Travels (27 page)

That night, at the huts, I inspect my feet. When I pull my boots off, my socks are stained red. I quickly pull the boots back on. My injuries don’t matter now anyway. Tomorrow night we will be back at the hotel. Loren comes up with a small mirror, laughs, asks if I want to see how I look; I say sure. I have not seen myself in four days. I stare at a dirty face with a scraggly beard, red skin, bloodshot eyes. In the tiny mirror, it is the face of a stranger.

Some local entrepreneur at Horombo Hut is selling Tusker beer for five dollars a bottle, and he has plenty of takers. Paul and Jan have one, and so do I. I go almost immediately to sleep, around 5:00 p.m.

The following day I discover that climbing down a mountain calls upon a whole other set of muscles; my legs are trembling before lunch. I also discover that, while my heel blisters are rested by the descent, my toe blisters now hurt fiercely. So coming down is not easier on my feet.

Although we retrace our route exactly, I am surprised by how different the views appear on the way back. In part, this is a standard trekker’s discovery: any route looks different going and coming. But in part it is my own sense of having succeeded in climbing the mountain. I feel different.

In the hotel, the bathwater turns opaque black. We each take two baths, trying to get clean. Sitting on the hotel bed, I peel off my socks and moleskin and finally take a good look at my feet. The blisters are open, exposing great patches of bleeding, raw, dirty skin around the heels up to the anklebone. My feet are so bad I make Loren take pictures of them, but they turn out like pictures in medical textbooks and I later throw them away.

For a couple of years afterward, the skin of my feet remained discolored, and if I was at the beach, or had my shoes off, people would say,
“What’s the matter with your heels? They’re funny-colored,” and I then would start to explain about climbing the mountain, and they would get an odd look in their eyes, and I would stop talking. Eventually I never talked about climbing the mountain.

What I learned was this: that I had defined myself as a person who didn’t like heights or cold, a person who didn’t like to be dirty, a person who didn’t like physical exertion or discomfort. And here I had spent five days cold, dirty, and exhausted; I had lost twenty pounds; and I had had a wonderful experience.

I realized then that I had defined myself too narrowly.

The experience of climbing Kilimanjaro affected me so powerfully that, for a long time afterward, if I caught myself saying, “I’m not a person who likes to do that activity, eat that food, listen to that music,” I would automatically go out and do what I imagined I didn’t like. Generally I found I was wrong about myself—I liked what I thought I wouldn’t like. And even if I didn’t like the particular experience, I learned I liked
having
new experiences.

Second, although I am tall, I had always secretly defined myself as a physically weak and somewhat sickly person. After climbing Kilimanjaro, I had to acknowledge that I was mentally and physically tough. I was forced to redefine myself. Climbing the mountain was the hardest thing I had ever done, physically, in my life, but I had done it.

Of course, part of the reason it was hard was that I had approached it like a damned fool. I was not in shape and not prepared, and I refused to listen to anybody.

Now it seems inconceivable to me that I had no inkling what was in store for me, no idea what exertion was implied by an eighteen-thousand-foot summit, no idea about proper conditioning and equipment. So much of my behavior looks to be deliberately unconscious, designed to give me a shocking, hard experience. It certainly was that. And it was an experience that I didn’t fully appreciate for years afterward.

But at the time it just left me flat. After we had taken our baths, and Loren had photographed my heels for posterity, we got dressed and walked to the polished dining room. Paul and Jan were eating silently at one table; other climbers at others. We felt a camaraderie as we sat down to eat. We were very tired, far more tired than hungry, but we were also
away in some special world reserved for exhausted athletes, a world in which triumph is muted, the gains countered by the costs.

At another table, a family stared at us curiously. I knew they were going to climb tomorrow morning, and they wanted to know what it was like.

I thought, What can I tell them? I can’t tell them what it’s really like. What would be the point of that? I found myself looking away, hoping they wouldn’t ask.

The father: “Did you climb the mountain?”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“You make it to the top, both of you?”

“Uh-huh.”

A silence. “How is it up there?”

It’s good, I said to them. It’s hard but it’s good. Some days are very hard, but it’s good. Just do a day at a time. It’s good.

They stared at me. I knew that stare. They were trying to figure out why I was so flat. I didn’t care. Tomorrow they would find out for themselves, and the climb would mean whatever it meant to them.

When we walked back to our room after dinner, the sun was just fading. Kilimanjaro hung above the garden like a pale, reddish, disembodied ghost. Unearthly. Unreal. Already unreal.

The next day we flew to Nairobi.

Pyramid of the Magician
 

Dawn appears as a yellow band over the Yucatán jungle horizon, as I climb the steep Pyramid of the Magician and look out over the extensive Mayan ruins of Uxmal.

It is an extraordinary sight to watch the rising sun illuminate the pale buildings of that ancient city. Guidebook in hand, I pick out the sights. Directly before me stands the white courtyard structure known as the Nunnery. To the west, the great tiered House of the Governor, which has been called the single most magnificent building ever erected in the Americas. Near it, the House of the Turtles and the House of the Pigeons. And beyond, the humped green shapes of more ruins still to be uncovered in the surrounding jungle.

At dawn, Uxmal is deserted. The tourists still sleep; an occasional parrot cries, but for the most part the jungle landscape is silent. The city before me is serene, yet I feel anxious.

Looking straight down the Pyramid of the Magician, with its nearly vertical incline of steps, is dizzying. But even more disorienting is the recognition of where you really are, for Uxmal is a great mystery.

The pyramid on which I stand is an oval structure, 125 feet high. It is called either the Pyramid of the Magician or sometimes the Pyramid of the Dwarf, for reasons that are unclear. The Nunnery and the House of the Governor are names applied by convention; the ruins already bore
those names when archaeologist John Lloyd Stephens stayed in them, in 1841.

The House of the Turtles is named for a row of turtles on its façade. The House of the Pigeons is so named because its roof suggests a dovecote. But no one knows what those buildings were really called, or what went on in them. No one has any idea at all.

It is easy to become anxious atop the pyramid, for I am looking at extensive ruins that no one understands. Uxmal is a city fifty miles from the ocean and a hundred miles from Chichén Itzá. Why was it built here? How does it relate to other Mayan cities? How many people lived in this great complex, which records date to
A.D
. 987? What was this city for?

The night before, I had watched the sound-and-light show at Uxmal, similar to sound-and-light productions elsewhere in the world, only here the narration artfully concealed from the audience exactly how little was known. Uxmal was not a French château or an Egyptian pyramid. There was no clear chronology, no well-understood purpose. Rulers could not be named, their edicts could not be quoted, histories of construction could not be cited. Uxmal was an utterly mysterious ruin. Sitting there watching the colorful play of lights on the buildings, I felt a sort of conspiracy among the audience, a conspiracy not to acknowledge the depth of the ignorance. It was almost intolerable to look at this vast complex and to admit that we didn’t know about it. We
had
to know. It was too large for us not to know. Uxmal is not a detail, not a footnote to history. It’s a big, impressive city.

How can we not know all about it?

I watched the sun rise over the buildings. The jungle grew warm. An hour later the first tourists begin to arrive, walking through the ruins, guidebooks in hand. They read confidently about the rules of the ball games that were played in the ball courts, and the meaning of various ceremonies and human sacrifices. They read the date of founding of Uxmal and they read that its Late Classic architectural style is termed decadent. Sources of information are never cited. Visitors are not reminded that scholars cannot easily read the hieroglyphs the guidebooks so glibly summarize. Nor are they reminded that scholars do not know how this ancient temple-building civilization of the Mayas arose, why it flourished, or why it died. Such reminders would be unnerving. Nobody on vacation wants to walk through a great ruined city and be told, “We know nothing about this place.”

But the truth is, we don’t know.

* * *

The closer one looks at history, the less coherent it becomes. From a distance, from the chapter headings of a textbook, history looks very tidy indeed. But on closer inspection it all breaks down. The Dark Ages weren’t dark; it is hard to be sure what the Middle Ages stood in the middle of; the Renaissance is as much a birth as a rebirth. Anyway, these headings only apply to European history, a small fragment of world history. Things were different in other parts of the globe, and in other cultural traditions.

For the most part, the constructions we make of our own past are invisible to us. The interpretations themselves become real. Nowhere is this clearer than in the interpretations we place on the artifacts of prehistory and early history. When we look at ancient ruins, our beliefs are manufactured whole. At Knossos, on Crete, Arthur Evans found a ruin he called the Palace of King Minos. Tourists have dutifully tramped through it ever since. Yet there is no clear evidence that Knossos was a palace, or that King Minos—if he was a historical figure—had anything to do with its construction or its habitation. Similarly, the story of Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of Troy is endlessly retold. But Schliemann merely found a previously unknown city in Asia Minor. There is no evidence that Schliemann found Troy. There is no compelling evidence that Troy ever existed, except in the imagination of a poet.

Schliemann went on to excavate at Mycenae, a known historical site in Greece. Schliemann decided he had found the grave of Agamemnon. There is no evidence that he did. He found a grave, and he called it Agamemnon’s grave. But there is no evidence that Agamemnon was a real person, either.

The internal psychological pressure to make up a story, to explain the ruins before one’s eyes, is powerful indeed. That was the shock that I felt atop the Pyramid of the Magician, as I watched the morning sun spread across the face of the ancient city. Soon enough I, too, clutched my guidebook and walked through the ruins of Uxmal, pretending that I understood far more than I did.

My Father’s Death
 

When I was in high school, my mother used to wait up for me until I came home from dates. This is, of course, a time-honored form of parental harassment of young people of dating age. If I asked why she stayed up, she said, “I was worried something might happen to you.”

There was no reasoning with her, no asking why she thought staying up would help in the unlikely event that something
had
happened to me. It was not polite to question a mother’s love, or her logic.

But I was bizarrely reminded of this on December 27, 1977, when, as I climbed back into the boat after a ninety-foot-deep dive on a paddle-wheel wreck called the
Rhone
in the British Virgin Islands, the divemaster Bert Kilbride looked at me and said significantly, “Call home.”

“What is it?” I said. My first thought was that my house had burned down. That’s what usually happened in California. And I had known Bert for many years. He’d tell me if he knew.