Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph Read Online Free PDF Page A

the centre stand, put up my umbrella, and go to sleep in the saddle, lying forward on the tank bag. I am amazed how easy it is, how little I care what others may think, how little sleep I need. I am riding high on energy, like a surfer on a big wave.
    To Rome on the autostrada, but the tolls are too high, and I get off it to go south through Latina and Terracina. Just before Naples, in the dark, I find a camp site that's open. During the last hours on the bike, my mood plunged to despair, but the work of unpacking and cooking keeps misery at bay, and a bottle of wine washes it away.
    To Naples and Salerno, and now the autostrada is free. It rides the bumps down the spine of Italy, a wonder of engineering, always either tunnelling or soaring across great airy chasms. The weather is wonderful too, hot sun, crisp clean air. On the empty highway I begin to feel the rhythm of a long, uninterrupted ride. In most of Europe this is impossible, life is so dense, intricate, a million parishes joined up higgledy-piggledy and every patch intimately known to somebody for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. I feel I am already leaving Europe. I can feel Africa there, so vast I am already within its aura.
    The movement has a complex rhythm with many pulses beating simultaneously. Underlying it is the engine with its subtle blend of sounds, eighty explosions a second, cams on push rods, push rods on tappets, rockers on valve stems, valves on seats, ball bearings revolving and racing, cogs meshing and thrashing in oil, oil pumps throbbing, gases hissing, chains whipping over sprockets, all this frenzy of metal in motion, amazing that it can last for even a minute, yet it will have to function for thousands of hours to take me round and home again. Through all these pulses blending and blurring I seem to hear a slow and steady beat, moving up and down, up and down, three semi-tones apart, a second up, a second down; as I listen it grows clearer, unmistakable. Is it there or am I inventing it? Is it the pulse of my own body intercepting the sound, modifying it with my bloodstream? Try as I will I can hear no other pulse, no other pitch. There are other instruments in the orchestra however. The lapel of the flying jacket flicks against my shoulder like a kettle drum, my overlong chinstrap beats a more complicated tattoo on the helmet, and undeniably there is vibration too, a faint tingle spreading
    from foot rests, grips and saddle, comfortable at fifty, distinctly unpleasant at sixty-five and then flattening out again at seventy. With fifteen hundred miles on the clock I consider the bike run in, and I'm riding at seventy and over. On the autostrada the load has no apparent effect, until I go up over eighty on a curve and feel the beginnings of a nasty wobble. I settle back to seventy and lean forward to hit less air. A full tank takes me almost three hours without a stop, three hours of contemplation and speculation, contemplation of past mistakes, speculation on future dangers. Why does my mind dwell so much on the down side of life, when the present is so exhilarating and satisfying! I find myself anticipating ghastly accidents, desperate situations, macabre and quite unreal challenges, like riding the bike over a rope bridge swinging across a Peruvian canyon, as the vines slowly untwist and snap, a strand at a time . . . (shades of San Luis Rey) - my heart is actually beating faster when I catch on to what's happening. It's the 'B' movie syndrome. In my childhood they always used to show two movies, 'A' and 'B', though often they were both 'B'. In 'B' movies everything spelled disaster. Windscreen wipers at night meant a horrific crash. A creaking door, a footstep, an oversweet smile, a 'nice' stranger, all boded pure evil. Anything whatever to do with aeroplanes or of course rope bridges, had you clinging to your seat (or girl friend) waiting for the spine-chilling consequences. Was that how I was conditioned to expect the worst? Or