Paul Theroux - To the Ends of the Earth - The Selected Travels

“They come down here and all the prices go up,” one old man said. He might have been a Kenyan, speaking of settlers. There were other objections: the outsiders didn’t bother to understand the village life, they kept to themselves, acted superior, and anyway were mostly retired people and not much use.

Expatriates and natives: the colonial pattern repeated in England. There was a scheme afoot to drill for oil on a beautiful hill near a picturesque village. The expatriates started a campaign against it; the natives said very little. I raised the subject in a pub one night with some natives of the area, asking them where they stood on the oil-drilling issue.

“That bugger—,” one said, mentioning the name of a well-known man who had lived there for some years and was leading the campaign. “I’d like to talk to him.”

“What would you say to him?” I asked.

“I’d tell him to pack his bags and go back where he came from.”

So one understands the linguistic variations in England, the dialect that thickens among the natives when an expatriate enters a pub. No one recognizes him; the publican chats with him; the talk around the fireplace is of a broken fence or a road accident. The expatriate is discussed only after he leaves the room: Where does he live? What does he do? The natives know the answers, and later when he buys a round of drinks they will warn him about the weather (“We’ll pay for these warm days!”). It is a form of village gratitude, the effort at small talk. But in England a village is a state of mind. “Are you new in the village?” a friend of mine was asked by a newsagent. This was in Notting Hill.

THERE IS A SULTAN IN MALAYSIA WHOSE NICKNAME IS “BUFFLES” and who in his old age divides his time between watching polo and designing his own uniforms. His uniforms are very grand and resemble the outfit of a Shriner or thirty-second-degree Mason, but he was wearing a silk sports shirt the day I met him on the polo ground. The interview began badly, because his first question, on hearing I was a writer, was “Then you must know Beverley Nichols!” When I laughed, the sultan said, “Somerset Maugham came to my coronation. And next week Lord Somebody’s coming — who is it?”

“Lewisham, Your Highness,” said an Englishwoman on his left.

“Lewisham’s coming — yes, Lewisham. Do you know him? No?” The sultan adjusted his sunglasses. “I just got a letter from him.”

The conversation turned quite easily to big-game hunting. “A very rich American once told me that he had shot grizzly bears in Russia and elephants in Africa and tigers in India. He said that bear meat is the best, but the second best is horse meat. He said that. Yes!”

We discussed the merits of horse meat.

The sultan said, “My father said horse meat was good to eat. Yes, indeed. But it’s very heating.” The sultan placed his hands on his shirt and found his paunch and tugged it. “You can’t eat too much of it. It’s too heating.”

“Have you ever eaten horse meat, Your Highness?”

“No, never. But the syces eat it all the time.”

The match began with great vigor. The opposing team galloped up to the sultan’s goal with their sticks flailing.

The sultan said, “Was that a goal?”

“No, Your Highness,” said the woman, “but very nearly.”

“Very nearly, yes! I saw that,” said the sultan.

“Missed by a foot, Your Highness.”

“Missed by a foot, yes!”

After that chukka, I asked the sultan what the Malay name of the opposing team meant in English.

The sultan shook his head. “I have no idea. I’ll have to ask Zayid. It’s Malay, you see. I don’t speak it terribly well.”

“CUSTOMS OVER THERE,” SAID THE MOTIONING AFGHAN. But the Customs Office was closed for the night. We could not go back to the Iranian frontier at Tayebad, we could not proceed into Herat. So we remained on a strip of earth, neither Afghanistan nor Iran. It was the sort of bedraggled oasis that features in Foreign Legion films: a few square stucco buildings, several parched trees, a dusty road. It was getting dark. I said, “What do we do now?”

“There’s the No-Man’s-Land Hotel,” said a tall hippie, with pajamas and bangles. His name was Lopez. “I stayed there once before. With a chick. The manager turned me on.”

In fact the hotel was nameless, nor did it deserve a name. It was the only hotel in the place. The manager saw us and screamed, “Restaurant!” He herded us into a candlelit room with a long table on which there was a small dish of salt and a fork with twisted tines. The manager’s name was Abdul; he was clearly hysterical, suffering the effects of his Ramadan fasting. He began to argue with Lopez, who called him “a scumbag.”

There was no electricity in this hotel; there was only enough water for one cup of tea apiece. There was no toilet, there was no place to wash — neither was there any water. There was no food, and there seemed to be a shortage of candles. Bobby and Lopez grumbled about this, but then became frightfully happy when Abdul told them their beds would cost thirty-five cents each.

I had bought an egg in Tayebad, but it had smashed in my jacket pocket, leaked into the material, and hardened in a stiff stain. I had drunk half my gin on the Night Mail to Meshed; I finished the bottle over a game of Hearts with Lopez, Bobby, and a tribesman who was similarly stranded at the hotel.

As we were playing cards (and the chiefs played in an unnecessarily cutthroat fashion), Abdul wandered in and said, “Nice, clean. But no light. No water for wash. No water for tea.”

“Turn us on, then,” said Lopez. “Hubble-bubble.”

“Hash,” said Bobby.

Abdul became friendly. He had eaten: his hysteria had passed. He got a piece of hashish, like a small mudpie, and presented it to Lopez, who burned a bit of it and sniffed the smoke.

“This is shit,” said Lopez. “Third-quality.” He prepared a cigarette. “In Europe, sure, this is good shit. But you don’t come all the way to Afghanistan to smoke third-quality shit like this.”

“The first time I came here, in ’68,” said Bobby, “the passport officer said, ‘You want nice hash?’ I thought it was the biggest put-on I’d ever heard. I mean, a passport officer! I said, ‘No, no — it gives me big headache.’ ‘You no want hash?’ he says. I told him no. He looks at me and shakes his head: ‘So why you come to Afghanistan?’ ”

“Far out,” said Lopez.

“So I let him turn me on.”

“It’s a groovy country,” said Lopez. “They’re all crazy here.” He looked at me. “You digging it?”

“Up to a point,” I said.

“You freaking out?” Bobby sucked on the hashish cigarette and passed it to me. I took a puff and gulped it and felt a light twanging on the nerves behind my eyes.

“He is, look. I saw him on the train to Meshed,” said Lopez. “His head was together, but I think he’s loose now.”

Lopez laughed at the egg stain on my pocket. The jacket was dirty, my shirt was dirty, and so were my hands; there was a film of dust on my face.

“He’s loose,” said Bobby.

“He’s liquefying,” said Lopez. “It’s a goofy place.”

“I could hang out here,” said Bobby.

“I could too, but they won’t let me,” said Lopez. “That scumbag passport shit only gave me eight days. He didn’t like my passport — I admit it’s shitty. I got olive oil on it in Greece. I know what I should do — really goop it up with more olive oil and get another one.”

“Yeah,” said Bobby. He smoked the last of the joint and made another.

With the third joint the conversation moved quickly to a discussion of time, reality, and the spiritual refuge ashrams provided. Both Lopez and Bobby had spent long periods in ashrams; once, as long as six months.