Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  At such times when he considered the relative importance of others in relation to himself he smiled gently and sorrowfully, as one who looks upon a piteous and silly sight: only a God or a Pharisee could have managed a smile like that.

  At Kurseong, their ultimate destination, they were installed in a house as old as the Lucknow Residency, and very nearly as dilapidated; a crumbling fortress, it was spread over a level jut of the hillside above the town, squinting down at right angles upon the pink and white straggle of the newer houses. From its upper windows it commanded a view of some thirty odd miles of mountain country, across the valley in which the heavy Balasun dragged its way, curdled and jade-green in winter, tooth-white and broad in summer, across the tangle of paths on the green fertile crest, dotted with pines, to where Kinchinjunga and her sisters climbed out of a grey and blue wilderness. You will find the town on the map (if you care to look) almost exactly in the middle of the bottle-neck territory of Northern British India which is jammed into the wide cavity lying between Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan.

  The greater part of the permanent population of the town, at the time when Clifton got his job on the narrow-gauge mountain-railway, consisted of tea planters whose narrow brick houses were built, for the most part, on the outer flanks of the hill-spurs, from where they overlooked mile upon mile of symmetrically planted tea-bushes, bright green even under the coating of summer dust; but beyond these flat territories of bushes the hill range was successful in its defiance of cultivation; isolated patches of sugar-beet and an odd garden of sickly vegetables here and there were all Nature allowed in a country which was almost utterly subject to her caprices, and in which she suffered warm, luxurious vegetable life on one square foot of ground, and gave to another a sprinkling of shale and chalk fit only to nourish dry and brittle stalks of grass. The soil had been flung as a cloak is flung, carelessly across the mountain, falling deep here and there where a crevice allowed it depth enough to cherish the roots of the gigantic forest-trees, the oak, the ash, the simul tree, and the tufted tree-fern, and in other places only thinly covering the frame of rock; here and there shoulders of rock had pierced the covering and emerged into the daylight, standing up in their smooth bulk as if in defiance of the soil-coverlet that had hidden them for so long. Occasionally, too, they would shake themselves loose and start trundling down the hill: more than once boulders the size of a whale had crashed into the sleeping village and demolished half a dozen or so of the rude dung huts of the inhabitants. But whenever such a thing happened, the village elders would gather together and, after a long session of sage discussion, announce that such a thing could only be the work of evil spirits, ghosts … their own expressive word, bhuts. After this first declaration another would be made which forbade anyone to lay a finger on the boulder for fear of drawing the malice of the bhut upon himself; prayer and the necessary acts of propitiation alone, if they would not actually repair the damage done, would at least prevent a repetition of the offence. That was how it was. The huts, which hung together on the edge of the penultimate crag above the river, which had been blessed by the collective designation “Kurseong,” were for the most part leaning among a nest of boulders against which other small huts of wood or dung leaned. It possessed a main street, through which ran the railway-line, and which served as a bazaar for the inhabitants, and a tethering ground for children and cattle alike, from which yet another row of ramshackle huts had been built back up the hillside.

  Above this rabble of houses stood the old house, detached and cynical, as incongruous and striking as a museum would be in a mining colony. The jut of its massive cornices, the peeling scabs of stucco on the walls, gave it the appearance of an over-ornamental, garish relic; bore witness to the passing of a style of architecture the characteristics of which were a sprawling stability and a superb insolence. It stood out sheer among the firs, dominating the ridge, like some incubus left over from a lost age.

  A long veranda shot out to the very edge of the cliff-side, bounded with stubby mock-Corinthian pillars of great girth, and weighed down by a broad-windowed corridor, which it carried. Above the façade a row of almost obliterated scrolls set the visitor wondering what arms had once been graven there, what knights had lodged under the heavy roof, what carousing and revelry had brightened the lowering silence of the enormous dusty halls.

  The blind lower windows looked out across the overgrown pathways, and the moss-clothed stones that edged in the rows of flowerbeds. The walks were redolent with the sharp smell of rottenness, as though centuries of decay had not managed to stifle the scent of the dwarf rose bushes.

  The gate, a writhing ornamental tangle of iron, was covered in a coat of barley-coloured rust: it opened squealing upon a hedge of rhododendrons, while on either side of the path which led to the porch stood a row of sentinel nightshade, the white flowers drooping in the languor of the silence.

  No birds seemed ever to fly about the garden. On the hillside below it grew a tangled profusion of ferns and wild flowers, heavy with scent, and here all day in the summer you could hear the twittering of a hundred junketing sparrows: but from the garden the sound seemed deadened, dim: even the ear-splitting scraw of the mina was a small beat of sound in the pulses of this silence. It was a queer illusion, this muting of all sound, this anonymous garden softly absorbing and deadening all voice, all utterance. It was as if one had unwittingly intruded upon a submarine life miraculously existing above the sea: the rotten drooping plants, with the water settling upon their leaves, the still earth gathered into a fine hair-net of weeds, and above all, this idiot half-sound tantalizing the ear which had been led by memory to expect a greater volume.

  The front door was studded with all manner of brass ornaments, knockers, and letter-boxes, all unrecognizable under their tarnish, and possessed an inlet window of blue and red glass: it cast an octagonal shadow across the bare boards of the hallway. All that had been left in the house was a wide smudged lithograph, framed and hanging upon the drawing-room wall, which depicted the “Stand of the Royal Scots,” at some famous action or other, long since forgotten.

  The house was called “Emerald Hall,” though who had given it the name no one could tell them. On the front gate was a lopsided plaque of rotten wood bearing the mystic letters EM … LD … LL: symbols which seemed to bear the same quality of mysterious decay as bore the unkept garden and the rambling house.

  Clifton had said: “It’ll be quite all right when we get some furniture in and cosy it up a bit. You see.” But his tone lacked conviction.

  The small boy had made no comment at all, but remained standing quite still, awed but not frightened by the silence. He had wondered why his feet made so great a noise on the gravel. A fat, beautifully marked caterpillar hung like a bright emerald ring in a crumpled rose: in his nostrils ran the dank smell of the earth: these were strangely exciting things.

  “It’ll be all right,” repeated the man, pressing the small hand of his son, “what do you say?”

  The boy offered no comment. He stretched his puny arms and yawned: his eyes filled with tears: he replaced his hand in his father’s and smiled slowly, shuffling his heels in the gravel.

  “It’ll be fine,” persisted the man, but he did not believe in his own assertions. He wished that there had been some other accommodation in this cursed hill-station than this hulk of masonry. Would any amount of furnishing ever reduce this atmosphere of deadness? Impossible: and he was right, for no amount of furniture made the rooms appear less cavernous, and the regular ministrations of a gardener only served to produce small isolated patches of tidiness which were soon swallowed up in the conflict of decay.

  But for the first few weeks the boy was too absorbed in the exploration of his new surroundings to be oppressed by them. The melancholy that brooded about the old house did not affect him; indeed, if he was aware of it at all, it was as something which heightened the colour of his daily discoveries in the garden, giving a sense of permanent mystery to these new experi
ences. The garden was full of all manner of strange flowers that he had not seen before, among which he was most conscious of the nightshade. He had been told it was poisonous, and the terrible poetry of the name haunted him with a fear that one day, unthinking, he would eat some of those bluish berries and die an agonizing death. But there were compensations for this fear: there were so many other things he could touch and pursue without fear. Haifa dozen different varieties of beetle, ranging from the walnut-sized coprophagous one, to the sheeny grey-green rose-beetles. Caterpillars were enormous, banded with every colour of the rainbow; moths and butterflies, blue, brown, slate-coloured, and bright yellow, busied themselves all day about the corners of the bushes. He explored these mysteries as thoroughly as he was able, wandering all day long through the deserted pathways, upon the carpets of moss, whispering to himself or talking to his companion, the ayah. She who had been engaged by Clifton to look after him during the day was a slender middle-aged woman with the characteristic secrecy and silence of the hill-people; her flat Mongolian features were broad, good-humoured, and lacking in any great animation. She was loaded with ear-rings, nose-rings, bangles, and heavy brass anklets that clipped monotonously as she walked. She tended the boy well, suffering his rages and irritations with the patience of a woman who has borne many children of her own.

  She was tactful, did not intrude, and was never officious; indeed, she did no more than her job, following him about to see that he came to no harm, giving him his meals, and explaining as best she could the nature of those things which baffled him; why the hill-people collected donkey-water in bottles; why the roof of every house in the village was covered with circular pats of offal, drying in the sunlight; why her husband beat her.

  She would sit on her haunches and smile kindly as she related these things without shame or reticence, as though these phenomena were as curious to her as they were to him, and her understanding of them something superficial which did not really touch the heart of things.

  Together they walked miles, exploring the country round the town, from the heights of Victoria Hill, to the bleak wind-haunted muzzle of Eagle’s Crag overlooking the plains. She taught him how to rid himself of the leeches: to avoid pulling them off his flesh, as they left round sore holes: to place instead, a pinch of salt upon them. He was amazed to see them quickly dissolve into blood and drip from him. She taught him to sing the crooning songs of her people, told him queer folk-stories, and first made him acquainted with the unusual intonation of the hill-tongue.

  Some evenings, when his father was late back from work, he would wander to the edge of the garden to watch the sun set behind Eagle’s Crag, and the veined rivers twinkle in the shadowy carpet of the plains that lay outstretched before him. The scattered legions of fir trees would stand very slim and erect, as if poised on the brink of some precipitous movement, while the colour-tones of the rock-balconies would change from blue to grey, from grey to silver, until the first webs of darkness blurred all defined outline and gave the uncertain body of objects the significance of a panic. In the dissolving half-light whole companies of trees would seem to change shape and position, the hulks of rock to recede slowly into themselves, and the thunder of the Balasun River in the valley to become subdued and merged in a monotone of plaint; a dirge only lightened by the sound of voices in the village, laughter across the dim roofs, and the final hard clatter of his father’s footsteps on the road below the house. He would run to meet him, happily confident of the inevitable greeting:

  “Hullo. You still up? It’s high time you were in bed.”

  They would walk up to the house arm-in-arm laughing and talking, and his father would shout to the servants to light the lamps, his voice a riot of cheering and comfortable sound in the silence.

  Sometimes Clifton would bring with him the illustrated journals of the month which he had bought from some station bookstall; he would hand them to his son with a sense of obligation, as though he were trying to lighten the loneliness of his surroundings, and in some way satisfy his own acute sense of guilt. Yet he was conscientious enough to feel the need of excuse. He had said:

  “It won’t be for very long … a month, or so and then your Aunt Brenda’ll be here to look after you.”

  Walsh had politely and without interest agreed. In actual fact he was as happy as anyone could be whose activities were superintended by a bland and self-effacing shadow, and whose territory of activity was not restricted to the limits of a garden, but to as much rocky country as he chose to explore. This fact, and the fact that each successive day he became more and more amazed at the inexhaustible hoard of marvels revealed to him during his explorations, made propitiation a farce.

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  He had wandered, without realizing it, to the curving ridge of trees above the burial-ground. He recalled with a start that it must be long after tea; he would probably be late for dinner, but it did not matter very much. He screwed up his eyes and estimated that the sun had another half-hour to live. It was just hidden behind the snout of Eagle’s Crag, and the shadows were beginning to lengthen across the glades. The moss was soft and springy under his feet.

  He decided to stay there awhile, judging the time by the height of the sun, and then to take the short cut home. There was the thrilling prospect of danger in the act of racing to get home before darkness fell; after dark it was unwise to take the scrubby and tortuous path down the hillside for fear of snakes. Even with a lantern and a stick the prospect was not too pleasing.

  The leeches fell from the trees about him with the heavy noise of rain-drops. Lucky it was not damp, otherwise there would be millions of them swarming all over the place. He carried in his pocket a soiled twist of paper in which were a few pinches of salt. Now as he sank down on the moss the action of habitude was the removal of this twist of paper from his pocket; he laid it beside him. However hot it might be, he reflected, there would be one or two at least of the pests upon you; that could not be helped.

  Sure enough you would find the small rubbery creature coiled on your skin, sucking the blood from a vein. When you put the smallest pinch of salt on it it trembled and released you; turned on its back, wriggling protestingly, and began to slip from you, dissolving slowly to blood. It left sticky red smears all down you, so that you had to go and wash them. It was more pleasing, he thought, to let the blood congeal, and then to pick it off with your fingers.… Sometimes when the leech had been feeding for a long time it became swollen and shiny and the salt acted almost immediately. Amazing change! One minute there would be the drowsy, sated creature moving gently upon the wound as it grew fatter, the next a gout of blood falling and catching on the points of hair.…

  He sat up in sudden alarm as a flying-fox swerved past in the trees. In the woods about him a small wind broke into mournful ragtime, drumming the leaves together and creaking the trees. A squirrel came down to ground level and set herself diligently about collecting food. He had always wanted a squirrel for a pet but had been warned that they did not survive captivity.

  He lolled back on the moss, clasping his hands behind his head. A slow melancholy took possession of him. He seemed to see himself lying there, looking up at the green leaves, as if from a great distance and from a totally new personality. He was plunged in a consuming self-pity.

  He drummed his heels on the ground and murmured defiantly:

  “Sala … swine … sala,” as if to drive away the mournful fancies that grew in his mind.

  The brown earth of the burial-ground was silent, with its circles of ankle-deep ash; brown and pitted. Why did people die? Illness? He too had a body, strong and healthy. He pinched his thigh as if to verify the fact. If you got ill and died, you were either buried or burnt. The little European graveyard below Eagle’s Crag was chill with decay and silence, the lettering on the tombstones pricked out in hectic reds and phosphorescent greens. He would hate to lie under the ground in a closed box; more particularly in that silent plot of ground. His father could not
save him. He could buy him presents but not save him; nor could Father Calhoun. That was a terrible thought. He shuddered suddenly, imagining his dead body in a box, and Father Calhoun standing over it, praying. His eyes would be shining and his cassock would be dark in the light of the candles about the room; he breathed more quickly, imagining his pale face under the flickering candleshine. He wanted to cry at the thought of it, but the tears would not come. He knew that his father would be sorry and much too shy to come and see him as he lay there in the loneliness of death. His father would smile, showing his white teeth, and talk very quietly about something. He felt, for probably the first time, utterly lonely; desperately in need of an ally, someone who would help him. He gave a little moan and turned over on his side. He could not cry; he felt hot and strained.

  Then, out of the murmurous evening, echoing in the hollowness of distance, came the sound. He heard and started upright; took a few hurried steps through the trees and stopped, listening. A mina screamed some where near at hand, and he started, oathing softly and volubly under his breath, telling himself that he had been mistaken; there were so many sounds that meant noth ing, so many sounds that picked up echoes and …

  Heavily the sound rolled up again through the trees, large and clear, as if to echo and refute the futility of doubt. The trees about him broke into a trembling at the sound of the conch. In that second s certainty the boy too was seized with a fit of shivering. He muttered to himself and looked about him.

  On the shelving edge of the table-land a great boulder had plucked itself away from the earth and fallen twenty feet to the circle of trees, laying bare the shoulder of the hillside: out of the rubble of shale that had dropped away from his wound, hung the leaning trunk of a sickening birch tree. The boy ran towards it, muttering.… “Should be high enough.” With the nervous agility of dread he swarmed up it, climbing higher and higher until he could lean, swaying perilously upon the highest branches, and look out over the road.