Paul Theroux - The Pillars of Hercules

Herculean was a word I kept wanting to use but never did. The only Herculean part of my trip was every night having to describe how I had spent the day, without leaving anything out; turning all my actions into words. It was like a labor in a myth or an old story. I could not sleep until the work was done. Mediterranean travel for me — for many people — was sometimes ancestor worship and sometimes its opposite. This was unlike any other trip I had taken, because although the journey was over, the experience wasn’t. Travel was so often a cure; I was cured of China and Peru, by going; I was cured of Fiji and Sri Lanka. Cured of Kenya and Pakistan. Cured of England, after many years. But my trip had not cured me of the Mediterranean, and I knew I would go back, the way you went back to a museum, to look — at pictures or out the window — and think; back to some Mediterranean places I saw, and more that I missed.

The mooring lines of the Boughaz were hauled aboard just as dawn broke. I thought of what Bowles had said. Don’t become a monument or people will piss on you. There was no danger of my becoming a monument, but Gibraltar was another story. Perhaps that explained why I had been so flippant when I had seen it the first time, and maybe so many monuments explained the mood of my Mediterranean travel, or some of it.

The darkness in the sky dissolved, as though rinsed in light. Into that eastern sky leaked yellow-orange, pinking to paleness, a whole illuminated day ahead, looming behind the Rock to the northeast, grander at this distance, and then the pair of pillars big and small on the facing shores. The sea was calm, and glittered under limitless sky — it was going to be a wonderful morning, the sort of restful brilliance you get, the sky exhausted of clouds, after days of storms. The light grew brighter, revealing the day, and it just got better, as this rosy dawn became a sunset in reverse.

PAUL THEROUX was born in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1941 and published his first novel, Waldo , in 1967. His subsequent novels include The Black House, The Family Arsenal, Picture Palace (winner of the Whitbread Prize for fiction), O-Zone, The Mosquito Coast , which was made into a hit movie starring Harrison Ford, the critically acclaimed My Secret History , and Chicago Loop. His bestselling and highly successful travel books include The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, Riding the Iron Rooster, To the Ends of the Earth , and The Happy Isles of Oceania.