Here and There Read Online Free PDF Page A

I’ve been to the Arctic Circle, and I can tell you, if you can find somewhere so remote that Eskimos won’t live there, then you’ve got about half an hour to get somewhere they do.
    The first travel piece I wrote was about the salt pans in the Kalahari – still one of my favourite places on earth. Nothing lives there. Birds don’t fly, fish don’t swim, antelope don’t stot (that, by the way, is a technical term for what antelopes do; they also ‘pronk’). Whatever stots, pronks, saunters, limps or flaps into the Makgadikgadi stays there and desiccates. I came across a man who had a New-Age revelation in the Kalahari. He was a rather ordinary buttoned-up mercantile chap. He told me he’d taken his spade and wandered into the bright, glittering nothingness for his morning ablution and, while squatting in the unforgiving spotlight with naught for his modesty, he was blinded by the truth that he was merely a speck in the great spinning harmony of the spheres. Stripped away of everything, including his dignity, he understood that he was a small thing. And? I asked. And what? he said. And, what else? Nothing else. He grew quite peeved: Isn’t that enough, the cosmic truth that we are just dust in the Hoover-bag of existence? Well, that’s not so much a revelation as a French cartoon cliché. How dare you call my revelation a cliché? Don’t you know who I am?
    And that’s rather the point of New-Age travel into wildernesses. It leads to a pompous snobbery – the wisdom that belongs to those who have been to the high places and the distant shores, and it’s all a nonsense and a delusion. The idea that there is some kind of special found knowledge, some higher understanding indebted to nature, is quite a modern one. It was invented in the 18th century by the Romantics and was centred prosaically around the manicured crags of Switzerland and the sodden sod of the Lake District. Wordsworth and Byron and various composers and lady watercolourists found an awe in the outdoors, and they commandeered a new word for it: they called it the sublime. Beauty, you see, was a man-made thing. The sublime was what was created by wind, rain, time and the god of your choice. And, in it, they found a great metaphor for people with too much time on their hands, too many black suits and too little sex.
    The other type of traveller, the one in whose caravanserai I happily include myself, is after people and the places of people. We are the older school. We trace our tour guides back to Herodotus, and they include Marco Polo, Richard Burton, Moses and Genghis Khan. We understand that the greatest wonders of the world are all man-made and they’re wonders because men made them. That what’s ultimately enlightening is the collective will, intelligence, aesthetics, fun and glamour of civilisation. So this piece is belatedly about one of the greatest cities in the world, Bombay. (We don’t say Mumbai. Only newsreaders and charity workers say Mumbai.)
    Bombay is a city where it’s impossible to avoid people. Indeed, the defining grace and glory of the whole subcontinent is its people. The teeming, steaming great masterpiece of humanity. Every vista, every angle has a cast of thousands, and Bombay is one of its principal joys. It’s not a beautiful city, not in the man-made sense, not in the Venice or Prague sense, although it has many spectacular parts. Its attraction lies in the throb and the hum of its population. It is a city in the process of shedding its skins. It was the great port of Empire, a self-consciously provincial view of the East from Home Counties clerks, a place of order and selfconscious provincial good taste. Victoria Station is an absurd totem of stiff grandeur to English self-regard and smug grandiloquence. Crawford Market is an attempt to turn a bazaar into a department store, with decoration and a fountain designed by Rudyard Kipling’s father.