The Liquid Continent

Travels through Alexandria, Venice and Istanbul

Nicholas Woodsworth

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781909961074
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

This omnibus edition brings together Nicholas Woodsworth's critically acclaimed Mediterranean trilogy into a single volume for the first time, allowing readers to fully appreciate the scope of Woodsworth's search for a distinctively Mediterranean "cosmopolitanism." Combining travel narrative, history, and reflection on contemporary lives and cultures, Woodsworth finds an intimacy, a garrulous warmth, and an extraordinary sociability as he travels from Alexandria through Venice and finally installs himself in a former Benedictine monastery in Istanbul overlooking the Golden Horn. Responding to this experience, he argues that the sea should not be seen as an empty space surrounded by Europe, Asia, and Africa, but rather as a single entity, a place from whose coastlines people look inwards over the water to each other—for it has its own cities, its own life, its own way of being.

Fourteen

I shifted my backside on the cold, hard bench of a Cairo bus station. There were times when I wished I’d done my travelling a century or more before. 1872 would have suited me fine. In that year Monsieur J Frugoli, Principal Agent of the Messageries Maritimes steamline company at Alexandria, posted the following tariffs for its Syrian Service, departing fortnightly on Saturdays

From Alexandria to: (in French Francs)	1st Class	2nd Class	3rd Class
Port Said	45	32	19
Jaffa	78	59	30
Beirut	110	82	40
Tripoli	135	101	50
Latakia	155	117	60
Alexandretta	182	138	69
Mersin	207	157	77
Rhodes	306	231	118
Smyrna	377	284	148
Mitilini	407	308	155
Dardanelles	428	323	166
Gallipoli	436	329	168
Constantinople	469	354	182

It was a dream voyage. It wasn’t so much the idea of first-class comforts that made me envious, although I was sure that even a third-class ticket with Messageries Maritimes would have brought more comfort than the bus I was about to board. What seemed almost miraculous were the destinations on offer. I would have gladly travelled deck-class on bread and water to sail into these Levantine ports one after the other. Never mind the leaps in transport technology that lay far in the future - in Monsieur Frugoli’s time it was much easier getting around the eastern Mediterranean than it is today.

If a Saturday departure didn’t suit, the French maritime company wasn’t the only one to stop at the harbours dotting the great curved arc of the sea. The Khedival Mail Line, Lloyd’s Austrian and the Russian Steam Navigation and Commercial Company were among others offering similar services along these coasts. But where were they all now ? I had checked and re-checked. There was a summer ferry-service to Brindisi and Venice, but that was months away. Short of smuggling myself aboard a freighter, it was impossible to get out of Alexandria by sea. In the end I had bought a ticket from the East Delta Bus Lines - hardly a name with the same kind of romantic resonance - and was headed to a seaport not even on the Mediterranean.

Such were the kinds of choices left to travellers in a politically-fraught Middle East - for anyone who had drawn the line at flying there weren’t many options available. Then again, there probably weren’t all that many people these days who actually wanted to see a succession of old port- cities in the eastern Mediterranean.

But I did. With appetite whetted and long, warm spring days stretching ahead, I felt the entire coastline beckoning. Already, though, I knew that the dozen places listed by Monsieur Frugoli posed a dozen different logistical problems. Long ago I’d acknowledged I wasn’t going to see Jaffa, Haifa or any other port in Israel. Twitchy travel relations between Arabs and Israelis - matters of visas, passport stamps and closed borders - simply made it too complicated. In fact, just getting to the Mediterranean coast north of Israel was difficult enough.

You could cross the Sinai Peninsula by road, but once on the other side you couldn’t get over the top of the Gulf of Aqaba to Jordan - the port of Elat and a five-mile coastal stretch of Israeli territory barred the way. Instead, you had to drive south down the coast of the Gulf, and halfway to the Red Sea catch a boat north again at Nuweiba; once back up the Gulf, it deposited its passengers on the far side of Israeli territory in the Jordanian city of Aqaba.

I wasn’t actually looking forward to an all-night bus ride, or even to this leg of the trip as a whole. It seemed an awfully roundabout way to go, and the journey was known to be tough and full of delays - getting from Cairo to Aqaba, less than 250 miles as the crow flies, often took twenty- four hours or more. That came to an average of just ten miles an hour.

It was a speed considerably slower, I calculated, than that of the standard military camel charge. In the Arab uprising of the First World War Lawrence of Arabia had once thundered into Aqaba at the head of hundreds of mounted and determined tribesmen. They were in a hurry, hurtling towards the post-Ottoman independence that Lawrence had promised them. In the end his efforts failed. But something at least could be said for that thundering charge - a direct and lightening-fast advance on the city had to have been a good deal more satisfying than this back-and-forth trundling about. I boarded the East Delta bus wishing that Lawrence - or even better, Monsieur Frugoli - were still in charge of things.

We left Cairo at eleven o’clock in the evening, a spaghetti of suburban motorways finally leading to a straight, two-lane highway that was almost deserted. Outside there was nothing but a quarter-moon and dimly lit roadside scrub. Occasionally we pulled over, waiting for no discernible reason before rumbling back onto the highway. Once we dropped down into a long, brightly lit concrete tunnel, a passage which I assumed ran beneath the Suez Canal. The only remarkable thing was the desert cold. The bus was unheated, and by two o’clock it wasn’t far from freezing outside. Inside, passengers huddled into the folds of their long galabi- yas, wrapped lengths of cloth around their heads, and fell asleep. Mouths gaped, limbs protruded into aisles in prolonged poses of rigor mortis. In the sickly yellow glimmer of the bus’s ceiling lights we looked like zombies from Night of the Living Dead.

We stopped at Taba, the border crossing just a couple of miles from the Israeli town of Elat. A few passengers got down, an Egyptian policeman checked passports, and we turned south to drive alongside the Gulf of Aqaba.

In the distance across the head of the gulf we could see two twinkling masses - the city lights of Elat and Aqaba. At the same time daylight was beginning to swell in the east. It revealed the road we were travelling, a winding strip of tarmac squeezed between water and bone-dry hills of bare rock. On the far side of the gulf, too, the desert ranges of Saudi Arabia climbed sharply away from the shore. But not even this deep, narrow fold in the earth could hide away from day forever. Just outside Nuweiba the sun’s rim appeared over the mountains and the whole world - sea, sky and rock - was suffused with light. For a few moments even the craggiest headland glowed a soft and delicate bonbon pink.

Nuweiba straggled alongside the sea, a town of low, white concrete buildings and sand-blown streets just a couple of blocks deep. The bus came to a halt by the harbourside. The zombie passengers abruptly awoke, hustled themselves off the bus and disappeared. Where to, I have no idea; perhaps they knew a good place to remain comatose for the six hours that remained before the sailing to Aqaba. That left just the foreigners. With our bags slung from our shoulders we wandered into a waterfront café - in reality no more than bits of ragged canvas hung over a wooden frame - and ordered tea.

There were four of us. We were all from different places, but in the way of travellers come together by chance in strange places we immediately formed a group.

Lotfi, confident and outgoing, immediately became our leader. He spoke little English but excellent French. He had a pleasing, cheerful manner and didn’t hesitate to use it - he could charm anyone to pieces in five minutes. Conscious or not, it was a trick that came in useful. Lotfi was Tunisian, a buyer and a seller. When pressed as to exactly what it was that he bought and sold he was evasive. But his business took him all around the shores of the Muslim Mediterranean. This was his fourth trip to Damascus.

Lotfi travelled light. Apart from a small holdall he didn’t have much more than the leather jacket and the clothes he stood up in. The rest of us were bleary-eyed and tired. Lotfi, who was thirty-five but looked ten years younger, was clear-eyed and fresh. He was now five days out of Tunis and moving fast. In order to cut down on expenses and avoid hotel costs he travelled day and night, and hoped to be in Damascus in the next thirty- six hours. Apart from ten-minute catnaps, he claimed he hadn’t slept on this trip at all, and I believed him. He was a natural-born traveller and trader, deft and self-assured in his life on the road, and it pleased him in a way that no sedentary occupation could. I doubt that what Lotfi did was entirely legal, but it didn’t stop me liking him.

I liked him even more when I saw the way he looked out for Jimmy. Jimmy was a tall, gangly twenty-year-old Iraqi with a wispy bit of beard on his chin and a prominent Adam’s apple. When he spoke he surprised you because he had a reedy, falsetto voice that was pitched higher than most girls’. He was a Christian Arab - Maronite or Syrian Orthodox, I cannot remember which, but at any rate had been brought up in one of those isolated churches that has persisted and survived in the Middle East for centuries. He was goofy about God, and had a touching belief that anyone nominally Christian was automatically a good and trustworthy person. It made you fear for him.

The fact that he felt he had some sort of divine backup only put him at risk, for he was setting off down a murderous road. Through an evangelist Christian connection Jimmy’s father was working in a supermarket in Tennessee. But Jimmy, who until now had avoided the Iraq war by staying with his uncle in Cairo, was on his way home to his mother in Baghdad. Lotfi promised Jimmy he would get him as far as Amman, but when he turned east he would be on his own. He had a stack of documents, every necessary paper neatly wrapped in a plastic bag with elastic bands, but he was very nervous.

I some...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Six
• Seven
• Eight
• Nine
• Ten
• Eleven
• Twelve
• Thirteen
• Fourteen
• Fifteen
• Sixteen
• Seventeen
• Eighteen
• Nineteen
• Twenty
• Twenty-One
• Twenty-Tow
• Twenty-Three
• Twenty-Four
• Twenty-Five
• Twenty-Six
• Twenty-Seven
• Twenty-Eight
• Twenty-Nine
• Thirty
• Thirty-One
• Thirty-Two
• Thirty-Three
• Thirty-Four
• Thirty-Five
• Thirty-Six
• Thirty-Seven
• Thirty-Eight
• Thirty-Nine
• Forty
• Forty-One
• Forty-Two
• Reference Notes