SOURCES OF WALKING

 

I bought a copy of Journey to the Source of the Nile by Christopher Ondaatje.  It was in the local charity shop, and  I bought it mostly because the index contains 60 odd references to Sir Richard Francis Burton. This is Mr Ondaatje: 

 

         He tells us, among many other things, that “the Swahili word for ‘white man’ is mzungu which comes from mzungu katimeaning ‘wandering around in circles, going nowhere.’” I think that’s worth knowing.

 

Also, if Ondaatje is to be believed (and why would you doubt him?), walking home from dinner in Zanzibar can be a scary business.  He eats at a Goan restaurant called Chit Chat which he finds to be “a fabulous treat,” … “However walking back … through the dark shadowy streets of Stone Town was far from pleasant.  As the evening darkened, the lanes of Stone Town became really claustrophobic.  Figures lurked in every archway and we were studied very closely as we walked quickly back to the safety of our small hotel.  I would certainly not have liked to make the journey across town on my own.” People said much the same to me about walking at night in Dublin.

 

Meanwhile, in tandem, I’ve been rereading Nabokov’s Lectures on Literatureand here he is writing about Joyce’s Ulysses,  “If you have ever tried to stand and bend your head so as to look back between your knees with your face turned upside down, you will see the world in a totally different light.  Try it on the beach: it is very funny to see people walking when you look at them upside down. They seem to be, with each step, disengaging their feet from the glue of gravitation without losing their dignity.  Well, this trick of changing the vista, of changing the prism and the viewpoint, can be compared to Joyce’s new literary technique.”

         Well yes, I’m sure it can, and I know that Nabokov is one of the greats, even so I never imagined he was a man who’d look back between his knees with his face turned upside down, but apparently he did, and again that seems to be something worth knowing.

         And then one day in the Times last week, under the headline “Can’t Sleep?  Don’t panic – here’s how to cope” we were told “A BMJ study showed gentle 30-minute morning walks were enough to improve memory and executive function.”

Honey, I didn’t even know I had an executive function but apparently I do, and so do most other people. A little research tells me “Executive function is a set of mental    skills. It includes working memory, flexible thinking, and self-control.”  Well OK – and this gentle 30 minute morning walk – is that a version of wandering around in circles, going nowhere?  If so, that’s OK by me. 

 

SPEKE MEMORY

If you’re looking for a catchy but modest (possibly faux-modest) title for your travel book then you could do a lot worse than A Walk Across Africa, James Augustus Grant’s 1864 volume, especially since it has the knockout subtitle Or, Domestic Scenes from My Nile Journal.

Grant’s book tells in part the story of his expedition with John Hanning Speke in search of the source of the Nile at Lake Victoria: they found it, more or less.

Speke was a profound, and in some sense perhaps ultimately a mortal, enemy of Sir Richard Francis Burton.  They too travelled together in search of the source of the Nile, and failed to find it, more or less.  

The two men loathed each other.  Speke shot himself (accidentally? we don’t know) the day before he was about to have a public debate with Burton.  This is Speke being chased by Somalis, on an earlier expedition with Burton.

There’s a tendency, and I share it, to find yourself ‘supporting’ either Speke or Burton as though they were opposing football teams, and I’m totally with Burton, even if I accept that at this point in history it’s a fairly meaningless kind of support.

Burton’s great memorial is his famous tomb in Mortlake in the shape of a Bedouin tent. 

Speke’s memorial, which I only recently discovered, is an obelisk made of Aberdeen red granite, which is located in Kensington Gardens, not a million miles away from the Peter Pan statue.  A plaque set in the ground tells us the memorial was sponsored by Sir Roderick Murchison of the Royal Geographical Society, and paid for by public subscription.

My unscientific observation when I went there is that the people who walk through Kensington Gardens, often with their dogs, pay very little attention to the Speke obelisk, although one or two of them did pay attention to me because I was looking at it with such intensity, and taking photographs, and they probably thought I was a nutter, so they walked on that much faster.

The memorial, as all true obelisk fans with observe, is not a true obelisk since it’s in three parts.  A true obelisk is made from a single piece.  I suppose that Aberdeen granite doesn’t come in big enough chunks.