Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

by Ted Simon

Regardless of the wonders of technology and communication, our world is the same size as it ever was, and somewhere on its surface colorful, fascinating and unpredictable things are happening, just as they always have.

The internet - and I'm on it, too - is a wonderful way for some of us to communicate certain kinds of information, but even at best it can never substitute for physical interaction, and at worst it is an escape from reality that can come perilously close to paranoia. Modern technology is a culture that cuts us off from the bigger world surrounding it. As human animals, we need to get out into that world, to feel it, smell it, think like it, to learn how good it is, and to feel free.

War or no war, I would have to go through, but it filled me with trepidation. The only consolation I could find was that fate had obviously marked me out for something special. If the omens were dark, they were at least vigorous. It seemed uncanny. I felt blessed and cursed at the same time. Star-crossed.

I failed my first driving test and I thought I might just as easily fail the second. Since that would not do at all, I obtained a fraudulent license and was quite prepared to go off with that, but fortunately it turned out to be unnecessary, and my life of crime ended there.

In spite of wars and tourism and pictures by satellite, the world is just the same size it ever was. It is awesome to think how much of it I will never see. It is no trick to go round the world these days; you can pay a lot of money and fly round it nonstop in less than forty eight hours, but to know it, to smell it and feel it between your toes you have to crawl.

I felt my gut scream at me to strip off this ridiculous outfit and rush back into that light and the familiar interdependence. It struck me very forcefully that if I went on with this folly I would forever after be the man outside in the gutter looking in. For a moment I was lost beyond hope, utterly defeated. Then I turned away from all that, somehow fumbled my packages away, got on the bike and set off in the general direction of the English Channel. Within minutes the great void inside me was filled by a rush of exaltation, and in my solitary madness I started to sing.

Remember, then, that outside cities, in the evening, when the light is failing, people are driving home in a hurry, tired and bored by their work. And you will be going the other way, also tired. So at the end of the day, when you're anxious to go quick, SLOW DOWN.

"When I was eighteen I was a Fascist from my eyes to my boots." His hands outline the ample portions of himself which that includes. "I volunteered for the army to go to war. I was in an officer school, then in Sicily, and four years after came my first real battle. I heard the toot-toot on the bugle" - he goes "toot toot" into his fist - "that meant `Prepare arms.' I was in the tent to pick up my gun and clean it, and I thought: `This time it is not for paper cut-out figures. This time you will have to kill real men,' and I knew then I couldn't. Not to kill men with mothers like mine, with children - men who have come from homes like mine which will be in misery."

In a measured hush he speaks of love and brotherhood, his face flitting between solemnity and ecstasy. As the battle progresses he shows graphically how others lost a hand, an eye or a leg, and wipes imaginary blood - other men's blood - from his face. Tears tremble under his lashes as he relives his moment of conversion in front of me, at his office desk. "Afterwards the colonel wanted to give me a decoration for staying on my feet through the battle. I refused. I told him I could never bring myself to kill another man. He said he understood and asked me only to keep my sentiments to myself. Three months later was armistice and I was able to go to university. In the new democratic Italy I studied to be a teacher and I came home to Roggiano to teach others that we must have peace not war.

"Another march on Rome," I suggest jokingly. "Never," he says. "There must never be another march anywhere." And that same ineffable sweetness floods over his face. "Peace and Love. Love and Peace."

I know that somehow the manner of my arrival enabled me to draw much more out of this man and the situation. I feel alive to every nuance, every color, aroma and texture, even the soup stain on Zanfini's jacket.

The Arabs nearest him began tapping and clapping along, and others drifted closer, but he continued for a while as though he were unaware of any of us, playing the fool for another audience that only he could see. The barman was noticeably annoyed and the tempo of his outrages increased, but although he still commanded two thirds of the saloon he did not meddle with the singer, whose territory was growing. I sat for a while on the border line of their two spheres of influence, and it was like looking out on two different worlds. To my left, shouting, hostility, the smashing of bottles and, from the TV, the gibbering howl of the ether. To my right, singing, laughter and a beat that was beginning to reach into me. Hassen and I moved across to the right.

The singer judged this the moment to come out of his private retreat, and began to respond to his followers. I could not imagine how I had ever thought him distasteful. At worst he was a simple clown, but his power now seemed to grow as the barman's dwindled. He interrupted his buffoonery with poetry, and Hassen told me it was original and good. The same thumb and forefinger placed the words in the air with a precision and meaning that I felt I could understand, though I spoke no Arabic. The songs also became longer, more lyrical. Slowly, over a period of several hours, the pitch of his performance built up. The barman by now was utterly effaced, the TV could no longer be heard. Everyone in the saloon was with the singer, his to a man, and yet he still seemed strangely detached from us, not feeding at all on our adulation in the manner of a Western "star." Nor was there ever an attempt by anyone to compete with him. He remained the focus of energy for the rest of the crossing.

"Then you will stay with me. My family will be very honored. You will have everything we can offer. We will be extremely proud to have such a famous man in our house and our friendship will last forever. I have a dark skin but my soul is white as a lily. You will be safe and well in my house." Before leaving the ship I happened to notice the barman. He seemed a rather insignificant person, cleaning up after us, hardly worth bothering with.

The old man talked crazy nonsense to me about the world beyond his cactus fence, and he had a perfect right because it was a crazy world. I ate his bread and honey - his own wheat, his own hives - and heard about the Jews. "These Jews," he said. "They have a strong smell. I can smell one a mile away." We were face to face, and half of me is Jewish. Maybe it's the rear half.

The way I write my own history it's low on winning streaks. I never could gamble. I like to work things out in advance, but it bothers me to think of what I might have been missing. I've done too much hacking away against the grain of life. Without all that solemn effort, maybe, I could have gone further, faster, easier. Remember what my headmaster said thirty years ago, that tar-stained old walrus: "Simon, you think too much." Thinking's like a black tunnel. Once you're in it you have to think your way through to the other end. At least I think so.

Over there the blackest of clouds is shedding doom on the land below. What does that poisonous-looking deluge represent? Plague? Famine? Civil war? Those who are under its terrible judgment can certainly not see beyond it. To them it must seem as if the universe is engulfed. While I can see that it is a momentary thing.

The entrance to the site was a wonderful gateway of honey-colored sandstone soaring above me. I entered and found myself in a vast forum, rows of columns reaching out beyond anything I could have imagined possible, and between the columns tantalizing glimpses of more marvels in every direction. I was alone in a great Roman city, certainly the only sightseer there.

It struck me that everywhere in the world I would meet people to whom being there would be an ordinary, everyday event. Was my journey really nothing more than a state of mind?

I met an Irishman in the street. He worked for the "Aisle" Institute (the what? Oh, OIL) where he taught English (or Irish) to Libyan oil men. He was earning £500 a month, a fortune in those days, and with his savings he was buying an apartment in Rome, another one in Ancona and a farmhouse in Ireland. He asked me in for lunch with his Italian wife and small children. She hated the Arabs, and said her children couldn't play with their children for fear of catching skin diseases. "I can't say I care for them myself," said the Irishman. "They seem to regard all Westerners as exploiters. But it wouldn't be so bad if they didn't treat us like Martians in the streets." They invited me to sleep there on my way back. I didn't know if I would. I felt rather sorry for them. These were nice people who seemed to have missed the point somewhere, but then I didn't have to live their lives.

In exchange for only a pair of socks he let me ride his camel around the pyramids for an hour, and I almost got the hang of it.Then we had tea together in his tent.

I was in a state of despair out of all proportion to the disaster. Weariness, the end of a long day, me alone with the bike at midnight in a strange country at war; that was part of it. From Mark Antony to Charlie Brown in one thoughtless moment. I snatched at the lesson. As always I felt I could endure my tribulations if there was something to be learned from them. Euphoria leads to thoughtlessness. That's how fortunes are told. So O.K.No more mindless chasing after cars. Is that all?

I wondered, unhappily, whether I was destined to leave a trail of grief and misery behind me too. "What colossal arrogance," I thought, but could not quite brush the idea aside.

For three days and two nights I drift up the Nile along Lake Nasser. The sunrises and sunsets are so extraordinarily beautiful that my body turns inside out and empties my heart into the sky. The stars are close enough to grasp. Lying on the roof of the ferry at night, I begin at last to know the constellations, and start a personal relationship with that particular little cluster of jewels called the Pleiades, which nestles in the sky not far from Orion's belt and sword. Really, those stars, when they come that close, you have to take them seriously.

During the first night we cross the Tropic of Cancer. During the second day a Turkish passenger goes mad. He has been looking more pale and drawn by the hour. Now, with his black eyes buttoned to the back of his brain, he begins to twirl in the saloon, stopping suddenly to point his finger and cast some fatal spell. He collapses, then rises to twirl again. His eyes have seen something too terrible to be borne.

In the oval engraved mirror of a colonial dining car I actually take notice of my face for the first time in a long while. Action has freed me from self-consciousness, and I am becoming a stranger to my own appearance. It is a very satisfying feeling. I no longer think of people seeing me as I see myself in a mirror. Instead I imagine that people can see directly into my soul. It is as though a screen between me and the world has dropped away.

There are no problems. To me this is a sort of miracle. I wheel it to where my bags are heaped on the platform and pack them on as children peer into the speedometer where they believe the soul of the machine to reside.

Is anything more relaxing than the hospitality of harmless villains? How do I know they're harmless? I don't, yet I do.

He and his six brothers, he says, fled to Uganda when the Muslims killed his parents in the war. They lived by hunting in the bush. Now all his brothers are famous. So he says. Why not believe him, until it becomes important?

There was a police station along the way which I had carefully avoided, but now I could think of nowhere else to go for an explanation. I was always afraid of involving myself unnecessarily with officials. Generally when a man in uniform has something unusual brought to his attention, his instinct is to stop it. Uniform is as uniform does.

I began to understand, with some embarrassment, that in Sudanese English the word "road" has no mineral connections, it simply means "the way." I had fallen into the simplest linguistic trap, imagining that the road had a physical reality. There was no road; only an imaginary line across the desert.

I ran into the same trap of intersecting ruts that had caught me on the first day. This time my "flops" was a good deal louder. The bike came crashing down again, but much harder, ripping one of the boxes off its mountings and smashing the headlamp. My shoulder also took a fair blow. Even so, all the important things were all right. The jerry was intact, the bike was functioning. My shoulder would manage. I found some wire and tied the box back on where the screws had torn through the fibreglass, taking my time, determined that I would get through somehow, and resolving that I would never again ride at anybody else's pace. Two such disasters, I thought, must teach me the lesson.

In my childhood I was devoted to stories of men who overcame terrible obstacles to win the hand of the princess; dogs with eyes like saucers, dogs with eyes the size of dinner plates, dogs with eyes as big as cartwheels. They always came in threes. I did not know then that they were tidied-up versions of ancient mythology. In my childhood, nobody talked about myths and legends. They were just stories. The job of explaining life was left to science, but science eventually failed the test. So did politics, of course. And love. And property. And journalism just went on begging the question. So here I am, still looking for an explanation, acting out those childhood stories which, perhaps, were always the most satisfying after all; making myself the hero of my own myth?

There are four Bescharyin here at the teahouse with me, exotic figures, splendidly robed and armed, their hair teased out and glued into strands. I realize with a start that these must be the "Fuzziewuzzies" who fought so fanatically against Gordon at Khartoum The contact between us is instantaneous and overwhelming. There is a spirit in this tea, a magic solvent to wash away our differences. This is another reason why I am here: to experience (nothing less) the brotherhood of man. Imagine meeting these men in a London pub or an American diner. Impossible. They could never be there what they are here. They would be made small by the complexities, the paraphernalia that we have added to our lives, just as we are, although we have learned to pretend otherwise.

Not a soul anywhere, not a vehicle or an animal or a person. What does it matter? I have water, rice, tea and sugar, and salt. I can take as long as I like, stop where and when I like.

The ford looks more manageable now that I've crossed it, but there will be others. For sure.

At one fall, some boys see me pick myself up from the dust, and they rush away, only to reappear with a kettle full of cold mountain water for me to drink. Another time, two boys in rags with gourds tied around their waists leave their cattle and come to watch. One carries a flute and hands it to me, but my brain is too addled by heat and effort to know what he wants. I hand it back and he plays the musical equivalent of a mountain torrent. His dexterity is astounding. He pours out notes with the speed and confidence of an absolute virtuoso, creating not a single stream of melody but a cascade of sound, which seems to be in several keys and registers simultaneously. He bathes me in his music and I know, as I listen, that I will never hear anything like this again. When he finishes I try to show my gratitude. We have not one word in common, and foolishly I feel it is impossible to repay such a gift with money. Afterwards I am ashamed to have made him the victim of my idealism. A dollar would have suited him better than my lofty sentiment, no doubt.

good intentions helpless against the tide of anger and frustration that wells up inside them, all that seems a quite excellent model of Ethiopia as I sense it from the road.

The roads are terrible again, but the people are softer and not so paranoid. Will it always be like that, better away from the highways?

All over Africa the white man is being pulled up by the roots. Weeded out. There will be much pain.

good

"Shit and damnation," I said, and, "Merde puissance treize." I swore a lot in those days, in a rather dull way but with feeling.

I was annoyed by my inability to see plants clearly and remember them. It was a great drawback. Above all things, a traveler should have an eye for natural detail, I thought, since that is what he sees most of the time. There was some bamboo and I was glad to find at least one thing I recognized, not knowing that there were over two hundred different species.

In any case I was happy that something was happening and I was in touch with people. At the time it seemed to me that what I wanted was to have my problem solved quickly and to get on my way. I had a boat to catch in Cape Town and the journey was still the main thing. What happened on the way, who I met, all that was incidental. I had not quite realized that the interruptions were the journey.

I allowed only a proportion of my time to things I did not feel like doing, since I found that the list of things I ought to do was endless and would otherwise take all the joy out of life. If at any time I really wanted to do anything on the list, of course I did it regardless of priority, but sandals never came into this category because of the painful recollection of skinned toes. That by and large was how I arranged my life. The list was not written down, but in my head, and it tailed off down my spinal column where it sometimes gave me a backache.

In the morning there was a telegram to say that the inner tube would be delivered during the day to the BP station, so I walked down to the junction and got to work again on the wheel. The day moved by slowly and I let it, working a bit, and talking and watching people come and go at the pump. A van arrived in the early afternoon, shiny and brisk from the city, with two tubes and two rim belts, and I viewed Nairobi through Kibwezi eyes as awesomely efficient and remote.

They were sad that I was leaving. We had come to like each other quickly because there was no obstacle to our friendship. All we wanted from each other was time and respect.

The Spirit Incarnate of the Great World of Dreams meets with the Three Wise Men of Kibwezi, and for forty-eight hours all is light and truth. A man could live up to his ideals for that long. And they did have ideals, these three, so we were equals, and they showed me true courtesy and paid for their share of the beer. And they shed a tear for the moment when the great bird would fly on. I was becoming a carrier of the dreams of men. I gathered them like pollen, fertilizing as I went. But I had not yet quite realized my power, nor its transforming effect on people, and I still thought they were as I saw them.