Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (25 page)

'As long as it's not too far. You'll use a lot of oil.'

From Pietersburg to Naboomspruit is thirty-four miles. I stop for more oil, but the bike won't even start again properly. I realize I must give up Jo'burg. It is 4 p.m. on Thursday 21 February. I realize that with the bike running well I could still have made that original sailing date in Cape Town. The thought gives some satisfaction.

I spend two days at Naboomspruit working on the engine. On the first day I take the barrel off. The old piston has shattered its skirt. The crank case is full of broken metal. The con rod is scarred, the sump filter in pieces, the scavenge pipe knocked off centre. The sleeve of the bad cylinder is corrugated. I have kept the old piston from Alexandria, and put it back thinking it might get me as far as Jo'burg. With everything washed out and reassembled, the engine runs, but no oil returns from the crank case. The second day I spend on the lubrication system, picking pieces out of the oil pump. On Sunday, on more smuggled petrol, I set off again, for twenty blissful miles before all hell breaks loose. The knocking and rattling is now really terrible. I decide that I must have another look, and by the roadside I take the barrel off again and do some more work on the piston and put it back again. By now I am really adept and it takes me four hours. There's a black fellow sitting there with me most of the time, just happy to be there and watch and have little things to do. He comes off a farm nearby, and I go there for water just as they're eating lunch. From the kitchen I can see into a small furnished room built separately from the house, where a young girl is eating alone. I catch sight of her only for a moment and see nothing describably wrong but it is obvious that she is mad. Intuition works so fast in some matters, why not in others?

My work has not improved things. The rumbling continues and the trouble is evidently in a bearing. I limp slowly to Nylstroom, and plan to take a train to Jo'burg, but Nick the Greek at the Park Cafe is very friendly and finds a fellow with a pick-up, willing to take me to Pretoria, using my petrol.

This fellow is an Afrikaans butcher, but although he subscribes to Apartheid, I find him unusually tolerant and good-tempered. It turns out that three years ago his wife, driving this same road in a van, was blown off by wind and crushed almost to death. She has now recovered all but the use of her left leg which is still bound up. I meet her too, a cheerful, handsome woman. His story of those three years, during which he also built his own house, is very touching. It occurs to me that these people would be good to have on one's side in adversity, and then I wonder

whether they choose adversity for that very reason. Is that what is meant by the
'laager
mentality'? If so, there is less hope for South Africa than I thought.

He puts me down at Mader's Hotel because it has a large car park, suitable for unloading the bike. Mader's is a great cavernous place, like a railway station, and intensely gloomy. I'm ten minutes too late to eat. No dinner, no drinks after 8 p.m. I have to fetch fish and chips from a shop and bring them back. As I sit in the green light of a morbid aquarium I see a couple sitting nearby. He is grey and shrivelled, his face mud-coloured by sun and alcohol, in a slovenly safari jacket. She is fortyish, with black-frame spectacles and biggish breasts packed into a sleeveless blouse. Then the man beckons me over.

'She likes you,' he says without preamble, pointing at her. Then, after a pause, 'You can sleep with this woman tonight.' I excuse myself, lamely, but he wanders off apparently unconcerned.

'He makes my life a torment,' she says. 'He's my husband but he is still in love with his first wife.'

The word love falls to the floor like a cigarette butt, waiting to be trodden on.

I was in Jo'burg for three weeks, and lived in style and comfort. I saw the sights, lived the life, visited the black township, and learned something of the good and bad side of South Africa. As in Nairobi, I found that the experience was in a different coin to the experiences on the road. In these big cities, where most people confront 'real' life, struggling for money and security, I was not able to find much that was new or fundamentally interesting. I was happy enough to fall into the easy way of it, absorbing pleasures and information like a sponge and getting by on conventional truths. All forms of life are fascinating, but 'The Journey' seemed to float in another dimension.

Joe's Motorcycles on Market Street, as agents for Meriden, took the engine to pieces again and sent me off with a re-bored barrel, two new pistons, a new con rod, main bearings, valves, idler gear, and other bits and pieces. The broken metal had penetrated everywhere and again I was struck by the force of the coincidence that all this havoc had been wrought virtually within sight of Johannesburg. I was very susceptible to 'messages' and wondered whether someone was trying to tell me something, like, for example, 'I'll get you there - but don't count on it.'

A good deal of my time in Johannesburg was taken up in trying to find an alternative sea passage to Brazil. The Yom Kippur War still dogged my destiny. Since the war, Arabs having turned from open warfare to economic aggression, oil was twice the price, shipping was totally
dis
oriented, and passenger berths were suddenly unobtainable. At last, through a contact in a big trading concern, one ship came to light that could take me to Rio. The
Zoë
G, a small cargo vessel under Greek ownership, would be sailing out of Mozambique for Rio de Janeiro at the end of April. It would cost me the same as the air fare, but the bike would go free. I was delighted. It could not have suited my idea of transatlantic crossing better. I had time to travel to Cape Town, and then to ride round the south coast of Africa to Lourenco Marques, and a quite different aspect of Africa, a Portuguese colony. It is an ill war that blows no good. Loaded with addresses of friends of friends, I left on the last long leg to Cape Town and the Southern Ocean.

The weather played tag with me, and I was dodging between storms and
rain clouds
all the way from Johannesburg. On the second morning at Kimberley it looked wet from the moment the sun came up. The light was the colour of reflections in flood water, but the sky was a clear eggshell blue when I set off at eight. Although wisps of cloud began to marble it, I thought I would probably stay dry until noon.

These calculations have become second nature to me since I entered the heavy rains south of Mombasa and my record of accuracy is improving steadily, to the point where they offer a sort of workmanlike structure to the day. I still need this reassurance, although it makes no practical difference to my behaviour. I would ride on whether it rained or not, and only the most violent showers would stop me. It is not cold, the waterproofs work well enough, and the road is good level asphalt, but I have still not taught myself to enjoy the prospect of rain. Whenever it threatens to fall, a vague uneasiness begins to squirm somewhere below my stomach. Nothing much, but enough to remind me that there is still plenty of anxiety waiting for a pretext to engulf me.

My encounters with the weather continue to be like reconstructions of a personal struggle on an epic scale. On the broad landscape of Africa, under the bright tropical sun, a bank of cumulus cloud appears out of thin air and grows with stealthy speed into the solid likeness of doom itself.

In an otherwise clear sky one of these monsters straddles the road ahead, growing at a mile a minute, like an airborne octopus of mythic proportions, its base filling with inky blackness, already feeling out the ground with stray tentacles. To leave the sunshine and ride underneath this devouring creature with its foetid breath and bulging carcass is like challenging the Dark Tower; as impudent and terrifying as that. To know with the intellect of what flimsy stuff this thing is really made does not disarm it, when you have already fought to exhaustion with even flimsier devils of your own making.

Perhaps there are men raised in peace and lucidity, with no phantoms on their tails, who see nothing in a storm cloud but convection currents

and water vapour. In any case I would not change places with one of them. What grandeur there is in my life blossoms out of my own mean beginnings. What times of peace I know are a thousand times more precious for being interludes. And there is much more. For example, the fascination with which I watch myself come closer and closer to merge with the world around me, dipping first a toe, then a foot, then a limb. Although I am made of the same stuff as the world, it used to seem that I might as well have been born on an asteroid, so awkward and unnatural was my place in the scheme of things. I remember my clumsy efforts to simulate 'normality', to win acceptance by any false pretence, and my desperate betrayals of my own nature to avoid detection. Then the gradual discovery (born, I think, out of some irreducible core), that others were twisting and cracking under the same strains, and that behind the apparent conformity of daily life was a world of 'all things counter, original, spare, strange.'

Then began a long apprenticeship, to become something certain in my own right, from which to see and be seen. Beyond that came the search for connections, freely offered and accepted, to confirm that the world and I, after all, were made for each other.

There are in me the seeds from which, if necessary, the universe could be reconstructed. In me somewhere there is a matrix for mankind and a holograph for the whole world. Nothing is more important in my life than trying to discover these secrets.

Now, with the engine running beautifully, I ride along the edge of the Orange Free State towards the Orange River. My waterproofs are crammed away confidently in a pannier, and my flying jacket is beating off the cool wind. On either side, among clumps of marshy grass, water gleams pale after the rains of a few days ago, when parts of this road were eighteen inches deep under floods. This enormous plain I am crossing, which will eventually become the Great Karroo, is supposed to be dry as a bone, but the whole of the Southern Hemisphere is awash this year. Here and there are cattle settled among a surfeit of greenery. Round them and over them hop Cattle Ibis, the slim white birds which live with the cattle, like private nurses, gracefully relieving them of their ticks.

The sky is still only faintly streaked with cloud when I pass Modder River, but on the horizon to my right are the beginnings of a sinister change. Hundreds of miles away across the moorland the sky is changing colour from light blue to gun metal, as though a vessel of dark pigment has been pricked by the western point of the compass and is seeping out into the heavens. Surely it is not merely fanciful to read apocalyptic warnings into the sky like this. Out on the veld, miles from even the nearest tree, there is no escape from the momentous events unfolding themselves above. Unknown to this human speck making his snail's track

across the floor of a vast arena, another spectacular has been prepared. Pressures and temperatures have plummeted, winds veered and strengthened, and when the first stain darkens the western sky the thing is already all but accomplished.

The climax is so quick and subtle and on such vast scale that my eye cannot follow it. The sky is light, then dark, then cloudy, then black. I am still hoping for another half hour's grace when the first drops fall splat on my goggles. Cursing, I pull up at the verge and begin the ludicrous business of putting on my waterproofs. Then I am in it.

The rain hardens to an obliterating downpour as I cross the Orange River, and I notice that the river reflects a baleful orange light from its charge of suspended red silt. Then into Hopetown, slowing down to look for shelter, cursing again as the goggles mist over without the fast air-stream to clear them. Peering through the mist I see two petrol stations, one on each side of the road and, astonishingly, two rival sets of African attendants grinning madly and beckoning me with theatrical gestures to patronize their pumps. Like the donkey that starved between two bales of hay, I get several times wetter before deciding to stick to the party on my own side of the road.

Calling at a petrol station is an event, particularly on a motorcycle with a foreign number plate. In Southern Africa everyone plays the number plate game. You can tell instantly where each one comes from - C for Cape Province, J for Jo'burg, and so on. My plate begins with an X, a mystery all the deeper because some pump attendants belong to the Xhosa tribe.

Peeling off damp layers of nylon and leather, unstrapping the tank bag to get to the filler cap, fighting to get at the money under my waterproof trousers, shaped like a clown's, chest high with elastic braces, I wait for the ritual conversation to begin.

'Where does this plate come from, Baas?' asks the man.

'From England.'

A sharp intake of breath, exhaled with a howl of ecstasy.

'From England? Is it? What a long one! The Baas is coming on a boat?'

'No,' I reply nonchalantly, knowing the lines by heart, relishing them rather. 'On this. Overland.'

Another gasp, followed by one or even two whoops of joy. The face is a perfect show of incredulity and admiration.

'On this one? No! Uh! I can't! You come on this one? Oh! It is too big.'

The wonder of it produces a pleasing sense of intimacy but it is illusory. It leads nowhere. He is safe in his attitude of admiration while I consent to play my heroic role. It is not a role in which I feel comfortable. I am learning, as I make my way through my fir
st continent, that it is remarkably easy to do things, and much more frightening to contemplate them. I am embarrassed by exaggerated respect.