Travels with Herodotus (15 page)

The questions have no end. For the first few days I politely answer them. For what if they’re being asked out of friendly curiosity, in accordance with local custom? On the other hand, it could be that those who are asking are from the police—better not to irritate them.

The questioners usually appear just once, replaced the following day by a fresh contingent; I am being passed along like a baton in a relay race, it seems.

Then two of them—always together—started to appear more repeatedly. They were extremely friendly. Students, I guess, with a lot of time on their hands these days, since the chief of the ruling junta, General Abboud, had shut down the university, as a breeding ground of discontent and rebellion.

One day, looking warily around them, they ask sotto voce if I would give them several pounds—they will buy some hashish, we will go out of the city, into the desert. What to do in the face of such an offer? I have never smoked hashish and am curious about how it makes one feel. On the other hand, what if these two are from the police, and trying to set me up, perhaps to extort money from me or else have me deported? And this at the very start of a journey that is promising to be so fascinating. I’m nervous, but choose the hashish and give them the money.

They pull up in the early evening in a beat-up, open Land Rover. It has only one headlight, but it is as strong as an antiaircraft reflector. Its beam parts the tropical darkness, a seemingly impenetrable black wall, opening it for a moment to allow the car through before it immediately closes in again. So dense is the dark
that one would have the impression—were it not for the brutal potholes—that the vehicle is actually standing still.

We drive for maybe an hour, at first on blacktop, thin and crumbling along the edges, which soon peters out into a desert road along which lie occasional immense boulders, as if cast in bronze. At one of them we make a sharp turn and drive on for a moment longer, then come to a sudden halt. We are at the top of an escarpment, and the Nile glimmers silver below, illuminated by the moon. The landscape is reduced to a minimalist ideal—desert, river, moon—which at this moment is world enough.

One of the Sudanese removes from his bag a small and already opened bottle of White Horse, enough for a couple of swallows for each of us. Then he carefully twists together two thick joints, handing one to his friend and one to me. In the light of the match I suddenly see, emerging from the night, his dark face and shining eyes, with which he looks at me as if he is considering something. Perhaps he has given me poison, I think, but I don’t know if I actually thought that, or if I thought about anything at all because I am already in another world, one in which I have become weightless, in which everything is incorporeal and everything is in motion. This movement is gentle, soft, wavy. It is a tender swaying. Nothing barrels ahead, nothing explodes. All is calm and quiet. A pleasant touch. A dream.

But the most extraordinary thing is the state of weightlessness. Not that awkward, ungainly weightlessness we have seen with astronauts, but a nimble, adroit, controlled one.

I do not remember how precisely I rose up off the ground, but I do distinctly remember floating through the skies, which were dark but of a darkness that was bright, even luminous, soaring amidst multicolored circles which parted, revolved, filled the space all around, and which resembled the light twirling of hula hoops.

Sailing along this way, I feel immense joy at being liberated from the burden of my own body, from the resistance it presents at every step, from its stubborn, relentless opposition. Who would have thought, but it turns out that your body need not be your enemy but rather can, if only for a moment, if only under such extraordinary circumstances, be your friend.

I can see in front of me the hood of the Land Rover, and out of the corner of my eye the shattered side-view mirror. The horizon is intensely pink, and the sand of the desert a graphite gray. The Nile in this predawn moment is a light navy. I am sitting in the open car and trembling from the cold. At this time of day the desert is as cold as Siberia; the chill pierces you to the bone.

But by the time we are once again entering the city, the sun has risen and it is instantly hot again. A terrible headache. The only thing I want is to sleep. Just to sleep. To not move, to not be, to not live.

Two days later, the Sudanese came to the hotel to ask how I was feeling. How am I feeling? Oh, my friends, you want to know how I feel? Yes, how do you feel, because Louis Armstrong is coming, there’s a concert tomorrow in the stadium.

I am instantly better.

The stadium was quite a distance outside the city, small, shallow, with a capacity of at most five thousand spectators. Even so, only half the seats were occupied. In the center of the field stood a podium, weakly illuminated, but we were sitting near the front and could see Armstrong and his small orchestra well. The evening was hot and airless, and when Armstrong walked out, attired moreover in a jacket and bow tie, he was already soaked
with perspiration. He greeted everyone, raising into the air the hand holding his golden trumpet, and said into the cheap, crackling microphone that he was pleased to be playing in Khartoum, and not only pleased, but downright delighted, after which he broke into his full, loose, infectious laugh. It was laughter that invited others to laugh along, but the audience remained aloofly silent, not quite certain how to behave. The drums and the bass resounded and Armstrong launched into a song appropriate enough to the time and place—“Sleepy Time Down South.” It is actually difficult to say when one first heard Armstrong’s voice; there is something in it that makes one feel one has known it forever, and when he starts to sing, everyone, with the most sincere conviction of his or her connoisseurship, proclaims: Why yes, that’s him, that’s Satchmo!

Yes, that was him—Satchmo. He sang “Hello Dolly, this is Louis, Dolly,” he sang “What a Wonderful World” and “Moon River,” he sang “I touch your lips and all at once the sparks go flying, those devil lips.” But the spectators continued to sit silently. There was no applause. Did they not understand the words? Was there too much openly expressed eroticism in all this for Muslim tastes?

After each number, and even during the playing and singing, Armstrong wiped his face with a large white handkerchief. These handkerchiefs were constantly changed for him by a man whose sole purpose in accompanying Armstrong around Africa seemed to have been this. I saw later that he had an entire bag of them, dozens and dozens probably.

After the concert people dispersed quickly, vanishing into the night. I was shocked. I had heard that Armstrong’s concerts elicited great enthusiasm, frenzy, ecstasy. There was no trace of these raptures in the stadium in Khartoum, despite the fact that Satchmo played many songs from the American South, from
Alabama and Louisiana, where he himself came from—songs that had originated with African slaves. But by then their Africa and this one here belonged to different worlds, lacking a common language, unable to communicate much less partake of an emotional oneness.

The Sudanese drove me back to the hotel. We sat down on the terrace for some lemonade. Moments later a car brought Armstrong. He sat down with relief at a table, or, more precisely, he collapsed into the chair. He was a stout, thickset man with wide, drooping shoulders. The waiter brought him an orange juice. He downed it in a single gulp, and then another glass, and another. He was depleted, sitting with his head bowed, silent. He was sixty years old at the time and—something I didn’t then know—already suffering from heart disease. Armstrong during the concert and Armstrong immediately after it were two entirely different people: the first was merry, cheerful, animated, with a powerful voice, able to coax an astonishing range of tones from his trumpet; the second was heavy, exhausted, weak, his face covered in wrinkles, extinguished.

Whoever leaves the safe walls of Khartoum and sets off into the desert must remember that danger and traps lie in wait. Sandstorms constantly change the configuration of the landscape, moving the orientation points about, and if as a result of these relentless natural caprices the traveler should lose his way, he will surely perish. The desert is mysterious and can arouse fear. No one goes off into it alone, largely because no one can carry enough water to conquer the distance separating one well from the next.

During his trip through Egypt, Herodotus, knowing that the Sahara was all around, wisely kept to the river, staying always close
to the Nile. The desert is a sunny fire, and fire is a wild beast, which can devour everything:
the Egyptians regard fire as a living creature (one which consumes everything it takes hold of until at last, when it is sated, it dies along with the object it has been devouring)
… And he offers as an example what happened when the king of the Persians, Cambyses, having set off to conquer Egypt and then Ethiopia, dispatched part of his army against the Ammonians, a people inhabiting the oases of the Sahara. These troops, departing from Thebes, arrived after seven days of marching through the desert in a city called Oäsis, at which point all trace of them disappeared: …
after that the only information available comes directly or indirectly from the Ammonians themselves; no one else can say what happened to them, because they did not reach the Ammonians and they did not come back either. The Ammonians, however, add an explanation for their disappearance. They say that after the army had left Oäsis and was making its way across the desert towards them—in other words, somewhere between Oäsis and their lands—an extraordinarily strong south wind, carrying along with it heaps of sand, fell on them while they were taking their midday meal and buried them
.

The Czechs arrived, Dushan and Jarda, and we set off immediately for the Congo. The first settlement on the Congolese side was a roadside hamlet—Aba. It nestled in the shade of an enormous green wall, the jungle, which began here abruptly, rearing up like a steep mountain from the plain.

There was a gas station in Aba, as well as several shops. These were shaded by decaying wooden arcades, beneath which lounged several idle, motionless men. They sprang to life when we stopped to ask about what awaited us deeper inside the country, and where we could change some pounds into local francs.

They were Greeks, and formed a colony similar to the hundreds that were already scattered around the world in Herodotus’s time.
That type of settlement had clearly survived among them to this day.

I had my copy of Herodotus in my bag, and when we were leaving I showed it to one of the Greeks as he was saying goodbye. He saw the name on the cover and smiled, but in such a way that I couldn’t tell if he was expressing pride, or else embarrassment at having no idea who this was.

W
e have come to a standstill on the outskirts of the little town of Paulis (Congo, Eastern Province). We have run out of gas, and live in hope that someone will pass this way one day and agree to give us some, if only a jerry can full. Until then, we wait in the only place possible—a school run by Belgian missionaries, whose prior is the delicate, emaciated, and seriously ailing Abbé Pierre. Because the country is in the grips of civil war, the missionaries instruct their charges in military drills. The children march around in fours, holding long thick sticks against their shoulders, singing and shouting out. How stern their facial expressions are, how vigorous their gestures, how at once solemn and exciting is this game of soldier!

I have a cot in an empty classroom at the end of the school barracks. It is quiet here, and the sounds of the battle drills barely reach me. Out front is a flower bed full of blooms—lush, tropically overgrown dahlias and gladioli, centauries, and still other beauties, which I am seeing for the first time and whose names I do not know.

I too am infected with the contagion of war—not the local one, but another, distant in place and time, which the king of the Persians, Darius, is waging against rebellious Babylon, and which Herodotus describes. I am sitting in the shade on the verandah, swiping at flies and mosquitoes and reading his book.

Darius is a young, twenty-something-year-old man, who has just become the king of what was then the world’s most powerful empire. In this multinational realm, one people or another are constantly lifting up their heads, rebelling, and battling for liberty. All such uprisings and revolts the Persians quash with ruthless ease. But this time a great threat has arisen, a genuine danger that could severely affect Persia’s destiny: Babylon, the capital of the Babylonian empire that had been incorporated by King Cyrus into the Persian empire nineteen years earlier, in 538 b.c.e., is in mutiny.

That Babylon desires independence is hardly surprising. Situated at the intersection of trade routes connecting the East with the West and the North with the South, it is the largest and most dynamic city on earth. It is the center of world culture and learning, renowned especially for mathematics and astronomy, geometry and architecture. A century will pass before Greek Athens is able to rival it.

For the time being, the Babylonians are preparing an anti-Persian uprising and a declaration of sovereignty. Their timing is good. They know that the Persian court has just come through a long period of anarchy, during which power had been held by the priestly caste of the Magi. They were recently overthrown in a palace coup staged by a group of Persian elites, who had only just selected from among themselves a new king—Darius. Herodotus notes that the Babylonians
were very well prepared
. Clearly, he writes,
they had spent the whole troubled period of the Magus’ rule … getting ready for a siege, and somehow nobody had noticed that they were doing so
.

The following passage now appears in Herodotus’s text:
Once their rebellion was out in the open, this is what they did. The Babylonian men gathered together all the women of the city—with the exception of their mothers and of a single woman chosen by each man from his own household—and strangled them. The single woman was kept on as a cook, while all the others were strangled to conserve supplies
.