NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (2 page)

“Our” of course is as questionable as “savages,” but you get the idea. A great deal happened on this coastline. It was not until the second century
B
.
C
. that the Romans sailed through the Pillars of Hercules. The reason for this late, if not timid, penetration of the straits was not the current, nor was it the inconvenient westerlies that blow through this narrow opening of the inland sea; it was the Mediterranean notion that nothing lay beyond the pillars except the Garden of the Hesperides and the lost continent of Atlantis, and hellish seas.

The pillars marked the limits of civilization, “the end of voyaging,” Euripides wrote; “the Ruler of Ocean no longer permits mariners to travel on the purple sea.” And later, in the second century
B.C
., Polybius wrote, “The channel at the Pillars of Herakles is seldom used, and by very few persons, owing to the lack of intercourse between the tribes inhabiting those remote parts … and to the scantiness of our knowledge of the outer ocean.”

Beyond the pillars were the chaos and darkness they associated with the underworld. Because these two rocks resembled the pillars at the temple
to Melkarth in Tyre, the Phoenicians called them the Pillars of Melkarth. Melkarth was the Lord of the Underworld—god of darkness—and it was easy to believe that this chthonic figure prevailed over a sea with huge waves and powerful currents and ten-foot tides.

The point is not that the Mediterranean peoples had never ventured westward through the straits, but that they had dared it—the Phoenicians had reached Britain by a sea route—and verified that it had a wicked and destructive turbulence. From this they conceived the idea that nothing useful existed past the straits, only the spooky Mare Tenebrosum, the dark and dangerous ocean which lay beyond the Middle Sea, a purple river of furious water. The Greeks named this the Stream of Ocean. It circled the earth at which they were privileged to live at the center, its precise location at Delphi, where a stone like a toadstool marked the Navel of the World. Mediterranean, after all, means “middle of the earth.”

The surface current moves through the straits at a walking pace to the east, streaming through the fifteen-mile-wide pillars into the Mediterranean; but two hundred and fifty feet below this another sub-current rushes in the opposite direction, westward, into the Atlantic, pouring over the shallow sill of the straits, “that awful deepdown torrent,” Molly Bloom murmurs in her bedtime reverie. The unusual circular exchange of water at the straits is the only way this just-about-landlocked sea is kept refreshed and alive. Very few large rivers flow into it. For thousands of years, until the Suez Canal was opened, to the strains of Verdi’s
Aïda
, in 1869, the Straits of Gibraltar—“The Gut,” to the English sailors, “The Gate of the Narrow Entrance”
(Bab el Zukak)
to the Moors—was the only waterway to the world.

Even so, the Mediterranean has an odd character. It has almost no tides at all, and except for a whirlpool here and there (notably at Messina), an absence of distinct marine currents. It is dominated by winds rather than currents, and each wind has a name and a series of specific traits: the
Vendaval
, the steady westerly that blows through the Straits of Gibraltar,
La Tramontana
, the strong wind of the Spanish coast,
La Bora
, the cold wind of Trieste,
le Mistral
, the cold dry northwesterly of the Riviera, and so on, through the
Khamsin
, the
Sirocco
, the
Levanter
, and about six others (often the same wind, with a different name) to the
Gregale
, the northeast wind of Malta that blows in winter and was probably the wind that caused Saint
Paul to be shipwrecked on the coast of Malta, as described in the Bible (Acts 27–28).

It is not a sea that is affected by the phases of the moon—it has moods rather than monthlies. Its nervous character has been mentioned by sailors, and its colors—purple, wine-dark, and its blueness in particular. The Mediterranean was the White Sea to the Greeks—the Turks still use that name for
it: Akdeniz
, “White Sea,” and the Arabs use a variant, “The White Central Sea.” If the oceans can be compared to vast symphonies, the German traveler Emil Ludwig has written, the Mediterranean “is subdued in a way that suggests chamber music.” It is tentative, and its waves with their short fetch, and its strange swells, are unlike any found in the great oceans.

All over the Rock of Gibraltar there were signs in six languages (English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Arabic, French) that said
Do Not Feed the Apes!
and
Apes Might Bite!
These signs were more frequent at the top, where one of the ape tribes—the friendlier of the two—lived.

Here at the top of the Rock, an ectoplasmic middle-aged woman, a French tourist, plump and pushy and grinning, picked up a pebble and approached an ape. It was a mother ape that was nuzzling her child, urging it against her pink nipple, with that serene and happy expression that mothers have when they breast-feed their young. The tourist’s name, I felt sure, was Grisette. She poked the pebble at the mother ape, giggling, while her three friends watched. One of the friends jerked the arm of her small boy, forcing him to watch Grisette tease the ape.

The mother ape took the pebble and considered it a moment before dropping it to the ground. Grisette laughed very hard and then went closer, making a hideous face. Grisette wore glasses with lenses so thick and distorting, her eyes swam and changed shape as she nodded at this cornered ape. The mother ape expressed concern, and when Grisette reached over and touched her young suckling baby the mother ape raised a cautioning hand—a shapely hand wonderfully pink, human in miniature, with fine nails. There were enough lines on the ape’s palm to occupy a fortune-teller for a whole session of palmistry.

Provoked and a bit irritated by the cautioning mother ape, Grisette
poked the baby ape as though testing a doorjamb with a
Wet Paint
sign. Grisette’s friends laughed again. The ape mother raised her cautioning hand again, and when Grisette pinched the baby, the mother ape rapped Grisette’s knuckles. This went on, back and forth, for a minute or so. I thought that the ape was going to leap into Grisette’s face and bite and claw her—Apes Might Bite!

But the mother ape showed enormous patience, as though she knew she was dealing with someone simpleminded and unpredictable, a nuisance rather than a threat. She merely raised a hand and restrained the stupid woman, and when Grisette put her big googly-eyed face nearer—simpering and calling her friends as she tormented the mother and child—all the mother ape did was show her teeth and she crept away, off the little rail, out of the sunshine where she had been suckling her infant. And as she padded away, still graceful in the face of all that provocation, the mother ape growled, just audibly to me, “This is unconscionable.”

Grisette moved heavily over to her fellow tourists, one of whom was hitting her child and saying, “I’m not a millionaire!” and an English one—British Army spouse, I supposed—“Get off me before you get a smacked bottom!” Grisette was chattering and scratching herself and looking to her friends to praise her for having pinched the ape baby and maddened the mother ape and driven them away.

And I thought: Yes, the apes are better mannered than the tourists, and while the tourists brutalized and screamed at their kids, the apes were tender towards their young. The apes did not say, “I told you to stop it—I’ll give you a clout!” The tourists yakked and giggled, the apes were quiet and thoughtful. The tourists teased the apes, the apes never teased the tourists. When the apes played they rolled over and over on the steep slopes or on the walkways of the Rock; when the tourists’ children played they hurt each other and made noise and it always seemed to end in tears. And the apes never made faces unless the tourists made faces at them first. Ape funerals were held in pious secrecy, a tourist death or funeral was accompanied by howling grief and hysterics. The tourists were obstreperous, the apes were dignified and correct. Yet every year apes are shot and killed on the Rock of Gibraltar for biting tourists.

The woman might have been a tourist from any country in the Mediterranean. She fit the description of “the Mediterranean sub-racial
group” I found in a textbook entitled
Advanced Level Geography
(1964): “brown-skinned, long-headed, wavy-haired, dark-eyed, slightly-built.” These people traveled back and forth, across this interesting stretch of water, all the time, keeping to their particular basin. But Mediterranean tourists were generally so offensive and ill-natured that I made a vow early in my trip to ignore them, the way I ignored the flies in Australia; to avoid writing about tourists at all. Far better to write about the apes.

“This ape is cruel,” the tourist says, and it is like an epitaph for the world’s animals. “When I pinch him he bites me.”

For years I was happy flopping along elsewhere, avoiding the Mediterranean. Such a trip had always been regarded as the Grand Tour, a search for wisdom and experience. Yet at the age of fifty I still had never been to Spain. All I had seen of Yugoslavia was the main line from Ljubljana to the Bulgarian border. Yugoslavia was now five separate nations. I had never been to Israel or Egypt or Morocco or Malta. Most people I met had been to many of these countries; everyone knew much more of the Mediterranean than I did. Everybody had been there. I suspected that from one end to the other it was nothing but urbanization and clip joints. James Joyce once wrote, “Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travelers his grandmother’s corpse.” I assumed the whole Mediterranean was like that, tourism as ancestor worship and the veneration of incoherent ruins.

Then I began to think that this was perhaps the best reason for going to see this part of the world, that it was so over-visited it was haunted and decrepit, totally changed. Change and decay had made it worth seeing and an urgent subject to record. I was the man for it. Half a lifetime of traveling had given me a taste for the macabre.

Some countries swallow the traveler; certainly in Africa and Polynesia and South America I found this to be true. But Europe, and the Mediterranean in particular, is like a stage set. It gives drama to a trip—it is a background.

You know this already. You have been to Italy—very likely to Sicily, perhaps to Siracusa, and you stayed at the same little hotel I found. Near
the harbor? Run by a grumpy man who wrote poetry? About twenty-five dollars, with breakfast? And you might read this and say: It was not that way at all! Siracusa was delightful, the hotel was clean, the poet was a cheery soul. Or it might be somewhere else we both visited, in Spain or Greece or Egypt. Never mind.

That was your trip, that was your Italy. This book is about my trip, my Italy. This is my Mediterranean.

My idea was to begin in Gibraltar, and go to Spain, and keep going, hugging the coast, staying on the ground, no planes; to travel by train, bus, ferry, ship; to make a circuit of the sea from the Rock of Gibraltar all the way around to Ceuta, from one Pillar of Hercules to the other. To travel the whole shore, from the fish and chip shops of Torremolinos to the gun emplacements of Tel Aviv, by way of the war in Croatia and the nudist beaches of Crete.

The Mediterranean, this simple almost tideless sea, the size of thirty Lake Superiors, had everything: prosperity, poverty, tourism, terrorism, several wars in progress, ethnic strife, fascists, pollution, drift nets, private islands owned by billionaires, Gypsies, seventeen countries, fifty languages, oil drilling platforms, sponge fishermen, religious fanatics, drug smuggling, fine art, and warfare. It had Christians, Muslims, Jews; it had the Druzes, who are a strange farrago of all three religions; it had heathens, Zoroastrians and Copts and Baha’is. It is over two thousand miles from end to end. It is noted for being salty. It ranged from the shoals and shallows of the northern Adriatic to the almost sixteen-thousand-foot depths in the Ionian Basin, west of Crete. Although it is deficient in plankton, it is still the home of dolphins, and in the deeps around Mallorca sperm whales (some of them entangled in drift nets) are often sighted. Giant loggerhead turtles—an endangered species in the Mediterranean—return in diminishing numbers every year to the Greek island of Zákinthos, where they struggle among tourists and beachside restaurants for nesting sites.

One of the many strange facts about the Mediterranean people is that compared with the British and the Northern Europeans they are not great fish eaters. This is Emil Ludwig’s observation and it is generally true. One of the more anticlimactic experiences in a Mediterranean market is surveying the fish goggling on marble slabs. There are not many, they are rather small, and the larger proportion have been caught outside the
Mediterranean. Tuna is the exception, because it makes an annual journey through the Pillars and across the Mediterranean to spawn in the Black Sea. Dolphins are protected. With the exception of illegal drift-net vessels that use nets up to ten miles long (for example, Greenpeace France detected and documented 137 illegal Italian drift-netters between April and June 1994), fishing is small-scale and unrewarding. Deep-sea fishing in the Mediterranean is almost unknown, apart from the illegal drift-netters and the competition for the migrating tuna.

It is not a fishy sea, but it is blessed with a beautiful climate, and though Mediterranean storms and high winds can be devastating, it has been noted for its calm waters. The very word Mediterranean signified sunny skies and balmy weather, and for thousands of years these shores had been a kind of Eden, fruitful with grapes and olives and lemons.

But soon after I set off, I mentioned my itinerary to a young French student on a train. Pointing to my map, I remarked on how it was so easy to travel around the Mediterranean.

“Croatia! Albania!” the student said. “And what about Algeria—are you going there?”

“Of course. I’ve always wanted to see the souk in Algiers, Albert Camus’ Oran, taking the night train from Tunis to Annaba.”