Travels with Herodotus

by Ryszard Kapuscinski

  Or about crocodiles:

  This is what crocodiles are like. They eat nothing during the four winter months. They are four-footed, and amphibious … As far as is known, there is no mortal creature which grows so big from such small beginnings. The eggs it lays are not much bigger than a goose’s eggs, and the size of a new-born crocodile corresponds to that of its egg, but a fully grown adult can be at least seventeen cubits long, and

  maybe more. It has eyes the size of a pig’s, but huge teeth and tusks …. With the

  exception of the sandpiper, all other birds and animals run away from it The sandpiper, however, is on good terms with it, because it is of use to the crocodile. When the crocodile climbs out of the water and on to land, it yawns widely (usually when facing west), and then the sandpiper slips into its mouth and swallows the leeches. This does the crocodile good and gives it pleasure, so it does not harm the sandpiper.

  I did not notice these cats and crocodiles at first. They appeared to me only upon successive readings, when I suddenly noticed, to my horror, the crazed cats leaping into the fire, and when it seemed to me, as I was sitting at the edge of the Nile, that I spotted nearby the opened jaws of a crocodile and a small, fearless bird rummaging around inside them. This is natural: one must read Herodotus’s book—and every great book—repeatedly; with each reading it will reveal another layer, previously overlooked themes, images, and meanings. For within every great book there are several others.

  Herodotus lives fully; he is not bothered by the lack of the telephone or the airplane, nor does he worry about not having a bicycle. These machines will appear only thousands of years later—and so what? It doesn’t occur to him that such things might have been useful to him, perhaps because he manages excellently without them. His world, his life have their own strength, their own undiminishing and self-sufficient energy. He senses it, and it gives him wings. He must have been a cheerful, relaxed, kind man, because it is only to such people that strangers reveal their secrets. They do not open up to someone withdrawn and gloomy; pessimistic dispositions awaken in others the desire to move away, the need for distance, and can even elicit fear. If such had been Herodotus’s personality, he would have been unable to accomplish what he did, and we wouldn’t have his book.

  I thought about this frequently, sensing at the same time, not without surprise and even a measure of anxiety, that as I immersed myself increasingly in Herodotus’s book, I identified more and more, emotionally and cognitively, with the world and events that he recalls. I felt more deeply about the destruction of Athens than about the latest military coup in the Sudan, and the sinking of the Persian fleet struck me as more tragic than yet another mutiny of troops in Congo. The world that I was experiencing was not only the African one, about which I was supposed to be writing as the correspondent of a press agency, but also that one far from here which vanished hundreds of years ago.

  And so there was nothing strange about the fact that, sitting of a steamy tropical evening on the verandah of the Sea View Hotel in Dar es-Salaam, I was thinking about the freezing soldiers of Mardonius’s army, who on a frosty night—for it was winter in Europe then—tried to warm their numb hands by the fire.

  THE DESERT AND THE SEA

  I set aside for a while the Greco-Persian war, with its endless processions of barbarian armies and the arguing of the quarrelsome Greeks—over who among them is most important, whose leadership should be recognized—because the Algerian ambassador, Judi, has just called, saying that “it would be worthwhile to meet.” The expression “it would be worthwhile to meet” has a subtext, and usually implies a promise of some sort, a hopeful eventuality, something worthy of interest and closer attention; it is as if someone said, “Come meet me, I have something for you—you won’t regret it.”

  Judi had a magnificent residence—a white, airy villa, in the grand old Mauritanian style, constructed in such a way as to create shade everywhere, even in those places which, logically, should be in direct sunlight. We sat in the garden, and from behind the high wall the sounds of the ocean washed over us. It was high tide, and from somewhere in the watery depths, from far beyond the horizon, enormous waves moved toward us and crashed nearby, for the villa stood right on the water, on a low, rocky shore.

  We spoke about everything, but about nothing important, and just as I was beginning to wonder why he had invited me here, he suddenly said:

  “I think that it would be worth your while to go to Algiers. It might be interesting there now. If you want, I’ll give you a visa.”

  I was taken aback. It was 1965, and there was nothing of note happening in Algeria. It had been an independent country for three years now, and had an intelligent, popular young leader: Ahmed Ben Bella.

  Judi would say no more, and because the hour of Muslim evening prayers was approaching and he had begun to finger his emerald prayer beads, I realized it was time for me to go. I faced a dilemma. If I were to approach my superiors for permission to take this trip, they would start asking me questions. I had no idea why I should be going there. At the same time, traveling halfway across Africa for no good reason would be a grave insubordination—not to mention a financial risk, especially given that my employer was a press agency so short of funds one had to justify at length the smallest expenditure.

  But there was something so convincing, insistent even, in Judi’s manner, in the encouraging tone of his voice, that I decided to take the chance. I flew from Dar es-Salaam through Bangui, Fort Lamy, and Agadez, and on these routes the planes are small and slow and even the upper limit of their flight paths are low, affording one an excellent view of the route over the Sahara, which is full of captivating images—either joyfully colorful or monotonously bleak, though even in the latter, there will suddenly appear, amidst a lunar lifelessness, a bright and crowded oasis.

  The airport in Algiers was empty, closed, in fact. Our plane was allowed to land because it belonged to the domestic carrier. Soldiers in gray-green camouflage jackets immediately surrounded it and escorted us—several passengers—to a glass building. The passport control was not onerous and the soldiers were courteous, although reticent. They would say only that there had been a coup d’état during the night, that “the tyrant had been removed,” and that power had been seized by the general staff. “Tyrant?” I wanted to ask, “what tyrant?” I had seen Ben Bella two years earlier in Addis Ababa. He seemed a polite, even pleasant man.

  The city is large, sunny, spread out broadly, amphitheatrically, around the bay. One must constantly climb uphill or down. There are stylish French streets and bustling Arab ones. All about is a Mediterranean mixture of architectural styles, clothing, and customs. Everything sparkles, smells, intoxicates, exhausts. Everything arouses curiosity, draws one in, fascinates—but also makes one anxious. If you are tired, you can sit down in one of the hundreds of Arab or French cafés. You can eat in one of the hundreds of bars or restaurants. Because the sea is close by, there are plenty of fish on the menus, and untold delicacies of frutti di mare—crustaceans, clams, cephalopods, octopi, oysters.

  But Algiers is first and foremost a place where two cultures meet and coexist—the Christian and the Arab. The history of this coexistence is the history of this city (although, of course, it also has other, much older historical chapters—Phoenician, Greek, Roman). Moving inevitably in the shadow of either a church or a mosque, the Algiers resident is continually made aware of the winding borderline between the two realms.

  Take downtown. Its Arab section is called the Casbah. You enter it walking uphill, along wide stone steps—dozens of them. But the stairs are not the problem; the difficulty is the sense of intrusion we feel as we venture deeper into the Casbah’s recesses. But do we really look into, try to penetrate those hidden corners? Or do we instead hurry along, intent on extricating ourselves from an uncomfortable, somewhat awkward situation—for we have noticed dozens of pairs of motionless eyes, importunately attentive, watching us as we walk? Are we perhaps only imagining i
t? Could it be that we are oversensitive? Why are we indifferent when someone stares at us on a French street? Why does it not bother us then, or cause us discomfort, whereas here in the Casbah it does? The eyes are similar, after all, likewise the act of observing, and yet we react to the two situations in such dissimilar ways.

  When we finally emerge from the Casbah and find ourselves once more in a French neighborhood, we may not breathe an audible sigh of relief, but we certainly feel lighter, more at ease, more natural. Why can we not control these latent, even subconscious attitudes and emotions? For thousands of years, all over the world—nothing?

  A foreigner who might have arrived in Algiers on the same day as I did would not have realized that something as important as a coup d’état had taken place the previous night, that the internationally popular Ben Bella had been ousted by an unknown who, as would soon become apparent, was the introverted, taciturn commander of the army, Houari Boumedienne. The entire business was carried out at night, far from the center of town, in an exclusive villa neighborhood called Hydra, and in that part of it, moreover, that is occupied by the government and the generals and thus inaccessible to ordinary pedestrians.

  One could not hear the shots or explosions in the city itself; there were no tanks in the streets, no marching troops. In the morning, people drove or walked to work as usual, shopkeepers opened their shops, vendors set up their stalls, and bartenders invited one in for morning coffee. Superintendents doused the sidewalks to give the city a bit of moist freshness in advance of the noontime heat. Buses roared terrifyingly as they struggled to scale steep streets.

  I walked around crushed—and furious at Judi. Why did he encourage me to make this trip? What did I come here for? What would I write about from here? How would I justify the expenditure? Dejected, I suddenly noticed a crowd gathering on the avenue Mohammed V. Unfortunately, they were merely gawkers drawn by the quarrel of two drivers who had collided at the intersection. At the other end of the street I saw another small gathering. I ran there. But they were merely people patiently waiting for the post office to open. My notebook was empty, and I had not witnessed a single event worth describing.

  But it was here in Algiers, several years after I had begun working as a reporter, that it slowly began to dawn on me that I had set myself on an erroneous path back then. Until that awakening I had been searching for spectacular imagery, laboring under the illusion that it was compelling, observable tableaux that somehow justified my presence, absolving me of responsibility to understand the events at hand. It was the fallacy that one can interpret the world only by means of what it chooses to show us in the hours of its convulsions, when it is rocked by shots and explosions, engulfed in flames and smoke, choked in dust and the stench of burning, when everything collapses into rubble on which sit people despairing over the remains of their loved ones.

  How did this spectacle come about? What do these scenes of destruction, replete with shouts and blood, mean to express? What forces—subcutaneous and invisible, yet powerful and unrestrainable—brought them about? Are these scenes the end or beginning of something, portents of tensions and conflicts still to come? And who will monitor them? We, the correspondents and reporters? No. The dead will barely have been buried, the wrecks of incinerated cars will have just been cleared away and the streets swept of the broken glass, and we will have already packed our bags and moved on, to where others are burning cars, shattering shop windows, and digging graves for the fallen.

  But might it not be possible to pierce that spectacular stereotype, to move beyond imagery, attempt to reach deeper? It seemed only practical to try. Unable to write about tanks, burned cars, and looted stores—having seen nothing of the sort—and wanting to justify my unauthorized journey, I went in search of the background and the wellspring of the Algerian coup, to try to determine what lay behind it and what it signified; to talk, to observe people and places, and to read—in short, to try to understand.

  It was only then that I began to see Algiers as one of the most fascinating and dramatic places on earth. In the small space of this beautiful but congested city intersected two great conflicts of the contemporary world. The first was the one between Christianity and Islam (expressed here in the clash between colonizing France and colonized Algeria). The second, which acquired a sharpness of focus immediately after the independence and departure of the French, was a conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical—I would even venture to say “Mediterranean”—current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

  Algiers, which at its beginnings, in Herodotus’s time, was a fishing village, and later a port for Phoenician and Greek ships, faces the sea. But right behind the city, on its other side, lies a vast desert province that is called “the bled” here, a territory claimed by peoples professing allegiance to the laws of an old, rigidly introverted Islam. In Algiers one speaks simply of the existence of two varieties of Islam—one, which is called the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world’s most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

  Under colonialism, both these strains of Islam were united by a common enemy; but later they collided.

  Ben Bella was a Mediterranean man, educated in French culture, open-minded and conciliatory by nature. Local Frenchmen referred to him in conversation as a Muslim of the river and of the sea. Boumedienne, on the contrary, was the commander of an army which for years had fought in the desert, had its bases and camps there, drew its recruits from there, and took advantage of the support and help proffered by the nomads, people of the oases and of desert mountains.

  The two men differed even in their appearance. Ben Bella was always well-groomed, elegant, refined, courteous, smiling amiably. When Boumedienne appeared for the first time in public after the coup, he looked like a tank commander who had just stepped out of his conveyance covered in the sands of the Sahara. He did try to smile, but without much success—it was simply not his style.

  In Algiers I saw the Mediterranean Sea for the first time. I saw it up close—I could dip my hand into it, feel its touch. I didn’t have to ask for directions; I knew that just by walking downward, then down some more, I would eventually reach it. It was everywhere, visible from afar, glimmering from behind various buildings, appearing at the bottoms of steep streets.

  At the very bottom was the port district, with simple wooden bars all in a row, smelling of fish, wine, and coffee. But it was the tart scent of the sea that was most noticeable, a gentle, calming refreshment carried on each gust of the wind.

  I had never been in a city where nature is so kind to man. For it offered everything all at once—the sun, a cooling breeze, the brightness of the air, the silver of the sea. The sea seemed familiar to me, perhaps because I had read so much about it. Its smooth waves signified fine weather, peace, something like an invitation to travel and experience. One had the urge to join those two fishermen over there, who were just setting sail.

  I returned to Dar es-Salaam, but Judi had left. I was told that he had been recalled to Algiers and assumed, because he was a participant in the victorious conspiracy, that the move meant a promotion. In any event, he did not return here. I never met him again, in fact, and so was unable to thank him for having incited me to take the trip. The military coup in Algeria was the start of an entire series, a whole chain of similar revolts, which for the next quarter century would decimate the continent’s you
ng postcolonial states. Those states turned out to be weak from the start, and many of them have remained so to this day.

  Not least, thanks to this journey, I stood for the first time on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It seems to me that from that moment on I understood Herodotus even better than before. His thoughts, his curiosity, how he saw the world.

  THE ANCHOR

  We are still by the Mediterranean, Herodotus’s sea, only now on its eastern end, where Europe adjoins Asia and where the two continents meet across a chain of gently contoured, sunny isles, whose quiet, calm bays encourage sailors to visit and to stay awhile.

  The commander of the Persians, Mardonius, leaves his winter lair in Thessaly and heads south at the head of his army to attack Athens. When he reaches the city, however, he finds it uninhabited. Athens is destroyed and deserted. The population has moved away, taking shelter in Salamis. He sends an envoy there, a certain Murichides, whose mission is to once again propose to the Athenians that they surrender without a fight and recognize King Xerxes as their ruler.

  Murichides presents this proposal to the highest Athenian authority, the Council of Five Hundred, and a crowd of Athenians listens in on the assembly’s deliberations. One member of the council, Lycides, argues that it would be best to accept Mardonius’s conciliatory offer and come to some kind of an agreement with the Persians. Hearing this, the Athenian audience erupts in anger, surrounds the speaker, and stones him to death on the spot.