Contact!

by Jan Morris

  Through a glass darkly

  The Yamut Turkoman tribes are the most daunting of the Iranian peoples. On Thursday mornings they hold a horse fair at the village of Pahlevi Dej, and there I went to see them. They converged upon the village in ones and twos, bolt upright on their horses, top heavy in their black fleece hats, in stately lolloping motion across their splendid landscape. Some brought their wives with them, demurely riding pillion and wearing purple or scarlet skirts with brightly flowered shawls. I saluted one formidable tribesman as he rode by; not for a moment did his pace flag, inexorably he continued his progress, kicking up little clouds of dust with each step, and looking distantly down at me from the saddle as through a thick glass plate.

  Joking on the coastal route

  Once on the Hurtigruten, the Norwegian coastal shipping service, an entire brass band boarded our vessel, with musicians of all ages down to small boys and girls. They were going to the next port up the coast and earned their passage by playing sombre but rousing marches in the forward lounge. The faces of the instrumentalists were quintessentially Norwegian: pale, long, incurious, handsome faces. One boy asked me where I was from, and when I told him he said, ‘I have a grandmother in Wales.’ ‘You don’t mean it!’ I exclaimed in delighted surprise. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I was only joking.’

  Pan’s blood

  Delight is still the occupation of Corfu, and sweet airs of comfort abound. The peasants of old may have deserted their olives for occupations of easier profit, but the olive trees are still there, and the stony earth beneath them, and the scents of herbs in the evening. On our way back from Kavos we saw, in one of the wayside villages, a pick-up truck run over a cat. In a trice the corpse of the poor animal was removed for burial, and I was struck by the air of true sadness that fell upon the village bystanders. It was the sweet silent sadness, I thought, of the ages. When we drove away the little pool of cat’s blood left in the street behind us suggested to me the blood of Adonis, or perhaps of Pan himself.

  Canadian arrivals

  Very early one morning I went down to Union Station to watch the transcontinental train passengers arrive out of the darkness from Vancouver. I knew exactly what to expect from this experience, but still it stirred me: the hiss and rumble of it, the engineers princely in their high cab, the grey faces peering out of sleeper windows, the proud exhaustion of it all–and then the thick tumble of the disembarking passengers, a blur of boots and lumber jackets and hoods and frosty breaths and bags and bundled children, clattering down the steps to breakfast, Grandma and Toronto.

  Destiny in Missouri

  ‘Mr Truman? Certainly, he’s expecting you,’ said the pleasant secretary in Independence, Missouri, and in a moment there was his familiar figure, sitting at a big polished desk. Beside him there stood a large and splendid globe, in a frame stand, and from time to time during our conversation Harry Truman would reflectively spin it or point to parts of it in a manner that I can only describe as proprietorial. He was, as he reminded me, the president who, in the years after World War II, had decreed an interventionist foreign policy for the United States of America–the Truman Doctrine. When he twirled that globe he was retrospectively reshaping my world, abolishing my empire, and affecting the way I would live for the rest of my life.

  A cabman’s wink

  I was wandering the streets of Alexandria’s Arab Quarter–‘The best way to see it’, E. M. Forster said, ‘is to wander aimlessly about’–when I happened to catch the eye of a wrinkled cabby with a towel wrapped round his head, high behind his poor Rosinante on the seat of his gharry. On the impulse of the moment I winked: and instantly there crossed his face an expression of indescribable knowingness and complicity, half comic, half conspiratorial–as though between us, he, the city and I, we had plumbed the depths of human and historical experience, and were still coming up for more.

  The touch of a hand at home

  The baby, we knew, was very near death.

  We lay sleepless in our room overlooking the garden,

  and a great moon shone.

  Towards midnight a nightingale began to sing.

  All night long it trilled and soared in the moonlight,

  infinitely sad, infinitely beautiful.

  We lay there through it all,

  each knowing what the other was thinking,

  and the bird sang on, part elegy, part comfort, part

  farewell, until the moon failed

  and we fell hand in hand into sleep.

  In the morning the child had gone.