Paul Theroux: Dark Star Safari

Everyone always available at any time in the totally accessible world seemed to me pure horror. It made me want to find a place that was not accessible at all … no phones, no fax machines, not even mail delivery, the wonderful old world of being out of touch; in short, of being far away.

All I had to do was remove myself. I loved not having to ask permission, and in fact in my domestic life things had begun to get a little predictable, too — Mr Paul at home every evening when Mrs Paul came home from work. ‘I made spaghetti sauce … I seared some tuna … I’m scrubbing some potatoes …’ The writer in his apron, perspiring over his béchamel sauce, always within earshot of the telephone. You have to pick it up because it is ringing in your ear.

I wanted to drop out. People said, ‘Get a mobile phone … Use FedEx … Sign up for Hotmail … Stop in at Internet cafes … Visit my website …’

I said no thanks. The whole point of my leaving was to escape this stuff — to be out of touch. The greatest justification for travel was not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace. As Huck put it, lighting out for the territory.

Africa is one of the last great places on earth a person can vanish into. I wanted that. Let them wait. I have been kept waiting far too many times for far too long.

I am outta here , I thought. The next website I visit will be that of the poisonous Central African bird-eating spider.

A morbid aspect of my departure for Africa was that people began offering condolences. Say you’re leaving for a dangerous place and your friends call sympathetically, as though you’ve caught a serious illness that might prove fatal. Yet I found these messages unexpectedly stimulating, a heartening preview of what my own demise would be like. Lots of tears! Lots of mourners! But also, undoubtedly, many people boasting solemnly, ‘I told him not to do it. I was one of the last people to talk to him.’

I had gotten to Lower Egypt, and was heading south, in my usual traveling mood — hoping for the picturesque, expecting misery, braced for the appalling. Happiness was unthinkable, for although happiness is desirable it is a banal subject for travel; therefore, Africa seemed perfect for a long journey.

The weather forecast printed in a box in the Cairo newspaper was Dust , on the cold day in February that I arrived, a day of gritty wind and dust-browned sky. The weather forecast for the next day was the same — no temperature prediction, nothing about sunshine or clouds or rain; just the one word, Dust. It was the sort of weather report you might expect on the planet Mars. Nevertheless, Cairo (population 16 million), a city of bad air and hideous traffic, was made habitable, even pleasant, by its genial populace and its big placid river, brown under a brown sky.

Tourists have been visiting Egypt for 2500 years — Herodotus (roughly 480–420 BC) was the first methodical sightseer. He was fascinated by Egyptian geography and ruins — and was also collecting information for his History, of which the whole of Volume Two is Egyptiana. Herodotus traveled as far as the First Cataract, that is Aswan. Later Greeks and Romans were tourists in Egypt, raiding tombs, stealing whatever they could carry, and leaving graffiti which is still visible today. The grander structures were also pilfered and for two thousand years such things — obelisks mainly — were dragged away and set up elsewhere and goggled at. Though obelisks were sacred to the sun god, no one had any idea of their meaning. The Egyptians called them tekhenu ; the Greeks named them obeliskos , because they looked like small spits for kebabs.

The first stolen obelisk was set up in Rome in 10 BC, and a dozen more followed. Felix Fabri of Ulm, a German friar, went to Egypt in 1480, taking notes throughout his trip. An obelisk he sketched in Alexandria now stands in New York’s Central Park. In the same spirit of plunder and trophy hunting, Mussolini looted a fourth-century obelisk from Ethiopia, the Obelisk of Axum. This treasure now stands in front of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, near Caracalla. Because the scattered wars in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made travel difficult, Egypt was regarded as a safe and colorful destination. Egypt stood for the Orient, for the exotic, for sensuality and paganism. Egyptology did not start in earnest until the early nineteenth century, when the Rosetta stone was deciphered and at last the ruins disclosed the secrets of their script. This discovery unleashed a rage for Egyptiana and travelers, writers and painters flocked to the Nile Valley in search of the exotic.

Even then, Egyptian ruins had been ruins for thousands of years. The Egyptians themselves had never left and, though Arabized and Islamized, and nominally conquered by the French, the British, the Turks, their homeland the battleground of European wars, Egyptians went on farming, fishing, and living at the edges of their broken temples and tombs. They were blessed with the Nile. The ruins they regarded as a sort of quarry, a great stockpile of building materials to cannibalize for new houses and walls. But foreign soldiers had done the same, customarily garrisoning themselves in the ancient shrines — any temple unsuitable for French or British cavalrymen was commandeered for their animals.

Throughout, as Egypt was looted and trampled and gaped at, Egyptians remained Egyptian. In pharaonic times Egyptians made a habit of repelling, or subverting or enslaving anyone who ventured into their kingdom. But ever since Herodotus they have been welcoming foreigners, with a mixture of banter, hearty browbeating, teasing humor, effusiveness, and the sort of insincere familiarity I associate with people trying to become intimate enough with me to pick my pocket.

‘Meesta, meesta! My fren,’ what country you come from? America Number One! My fren’, you come with me … my house. You come. Meesta!’

In Cairo, there was a thin line between pestering and hospitality — indeed, they often amounted to the same thing, and although there were plenty of beggars there was little thievery. Egyptians seemed amazingly agreeable. You think they have been briefed to make jokes, by some government bureau but no, they are just hungry, desperation making them genial and innovative. It was obvious they were hoping to make a buck but at least they had the grace to do it with a smile.

‘You don’t speak Arabic today,’ Amir the cab driver said, ‘but you speak Arabic very good tomorrow.’

Everyone in this vast much-visited city had the patter. Amir then taught me the Arabic for please, thank you and sorry. I already knew inshallah , which means ‘God willing.’

‘Now teach me “No, thank you — I have no need.” ’

Amir did so, and before he dropped me he insisted that I hire him the next day.

‘No, thank you — I have no need,’ I said in Arabic.

He laughed but of course kept pestering.

‘My name Guda. Like the Dutch cheese,’ the cab driver said. ‘This is not limousine — not cost a hundred pounds. Just car, black and white taxi only. But clean. Fast. Handsome driver.’

And he spent the entire ride nagging me to hire him for the whole day. That was the theme in Cairo. Once someone had your attention they didn’t want to let go, for if they did you would slip away, forcing them to spend the day prowling for a fare. Business was terrible. But I saw this patter as another age-old artifact, like the plaster sphinxes and the chess sets and the camel saddles they sold to the tourists, the patter was another home-made curio, polished over the centuries.