Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  He picked up the landmarks that he knew well by sight: eastward from Eagle’s Crag the tin hut of the station was recognizable: to the right of that road. Empty. It came into view again by the disused shrine, a long strip of cobbles flanked with boulders. That too was empty. He swore fiercely and gripped the swinging branches.

  On each corner of the road lay a slab of grey rock. The boy stared until his eyes ached at as many of these slabs as were in view, but could not see clearly enough to determine whether or no they were sprinkled with rice and pan leaves. He had almost decided to get down from the tree and make a bolt for home when the procession came into view from behind a clump of trees. They had passed Emerald Hall. In front of those who bore the corpse walked a gigantic Bhutia, carrying the conch-shell. At each corner of the road he threw back his head, and placing it to his mouth blew a long terrible blast on it. The sound scattered a million echoes in the hillsides, prolonging itself into a wild cry that dwindled rumbling into the farthermost fastnesses of the mountains; each small gully and coign of rock caught the echo and flung it back, magnified to the farther summits of crag.

  Behind him trailed the bearers, staggering under the burden of the corpse that had been placed in a sheet, the extremities of which were fastened to a length of bamboo pole. As they made their uneven and erratic way up the hill, the dead man jumped and bounced in his scanty covering, and seemed to be protesting at the horror of being buried alive. His outlines were clear against the sheet.

  The boy drew his breath sharply in relief at the sight. Horror had been only in the knowledge that the funeral cortege was approaching nearer and nearer, and that he could not tell exactly where they were. He dreaded passing them on the road. Now, with the problem solved, he slid nimbly down the tree, and struck through the woods towards the boundaries of the Keen plantation, where he would be able to pick up the track home without fear. He whistled as he trotted along, trying to forget the wailing of the conch, and obliterate his knowledge of that staggering procession who were about to consign a corpse to earth; or ashes.

  Later, as he neared home, a huge Columbian moth, furred blue, and measuring about six inches from wing-tip to wing-tip, fluttered across his path and away into the evening.

  He cursed himself bitterly for a fool. He should have brought his butterfly-net.

  Arrival in England

  It would perhaps be impossible to define accurately the feeling of disappointment he experienced as he stood on the deck of the liner and watched the pearly cliffs insinuate themselves out of the light sea-haze; at any rate, he was not impressed by what he saw, and as he leaned his chin upon the rail, he told himself bitterly that it was smaller than he had imagined! Since he could not see the whole island at once it must be concluded that this observation implied some sort of intuitive deduction based on as much of the coast as was visible.

  To the right, where a sickly sunlight had penetrated the haze, the cliffs curved away, trim and lacquered. The towns, threaded like beads on the string of white road diminished in size as the cliffs curved and diminished under them into an ultimate hinterland of blue fog. The nearest houses, insolently dressed in their vulgar reds and greens, perched in rows: as haughtily self-assured as a line of prize brooding-hens; behind them, to the west, a factory-chimney accused the sky; and behind that again, so far distant that it was a mere speck, an airplane nested in a single cloud, the sunlight running liquid amber down its wings.

  He sucked his orange noisily and wondered why he did not feel gloriously happy at the thought that he was actually looking upon England. The others were happy. Oh, beyond all doubt. They had crowded to the side and leaned over, peering out upon the promised land, laughing and pointing; but those who shouted, pointed, and exclaimed were in the minority. A great number stood silent, gripping the rail, and experiencing that emotion of country-love which is occasioned in exiles by the sight of the Dover cliffs.

  But though on this particular occasion the sight of Dover affected more than half of those men who were on deck, it did not affect in the slightest the solemn-eyed, orange-sucking manikin who stood with them. A concourse of soldiers, representing every rank of the Indian Army, engineers, planters, all stood dumbly at the rails and stared upon Albion, with few signs of outward emotion, but with pleasurable and very muddled memories of Matthew Arnolds poetry, and the more throaty stanzas from Marmion. They were mostly tall, sunburnt men, with cropped hair and fuzzy moustaches: men to whom sentiment was a source of discomfort: men who should have known better.

  “There she is,” said a stout major, puffing out his cheeks, and hooking his thumbs in the loops of his trousers.

  “Yes. Yes,” chorused the voices softly.

  “White as white.”

  “Dover.… See the airplane?”

  “And the breakers.”

  “There she is.”

  “How long before we dock? How long?”

  “Yes, yes,” chorused the voices softly. A hedge of arms waved over the side pointing. Hundreds of feet, clad in canvas shoes, shuffled the clean wood deck.

  “Five years since I last saw them.”

  “I remember them distinctly since nineteen.”

  “Impressive—”

  “There she is.”

  “White as white.”

  “Yes, yes,” chorused the voices.

  It would have taken a small effort of imagination to metamorphose them into a company of weary crusaders, blinded by the desert suns, rough of skin and infirm of body, to whom the ubiquitous mud of the London kennels was more than welcome after a long sojourn in Moorish deserts, and the green forests of Hampstead a divine blessing after the parched deserts of another continent. Perhaps there was something a little touching about it all; the crowding to the rails, the silence, the intent expressionless faces gazing out upon the cliff-lines. Perhaps there was!

  As for the boy, he felt galled by his own lack of excitement: by his own apathy. Was it right that he should remain in a solemn detachment, unable to respond to a moment which was supremely important in his life? But he could find no tribute to answer the lavish tributes of those who were neither sufficiently carried away by sentiment to remain silent, nor too disabled by sea-sickness to be forced to remain below. Beside him stood a waggish young engineer, unfeignedly glad to be home again. He repeated from time to time in a hollow voice: “Jolly old England. Soon, soon for wine, women, and song.” He smiled round idiotically at intervals and punctuated this incantation by blowing his nose loudly. He was in great spirits.

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  A toy forest waved its tiny trees in mocking ovation, as though rejoicing in its own sparseness; not like the Terai, which swept in a dense green cloud of interlacing forest, dizzily away to the first uplands, the first walls of black rock, dwindling gradually in thickness until it lay, a mere scrub of pastel-shaded vegetation about the lip of the ultimate icy horn—Mirik. No, he was accustomed to a different dimension, a different space. How cramped England was.

  A puny train, dragging a dozen grimy carriages, stumbled away inland, with little shrapnel-puffs of smoke swinging up from it to an empty sky. The water beneath them was glazed and still, and the air so still that you could hear the faint hurdy-gurdy of the propellers shaking the decks.

  He rubbed his sticky hands on his coat and coughed. Then he looked down at his feet which were clad in a pair of new brown shoes. Brenda had bought them for him during the voyage. “There!” she said, “they’re real English shoes.”

  Certainly they were excellent shoes: new and very expensive. They had an ornamental tracery of holes punched in the leather, which stretched from toe to heel; and a disastrous habit of squeaking when he walked.

  The only trouble was that they were a little too small for him, and made his feet sore and hot. Now as he looked down at them, reflecting on their excellence, he wriggled his toes about, and rubbed his ankle with his hand. It was a great pity they did not fit him.

  He shivered slightly in the breeze. It w
ould be no use, he thought, to keep on looking at the coast and trying to pinch himself into enthusiasm. It would be much more fun to go into the lounge now that it was empty and make a noise on the piano. But as he walked his shoes hurt him, forcing him to limp slightly.

  They detrained (in the full military sense of the word) at Victoria, and were both secretly alarmed at the thunderous noise of traffic that sounded under the great sheds. Unused to the English porters, it was some time before Brenda mustered up courage to ask one if he would mind their baggage. When she did so, however, it was with such an air of deference that the man (as becomes Englishmen who detect inferiority in anyone) was exceedingly rude to her. He performed the job with an air of sullen stupidity, and looked at the half-crown she gave him with insolent hauteur, trying it between his teeth to see if it was good.

  They were bundled into a taxi, which jerked its unsteady way out of the station in the direction of Russell Square, while the two of them sat back on the seat like frightened children and gazed out disappointedly upon the slushy streets. The air was heavy and poisoned, a kind of dust-fog that was irritating to the throat and the nose. Hyde Park, of which they had read so much, turned out to be, on first sight, a foggy sector of threadbare grass, fringed by a line of damp green chairs.

  London at Night

  (Walsh in Bloomsbury)

  Some nights, when sleep was impossible, and he had lain awake for hours watching the yellow pools of light on the ceiling as they flickered, and listening to the growing quiet of the streets, he would get up out of his bed and stand at the window. The café opposite stayed open until three o’clock and through the steamy glass of the swing-doors he could see the groups of men and women sitting round the marble-topped tables drinking coffee; mostly tall, sallow Jews, he noticed, with long dark overcoats and rakish hats; their clothes were padded out about the shoulders to give them the appearance of physique which they did not possess. And the women, mostly Euston Road bawds, with their loud market-place voices and disease fast hollowing out their eyes and melting down their features. Across the clear sound of voices in the silent street he caught clear scraps of words, unfinished sentences which hung for a moment in the air of the darkened room, and disappeared, leaving only the ghost of meaning in his watching mind. And from this polyglot crew of ruffians and bawds, lustrous jews who waited in the shadows of every street-corner, and loudmouthed taxi-drivers who drank tasteless coffee as they awaited late fares, some few he selected as worthy of remembrance. He knew from habit the times of their appearance, and waited to see them come down the street and shoulder their ways into the steamy den. At eleven, for instance, a tall negress walked through the street, limping with fatigue but with a face cocked up to the sky. She hummed a song as she passed in a low, nasal voice, very melancholy but not displeasing, and, surprisingly, held a beautiful silvery-coated whippet on a lead, which followed her softly, its arched body taut and docile. Every night, as she passed, she stopped at the entrance of the café and pushed the swing-doors aside, peering around at the seated people as though seeking someone; but she never went inside, only turned back each night with a little shrug of annoyance and continued her walk. Later, shortly after two, there appeared the figures of two men, one tall and powerful, the other smaller, but sturdily made. The larger was always without a hat, and his face was small and twisted with knobs of curly hair trained back across his poll. His shoulders were large enough for him to do without a padded overcoat. His companion was dark but in a more pallid, Israelite way and carried a huge, ebony-handled stick which seemed thick enough to house the blade of a sword. They walked slowly, with a kind of nervous nonchalance, and always stayed in the café until a quarter-past three when they both swaggered out and called a taxi to them from the cab-rank at the corner of the road. They seemed never to speak to each other.

  Some nights when he found it impossible to sleep he would dress and go out for a walk in the streets, slowly treading out the deliberate sound of his feet upon the pavements, smelling the stale night smells and hearing the noises, and imagining himself in a new world—a world of which half-silence and fear were the keynotes. The stale earth in the window-boxes, sterile and exhausted, unwilling to put forth more small flowers for the dust to choke, had a sharp, rancid smell that mingled with the stale odours of basement kitchens. When he walked thus, in a land where noise was so sharp and disturbing, he found himself able to notice things and comment on them, compare and associate groups of ideas. Even if the nearer silence was unbroken there was the great purring sound of distance, the mighty pouring of blood through the arteries of the city that was never silent. He wondered how many diverse sounds, how many different causes, went to make up this giant uniform growl of silence; the gurgle of water in the underground sewers, the wailing of sirens on the river, the swishing of the late trains as they moved out on their journeys, the groan of an early cart as it crawled down through the city, the chatter of the prostitutes at the street corners, the drone of taxis, the scratching of paper as it drifted upon the pavements—all these were absorbed and became components of that blare of silence; even the small flat sound of his feet upon the pavement was absorbed into it, and made a millionth part of the activity. Sometimes he would stand quite still and strain to distinguish the separate sounds of the vast orchestra—strain until his head ached for those indistinct siren-calls, the roar of trains, but he could never distinguish anything; always a nearer sound would break down his effort, laughter from the next street, or a cry from some shuttered window.

  Yet from out of all the bewildering diversities of the night-life some sounds and smells remained constant and unchanging, and for these he treasured recognition as he did for those two or three inhabitants of the café opposite his house. The wheels of a taxi on the smooth black road never made anything but the sound of a choir of gnats, even in wet or frosty weather; and those gaunt men who wheeled their barrows of fruit through the dark squares never looked anything but furtive and hunted; their filthy cloth caps were pulled down low over their faces, and they lowered their voices when they spoke as though there were something shameful in the act of peddling their rich merchandise through the midnight city.

  In a little street off Fitzroy Square there was always a light in the basement, and if you stood on the gleaming glass slab fretted with metal, your body was shaken by the pulsing of the machines that baked bread all night; and at each fresh throb of sound the wholesome smell of bread came out upon you from the grating in great heartening whiffs. He would stand upon the pitted glass and let the hot draught pour out around him, permeating his clothes, while he sniffed the sweet odours of the bakery. Once, as he stood there, taking great breaths of the pure warm air, a man, clad in a white smock, came to the grating and handed him two huge hunks of newly-baked bread on a long fork, inviting him to eat it, smiling very kindly upon him:

  “I get lots of you poor artists round ’ere. Always ’ungry, aren’t yer?”

  And as Walsh let his teeth sink into the warm crumbly richness of the bread he said, after thanking the man:

  “That’s settled it. I’m going to be a baker.”

  But there were other things that he hated. Down by Leicester Square, in the little burrows behind the theatres, he found many a bundle of rags that had once been a human being curled up asleep in the doorway where tomorrow it would be turned away to make room for a pit queue; and once, a ragged little old man with a tabby beard who was burrowing in a dustbin. Beside him on the pavement lay a very old and very worn violin with only three sound strings, and a minute parcel of his belongings, girded up in a stained handkerchief. Walsh gave him a florin, but the poor creature seemed hardly to comprehend the meaning of the act, and he stared at the coin as it lay in his creased brown palm. Then, with a sudden quick gesture, he nodded his head and turned back to the dustbin, rummaging among the scattered paper and filth. His little frog-head was ducked flat as he tried to reach some object deep in the bin, while unconsciously with his boots he trampled the l
ittle round parcel, which held his belongings, trampled and tore the red handkerchief.

  On these late walks Walsh would often be filled with the feeling that he alone among the living trod the gloomy streets; his moving body and the feel of his clothes hanging on him, they were the only knowledge of substance in an illusory world. Even the sleek and silent men who stood night-long at the street-corners, and the women with their chalk-pale vermilion-rouged masks hiding what little self was left them, were but puzzling symbols of actualities that existed only in the squalid turbulence of the daytime. With the knowledge that so many activities, so many interests, so many personalities lay submerged in the second-sleep of dawn, his own perceptions quickened and briskly demanded food, as if given a freedom which the day denied them.

  Corfu, Greece, Cyprus

  A Landmark Gone

  Published in Orientations, Vol. 1. No. 1.

  (A Forces Quarterly, edited by G. S. Fraser.)

  Cairo, n.d. (War years.)

  Privately printed, in an edition of 125 copies,

  for Lawrence Clark Powell, Los Angeles, 1949.

  SOMEWHERE BETWEEN CALABRIA and Corfu the blue really begins. You feel the horizon beginning to stain at the rim, the sky seems to come a little nearer and into deeper focus; the sea darkens as it uncurls in troughs around the boat. You are aware not so much of a landscape coming to meet you invisibly over those blue miles of water, as of a climate. Entering Greece is like entering a dark crystal; the form of things becomes irregular, refracted. Mirages suddenly swallow islands and if you watch you can see the trembling curtain of the atmosphere. Once in the shadow of the Albanian hills you are aware of this profound change. It haunts you while you live there, this creeping refraction of light altering with the time of day, so that you can fall asleep in a valley and awake in Tibet, with all the landmarks gone.