Paul Theroux: The Pillars of Hercules

One of the many strange facts about the Mediterranean people is that compared with the British and the Northern Europeans they are not great fish eaters. This is Emil Ludwig’s observation and it is generally true. One of the more anticlimactic experiences in a Mediterranean market is surveying the fish goggling on marble slabs. There are not many, they are rather small, and the larger proportion have been caught outside the Mediterranean. Tuna is the exception, because it makes an annual journey through the Pillars and across the Mediterranean to spawn in the Black Sea. Dolphins are protected. With the exception of illegal drift-net vessels that use nets up to ten miles long (for example, Greenpeace France detected and documented 137 illegal Italian drift-netters between April and June 1994), fishing is small-scale and unrewarding. Deep-sea fishing in the Mediterranean is almost unknown, apart from the illegal drift-netters and the competition for the migrating tuna.

It is not a fishy sea, but it is blessed with a beautiful climate, and though Mediterranean storms and high winds can be devastating, it has been noted for its calm waters. The very word Mediterranean signified sunny skies and balmy weather, and for thousands of years these shores had been a kind of Eden, fruitful with grapes and olives and lemons.

But soon after I set off, I mentioned my itinerary to a young French student on a train. Pointing to my map, I remarked on how it was so easy to travel around the Mediterranean.

“Croatia! Albania!” the student said. “And what about Algeria — are you going there?”

“Of course. I’ve always wanted to see the souk in Algiers, Albert Camus’ Oran, taking the night train from Tunis to Annaba.”

“In the past two years, twenty thousand people have been killed in fighting in Algeria, most of them on the coast,” he said. “You didn’t know that the most recent election was annulled and the Muslim fundamentalists have a policy of killing all foreigners?”

No, I did not know that.

“Maybe I’ll skip Algeria.” And I thought: Maybe they’ll stop killing each other before I get there.

Gibraltar is tiny, just two square miles of it, mostly uninhabited cliffs, and there are almost as many apes as there are humans. The name is from Tarik el Said, the Moorish conquerer who named it “Geb-el-Tarik” (Hill of Tarik). I arrived on a cheap flight from London sitting with Mr. Wong, from the People’s Republic. We looked at the rock.

“Like a small mountain,” Mr. Wong said.

Like a beheaded sphinx, I thought, all buttocks and trunk, crouching with its paws on the water, and the more impressive for there being no other monstrosities or mountains near it.

Mr. Wong told me he was planning to start a Chinese restaurant in the town. “And why did you come here?”

“Because I’ve never been here before,” I said.

I had never been to Spain either. Once I had been to the south of France, to see Graham Greene in Antibes. That tiny fishing port was all I knew of the Riviera. I had seen a little bit of Italy and had spent one day in Athens, but apart from that had not traveled in the Mediterranean, not even to the most obvious places. Israel, no. Lebanon, no. Egypt, no — had never seen the pyramids. Most English people I met had been to Mallorca; I had never been there. Because I had not been to any of these Mediterranean places I had vigorous and unshakable prejudices, and those prejudices amused me and kept me from wanting to visit the places.

And in the way that you don’t really understand great novels until you are older and experienced, you needed to be a certain age to appreciate the subtleties of the Mediterranean. I had reread Anna Karenina and felt that it was a different novel from the one I had read when I was twenty-one. I had also reread Tender Is the Night , and The Plague , and The Secret Agent. I wondered whether they would have the same impact. They did, but for different reasons; they were different books, because thirty-odd years later I was a different man.

By a happy coincidence these books all had Mediterranean connections. Dick and Nicole Diver single-handedly invent the Riviera by turning the sleepy fishing village of Juan-les-Pins into a fashionable resort. Anna Karenina and her lover Vronsky escape Russia, and the scandal of their liaison, and experience bliss in a romantic interlude in Venice, Rome, and Naples; but after an extended stay in a palazzo in a small Italian town, they are disillusioned with Mediterranean life, “and the German tourists became so wearisome, that a change became absolutely necessary. They decided to return to Russia.”

Joseph Conrad wrote the whole of his London novel in the south of France, in Montpellier, and Camus, who was born on the Algerian coast, set his novel in Oran. I had also recently read Hemingway (bullfighting in Spain), Naguib Mahfouz and Cavafy (both Alexandria), Flaubert (Salammbo in Carthage), Cyril Connolly (the Riviera again in The Rock Pool) , and Evelyn Waugh’s Labels , which takes in almost the whole of the Mediterranean. One of the most neglected postwar American novels of the Mediterranean coast — in this case, southern Italy — is William Styron’s complex and brilliant Set This House on Fire. I reread it with renewed admiration for its portraits of expatriate artists and drunks and posers, their brains baking in the Amalfi sunlight. And I had finally got around to reading Christ Stopped at Eboli , by Carlo Levi. The miserable little village he writes about, which he called Gagliano, isn’t on the Mediterranean, but it is near enough; the real place, Aliano, is only about twenty miles from the sea, at the arch on the sole of Italy’s boot. These books fueled my desire to travel there. Perhaps unconsciously I had been doing homework.

There was a time when I wanted to see only wild places, and was reluctant to go to a place that had been written about extensively. But then — it is so funny about travel — I would go to a place that everyone had been written about and it was as though I was seeing something entirely new. I felt that when I was writing about Britain. My Britain was different from anything I had read. It made the going good because I was unprepared for what I saw. That was always the best part of travel, the sense of discovery. When there was none and it was all predictable I wanted to go home.

The Mediterranean was not one place, but many; and I was at last calm enough to venture into its complexity without the risk of getting lost. I was happier with love in my life. I was not looking for a new home, traveling hopefully down the road rejecting places as I passed through. I was traveling in the purest way, without envy or a spirit of acquisition. I was setting out on an extensive trip around the shores of the Mediterranean, Christian, Muslim, Jewish and heathen; to meet the people, eat the food, get rained on and shot at.

My idea was to see it out of season, when the tourists were back home, spending the fall and winter in the northern half, the spring and summer in the Levant and North Africa, going from one Pillar to the other; and to make a modern Grand Tour, seeking out wise people.

An inland sea is perfect for a journey, because the coastline determines the itinerary.

• • •

The day I arrived in Gibraltar, the Chief Minister of Gibraltar, Joe Bossano, was at the United Nations, explaining to the assembly why Gibraltar wanted to remain itself, autonomous. But Gibraltar has nothing but the rock and its strategic location. It makes nothing, it sells nothing, it imports everything it needs to sustain life; it is tiny in both land area and population (a mere twenty-eight thousand people, of which sixteen thousand are voters). It is just a few streets at the base of the rock, and on the lower slopes there are some luxury homes and gun emplacements. There is not enough room for an airport, and so when a plane is due the main road into Spain is closed — barriers swing shut — and traffic is halted until the plane has landed. The aircraft taxis across the road, and the portion of Gibraltar known as The Neck, and continues to the terminal. At the All Clear, the road reopens.