The Pillars of Hercules

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"DAZZLING."
–Time
"[THEROUX’S] WORK IS DISTINGUISHED BY A SPLENDID EYE FOR DETAIL AND THE TELLING GESTURE; a storyteller’s sense of pacing and gift for granting closure to the most subtle progression of events; and the graceful use of language. . . . We are delighted, along with Theroux, by the politeness of the Turks, amazed by the mountainous highlands in Syria, touched by the gesture of an Albanian waitress who will not let him pay for his modest meal. . . . The Pillars of Hercules [is] engrossing and enlightening from start (a damning account of tourists annoying the apes of Gibraltar) to finish (an utterly captivating visit with Paul Bowles in Tangier, worth the price of the book all by itself)."
–Chicago Tribune
"ENTERTAINING READING . . . WHEN YOU READ THEROUX, YOU’RE TRULY ON A TRIP."
–The Boston Sunday Globe
"HIS PICARESQUE NARRATIVE IS STUDDED WITH SCENES THAT STICK IN THE MIND. He looks at strangers with a novelist’s eye, and his portraits are pleasantly tinged with malice."
–The Washington Post Book World
"THEROUX AT HIS BEST . . . An armchair trip with Theroux is sometimes dark, but always a delight."
–Playboy
"AS SATISFYING AS A GLASS OF COOL WINE ON A DUSTY CALABRIAN AFTERNOON . . . With his effortless writing style, observant eye, and take-no-prisoners approach, Theroux is in top form chronicling this 18-month circuit of the Mediterranean."
–Kirkus Reviews (starred review)Paul Theroux‘s highly acclaimed novels include Blinding Light, Hotel Honolulu, My Other Life, Kowloon Tong, and The Mosquito Coast. His renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Dark Star Safari, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, and The Happy Isles of Oceania. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.The Cable Car to the Rock of Gibraltar
 
            People here in Western Civilization say that tourists are no different from apes, but on the Rock of Gibraltar, one of the Pillars of Hercules, I saw both tourists and apes together, and I learned to tell them apart. I had traveled past clumps of runty stunted trees and ugly houses (the person who just muttered, “Oh, there he goes again!” must read no further) to the heights of the Rock in a metal box suspended by a cable. Gibraltar is just a conspicuous pile of limestone, to which distance lends enchantment; a very small number of people cling to its lower slopes. Most of them are swarthy and bilingual, speaking intelligible English, and Spanish with an Andalusian accent. Mention Spain to them and they become very agitated, though they know that as sure as eggs are huevos the British will eventually hand them over to the King of Spain, just as they chucked Hong Kong into the horny hands of the dictator of China.
 
The Rock Apes of Gibraltar are Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus), the only native apes in Europe. The apes are still resident, and have lived there longer than most Gibraltarian families. There is a social order among the ape tribes, as well as ape rituals that are bizarre enough to be human. Ape corpses and skeletons are never found on the Rock. Somewhere in the recesses of this rock that looks like a mountain range there is said to be a secret mortuary established by the apes; ape funerals, ape mourning, ape burials. The apes are well established, but disadvantaged—unemployed, unwaged, destitute welfare recipients. The municipal government allocates money to feed them.
 
But there might be darker motive in this food aid. A powerful superstition, held by locals, suggests that if the apes vanish from Gibraltar, the Rock will cease to be British. For hundreds of years—since 1740, in fact—the apes have been mentioned by travelers—Grand Tourists, in whose footsteps I was following. Yet Gibraltar has been visited almost since Hercules, patron of human toil, flung it there on his journey to capture the Red Oxen of Geryones, the monster with three bodies (Labor Ten). He tossed another rock across the straits, Ceuta in Morocco. These two promontories, Cape and Abya to the Greeks—the Mediterranean bottleneck—are the twin Pillars of Hercules.
 
My idea was to travel from one pillar to the other, the long way, with the usual improvisations en route that are required of the impulsive traveler; all around the Mediterranean coast, the shores of light.
 
“The grand object of traveling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean,” Dr. Johnson said. “On those shores were the four great Empires of the world; the Assyrian, the Persian, the Grecian, and the Roman. All our religion, almost all our law, almost all our arts, almost all that sets us above savages, has come to us from the shores of the Mediterranean.”
 
“Our” of course is as questionable as “savages,” but you get the idea. A great deal happened on this coastline. It was not until the second century B.C. that the Romans sailed through the Pillars of Hercules. The reason for this late, if not timid, penetration of the straits was not the current, nor was it the inconvenient westerlies that blow through this narrow opening of the inland sea; it was the Mediterranean notion that nothing lay beyond the pillars except the Garden of the Hesperides and the lost continent of Atlantis, and hellish seas.
 
The pillars marked the limits of civilization, “the end of voyaging,” Euripides wrote; “the Ruler of Ocean no longer permits mariners to travel on the purple sea.” And later, in the second century B.C., Polybius wrote, “The channel at the Pillars of Herakles is seldom used, and by very few persons, owing to the lack of intercourse between the tribes inhabiting those remote parts … and to the scantiness of our knowledge of the outer ocean.”
 
Beyond the pillars were the chaos and darkness they associated with the underworld. Because these two rocks resembled the pillars at the temple to Melkarth in Tyre, the Phoenicians called them the Pillars of Melkarth. Melkarth was the Lord of the Underworld—god of darkness—and it was easy to believe that this chthonic figure prevailed over a sea with huge waves and powerful currents and ten-foot tides.
 
The point is not that the Mediterranean peoples had never ventured westward through the straits, but that they had dared it—the Phoenicians had reached Britain by a sea route—and verified that it had a wicked and destructive turbulence. From this they conceived the idea that nothing useful existed past the straits, only the spooky Mare Tenebrosum, the dark and dangerous ocean which lay beyond the Middle Sea, a purple river of furious water. The Greeks named this the Stream of Ocean. It circled the earth at which they were privileged to live at the center, its precise location at Delphi, where a stone like a toadstool marked the Navel of the World. Mediterranean, after all, means “middle of the earth.”
 
The surface current moves through the straits at a walking pace to the east, streaming through the fifteen-mile-wide pillars into the Mediterranean; but two hundred and fifty feet below this another sub-current rushes in the opposite direction, westward, into the Atlantic, pouring over the shallow sill of the straits, “that awful deep down torrent,” Molly Bloom murmurs in her bedtime reverie. The unusual circular exchange of water at the straits is the only way this just-about-landlocked sea is kept refreshed and alive. Very few large rivers flow into it. For thousands of years, until the Suez Canal was opened, to the strains of Verdi’s Aïda, in 1869, the Straits of Gibraltar—“The Gut,” to the English sailors, “The Gate of the Narrow Entrance” (Bab el Zukak) to the Moors—was the only waterway to the world.
 
Even so, the Mediterranean has an odd character. It has almost no tides at all, and except for a whirlpool here and there (notably at Messina), an absence of distinct marine currents. It is dominated by winds rather than currents, and each wind has a name and a series of specific traits: the Vendaval, the steady westerly that blows through the Straits of Gibraltar, La Tramontana, the strong wind of the Spanish coast, La Bora, the cold wind of Trieste, le Mistral, the cold dry northwesterly of the Riviera, and so on, through the Khamsin, the Sirocco, the Levanter, and about six others (often the same wind, with a different name) to the Gregale, the northeast wind of Malta that blows in winter and was probably the wind that caused Saint Paul to be shipwrecked on the coast of Malta, as described in the Bible (Acts 27–28).
 
It is not a sea that is affected by the phases of the moon—it has moods rather than monthlies. Its nervous character has been mentioned by sailors, and its colors—purple, wine-dark, and its blueness in particular. The Mediterranean was the White Sea to the Greeks—the Turks still use that name for it: Akdeniz, “White Sea,” and the Arabs use a variant, “The White Central Sea.” If the oceans can be compared to vast symphonies, the German traveler Emil Ludwig has written, the Mediterranean “is subdued in a way that suggests chamber music.” It is tentative, and its waves with their short fetch, and its strange swells, are unlike any found in the great oceans.
 
 
All over the Rock of Gibraltar there were signs in six languages (English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Arabic, French) that said Do Not Feed the Apes! and Apes Might Bite! These signs were more frequent at the top, where one of the ape tribes—the friendlier of the two—lived.
 
Here at the top of the Rock, an ectoplasmic middle-aged woman, a French tourist, plump and pushy and grinning, picked up a pebble and approached an ape. It was a mother ape that was nuzzling her child, urging it against her pink nipple, with that serene and happy expression that mothers have when they breast-feed their young. The tourist’s name, I felt sure, was Grisette. She poked the pebble at the mother ape, giggling, while her three friends watched. One of the friends jerked the arm of her small boy, forcing him to watch Grisette tease the ape.
 
The mother ape took the pebble and considered it a moment before dropping it to the ground. Grisette laughed very hard and then went closer, making a hideous face. Grisette wore glasses with lenses so thick and distorting, her eyes swam and changed shape as she nodded at this cornered ape. The mother ape expressed concern, and when Grisette reached over and touched her young suckling baby the mother ape raised a cautioning hand—a shapely hand wonderfully pink, human in miniature, with fine nails. There were enough lines on the ape’s palm to occupy a fortune-teller for a whole session of palmistry.
 
Provoked and a bit irritated by the cautioning mother ape, Grisette poked the baby ape as though testing a doorjamb with a Wet Paint sign. Grisette’s friends laughed again. The ape mother raised her cautioning hand again, and when Grisette pinched the baby, the mother ape rapped Grisette’s knuckles. This went on, back and forth, for a minute or so. I thought that the ape was going to leap into Grisette’s face and bite and claw her—Apes Might Bite!
 
But the mother ape showed enormous patience, as though she knew she was dealing with someone simpleminded and unpredictable, a nuisance rather than a threat. She merely raised a hand and restrained the stupid woman, and when Grisette put her big googly-eyed face nearer—simpering and calling her friends as she tormented the mother and child—all the mother ape did was show her teeth and she crept away, off the little rail, out of the sunshine where she had been suckling her infant. And as she padded away, still graceful in the face of all that provocation, the mother ape growled, just audibly to me, “This is unconscionable.”
 
Grisette moved heavily over to her fellow tourists, one of whom was hitting her child and saying, “I’m not a millionaire!” and an English one—British Army spouse, I supposed—“Get off me before you get a smacked bottom!” Grisette was chattering and scratching herself and looking to her friends to praise her for having pinched the ape baby and maddened the mother ape and driven them away.
 
And I thought: Yes, the apes are better mannered than the tourists, and while the tourists brutalized and screamed at their kids, the apes were tender towards their young. The apes did not say, “I told you to stop it—I’ll give you a clout!” The tourists yakked and giggled, the apes were quiet and thoughtful. The tourists teased the apes, the apes never teased the tourists. When the apes played they rolled over and over on the steep slopes or on the walkways of the Rock; when the tourists’ children played they hurt each other and made noise and it always seemed to end in tears. And the apes never made faces unless the tourists made faces at them first. Ape funerals were held in pious secrecy, a tourist death or funeral was accompanied by howling grief and hysterics. The tourists were obstreperous, the apes were dignified and correct. Yet every year apes are shot and killed on the Rock of Gibraltar for biting tourists.
 
The woman might have been a tourist from any country in the Mediterranean. She fit the description of “the Mediterranean sub-racial group” I found in a textbook entitled Advanced Level Geography (1964): “brown-skinned, long-headed, wavy-haired, dark-eyed, slightly-built.” These people traveled back and forth, across this interesting stretch of water, all the time, keeping to their particular basin. But Mediterranean tourists were generally so offensive and ill-natured that I made a vow early in my trip to ignore them, the way I ignored the flies in Australia; to avoid writing about tourists at all. Far better to write about the apes.
 
“This ape is cruel,” the tourist says, and it is like an epitaph for the world’s animals. “When I pinch him he bites me.”
 US

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