The Pillars of Hercules
Paul Theroux
“THEROUX, WHEREVER HE IS,
IS ALWAYS WORTH READING.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“[Theroux’s] observations come in hilarious quips and thought-provoking bolts…. Disdaining museums, ruins and ‘famous graves,’ he seeks out human encounters, from rich retirees on a luxury cruise to ragged beggars in Albania, from intellectual writers such as Naguib Mahfouz and Paul Bowles to the punks of Cagliari.”
—The Kansas City Star
“Vivid … Theroux flourishes in the gritty texture of daily life in all these ports, where he eats the food, sleeps in the hotels, eats in the low-rent cafes that most locals do—and, like them, seeks the water.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Powerful … A nimble, multilayered armchair journey, bristling with sights, sounds, smells, anecdotes, brief encounters, snippets of erudition, reading suggestions, impromptu decisions, moments of danger, bursts of indignation, sudden ecstasies … Theroux’s keen wit and descriptive gifts are in peak form.”
—The Sunday Oregonian
“Travel writing at its eccentric best—a mix of irony, adventure lucidity, and cross-grained crankiness.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“In the best tradition of the 19th-century Grand Tour, Theroux’s travels provide an unsentimental education in history and human nature, drawn not from museums and monuments but from a varied, and occasionally surprising, landscape peopled with an array of memorable characters. Certainly there is lots of meaty material to work with: centuries of art and architecture, classical myths and contemporary writers, the constant movement of emigrants, refugees, and travelers. And Theroux rises wonderfully to the occasion.”
—Islands Magazine
“A beautiful adventure.”
—Booklist (starred review)
By the Same Author
FICTION
Waldo
Fong and the Indians
Girls at Play
Jungle Lovers
Sinning with Annie
Saint Jack
The Black House
The Family Arsenal
The Consul’s File
A Christmas Card
Picture Palace
Londom Snow
World’s End
The Mosquito Coast
The London Embassy
Half Moon Street
O-Zone
My Secret History
Chicago Loop
Millroy the Magician
My Other Life
Kowloon Tong
Hotel Honolulu
CRITICISM
V. S. Naipaul
NONFICTION
The Great Railway Bazaar
The Old Patagonian Express
The Kingdom by the Sea
Sailing Through China
Sunrise with Seamonsters
The Imperial Way
Riding the Iron Rooster
To the Ends of the Earth
The Happy Isles of Oceania
Fresh Air Fiend
Sir Vidia’s Shadow
A Fawcett Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1995 by Cape Cod Scriveners Company
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Excerpt from “At Algeciras—A Meditation upon Death,” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats. A New Edition, by Richard J. Fenneran, reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc., copyright © 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed by Bertha Georgie Yeats, in the U.S., and Michael Yeats in the U.K. and Canada.
Excerpts of the The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, copyright © 1961, 1963 by Robert Fitzgerald and renewed 1989 by Benedict R. C. Fitzgerald. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Excerpt from “The Next Time,” from The Collected Poems of Robert Graves, reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press, in the U.S., and Carcanet Press in the U.K. and Canada.
The edition published by arrangement with G. P. Putnam’s Sons
Fawcett is a registered trademark and the Fawcett colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-96586
eISBN: 978-0-307-79028-6
Map by John Burgoyne
v3.1
To the memory of my father,
Albert Eugene Theroux,
13 January 1908–30 May 1995
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Epigraph
1. The Cable Car to the Rock of Gibraltar
2. The “Mare Nostrum” Express to Alicante
3. The M.V. Punta Europa to Mallorca
4. The “Virgen de Guadalupe” Express to Barcelona and Beyond
5. “Le Grand Sud” to Nice
6. The Ferry Île de Beauté to Corsica
7. The Ferry Ichnusa to Sardinia
8. The Ferry Torres to Sicily
9. The Ferry Villa to Calabria
10. The Ferry Clodia from Chioggia
11. The Ferry Liburnija to Zadar
12. The Ferry Venezia to Albania
13. The Seabourn Spirit to Istanbul
14. The M. V. Akdeniz: Through the Levant
15. The 7:20 Express to Latakia
16. The Ferry Sea Harmony to Greece
17. The Ferry El Loud III to Kerkennah
18. To Morocco on the Ferry Boughaz
About the Author
Have you ever reflected on what an important sea the Mediterranean is?
—James Joyce in a letter to his brother Stanislaus
The Mediterranean is an absurdly small sea; the length and greatness of its history makes us dream it larger than it is.
—Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar
1
The Cable Car to the Rock of Gibraltar
People here in Western Civilization say that tourists are no different from apes, but on the Rock of Gibraltar, one of the Pillars of Hercules, I saw both tourists and apes together, and I learned to tell them apart. I had traveled past clumps of runty stunted trees and ugly houses (the person who just muttered, “Oh, there he goes again!” must read no further) to the heights of the Rock in a metal box suspended by a cable. Gibraltar is just a conspicuous pile of limestone, to which distance lends enchantment; a very small number of people cling to its lower slopes. Most of them are swarthy and bilingual, speaking intelligible English, and Spanish with an Andalusian accent. Mention Spain to them and they become very agitated, though they know that as sure as eggs are huevos the British will eventually hand them over to the King of Spain, just as they chucked Hong Kong into the horny hands of the dictator of China.
The Rock Apes of Gibraltar are Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus), the only native apes in Europe. The apes are still resident, and have lived there longer than most Gibraltarian families. There is a social order among the ape tribes, as well as ape rituals that are bizarre enough to be human. Ape corpses and skeletons are never found on the Rock. Somewhere in the recesses of this rock that looks like a mountain range there is said to be a secret mortuary established by the apes; ape funerals, ape mourning, ape burials. The apes are well established, but disadvantaged—unemployed, unwaged, destitute welfare recipients. The municipal government allocates money to feed them.
But there m
ight be darker motive in this food aid. A powerful superstition, held by locals, suggests that if the apes vanish from Gibraltar, the Rock will cease to be British. For hundreds of years—since 1740, in fact—the apes have been mentioned by travelers—Grand Tourists, in whose footsteps I was following. Yet Gibraltar has been visited almost since Hercules, patron of human toil, flung it there on his journey to capture the Red Oxen of Geryones, the monster with three bodies (Labor Ten). He tossed another rock across the straits, Ceuta in Morocco. These two promontories, Cape and Abya to the Greeks—the Mediterranean bottleneck—are the twin Pillars of Hercules.
My idea was to travel from one pillar to the other, the long way, with the usual improvisations en route that are required of the impulsive traveler; all around the Mediterranean coast, the shores of light.
“The grand object of traveling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean,” Dr. Johnson said. “On those shores were the four great Empires of the world; the Assyrian, the Persian, the Grecian, and the Roman. All our religion, almost all our law, almost all our arts, almost all that sets us above savages, has come to us from the shores of the Mediterranean.”
“Our” of course is as questionable as “savages,” but you get the idea. A great deal happened on this coastline. It was not until the second century B.C. that the Romans sailed through the Pillars of Hercules. The reason for this late, if not timid, penetration of the straits was not the current, nor was it the inconvenient westerlies that blow through this narrow opening of the inland sea; it was the Mediterranean notion that nothing lay beyond the pillars except the Garden of the Hesperides and the lost continent of Atlantis, and hellish seas.
The pillars marked the limits of civilization, “the end of voyaging,” Euripides wrote; “the Ruler of Ocean no longer permits mariners to travel on the purple sea.” And later, in the second century B.C., Polybius wrote, “The channel at the Pillars of Herakles is seldom used, and by very few persons, owing to the lack of intercourse between the tribes inhabiting those remote parts … and to the scantiness of our knowledge of the outer ocean.”
Beyond the pillars were the chaos and darkness they associated with the underworld. Because these two rocks resembled the pillars at the temple to Melkarth in Tyre, the Phoenicians called them the Pillars of Melkarth. Melkarth was the Lord of the Underworld—god of darkness—and it was easy to believe that this chthonic figure prevailed over a sea with huge waves and powerful currents and ten-foot tides.
The point is not that the Mediterranean peoples had never ventured westward through the straits, but that they had dared it—the Phoenicians had reached Britain by a sea route—and verified that it had a wicked and destructive turbulence. From this they conceived the idea that nothing useful existed past the straits, only the spooky Mare Tenebrosum, the dark and dangerous ocean which lay beyond the Middle Sea, a purple river of furious water. The Greeks named this the Stream of Ocean. It circled the earth at which they were privileged to live at the center, its precise location at Delphi, where a stone like a toadstool marked the Navel of the World. Mediterranean, after all, means “middle of the earth.”
The surface current moves through the straits at a walking pace to the east, streaming through the fifteen-mile-wide pillars into the Mediterranean; but two hundred and fifty feet below this another sub-current rushes in the opposite direction, westward, into the Atlantic, pouring over the shallow sill of the straits, “that awful deepdown torrent,” Molly Bloom murmurs in her bedtime reverie. The unusual circular exchange of water at the straits is the only way this just-about-landlocked sea is kept refreshed and alive. Very few large rivers flow into it. For thousands of years, until the Suez Canal was opened, to the strains of Verdi’s Aïda, in 1869, the Straits of Gibraltar—“The Gut,” to the English sailors, “The Gate of the Narrow Entrance” (Bab el Zukak) to the Moors—was the only waterway to the world.
Even so, the Mediterranean has an odd character. It has almost no tides at all, and except for a whirlpool here and there (notably at Messina), an absence of distinct marine currents. It is dominated by winds rather than currents, and each wind has a name and a series of specific traits: the Vendaval, the steady westerly that blows through the Straits of Gibraltar, La Tramontana, the strong wind of the Spanish coast, La Bora, the cold wind of Trieste, le Mistral, the cold dry northwesterly of the Riviera, and so on, through the Khamsin, the Sirocco, the Levanter, and about six others (often the same wind, with a different name) to the Gregale, the northeast wind of Malta that blows in winter and was probably the wind that caused Saint Paul to be shipwrecked on the coast of Malta, as described in the Bible (Acts 27–28).
It is not a sea that is affected by the phases of the moon—it has moods rather than monthlies. Its nervous character has been mentioned by sailors, and its colors—purple, wine-dark, and its blueness in particular. The Mediterranean was the White Sea to the Greeks—the Turks still use that name for it: Akdeniz, “White Sea,” and the Arabs use a variant, “The White Central Sea.” If the oceans can be compared to vast symphonies, the German traveler Emil Ludwig has written, the Mediterranean “is subdued in a way that suggests chamber music.” It is tentative, and its waves with their short fetch, and its strange swells, are unlike any found in the great oceans.
All over the Rock of Gibraltar there were signs in six languages (English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Arabic, French) that said Do Not Feed the Apes! and Apes Might Bite! These signs were more frequent at the top, where one of the ape tribes—the friendlier of the two—lived.
Here at the top of the Rock, an ectoplasmic middle-aged woman, a French tourist, plump and pushy and grinning, picked up a pebble and approached an ape. It was a mother ape that was nuzzling her child, urging it against her pink nipple, with that serene and happy expression that mothers have when they breast-feed their young. The tourist’s name, I felt sure, was Grisette. She poked the pebble at the mother ape, giggling, while her three friends watched. One of the friends jerked the arm of her small boy, forcing him to watch Grisette tease the ape.
The mother ape took the pebble and considered it a moment before dropping it to the ground. Grisette laughed very hard and then went closer, making a hideous face. Grisette wore glasses with lenses so thick and distorting, her eyes swam and changed shape as she nodded at this cornered ape. The mother ape expressed concern, and when Grisette reached over and touched her young suckling baby the mother ape raised a cautioning hand—a shapely hand wonderfully pink, human in miniature, with fine nails. There were enough lines on the ape’s palm to occupy a fortune-teller for a whole session of palmistry.
Provoked and a bit irritated by the cautioning mother ape, Grisette poked the baby ape as though testing a doorjamb with a Wet Paint sign. Grisette’s friends laughed again. The ape mother raised her cautioning hand again, and when Grisette pinched the baby, the mother ape rapped Grisette’s knuckles. This went on, back and forth, for a minute or so. I thought that the ape was going to leap into Grisette’s face and bite and claw her—Apes Might Bite!
But the mother ape showed enormous patience, as though she knew she was dealing with someone simpleminded and unpredictable, a nuisance rather than a threat. She merely raised a hand and restrained the stupid woman, and when Grisette put her big googly-eyed face nearer—simpering and calling her friends as she tormented the mother and child—all the mother ape did was show her teeth and she crept away, off the little rail, out of the sunshine where she had been suckling her infant. And as she padded away, still graceful in the face of all that provocation, the mother ape growled, just audibly to me, “This is unconscionable.”
Grisette moved heavily over to her fellow tourists, one of whom was hitting her child and saying, “I’m not a millionaire!” and an English one—British Army spouse, I supposed—“Get off me before you get a smacked bottom!” Grisette was chattering and scratching herself and looking to her friends to praise her for having pinched the ape baby and maddened the mother ape and driven them away.
And
I thought: Yes, the apes are better mannered than the tourists, and while the tourists brutalized and screamed at their kids, the apes were tender towards their young. The apes did not say, “I told you to stop it—I’ll give you a clout!” The tourists yakked and giggled, the apes were quiet and thoughtful. The tourists teased the apes, the apes never teased the tourists. When the apes played they rolled over and over on the steep slopes or on the walkways of the Rock; when the tourists’ children played they hurt each other and made noise and it always seemed to end in tears. And the apes never made faces unless the tourists made faces at them first. Ape funerals were held in pious secrecy, a tourist death or funeral was accompanied by howling grief and hysterics. The tourists were obstreperous, the apes were dignified and correct. Yet every year apes are shot and killed on the Rock of Gibraltar for biting tourists.
The woman might have been a tourist from any country in the Mediterranean. She fit the description of “the Mediterranean sub-racial group” I found in a textbook entitled Advanced Level Geography (1964): “brown-skinned, long-headed, wavy-haired, dark-eyed, slightly-built.” These people traveled back and forth, across this interesting stretch of water, all the time, keeping to their particular basin. But Mediterranean tourists were generally so offensive and ill-natured that I made a vow early in my trip to ignore them, the way I ignored the flies in Australia; to avoid writing about tourists at all. Far better to write about the apes.
“This ape is cruel,” the tourist says, and it is like an epitaph for the world’s animals. “When I pinch him he bites me.”
For years I was happy flopping along elsewhere, avoiding the Mediterranean. Such a trip had always been regarded as the Grand Tour, a search for wisdom and experience. Yet at the age of fifty I still had never been to Spain. All I had seen of Yugoslavia was the main line from Ljubljana to the Bulgarian border. Yugoslavia was now five separate nations. I had never been to Israel or Egypt or Morocco or Malta. Most people I met had been to many of these countries; everyone knew much more of the Mediterranean than I did. Everybody had been there. I suspected that from one end to the other it was nothing but urbanization and clip joints. James Joyce once wrote, “Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travelers his grandmother’s corpse.” I assumed the whole Mediterranean was like that, tourism as ancestor worship and the veneration of incoherent ruins.
