Around the World in Eighty Years
ROSSERK FRIARY, CO MAYO
Magnificent ruins of a fifteenth century Franciscan establishment, in a romantic and solitary situation on the west bank of the estuary of the River Moy. Close by, towards the shore, is a little holy well which is visited on the feast of the Assumption (August 15).
THE CHEESEWRING ON BODMIN MOOR, 1967
West of the village of Minions on Stowess Hill, three quarters of a mile to the north of three stone circles and with amazing views overlooking the abandoned workings of the South Phoenix United copper mines.
An extraordinary formation of smooth granite blocks, some balanced on each other and looking like huge fungoid growths… Below it there is a disused quarry with Cyclopean ramps of stones – memorable.
THE CLIFFS OF MOHER, CO CLARE
The cliffs, 668 feet high at their highest point, are best viewed from O’Brien’s Tower. In a gale with the wind setting strongly on the cliffs, and carrying the spray of the sea and the waterfalls up the face and over the edge, there is no more awe-inspiring place in all Ireland.
THE HALDON BELVEDERE, DEVON
Four miles south-west of Exeter, this castellated, grey stone folly tower, high on a hill, was built by Sir Robert Palk (whose name was given to the straits between India and Ceylon) and is all that a usable folly should be. It has a bizarre room on the ground floor and a spiral staircase to a roof with three turrets and splendid views. Very Gothicky!
East of Perth; the view from the cliff edge should satisfy the most romantic vertiginous taste. In the foreground, on the mossy, tree-clad cliffs, stands a ruined tower built by the ninth Earl of Kinnoull in the eighteenth century, in emulation of a Rhine castle. Further along the side of the hills there is another tower. Far below, the Tay winds its way to the sea. From the summit itself there is a splendid panorama of mountains. The summit is about ten minutes’ climb through woods of oak, birch and conifer.
TOBER TULLAGHAN – ST PATRICK’S WELL, CO SLIGO.
At the eastern end of the Slieve Gamph Mountains, lies a wonder of early Christian Ireland, because the water in it is said to ebb and flow with the tides of the sea.
The amazing remains of Corfe Castle seen from the west. One of the finest medieval military monuments in Europe, here filling a gap in the Purbeck Hills in Dorset. A Cavalier stronghold, besieged during the Civil War, from 1642 to 1649. It was ‘slighted’ by the Roundheads after having been taken by treatcheryits towers had large charges of gunpowder exploded beneath them which caused them to slide a few feet downhill without disintegrating when the siege ended.
It took three days on bicycles to follow the Canal de Bourgogne up past its locks to the 378 metre summit at Pouilly-en Auxois, a place with a name that makes you think that it must have a wonderful little restaurant; well, it hasn’t.
The Trans-Siberian Railway as it was back in 1977, when we travelled on it, was the only continuous land route from Western Europe to the Pacific Coast of the USSR. In the course of this immense journey it crossed nearly 100 degrees of longitude in Europe and trasversed seven time zones. By the time it reached the Pacific it was seven hours ahead of Moscow time, but had observed Moscow time throughout the route, as had all the clocks on the stations. The journey for a Soviet citizen took seven twenty-four hour days, or to be more precise 170 hours and 5 minutes if the train was on time, to cover the 5810 miles from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan where it arrived soon after noon on the eighth day. Foreigners were not allowed into Vladivostok, in case they might espy some more modern version of the battleship Potemkin. They had to go on to Nakhodka, at that time the only Soviet port facing the Pacific that was open to them. From which they could take a ferry to Japan – a distance of 5900 miles. The journey consumed almost eight twenty-four hour days – 192 hours and thirty five minutes, which included a stop from day seven to day eight at Kharbarovsk on the Amur River, once a runner up as the site of Armageddon. Here you changed trains for the last, exciting lap along the frontier with China. The train reached Nakhodka on the morning of the ninth day. There is no railway of comparable length anywhere in the world. Even New York – Los Angeles on the Sunset Limited is a mere 3420 miles. The Trans-Siberian is the Big Train Ride.
Horse and cart on the Buryat Steppe, eastern Siberia
Man with a hat, Buryat Steppe, eastern Siberia
Petrol station, Anatolia
LEFT KARS, UNDER THE SNOW
The beginning of the end of Kars was in 1915 when the Armenians in the walled city below the citadel were besieged by the Turkish Army. Then it was captured and lost again by the Russians, who finally held it from March 1917 until the Armistice. Now, in 1991, it looked as if it had been atomised.
Carpet auction in the Sandal Bedesten, Istanbul, part of the Great Bazaar, now closed for business. Until the middle of the last century, when European competition wiped it out, the Sandal Bedesten was the centre of trade in rare silks, which was conducted there by the Armenians. It was originally built of wood in the reign of Mehmed II, the Conqueror, not long after he took the city in 1453. Together with the rest of the city, the bazaar has been burned down innumerable times. Rebuilt in stone, it is a huge vaulted building of almost Piranesian grandeur and until recently was used for auctions of carpets and other valuables. Here sitting on one of the curved wooden benches, you could pit yourself against Turkish and Armenian dealers, starting to buy carpets from £100 a throw.
Remains of a fortress in Anatolia
Nemrut Dagi, stone statues thrown down by some cataclysm, now being ruined by people climbing on them.
The summit of Nemrut Dagi in eastern Anatolia was 6,500 above the sea and the air was as clear as crystal. Wild-looking Kurds with rifles guarded the site with commendable ferocity against would-be thieves and vandals, and one of the former, a tourist, was being removed as we arrived. Here in a tent flapping in the wind, her advanced and very exposed headquarters, the distinguished, now elderly archaeologist, Theresa Goell, was already at work. She and professor E. K. Dörner were the first to carry out a methodical investigation of the site, beginning in 1953. Above us rose the cone-shaped tumulus more than 160 feet high and more than 48-feet in diameter, constructed for King Antiochos I Epiphanes who ruled over this, his kingdom of Commagene, in the first century BC. Under it his remains are thought to lie. Please God someone doesn’t have the bright idea of removing it in order to find out, for it is built of millions, of smallish white stones. Now, in the early morning, against the amazingly blue sky, it looked incomparably beautiful. As if it were the true summit of the mountain, covered by a heavy night frost.
Church in Yucatan
Urban development, Mexico City
Street corner, Haiti
Port-au-Prince, Haiti, at the airport we joined a queue which eventually brought us to a desk at which was perched a large man aged about fifty, wearing dark glasses, and an unreasonably thick Cheviot suit. It required little imagination to identify this senior citizen as a former member of Les Volontaires de La Sécurité Nationale, otherwise the Tonton Maccoutes. Despite Papa Doc’s timely demise, the organisation remains under a cloud.
Festa di Funghi in a village in the Apuan Alps
Village street in Apuan Alps, Italy
Horse statues in the Galoppatoio the riding track in the grounds of Villa Bolasco near Treviso, northern Italy.
Vines on the march, Veneto.
I Castagni, otherwise The Chestnuts. The farmhouse near Sarzana in Tuscany that we lived in for many years and will never forget.
Attilio, described by the local people as ‘un ometto molto bravo e intelligente,’ here seen repairing ladders before the grape harvest.
Wedding procession, Molise, Italy
Mother and daughter at Tellaro. The elderly lady on the left acted as housekeeper to D. H. Lawrence when he was living in Tellaro, near Spezia during the First World War.
Palestinian quarter of Jerusalem
GREEK ORTHODOX MONK, ST KATHARINE’S MONASTERY
We went down from the top of Mount Sinai by the old penitential route, which was designed to be ascended rather than descended if one was to appreciate properly its penitential significance. It consisted of thousands of stone steps, variously estimated as being fourteen thousand by an Italian pilgrim called Gucci in 1384; six thousand six hundred and sixty-six by an Arab, Al-Makrizi, who lived from 1364 to 1442, quoting another Arab; three thousand five hundred, source unknown; and five thousand by Richard Pococke, the English Orientalist and traveller, who visited the monastery in 1726. However many there were, and we soon gave up counting them, it must have been an appalling job putting them in position.
St. Katharine’s Monastery, 1971
CHRISTIAN GRAVES, ALBANIA
Behind the monastery and the church, which had a number of very beautiful but very badly neglected icons propped up in the narthex, was something now extremely rare in Albania – a partly undesecrated Christian cemetery.
In this one there still remained the tombs of eight members of the same family, the last of whom had been buried as late as 1980.
What influence, I wondered, could this family have had, sufficient to enable their tombs to remain unscathed and to allow for the burial of one of its members to take place so recently? The view from the cemetery was extensive, across fields to the sea and further inland to some low hills with perhaps the most heavily fortified defence system we had seen anywhere in Albania, the piéce de résistance of which was a battery of twenty-four guns.
CHARCOAL BURNER, ALBANIAN/GREEK BORDER
When we visited Suli its isolation was about to be destroyed by a road which was being bulldozed through this wild mountain region in which there were scarcely any habitations apart from herdsmens’ bothies and those built by charcoal burners.
Long lines of mules laden with wood were being brought down from the heights by savage looking mountaineers and their equally wild looking womenfolk. Huge piles of wood lay about, in what appeared to be the utmost confusion. To burn charcoal they set up the timber on end in conical piles up to twelve feet high and anything up to twenty feet in diameter at the base. They then covered them with earth and charcoal dust, leaving a vertical chimney in the middle, open to the air. These piles were now smoking away rather like wigwams with fires burning away inside them.
Wild-looking though they might be, these charcoal burners were kindly, hospitable people. Taking us to their camp fire, plying us with delicious, sweet, slightly smoky tea which had some unidentifiable herb in it.
How long these people would continue to earn their living in these mountains once the road was completed was uncertain. ‘The wood’ as one of them who spoke Italian said, ‘will still have to be cut and brought down to the road. But it seems likely that it will be loaded on lorries and taken to some modern plant where the charcoal will be made using kilns and retorts, which is a less wasteful method.’ He spoke with a complete absence of rancour, almost with resignation as I had noticed that simple people often do when they find their way of life threatened, in this case one which their forebears had practised since time immemorial.
Children riding a tractor to a wine harvest
FARMER IN THE VALLEY OF THE KRMA
In one of these villages, very close to the Austrian border, all the male inhabitants were killed by Fascists. And from that day all the females dressed in black and a sign was erected forbidding entry to all Italians and Germans. The name of the village was changed to Strmec – ‘village of the Black Women’.
Apartments in Ljubljana (the capital of Slovenia)
Bogomil Cehovin, a descendant of General Cehovin, displays his ancestor’s honours. In front of the Cehovin house which stands on a bank of the Branica in a very prominent position is a tall white statue of Mr Bogomil Cehovin’s great uncle, General Baron Andrea Cehovin. He was born in Brancia in 1810 and died at Baden near Vienna in 1855, after a most distinguished military career. He played an important part in the battles of Livorno, Somma Campagna, Mortara and Montanara. It was the Emperor Franz Josef of Austria himselfwho decorated the Baron with the Highly Distinguished Cross and had the statue erected with the inscription: ‘To the Bravest of the Brave’.
During the Second World War the statue was damaged by Fascists who smeared it with tar. And to avoid further vandalism the Cehovini had it buried in their kitchen garden leaving (presumably by mistake) one boot sticking out of the ground. It has recently been restored, and the Baron stands once more in his original position, high on a pedestal. He wears a uniform covered by a large cloak, but the hand which originally held his sword is empty.
Village in the arcadian valley of the Radovna, close to the Austrian frontier at the foot of Triglav, Slovenia’s highest mountain. The scene of a terrible holocaust in the 1940s when numbers of farmers and their entire families were burned alive.
VIENNA
Jolly looking sphinx between the upper and lower Belvedere, Vienna. Built between 1714 and 1723 by the architect Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt for Prince Eugene of Savoy, who continued to occupy another baroque masterpiece, the Winter Palace, built by J. B. Fischer von Ehrlacht, which later became the Finanz-Ministerum, in which he died in 1736. The Belvedere has what are perhaps the nicest gardens in the city, and one of the loveliest palaces. The upper Belvedere now houses a remarkable collection of modern art, with works by Kokoschka, Munch, Schiele and Klimt and others.
Wedding party in a horse-drawn cart, outside the walled monastery of Sucevita in Moldavia, Romania. Inside, the church was painted with frescoes. Moldavia now has a more sinister reputation as the place where the previous regime set up so-called ‘orphanages.’
Racy visitor to the Kärtner Strasse. In winter their chaperones will appear in full-length fur coats with hats to match, en route for Demel’s patisserie, noted for its torte and an extremely elegant cafe Konditorei.
Winter in the moat of the forbidden city
Fishmonger, Macao
The opening of the Japan World Exposition (Expo 70) at Osaka, 1970.
BALI 1969
‘Prohibited from Entry:’ warns the Indonesian Customs and Excise Declaration we filled in on the plane, ‘weapons, narcotics, pornography (without special licence).’ They need not worry. This is one of the last countries on earth where one needs pornography.
There are few places to which I would really be happy to return by the next plane from London, after having flown more than 8,000 miles from it in twenty-four hours, but Bali is one of them. I cried on my last morning there – in private of course – simply because I knew that the chances of my going back there were extremely remote. Even before one arrived, flying over Java and looking down from 28,000 feet or so into the enormous, reeking maws of 10,000 ft-high volcanoes, one of them with a blue lake hidden in it, I was sure that I was on the way to something extraordinary, which even the let-down of Bali airport (which is just like any other airport, set in a huge expanse of gravel) failed to dispel.
In spite of what people who knew it before the war and after say, In 1969, Bali still had an extraordinary, vernal atmosphere which comes from the people who inhabit it rather than the place itself.
The island is beautiful, but it is no more entrancing than some other places in the East. There are other wild shores equally or even more lovely, on the coasts of Malabar and Coromandel. There are no great, lost cities, buried for centuries in the jungle, such as Ankor Wat or Gaur in southern India, and even the biggest of the temples is not as stupefyingly large as that of Borobodur, the Buddhist shrine across the narrow straits in Java, or as extravagant as Konorak, hidden away in the sands on the shore of the Bay of Bengal.
Fighting cocks, Bali
THE AUTHOR ON THE STEPS OF A TEMPLE
Bali is about twenty times the size of the Isle of Wight and much the same shape, but there the resemblance ends. There are said to be 10,000 temples in Bali and there may be many more, for every house has a shrine and many of them are large enough to qualify as temples. They were less frequented than those in India, the little doors of the tabernacles were mostly shut in the day time, and less creepy. Here, as well as in the temples, offerings are made – in the dust of the road, on the floor of a shop, in the narrowest part of a bazaar – a rectangle of plaited leaf with marigolds and other flowers on it. Even a great cave in the interior, with a monster carved over the entrance which seems to be splitting the rock in two, has none of the eerie dottiness, of the cave in A Passage to India, no bats, only a passive statue of the elephant god in a niche inside, waiting for someone to illuminate him momentarily with a gas lighter.
It is the human beings that are so beautiful in Bali, so small, so finely made. To them a European man or woman of five feet nine or ten must resemble a Goliath. Not all the women are beautiful, but they carry such immense weights on their heads, and have to stand so upright to do so, that one wonders that they do not sink into the earth. This gives them an immense grace and splendour even when they are carrying nothing but themselves.
You would have to be a person with a heart of stone to ignore the people in this land, or stone deaf, for this is (or was) a place of constant greeting. Any visitor with feeling will be constrained to memorise one or two greetings or farewells in the language to use along the road, but employing them you will not get the enthusiastic response that you might expect. The universal greeting here between visitors and visited is ‘Ullo!,’ to which you must reply; no other response gives such universal pleasure. But you are ‘ulloed’ by delicious girls who would roar for help if you ‘ulloed’ them up the junction, by small boys high up in the rigging of fruit trees, from the bottom of wells, and by cohorts of potbellied infants just off the breast, standing in doorways. Difficult to believe that terrible atrocities happen here.
Preparing to dance the Legong a famous Balinese dance
Decorating a church, Goa
Cockfight, Goa
A HOUNGAN OR VOODOO PRIEST, PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI
Although it was the close season for voodoo, we visited one of the tonnelles (shrines) on the outskirts of the city. Our guide was a Houngan, a tall, thin, praeternaturally intelligent-looking man who spoke only Creole. In the huts round about, there were altars and all the complex apparatus of voodoo: bottles filled with strange substances, swords, crucifixes, bells and anthropomorphic paintings of gods and goddesses. There were gourds enclosed in beads and vertebrae, china pots that looked as if they ought to have contained foie gras, also tied up with beads, pincers, iron serpents, old bedsteads, and on the walls, mystical patterns and pictures of the Virgin and the Saints.
In the smallest hut, the Caye Zombi, there were shackles and whips. And of course, there was the complete equipment of The Baron, set out like a gentleman’s wardrobe for the day, but on a black cross. It was all very interesting, but it needed the ecstatic participants in the ritual to give it any meaning.
Gond boy, one of the aboriginal people living in a clearing in the jungle near the banks of the Gondaveri River, Andhra Pradesh formerly the state of Hyderabad, before the Nizam was shorn of his powers in 1948. Near his village, a tiger had killed a water buffalo three nights previously. Here people were apprehensive of wild animals. In the fields at night, which falls rapidly, watchmen sat in little machans (watchtowers) to see that the wild pig and the bison did not damage the crops. They sat in them all night, from sunset till dawn, with a little fire in a pot for company, alternately groaning and striking some metal object in the hope of frightening the beasts away.
In and about them the day-to day activities of the inhabitants make a timeless, ageless scene. The long pendant branches of banyan trees growing on the banks, overhang the water casting a deep shadow, turning it to the colour of greengages. Sadhus and small boys perch in niches in the bank, the sadhus immobile, looking like mummified corpses, the small boys happily fishing.
On the bank above, spindle-shanked men run rather than walk as such men always do in India, with bamboos slung across their shoulders, heavy earthenware pots suspended from them at either end. Sometimes they are carrying corpses wrapped in white cloths to the burning places, or crying ‘Rim Nam Sat Hai,’ (the Name of God is Truth) accompanied by another who carries a pot with fire in it to kindle the pyre.
In the river, near a shrine in which the platform from which a black linga rises is decked with fresh marigolds, some white-clad figures perform their pujas and women and girls wallop the washing on lumps of brickwork, all that remains of some Moghul palace or gazebo, and shout to one another in coarse cheerful voices. There are ruins everywhere: red sandstone temples, their spires carved with figures of men and animals and gods, but still in use, and the even more ruined remains of secular Muslim buildings and mosques. All of them, overgrown with vegetation and reeking of the sickly smell of bat dung, stand incongruously among the groves of mangoes, clumps of palms, plantations of castor oil trees, fields of bushy-topped millet and wheat and sugar-cane: the immense, horizonless agricultural country of Uttar Pradesh, in which the peasant’s plough still turns up tiles, coins and broken pieces of sculpture, testifying to the transience of civilisations.
For many miles downstream from Hardwar a boat is a comparative rarity. But here there are more ferries loaded with men and bicycles and goats. And there are boats going down under sail, running before the wind, sometimes lashed together in pairs with one ragged square sail set on a communal yard.
Children at camel fair, Pushkar, Rajasthan
Shakravati – Wall paintings
Barber performing a ritual haircut at the Kumbh Mela Allahabad. The pilgrims at Allahabad had all been shaven with varying degrees of severity, in the barbers’ quarter: Women from the south and widows had their heads completely shaven; men were left with their chhotis, the small tufts on the backs of their skulls, and those who had moustaches but whose fathers were still alive, had been allowed to retain them; natives of Allahabad were allowed to keep their hair; Sikhs gave up a ritual lock or two. At one time, the hair was buried on the shore of the river; now it was taken away and consigned to a deep part of the Ganges, downstream.
The great bridge of Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923) at Oporto; a 560 foot arch spanning a gorge of the River Douro. Eiffel also designed the railway bridge of Dona Maria (1876-77). Another monument to the engineer is the elevador in Lisbon, which links the upper and lower towns. Alexander Gustave Eiffel was a French engineer born at Dijon. A great bridge builder, he also designed the armature for the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower, built for the Paris Exposition of 1900, largely at his own expense. Eiffel became involved in the Panama Canal scheme and received a two-year prison sentence and a 20,000 franc fine, but surmounted these obstacles and remained honoured.
A PENITENT IN SEMANA SANTA (HOLY WEEK) SEVILLE, 1984
During Holy Week in Seville we had seen at least part, in some cases the major part, of fifty-two processions. None had lasted for less than four hours. The longest, La Macarena, had lasted twelve and a half hours.
Night and day except for an hour or so after midday, the great floats – all of them enormously heavy – embellished with silver, some decorated with flowers and bearing sumptuously dressed figures of the Virgin (the floats and figures of inestimable value, a Virgin’s clothing and accessories alone valued at £100,000), other effigies depicting events in the last six days of the life of Christ, had swayed through the streets, those of the Virgins like great ships illuminated by masses of candles, all born on the backs of hordes of sweating porters invisible beneath the velvet draperies, some macabre, some beautiful, some very old, some made as late as the 1970s.
Here, the custodian is letting fire a premonitory rocket to mark the recommencement of the swinging of El Botafumeiro, the giant censer which was first hung and swung in 1602 in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, brilliantly described by Walter Starkie (1894-1976) in The Road to Santiago (1957).
MEN IN A CAFé, PICOS DE EUROPA, 1965
The Picos de Europa are in the mountainous area on the borders of Santander, Asturias and Leon. The actual place where the provinces meet is on the 7, 710 ft Pico Tesorero right in the middle of the massif. The peaks rise in pale clusters like giant funghi. The are not particularly high, but they are exceptionally sheer.
The inhabitants existed in an isolation which was rare in the West. Even then, the region was in danger of being turned into just another Dolomite, and the roads were planned up the steep valleys of Sotres, and a telférico was already under construction. Soon a way of life was to disappear for ever.
Boy on a donkey, in the Picos de Europa, Northern Spain, 1965
