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by Jan Morris


  It was like exploring a rambling old family home, the streets its corridors, the houses its rooms, the citizens its extremely gossipy owners and retainers. One morning I arranged to meet two of the town’s many widows and, idly passing the time beforehand by wandering through the town cemetery, I found both those ladies’ names already inscribed upon gravestones, below their departed husbands’.

  Key West, 1960s

  Key West is full of people with nothing much to do, but a talent for lounging gracefully in doorways. If I stood on the waterfront on a sunny morning I would soon find other idlers wandering to my side to stare at the water with me, and sometimes gentlemen would buttonhole me with dark questions. Was I looking for rare fish? Had I spoken to Mr Alvark? Was it right, what the papers were saying about convertibility? Did I realize that the deputation from Ecuador was arriving next day? What did the British government think about labour restrictions in Peru? Most of them had wild gleams in their eyes, and having said their queer bit, shuffled away like disappointed saboteurs. Slow and old is the island city of Key West; also surreptitious, bland and turtle-like.

  All in the family

  At the railway station at Assiut an elderly Copt had come to meet me. We sat in the station cafe for a preliminary cup of coffee, and he undid the buttons of his tight linen jacket and wiped his head fastidiously with a silk handkerchief. ‘I come from a family of priests,’ he said by way of introduction. ‘There have been Christian priests in my family since AD 48, when St Mark paid his visit to Assiut; and before that my family, through unnumbered centuries, provided priestly acolytes for the local god of Assiut, Leci. Come, finish your coffee while I settle this infamous account.’

  Marching with us!

  One evening we were driving down a road on the outskirts of Chattanooga when we saw a dirty marquee. From it there came strains of music, with accompanying desultory snatches of women’s voices, so we stopped at once and went inside. At the end of the tent a very fat woman was lying on the ground quivering and shaking, sometimes tremulously, like a jelly, sometimes with sharp stabs of impulsive movement. Two fierce women were supporting her head, and standing above them, waving his arms like a Paganini, prancing crazily here and there, a youth was strumming on a guitar. In the background a small girl was banging a hymn tune on an upright piano, and a group of black ladies, respectably dressed, looking a trifle bored, and sometimes pausing to exchange gossip or look out of the tent flap, was half-heartedly singing some sacred words: ‘I’ll never go hungry or know poverty/ So long as the good Lord is marching with me./ Marching with me! Marching with thee!/ So long as the good Lord is marching with me.’

  Presently the prostrate patient, with heavings and convulsions, tried to gasp a few words, and at this the attendant harpies were galvanized. Seizing the patient by the front of her dress, they yanked her into a sitting position and hissed urgent instructions into her ear. She was still jerking incessantly. ‘Take Him in, take Him in!’ they hissed, and were soon screaming, ‘Take Him in! Roll it! O Jesus, the glory of it!’ until the patient herself, jerking and jumping, managed to croak from her constricted throat a few unintelligible syllables.

  When we left the marquee she was still unhealed. The guitarist still whirled about her. The piano still tinnily clanged. The lady choristers whined their listless hymn. And the convulsed patient, all her draperies loose by now, was still being urged to ‘Let Him in, sister! Glory, glory, roll it, roll it!’ by the demon women at her side.

  Economic imperative

  In the worst times of the Irish troubles, when Belfast was more or less in a state of war, I once saw a patrol of five or six British infantrymen moving cautiously and watchfully through the city centre in the prescribed mode–guns cocked, helmeted heads constantly turning right and left, lead man well in front, rearguard walking backwards with his finger on the trigger. As they passed an office of the National Westminster Bank one of them peeled away, while the others crouched there covering his back, ready for instant fire. He put his card in the bank’s cash dispenser, he tucked his money away in a pocket of his camouflage suit, and they proceeded grimly on their prowl.

  Sporting pleasures!

  My first floodlit cricket match, in Sydney, was a terrific affair. Australia were playing New Zealand, and passions ran high. If a wicket fell or a catch was missed the crowd burst into magnificent displays of emotion, throwing hats, paper, cups and balloons into the air, shouting, whistling, clapping, booing and cheering. I was exhilarated! In the course of the game I happened to look over the balcony into an open space outside the stadium, and there I saw a succession of young men being hauled in, handcuffed by plainclothes policemen, briskly questioned, photographed there and then and shoved into a windowless van from whose interior emerged muffled thumps of protest. A few yards away, within sight of the police but on the safe side of a high wire-mesh fence, three small boys were getting their own kicks by sniffing aerosol cans.

  The French swimmer

  To my right, as I sat beside the harbour at La Rochelle, there came into my field of view a swimming man. He was in his fifties, I would guess, but stout and muscular, and he was swimming with an absolute rhythmic exactitude. A slow and powerful crawl, one two, one two, deep wallowing in the water went his head, up came his podgy arm, out emerged his face for breath, running with salt water–a slight pause at the top of his stroke, and he was down again half submerged. He never wavered. The pace of his stroke was metronomic, and it suddenly occurred to me that he was on the way somewhere, as one might walk to work, or take a bus. He was the first swimmer I ever saw who was using his crawl as a means of transport. I watched him intently, and once I thought I caught his eye, as he rolled around for breath out there; but if I did it was an entirely dispassionate eye, like the lens of a submarine’s periscope. It took him some time to pass me, until he disappeared round the headland to my left, and for some time afterwards I fancied I could hear the regular flop and splashing of his stroke, as one sometimes hears the tread of a ship’s engines when it has long sailed out of vision. Since then, whenever I hear such a beat of engines in the night, I think, there goes the French swimmer on his way.

  Thrashing as they went

  On Ascension Day they beat the bounds of St Michael’s Church in Oxford, to establish once again the parish limits and emphasize the old pre-eminence of the Church. Once I followed the course of this antic but moving ceremony. Led by the vicar, a little raggle-taggle group of choirboys and parishioners paraded through the city centre, now and then pausing at immemorially ordained spots to thrash a wall with canes and shout ‘Mark! Mark! Mark!’ (in the old days they used to thrash the choirboys too, to impress the boundaries on them once and for all). The route they pursued was involved, but the vicar and his crew were not perturbed. Once they scrambled over a high wall, once they marched deadpan through Woolworth’s, and once they beat the wall of a banana store in the market. They followed the line to the bitter end, thrashing as they went, as fifteen generations of parsons and giggling choristers had loyally done before them.

  Forty tailors and a camel driver

  In a little upstairs factory in a Cairo backstreet forty tailors work, year after year, on the vast and splendid carpet, lavishly embroidered with gold thread, that covers the sacred shrine of the Kaaba in Mecca. A new one is woven every year, and is taken to the holy city at the time of the great pilgrimage, escorted by soldiers of the Egyptian army. When I visited the factory the tailors were nearly all Turkish by origin, and nearly all related to one another, and nearly all very old, and some of them represented the third or fourth family generation to work there. They sat at trestle tables in a long rickety room and stitched away there like the tailors of myth. They held their eyes very close to their work, and some of them wore little steel-rimmed spectacles on the ends of their noses. Their director, a portly and paternal official, sauntered up and down the tables with me, and the tailors, working away with their reels of gold thread, threw pleasantries as we passed.
I asked one how old he was. As old as the hills, he said, but the director said with pride that he was actually a hundred years old–‘And so,’ he added, peering round the room and indicating another benevolent ancient, ‘so is the one in the corner, the one with the hat on.’ All the old men grinned and nodded.

  As we climbed down the staircase to the street, I noticed an elderly Egyptian sitting morosely on a stool outside the door, like a disconsolate watchman, with a white scarf around his head and a string of prayer beads in his lap. Who was he, I wondered. They said that until a few years before the carpet had been taken to Mecca each year on a magnificently caparisoned camel, and the man on the stool had been the camel driver. His unique occupation was gone, and he had never been the same man since. ‘Poor fellow,’ they said, ‘he never leaves the factory’–and when we looked at him, I noticed, he shifted his big feet uneasily.

  Singin’ in the dawn

  Once very early in Beijing I strayed over a bridge to a leafy path beside a moat. I was led there by a curious cacophony of shouts, singing and twanged instruments, and I found it to be a place of self-fulfilment. Resolutely facing a high stone rampart above the moat, like Jews at the Wailing Wall, all along the path men and women were rehearsing their own particular accomplishments privately in the dawn. As we sing in the evening tub, so the people of Beijing go to that wall. Here was a man, his face a few inches from the masonry, declaiming some heroic soliloquy. Here a woman was practising an astonishing range of arpeggios. A splendid bass was singing a romantic ballad, a poet seemed to be trying out a lyric, an elderly man with a bicycle was plucking the strings of an antique lute. I thought of joining in, so universal did these impulses seem, sending To Be or Not to Be reverberating down that wall, or perhaps reciting some of my own purple passages: but I restrained myself, as a Foreign Guest, and just whistled my way home to breakfast.

  ‘I hope you see it truly’

  A young forester walked by, as I picnicked by Loch Ness, and I asked him if he had ever seen the monster. He did not smile at the question. He had lived there always, he said, but he had not seen it yet. For him, though, its existence or nonexistence was not important, because he interpreted it as a didactic figure of faith. ‘It teaches us to believe in something we canna see–you understand me?’ He thought a great deal about the matter, he told me, and often looked out there on the half chance of glimpsing the creature. I said I seemed to see it every five minutes, but again he did not laugh. ‘Well before you go home,’ he said meaningfully, looking me straight in the eye, ‘I hope you see it truly…’

  Not altogether intelligible

  The holy land of the Yezidis is in the Kurdish country of Iraq, and I was taken to meet some in their village north of Mosul. They follow an unusually cloudy religion concerned with the worship or perhaps propitiation of the devil. They seemed to me distinctly vague about it all, but although they were very hospitable I was haunted throughout my visit by the fear of committing some dreadful spiritual solecism. I must never, I had been told, utter the name Satan, for it is anathema to the devil: if somebody does speak it, the really convinced Yezidi must either instantly kill the transgressor, or commit suicide. Lettuces were strictly taboo: it is said that the Evil One once tried to hide inside a lettuce, but found its leaves insufficient to conceal him. Radishes were also unpopular, I was told, and the colour blue was something the Yezidis particularly loathed. They are most welcoming in everyday affairs, though, and if I wandered up the village stream the housewives at their washing would smile at me and make jokes (which, being expressed in a corrupt version of medieval Kurdish, were not altogether intelligible to me).

  The croupier

  I remember clearly the appearance of one of the most famous of the Nevada croupiers. He was a tall man who wore a check shirt, open at the neck, narrow trousers sustained by a belt with an ornate buckle, and a black eyeshade. His face was withered and wrinkled like a tortoise’s, his nose hooked and slightly crooked, his eye sharp and pale, his mouth thin but humorous, conveying an impression of very calculated bonhomie. His ears were long and protruding and his long thin neck was entwined with a mesh of muscles, like Laocoön and the snake. Coldly and knowingly this man presided over the game, taking or paying mechanically with never a flicker of emotion, only the slightest hint of a nod, or the suspicion of a gesture, or the embryo trace of a beckon in the direction of the management. In front of him the piles of big silver dollars (common currency in Nevada then) glittered like stage properties; and once in a decade, I dare say, there passed through his hands a dollar made of gold, withdrawn with heart searchings from beneath some aged indigent’s mattress.

  Mormon faithful

  Whenever I think of Salt Lake City, with the pinnacles of the Mormon Temple shining there beneath the mountains, I think of bright clothes and urgent smiles, the voices of the vast Mormon choir ringing across Temple Square on Sunday morning, the unquenchable cheerfulness of the people, the general air of satisfied competence, and the extraordinary blandness of the old lady who told me one fine summer morning that for high religious purposes she had been tracing the course of her ancestry, and had succeeded in establishing it as far back as 64 BC, ‘Only a few years,’ as she rightly remarked, ‘before Caesar went to England, but of course the ancient Americans had been civilized for centuries, as the blessed prophet Moroni told our founder–that’s him, that’s the prophet Moroni, right up there on the Temple tower–see?’–and I looked up there, shading my eyes against the sun, but could perceive only the vague outline of that antique saint, holding what looked like a trumpet.

  His Highness

  One fine Arabian morning I walked into the palace of the Sultan of Muscat and Oman, on the shores of the Indian Ocean in Dhufar. Through the great gate of the outer courtyard I passed, and the slaves bowed low, into the polished hall of the palace, lined with bearded and begowned retainers, their rifles in their hands, until there approached me from the darkened recesses of the building a small dignified figure in a brown and gold aba, a turban on his head, a sword at his side, a heavy scent of frankincense emanating from his person. ‘Good morning,’ said His Highness the Sultan Said bin Taimur.

  He was only forty-four, but the voluminous dignity of his robes, his stately bearing and his luxuriant beard all combined to make him look much older. His eyes were large, dark, long-lashed and very serious. His mouth, though kindly and humorous, looked to me capable of an occasional sneer. It was an antique, melancholy face, such you might see in old pictures of the East, and as profoundly enigmatical as the Pyramids. Later I was to encounter him in less autocratic mode, and then his eyes had a soft, thoughtful, almost sleepy look beneath their heavy eyelids, reminding me rather of an elaborately turbaned Cheshire Cat.

  Feudalism

  If you go down a gold mine, in the South Africa of the 1950s, you will find that racial feudalism extends even to the face of the reef. A black man brings you your boots, helmet and overalls; and a black man hands you your face rag as you enter the hoist; and a black man blows his whistle and drives you in his trolley along the underground corridor; and a black man helps you off with your jacket when, as you approach the stope, the heat of the pit suddenly blasts you. A white Afrikaner overseer grins you a welcome there, but in front of him, flat on his back in an alcove of the rock, is the African driller, helmeted and bathed in sweat at the very war front of the mine. He holds his big drill with his feet, and he lies there like some hefty freak or prodigy, a handless painter or a three-legged man, his whole body shaking with the vibration of the drill, and the very air about him shuddering with its noise. He pauses in his work as you approach, but the supervisor gives him a flicker of his torch, and he is off again, smiling broadly through his dirt.

  Merciless fish

  At sea in the Caribbean an elderly sailor pointed out to me the dark shadow of a shark, loitering beside the hull of our ship, and this is what he told me: ‘It’s got no marcy, no marcy at all. Big blue fish, so you can’t see ’um in de wa
ter, he’s sly! No marcy, see, not a drop of marcy!’

  Nanny talk

  The nannies of the London park were there in their battalions, elderly complacent nannies and perky young ones and hard old professionals with starched faces. ‘So I said to her, I said, “No, madam, it is not and never has been my job to make the tea…”’ ‘It’s never been the same since Lady Sarah passed over but, there, times have changed, haven’t they, dear?’ ‘No, Jeremy darling, keep away from the doggy, dear…’ ‘“Give him his tea?” I said, “I haven’t been looking after children for thirty years without knowing when it’s teatime,” I said, and with that I walked out…’ ‘Try rubbing his back, Mabel, that usually brings it up, doesn’t it, dear?’

  Chief of the Egyptians

  Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt, lived blamelessly with his buxom wife and five children in a modest Cairo house that was plain to the point of ugliness. No rude or ranting orator greeted me there, behind some big officious desk. On the contrary, the Chief of the Egyptians was relaxed and friendly, in shirtsleeves, his vest showing between the buttons, and he gave me coffee and talked pleasantly and intelligently for as long as I liked. Nasser like to call himself the first indigenous ruler of Egypt since the Pharaohs, and he was indeed a genuine through-and-through Egyptian, born of peasant stock on the banks of the Nile. ‘What a reasonable sort of man,’ I said to myself as we talked across the plain deal table, sipping thick chamomile coffee from cups edged with blue roses and gilt.

 

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