by Paul Theroux
Bruce Chatwin, in The Songlines, quotes an Old English proverb: “The stranger, if he be not a trader, is an enemy.” In The Valleys of the Assassins, Freya Stark wrote of the nomads in Luristan: “The laws of hospitality are based on the axiom that a stranger is an enemy until he has entered the sanctuary of someone’s tent.”
Some words for stranger have the meaning of a spirit, as in the case of the New Guinea Highlanders, who could not conceive of the white Australians as anything but spectral ancestors. In Swahili, the word muzungu (plural, wazungu) has its root in the word for ghost or spirit, and cognates of the word — mzungu in Chichewa and murungu in Shona and other Bantu languages — have the meaning of a powerful spirit, even a god. Foreigners had once seemed godlike when they first appeared in some places.
The word for foreigner in Easter Island, in Rapa Nui speech, is popaa — so I was told there. But this is a neologism. In an earlier time the Rapa Nui word for foreigner (according to William Churchill’s Easter Island, 1915) was etua, which also means god or spirit. It is related to the Hawaiian word atua, though the Hawaiian word for stranger is haole, meaning “of another breath”.
Here is a list of countries and languages and their words for stranger.
Maori—pakeha, white man, foreigner.
Fiji—kai valagi (pronounced valangi), white person, foreigner, “person from the sky”, as opposed to kai India for Indians and kai China for Chinese.
Tonga—papalangi, a cognate of Samoan palangi, meaning “sky burster”, a person who comes from the clouds, not a terrestrial creature.
Samoa—palangi, “from the sky”, related to the Fijian kai valangi.
Trobriand Islands—dim-dim, for foreigner or white-skinned person; koyakoya for dark-skinned non-Trobriander. Koya is the word for mountain. But there are no mountains in the Trobriand Islands. So a koyakoya is a mountain person — that is, from mainland New Guinea, or simply an off-islander.
Hong Kong—gweilo, “ghost man”, a prettier way of saying “foreign devil”, since a ghost is menacing, something to fear.
Japan—gaijin. The word is composed of two characters, gai, meaning outside, and jin, person. This appears to be a contraction for gaikokujin, “outside-country person”, thus an outsider in the most literal sense — racially, ethnically, geographically.
China—wei-guo ren is the neutral term, a person from a foreign country. But yanguize, “foreign devil”, is also common, and there are words for “red-haired devil”, “white devil”, and “big nose”.
Arabic—ajnabi, “people to avoid”; also ajami, meaning foreigner, barbarian, bad Arabic speaker, Persian; also gharib, stranger, “from the west”.
Kiribati—I-matang. Travelling by kayak within the huge atoll of Christmas Island (Kiritimati), I heard this word often. I-matang is generally used to mean foreigner (there were four such people on Christmas Island), but etymologically it is “the person from Matang”, said to be the ancestral home of the I-Kiribati, the original fatherland, a place of fair-skinned people. The word implies kinship. By the way, it is an actual place — Madang, on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea, thought by historians to be the origin of these Micronesian people.
Mexico—gringo. The word seems to have come from griego, a Spanish term for a Greek. The Diccionario Castellano (1787) defines gringo as a word used in Málaga for “anyone who spoke Spanish badly”, and in Madrid for “the Irish”. It implies gibberish. The many popular theories (among them, that it may be derived from hearing the disenchanted Irish soldiers who’d joined the Mexicans singing “Green Grow the Rushes Oh!” during the Mexican–American War in the mid-1840s) are fanciful and unconvincing. The earliest recorded use of gringo in print is in the Western Journal (1849–1850) of John Woodhouse Audubon (son of John James, and also an artist), who travelled by horseback through northern Mexico on his way from New York to witness the Gold Rush in California. In Cerro Gordo (“a miserable den of vagabonds”) Audubon and his fellow travellers were abused: “We were hooted and shouted as we passed through, and called ‘Grin-goes’ etc., but that did not prevent us from enjoying their delicious spring water.”
Being Frank
I HEARD THE word faranji, for foreigner, in Ethiopia when I was on my Dark Star Safari trip, and remembered farang in Thailand, ferangi in Iran, and firringhi in India and Malaysia (though orang-puteh, for white person, is more common in Malaysia). What’s the connection?
When Richard Burton took his first trip to Abyssinia — recounted in First Footsteps in East Africa — he wrote, “I heard frequently muttered by the red-headed spearmen the ominous term ‘Faranj’.” Burton went on to say that the Bedouin in Arabia “apply this term to all but themselves”. In his time, even Indian traders in Africa were called faranji if they happened to be wearing trousers (shalwar), since trouser-wearing was associated with outsiders. In his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1853), he wrote, “The convert [in Arabia] is always watched with Argus eyes, and men do not willingly give information to a ‘new Moslem’, especially a Frank.”
In The Valleys of the Assassins (1934), Freya Stark says, “The aim of the Persian government is to have [the people of Luristan] dressed à la Ferangi in a year’s time.” Later on, in a valley “stood the castle of Nevisar Shah to which no Frank, so they told me, had ever climbed”.
These words, all related to farang, are cognates of “Frank”, though the people who use the word don’t know beans about Franks. The Franks were a Germanic tribe who peregrinated western Europe in the third and fourth centuries. But the name, of which “French” is a cognate, probably gained currency from the Crusades of the twelfth century, when Europeans plundered Islamic holy sites and massacred Muslims in the name of God. In the Levant and ultimately as far as East Africa and South-East Asia, a Frank was any Westerner.
Even in Albania: “Immense crowds collected to witness the strange Frank and his doings,” wrote Edward Lear about himself, in his Albanian journal in 1848. A form of faranji, the word afrangi is regarded as obsolete in Egypt, though it is still occasionally used, especially in combination. In Egypt, a kabinet afrangi is a Western, sit-down toilet.
Almost the entire time I spent in Harar, Ethiopia — where the poet Rimbaud had lived — I was followed by children chanting, “Faranji! Faranji! Faranji!” Sometimes older people bellowed it at me, and now and then as I was driving slowly down the road a crazed-looking Harari would rush from his doorstep to the window of my car and stand, spitting and screaming the word into my face.
Travel Wisdom of
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
In spite of being weak and tubercular — wraithlike in his John Singer Sargent portrait — Stevenson travelled widely. Mostly he travelled for his health, searching for clement weather to ease his infected lungs, but also for the romance of the experience:
I would like to rise and go
Where the golden apples grow.
He rambled on the Continent, criss-crossed the United States, sailed around the Pacific, and ended up in Samoa, where he died (1894) and is buried. He was well read and undoubtedly knew Montaigne, who wrote in his essay “Of Vanity”: “But, at such an age, you will never return from so long a journey. What care I for that? I neither undertake it to return, nor to finish it: my business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me; I only walk for the walk’s sake.” Stevenson seems to paraphrase this in his first quotation:
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life a little more nearly, to get down off this feather-bed of civilization, and to find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.
—Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879)
A voyage is a piece of autobiography at best.
— The Cévennes Journal:
Notes on a Journey Through the French Highl
ands (1978)
Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.
— “Virginibus Puerisque”
Herein, I think, is the chief attraction of railway travel. The speed is so easy, the train disturbs so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country; and while the body is being borne forward in the flying chain of carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humour moves them, at unfrequented stations.
— “Ordered South”
There lie scattered thickly various lengths of petrified trunk … It is very curious, of course, and ancient enough, if that were all. Doubtless, the heart of the geologist beats quicker at the sight; but, for my part, I was mightily unmoved. Sightseeing is the art of disappointment.
— “The Silverado Squatters”
There’s nothing under heaven so blue,
That’s fairly worth the travelling to.
But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many agreeable prospects and adventures by the way.
— “The Silverado Squatters”
13
It Is Solved by Walking
ALL SERIOUS PILGRIMS GO ON FOOT TO THEIR holy destination — Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims stand for so many others. Walking is a spiritual act; walking on one’s own induces meditation. The Chinese characters for pilgrimage mean “paying one’s respect to a mountain” (ch’ao-shan chin-hsiang). As I saw on my Riding the Iron Rooster trip, many Taoists make a point of visiting the five holy mountains they regard as pillars of China, the cardinal compass points as well as the centre, separating Heaven and Earth. And there are four other mountains, sacred to Buddhism and associated with a particular bodhisattva. “Paying respect” means climbing the mountains — though this often involves walking up stairs, since steps have been cut into most of the mountainsides. Ambrose Bierce defined a pilgrim as “a traveller that is taken seriously”.
In his essay “Walking”, in the posthumous collection Excursions (1863), Thoreau spoke of the word “saunter” as having been derived from the French expression “going to the Holy Land”: “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going ‘à la Sainte Terre’, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, ‘There goes a Sainte-Terrer’, a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean.” And later in this long paragraph he says, “For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.”
The Spanish word sendereando, for hiking, is compact and pretty (sendero is path), but the wisest phrase for this activity is the Latin solvitur ambulando (“it is solved by walking”), attributed to Saint Augustine. The phrase was mentioned by the long-distance walker Patrick Leigh Fermor to Bruce Chatwin. “Hearing it, immediately Bruce whipped out his notebook,” Chatwin’s biographer wrote. Walking to ease the mind is also an objective of the pilgrim. There is a spiritual dimension too: the walk itself is part of a process of purification. Walking is the age-old form of travel, the most fundamental, perhaps the most revealing.
Chatwin regarded walking in an almost mystical way. His predecessors, beginning with the great Japanese poet Bashō, felt the same. Walking inspired the poets Whitman and Wordsworth, and Rousseau based a series of philosophical essays on walks. Stanley walked across Africa twice. When David Livingstone wished to get into shape, and to invoke the travelling mood, he walked for weeks at a time in the African bush, “until my muscles were hard as boards”.
Some walks are those of the flâneur, an almost untranslatable French word meaning stroller, saunterer, drifter — the essence of a traveller — but in this case usually one in a city, perhaps the very word to describe someone trying to solve a problem. Some walks by travellers border on stunts or bids for the record book — two obvious examples are Ewart Grogan tramping from Cape Town to Cairo in 1898, and more recently Ffyona Campbell, who in her way walked around the world (see Chapter 14, “Travel Feats”).
But it is the committed walker, the thoughtful walker, who interests me the most.
Xuanzang (603–664): The Ultimate Pilgrim
A MONK AND a scholar, the young Xuanzang (Hsüan-tsang in some renderings) felt that the Buddhist texts in China were badly translated, debased versions of the originals, so he decided to travel to India to verify them and to bring back as many texts as possible. He hoped also to see the holy places associated with Buddha’s life and enlightenment. In some old illustrations he is shown accompanied by a pony — he certainly brought back the manuscripts on packhorses. But in his account of his seventeen years of travels he frequently refers to walking on narrow and difficult trails, and he appears to have travelled alone.
“At a time when the country was most prosperous, and equipped with unparalleled virtue, he started his journey to the remote lands carrying his pewter staff and whisked the dust with his robes,” wrote Yu Zhining, Duke of Yanguo, in the original preface to The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions. In a postscript to the book, Xuanzang is eulogized: “With the prestige of the emperor, he made his way, and under the protection of deities, he travelled in solitude.”
Xuanzang left from the Tang Dynasty capital, Changan — Xian today, site of the terracotta warriors, imperial tombs, and glorious pagodas — and kept going, through Qinghai and across Xingjiang to Bokhara, Samarkand, and into present-day Afghanistan. All the while he made notes on the state of Buddhism, the condition of monasteries, the number of monks. He was awestruck by the giant carved Buddha statues at Bamiyan (dynamited and destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, to the cries of “Allah is great!”). He crossed Peshawar and Taxila in what is now Pakistan, describing the ruins of Gandhara, where “there were more than a thousand monasteries but they are now dilapidated and deserted, and in desolate condition.” He wandered all over India. The fastidiousness of the early manifestations of the caste system fascinated him: “Butchers, fishermen, harlots, actors, executioners, and scavengers mark their houses with banners and are not allowed to live inside the cities,” he wrote of the walled towns of northern India.
Throughout, he chronicled the presence of dragons, some protective, others menacing. He succeeded in his mission to find copies of ancient Buddhist texts, to visit the sacred places associated with Buddha: Gaya, Sarnath, Lumpini Gardens, and at last Kushinagara, where Buddha died. He stayed for years at a time in monasteries, learned Sanskrit, kept travelling, and returned to China with 657 texts, carried by twenty packhorses. At the suggestion of the emperor, he dictated The Great Tang Dynasty Record, finishing it in 646. When it was translated into French and English in the nineteenth century, other travellers (Aurel Stein for one) were able to find the lost cities and forgotten ruins that Xuanzang had so meticulously described. A new edition of Xuanzang’s travels appeared in 1996, translated by Li Rongxi.
Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694): Narrow Road to the Deep North
BASHŌ WAS A nickname — it means banana tree: one was planted at the hut of the poet by an admirer, and the poet adopted the name. Bashō is said to be one of the greatest writers of haiku, the highly distilled, rigorously syllabic, and allusive Japanese three-line poem.
A Zen practitioner, Bashō also wrote haibun, a compressed and sometimes staticky prose that resembles the starkness of haiku. An admirer of the mendicant monks, he spent his life alternating spells of meditative living, usually in a remote hut, with walks (occasionally resorting to horseback), some short, several of them quite lengthy, which he recounted in b
ooks that combined prose with poems. He acknowledged Kamo-no-Chōmei (see page 162) as an inspiration in the writing of travel journals. His first, a quest for spiritual wisdom, was The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton (1685). One passage is heart-rending:
On a road along the Fuji River we came upon an abandoned child, about two years of age and crying pathetically. Apparently his parents, finding the waves of this floating world as uncontrollable as the turbulent rapids of this river, had decided to leave him there until his life vanished like a dewdrop. He looked like a tiny bush-clover blossom that would fall any time tonight or tomorrow beneath the blow of an autumn gust. I tossed him some food from my sleeve pocket, and mused as I passed by:
Poets who sang of monkey’s wailing:
How would they feel about this child forsaken
In the autumn wind?
(translated by Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Bashō, 1977)
In 1689 Bashō took his most ambitious trip, nine months of walking that resulted in his best-known work, his masterpiece, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (or Back Roads to Far Towns), at the time a remote and forgotten part of Honshu, the main island of Japan. Bashō was accompanied by his friend Sora, and both dressed as pilgrims. On this long walk Bashō describes the enlightenment he seeks:
Spent night at Iizuka, bathed at hot-springs there, found lodgings but only thin mats over bare earth, ramshackle sort of place. No lamp, bedded down by shadowy light of fireplace and tried getting some rest. All night, thunder, pouring buckets, roof leaking, fleas, mosquitoes in droves: no sleep. To cap it off the usual trouble cropped up [illness], almost passed out. The short night sky at last broke, and again picked up and went on. But the night’s traces dragged, mind balked. Hired horses, got to post town of Ko-ori. Future seemed farther off than ever, and recurring illness nagged, but what a pilgrimage to far places calls for: willingness to let world go, its momentariness to die on the road, human destiny, which lifted spirit a little, finding foot again here and there, crossing the Okido Barrier in Date.
