Patrick Leigh Fermor, Colin Thubron and Paul Theroux are all quoted elsewhere in Scraps. Here Patrick Leigh Fermor is writing about his first youthful travelling steps. Paul Theroux is writing his first travel book, whereas Colin Thubron is already well established, with twenty years of travel writing behind him. For all three in their different ways it is the journey itself rather than the destination that is their subject.
Robert Macfarlane cites Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams as the book that ‘changed the course of my life. It turned me into a writer.’ Echoing Lopez, Macfarlane’s The Wild Places, The Old Ways and Landmarks are part of a new age of travel writing. The omnipresence of cameras has changed the role of the travel writer. Macfarlane shows instead what is under our feet and gives the reader an intimacy with land and landscape, with which a camera could not compete.
Both he and Leigh Fermor are simultaneously travel and philological adventurers. Leigh Fermor’s use of vocabulary and historical reference can be luxuriantly flamboyant, such as in Mani. Macfarlane introduces a lexicon of rediscovered words and foreign words maybe as a device to make us look again at the familiar. The difference is that Macfarlane is an evangelist of land and language, whereas Leigh Fermor was an epicurean, in life as well as book.
‘… dripped and glittered like faces at an ogre’s banquet’
PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR
A Time of Gifts (1977)
A Time of Gifts is the first book of the trilogy that narrates Leigh Fermor’s celebrated walk from London to Istanbul. It started on a wet December afternoon from a sheltered archway in what was then Mayfair’s red light district, Shepherd Market. Leigh Fermor was just eighteen. He had a prodigious memory for historical and social detail. The book was finally completed four decades later, following the rediscovery of the diaries he had lost in Romania.
Here the eagerly exuberant Leigh Fermor is taking his very early steps, first in Holland and then a while later into High Germany.
My spirits, already high, steadily rose as I walked. I could scarcely believe that I was really there; alone, that is, on the move, advancing into Europe, surrounded by all this emptiness and change, with a thousand wonders waiting. Because of this, perhaps, the actual doings of the next few days emerge from the general glow in a disjointed and haphazard way. I halted at a signpost to eat a hunk of bread with a yellow wedge of cheese sliced from a red cannon ball by a village grocer. One arm of the signpost pointed to Amsterdam and Utrecht, the other to Dordrecht, Breda and Antwerp and I obeyed the latter. The way followed a river with too swift a current for ice to form, and brambles and hazel and rushes grew thick along the banks. Leaning over a bridge I watched a string of barges gliding downstream underneath me in the wake of a stertorous tug bound for Rotterdam, and a little later an island as slender as a weaver’s shuttle divided the current amidstream. A floating reed-fringed spinney, it looked like; a small castle with a steeply-pitched shingle roof and turrets with conical tops emerged romantically from the mesh of the branches. Belfries of a dizzy height were scattered haphazard across the landscape. They were visible for a very long way, and, in the late afternoon, I singled one of them out for a landmark and a goal.
It was dark when I was close enough to see that the tower, and the town of Dordrecht which gathered at its foot, lay on the other bank of a wide river. I had missed the bridge; but a ferry set me down on the other shore soon after dark. Under the jackdaws of the belfry, a busy amphibian town expanded; it was built of weathered brick and topped by joined gables and crowsteps and snow-laden tiles and fragmented by canals and re-knit by bridges. A multitude of anchored barges loaded with timber formed a flimsy extension of the quays and rocked from end to end when bow-waves from passing vessels stirred them. After supper in a waterfront bar, I fell asleep among the beer mugs and when I woke, I couldn’t think where I was. Who were these bargees in peaked caps and jerseys and sea-boots? They were playing a sort of whist in a haze of cheroot-smoke and the dog-eared cards they laid down were adorned with goblets and swords and staves; the queens wore spiked crowns and the kings and the knaves were slashed and ostrich-plumed like François I and the Emperor Maximilian. My eyes must have closed again, for in the end someone led me upstairs like a sleep-walker and showed me a bedroom with a low and slanting ceiling and an eiderdown like a giant meringue. I was soon under it. I noticed an oleograph of Queen Wilhelmina at the bed’s head and a print of the Synod Dort at the foot before I blew the candle out.
The clip-clop of clogs on the cobblestones – a puzzling sound until I looked out of the window – woke me in the morning. The old landlady of the place accepted payment for my dinner but none for the room: they had seen I was tired and taken me under their wing. This was the first marvellous instance of a kind hospitality that was to occur again and again on these travels.
…
Into High Germany
Apart from that glimpse of tramlines and slush, the mists of the Nibelungenlied might have risen from the Rhine-bed and enveloped the town; and not only Mainz: the same vapours of oblivion have coiled upstream, enveloping Oppenheim, Worms and Mannheim on their way. I spent a night in each of them and only a few scattered fragments remain: a tower or two, a row of gargoyles, some bridges and pinnacles and buttresses and the perspective of an arcade dwindling into the shadows. There is a statue of Luther that can only belong to Worms; but there are cloisters as well and the black-letter pages of a Gutenberg Bible, a picture of St Boniface and a twirl of Jesuit columns. Lamplight shines through shields of crimson glass patterned with gold crescents and outlined in lead; but the arch that framed them has gone. And there are lost faces: a chimney sweep, a walrus moustache, a girl’s long fair hair under a tam o’shanter. It is like reconstructing a brontosaur from half an eye socket and a basket full of bones. The cloud lifts at last in the middle of the Ludwigshafen – Mannheim bridge.
After following the Rhine, off and on ever since I had stepped ashore, I was about to leave it for good. The valley had widened after Bingen and opened into the snowy Hessian champaign: the mountains still kept their distance as the river coiled southwards and out of sight. But the Rhine map I unfolded on the balustrade traced its course upstream hundreds of miles and far beyond my range. After Spires and Strasburg, the Black Forest scowled across the water at the blue line of the Vosges. In hungry winters like this, I had been told, wolves came down from the conifers and trotted through the streets. Freiburg came next, then the Swiss border and the falls of Schaffhausen where the river poured from Lake Constance. Beyond, the map finished in an ultimate and unbroken white chaos of glaciers.
On the far side of the bridge I abandoned the Rhine for its tributary and after a few miles alongside the Neckar the steep lights of Heidelberg assembled. It was dark by the time I climbed the main street and soon softly-lit panes of coloured glass, under the hanging sign of a Red Ox, were beckoning me indoors. With freezing cheeks and hair caked with snow, I clumped into an entrancing haven of oak beams and carving and alcoves and changing floor levels. A jungle of impedimenta encrusted the interior – mugs and bottles and glasses and antlers – the innocent accumulation of years, not stage props of forced conviviality – and the whole place glowed with a universal patina. It was more like a room in a castle and, except for a cat asleep in front of the stove, quite empty.
This was the moment I longed for every day. Settling at a heavy inn-table, thawing and tingling, with wine, bread, and cheese handy and my papers, books and diary all laid out; writing up the day’s doings, hunting for words in the dictionary, drawing, struggling with verses, or merely subsiding in a vacuous and contented trance while the snow thawed off my boots. An elderly woman came downstairs and settled by the stove with her sewing. Spotting my stick and rucksack and the puddle of melting snow, she said, with a smile, ‘Wer reitet so spat durch Nacht und Wind?’ My German, now fifteen days old, was just up to this: ‘Who rides so late through night and wind?’ But I was puzzled by reitet. (How was I to know that it was the first line of Goethe’s famous Erlkonig, made more famous still by the music of Schubert?) What, a foreigner? I knew what to say at this point, and came in on cue … ‘Englischer Student … zu Fuss nach Konstantinopel’ … I’d got it pat by now. ‘Konstantinopel?’ she said. ‘Ooh Weh!’ O Woe! So far! And in midwinter too. She asked where I would be the day after, on New Year’s Eve. Somewhere on the road, I said. ‘You can’t go wandering about in the snow on Sylvesterabend!’ she answered. ‘And where are you staying tonight, pray?’ I hadn’t thought yet. Her husband had come in a little while before and overheard our exchange. ‘Stay with us,’ he said. `You must be our guest.’
They were the owner and his wife and their names were Herr and Frau Spengel. Upstairs, on my hostess’s orders, I fished out things to be washed – it was my first laundry since London – and handed them over to the maid; wondering as I did so how a German would get on in Oxford if he turned up at the Mitre on a snowy December night.
‘I came upon a monkey skeleton, and four bears’ paws’
COLIN THUBRON
Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China (1987)
Colin Thubron has said: ‘The opening up of China (in the 1980s) stirred me unbearably. It was like discovering a new room in a house in which you had lived all your life.’ Behind the Wall, the first of four books about China and Central Asia by the author, is a 10,000-kilometre journey alone around most of China east of Qinghai and Tibet. It won Thubron both the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 1988.
I walked into the food market with a squeamish certainty of what was coming. Under its covered way the first stalls were pungent with roots and powdered spices. Sacks of medicinal tree-bark lay heaped up like firewood, and the air was drowsy with musk, but when l peered closer I saw that several of these piles were desiccated snakes – coiled skeletons and clouded skins – or smaller snakes dried rigid like sticks. I came upon a monkey skeleton, and four bears’ paws. There were cellophane bags brimming with dried seahorses, and python skins folded up like linen.
In shallow bins among the fish-stalls, yellow-headed tortoises scrambled over one another’s backs – many already overturned and dead – and strings of frogs dangled for sale in pendants of pulsing gullets and legs. The vendors described their wares as ‘fresh’, not ‘alive’. They weighed and dismembered them as if they were vegetables. Throats were cut and limbs amputated at a casual stroke, turtles tossed about like small change.
Then I entered an arena resembling other countries’ pet shops – but here it was a butcher’s. From its banked cages rose the piping wails of hundreds of cats and kittens – mere scaffolds of fur-covered bones – which were huddled together in a congeries of ginger and white, or were tied to the cage-tops with gaily coloured string. Customers bought several at a time, the meat on them was so scant. They were weighed in mewing sacks and lugged away.
My revulsion, I knew, was hypocritical. When I passed the huddled quails and pheasants I felt nearly nothing, but the thrushes seemed pitiful and the tiered death-cells of the dulled and hopeless mammals angered me. The only dogs I saw had already been killed and skinned, but six or seven racoons lay with their heads buried in their legs, one still hopelessly suckling its young. In another cage sat a monkey – monkey brains are a delicacy – picking at its bars; in another was a porcupine, most of whose quills had already been pulled out. And once I came across a deer lying on a crate, its head tied up with newspapers from which the nostrils still palpitated.
Then I arrived at the owls. They were chained to their cages in a bedraggled row: two handsome eagle-owls, a group of Scops owls and some tufted grey predators which I did not know. Finally, on a cage beside a brute-faced entrepreneur, perched a barn-owl. With its white culottes and heart-shaped facial disks, it was identical to the north European species. Its head and cream-coloured breast, dusted with black specks, were so soft that I might have been stroking air. In its quaint face the eyes gleamed defiantly. It was beautiful.
The man perhaps knew that foreigners did not buy in the market, and he greeted my questions with boredom. He would have no trouble selling it, he said. (Some peasants believed that to devour a whole owl – feathers and all – was a cure for epilepsy.) Then he saw that I was fingering money. So he tugged out one of the bird’s wings, pinched its chest and shoved his fingers into his mouth. ‘That’s the best part.’ For its beauty and its fierceness – and perhaps as a penance for eating wildcat – I paid over the equivalent of £4. Briefly I wondered whether I should have chosen a kitten or a racoon instead, but they would only have been recaptured and eaten. Whereas the owl was a predator, and would survive. The man tied its feet, and I took it away in a carrier-bag. I decided to keep it until I had reached the countryside, and fed it meat on the top of my hotel wardrobe, where it shuffled and snored all night.
…
The train crept out of the river delta. For the first time I was leaving the Pacific littoral and entering the mountains and plateaux of the centre, which never stop until they fall into the Gobi fifteen hundred miles to the north, or merge with the Himalaya in the west. In my luxury carriage the four berths were each furnished with a pair of black slippers and a muslin-covered pillow patterned in dainty flowers. I shared it with three plump officials. After lunch they stretched out to nap under orange blankets, like crystallised fruit, and fell importantly asleep. In the neighbouring compartments sat a few Hong Kong Chinese with their look of irritably enduring China, and a group of retired army officers on their way to holiday camp.
As darkness fell I hoped the cadres would retire early to bed. I was waiting for an opportunity to release the owl. It crouched unseen in my carrier-bag, but had defecated nervously in the bottom, and the stench was pervading the carriage. The monkey-faced official beside me was reading Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Country, but from time to time his nose would wrinkle and he would glance around him nonplussed.
I started conversation with the men opposite, trying to deflect attention from the smell. They turned out to be professional painters and administrators in an art museum, but when I asked one about his feelings for landscape, I realised that I’d gone too far. His gaze detached itself, his smile expanded, and he said nothing. But the official beside him looked appalled, and whispered across to me: ‘Mr Kung is now Deputy Director of our museum. You cannot ask such personal things,’ while Mr Kung went on smiling smugly in front of him through a mouthful of stained teeth.
This indiscretion drove them both to bed. I climbed into my berth and smuggled meat into the owl’s beak. It was growing restless with the night. But the Megatrends official was still awake, reposing on his bunk with his head supported on his hand, like the Buddha entering paradise. I killed time by inspecting some pamphlets which the railway attendant had handed me. They were like parodies from fifteen years before. I started ‘Raptures of Devotion’ – the success-story of a citric acid work team at Nantong Distillery. I began to doze. After a while the loudspeaker in the ceiling emitted ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ in Mandarin, then went silent and the lights dimmed.
Much later I woke to find the train slowing down and whistling feebly. We were among steep, empty hills. The officials in their blankets lay still as tomb effigies. While the train laboured on a forested incline, I dropped from my bunk and eased open the window. The air came soft and warm. Gingerly I tipped the owl on to the sill. For a second, while its courtier’s legs dallied along the ledge, I thought it would not fly. It averted its head from the slipstream. Then, like a giant white moth, it opened its wings and vanished into the night.
I closed the window with relief and turned round. Mr Kung’s eyes were open and he was looking at me aghast. I had already disgraced myself with him, and now I had emptied this expensive meal into the dark. He buried his face in his blanket.
‘Trains seemed the happiest choice. You could live your life and go long distances’
PAUL THEROUX
The Great Railway Bazaar (1975)
Paul Theroux began the large part of his life that has been devoted to travel writing determined that: ‘The travel book was a bore. A bore wrote it and bores read it.’ But he changed his mind when offered an advance by his publisher, as he explained in the introduction to his first of many, The Great Railway Bazaar. ‘When I wrote it, I was groping around in the dark … my self assurance in the narrative was sheer bravado. But I knew with delight when I finished this first travel book that I could do it again.’
The station at Calais was dark, but the Paris Express was floodlit. I was comforted. Lady Glencora says to her friend, ‘We can get to the Kurds, Alice, without getting into a packet again. That, to my way of thinking, is the great comfort of the Continent.’ Well, then, to Paris, and the Orient Express, and the Kurds. I boarded and, finding my compartment oppressively full, went to the dining car for a drink. A waiter showed me to a table where a man and woman were tearing their bread rolls apart but not eating them. I tried to order wine. The waiters, hurrying back and forth with trays, ignored my pleading face. The train started up; I looked out the window, and when I turned back to the table I saw that I had been served with a piece of burned fish. The roll-shredding couple explained that I’d have to ask the wine waiter. I looked for him, was served the second course, then saw him and ordered.
‘Angus was saying in The Times that he did research,’ the man said. ‘It just doesn’t make sense.’
‘I suppose Angus has to do research,’ said the woman.
‘Angus Wilson?’ I said.
The man and woman looked at me. The woman was smiling, but the man gave me a rather unfriendly stare. He said, ‘Graham Greene wouldn’t have to do research.’
‘Why not?’ I said.
The man sighed. He said, ‘He’d know it already.’
‘I wish I could agree with you,’ I said. ‘But I read As If By Magic and I say to myself, “Now there’s a real agronomist!” Then I read The Honorary Consul and the thirty-year-old doctor sounds an awful lot like a seventy-year-old novelist. Mind you, I think it’s a good novel. I think you should read it. Wine?’
‘No, thank you,’ said the woman.
‘Graham sent me a copy,’ said the man. He spoke to the woman. ‘Affectionately, Graham. That’s what he wrote. It’s in my bag.’
‘He’s a lovely man,’ said the woman. ‘I always like seeing Graham.’
There was a long silence. The dining car rocked the cruets and sauce bottles, the dessert was served with coffee. I had finished my half-bottle of wine and was anxious for another, but the waiters were again busy, reeling past the tables with trays, collecting dirty plates.
‘I love trains,’ said the woman. ‘Did you know the next carriage on is going to be attached to the Orient Express?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘As a matter of fact –’
‘Ridiculous,’ said the man, addressing the small penciled square of paper the waiter had given him. He loaded the saucer with money and led the woman away without another glance at me.
My own meal came to forty-five francs, which I estimated to be about ten dollars. I was horrified, but I had my small revenge. Back in my compartment I realised I had left my newspaper on the table in the dining car. I went back for it, but just as I put my hand on it, the waiter said, ‘Qu’est-ce que vous faites?’
‘This is my paper,’ I snapped.
‘C’est votre place, cela?’
‘Of course.’
‘Eh bien alors, qu’est-ce que vous avez mangé?’ He seemed to be enjoying the subtlety of his cross-examination.
I said, ‘Burned fish. A tiny portion of roast beef. Courgettes, burned and soggy, cold potatoes, stale bread, and for this I was charged forty-five, I repeat, forty-five –’
He let me have my paper.
‘I stopped to look out over one of the last great wild spaces of Britain’
ROBERT MACFARLANE
The Old Ways (2012)
The Old Ways is subtitled A Journey on Foot. It leads us, sometimes barefoot, along the old pathways of Britain (plus a little of Sichuan) to see the land as it was when the paths were first used. Among these old ways there is the Icknield Way, meandering along topographically sensible lines from Norfolk to Dorset, and the Broomway, an offshore pathway at Foulness traversable only at low tide, known as the deadliest path in Britain for the number of travellers lost to the incoming tide.
Here Macfarlane is on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides seeking a part-lost path; its ‘elusive nature was appropriate to the terrain through which it ran’. His guide was Finlay MacLeod, who is described as novelist, naturalist, seal summoner, sometime selkie-singer, eloquent in Gaelic and English.
Everywhere we went, people knew Finlay. They stopped their cars on the moor roads and scrolled down their windows to talk with him, or downed tools on peat-banks to raise hands of greeting. It was like travelling with the Queen. ‘It must take you a long time to get anywhere,’ I said.
Eventually, late on a windy sunlit day, he drove me down the thin west-coast road that leads from the great sands of Uig through the crofting township of Breanish to Mealasta, where the road petered out. All that survived of Mealasta was a ground-plan of stones, but it felt oddly like the blueprint of a future village, rather than the trace of a near-vanished one.
The road ended at a wide cove called Camus Mol Linis: the Bay of the Boulders of Linis. I hugged Finlay goodbye, and he drove off north, waving out of the window as he went. I walked onto the little peninsula that jutted south of the bay, and found a smear of grass on which to pitch my tent. The peninsula was a beirgh, or a’ bheirgh, a loan-word from the Norse that designates ‘a promontory or point with a bare, usually vertical rock-face, and often with a narrow neck’. Its cliffs were pinkish with feldspar. Inland, near Griomabhal, I could see a golden eagle, its primaries extended like delicate fingers, roaming on a late-day hunt. A tern beat upwind: scissory wings, its black head seemingly eyeless, its movement within the air veery and unpredictable as a pitcher’s knuckle-ball. Creamy waves moshed and milked on the beach and rocks, making rafts of floating foam just offshore and sending spray shooting above the level of the tent. Wave-surged infralittoral rock, tide-swept circalittoral rock, micro-terrains of lichen and moss. Far out to sea there were breaches in the cloud through which sun fell.
I boiled up a cup of tea and sat drinking it and eating a slab of cake, glad to be alone and in such a place. A seal surfaced – a fine-featured female, ten yards to my north. I tried to sing a seal song that Finlay had taught me a year or two previously, but it turned out that I couldn’t remember either the tune or the words, so I switched to early English folk music, a Vaughan Williams setting of one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Songs of Travel’. The seal ducked its head under water and out again three times, as if rinsing its ears clean of the noise. I changed to the only other song I could remember – ‘Paradise City’ by Guns ’n’ Roses. The seal dived and never came back. I felt rather embarrassed.
The sun set over the Atlantic. The water a sea-silver that scorched the eye, and within the burn of the sea’s metal the hard black back of an island, resilient in the fire, and through it all the sound of gull-cry and wave-suck, the sense of rock rough underhand, machair finely lined as needlepoint, and about the brinks other aspects of the moment of record: the iodine tang of seaweed, and a sense of peninsularity – of the land both sloping away and fading out at its edges.
A sea mist crept up the coast, cutting visibility to fifty yards, so that my narrow-necked cape of rock seemed to have become an island. It felt as if anything might be going on under the mist’s cover, and soon I experienced the peculiar illusion, with a light westerly wind moving across my face from the sea, that I was on board a boat beating outwards into the ocean and that I would wake the next morning far out into the North Atlantic. Then in a meteorological magic trick – like whipping away the tablecloth and leaving the crockery standing – the mist dispersed to reveal a cloudless sky and the coastline still intact. Inland was the half-dome of Griomabhal, and near it hung Jupiter again, bright as a lantern, while clouds juddered westwards across the moon.
It was the next morning that I followed the deer tracks up into the glen of stones that ran beneath Griomabhal’s north face, with the wind rushing from the east. I searched the glen for almost two hours, moving inland and uphill, losing hope of finding the path.
Right beneath the north face, where the rock dropped 500 feet sheer to the moor, was a pool called the Dubh Loch – the Black Lake – by whose shore I rested. Tar-black water, emerald reeds in the shallows. The surface of the loch was being stirred by the wind in vortical patterns, rotating in sympathy with the wind-shear flows coming down off the north face of Griomabhal. This was a miniature cyclone-alley. Griomabhal’s summit was finally cloud-free, and looking up its face, with the clouds posting far overhead, the mountain seemed to be toppling onto me. The face was tracked laterally with seams of quartz, hundreds of yards long, standing out like the veins on a weightlifter’s arms. I glanced uphill and into the wind to pick my next line – and there was Manus’s path.
Click. Alignment. Blur resolving into comprehension. The pattern standing clear: a cairn sequence, subtle but evident, running up from near the Dubh Loch shore. The form of the cairns was the rudhan, the three-bricked stack, though there were also single stones standing like fingers and pointing the way. I jumped up from my resting stone and followed Manus’s path, eastwards over the slopes of gneiss. Mostly, the cairns were thirty or fifty yards apart. But near the pass, where the ground flattened off, I found seventeen cairns, each no further than ten yards from the next. Malky had been right: Manus’s path really was a Richard Long sculpture, created long before Long, and similar in form to his A Line in the Himalayas. I stepped into the path of the cairns and looked along it. One end pointed off towards the summit of the pass. The other ran toward Mealasta, dropping out of sight over a shoulder of gneiss. Above me, ravens muttered their hexes.
At last I reached the crest of the pass beneath Griomabhal’s north face. I stopped to look out over one of the last great wild spaces of Britain – the deer forests of South Lewis and North Harris, hundreds of square miles of (privately owned) moor, river, loch and mountain. The cairn stones at the pass were decisive, and they led the eye and the foot down over the back of Griomabhal and toward the wilderness of the moor.
I was grateful to the rudhan for their guidance, and followed them steeply down towards the head of Loch Hamnaway. The sun was breaking through the cloud, bringing a redness to the moor. I stopped to drink at a river pool, its water bronze and gold. In its shallows I could see several rough white pebbles of quartz, and I recalled a word that Finlay had taught me, one of the many poetically precise terms that Hebridean Gaelic possesses to designate the features of the moor landscape. ‘Eig’ referred, Finlay said, to ‘the quartz crystals on the bed of moorland stream-pools that catch and reflect moonlight, and therefore draw migrating salmon to them in the late summer and autumn.’