The Pillars of Hercules

Excerpt from “The Next Time,” from The Collected Poems of Robert Graves, reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press, in the U.S., and Carcanet Press in the U.K. and Canada.

The edition published by arrangement with G. P. Putnam’s Sons

Fawcett is a registered trademark and the Fawcett colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

www.ballantinebooks.com

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-96586

eISBN: 978-0-307-79028-6

Map by John Burgoyne

v3.1

To the memory of my father,

Albert Eugene Theroux,

13 January 1908–30 May 1995

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Epigraph

1. The Cable Car to the Rock of Gibraltar

2. The “Mare Nostrum” Express to Alicante

3. The M.V. Punta Europa to Mallorca

4. The “Virgen de Guadalupe” Express to Barcelona and Beyond

5. “Le Grand Sud” to Nice

6. The Ferry Île de Beauté to Corsica

7. The Ferry Ichnusa to Sardinia

8. The Ferry Torres to Sicily

9. The Ferry Villa to Calabria

10. The Ferry Clodia from Chioggia

11. The Ferry Liburnija to Zadar

12. The Ferry Venezia to Albania

13. The Seabourn Spirit to Istanbul

14. The M. V. Akdeniz: Through the Levant

15. The 7:20 Express to Latakia

16. The Ferry Sea Harmony to Greece

17. The Ferry El Loud III to Kerkennah

18. To Morocco on the Ferry Boughaz

About the Author

Have you ever reflected on what an important sea the Mediterranean is?

—James Joyce in a letter to his brother Stanislaus

The Mediterranean is an absurdly small sea; the length and greatness of its history makes us dream it larger than it is.

—Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar

1

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.”