Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (13 page)

What was the voice going to suggest next? A little shudder of excitement ran through my body, because I knew, at that moment, that I could not be sure of my responses. The strange, emptying effect of the desert seemed to have drained away all my conditioning. I did not know whether I was young or old, wise or foolish, strong or weak, and perhaps I did not even know whether I was male or female. But I did know that the tap on the thigh had released a current of sexual energy, and this invisible figure close to me had become mysteriously potent.

'Sudan signor queiss?'

Ah, there it was. The voice went on softly, but with a sharp edge of interrogation.

'You Sudan signor?'

This time the finger tapped, very precisely, on my cock which was already straining slightly against the denim.

Ted Simon was shocked. He wanted to do something, to demonstrate. Nothing like that had happened to him in his conscious life. But I was already somewhat removed from him.

Don't be such a prig, I told him. How often have you wondered, secretly, whether you were caught up somewhere deep inside by other cravings, by repressed desires and weaknesses. What about that other Arab on the highway? What about your problems with male authority? This is a moment when you have absolute freedom of choice. Morality has blown away into the desert, you are not accountable to anyone. This is a privilege you have never allowed yourself before. So, do you want a sexual adventure with this man?

'Sudan signor queiss?' repeated the voice, and the finger tapped again.

'Si,' I said, but only to avoid offence, and I put myself out of range of the questing finger. 'This way is no good for me,' I said in English, relying on my tone to tell him.

It seemed to me that I really did not want it. That one important question had been finally answered.

There was no awkwardness, no break even in the mood. The episode seemed quite natural. It went one way, could as easily have gone another. I sat up with my back against a pillar and smoked another cigarette, lost in the mystery of it.

The bus came at midnight. Its light and sound preceded it far across the desert and it grew in noise and brilliance, approaching as I imagined the end of the world would come, or a landing from Mars. For all the long warning, its arrival in the square was very sudden. It stopped by us, and from its bright interior a horde of people jumped out. They seemed to be all men, and each one had a sword slung across his back. They wore sleeveless jackets over shirts over robes, and without further ado, they fell to the ground all about the bus, and went to sleep, their swords hugged to their bodies. When I saw that the driver was among them, I did likewise.

At four in the morning we were all woken. It was still dark, and now it was also chilly. I had not anticipated a night in the desert. My thin shirt left me very cold. The merchant and I sat side by side in the bus, the physical contact feeling rather odd to me now. Uneasily I pondered again on the meaning of our encounter. He must have felt me shivering slightly with cold, because he opened his shawl and laid it round my shoulders as well as his own. This paternal gesture seemed to offer some clue to what I was looking for. I was still uneasy. It was only long afterwards that the dark and inscrutable face of my own unknown father joined the mosaic of images that whirled around that incident, because I had forgotten that he, too, might have been taken for an Arab.

The bus juddered along into the dawn. I dozed and woke and dozed again. The two men in the seat in front of mine sat very upright, with their swords in their strange, paddle-shaped scabbards sticking up beside them. Their hair hung in greased ringlets over the collars of their dung-coloured shirts, and I smelled a particular, musty but not unpleasant odour, which might have been animal fat.

A little way outside Atbara, the bus made a stop, and all the passengers got out to stretch their legs and relieve themselves. One family was getting off for good. They had small bundles of pots and pans, and some poles wrapped in cloth off the roof of the bus. As they set their belongings down in the desert, I noticed that there were, after all, some women among them, carefully veiled from view. They all looked miserable and sick, coughing and shivering in very thin clothing, and their small boy, I realized, was the one that had been coughing throughout the journey. I was quite absorbed in their plight when the bus's horn called us aboard again. Only then did I realize that the merchant had disappeared. I could not understand it. There seemed to have been nowhere for him to go out there. I looked in all directions, but he had left my life as discreetly as he entered it.

By eleven I had my five gallons of petrol and had found a lorry going to Kinedra. By mid-afternoon I was back there. The lorry set me down about a kilometre away, and a small boy on a donkey carried the petrol as I walked alongside.

The warmth and generosity of the schoolmasters rose to a crescendo on my last night. In the morning they gave me a gift of money which they had collected between them to help me on my way. I knew that for them it represented a sizeable sacrifice and it was difficult to take it, but I felt that such gifts could not, and should not, be refused.

I had become close to them and it was a wrench to leave. They were very solemn in their farewells, giving the parting its full value as they did with everything and not shirking the emotion. A great crowd of boys had gathered to wave me goodbye. I would have been embarrassed if I had not known the feeling was genuine.

My feeling for the Sudanese was one of total admiration. Never had I met such unmotivated generosity, such a capacity for imbuing the simplest life with a touch of splendour. I had felt it straight away in Atbara. In the tea houses there it had been rare for me to pay, though I had tried. When it was time to settle I would find that someone had paid my bill and left before me. Only afterwards would I remember the quiet greeting from a stranger on his way out. Or the proprietor would refuse my piastre. They were small amounts, but they added great value to the tea and made it rich.

The previous day I had been told that a District Forest Officer was taking his Landrover to Kassala for brake fluid, and had agreed to lead me

on to the best route. When we met, I asked him, naturally enough, where his forest was. He told me that this desert I was travelling through, which I had thought of as being as old as the stars above it, had become a desert only in the previous thirty years. Before that there had been grasses and trees, but the travelling herds of cattle had increased and stripped away all the natural vegetation, and men had cut down the trees. Now dunes were beginning to form, and soon it would be like the Sahara. The fence I had encountered the other day was to protect new plantations of grasses and trees to stabilize the soil once more. He was not cheerful about the prospect. 'We are too few,' he said, 'and they are too many. The dunes will spread. We are like Canute against the waves.'

At mid-morning he was ready, and we set off. From the start it was touch and go. His driver, over-impressed by the size of the Triumph, set a pace that was altogether too dashing. I managed to keep him in sight for several miles, but dropped far behind, unable to fly across the dips and soft bits as he could. It was while trying to catch him again on a fairly easy stretch that I ran into the same trap of intersecting ruts that had caught me on the first day. This time my 'Oops' was a
,
good deal louder. The bike came crashing down again, but much harder, ripping one of the boxes off its mountings and smashing the headlamp. My shoulder also took a fair blow.

Even so, all the important things were alright. The jerry was intact, the bike was functioning. My shoulder would manage. I found some wire and tied the box back on where the screws had torn through the fibre-glass, taking my time, determined that I would get through somehow, and resolving that I would never again ride at anybody else's pace. Two such disasters, I thought, must teach me the lesson.

I
was almost ready to go again when the Landrover returned. They had missed me, eventually; I explained that it was far better for me to ride alone, if they would just describe the route as best they could. They wanted to try to load the bike on the car, but I refused, and at last they did their best to draw me a diagram of what to look for, and left wishing me luck.

That was the beginning of the hardest and most rewarding physical experience of my entire journey.

I am trying to keep track of the number of times I have fallen. The other day, three times. Today twice, the hard fall that wrenched my left arm, and one soft tumble since. The arm is alright, but weakened.

My greatest problem is keeping up concentration. I have to watch the surface all the time, with only occasional glimpses at the longer views around me. The light is intense, but luckily I was given some Polaroid ski goggles in London, and they are excellent for the desert. When wearing them I sometimes have the feeling that I am travelling underwater. They give everything that cool clarity you get in a rock pool.

Heat does not worry me, even in the jacket and the sheepskin lined boots. It seems crazy, but I don't feel it. It is not hot by Sudanese standards of course, but it must be nearly ninety in the shade. And I am not in the shade. It is very dry heat, easier to support. Does the clothing help to conserve sweat?

Goz Regeb, said Mochi, is the place to spend the night. It is still a hundred miles away, five hours at this present rate. I will not make it today.

Something is moving on the horizon, something live. I stop. Far away I see cattle crossing the desert, but they seem to be swimming through a silver lake. A mirage. A fantastic sight.

It is Thursday 13 November. I have been travelling five weeks. How many days of actual riding? I count twenty-one. How far have I ridden? The clock shows 5,137 miles. Minus 867 when I started, leaves 4,170 miles on the journey. Average, 200 miles a day. Not bad. Well, the average will start dropping now.

After three more hours I have come another fifty miles. In an hour or two it will be dark, but there should be a tea hut soon. I think it is called Khor el Fil, which is supposed to mean The Crocodile's Mouth. Spelling is very optional and distances are vague.

I have had one more soft fall, but each jerk on the wheel pulls the muscle in my left shoulder and prevents it from healing. I feel no hunger, no thirst. I am absolutely wrapped up in this extraordinary experience, in the unremitting effort, in the marvellous fact that I am succeeding, that it is at all possible, that my worst fears are not just unrealized but contradicted. The bike, for all its load, is manageable. I seem to have, after all, the strength and stamina to get by, and my reserves seem to grow the more I draw upon them. The natives, armed with swords and fierce pride, show me only the greatest respect.

Sometimes I wonder why the wilder parts of the world have always seemed so frightening, why the word 'primitive' has always meant 'danger'. If it weren't so, would I be falling over tourists out for a day in the desert? Would I meet Len and Nell from Cranfield Park Road sitting under a tree at Khor el Fil, mopping their brows and writing picture postcards?

No, I must not forget why I am able to function here. These five weeks have changed me already. My stomach has shrunk drastically, my blood has changed, my sweat glands are adapted to a different regime, my palate has altered and my muscles have certainly hardened, to speak only of physical changes.

I have also had time to learn a confidence I never knew before, and surely my own confidence in the face of strangers must, in turn, increase their confidence in me. Then there is also the fact that I am proud of what I am doing. There is no denying it. I try to be modest, to say anyone could do it. But they don't, and I feel I have managed to pull off something special. It helps me to know that, as though I were plugged into a kind of power I did not know I had.

Why doesn't everybody do it? I don't think it's only timidity. I was as afraid as anyone would be. They have careers, of course, and mortgages. They say they would do it 'if it weren't for the kids'. I used to laugh at that, but why should I? It's perfectly legitimate. Much as they envy me, they are simply too absorbed in their lives to want to leave them behind. They are fascinated, as I pass by, to hear about my plans and my stories, but in the end they are happy enough to let me do it for them. Len and Nell can mop their brows under the pyramids for a week and leave the stomach-shrinking to me.

Why you?

Why were you chosen to ride through the desert while other men are going home from the office?

Chosen? I thought I chose myself. Were Odysseus and Jason, Columbus and Magellan chosen?

That is a very exalted company you have summoned up there. What have you got in common with Odysseus, for God's sake?

Well, we're all just acting out other people's fantasies, aren't we. Maybe we're not much good for anything else.

Looking back on what has already happened I can see that it would have the makings of a legend. Every encounter seems so significant, each one testing me and preparing me for the next. Zanfini; the Via Torre-muzzo, the SS
Pascoli;
Kabaria; Sfax; Cyrenaica; Salloum; Mersa Mat-ruh; Alexandria; The Great Bird of Atbara; and Sidon. And why did the Twirling Turk on the ferry point his finger at
me?

In my childhood I was devoted to stories of men who overcame terrible obstacles to win the hand of the princess; dogs with eyes like saucers, dogs with eyes the size of dinner plates, dogs with eyes as big as cartwheels. They always came in threes. I did not know then that they were tidied up versions of ancient mythology. In my childhood, nobody talked about myths and legends. They were just stories. The job of explaining life was left to science, but science eventually failed the test. So did politics, of course. And love. And property. And journalism just went on begging the question.