To the Ends of the Earth

What was that? Sweet voices, as clear as organ tones, drifted from my compartment. I froze and listened. The Russians, awestruck by the sight of the Volga, had fallen silent; they were hunched, staring down at the water. But the holy music, fragrant and slight, moved through the air, warming it like an aroma.

Where a Mother laid her Baby

In a manger for His bed …

The hymn wavered, but the silent reverence of the Russians and the slowness of the train allowed the soft children’s voices to perfume the corridor. My listening became a meditation of almost unbearable sadness, as if joy’s highest refinement was borne on a needle point of pain.

Mary was that Mother mild

,

Jesus Christ her little Child …

I went into the compartment and held the radio to my ear until the broadcast ended, a program of Christmas music from the BBC. Dawn never came that day. We traveled in thick fog and through whorls of brown blowing mist, which made the woods ghostly. It was not cold outside: some snow had melted, and the roads—more frequent now—were rutted and muddy. All morning the tree trunks, black with dampness, were silhouettes in the fog, and the pine groves at the very limit of visibility in the mist took on the appearance of cathedrals with dark spires. In places the trees were so dim, they were like an afterimage on the eye. I had never felt close to the country, but the fog distanced me even more, and I felt, after six thousand miles and all those days in the train, only a great remoteness; every reminder of Russia—the women in orange canvas jackets working on the line with shovels, the sight of a Lenin statue, the station signboards stuck in yellow ice, and the startled magpies croaking in Russian at the gliding train—all this annoyed me. I resented Russia’s size; I wanted to be home.

The Old

Patagonian Express

Travel Is a Vanishing Act

TRAVEL IS A VANISHING ACT, A SOLITARY TRIP DOWN A pinched line of geography to oblivion.

What’s become of Waring

Since he gave us all the slip?

But a travel book is the opposite, the loner bouncing back bigger than life to tell the story of his experiment with space. It is the simplest sort of narrative, an explanation which is its own excuse for the gathering up and the going. It is motion given order by its repetition in words. That sort of disappearance is elemental, but few come back silent. And yet the convention is to telescope travel writing, to start—as so many novels do—in the middle of things, to beach the reader in a bizarre place without having first guided him there. “The white ants had made a meal of my hammock,” the book might begin; or “Down there, the Patagonian valley deepened to gray rock, wearing its eons’ stripes and split by floods.” Or, to choose actual first sentences at random from three books within arm’s reach:

It was towards noon on March 1, 1898, that I first found myself entering the narrow and somewhat dangerous harbour of Mombasa, on the east coast of Africa.

(The Man-Eaters of Tsavo

, by Lt. Col. J. H. Patterson)

“Welcome!” says the big signboard by the side of the road as the car completes the corkscrew ascent from the heat of the South Indian plains into an almost alarming coolness.

(Ooty Preserved

, by Mollie Panter-Downes)

From the balcony of my room I had a panoramic view over Accra, capital of Ghana.

(Which Tribe Do You Belong To?

by Alberto Moravia)

My usual question, unanswered by these—by most—travel books, is: how did you get there? Even without the suggestion of a motive, a prologue is welcome, since the going is often as fascinating as the arrival. Yet, because curiosity implies delay, and delay is regarded as a luxury (but what’s the hurry, anyway?), we have become used to life being a series of arrivals or departures, of triumphs and failures, with nothing noteworthy in between. Summits matter, but what of the lower slopes of Parnassus? We have not lost faith in journeys from home, but the texts are scarce. Departure is described as a moment of panic and ticket-checking in an airport lounge, or a fumbled kiss at a gangway; then silence until, “From the balcony of my room I had a panoramic view over Accra …”

Travel, truly, is otherwise. From the second you wake up you are headed for the foreign place, and each step (now past the cuckoo clock, now down Fulton to the Fellsway) brings you closer. The Man-Eaters of Tsavo is about lions devouring Indian railway laborers in Kenya at the turn of the century. But I would bet there was a subtler and just as riveting book about the sea journey from Southampton to Mombasa. For his own reasons, Colonel Patterson left it unwritten.