Magic Bus by Rory Maclean Read Free Book Online Page B

liar…’
    â€˜Got to do something that scares you every day,’ says Penny, levering her cane between us and pushing ahead.
    Our sandy footfalls curve into a hooked ravine, following a marble-lined stream broken by submerged Roman columns. The blackness and oleander banks close in on us. Underfoot crunch shards of terracotta pottery and fragments of roof tiles. There is no moon but I can just make out the wooded crest of Musa mountain against the night sky.
    â€˜â€¦ Come on, baby, light my fire…’
    As we loop towards the sea, a lamp flashes in the ruins. Then a candle appears on the citadel. Another light glints across the quay of the ancient port. Open fires flare beyond the entrance to this pre-Christian pirates’ hideout. The music grows louder, yet still we see no people. Not a soul in the dark.
    â€˜â€¦ Try to set the night on fire.’
    Suddenly we’re on the beach, in the open, in a convergence of flames and figures. Hundreds of shadows throb and stamp in the flickering light. Chanting men carry burning torches above their heads. Half-naked women circle, whirl around a portable sound machine.
    â€˜Now
this
is a happening,’ yells Penny, her spirits lifting with the volume.
    The noise is tremendous, a deafening wall of sound that beatslike a pulse. Bodies gyrate along the goat paths, thrash over millennia of detritus. Dreadlocked Kiwis kiss, black Canadians run into the sea, a lithe German couple rock together on the smooth, osseous pebbles. I won’t be surprised if the uproar rouses Ken Kesey from his grave. In 1966, he was one of the main promoters of the seminal Trips Festival that gave birth to the dance, disco then trance scenes. But he’d find similarities between the two events superficial. Few of these reeling hedonists – the sons and daughters of rich consumer societies – share their predecessors’ spiritual or social ambitions.
    â€˜Dance?’ Jeff calls to Debbie, and they fall into the press of flesh, sharing a wild, ecstatic grin. Mary recognizes a face from their Istanbul hostel. Penny smoothes the wrinkles out of her skirt, lifts her arms above her head and shimmies around the rim of the circle. Terry squats on the beach and lights a cigarette. I look at the hundreds of faces and don’t see a single Turk.
    By the crackle of a fire I shout into an Aussie’s ear.
    â€˜Mate, there’s always a free bed at Treehouses,’ he assures me. ‘Or at least half of one. Kadir had four hundred people staying one night last week.’
    A few numbers later, the music eases off a couple of notches, maybe in deference to the sea turtles which nest along the Cirali shore. Or maybe not. Jeff and Debbie take a break from the dancing. Mary strolls over to join us, having scored a little grass. Penny sways back into sight calling, ‘I’m not stoned, it’s my hip.’
    The girls want to smoke, and we recongregate in a circle. Penny sinks cross-legged on to the beach as they ply her with questions about her decision to come to Asia.
    â€˜By ’68 San Fran was falling apart,’ she says, wiping a sheen of perspiration from her forehead. ‘People wanted to escape from the cycle of karma. Sitars were all the rage. The Beatles had checked out Rishikesh. Leary was tripping through the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
.’
    Timothy Leary was the Harvard psychology professor who linked LSD and Tibetan Buddhism, espousing drug use as a means of altering consciousness.
    â€˜Most of all, we had Ginsberg’s example of living in India. That was the big enchilada.’
    I add, ‘In his journal, Ginsberg wrote, “It’s my promised land. I’m wandering in India, it’s like a new earth – I’m happy.”’
    â€˜We felt like there was a current drawing us east.’
    As Penny talks, the dance beat recedes further, yielding to the sound of cicadas. Laughter and murmurs of English