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

and be as safe there as in his own home, as long as he came as a person and not a label. I watched him, listened to his voice rather than his words, and drank in the scene. Everything fitted, everything was right; shape, size, colour, texture, all the parts had grown together, into something that would shape the instincts of the people who made it and lived in it. Whatever messages of hate he picked up and repeated, his personal dealings guided by those instincts would surely be alright. But in Kabaria what was there to inspire the inhabitants of those shabby, cramped boxes, fighting for work on the edge of an overcrowded city? Perhaps the old man led a tougher life, perhaps at times he ate less or felt the cold. If so it had only done him good. But the kids couldn't see it. How could they? They had to get into that mess on the edge of the city so that one day some of them might appreciate what they had left behind. Did they choose or were they driven? Either way, I thought, they were the stuff that wars are made of.
    In Tunis I worked the embassies. The Libyans gave me my visa, and took out one heavy anxiety, which the Egyptians replaced with another. There would be no possibility, they said, of crossing the border from Libya into Egypt.
    I stared at the map. There was the road, no other. North of the road was the sea. South of the road, the desert. Here and there tracks trailed into the desert. . . and disappeared, punctuated full stop by an oasis, or dwindling into nothing. There was no other way. A fourteen hundred mile cul-de-sac to Salloum on the Egyptian border. I had to go down it, just in case . . .
    On the third morning I was ready. The bike was packed. Mohamad had his gang around him, and they were going to escort me to the highway, and take ritual pictures on my cameras. Each time the bike had gone out into the street more people had seen it. By the third day every kid in town knew about it. As I rolled it along in first gear, over-heated and dressed up to kill, the parade swelled to fantastic proportions. The Pied Piper or the Wizard of Oz could not have had a greater success, but I had nowhere to take this crusade and I began to get nervous wondering where it would take me. It was immodest, out of all proportion; I couldn't stop it, but I knew it had to go wrong.
    As my army turned the last corner, in sight of the main road, the police came in and wound it up. They grabbed Mohamad, who was carrying my cameras, and told me to follow. The rest they sent scattering. There were only a couple of them, in dark and dingy suits, but they looked awkward and angry. When I got into their office on the highway one of them had already managed to find the release to open the camera, but didn't know what to do then, so I grabbed it, and closed it and rolled the film back into its cassette and then opened it for him.
    Mohamad was looking quite defeated, and they were shouting at him. Then one of them turned on me, and accused me of being a sensation-mongering journalist trying to get pictures of Arabs stabbing each other in drunken brawls, exploiting their poverty and ignorance to sell my dirty rag. It was a good story. Maybe it fitted somebody else. Then they turned to accusing Mohamad of being out to rob me, and said I had been taking my life in my hands, and I said all the best things I could as convincingly as possible and tried to get the temperature down. So they took us out in the street and told Mohamad to go home and told me to piss off.
    I tried to make it alright with Mohamad before I went, but he was very chastened and didn't want to talk. I didn 't like to go but I was a provo cation just being there, and so I said a sad goodbye and rode off into my cul-de-sac.
    Tunisia rolls by. The first marvel comes in right after Kabaria, a huge Roman aqueduct swings alongside me for a few miles, crumbling but unconquered like a monster from the depths of time. The rains are early and I see the water hanging in the sky ready to