— Remote People (1931)
22. Traveler's Bliss
BLISS IS RARE IN THE TRAVEL NARRATIVE, where the usual theme is hardship and sometimes horror. Our happiness in print in any case always seems boastful and improbable, quite far from the human condition. But now and then the traveler arrives at the Great Good Place, gives thanks for his luck, and shows the reader that the travail which gave the word "travel" its form can result in an epiphany, like Doughty's triple rainbow or Vikram Seth's sight of the Potala Palace. The first traveler is William Bartram, who spent four years among Native Americans in the South and, contradicting all the reports of pugnacity and savagery, found only hospitality, goodwill, and wisdom. He described the people who were later expelled from their native land to travel westward on the Trail of Tears.
The Good Manners of the Muscogulges of the Creek Nation
A [Muscogulge] man goes forth on business or avocations, he calls in at another town, if he wants victuals, rest or social conversation, he confidently approaches the door of the first house he chooses, saying, "I am come." The good man or woman replies, "You are; it's well." Immediately victuals and drink are ready; he eats and drinks a little, then smokes Tobacco, and converses either of private matters, public talks or the news of the town. He rises and says, "I go." The other answers, "You do!" He then proceeds again, and steps in at the next habitation he likes, or repairs to the public square, where are people always conversing by day, or dancing all night, or to some more private assembly, as he likes; he needs no one to introduce him, any more than the black-bird or the thrush, when he repairs to the fruitful groves, to regale on their luxuries, and entertain the fond female with evening songs.
It is astonishing, though a fact, as well as a sharp reproof to the white people, if they will allow themselves liberty to reflect and form a just estimate, and I must own elevates these people to the first rank among mankind.
—William Bartram,
Travels Through North and South Carolina
(1791)
C. M. Doughty Sees a Triple Rainbow in Arabia
Late in the afternoon there fell great drops from the lowering skies; then a driving rain fell suddenly, shrill and seething, upon the harsh gravel soil, and so heavily that in a few moments all the plain land was a streaming plash...
After half an hour the worst was past, and we mounted again. Little birds, before unseen, flitted cheerfully chittering over the wet wilderness. The low sun looked forth, and then appeared a blissful and surpassing spectacle! A triple rainbow painted in the air before us. Over two equal bows a third was reared upon the feet of the first; and like to it in the order of hues.—These were the celestial arches of the sun's building, a peace in heaven after the battle of the elements in the desert-land of Arabia
— Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888)
Vikram Seth on the Potala Palace in Lhasa
When I next look out we are already in the broad valley of the Lhasa River—with fields of wheat and barley, tall trees, buildings of cement, and, from far away, the dominating vertical plane of the Potala palace, monolithic and of immense grandeur, white and pale pink and red and gold.
In this late afternoon light it is so beautiful that I cannot speak at all. I get up and stare at it, holding onto one of the supports at the back of the truck, and looking forwards in the direction we are traveling. The hill on which it rests, and its own thick, slightly slanting walls, combine to give it a powerful sense of stability; and the white and gold add an almost unreal brilliance to the vast slab that is its structure.
—From Heaven Lake (1983)
Flaubert Blissed-Out on the Nile
When we arrived off Thebes our sailors were drumming on their darabukehs, the mate was playing his flute, Khalil was dancing with his castanets: they broke off to land.
It was then, as I was enjoying those things, and just as I was watching three wave-crests bending under the wind behind us, that I felt a surge of solemn happiness that reached out towards what I was seeing, and I thanked God in my heart for having made me capable of such a joy: I felt fortunate at the thought, and yet it seemed to me that I was thinking of nothing: it was a sensuous pleasure that pervaded my entire being.
— Flaubert in Egypt, translated by Francis Steegmuller (1972)
Freya Stark at Peace in Hakkiari, Turkey
It was still far from daylight. The high dome of heaven was revolving with peacock colors and secret constellations among the outlined rocks. There was, of course, no sign of the muleteers. I sat there for over an hour, watching the moonlight retreat from the rocky bastions, a process of infinite majesty and peace. I felt, as Firdausi says, like dust in the lion's paw.
— The Valleys of the Assassins (1934)
23. Classics of a Sense of Place
SOME TRAVEL BOOKS ARE LESS ABOUT TRAVEL (that is, a specific itinerary and perambulation) than about an intense experience of a particular place. It could be a wilderness area (Thoreau's Maine), a river (Moritz Thomsen's Amazon), an American state (John McPhee's Alaska), or part of a state (Jonathan Raban's "bad land" of eastern Montana)—or the whole of Wales (Jan Morris), the whole of Spain (Pritchett), or India for half a lifetime (Chaudhuri). Carlo Levi was banished to southern Italy, exiled in the hill town of Aliano in 1935, for his antifascist views. He rambled around the town for a year, tended the sick (he was a doctor), and later wrote with feeling about it, and he is buried there. That, too, was travel. He said it was like being on the moon. I think of this as both an inner and an outer journey: what is illuminated is the landscape and the people—the place rather than the traveler or the trip. In most of the following cases the writers are in residence.
The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau
IN 1846 IN Maine, only a matter of days from his home in Concord, Thoreau found the wild place he was looking for. In the chapter "Ktaadn" he defines the essence of wilderness. "It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man," he begins modestly. Then comes his hammer stroke:
Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever.
The book was published posthumously, and based on three pieces that Thoreau had written, about three fairly short trips to the hinterland of Maine. Thoreau made his last trip in 1857. He was forty then, and you can see by his prose style that he is a different sort of traveler: humbler, affronted by the changes he sees in the eleven years since his first visit, no longer a quoter of Milton, or a praiser of lumberjacks, or a hyperbolic observer of the mystical Indian. He is now a denouncer of the logging industry and a clear-sighted diarist. Native Americans fascinated Thoreau, and this third trip in Maine offered him his best opportunity to study them.
Once, when Joe had called again, and we were listening for moose, we heard come faintly echoing or creeping from far through the moss-clad aisles, a dull dry rushing sound, with a solid core to it, yet as if half-smothered under the grasp of the luxuriant and fungus-like forest, like the shutting of a door in some distant entry of the damp and shaggy wilderness. If we had not been there no mortal had heard it. When we asked Joe in a whisper what it was, he answered, "Tree fall."