Even in Albania: "Immense crowds collected to witness the strange Frank and his doings," wrote Edward Lear about himself, in his Albanian journal in 1848. A form offaranji, the word afrangi is regarded as obsolete in Egypt, though it is still occasionally used, especially in combination. In Egypt, a kabinet afrangi is a Western, sit-down toilet.
Almost the entire time I spent in Harar, Ethiopia—where the poet Rimbaud had lived—I was followed by children chanting, "Faranji! Faranji! Faranji!" Sometimes older people bellowed it at me, and now and then as I was driving slowly down the road a crazed-looking Harari would rush from his doorstep to the window of my car and stand, spitting and screaming the word into my face.
Travel Wisdom of Robert Louis Stevenson
In spite of being weak and tubercular—wraith like in his John 0/ Singer Sargent portrait—Stevenson traveled widely. Mostly he traveled for his health, searching for clement weather to ease his infected lungs, but also for the romance of the experience:
I would like to rise and go
Where the golden apples grow.
He rambled on the Continent, crisscrossed the United States, sailed around the Pacific, and ended up in Samoa, where he died (1894) and is buried. He was well read and undoubtedly knew Montaigne, who wrote in his essay "Of Vanity": "But, at such an age, you will never return from so long a journey. What care I for that? I neither undertake it to return, nor to finish it: my business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me; I only walk for the walk's sake." Stevenson seems to paraphrase this in his first quotation:
***
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life a little more nearly, to get down off this feather-bed of civilization, and to find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.
—
Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
(1879)
***
A voyage is a piece of autobiography at best.
—
The Cévennes Journaclass="underline"
Notes on a Journey Through the French Highlands
(1978)
***
Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.
—"Virginibus Puerisque"
***
Herein, I think, is the chief attraction of railway travel. The speed is so easy, the train disturbs so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country; and while the body is being borne forward in the flying chain of carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humor moves them, at unfrequented stations.
—"Ordered South"
***
There lie scattered thickly various lengths of petrified trunk ... It is very curious, ofcourse, and ancient enough, if that were all. Doubtless, the heart of the geologist beats quicker at the sight; but, for my part, I was mightily unmoved. Sightseeing is the art of disappointment.
—"The Silverado Squatters"
***
There's nothing under heaven so blue,
That's fairly worth the traveling to.
But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many agreeable
prospects and adventures by the way.
—"The Silverado Squatters"
13. It Is Solved by Walking
ALL SERIOUS PILGRIMS GO ON FOOT TO THEIR holy destination—Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims stand for so many others. Walking is a spiritual act; walking on one's own induces meditation. The Chinese characters for pilgrimage mean "paying one's respect to a mountain" (ch'ao-shan chin-hsiang). As I saw on my Riding the Iron Rooster trip, many Taoists make a point of visiting the five holy mountains they regard as pillars of China, the cardinal compass points as well as the center, separating Heaven and Earth. And there are four other mountains, sacred to Buddhism and associated with a particular bodhisattva. "Paying respect" means climbing the mountains—though this often involves walking up stairs, since steps have been cut into most of the mountainsides. Ambrose Bierce defined a pilgrim as "a traveler that is taken seriously."
In his essay "Walking," in the posthumous collection Excursions (1863), Thoreau spoke of the word "saunter" as having been derived from the French expression "going to the Holy Land": "I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going 'à la Sainte Terre,' to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, 'There goes a Sainte-Terrer,' a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean." And later in this long paragraph he says, "For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels."
The Spanish word sendereando, for hiking, is compact and pretty (sen-dero is path), but the wisest phrase for this activity is the Latin solvitur ambulando ("it is solved by walking"), attributed to Saint Augustine. The phrase was mentioned by the long-distance walker Patrick Leigh-Fermor to Bruce Chatwin. "Hearing it, immediately Bruce whipped out his notebook," Chatwin's biographer wrote. Walking to ease the mind is also an objective of the pilgrim. There is a spiritual dimension too: the walk itself is part of a process of purification. Walking is the age-old form of travel, the most fundamental, perhaps the most revealing.
Chatwin regarded walking in an almost mystical way. His predecessors, beginning with the great Japanese poet Bashö, felt the same. Walking inspired the poets Whitman and Wordsworth, and Rousseau based a series of philosophical essays on walks. Stanley walked across Africa twice. When David Livingstone wished to get into shape, and to invoke the traveling mood, he walked for weeks at a time in the African bush, "until my muscles were hard as boards."
Some walks are those of the flâneur, an almost untranslatable French word meaning stroller, saunterer, drifter—the essence of a traveler—but in this case usually one in a city, perhaps the very word to describe someone trying to solve a problem. Some walks by travelers border on stunts or bids for the record book—two obvious examples are Ewart Grogan tramping from Cape Town to Cairo in 1898, and more recently Ffyona Campbell, who in her way walked around the world (see Chapter 14, "Travel Feats").
But it is the committed walker, the thoughtful walker, who interests me the most.
Xuanzang (603–664): The Ultimate Pilgrim
A MONK AND a scholar, the young Xuanzang (Hsüan-tsang in some renderings) felt that the Buddhist texts in China were badly translated, debased versions of the originals, so he decided to travel to India to verify them and to bring back as many texts as possible. He hoped also to see the holy places associated with Buddha's life and enlightenment. In some old illustrations he is shown accompanied by a pony—he certainly brought back the manuscripts on packhorses. But in his account of his seventeen years of travels he frequently refers to walking on narrow and difficult trails, and he appears to have traveled alone.