East of Suez Read Online Free PDF Page B

heartily sick of that aircraft, I finally stumbled out into a scalding blast of wind in my face. At first I thought it came from the jet engine or some other machine whose by-product was hot air. No: the hot air belonged all around me; it was the local weather. I felt like Margaret Hamilton melting as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz . The heat hit me in the solar plexus like the fist of a heavyweight. The humidity drilled through my shirt. The strap of my carry-on bag began to bother my shoulder before I reached the bottom of the rollaway steps. We weren’t collected onto an enclosed ramp that would keep us off the tarmac; we descended down to it, so that we might not miss the strong smell of aviation fuel, eau de Miranam Airways , nor the savage stab of tropical heat. Melting tar halfsoled my shoes as I trundled my carry-on to the terminal. I thought that things would become better once we got away from the runway apron. The press of the people behind me carried me from the outside heat into the terminal where the real heat began. Inside, the air conditioning didn’t cool things off, it only made a clattering noise. Here I noticed that most of my fellow passengers had changed into tropical clothing before we left the aircraft. Men in short pants, women in pressed khaki skirts. I could see that my tweed jacket was a big mistake.
    I had my passport checked and watched a customs official paw through my luggage. He found a transistor radio, which he made a big fuss about. He was a wispy man with shortcropped black hair which refused to stand up, Prussian-style. Like the rest of us, he was sweating. Of course, I couldn’t understand a word he said, even when he repeated it in a louder voice. I recognized his French and German as French and German, but that is about as far as it went. The woman next to me, anxious to have her turn with him, told me to offer him twenty dollars American. As I did so, the man made a scribble in white chalk on the top of my bag. He then greeted my helpful fellow traveler in English. I moved on through a crowd of sweaty relations and friends of the other passengers pressing against a wire barrier. Next to them were the taxi touts and the eager faces hoping to drag me off to a pension or maybe to discover the fleshpots of the capital. During the flight, I’d been warned about them by my seatmate. He said it made Joyce’s Nighttown look like a Sunday school picnic, whatever that meant.
    When I got clear of the mob, I joined the line waiting for the better class of taxi. Behind me I could see the backs of cotton shirts all waving their arms at the chance of picking up a fare or a meal ticket. In the end, after a ten-minute wait, I shared a taxi into Takot with a chubby Catholic priest who had been on holiday in Paris. I asked him for the name of a reasonable hotel while we were exchanging pleasantries. I had tried to book a room from home, but failed to make myself understood. The taxi made its way through the suburbs, dragging the heat with it.
    “You were right to share a taxi,” the priest said, without looking at me. “You’ll get on to the tuk-tuks later on, after you’ve got your land legs. A tuk-tuk driver will pull up at his cousin’s so you can buy jewelry or at his friend’s where you can buy drugs. You can die on a tuk-tuk if you aren’t firm.”
    “A sort of local taxi, is it?”
    “I suppose that you can stretch the definition: a lump of coal is a kind of diamond without a pedigree. Riding a tuk-tuk is more like riding the whirlwind or mounting a cyclone. I hope you have travel insurance.” He fell silent after that and turned to look out the car window.
    I hadn’t expected suburbs: nobody ever puts suburbs in a guidebook. There were low, earth-colored buildings running to no more than three floors, sometimes with a penthouse showing torn awnings and bamboo screens. The buildings looked old, stained, and shopworn, like the wall behind a bedstead. Concrete