bars. There were tables everywhere on the sidewalks, and people sat at them, drinking and talking, or just simply looking at the street and the passersby. Behind tall, narrow counters the barmen poured drinks, mixed cocktails, brewed coffee. Waiters bustled about, delivering glasses and cups with a magician’s legerdemain, the likes of which I had seen only once before, in a Soviet circus, when the performer charmed a wooden plate, a glass goblet, and a screeching rooster out of thin air.

  One day I spotted an empty table, sat down, and ordered a coffee. After a while I became conscious that people were looking at me. I had on a new suit, an Italian shirt white as snow, and a most fashionable polka-dotted tie, but there must still have been something in my appearance and gestures, in my way of sitting and moving, that gave me away—betrayed where I came from, from how different a world. I sensed that they took me for an alien, and although I should have been happy, sitting there beneath the miraculous skies of Rome, I began to feel unpleasant and uncomfortable. I had changed my suit, but I apparently could not conceal whatever lay beneath it that had shaped and marked me as a foreign particle.

  * All quotations in italics throughout the text are from Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Robin Waterfield, with an introduction and notes by Carolyn Dewald (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

  CONDEMNED TO INDIA

  Astewardess dressed in a light, pastel-colored sari was greeting passengers in the doors of the four-engine Air India International colossus. The subdued hues of her outfit suggested that a peaceful, pleasant flight awaited us. Her hands were arranged as if in prayer; the anjali, I would soon learn, was a Hindu gesture of greeting. In the cabin was a strong and unfamiliar aroma—surely, I thought, the scent of some eastern incense, Hindu herbs, fruits, and resins.

  We flew by night, only a small green light twinkling at the tip of the wing visible through the window. This was still before the population explosion, when air travel was comfortable, with planes often carrying but a few passengers. So it was this time. Passengers slept, stretched out across several seats.

  I felt that I wouldn’t be able to shut my eyes, so I reached into my bag and took out the book that Tarłowska had given me. The Histories of Herodotus is a lengthy tome of several hundred pages. I found such thick books alluring, and I began with the introduction, in which the translator, Seweryn Hammer, describes Herodotus’s life and introduces us to the meaning of his work. Herodotus, writes Hammer, was born in 485 B.C.E. in Halicarnassus, a port city in Asia Minor. Around 450 he moved to Athens, and from there, several years later, to the Greek colony of Thurii, in southern Italy. He died around 425 B.C.E. He traveled extensively during his life. And he left us a book—one can assume it is the only one he wrote.

  Hammer tried to bring to life a man who lived two and a half thousand years ago, about whom we know little, and whose appearance is difficult to imagine. Even the one thing he left behind was, in its original version, accessible to only a handful of specialists who, in addition to possessing a knowledge of ancient Greek, had to know how to decipher a very specific kind of notation: the text looked like one unending, undifferentiated word stretching across dozens of rolls of papyrus. “Individual words or sentences were not demarcated,” wrote Hammer, “just as chapters and books were unknown; the text was as densely woven as a tapestry.” Herodotus concealed himself behind this verbal fabric as behind a screen, which we are even less well equipped to penetrate than his contemporaries were.

  The night ended and day came. Looking through the little window, I was able to gaze for the first time on an enormous expanse of our planet. The sight brought thoughts of infinity to mind. The world I had known until then was perhaps five hundred kilometers in length and four hundred in width. And here we were, flying seemingly forever, while the earth, very far below us, kept changing colors—for a while it was burnt, brown; then green; and then, for a long while, dark blue.

  It was late evening when we landed in New Delhi. I was instantly awash in heat and humidity, and stood dripping with sweat. The people with whom I had been flying suddenly vanished, swept away by the colorful, animated crowd of friends and relatives that had been waiting for them.

  I was left alone and had no idea what to do. The airport building was small, dark, and deserted, a far cry from Rome’s. It stood all by itself cloaked in night, and I didn’t know what lay beyond, in the depths of the darkness. After a while an old man in a white, loose knee-length garment appeared. He had a gray beard and an orange turban. He said something I did not understand, although I assume he was asking why I was standing there alone, in the middle of the empty airport. I had no idea what to answer and looked about me, pondering—what next? I was quite unprepared for this journey. I had neither names nor addresses in my notebook. My English was poor. I was not entirely to blame, though: my sole desire had been to achieve the unachievable—to cross the border. I wanted nothing more. But in expressing that wish I’d started the chain of events that had now deposited me all the way here, on the far side of the world.

  The old man thought for a while, then motioned with his hand for me to follow him. To one side of the entrance stood a scratched-up, dilapidated bus. We got in, the old man started the motor, and we set off. We had covered only several hundred meters when the driver slowed down and began honking violently. Before us, where the road should have been, I saw a broad, white river vanishing somewhere in the thick blackness of the sultry, sweltering night. The river was of people sleeping out in the open, some on wooden plank beds, others on mats, on blankets, but most directly on the bare asphalt and the sandy banks stretching on each side of it.


  I thought that the crowds, awakened by the roar of the horn resounding directly over their heads, would fall upon us in a rage, beat us, perhaps lynch us even. Far from it! As we inched forward, they rose one by one and moved aside, taking with them children and pushing along old women barely able to walk. In their ardent compliance, in their submissive humility, there was something apologetic, as if sleeping here on the road were some crime whose traces they were quickly trying to erase. And thus we inched our way toward the city, the horn blaring, people stirring and giving way—on and on and on. Once we reached town, its streets turned out to be equally difficult to navigate: it too seemed just one enormous camp of white-clad, somnambular phantoms of the night.

  In this fashion we arrived at a place illuminated by a red light-bulb: HOTEL. The driver left me at reception and disappeared without a word. The man at the desk, this one sporting a blue turban, led me upstairs to a little room furnished with only a bed, a table, and a washstand. Without a word he pulled off the bedsheet, on which scurried panicked bugs, which he shook off onto the floor, muttered something by way of good night, and departed.

  Left alone, I sat down on the bed and started to consider my situation. On the negative side, I didn’t know where I was. On the positive, I had a roof over my head; an institution (a hotel) had given me shelter. Did I feel safe? Yes. Uncomfortable? No. Strange? Yes. I could not define precisely wherein lay this strangeness, but the sensation grew stronger in the morning, when a barefoot man entered the room bearing a pot of tea and several biscuits. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. He placed the tray on the table, bowed, and, having uttered not a word, softly withdrew. There was such a natural politeness in his manner, such profound tactfulness, something so astonishingly delicate and dignified, that I felt instant admiration and respect for him.

  Something more disconcerting occurred an hour later, when I stepped out of the hotel. On the opposite side of the street, on a cramped little square, rickshaw drivers had been gathering since dawn—skinny, stooped men with bony, sinewy legs. They must have learned that a sahib had arrived in the hotel. A sahib, by definition, must have money, so they waited patiently, ready to serve. But the very idea of sprawling comfortably in a rickshaw pulled by a hungry, weak waif of a man with one foot already in the grave filled me with the utmost revulsion, outrage, horror. To be an exploiter? A bloodsucker? To oppress another human being in this way? Never! I had been brought up in a precisely opposite spirit, taught that even living skeletons such as these were my brothers, kindred souls, near ones, flesh of my flesh. So when the rickshaw drivers threw themselves upon me with pleading encouragement, clamoring and fighting amongst themselves for my business, I began to firmly push them away, rebuke them, protest. They were astounded—what was I saying, what was I doing? They had been counting on me, after all. I was their only chance, their only hope—if only for a bowl of rice. I walked on without turning my head, impassive, resolute, a little smugly proud of not having allowed myself to be manipulated into assuming the role of a leech.

  Old Delhi! Its narrow, dusty, fiendishly hot streets, with their stifling odor of tropical fermentation. And this crowd of silently moving people, appearing and disappearing, their faces dark, humid, anonymous, closed. Quiet children, making no sound. A man stares dully at the remains of his bicycle, which has fallen apart in the middle of the street. A woman sells something wrapped in green leaves—what is it? What do those leaves enfold? A beggar demonstrates how the skin of his stomach is plastered to his spinal cord—but is this even possible? One has to walk carefully, to pay attention, because many vendors spread their wares directly on the ground, on the sidewalks, right on the edge of the road. Here is a man who has laid out two rows of human teeth and some old pliers on a piece of newspaper, thereby advertising his dental services. His neighbor—a wizened, shrunken fellow—is hawking books. I rummage through the carelessly arranged, dusty piles and settle on two: Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (useful for learning English) and the priest J. A. Dubois’s Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies. Father Dubois arrived in India as a missionary in 1792 and stayed for thirty-one years, and the fruit of his studies of Hindu ways of life was the book I had just purchased, which was published in England in 1816 with the assistance of the British East India Company.

  I returned to the hotel, opened the Hemingway to the first sentence: “He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.” I understood nothing. I had a small English-Polish pocket dictionary, the only one that had been available in Warsaw. I managed to find the word “brown,” but none of the others. I proceeded to the next sentence: “The mountainside sloped gently…” Again—not a word. “There was a stream alongside …” The more I tried to understand this text, the more discouraged and despairing I became. I felt trapped. Besieged by language. Language struck me at that moment as something material, something with a physical dimension, a wall rising up in the middle of the road and preventing my going further, closing off the world, making it unattainable. It was an unpleasant and humiliating sensation. It might explain why, in a first encounter with someone or something foreign, there are those who will feel fear and uncertainty, bristle with mistrust. What will this meeting bring? How will it end? Better not to risk it and to remain in the cocoon of the familiar! Better not to stick one’s neck out of one’s own backyard!

  On first impulse, I might have fled India and returned home, if not for my having bought a return ticket on the passenger ship Batory, which in those days sailed between Gdańsk and Bombay. The Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had just nationalized the Suez Canal, prompting England and France to respond with armed intervention; as war broke out, the canal was blocked, and the Batory was stuck somewhere on the Mediterranean Sea. Cut off from home, I was condemned to India.

  Cast into deep water, I didn’t want to drown. I realized that only language could save me. I started to think about how Herodotus, wandering the world, had dealt with foreign languages. Hammer writes that Herodotus knew only Greek, but because Greeks at the time were scattered over the entire planet, had their colonies, ports, and factories everywhere, the author of The Histories could avail himself of help offered by the countrymen he encountered, who served as his translators and guides. Moreover, Greek was the lingua franca of those days, and many people in Europe, Asia, and Africa spoke the language, which was later replaced by Latin, and then French and English.

  I began cramming words, night and day. I placed a cold towel on my temples, feeling my head was bursting. I was never without the Hemingway, but now I skipped the descriptive passages I couldn’t understand and read the dialogues, which were easier:

  “How many are you?” Robert Jordan asked.

  “We are seven and there are two women.”

  “Two?”

  “Yes.”

  I understood all of that! And this, too:

  “Augustín is a very good man,” Anselmo said….

  “You know him well?”

  “Yes. For a long time.”

  I walked around the city, copying down signboards, the names of goods in stores, words overheard at bus stops. In movie theaters I scribbled blindly, in darkness, the words on the screen, and noted the slogans on banners carried by demonstrators in the streets. I approached India not through images, sounds, and smells, but through words; furthermore, words not of the indigenous Hindi, but of a foreign, imposed tongue, which by then had so fully taken root here that it was for me an indispensable key to this country, almost identical with it. I understood that every distinct geographic universe has its own mystery and that one can decipher it only by learning the local language. Without it, this universe will remain impenetrable and unknowable, even if one were to spend entire years in it. I noticed, too, the relationship between naming and being, because I realized upon my return to the hotel that in town I had seen only that which I was able to name: for ex
ample, I remembered the acacia tree, but not the tree standing next to it, whose name I did not know. I understood, in short, that the more words I knew, the richer, fuller, and more variegated would be the world that opened before me, and which I could capture.

  During all those days after my arrival in Delhi I was tormented by the thought that I was not working as a reporter, that I was not gathering material for the stories that I would later have to write. I hadn’t come as a tourist, after all. I was an envoy, engaged to render an account, to transmit, relate. But I found myself empty-handed, and feeling incapable of doing anything, at a loss even to know where to begin. I knew nothing about India, after all, and hadn’t asked for it. Crossing the border—that was it. Nothing more. But now, since the Suez war made returning impossible, I could only move forward. I decided to travel.

  • • •

  The receptionists in my hotel advised me to go to Benares: “Sacred town!” they explained. (I had noticed already how many things in India are sacred: the sacred town, the sacred river, millions of sacred cows. It is striking, the degree to which mysticism permeates life, how many temples there are, chapels and various little altars at every step, how many fires and how much incense is burning, how many people have ritual markings on their foreheads, how many are sitting motionless, staring at some transcendent point.)

  I heeded the receptionists and took a bus to Benares. One drives there through the valley of the Jamuna and the Ganges, through flat, green countryside dotted with the white silhouettes of peasants wading in rice paddies, digging in the ground with hoes, or carrying bundles, baskets, or sacks on their heads. But this view outside the window was mutable, and frequently an immense expanse of water filled the landscape. It was the season of the autumn floods, and rivers metamorphosed into broad lakes, veritable seas. On their shores camped barefoot flood victims. They fled before the rising water but maintained their contact with it, escaping only as far as was necessary and returning immediately when the floodwaters started to recede. In the ghastly heat of the dying day, the water vaporized and a milky, still fog hovered over everything.