Books by Paul Theroux
FICTION
Waldo
Fong and the Indians
Girls at Play
Murder in Mount Holly
Jungle Lovers
Sinning with Annie
Saint Jack
The Black House
The Family Arsenal
The Consuls File
A Christmas Card
Picture Palace
London Snow
Worlds End
The Mosquito Coast
The London Embassy
Half Moon Street
O-Zone
My Secret History
Chicago Loop
Millroy the Magician
My Other Life
Kowloon Tong
Hotel Honolulu
The Stranger at the Palazzo dOro
Blinding Light
The Elephanta Suite
A Dead Hand
The Lower River
CRITICISM
V. S. Naipaul
NONFICTION
The Great Railway Bazaar
The Old Patagonian Express
The Kingdom by the Sea
Sailing Through China
Sunrise with Seamonsters
The Imperial Way
Riding the Iron Rooster
To the Ends of the Earth
The Happy Isles of Oceania
The Pillars of Hercules
Sir Vidias Shadow
Fresh Air Fiend
Dark Star Safari
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
The Tao of Travel
The Last Train to Zona Verde
Copyright 2013 by Paul Theroux
Published simultaneously in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication available upon request
eISBN: 978-0-7710-8522-2
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v3.1
To Albert and Freddy,
Sylvie and Enzo,
with love from Grandpa
When my father used to travel, he didnt fear the night. But had he all his toes?
Bakongo (Angola) proverb
God almighty said to Moses, peace be upon him: Take an iron staff and wear iron sandals, and then tour the earth until the staff is broken and the shoes are worn out.
Muhammad bin al-Sarraj, Uns al-Sari wa-al sarib (A Companion to Day and Night Travelers), 1630, translated by Nabil Matar
Contents
Among the Unreal People I N THE HOT FLAT BUSH in far northeast Namibia I crossed a bulging termite mound of smooth, ant-chewed sand, and with just the slightest elevation of this swelling under my foot soles the landscape opened in a majestic fan, like the fluttered pages of a whole unread book.
I then resumed kicking behind a file of small-bodied, mostly naked men and women who were quick-stepping under a sky fretted with golden fire through the dry scrub of what was once coarsely known in Afrikaans as Boesmanland (Bushman Land) pouch-breasted women laughing among themselves, an infant with a head like a fuzzy fruit bobbing in one womans sling, men in leather clouts clutching spears and bows, nine of us altogether and I was thinking, as Id thought for years traveling the earth among humankind: The best of them are bare-assed.
Happy again, back in Africa, the kingdom of light, I was stamping out a new path, on foot in this ancient landscape, delighting in a palpable imaginable visitable past in the nearer distances and clearer mysteries. I was ducking among thornbushes with slender, golden-skinned people who were the earths oldest folk, boasting a traceable lineage to the dark backward and abysm of time in the Upper Pleistocene, thirty-five thousand years or so ago, the proven ancestors of us all, the true aristocrats of the planet.
The snort of a startled animal out of sight stopped us. Then its hindquarters swishing through brush. Then the leaping clop of its hooves on loose stones.
Kudu, one of the men whispered, bowing to listen to its departure without glancing aside, as though saying the familiar first name of someone he knew. He spoke again, and while I didnt understand, I listened as if to new music; his language was preposterous and euphonious.
That morning in Tsumkwe, the nearest town but not a town, just a sun-scorched crossroads with many hovels and a few shade trees I had heard on my shortwave radio: World financial markets are in turmoil, facing the worst crisis since the Second World War. The Eurozone countries are approaching meltdown as Greece is expected to collapse into bankruptcy, its government having turned down a $45 billion loan to write down its debt.
The people I was following were laughing. They were Khoisan-speaking, a subgroup of !Kung people who called themselves Ju/hoansi a clucking, hard-to-pronounce name meaning Real People or Harmless People. Traditional hunter-gatherers, they had no history of using money. Even now, pushed to the margins of so-called Bushman Land (they knew this part of it as Nyae Nyae) and irregularly settled, with some cattle and crops these people seldom saw money and hardly used the decaying stuff. They still supplemented their diet by hunting and grubbing and foraging and accepting pitiful handouts. They probably did not think about money, or if they did, they knew they would never have any. As the Greeks rioted, howling against their government, and Italians cried poverty in the streets of Rome, and the Portuguese and the Spanish stared hollow-eyed at bankruptcy, and the news was of failure, worthless currencies, and austerity measures, the Ju/hoansi were indestructible in all their old ways, or seemed so to me in my ignorance.
The young woman in front of me dropped to her knees in the sand. She had the lovely, elfin, somewhat Asiatic face but also suggesting the face of an extraterrestrial that most San people possess. That is to say, pedomorphic, the innocent and fetching face of a child. She traced her fingers around a threadlike vine sprouting from the sand, crouched, leaned on one elbow, and began digging. With each scoop and handful of sand her eyes brightened, her breasts shook, and her nipples trembled against the earth, one of the minor titillations of this excursion. Within a minute she extracted a finger-shaped tuber from the dark, strangely moist hole shed made and cradled it in her hand. As she flicked dust from the root, it paled beneath her fingertips. Smiling, she offered the first bite to me.