Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph by Ted Simon Read Free Book Online

yard. Mohamad went first and then asked me to bring the bike inside. I barely squeezed through. The father was standing there in a fez, loose shirt, trousers and sandals. He greeted me very formally and! politely, with few French words. The yard was maybe ten feet square, and the rooms opened off it on three sides, so that the whole house was,
    in effect, a tiny walled fortress, with one door leading out. I could see already that the rooms were very small. I was ushered into a room opposite the street door, which was like a little cave. It was about seven feet wide, and half of it was filled with a brass bed, covered sumptuously by a shiny cotton pile rug. There was a bit of floor space and a chest cluttered with ornaments, like a shrine, with an oil lamp burning.
    I was left to sit there for a while as whispered conferences took place outside, and I began to feel nervous about what was going on, so I went out to look. Mohamad's mother and two small children were there with him, moving about in deep shadow. The five of us and the motorcycle filled the yard.
    Some hint of suspicion must have shown in my movement or expression.
    'If you wish to watch over your motorcycle, please do, but I assure you it is safe,' said Mohamad. He spoke gently and quietly, not at all the brash boy on the ship. I felt ashamed and went back to the room (three steps away, everything was so close) to find that a supper had been laid out on the chest. Two small lamb chops in heavily spiced hot sauce with peas and pimentos, and some bread. No cutlery.
    I ate the bread with the chops, and then made a mess having to scoop up the peas and sauce with my fingers. The sauce burned my mouth terribly and I could not finish it, and that made me feel bad too. I turned to the door and asked for water. The mother came in with a jug and a metal cup and I saw her face in the light, small and worn, but very calm and tender. This is definitely not a 'B' movie, I told myself, and from then on felt absolutely secure.
    The bed was Mohamad's but I was to sleep on it. I protested, but in vain.
    'Whether you sleep on it or I, it's the same thing. If you sleep on it, it is as if I were sleeping on it,' he said, offering it as a pleasure rather than a sacrifice, and though it was a traditional formula of hospitality, maybe, it came alive on his lips.
    I lay down on it like a visiting emperor, with a small boy lying on the floor by my bedside, and prepared to fall immediately into a deep sleep, but sleep would not come for a long time, and my skin, which had been itching nervously for some weeks, tingled even more than usual. Sometime in the night I came half out of sleep again to hear muffled drum beats and what seemed in my dreamy state to be a procession of phantoms moving through the darkness.
    I awoke with numb lumps all over my wrists and neck and half my face. Bugs, I told myself. Not nervousness, not heat rash. Bed bugs. But I refused to believe it. That beautiful bed, infested? Never.
    I slept on the bed three nights. The second night was just as bad. The third night I got out my nylon tent and wrapped it round me and that was better. The pleasure was Mohamad's, the sacrifice was mine.
    So on that first morning I squinted through my swellings at an African day. Everybody was up and about early. They had nibbled at something before dawn because it was Ramadan, and for that month no Muslim may eat while the sun is in the sky. The drum was to tell people it was breakfast time, but as a nominal Christian I was exempt and had a peppery fried egg-In daylight the place seemed even smaller. There were two other rooms the size of mine. The rest of the family, mother, father, Mohamad and little daughter, slept in one of the other rooms, which was also a tobacco shop. The father had been a prison warder, and as a retired civil servant he qualified for a licence to sell tobacco. It was not a roaring trade.
    How they all fitted together in that tiny space, why they weren't