What the Traveller Saw (21 page)

Sun deck of the
France
, 1972, around 11 a.m. in mid-Atlantique. There wasn’t much sun, but very soon stewards would arrive, and, after ascertaining by holding a mirror to their lips that recumbent forms were in the land of the living, they would offer those with British passports beef tea, and those with US passports some French equivalent, such as
Le Bullshot.

St-Emilion, Gironde. A vineyard village built of golden limestone, a lot of it subterranean, in one of the most beautiful situations in all France (in my opinion, that is). During the Revolution it became the last refuge of those luckless moderates, the
Girondins
.

Sinai, 1971. The favourite wife of Sheikh el Sheikh Abu Abdullah of the Umzeini Beduin, photographed while travelling in then dangerous country occupied by Egyptian infiltrators, with a heavily armed escort. She was photographed by Wanda, the only one of our party allowed near her. While the rest of the harem travelled in black tent-like litters on camel-back, she sat in the front of a very smart jeep, next to the driver.

A woman of the Picos de Europa on her way down to a village, four thousand feet below, to sell or barter a load of butter. She would accomplish the journey, fifteen miles there and back, in one single day.

A spectator (long since removed to a museum) in the great theatre at Side – one of the largest theatres in Asia Minor – which could scat twenty thousand people, here seen in its still pristine state of ruin in 1965. It stands on a peninsula, and, although the whole area has been subjected to extensive development, in other words mucked about. there are still remarkable views to be had from the top of it.

A
hamal
(porter) carrying an immense load of canvas up to one of the
hans
(caravanserais) on the periphery of the Great Covered Bazaar, the Kapali Çarşisi, in Istanbul.

Jordan, the Temple of Isis, dating from the time of Hadrian, at the foot of the long, narrow gorge, Siq, is the unforgettable spectacle which confronts the traveller as he, or she, emerges from it. Known to the local Beduin as El Khazna, or the Treasure House of Pharaoh, they were convinced that the great urn carved out high up on the fçade was filled with gold. Ever since they acquired them they used to discharge their matchlocks at it in the hope that a lucky shot might shatter it and cause it to spill out a great hoard of gold, rather like a fruit machine when one hits the jackpot.

Muso-o-Tunya – The Smoke that Thunders. Otherwise the Victoria Falls, from the Zambian side of the Zambezi, 1971. To me it looked more like molten metal than water, as it slid rather than ran gently downhill through an archipelago of boulders to the edge of a trench, a mile long and twice as deep as Niagara, sliced through the basalt of the African plateau. There it seemed to hesitate before dropping into the rift. which looked like a one-way trip to eternity; and the great clouds of vapour that resulted – as high again as the Falls themselves – could be seen up to twenty miles away.

Costa Nova do Prado. Here the only sounds were the flapping of the washing and the boom of the Atlantic surf on the dunes. A place where I felt I could have stayed for ever. It, too, has been given the holiday-homes treatment.

The beach at Nazaré, Portugal.