East Africa is not a pretty place in the usual sense of that twinkling word. The elemental and powerful landscape, ranging around the Rift Valley, is one of the earth's monuments to vulcanism, showing as great plains, steep escarpments, and deep lakes. The Africa Beard saw, even then, in the almost undetectable early stages of corruption, was teeming with animals, thinly populated, hardly urbanized, and self-sufficient. Years later, the pressures of human population on animal life and the land itself became apparent in an Africa faltering and fragile, as though after the Fall. Beard's improvisational safari to the edge of Somalia in 1960 was a piece of unrepeatable history. He understood very early that the "harmonies and balances" in East Africa had been deranged, and this dramatic crease in the greenest continent was on the wane.
Mingling personal history with African history, Beard vividly evoked the building of the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway. "A railroad through the Pleistocene," Teddy Roosevelt called it in his African Game Trails, playing up the primitive. Roosevelt, a sort of evil twin to the biblical Noah, hunted down and killed two (and sometimes as many as eighteen) of every species of animal that could be found from the Kenyan coast to the swamps of southern Sudan (total bag, 512 creatures). He wrote, "The land teems with beasts of the chase, infinite in number."
"Infinite" is the kind of hyperbole that affects many deluded travelers in Africa. The powerful message of The End of the Game was that the animals were finite, that urbanization was a creeping blight, that a free-for-all was imminent. Most of what Beard predicted came to pass, but even he could not have imagined what an abomination the cities of East Africa became — sprawling, dense with slums, so crime-ridden as to be almost uninhabitable.
The End of the Game is less a wildlife book than a book about human delusion, as important now as it was when it first appeared. Rare among visitors to Africa, Beard went simply to learn and grow. Because he was essentially an observer, patient and keen-sighted, not a ranter, with no agenda, he was able to see a process at work that many had missed, in the convergence of people and animals. One of his book's great virtues, and its lasting value, is that it takes no notice of politics. It is single-mindedly concerned with the living and the dead, predators and prey. Beard was true to what he saw — and the truth of it has made it prophetic.
The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald
IN 1992, AS he tells us on the first page of his book, W. G. Sebald, a German teacher-writer living in England, decided to strap on his rucksack and circumambulate the flat, featureless, not very large county of Suffolk. The result was The Rings of Saturn, a ruminative work full of free association and arcane lore, with the subtext "Not a lot of people know this!" Sebald claims that the book was "prose fiction" (Chatwin made the same claim about his Songlines) and inspired by Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial, but though this is self-serving, the stitched-together anecdotes do have a point, perhaps unintentional, but forceful nevertheless.
To write about what one sees in Suffolk would be a work of topography or social history, but rambling describes what Sebald does — on foot and on the page. What do we find in Lowestoft? Not much. Joseph Conrad had a seafaring connection to Lowestoft, and from this slender link Sebald develops a whole historical reverie that involves Conrad, King Leopold of Belgium, the hellish Congo, Roger Casement, and Casement's sensational diaries. This is pretty much the structure of the book, except that a bigoted note occurs when he speaks of the Congo and Belgians, whom Germans (though Sebald doesn't say why) particularly abominate. "And, indeed, to this day one sees in Belgium a distinctive ugliness, dating from the time when the Congo colony was exploited."
Does he mean a metaphorical ugliness? No. "At all events, I well recall that on my first visit to Brussels in December 1964 I encountered more hunchbacks and lunatics than normally in a whole year. One evening in a bar in Rhode St Genèse I even watched a deformed billiard player who was racked with spastic contortions." And so forth.
He comes to Dunwich. Dunwich hardly exists, most of it having been overwhelmed by the sea. And so what Sebald provides is nothing less than the history of the town, the name of every sunken church, the monastery, and a detailed account of the storms that reduced Dunwich to a pathetic settlement.
But here is the point: the native of a place seldom sees what the alien sees, seldom remarks on what he or she takes for granted. Sebald describes how the passengers in the first train he takes, from Norfolk to Lowestoft, are so silent "that not a word might have passed their lips in the whole of their lives." This is empty hyperbole. English people, and in particular the provincial English, seldom yammer on public transport. Without saying so, the German is comparing the English to Germans. Still, the originality of the book arises from the remarks that only a foreigner would make, and such observations, even when they are misapprehensions and distortions, have value.
24. Evocative Name, Disappointing Place
A PLACE NAME CAN BEWITCH THE TRAVELER. The name "Singapore" cast a spell on me until I lived there for three years in the 1960s without air-conditioning. But the village of Birdsmoor Gate, in the west of England, near where I lived after Singapore, was just as lovely as its name. California names, such as Pacific Grove, Walnut Creek, and Thousand Palms, seemed to beckon. But in Philadelphia, the corner of Kensington Avenue and Somerset Street — music to the ears of the average Anglomaniac — is a dangerous slum area and the busiest drug-dealing site in an otherwise salubrious city. ¶ In Remote People, Evelyn Waugh talks about the deception of names. "How wrong I was, as things turned out," he says, "in all my preconceived notions about this journey. Zanzibar and the Congo, names pregnant with romantic suggestion, gave me nothing, while the places I found most full of interest were those I expected to detest — Kenya and Aden."
Here are some place names that have misled the credulous traveler.
Shepherds Bush: A gray, malodorous, overpopulated district, the opposite of its name, in west London. The traveler not wise to the truth of this squints and mutters, "Where is it?" gazing at the greasy cafés, kebab shops, Australian mega-pubs, cut-price emporiums, and honking traffic. Shepherds Bush is noted for its shopkeepers, who, when it's not raining, stand at their doorways voluptuously scratching themselves.
Casablanca: "Casablanca is an anonymous cluster of high-rises, and modern roads so straight and thin there'd be no room for Sidney Greenstreet there" (Pico Iyer).
Baghdad: "Celebrated as the city of the Arabian Nights," James Simmons writes in Passionate Pilgrims, "Baghdad 1,000 years before had been one of the great cities of Asia, a center of art, literature and learning. Richard Burton called it 'a Paris of the ninth century.'"