Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  You are confronted, then, with what appears to be simply an enormous cave—until you notice that the floor is a floor of water. Notice how slowly it moves; a heavy black thrust of water, glacier-slow, protruding from the darkness like a naked limb. The interior appears fathomless, mesmeric, labyrinthine. Make the ritual offering of rice and, as if by magic, the enigmatic boat appears from the depths. Step into it firmly, holding the cherry-wood crucifix. There is no cause for alarm. Do not address the figure at the helm. Charon is a singular old fellow to be sure, but his voice is unpleasant: the voice of a gnat. To watch him open his mouth is like watching a prehistoric sandwich being prized open; his rimless gums are laid in an appetizing manner, like layers of crab or prawn between two lids of lip. Occupy yourself with memories of Bournemouth, and prepare for the change, as you enter the deep maw for the tunnel, propelled by no oar but simply by the deep stagnant flux of water, an amniotic lustreless soup on whose elastic back you, my dear Aunt, are seated. As you enter the eclipsed interior you will be aware of having entered as it were, the ganglionic processes of some giant bug; it sounds hardly reasonable, I know, but the idea will become accustomed to you. Face it. You are sitting in a black boat sailing down the arteries of the Minotaur itself. The walls, you notice, are not made of rock but of some dark fungoid plasm which trembles ever so lightly and exudes the rich teeming scent of musk. Their range of colour exhausts the spectrum; from the gold speck in the eye of the strawberry to the pigeon-violet seams which trace themselves in granite or Maltese marble. The surface of the chambers resembles the moist, horny palpitating skin which you have seen perhaps on the backs of toads. Ammonite, shale, dolerite: carbuncles and facets which blind. You will not be amazed by this time to find your body become dimensionless—without substance as if projected on the screen of some giant cinema. You are seeing with the X-ray eye now, dear Aunt Prudence: the eye which strips the features and traces the zygomatic arch, bores the hollow temples and observes the mastoid processes ticking like a watch: the eye which dissects the flaps of the abdomen and finds destiny curled up beside the liver like a clock-spring. You are seeing now as the butterfly sees who is pure of heart. It is the cataclysmic second-sight given to the blind.

  If you are thirsty remember that the water is nourishing; the Stygian flux is warm, very faintly saline, and palatable. It crusts on the mouth, suggesting a heavy albumen content. It varies, also, at each stage of the journey, in colour. When you reach, for example, the endocrine network of caves, you will observe it thickening to the consistency of lava, boiling and sheeting, coughing up splashes of lymph and clots of arterial blood on the walls. But you have some way to go before you reach that point. The scenery is temperate and clarid for several light-years as yet; in the carotid tunnel you will become aware of a persistent drubbing on the sides of the boat, as of small rubber bladders. Lean over and stare down. At this point the bottom is clear and the infiltration of light will show you, to your surprise, that the water is crowded with small foetuses, for all the world like coloured fish. They will approach the boat in great playfulness and without suspicion. In fact they are quite tame. Notice the rudimentary gills. They long to speak to you, to say something, but in the present state of development cannot. Therefore they signal by banging themselves against the bottom of the boat smiling the foetal smile and flirting their limbs in the luminous fluid. They are tremendously amusing little fellows. You will be quite sorry to pass them and enter the long tunnel of calcium where the temperature becomes suddenly quite polar and the air vaporous. On each side lies a thick bank of frozen marrow, whose edges are warmed to a squashy, musky thaw by the waters of the Styx; on these you will see the eternal and amusing bacilli playing their careless games. They are all dressed alike, resembling penguins, and stand about to watch the barge pass, in little groups, hands behind their back, like financiers. On the metatarsal promontory you will doubtless observe some scarlet-fanned flamingoes, fishing ravenously for eel in the little backwater where the discharge from the marrow-bank precipitates a little pool of pus. The odour is not pleasant, dear Aunt Prudence, but there is nothing to be done. You will pass this tunnel and enter the cardiac whirlpool which smells of oil and makes a curious inaudible but regular roar. On the right hand, sculptured it seems, hangs a huge and brilliantly coloured vulva, like a sea-anemone magnified a thousand times, holding to the walls by a terrific act of suction. A thick piston of gristle agitates the walls of the cardiac monster and communicates a thumping noise to the shaky barge. As you pass under the vast sticky arch of pink integument be sure of putting up your umbrella, because you will find yourself moving in a soft rain of blood and ashes. The water is studded with violet fish, turtles, sperm whales at anchor, and all varieties of religious experience. The barge drives its long black furrow through them. By this time you will be weary of wondering if this journey has a destination: the face of Charon is sphingine. Do not ask, but fall asleep.

  When you are awakened you find yourself in clear water, between open banks, falling away from the river to a vast tortured skyline hung in rags of cloud. It is so silent that your breathing sounds enormous, noisy as a blacksmith’s bellows. The boat goes so infinitely slowly that you will have time to get off and examine this territory which is without doubt the most interesting you have yet seen. It is a section of the Tibetan colon; the silence, the utter cessation of being here will explain itself when you examine the plants and trees which stud the banks. It is a mineral world. It is a world calcined, petrified, shrunk down to its elemental carbon. Now do you understand why there is no sound? You can no longer hear the sap moving in the trees, no longer hear the pulse-beats stirring the throat of the bird. You cannot hear the mole tunnelling, the blind worm chewing his pinshead of mud. They are all there—trees, birds, fruit, worms: but mineral now. The iris of the blackbird’s eye is shaken with a rich moving lustre for which there is no musical expression; the worm is withered down to the colour of the prune. So silent is it that the white grapes in the vineyard gleam crystalline, like pearls; and the tree of the Forbidden Apple is clustered with enormous shining globes of trite slag. Here, if you look, you will see that every apple is an El Greco, every whale a Cézanne. Do not miss the boat wandering here in this enchanted world, for there are penalties. You will find yourself affected slightly even after a few moments spent here: you cough up fragments of diamond-dust and horsehair into your handkerchief. But do not be alarmed. It is only your liver which has been turned to speckled granite. Had you stayed longer you would have suffered a seachange. The light is strangely unvarying here, also: it is the light given off by spores of copper ore or freckled litharge in the bowels of the earth; it is consistent, even, polar: and contributes a mineral falsity to the fields and trees as of a lighted stage.

  Well, my dear Aunt Prudence, there are many stages on this interesting journey, but I have not time or memory to describe them all to you. You will pass some time, of course, in the territory of the impregnable amnion; outside its walls you will observe the spermatozoa being trained for the great assault. Quaint shock-troops in their uniform of cellophane, their long pigtails which they use like a giant fin, dorsal, caudal, and pectoral all in one. They develop enormous speeds and are famous for their audacity. In the schoolrooms you will see whole classes of them sitting at desks and learning the theory of tactics. They chant in unison the only lesson which is aural, and compulsory to master. You will be drugged by their steady repetition of the words: “Doctor Livingstone, I presume. Doctor Livingstone, I presume, Doctor Livingstone, I presume.”

  There is nothing in all this to cause you a moment’s anxiety. But like all great journeys this also has an end; unlike most journeys however, this turns out to be a beginning. You are sailing down, dear Aunt, towards the great beginning of nothing, which is the ending of everything. You will hear your memory falling away little by little. He lay in bed with you for forty years but his name you cannot recall: a rose by any other name. In the vegetable garden you could see him with h
is great thumbs lined with soft rank soil. He treads in your womb towards the hour of eight when the village clock chimes and the rain hisses among the taciturn statues. He is everywhere. But now it is you who are nowhere. Neither the memory nor the photograph impinges. The scalpel in one movement severs the ganglionic cords and you are deaf. Sit there primly in your Sunday clothes while the great black barge noses down into the abyss of gestation. He was a bone from your side but the apple was rotten. You cannot read the brass tablet in the village church where his identity is insisted upon. Dear Aunt Prudence, his name is engraved on the brooch and written in the hymnbook. He was a bookmarker in your life. Where is he now, on which side of what ledger—debit or credit, anode or cathode, electron or neutron? To these questions I can give you no answer. To the rest of the journey I can give you no card, no compass, no latitude, longitude, rainfall, humidity, curious isobars. The boat tilts now and enters the outskirts of the falls. You are in for great changes; I can say no more than that. You have been formed up suddenly into a great watery ball of anguished blood. The smell of civet pervades everything. Charon’s face is outlined in the sharp red flares. You are being swallowed. This is a placental nightmare in which you are being carried through a solid filter of lochia; giant hairs, bald scabs, detached ulcers, wedding-rings, knucklebones, sets of carious teeth. It is a vast suffocating whirlpool where all this human garbage is being assembled together; the walls contract and expand, scarlet, purple, suffocating, distended. The eyeballs of horses choked with blood. A biological dementia in which the barge ploughs through these dripping walls of red sponge, hung with rags of tissue, goitres, stalactites of calcium, calculi. Aunt Prudence, with the hair-pins in her hat and the hymnbook in her fingers; Aunt Prudence, with the sebaceous cysts and the spinal anomalies.

  The centrum itself is built of steel, with ribs of colossal girth, watertight bulkheads and a periscope with a magnification of eight. It resembles an enormous grenade. The walls are bathed in blood and mucus and are too hot to touch. You will find by this time that both Charon and the barge have disappeared. The problem of gaining admittance remains. What is inside nobody knows except myself. Courage, Prudence, in the sight of the Lord; this is the chamber where the sight of the usually sightless is unsealed. This is the womb of the Minotaur, the abyss, the dining-room where in the person of your foetal self you can break the bread and partake of the first supper.

  You will enter. You, the ghost of Prudence will enter, clean and shining like a knife-blade; you will enter like a sacred wafer between the lips of Christ. The walls will admit you. Inside you will stumble upon the body of a young boy, lying in a pool of blood. Paralysing beauty and silence. The lips hang there like cherries. The eyes are silent, behind their beautiful stone lids. He is the first-born. There will be nothing to say. Simply sit down beside him for a short rest, and absently begin to count the spokes of your umbrella. The worst is over. Trust in your inner ghost and be upright. Let me kiss you on the forehead and wish you Bon Voyage in the black barge, my dear. It is all I can do.

  Your affectionate nephew,

  Lawrence

  Reflections on Travel

  Published in the sunday Times. London. December 27, 1959.

  ALMOST EVERY YEAR, usually towards the autumn, I receive at least one such card from a returning traveller; its expressed disappointment carries more than a plaintive hint of reproach. “Couldn’t you have warned us that we’d find St. Juan (or Bevalo, or Kalamas) so very hot and dusty and full of our compatriots?” it always runs. Reading it with a sigh I always find myself wondering why nobody has compiled a Handbook of Hazards which might offset the flowery verbiage of the travel bureaux. For the truth is that with so much excellent travel writing being published, and with so many inducements held out to visit foreign parts, there is nevertheless no compilation to which one can turn for the naked and unvarnished truth about the smaller hazards. How simple if there were! One envisages a set of small guides, each devoted to a single country, which could forewarn and forearm intending travellers against every possible disenchantment. Thus one might turn to the letter D and read, under the section entitled “Drainage, Main, and Otherwise” a brief but truthful account of the lavatories to be encountered (three stars) in out-of-the-way spots like Macedonia or the Pyrenees; or under the sub-title “Drinks,” be advised that vieux marc and slivovitz alike are the only specifics against winds like the Provençal mistral or the Yugoslav koshava. Within these pages one would find the only way to deal with the Mediterranean affliction of high summer known to us all as “tummy” (Egyptian, Greek, or Naples tummy). A single tube of magic Entero-vioform (make a note of it) will enable one to throw off all grim forebodings about melons and grapes, unwashed salads, or those magnificent cassata ices which spell death in Naples to small children with nordic stomachs. Similarly, one would be advised to take witch-hazel against hornet stings or infected mosquito bites—so much stronger than the useless arnica preparations which one finds.… These may be trivia but what a help it would be to have them recorded! Guides of such a nature would at least prevent the traveller from making the elementary mistakes which, to judge by the autumn mail, he is still making. (“Couldn’t you have said that Athens is a steam-bath in August?”—“Just back from Sicily. Never again. Why didn’t you warn us?”)

  One sympathizes deeply, but what is to be done with people who are still in the habit of deciding at Christmas to run down to Nice for a little sunlight? Nothing. Just let them try it. To sit shivering in a draughty hotel without central heating during the short but ferocious winter season of the Côte d’Azur … why, one might as well be in Bournemouth. The pines in the Garden of Fragrance moan not more ghoulishly than the swaying palms on the Promenade des Anglais. Now if only they would wait until mid-March it would be quite a different story, for by then the weather has really begun to stabilize. The weather, yes, but not the sea. Disappointment with Nice usually drives these same blithe people to set off from the Piraeus on a sea-cruise in mid-March. Now there is a patch of good weather usually in late March when, for ten days or so, one imagines one is in high summer; calm seas, warm nights, blue days.… It is very deceptive. The Greeks call this little patch The Little Summer of Saint Demetrius. It is followed usually by a longish bout of north wind, high seas, cloud, thunder, hail, rain, and often snow. So very often one finds oneself sea-bound in Heraclion or Leros for a spell with nothing better to do than to address yet another insulting postcard to me. (If only someone had said.…)

  But if on the one hand we need a large and frank dictionary devoted to the hazards of travel, we also need something like a Year Book which would list, under the months of the year, the places which are worth time and money to visit. Professional tourism has tended to encourage the belief that travel belongs to certain seasons of the year, whereas the truth is that there is always somewhere which will answer the traveller’s need at whatever time of the year. Such a book might prevent his going to Nice but it would also suggest that (unless he is an alpinist) the only truly stable winter climate is that of the North African coast, from Alexandria to Casablanca. Here he will find brisk, radiantly sunny days and cold nights. I can think of only one place towards the opposite shore of the Mediterranean which seems blessed with the same sort of stable winter. (Ischia, Corsica, Cyprus, Corfu: never before April and May.) But the two winters I spent in Rhodes were of a totally different kind, sunny, cold, and dry. It was particularly interesting to notice also that the sea was warm, autumnal warm, and that one could bathe in January without turning blue. This is certainly not possible in other islands where I have resided. Perhaps these two winters were exceptional? It is hard to say. The inhabitants claim that winter is always like that in Rhodes, and certainly Tiberius (a great connoisseur of wintering spots) chose it for seven years for this reason.

  My own contribution to such a Year Book would suggest North Africa for the heart of winter; mind you, for those who like myself do not ski or climb and yet who love snow once in a while
, I would add in the margin the name of Slovenia, that little-known country which joins Yugoslavia to Austria. The little lake of Bled, for example, is an enchanting place to spend a snowbound winter. Nor is it less delectable in summer. But for the spring and summer I should think there is nothing to equal the Mediterranean. One could go island-hopping from April to the end of June, starting in Ischia and touching Sicily, Crete, and Cyprus. But though I share the ordinary northerner’s passion for heat, I think Athens and Stamboul should be avoided (no less than Naples) in August. This is the month to spend on a small Greek island with its permanent cool sea breezes, or among the foothills of the Lebanon, or in the Cévennes. But, of course, everyone will have his own preference. The point of such a Year Book would be that it would be constructed on the lines of a great anthology. Its contributors would range far and wide over Europe and Asia, giving us the fruit of their experience, season by season. Each month would offer the reader a bewildering choice of projects, often by his favourite writers; Mr. Connolly would advise him how to eat well, and where. Mr. Quennell would infect him with his own enthusiasm for landscape and history. Mr. Patrick Leigh Fermor would put him onto the only village in Crete where travellers are knocked down if they try to pay for their lodging and entertainment.…