A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (45 page)

In Venice in winter you can often hear more than you can see of it: the melancholy crying of gulls, the tolling of a bell on a buoy moored out in one of the channels and, occasionally, angry cries as helmsmen set on collision courses record near misses.

Giza: encampment of the Nagamas below the Great Pyramid. They specialize in giving visitors camel rides and driving them round the bend with their attentions. Some people, myself included, believe that the Nagamas commissioned the building of the Pyramids as a tourist attraction. While resting from their labours they feed their camels bright green foliage.

Cairo.

Inhabitants of one of the labyrinthine cities of the dead now occupied by the very poor.

The trouble with Irish roads in that they begin at a cross miles from anywhere and end up at a similar one – neither of them furnished with signposts.

Two views of the great annual horse fair at spancil Hill, County Clare.

Wanda – done in, in Ireland

Occpant of a fine wooden house – one of many such scheduled for demolition at that time (1976), in the city of Irkutsk: five time zones, and 3244 miles by the Trans-Siberian railway, east of Moscow.

Seller and buyer on a station platform somewhere east of the Urals.

Pilgrim in the austerely beautiful cathedral of the Troirska in Zagorsk; the air resonant with the constant chanting of the plea‘
Gospodi Pomiha!
’ (‘Lord have mercy upon us!’).