Chambers of the Sun Part 7

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A Passage to Turkey

Hotel Athena, Pergamon - September 11th

Yesterday, I took what Milton would have called a "gaudy day." Cheerfully bobbing around in Ayvalýk's harbour are any number of large-ish boats offering a day's tour of the bay, with lunch and swimming thrown in, for the stingier part of seven pounds. Travel may bring out the snobbery in us all, but there are some things about which it is hard to be a snob, and sea-swimming is one of them. I decided to stand up Sappho and Alcaeus and have a day without thinking for once, lest I should end up like Bernard of Clairvaux, whose mind was so abstracted that he failed to notice Lake Geneva standing in front of him. And although the contents of a package tour descended on the boat, and I was, as one of the Australian ladies helpfully observed, "boxed in," it was the kind of day that no number of Antipodeans could spoil.

About half an hour's sailing west of Alibey Island - where the first shots of the Turkish War of Independence were fired - is a little rocky shoal. The waters of this shoal are so pellucid that you can see the rocks beneath you at a depth of twice your own height with wonderful clarity, and sardines circle about as fluidly as filigreed dust motes in the lancing sunlight. In the corner of your eye, you could almost see the Nereids combing their ambrosial tresses on the strand. The water was like an inspiration on the skin, warm but with an edge of freshness that took the breath away, and I left all my tiredness and Durrell's "carapace of the intellect" sinking languidly away into the depths. I came out laughing like a small child.

The sight of those swirls of sardines served up deep-fried for lunch did no more to dampen the spirits than exchanging platitudes and banter with the package tourists. I have, with all the wisdom of my eighteen years of age, been known on occasion to be quite rude about colonials and package tours, whether separately or in unholy alliance, and it is quite nice to be vindicated once in a while. The star of the show was a bulky bloke with a beard who we will, for the sake of verisimilitude if not strict factual accuracy, call Kevin. Everybody knows a Kevin type, and this guy set out to be the life and soul with a touching enthusiasm, ducking the waif-like shop manager, dive-bombing off the top rung and managing to be on his third beer by lunchtime. The charming family from Cologne asked, wide-eyed, "why is he always drinking?" "Because it's Wednesday."

The trouble with stereotypes, though, is that they are a useful rule of thumb but a bloody embarassment when you have to recant. My theory about Germans reverting to archetype on holiday was totally quashed by the beautiful manners and Mediterranean warmth of the family on the boat, who owned a house some five miles south of the town and swayed delicately as a Gotterdammerung of tipsy Anglophones was unleashed on the dancefloor. Better, my extensive arsenal of prejudice against American girls was deftly disarmed by J-, a lady with a useful head screwed onto her fair shoulders and a heart in the right place. Under a cloudless dome, with the purple houses winking from Cunda island, "bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven." The boat drifted serenely on into an endless cloudscape, the timeless afternoon interrupted only by watermelon and the odd primordial return to the sea.

I spent the evening lounging around on the roof terrace with J- and a pair of French newlyweds whom we met back at the pension, seeing the sun down with raký and dondurma - the latter being Turkey's brand of ice cream, something in between taffetta and Mr Whippy that has to be chewed thoroughly and thoughtfully before swallowing. I had forgotten the sheer joy of the easy accord and license of striking up friendships abroad, and as the first star pricked the sky after sundown, and the evening call wafted over the town like a lullaby, a lingering sense of permanence attached to this most transient of scenes. I really must stop quoting poetry, but reading Shelley last night, in the midst of a poem that shivers with majesty, I could not help but marvel, and think that I had found

"...the mighty portal,
Like a volcano's meteor-breathing chasm,
Whence the oracular vapour is hurled up
Which lonely men drink wandering in their youth,
And call truth, virtue, love, genius or joy,
That maddening wine of life, whose dregs they drain
To deep intoxication; and uplift,
Like Maenads who cry loud, Evoe! Evoe!
The voice which is contagion to the world."

The reader probably thinks that he has gotten away without a sermon by now, and I'm afraid that he is horribly wrong. Reflecting on the day, and remembering the barman running out of fingers while reckoning up Kevin's tab, I wondered whether the mere possession of a Lonely Planet guide really entitles me to lord it over a man who had come to Turkey to drink, and whether for every artificial inch I would like to place between us there might not be at least another between myself and the great travel writers whose appetite and instinct for life I so admire. I suppose that the answer ultimately lies in the real purpose of travel. I do not mean for new friends and material concerns, as these wonderful accidents cannot be planned for and are incidental to the object of travel.

So why do it? The answer rises almost too swiftly to the lips: to broaden the mind. And yet I mistrust the glibness in those words; if pressed, they would explain, I think, that travel enlivens those virtues - tolerance, curiosity, perhaps, and wakefulness of spirit - which make the rest of life more bearable. I remain, however, to be convinced of their permanence. A Ku Klux Klan member could enjoy himself thoroughly on holiday in darkest Africa, and then slip seamlessly back to his normal life, such is the strength of the ties that bind us to our existence. I have myself felt that when travelling we exist in a species of vacuum, a dream world, if you like, from which we may bring back little more substantial than stories and photographs. The price that one pays for the rich fiction of travel is that it remains a fiction. The growth of the mind is so ponderous and ineffable that travel can only add but a little formative experience; experiences of greater colour and intensity, but nonetheless of a lesser significance than events in the normal framework of our lives. Like a fruit tree trained to a stance, the bent of the mind cannot easily be altered by a season of freedom alone. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister is an excellent case in point: for all the burlesque variety of his adventures, his sentiment only develops as the core of his life changes over time, as his father dies, as his long-abandoned lover Mariana's faithfulness unfolds, but not with every vicissitude of the road.

Yet if it does not bring us change, at the least it brings us clarity of vision. In his novels about travel, the author E.M. Forster uses the less constrained settings of Italy and India to expose the hypocrisy and straitened habits of the English middle classes. The typical Forster protagonist suddenly sees the golden fetters around his or her feet as soon as they are removed, and blossoms into a brave new world; as Lucy Honeychurch says in A Room With a View, "I've an undeveloped heart, not a cold one." It is only in stepping outside of the framework that we can make out just what that framework is. This is why the very best travel writing is as much a glorious, objectified self-portrait as it is a testament to the countries visited; I would not love Leigh Fermor's writing half so much had he twice the modesty.

There is more, though. In the finest of Forster's travel novels, A Passage to India, there is another, deeper force at work. Deep down, far away in the labyrinthine recesses of the caves under Simla, there lurks an echo. This echo, a terrible, resounding clangour older than the hills themselves, distorts everything said in the caves to the one slow, brazen-voiced reply: "ba-um." This spirit of the land, this genius loci of the Indian uplands, terrifies natives and naive tourists alike. The wild, ancient creature whose skin is the highlands and whose veins flow with the waters of the Ganges, whose life is India's, is little understood by any who catch her scent, and even the wisest characters can only allow themselves to be taken by the flow. The point which Forster wants to make is that a country is composed of so much more than an individual's understanding.

At precisely 4.30 this morning, I was awoken by an approaching drumbeat. A Sufi was wandering through the streets of Ayvalık with his tabor, singing softly and playing out a rhythm that was like nothing I have ever heard or will ever hear again. It was not so much a regular rhythm as an irrational, maddening chaos, and yet in spite of the irregularity there was a stream of continuity running through the pulse, so that I caught myself breathing in time to that strange, shifting beat. The only analogy that I can find for it is the shifting of the wind on the sands, and now I feel that this queer, indefinable phenomenon flirting with the very borders of music has infused the pace of all Turkish life. There are more things in Heaven and earth than we men can name, and there is a seismic force overlaying each land like a wave; occasionally it leaks, and finds its way into our conscience in snatches of sound, or vague tropes of light, or feelings that shrink from definition. I always found it queer to think that the same call to prayer falls softly upon the ears of both the Kevins of the world and the most devout Hanafi student, but now I think that travel is like life: universal, and ever generous. Kevin imbibes the same spirit with his Efes that flushes me when reading Kemal, this "maddening wine of life;" some of us are better able to describe the taste, but we are all intoxicated alike.

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