'And I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth’
(Genesis 4:14)A traveller in a hostile desert allows the monotony of the landscape, the pallor and shimmerings of phantasmal mirages and the glare of the orb of the sun, to evacuate his mind of all but the essentials. So that what remains of a travellers description of a caravan into Africa is a bone picked clean by vultures:
‘Twenty days on horse-back across the Somali desert’
And so we have Arthur Rimbaud in Africa - Abyssinia. The mountains opened up to a grassy plateau grazed by herds of Zebu wild beast. A semi-arid cornucopia compared to the dispiriting sulphurous desert from which they’d barely emerged. The ochre soil permitted the growth of vegetables, bananas, coffee, tobacco, saffron and the mildly intoxicating leaves of the Qat plant, which when chewed, left one in the arms of a pleasant torpor. The staple food was ‘durra’ a variety of sorghum that resembled and had the consistency of a modern day bath mat.
When the caravan passed through villages the local women, after spying the white man at the head of the phalanx would shuffle forth to inspect him. They'd tug at his clothes and touch his face to see whether he was white all over. You can imagine the affect this must have had. The appearance of a white man was as if a ghost from the netherworld had crossed the divide. Many believed white men to be dead ancestors.
Harar appeared suddenly at the summit of a slope; a reddish clump on a hillock. Two stumpy minarets surrounded by scraggy cultivated fields outlined the silhouette of the Forbidden City. The city was surrounded by pasty red-ochre walls; unrepaired since the Middle Ages. Rimbaud showed his papers to the city guards and was led in. Harar was a pandemonium of market traders, craftsmen, beggars, lepers and young slaves – many of who were still recovering from castration. He passed through the curious importuning crowd, catching whiffs of unknown languages, buffeted by the smells of an African market – the sickly stench of sugar cane, shit and putrefying flesh. Harar's 30,000 residents lived under squat, terraced houses of mud and stone. The streets were simply the spaces between the houses, rutted by torrents from the surrounding hills. Street cleaning was left to the hyenas. A traveller would have to constantly dodge and walk around the mounds of turds left on the streets by squatting humanity and wild dogs.
Rimbaud settled down in the ‘House of Raouf Pasha’ – a rudimentary building in the centre of town. The shutters in his room were constructed from the bits and pieces of wooden packing crates and his room looked over the main square. Rimbaud was the only employee of the ‘Company from Aden’ – and as their representative in Harar he was to oversee the trading in coffee, hides, ivory, gold, scents, incense, musk etc. His constant caravans to the coast 240 miles away laden with goods were giving him a comfortable income but he took pains to write in his letters home to France:
‘If you think that I’m living like a prince, I am quite certain that I’m living in a very stupid and irritating fashion. Anyway let’ hope we can enjoy a few years of true repose in this life; and it’s a good thing that this life is the only one and that it’s obvious it is, since it’s impossible to imagine another life more tedious than this!’
These self-deprecating and desolate letters to home are our only source of information on his state of mind. He was pessimistic as always but business was brisk and new horizons were dawning. There were new languages to be learnt, new markets to develop, and some feisty traders to be driven out of business by efficient competition. As well as his trading Rimbaud also made excursions into surrounding unexplored territory. These were timid affairs at first but gradually became more confident and daring. His motives for these ‘trafficking in the unknown’ were not purely mercantile:
‘I am intending to leave Harar soon to go trafficking or exploring on my own account in the unknown. There is great lake a few days from here, and it’s in ivory country…just in case things turn out badly and I don’t come back, please note that I have a sum of 715 rupees deposited at the Aden branch. You can ask for it if you think it’s worth the bother’
There is this account of Rimbaud about to head off:
‘Just as he was about to set off at the head of his little procession, Rimbaud wrapped a towel around his head as a turban and draped a red blanket over his usual garbs. He was intending to pass himself off as a Muslim…Sharing our amusement at his fancy dress; Rimbaud agreed that the red blanket, which orientalised his European costume, might attract robbers. But he wanted to be seen as a rich Mohammedan merchant for the sake of company prestige’
Rimbaud’s smile breaks through at this moment. He was taking a holiday from himself. A well deserved holiday. He rode out through the pulverised south gate of Harar, past the grovelling lepers, the wandering Ostrich’s and the stench of humanity, into the unmapped landscape before him. After a few days the terrain turned into open woodland. This is the furthest point south any European had ever ventured. The creature in the red cape and the white skin caused quite a stir amongst the natives. He won the protection of the ‘boko’ the local chief and set up two stalls on either side of the market in Babussa. For a week Rimbaud traded in the open market doing brisk business with traders many of whom came from distant regions. At night he slept on a pile of sweaty stinking hides. Then, having revolutionized the local economy he returned to Harar, surprised to be still alive, and spent the next two weeks recovering in bed from a severe fever. Rimbaud had glimpsed the edges of the mysterious ‘Ogaden’ – a region as yet unexplored and the size of both France and Belgium put together. Still recovering he wrote another letter home describing his ordeal:
‘What could I say about the things I’ve attempted with such extraordinary exertions and which have brought me nothing but fever. But it can’t be helped. I’m used to everything now. I fear nothing...’
(To be continued...)
On the pleasures of being made to feel small
The poet Wordsworth had urged us to travel through landscapes to feel emotions that would benefit our souls. It is usually unpleasant to be made to feel small. But imagine you are a solitary traveller who walking though the desert, suddenly emerges from a craggy overhang, and before you lies the unimaginable emptiness that is the Ogaden. Reams and reams of undulating landscape reeling before you. The horizon dissolving into the sky. What do you feel? What do you feel when you are confronted with the sheer majesty of the Nanga Parbat massif or mighty K2, as they loom over you – just there, in front of you, impenetrable, scaling the firmament, caressing the clouds with their tips?
You feel a sense of the sublime.
But why the pleasure? Why seek out this feeling of smallness – to positively delight and waddle in it even? Why stand naked before this mountain and feel exhilaration rather then despair at your titchyness?
Not everything that is more powerful then us is hateful to us. Such things also arouse awe and respect. It also depends on whether the thing that defies us appears noble in its defiance or squalid and insolent. Compare the cocky assurance of a hotel doorman with the defiance of a bearded mountain. Sublime places teach us that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and tepid and temporary and that we have no alternative but to accept our limitations. Some people experience this awe as God, others surmise that the planet was built by forces powerful, forces greater than what out hands could achieve. Forces that have continued from the the veil of the pass and will continue, long after we are gone, into the veil of the distant future.
