Hello world!

The Humber monsoon has liquified the family archive including that charcoal sketch of a steam train leaving magical Smyrna before the Great War. The digital files with your award winning snaps of rare fauna in Kerala and Jilin Rime have been erased. Those kodak icons of trooping Uncles in faraway lands have faded to a visual whisper. You are left with words. Some of them hardwired from the classroom like Cargoes by John Masefield. Others read along the way and bookmarked with now faded rail tickets from the Red Arrow bound for St Petersburg. Oh, for a jar at Akhmatova’s favourite haunt, the Stray Dog – when the weather clears!

Alas, habituated – as Coleridge would say – to the vast, you can’t carry with you all those poems and notes on things people said or say. Maybe that’s what the pack mule caravan was for! So, to help you on your way – Welcome to RihlaJourney! This is where all those moments return, the pack mules take a rest and words read – as Heaney puts it – may echo in the darkness!

Les Murray, the Australian poet of the outback, who “is only interested in everything” had this to say about journeys at sea in his novel in verse, Fredy Neptune:

Here’s me riding bareback in the sweater
I wore to sea first.
I never learned the old top ropes,
I was always in steam. Less capstan, less climbing,
More re-stowing cargo. Which could be hard and slow
As farming – but to say Why this is Valpariso!
Or: I’m in Singapore and know my way about
Takes a long time to get stale.

 

Jorge Luis Borges

A man sets out to chart the world. Through the years, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the images of his own face.

 

Treasure Map, Ruth Padel

The vivid delight in scenery then awakened in my mind has lasted longer than any other aesthetic pleasure. Darwin, Autobiography

The world poured back and forth a daft number of times
between mountains and the drill-holes of his eyes.

Fissure and sky. Bronze grass, brown-glow bog
asphodel and purple heather. “The Welsh Borders
with my elder brother!” Hours in a wet saddle.

His pony’s stingy mane. Long wriggles of shadow
through drystone walls. A treasure map, painted by gods.

 

From, Goblin Market, Christina Rossetti

Laura stretched her gleaming neck
Like a rush-imbedded swan,
Like a lily from the beck,
Like a moonlit poplar branch,
Like a vessel at the launch
When its last restraint is gone.

 

Robert Louis Stevenson, Christmas at Sea

The sheets were frozen hard, and they cut the naked hand;
The decks were like a slide, where a seamen scarce could stand;
The wind was a nor’wester, blowing squally off the sea;
And cliffs and spouting breakers were the only things a-lee.

They heard the surf a-roaring before the break of day;
But ’twas only with the peep of light we saw how ill we lay.
We tumbled every hand on deck instanter, with a shout,
And we gave her the maintops’l, and stood by to go about.

All day we tacked and tacked between the South Head and the North;
All day we hauled the frozen sheets, and got no further forth;
All day as cold as charity, in bitter pain and dread,
For very life and nature we tacked from head to head.

We gave the South a wider berth, for there the tide-race roared;
But every tack we made we brought the North Head close aboard:
So’s we saw the cliffs and houses, and the breakers running high,
And the coastguard in his garden, with his glass against his eye.

The frost was on the village roofs as white as ocean foam;
The good red fires were burning bright in every ‘long-shore home;
The windows sparkled clear, and the chimneys volleyed out;
And I vow we sniffed the victuals as the vessel went about.

The bells upon the church were rung with a mighty jovial cheer;
For it’s just that I should tell you how (of all days in the year)
This day of our adversity was blessed Christmas morn,
And the house above the coastguard’s was the house where I was born.

 

The Bilbao Song, Brecht/ Weill, trans. Johnny Mercer

That old Bilbao moon, I won’t forget it soon
That old Bilbao moon, just like a big balloon
That old Bilbao moon would rise above the dune
While Tony’s Beach Saloon rocked with an old-time tune
We’d sing a song the whole night long and I can still recall
Those were the greatest (those were the greatest)
Those were the greatest (those were the greatest)
Those were the greatest nights of them all
No paint was on the door (no paint was on the door)
The grass grew through the floor (the grass grew through the floor)
Of Tony’s Two By Four (of Tony’s Two By Four)
On the Bilbao shore (on the Bilbao shore)
But there were friends galore (howdy do, howdy do)
And there was beer to pour (chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug)
And moonlight on the shore (and the moon shines above)
That old Bilbao shore (on the shore, not the floor)
We’d sing all night with all our might and I can still recall
Those were the greatest (those were the greatest)
Those were the greatest (those were the greatest)
Those were the greatest nights of them all
Those old Bilbao guys
They loved to harmonize,
Who stopped to realize
How fast the summer flies!
The moon was on the rise,
We’d catch the ladies’ eyes
And whisper Spanish lies,
They never did get wise.
We’d sing a song the whole night long and I can still recall
Those were the greatest
Those were the greatest
Those were the greatest nights of them all
That old Bilbao moon, I won’t forget it soon
That old Bilbao moon, just like a big balloon
That old Bilbao moon would rise above the dune
While Tony’s Beach Saloon rocked with an old-time tune
We’d sing all night with all our might and I can still recall
Those were the greatest (those were the greatest)
Those were the greatest (those were the greatest)
Those were the greatest nights of them all

 

Padraic Colum, The Drover

To Meath of the pastures,
From wet hills by the sea,
Through Leitrim and Longford
Go my cattle and me.

 

George Eliot, from Daniel Deronda

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix a point in the stars unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understodd to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backward as well as forward, divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off in medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-pre-supposing fact with which our story sets out.

 

John Reed, from War in Eastern Europe

We rubbed ourselves from head to foot with camphorated oil, put kerosene on our hair, filled our pockets with moth-balls, and sprinkled naphthaline through our baggage; and boarded a train so saturated with formalin that our eyes and lungs burned as with quicklime. The Americans from the Standard Oil Office in Salonika strolled down to bid us farewell.

“Too bad,” said Wiley. “So Young too. Do you want the remains shipped home, or shall we have you buried up there?”

These were the ordinary precautions of travellers bound for Seria, the country of typhus …

1916

 

Nina Berberova, from The Tattered Cloak

Paris. Paris. There is something silken and elegant about that word, something carefree, something made for a dance, something brilliant and festive ike champagne. Everything there is beautiful, gay, and a little drunk, and festooned with lace. A petticoat rustles at every step; there’s a ringing in your ears and a flashing in your eyes at the mention of that name. I’m going to Paris. We’ve come to Paris. We’re going to live in Paris. But what I saw my first day resembled neither silk nor lace nor champagne.

Imagine that a man has landed on the moon. He’s expecting to see a  majestic and menacing wasteland, dead mountains, stone chasms, a special sky. And suddenly he notices that he’s looking at the stucco wall of his neighbour’s house, it’s raining and the courtyard stinks.

 

Ignazio Silone

“I don’t know where to go.”

“Neither do I. Let’s go together.”