by Paul Theroux
“Looking for Trouble” might be the subtitle of the most readable, most memorable travel books. When Redmond O’Hanlon published In Trouble Again, my hand leaped to the shelf. Congo Journey promised more horror, and another delightful read. So I begin with him.
Making a Deal with the Chief of Boha
In his right hand [the Chief] gripped a spear against the inside of his right thigh, its end on the ground and its winged blade high above his head. His left hand lay on his left thigh, and from his right shoulder there hung a large liana-twine bag full, I presumed, of the royal fetishes …
Twelve spearmen stood at intervals in a circle before him, enclosing a line of three chairs; an old man in a brown shirt, torn grey trousers and red plastic sandals, standing on the Chief’s left, tilted his spear towards us and then at the waiting seats …
The Chief inclined his head to his left: the old man, his porte-parole, his word carrier, bent down until his right ear was close to the royal lips; the Chief spoke softly. The audience over, the old man straightened his back, held his spear upright, strode into the centre of the circle, filled his lungs, and sang out a speech in Bomitaba …
At the end of the pronouncement there were shouts from some of the spearmen and from other warriors around the square …
“The white man will pay 75,000 francs to the Chief of Boha,” [the old man] shouted in French, “and 20,000 francs to the Vice-President of the People’s Committee. Then if the Government come with soldiers to take our Chief to prison in Epéna they must take their Vice-President away too. The white man will keep faith with our Customary Rights.”
“It’s far too much!” I said.
The old man nodded. The warrior to the right and behind me lowered his spear and pricked me gently between the shoulder-blades.
“It’s a bargain!” I said.
— Redmond O’Hanlon, Congo Journey (1996)
Fanny Trollope on American Hypocrisy
Had I, during my residence in the United States, observed any single feature in their national character that could justify their eternal boasts of liberality and the love of freedom, I might have respected them, however much my taste might have been offended by what was peculiar in their manners or customs. But it is impossible for any mind of common honesty not to be revolted by the contradictions in their principles and practice … You will see them with one hand hoisting the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves. You will see them one hour lecturing their mob on the indefeasible rights of man, and the next driving from their homes the children of the soil, whom they have bound to protect by the most solemn treaties.
— The Domestic Manners of Americans (1832)
Elias Canetti: Unfathomable Prices in Marrakesh
In the souks, however, the price that is named first is an unfathomable riddle. No one knows in advance what it will be, not even the merchant, because in any case there are many prices. Each one relates to a different situation, a different customer, a different time of day, a different day of the week. There are prices for single objects and prices for two or more together. There are prices for foreigners visiting the city for a day and prices for foreigners who have been here for three weeks. There are prices for the poor and prices for the rich, those for the poor of course being the highest. One is tempted to think that there are more kinds of prices than there are kinds of people in the world.
— The Voices of Marrakesh, translated by J. A. Underwood (1978)
Edward Lear Being Pestered in Albania
No sooner had I settled to draw … than forth came the populace of Elbassan; one by one and two by two to a mighty host they grew, and there were soon from eighty to a hundred spectators collected, with earnest curiosity in every look; and when I had sketched such of the principal buildings as they could recognize a universal shout of “Shaitan!” [Satan] burst from the crowd; and strange to relate, the greater part of the mob put their fingers into their mouths and whistled furiously, after the manner of butcher boys in England. Whether this was a sort of spell against my magic I do not know … One of those tiresome Dervishes — in whom, with their green turbans, Elbassan is rich — soon came up, and yelled, “Shaitan scroo! — Shaitan!” [The Devil draws! The Devil!] in my ears with all his force; seizing my book also, with an awful frown shutting it, and pointing to the sky, as intimating that Heaven would not allow such impiety.
— Journal of a Landscape Painter in Albania (1851)
André Gide: Thoroughly Bored in Bosoum
The absence of individuality, of individualization — the impossibility of differentiating — which depressed me so much at the beginning of my journey, is what I suffer from too much of the landscape. (I experienced this sensation as early as Matadi on seeing the population of children all alike, all equally agreeable, etc … . and again on seeing the huts of the first villages, all alike, all containing droves of human cattle with the same looks, tastes, customs, possibilities, etc … .) Bosoum is a place that looks over a wide stretch of country, and as I stand here on a kind of terrace, made of red ochre-coloured laterite, gazing on the marvellous quality of the light and admiring the vast undulations of the ground, I ask myself what there is to attract me to any one point rather than to any other. Everything is uniform; there can be no possible predilection for any particular site. I stayed the whole day yesterday without the least desire to stir. From one end of the horizon to the other, wherever my eye settles, there is not a single point to which I wish to go.
— Travels in the Congo (1929)
Rimbaud Having a Bad Day in Harar, Abyssinia
I still get very bored. In fact, I’ve never known anyone who gets as bored as I do. It’s a wretched life anyway, don’t you think — no family, no intellectual activity, lost among negroes who try to exploit you and make it impossible to settle business quickly? Forced to speak their gibberish, to eat their filthy food and suffer a thousand aggravations caused by their idleness, treachery and stupidity!
And there’s something even sadder than that — it’s the fear of gradually turning into an idiot oneself, stranded as one is, far from intelligent company.
— letter to his mother, 1886, in Geoffrey Wall, Rimbaud
V. S. Naipaul Disgusted by India
The point that one feels inescapable is the fact of India’s poverty; and how deep is one’s contempt for those Indians who, finding no difficulty in accepting one standard in India and another outside it, fail to realize this, and are failing to work night and day for the removal of this dreadful insult and humiliation … I wonder, wonder if the shitting habits of Indians are not the key to all their attitudes. I wonder if the country will not be spiritually and morally regenerated if people were only made to adopt the standards of other nations in the business of shitting …
So goodbye to shit and sweepers; goodbye to people who tolerate everything; goodbye to all the refusal to act; goodbye to the absence of dignity; goodbye to the poverty; goodbye to caste and that curious pettiness which permeates that vast country; goodbye to people who, though consulting astrologers, have no sense of their destiny as men … It is an unbelievable, frightening, sad country. Probably it all has to change. Not only must caste go, but all those sloppy Indian garments; all those saris and lungis; all that squatting on the floor, to eat, to write, to serve in a shop, to piss.
— letter to Moni Malhoutra, 1963, in Patrick French, The World Is What It Is
Umberto Eco, Hyperbolic in San Luis Obispo
The poor words with which natural human speech is provided cannot suffice to describe the Madonna Inn. To convey its external appearance, divided into a series of constructions, which you reach by way of a filling station carved from Dolomitic rock, or through the restaurant, the bar, and the cafeteria, we can only venture some analogies. Let’s say that Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Gaudí, swallowed an overdose of LSD and b
egan to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli. But that doesn’t give you an idea. Let’s say Arcimboldi builds the Sagrada Familia for Dolly Parton. Or: Carmen Miranda designs a Tiffany locale for the Jolly Hotel chain. Or D’Annunzio’s Vittoriale imagined by Bob Cratchit, Calvino’s Invisible Cities described by Judith Krantz and executed by Leonor Fini for the plush-doll industry. Chopin’s Sonata in B flat minor sung by Perry Como in an arrangement by Liberace and accompanied by the Marine Band. No, that still isn’t right. Let’s try telling about the rest rooms. They are an immense underground cavern, something like Altamira and Luray, with Byzantine columns supporting plaster baroque cherubs. The basins are big imitation-mother-of-pearl shells, the urinal is a fireplace carved from rock, but when the jet of urine (sorry, but I have to explain) touches the bottom, water comes down from the wall of the hood, in a flushing cascade something like the Caves of the Planet Mongo.
— Travels in Hyperreality (1995)
Lord Byron on the Black Sea (the Euxine)
There’s not a sea the passenger e’er pukes in,
Turns up more dangerous breakers than the Euxine.
— Byron, Don Juan (1818–24)
20
Imaginary People
IT IS NOT FRIVOLOUS TO CONSIDER THE TRAVEL literature that describes men with tails, or one-eyed people, or dragons. Such marvels are the reasons the early travel books commanded attention. The Tang Dynasty traveller Xuanzang, who was meticulous in his topographical descriptions, often mentions the presence of dragons. ¶ The many varieties of travel narrative show what readers wish to find in travel — the strange, the sexy, the disgusting, the amazing, the Other. Susan Sontag analysed this fascination (and gullibility) in her essay “Questions of Travel”, where she wrote, “Books about travel to exotic places have always opposed an ‘us’ to a ‘them’ — a relation that yields a limited variety of appraisals. Classical and medieval literature is mostly of the ‘us good, them bad’ — typically, ‘us good, them horrid’ — sort. To be foreign was to be abnormal, often represented by physical abnormality; and the persistence of those accounts of monstrous peoples, of ‘men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders’ (Othello’s winning tale), of anthropophagi.”
Those men whom Othello mentions having seen appear in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, one of the most popular books of the Middle Ages. It was popular precisely because of the bizarre people and places it described. Mandeville claimed that he travelled the world from 1322 to 1356. The first known edition appeared in French in 1371, and in English translation in the early fifteenth century. It went through many editions, and was augmented and embellished as it was reprinted. Mandeville probably did not exist, or if he did exist as a fantasizing Frenchman of the fourteenth century, he may not have gone anywhere: many of Mandeville’s strange tales also appeared in the books of other travellers of the time.
Such grotesque and outlandish accounts hold an enduring fascination, even though it was known (as Henry Fielding wrote) that there was a “vast pile of books which pass under the names of voyages, travels, adventures, lives, memoirs, histories, &c., some of which a single traveller sends into the world in many volumes, and others are, by judicious booksellers, collected into vast bodies in folio, and inscribed with their own names, as if they were indeed their own travels; thus unjustly attributing to themselves the merit of others.”
We know from comparing parallel passages that Chaucer probably read Mandeville. Shakespeare certainly did. Some of the book represents accurate geography; other parts are distorted, fanciful, absurd, and freakish.
Mandeville’s Marvels
THE ISLANDS NEAR JAVA
In that country and others thereabout there be wild geese that have two heads. And there be lions, all white and as great as oxen, and many other diverse beasts and fowls also that be not seen amongst us.
In one of these isles be folk of great stature, as giants. And they be hideous for to look upon. And they have but one eye, and that is in the middle of the front. And they eat nothing but raw flesh and raw fish.
And in another isle toward the south dwell folk of foul stature and of cursed kind that have no heads. And their eyen be in their shoulders.
And in another isle be folk that have the face all flat, all plain, without nose and without mouth. But they have two small holes, all round, instead of their eyes, and their mouth is flat also without lips.
And in another isle be folk of foul fashion and shape that have the lip above the mouth so great, that when they sleep in the sun they cover all the face with that lip …
And in another isle be folk that have horses’ feet. And they be strong and mighty, and swift runners; for they take wild beasts with running, and eat them.
And in another isle be folk that go upon their hands and their feet as beasts. And they be all skinned and feathered, and they will leap as lightly into trees, and from tree to tree, as it were squirrels or apes.
And in another isle be folk that be both man and woman, and they have kind; of that one and of that other. And they have but one pap on the one side, and on that other none. And they have members of generation of man and woman, and they use both when they list, once that one, and another time that other. And they get children, when they use the member of man; and they bear children, when they use the member of woman.
And in another isle be folk that go always upon their knees full marvellously. And at every pace that they go, it seemeth that they would fall. And they have in every foot eight toes.
IN THE KINGDOM OF PRESTER JOHN
In that desert be many wild men, that be hideous to look on; for they be horned, and they speak nought, but they grunt, as pigs. And there is also great plenty of wild hounds. And there be many popinjays, that they clepe psittakes their language. And they speak of their proper nature, and salute men that go through the deserts, and speak to them as apertly as though it were a man. And they that speak well have a large tongue, and have five toes upon a foot. And there be also of another manner, that have but three toes upon a foot, and they speak not, or but little, for they can not but cry.
DEFLOWERING
Another isle is there, full fair and good and great, and full of people, where the custom is such, that the first night that they be married, they make another man to lie by their wives for to have their maidenhead: and therefore they take great hire and great thank. And there be certain men in every town that serve of none other thing; and they clepe them cadeberiz, that is to say, the fools of wanhope. For they of the country hold it so great a thing and so perilous for to have the maidenhead of a woman, that them seemeth that they that have first the maidenhead putteth him in adventure of his life.
SEXUAL HABITS ON “ANOTHER ISLE” NEARBY
In that country they take their daughters and their sisters to their wives, and their other kinswomen. And if there be ten men or twelve men or more dwelling in an house, the wife of everych of them shall be common to them all that dwell in that house; so that every man may lie with whom he will of them on one night, and with another, another night. And if she have any child, she may give it to what man that she list, that hath companied with her, so that no man knoweth there whether the child be his or another’s. And if any man say to them, that they nourish other men’s children, they answer that so do over men theirs … And I asked them the cause why that they held such custom: and they said me, that of old time men had been dead for deflowering of maidens, that had serpents in their bodies that stung men upon their yards, that they died anon: and therefore they held that customs to make other men ordained therefore to lie by their wives, for dread of death, and to assay the passage by another [rather] than for to put them in that adventure.
Marco Polo’s Human Oddities
Let me tell you next of the kingdom of Lambri [in present-day Sumatra], which also has a king of its own but professes allegianc
e to the Great Khan. The people are idolaters …
Now here is something really remarkable. I give you my word that in this kingdom there are men who have tails full a palm in length. They are not at all hairy. This is true of most of the men — that is, of those who live outside in the mountains, not of those in the city. Their tails are as thick as a dog’s. There are also many unicorns [probably rhinos] and a profusion of wild game, both beast and bird.
— The Travels of Marco Polo, translated by Ronald Latham (1958)
Andaman is a very big island. The people have no king. They are idolaters and live like wild beasts. Now let me tell you of a race of men well worth describing in our book. You may take it for a fact that all the men of this island have heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes like dogs; for I assure you that the whole aspect of their faces is that of big mastiffs. They are a very cruel race: whenever they can get hold of a man who is not one of their kind, they devour him.
— The Travels of Marco Polo
21
Writers and the Places They Never Visited
FOR A WRITER TO DESCRIBE A PLACE HE OR SHE has not bothered to visit is not only self-deluded but deeply insulting to the people living there and to those travellers who actually troubled to go there. Laziness, indifference, contempt, fear of the place, fear of travel, fear of being disillusioned, and the novelist’s natural instinct to fantasize — all are factors in the decision of a writer to stay home and invent the exotic, as Saul Bellow did, conjuring up an Africa he had never seen while sitting in his book-lined study in Tivoli, New York, without ever having to swat a tsetse fly. Even so, you know a writer’s mind, and especially his or her fantasies, from the fiction. You know what they think of themselves, and other people, and of the world.
