I may truly say that, of all the worshippers who clung weeping to the curtain, or who pressed their beating hearts to the stone, none felt for the moment a deeper emotion than did the Haji from the far-north. It was as if the poetical legends of the Arab spoke truth, and that the waving wings of angels, not the sweet breeze of morning, were agitating and swelling the black covering of the shrine. But, to confess humbling truth, theirs was the high feeling of religious enthusiasm, mine was the ecstasy of gratified pride.
Being Burton, though, another ecstatic experience is his glimpse of a flirtatious pilgrim, a girl he calls Flirtilla.
Close to us sat a party of fair Meccans, apparently belonging to the higher classes, and one of these I had already several times remarked. She was a tall girl, about eighteen years old, with regular features, a skin somewhat citrine-coloured, but soft and clear, symmetrical eyebrows, the most beautiful eyes, and a figure all grace. There was no head thrown back, no straightened neck, no flat shoulders, nor toes turned out — in fact, no "elegant" barbarisms: the shape was what the Arabs love, soft, bending, and relaxed, as a woman's figure ought to be. Unhappily she wore, instead of the usual veil, a "Yashmak" of transparent muslin, bound round the face; and the chaperone, mother, or duenna, by whose side she stood, was apparently a very unsuspicious or complaisant old person. Flirtilla fixed a glance of admiration upon my cashmere. I directed a reply with interest at her eyes. She then by the usual coquettish gesture, threw back an inch or two of head-veil, disclosing broad bands of jetty hair, crowning a lovely oval. My palpable admiration of the new charm was rewarded by a partial removal of the Yashmak, when a dimpled mouth and a rounded chin stood out from the envious muslin. Seeing that my companions were safely employed, I entered upon the dangerous ground of raising hand to forehead. She smiled almost imperceptibly, and turned away. The pilgrim was in ecstasy.
No non-Muslim since Burton has made the pilgrimage to Mecca and lived to tell the tale.
Sailing Alone Around the World
JOSHUA SLOCUM DECIDED to be the first man to sail single-handedly around the world. He was an experienced sailor — and restless from the time of his youth in Canada, where he had been an inveterate runaway. He found an old thirty-seven-foot sloop, rebuilt and refitted her, named her Spray, and left in 1895 on his voyage, without a chronometer but using dead reckoning. The trip, which took three years and covered forty-six thousand miles, was full of incident, and Slocum's account of the voyage, Sailing Alone Around the World (1899), is a well-told book — vivid, detailed, and very funny, right from the beginning, where he says, "I was born in a cold spot, on coldest North Mountain, on a cold February 20, though I am a citizen of the United States — a naturalized Yankee."
Slocum, self-educated, wrote that "my books were always my friends" — in his library he had Darwin, Twain's Life on the Mississippi, Don Quixote, R. L. Stevenson, and Shakespeare. His book made him famous, and he continued voyaging, as well as lecturing about his exploits. He also spent forty-two days in jail on a charge of molestation (see Chapter 8, "Fears, Neuroses, and Other Mental Conditions"). In the fall of 1909, he left Martha's Vineyard, intending to sail the Spray to the Amazon. Nothing was heard from him after that — he was lost at sea, presumed to have been sunk after having been hit by a steamer, though he (as always using his self-steering device) was snug in his cabin, reading a book, his normal practice when sailing.
In The Cruise of the Snark (1911), which was inspired by Slocum's voyage, Jack London wrote:
Joshua Slocum sailed around the world a few years ago in a thirty-seven-foot boat all by himself. I shall never forget, in his narrative of the voyage, where he heartily indorsed the idea of young men, in similar small boats, making similar voyage. I promptly indorsed his idea, and so heartily that I took my wife along. While it certainly makes a Cook's tour look like thirty cents, on top of that, and on top of the fun and pleasure, it is a splendid education for a young man — oh, not a mere education in the things of the world outside, of lands, and peoples, and climates, but an education in the world inside, an education in one's self, a chance to learn one's own self, to get on speaking terms with one's soul.
No Picnic on Mount Kenya
THE UNUSUAL ITINERARY in this book clearly illustrates one of the principal motives in traveclass="underline" the wish to escape from boring, nagging, pestiferous people. That wish can inspire long journeys and ambitious travel feats.
In 1943, Felice Benuzzi (1910–1988) was bored and irritated with confinement and his annoying fellow Italians in a British prisoner of war camp outside the town of Nanyuki in Kenya. He was surrounded by "every kind of person… old and young, sick and healthy, crazy and sensible." He says that the lunacies and achievements of the other prisoners could fill a book, and he proves this with examples. But his mind was on other things. From behind the barbed wire of the camp Benuzzi had a view of majestic Mount Kenya: "An ethereal mountain emerging from a tossing sea of clouds framed between two dark barracks — a massive blue-black tooth of sheer rock inlaid with azure glaciers, austere, yet floating fairylike on the near horizon. It was the first 17,000-foot peak I had ever seen."
A junior colonial officer in Italian-controlled Ethiopia, he had been captured by British soldiers along with thousands of other Italians and imprisoned in the British colony of Kenya. (Benuzzi does not mention that other Italian prisoners, as forced laborers, helped build the western road out of Nairobi that traverses the Great Rift Valley, as well as a lovely chapel in one of the bends in the road.)
More than a year of imprisonment passed before he was able to choose two fellow prisoners, Giuan and Enzo, for his team. With great ingenuity they made ice-climbing equipment (crampons, axes) out of scrap metal, and they stockpiled warm clothes and food. "Life [in prison] took on another rhythm because it had a purpose." With a copied key and an attitude, they bamboozled the camp guards and broke out, leaving a letter behind for the prison authorities stating their intention and apologizing for the bother they might be causing.
Their climb took them through the lairs of leopards and lions, through dense bamboo forests and fields of lobelia. Enzo was ill; rations were often short; the cold and the necessity to avoid detection were also problems. Yet given the circumstances, they were equipped for the assault on the summit. Without a map, they used their judgment and experience of other climbs. They struggled upward, at times in deep snow, blazing their own trail. On one of their climbs they were in the snow and cold for eighteen hours. Although they were defeated in their attempt to reach Batian, the highest peak, they summited Point Lenana, 16,300 feet, where they left an Italian flag that was later found.
After their arduous climb they descended the mountain, returned to the prison camp, and surrendered. The punishment for escaping was twenty-eight days in solitary confinement, but the British camp commandant, saying he "appreciated our sporting effort," gave them seven days.
Yes, a sporting effort. But it was something else — a disgust with confinement and a wish, as herded-together prisoners, to reclaim their humanity. "Forced to endure the milieu [of the camp]," Benuzzi says early in the book, "we seemed almost afraid of losing our individuality." Thus Benuzzi and his comrades saw a kind of salvation in the climb, as many people see liberation in travel and the triumph of the will in a singular travel feat.
After the war, Benuzzi wrote his book, Fuga sul Kenya: 17 Giorni di Libertà, which was translated under the less-than-gripping title No Picnic on Mount Kenya (1952).