Travels with Herodotus
Page 26
I set out along the town’s main street, planted with palm trees and fig and azalea bushes. In one spot, at the edge of the bay, fishermen were selling their morning catch at a long table dripping water. They grabbed the floundering fish that had been dumped onto the tabletop, smashed open their heads with a blunt object, gutted them with lightning speed, and with sweeping dexterity tossed the entrails into the bay. The waters were swarming with other fish feeding on the bloody scraps. At dawn the next day, the fishermen would gather another day’s fresh catch into their nets and toss those fish now caught onto the slippery table—where each fell straight under the knife. In this way nature, devouring its own tail, fed both itself and humans.
Halfway down the road, on a hill on a promontory jutting out to sea, stands the castle of Saint Peter, built by the Crusaders. It houses the rather extraordinary Museum of Underwater Archeology, a collection of objects found by divers at the bottom of the Aegean. Especially striking is the large collection of amphorae. Amphorae have existed for five thousand years. Slender, with swanlike necks, they combine an elegant shape with the strength and resilience of their material—fired clay and stone. They were used to transport olive oil and wine, honey and cheese, wheat and fruit, and circulated throughout the entire antique world—from the Pillars of Heracles to Colchis and India. The bottom of the Aegean is strewn with their shards, but there are also plenty of intact amphorae about, perhaps still filled with olive oil and honey, reposing on the shelves of underwater cliffs or buried in the sand, like lurking, motionless beasts.
What the divers brought up is but a fragment of the whole watery world, whose depths are as rich and variegated as is the realm above, which we inhabit. There are sunken islands down there, and on them sunken towns and villages, ports and harbors, temples and sanctuaries, altars and statues. There are sunken ships and a good many fishing boats. There are merchant ships and the pirate vessels awaiting discovery. Galleys of the Phoenicians lie beneath the surface and, at Salamis, the great Persian fleet, the pride of Xerxes. Countless teams of horses, flocks of goats and sheep. Forests and arable fields. Vineyards and olive groves.
The world that Herodotus knew.
What moved me most, however, was one of the museum’s dark chambers, mysterious as a murky cave, in which, on tables, in display cabinets, and on shelves lie illuminated glass objects which had been pulled up from the depths—cups, bowls, pitchers, perfume flasks, goblets. They are not clearly visible at first, when the doors to the room are still open and daylight penetrates its interior. But when the doors close and it grows dark, the curator presses a switch turning on small lightbulbs inside the little vessels, bringing to life the fragile, matte pieces of glass, which start to sparkle, brighten, pulsate. We stand in deep, thick darkness, as if at the bottom of the sea, at a feast of Poseidon’s, surrounded by goddesses each holding an olive oil lamp above her head.
We stand in darkness, surrounded by light.
I returned to the hotel. At reception, in place of the dolorous boy, stood a young black-eyed Turkish girl. When she saw me, she adjusted her facial expression so that the professional smile meant to invite and tempt tourists was tempered by tradition’s injunction always to maintain a serious and indifferent mien toward a strange man.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ryszard Kapuściński, Poland’s most celebrated foreign correspondent, was born in 1932 in Pińsk (in what is now Belarus) and spent four decades reporting on Asia, Latin America, and Africa. He is also the author of The Shadow of the Sun, Another Day of Life, Imperium, Shah of Shahs, The Soccer War, and The Emperor. Kapuściński’s books have been translated into twenty-eight languages. He died in 2007.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Translation copyright © 2007 by Klara Glowczewska All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Originally published in Poland as Podróże z Herodotem by Znak, Kraków, in 2004.
Copyright © 2004 by Ryszard Kapuściński
Portions of this book originally appeared in Condé Nast Traveller, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Oxford University Press for permission to reprint excerpts from The Histories by Herodotus, translated by Robin Waterfield, translation copyright © 1998 by Robin Waterfield. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kapuściński, Ryszard.
[Podróze z Herodotem. English]
Travels with Herodotus / by Ryszard Kapuscinski; translated from the Polish by Klara Glowczewska.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-54823-8
1. Herodotus. History. 2. Kapuscinski, Ryszard—Travel. I. Title.
D56.52.H45K3713 2007
930—dc22 2006039565
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