The Tao of Travel

Greene and his cousin are not deterred by their incompetence. They seek guidance. They hire porters and a cook. They board the train for the Liberian frontier and start walking around the back of the country. They have twenty-six poorly paid African porters carrying their food and equipment. They have a pistol, they have a tent (never to be used), they have a table and a portable bath and a stash of whiskey. They even have trinkets to hand out to natives—but the natives prefer gifts of money or jolts of whiskey to trinkets. The trip is eventful: the travelers suffer fatigue, Greene falls ill with a serious fever, there are misunderstandings and wrong turns. There is a great deal of foot dragging on the part of the porters. A little over a month after they set off, the Greenes are back on the coast, and in a matter of a week or so (the book skimps on dates) they are on a ship heading back to Britain.

Greene called this short but difficult trip 'life-altering."

Thoreau on rivers: Traveling for A Week on the Concord and Merrimac: two weeks. This was one of the two books (Walden was the other) published in Thoreau's lifetime. The trip itself is a way of speculating on the natural world, the meaning of existence, urbanization, American history, and the nature of friendship. The book did not sell. In 1853, four years after publication, when the 706 unsold copies (of an edition of 1,000) were returned to him by the printer, Thoreau remarked wryly in a letter, "I now have a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, more than seven hundred of which I wrote myself."

D. H. Lawrence in Sardinia: Ten days. The travel book he wrote immediately afterward, Sea and Sardinia, is 355 pages long, and of course full of digressions.

He traveled throughout Italy at the same hectic pace. But Lawrence was so alert, even hypersensitive, he was able to sum up his travel experience with intense feeling, as here, in another travel book about Italy, where he is in Lago di Garda.

I went into the church. It was very dark, and impregnated with centuries of incense. It affected me like the lair of some enormous creature. My senses were roused, they sprang awake in the hot, spiced darkness. My skin was expectant, as if it expected some contact, some embrace, as if it were aware of the contiguity of the physical world, the physical contact with the darkness and the heavy, suggestive substance of the enclosure. It was a thick fierce darkness of the senses. But my soul shrank.

I went out again. The pavemented threshold was clear as a jewel, the marvelous clarity of sunshine that becomes blue in the height seemed to distil me into itself.

—

Twilight in Italy

(1913)

Stephen Crane in "The Open Boat": A day and a half, from late afternoon on January 1 to noon on January 3, 1897, off the Florida coast. Subtitled "A Tale Intended to Be After the Fact," this story is regarded as a classic in ordeal literature. But the ordeal (Crane and three others splashing fifteen miles to Daytona Beach in a dinghy after their ship, the Cuba-bound Commodore, sank) is a landlubber's exercise in mythomania and hyperbole. Though a literary critic was later emboldened to write, "Captain Bligh's account of his small boat journey ... seems tame in comparison," it is a matter of record that Bligh's treacherous voyage of four thousand miles in a small lifeboat took him six weeks, compared to Crane's thirty-six hours.

Kipling in Mandalay: He never went there, though he was briefly in Rangoon in 1889 and was impressed by the golden stupa of the Shwe Dagon pagoda. "Briefly" meant a few hours, as he explained in From Sea to Sea (1899):

My own sojourn in Rangoon was countable by hours, so I may be forgiven when I pranced with impatience at the bottom of the staircase [of the pagoda] because I could not at once secure a full, complete and accurate idea of everything that was to be seen. The meaning of the guardian tigers, the inwardness of the main pagoda, and the countless little ones, was hidden from me. I could not understand why the pretty girls with cheroots sold little sticks and

HOW

Long did

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colored candles to be used before the image of Buddha. Everything was incomprehensible to me.

There are obvious howlers in the poem "Mandalay" (written in 1890 and published in Barrack-Room Ballads): the old Moulmein pagoda is hundreds of miles from Mandalay, and the dawn does not come up "like thunder out er China 'crost the bay," yet the poem is persuasively atmospheric, as in the last verse:

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,

Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst;

For the temple bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be—