Free Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph by Ted Simon

the past, on half-baked impressions left by Bible tales and Christmas carols which I had discounted then as silly fables and superstitions. Such things had no place in the crowded streets and classrooms of my childhood. They were only possible here, under this sky, in this light and on this land. This was Bible country, and on a night like this one could believe.
    I walked over to the shepherds and exchanged the Arab greetings I had learned. We could do no more. We smoked a cigarette together peacefully and after ten minutes I returned to the tent and slept.
    During the hours before dawn the temperature fell below zero and I woke to find the dew frozen on the ground. The shepherds were still there, and now they were as remarkable for their poverty as they had been for their grandeur. Their faces were ugly and dulled by ignorance. Their robes were transformed from silver cloth to sacking. They were huddled on the ground, miserably cold, two ill-favoured and pathetic peasants gazing in awe at the paraphernalia I was struggling to pack with frozen fingers. I would have made coffee for them, but there was no water left. The contrast between day and night inspired no lofty sentiments in me at the time. It was too cold for that.
    I shared my last cigarettes with them and left. At the next town I realized that I was not on the road I had meant to take, but was heading willy-nilly for the antiquities. An hour later I was at Cyrene.
    I meant to pay only a token visit. Roman ruins, I felt, were a bit too close to home, and my mind always seemed to be travelling several thousand miles ahead of my body. The entrance to the site was a wonderful gateway of honey-coloured sandstone soaring above me. I entered and found myself in a vast forum, rows of columns reaching out beyond anything I could have imagined possible, and between the columns tantalizing glimpses of more marvels in every direction. I was alone in a great Roman city, certainly the only sightseer there. At one time I saw some robed women in an amphitheatre, but they fled at my approach. I spent the day wandering, entranced, among pools and patios, gymnasia,
    temples, and in and out of the homes of ordinary Roman citizens. In one part an Italian archaeologist was involved in restoration with some workmen, but they seemed to belong more to the city's past history than to the present. Later in the afternoon the bubble burst for ten minutes when a party of very superior air force commanders swept round the ruins at the speed of flight, with their uniformed photographer bursting blood vessels to break the record for exposures per minute. He was using flash in that blinding sun which meant that he was only interested in their faces, and I thought that summed up their trip very well, Just faces.
    I finished the day on the lower level of the city, with the Mediterranean spread out below me. As the sun itself faded the light seemed to spring out of the stone, and the city glowed before falling back into the night. I knew that these experiences, the shepherds, Cyrene, were striking deep into me, that each day's events seemed to intensify the following day, and yet I had barely grazed the edge of my first continent. At the hotel I ate a meal with two French salesmen taking time off for a side trip. They were pleasant to talk to, informative about Arab deficiencies, but they seemed to me to have left their imaginations at home in Paris. Did I seem as ordinary, as uninspired to them? They were used to Africa, of course. It struck me that everywhere in the world I would meet people to whom being there would be an ordinary, everyday event. Was my journey really nothing more than a state of mind?
    I slept out again that night, on the coast just beyond Marsa Susa, and I knew next morning that I would have to reach the border that day. By lunchtime I was already in Tobruk, a dry bone of a city, splintering and powdering in the sun. I met an Irishman in the street. He worked for the 'Aisle'