To the Ends of the Earth

CHRIST JESUS CAME INTO THE WORLD TO SAVE SINNERS was the motto over my bedstead, in this enormous drafty room, and the bed was a great slumping trampoline. Mrs. Wheeney was saying that she had not slept a wink all the previous night. It was the thunder and the poor soul in number eight, who was scared to death.

“It’s funny how tired you get when you miss a night’s sleep.” she said. “Now me, I’m looking forward to going to bed. Don’t worry about the money. You can give me the five pounds tomorrow.”

The rain had started again and was hitting the window with a swish like sleet. It was like being among the Jumblies, on a dark and rainy coast. They were glad to see aliens here, and I was happy among these strangers.

Belfast

I KNEW AT ONCE THAT BELFAST WAS AN AWFUL CITY. IT HAD A bad face—moldering buildings, tough-looking people, a visible smell, too many fences. Every building that was worth blowing up was guarded by a man with a metal detector who frisked people entering and checked their bags. It happened everywhere, even at dingy entrances, at buildings that were not worth blowing up, and, again and again, at the bus station, the railway station. Like the bombs themselves, the routine was frightening, then fascinating, then maddening, and then a bore—but it went on and became a part of the great waste motion of Ulster life. And security looked like parody, because the whole place was already scorched and broken with bomb blasts.

It was so awful I wanted to stay. It was a city that was so demented and sick that some aliens mistook its desperate frenzy for a sign of health, never knowing it was a death agony. It had always been a hated city. “There is no aristocracy—no culture—no grace—no leisure worthy of the name,” Sean O’Faolain wrote in his Irish Journey. “It all boils down to mixed grills, double whiskies, dividends, movies, and these strolling, homeless, hate-driven poor.” But if what people said was true, that it really was one of the nastiest cities in the world, surely then it was worth spending some time in, for horror interest?

I lingered a few days, marveling at its decrepitude, and then vowed to come back the following week. I had never seen anything like it. There was a high steel fence around the city center, and that part of Belfast was intact, because to enter it, one had to pass through a checkpoint—a turnstile for people, a barrier for cars and buses. More metal detectors, bag searches, and questions: lines of people waited to be examined so that they could shop, play bingo, or go to a movie.

Giant’s Causeway

I BEGAN TO DEVELOP A HABIT OF ASKING DIRECTIONS, FOR THE pleasure of listening to them.

“Just a munnut,” a man in Bushmills said. His name was Emmett; he was about sixty-odd and wore an old coat. He had a pound of bacon in his hand, and pressing the bacon to the side of his head in a reflective way, he went on.

“Der’s a wee wudden brudge under the car park. And der’s a bug one farder on—a brudge for trums. Aw, der used to be trums up and down! Aw, but they is sore on money and unded it. Lussun, ye kyan poss along da strond if the tide is dine. But walk on da odder side whar der’s graws.” He moved the bacon to his cheek. “But it might be weyat!”

“What might be wet?”

“Da graws,” Mr. Emmett said.

“Long grass?”

“In its notral styat.”

This baffled me for a while—notral styat—and then I thought: Of course, in its natural state!

Kicking through bracken, I pushed on and decided to head for the Giant’s Causeway.

BOSWELL: Is not the Giant’s Causeway worth seeing?

JOHNSON: Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

I stayed on the coastal cliffs and then took a shortcut behind a coastal cottage, where I was startled by a big square-faced dog. The hairy thing growled at me and I leaped to get away, but I tripped and fell forward into a bed of nettles. My hands stung for six hours.

The Giant’s Causeway was a spectacular set of headlands made of petrified boilings and natural columns and upright pipe-shaped rocks. Every crack and boulder and contour had a fanciful name. This massive coastal oddity had been caused by the cooling of lava when this part of Ireland had oozed during a period of vulcanism. I walked along it, to and from Dunseverick Castle—“once the home of a man who saw the Crucifixion” (supposed to be Conal Cearnach, a roving Irish wrestler who happened to be in a wrestling match in Jerusalem the day Christ was crucified).