The Books: “Sunrise with Seamonsters” (Paul Theroux)

And here is my next excerpt from my travel/history shelf:

Paul Theroux’s Sunrise with Seamonsters.

This is a collection of Theroux’s writings – on all different topics, but mainly snapshots of his travel experiences. Meeting a sultan in Malaysia, hanging out with nudists in Corsica, his essay on the New York subway (which sounds like it was the NY subway of the late 70s, early 80s – grafitti-covered and dangerous) … A wide range of topics. I love his essay about driving through Dingle (that’s where the title of the book comes from) – the coast of Dingle is truly one of those places on earth where … if you don’t find yourself in believing fairies and dragons and magical monsters of old … or at least entertaining the possibility of them … then there is no hope for you. It’s IN the landscape.

Paul Theroux spent some time as a young man teaching school in Africa. I’ll excerpt from his essay about that – which is called “The Edge of the Great Rift”.

From Sunrise with Seamonsters by Paul Theroux.

There is a crack in the earth that extends from the Sea of Galilee to the coast of Mozambique, and I am living on the edge of it, in Nyasaland. This crack is the Great Rift Valley. It seems to be swallowing most of East Africa. In Nyasaland, it is replacing the fishing village, the flowers, and the anthills with a nearly bottomless lake, and it shows itself in rough escarpments and troughs up and down this huge continent. It is thought that this valley was born amid great volcanic activity. This period of vulcanism had not ended in Africa. It shows itself not only in the Great Rift Valley itself, but in the people, burning, the lava of masses, the turbulence of the humans themselves who live in the Great Rift.

My schoolroom is on the Great Rift, and in this schoolroom there is a line of children, heads shaved like prisoners, muscles showing through their rags. They are waiting to peer through the tiny lens of a cheap microscope so they can see the cells in a flower petal.

Later they will ask, “Is fire alive? Is water?”

The children appear in the morning out of the slowly drifting hoops of fog wisp. It is chilly, almost cold. There is no visibility at six in the morning; only a fierce white-out where earth is the patch of dirt under their bare feet, a platform, and the sky is everything else. It becomes Africa at noon when there are no clouds and the heat is like a blazing rug thrown over everything to suffocate and scorch.

In the afternoon there are clouds, big ones, like war declared in the stratosphere. It starts to get grey as the children leave the school and begin padding down the dirt road.

There is a hill near the school. The sun approaches it by sneaking behind the clouds until it emerges to crash into the hill and explode yellow and pink, to paint everything in its violent fire.

At night, if there is a moon, the school, the Great Rift becomes a seascape of luminescent trees and grass, whispering, silver. If there is no moon you walk from a lighted house to an infinity of space, packed with darkness.

Yesterday I ducked out of a heavy downpour and waited in a small shed for the rain to let up. The rain was far too heavy for my spidery umbrella. I waited in the shed; thunder and close bursts of lightning charged all around me; the rain spat through the palm-leaf walls of the shed.

Down the road I spotted a small African child. I could not tell whether it was a boy or a girl, since it was wearing a long shirt, a yellow one, which dropped sodden to the ground. The child was carrying nothing, so I assumed it was a boy.

He dashed in and out of the puddles, hopping from side to side of the forest path, his yellow shirt bulging as he twisted under it. When he came closer I could see the look of absolute fear on his face. His only defense against the thunder and the smacking of rain were his fingers stuck firmly in his ears. He held them there as he ran.

He ran into my shed, but when he saw me he shivered into a corner where he stood shuddering under his soaked shirt. We eyed each other. There were raindrops beaded on his face. I leaned on my umbrella and fumbled a Bantu greeting. He moved against a palm leaf. After a few moments he reinserted a finger in each ear, carefully, one at a time. Then he darted out into the rain and thunder. And his dancing yellow shirt disappeared.

I stand on the grassy edge of the Great Rift. I feel it under me and I expect soon a mighty heave to send us all sprawling. The Great Rift. And whom does this rift concern? Is it perhaps a rift with the stars? Is it between earth and man, or man and man? Is there something under this African ground seething still?

We like to believe that we are riding it and that it is nothing more than an imperfection in the crust of the earth. We do not want to be captive to this rift, as if we barely belong, as if we were scrawled on the landscape by a piece of chalk.