Mr. President. Fellow
members. My papers written for the Literary Club have all been incidents from
my travels. This was planned with malice aforethought, on the grounds that
such papers are easy to write, that the doing appeals to my sentimental and
nostalgic nature, that I am always intrigued with the missionary hope that my
enthusiasm for travel may result in the seduction of another habitué and finally
that no cerebration is required. To bring my series of travel tales to a
close, I have been planning a kaleidoscopic paper with the title
"Hotel," obvious enough, and now I find that a professional writer
has published a so-so novel with my title, which really puts me out. But I am
back in with "Inn."
INN
My father, who was a pleasant boastful man, took great pride in extolling the
generous hospitality of his parents. Never did anyone come to the door of
that simple abode in Tilsit, in East Prussia, invariably in the dead of
winter, but he was welcomed in, encouraged to warm himself at or on the
porcelain stove, and given a steaming fragrant bowl of potato soup with knoedel. I always suspected that my paternal
grandparents, in the middle of the last century, ran an inn surreptitiously,
probably without paying a license fee to the counts and archdukes of that
feudal state, and received a fee of adequate pfennig in return for their warm
hospitality.
The overnight guests, my father said, were often travelers from Russia,
traders, on their way to Koenigsberg with a
horse-drawn sledge full of pig bristles. There were often hints, in my
father's tales, that my shrewd grandfather was not only the genial host, but
that he was often successful in squeezing out a modest commission by
directing the trader to the right British bristle buyer in the big city
market.
With that tradition of inn inheritance, it is not surprising that I have had
an interest in inns. Most of us do. Moreover, I love to travel and how could
one travel pleasantly without an inn? I might define an inn as a cozy little
hotel. One might add the adjective quaint. This is because one has been
brought up in the cozy quaint confines of English literary pieces of the
nineteenth century.
But I do not promise, in this essay, to confine myself to inns; the reader
may find himself strolling arm in arm with me down the cool corridors of the Mamoulia in Marrakech or having a Pim's
cup in the great drinking lobby of the Raffles in Singapore. But I do promise that
we will not walk through the air curtain doors of a Hilton, or argue with the
austere room clerk of a Sheraton, or stumble through the plush rugs of the
Ritz lobby in Lisbon.
In fact, we will not stop over in Lisbon
any more, now that the people who know go to the Ritz, since the Aviz fell to the bulldozers. The small Aviz was one of the most delightful of European hotels.
One can hardly recall without tears the immense gorgeous hand-carved
fireplace and mantel in the tiny lobby, the elegant curved marble stairs
leading down to the sumptuous dining room, whose great draped windows opened
on the luxurious walled garden and the silly bizarre quality of the Manueline architecture. Why did the richest man in the
world, the Armenian munitions dealer Gulbenkian,
make it his home for many years?
We liked the elevator. As Bangkok has its collection of royal barges, Lisbon
has its collection of royal carriages, housed for the tourists in the Riding
School near the Jeronimos, and the whimsical
architect of the Aviz used the cab of one of the
dated carriages for the elevator, with pink plush tufted seat, small windows
draped with gold-fringed velvet, and a carriage door instead of a sliding
grill. The trouble was that the cab was much too tiny and too prissy to carry
luggage and so some overworked porter, tired of lugging portmanteaus up to
the third floor and down again the next day, rigged up a platform of raw
two-by-fours under the royal carriage elevator, necessitating double jerky
stops first for passengers and then for bags.
The high-ceilinged rooms were fussy with French rugs and antique furniture,
and when you pulled the chain in the toilet you looked up to see that the
tank away up there on the wall was Royal Doulton
china.
Since we are in the toilet we may as well cover the subject which my
traveling companion insists merits a paragraph in any essay on inns and
hotels, namely, toilet paper. Where does one look
for it and what does one find? In the St. James and Albany
in Paris, the
little white-enameled box holding folded slips of paper is on the other side
of the room. Sometimes the dispensing contraption for rolls is hidden under
the wash bowl, and usually it does not work well, being either too tight so
that one must unwind the tissue from the immovable roll, or so loose that the
entire roll falls out at the first touch and disappears under the antiquated
four-legged bathtub.
When one finally does have it in hand, it can turn out to be anything from
frail tissue paper to unyielding Kraft-quality wrapping paper, and the
surface may be anything from hard enameled stock to sandpaper. One often
yearns for the familiarity of the softer pages of the Sears Roebuck
catalogue.
Not being willing to trade the delightful Aviz for
the plush Ritz in Lisbon, we find it necessary to by-pass that once
intriguingly cosmopolitan city and lodge twenty miles away by expressway in Sintra, at the lovely Hotel Palacio
dos Sete Ais, the palace
hotel of the seven sighs, not the seven sighs of sorrow or fatigue, but the
seven sighs of rapture. We leave the narrow, climbing, winding road and drive
through the park- like grounds, past the wall covered with fuchsia in full
bloom, to the simple front door, where well-fed, smooth-faced Carlos greets
us as friends returned from a long journey and leads us up the long
white-spindled staircase to room 312, with windows open over the formal
garden, the rose garden, the lemon orchard and beyond, down the slope, the
farms of Portugal, the clumps of yellow gorse, the red tile roofs and in the
distance, the misty blue Atlantic.
Shall we dress and go to dinner? We stop in the pink and white barroom, where
the bar itself is hardly more than a cabinet, but wondrous elixirs pour forth
therefrom and sensitive Miguel seems to be ready,
on a hot tennis afternoon, with a tall thin- tumblered
gin and tonic, or, after dinner, a rare old bottle of Madeira Sercial.
Very fancy folk come out from Lisbon
for luncheon and often for dinner, and occasionally in the room with the
closed doors there is an official affair, for the Portuguese government uses
this inn for entertainment of foreign guests.
Dinner tonight begins with a dab of pate de foie gras with truffles, followed by turtle soup brightened
with sherry wine. For our simple meal the entrée is sautéed swordfish,
brought in fresh from Paniche on the near-by
seacoast. The vegetables, cooked and in salad, are
from the garden of the inn. The wine is white and chilled, and comes from the
vineyards near Oporto
in the north. The dessert is chocolate soufflé in casserole and one may
resist, or succumb, to the delicate creamy sauce.
Since the evening is mild, and fairly young, we have a small black coffee on
the terrace, under the row of plane trees whose branches have been spliced from
tree to tree like a daisy chain, and look up at crazy Pena Castle,
on the rocky hill, silhouetted against the pastel evening sky.
Sete Ais is a very
soothing and comforting inn, especially before we head for home after travel
in foreign parts that lack the amenities of European innhood
with the Portuguese flavor. Like Afghanistan, for instance. Like
the old Kabul Hotel.
We had holed in at Dean's Hotel in Peshawar,
where our first unscreened room was busy with hornets, waiting from day to
day for the old Pathan official in the Emigration
Bureau to give us and our Afghani driver permission to leave the country. Peshawar was exciting,
almost too exciting. In the first place our Pakistani air force friends, in
the encampment, had shot down an Indian bomber two hundred miles within the
country's border, and had captured and questioned the parachuted crew.
In answer to his wife's concerned question, Colonel Munir
growled, "I hope this is it!" Actually, "it" did not
happen until six years later and then only for a few vicious hours. But that
day, tea on the Peshawar
terrace was tense, and the girls skipped off to the badminton court to get
away from it.
In the second place, it was Eid, the feast day at
the close of Ramadan. The Moslem high priests set the day after study of the
current phases of the moon and that year they failed to agree, in adjoining
dioceses, and so we celebrated Eid in Rawalpindi one day and in Peshawar the next. The
tribesmen came into that frontier city in great raucous numbers for the
religious festival. The bazaars were crowded with groups of jostling
mountaineers, wild bearded fellows, shirttails flapping out from under bright
embroidered vests, with jaunty hats of shiny black unborn lamb, with rifles
slung over their shoulders, revolvers bristling in holsters and knives handy
in waist sashes.
Official permission to leave came early one morning and by eleven we had
packed the station-wagon to the eaves and ordered our reluctant Afghani
driver to set out for the Khyber Pass and for the great gorge of the Kabul River beyond the border. Awe over the
wonder and beauty of the rugged mountains and the roaring river was mixed
with alarm and anxiety over the halt for a flat tire in bandit territory. The
long exhausting drive, without a stop for food, ended at nine that night when
Janbaz pulled the rattling car to a halt at the
unprepossessing door of the old Kabul Hotel.
Management did not deign to notice us, but an attendant carried our bags and
helped us light a fire in the wood stove in our barren room. One could have
warm water for shave or bath by starting a similar wood fire in the heater in
the chilled bathroom, but one was a little discouraged in the prospect by the
fact that the running water was brown.
We went hopefully down to the first-floor low-ceilinged smoke-filled dining
room only to be offered thin borscht, greasy fried eggs, dry brown bread and
weak tea, in dishes that had not been washed properly by a waiter who had not
been washed properly either.
We went to bed shivering with cold and hunger, but the sun was bright the
next morning. Out of our window we saw spring come blowing into Kabul and on the
streets burly Afghans in bright purple padded coats and bevies of teen-aged
girls on their way to school, all covered up from crown to heel in graceful
flowing chaderi in soft shades of grey, pale blue,
pink and delicate green. Friends then arranged for us to have our meals at
the International Club where we enjoyed delicious "chicken roost"
(or roast chicken) and good German beer for both lunch and dinner for each
one of our Kabul
days.
Vera Penzl and her husband Herbert, the Pashtu scholar, invited us to dinner one dry night. I say
"dry" night, because they were living in a house rented from an
Afghan nobleman and when it rained the mud roof leaked generously and the
deep red rugs from Mazur i Sherif
slid around dangerously on the mud floor. It was not practical to invite
guests in the rainy season.
After dinner we relaxed on soft cushions, drank Turkish coffee and talked
about wolves, wild tulips and women's rights. At a pause, Vera asked where we
had started our motor trip.
Actually, it began at the elegant doors of the Ashoka
Hotel in New Delhi, that monument to luxury and extravagance and high prices,
but the first night out found us in the holy city of the Sikhs, Amritsar; the home of the Golden Temple. We were to stay
at Madame Bhandari's Guest House and we could not
find it. Everyone we asked knew Bhandari. He had
been the dedicated mayor of the trouble-ridden city, but he was dead, and it
was believed that his widow lived somewhere in the encampment. We finally
found her, in a pleasant modern bungalow. She took in a handful of guests as
they might turn up in Amritsar
from time to time, and educated her two daughters in America.
There were roses and mosquitoes in the garden. She raised her own vegetables
and kept a Brahmin cow, a goat and a burro, the first two of which supplied
her table with fresh cream, milk, butter and cheese. The meals were
fascinating. Breakfast was informal, each guest being expected to get his
own, unless one could induce one's spouse to get it for one. Luncheon was
delightfully light with salads, fruits, biscuits and tea. Dinner was a
banquet, served with deft formality by dedicated servants. One night dessert
was a foot-high peacock, fashioned entirely of spun sugar.
There was only one serious flaw in the establishment and that was that
bathrooms had not been changed when the bungalow became a guest house, with
the result that guests had to find a bathroom where they could, even if it
meant wandering through some other guest's bedroom at any hour of the day or
night.
But we missed the comfort and warm hospitality and intriguing informality of
Mrs. Bhandari's Guest House when we stopped overnight
in Banihal on our way to the Vale of Kashmir. We
had lingered too long, in the morning, on the white marble banks of the Pool
of Immortality in the Golden Temple, in Amritsar, and so missed the
early start which we needed for our long drive. Moreover, our Hindu driver,
much scorned by Mrs. Bhandari, could not find our
scheduled eating place at noon in Jammu,
and wasted two hours of our precious time there, without result. We had a
chocolate bar for lunch.
Partition had closed, for Indians, the old accepted road via Rawalpindi to Srinagar in Kashmir.
The Indians had developed another road, via Jammu,
and at the time had just opened the Banihal Pass tunnel, at ten thousand feet.
This is the road we followed, climbing higher and higher in the Himalayas, delayed by washouts, fallen trees and often
forced to wait for long periods, to give the right of way to strings of army
lorries on their way up or down. Night fell. It began to rain. We developed a
soft tire. No one we asked, whether lorry driver, bus driver or mountain
shepherd, knew how far it might be to Banihal, but
since there was only one road, we could not miss it.
Eventually, that night, we arrived and easily found the Government Guest
House, where an old Indian civil servant greeted us, pulling out of his
pocket a mutilated slip of paper, the notice of our reservation, sent to him
from New Delhi,
three months previously. He had carried it with him all the time,
anticipating our arrival. He said pathetically that we were the first
non-Indians who had ever stopped with him and he gave us eggs, bread, fruit
and tea for supper.
It was cold. It began to snow. The fireplace in our simple room was boarded
up. We went to bed wearing everything we owned, wool sox, wool underwear,
knit pajamas, flannel shirts and topcoats and we were still cold.
There was a room beyond the bedroom which might be called the bathroom. All
of the bathroom facilities were removable. There was a small ditch outside
the building in the rear.
We wanted to arise at dawn to continue our precarious journey through the
weather and the mountains to the pass, but we were forced to delay our start
until two in the afternoon, because the narrow road was one-way from the pass
until that hour.
In Srinagar
that night we picked up our reservations at the luxurious Oberoi
Palace Hotel. After a bit the travel man called on us to talk about the
program for the following day and asked us by which flight we had arrived.
When I said we had come by motorcar, he was shocked, saying, "But no one
comes by motorcar. The road is bad. The trouble is that the route is laid
over a soft mountain."
We had similar road and similar problems, when, some years ago, we stopped
for a holiday in Arequipa,
in the Andes, in Peru.
But there we lived happily in one of the most delightful inns of all of our
travels, Quinta Bates, operated by Tia Bates of international fame. The inn itself was a
great rambling structure of stone and timbers built haphazardly against the
side of the mountain, with many different levels and stairs and hallways
leading off in all directions. Our first room was practically a stone-walled
cell; after we had complained sufficiently to Tia,
she sent the doctor and his wife off to the seashore at Mollendo
and gave us his bungalow in the garden. We had our own bathroom there and
could get warm water by lighting a match to a pan of fuel oil and setting it
under a copper coil.
The garden was a wonderland. Everything flourished in it. There were apple
trees, peach trees, lemon trees and banana trees, all bearing fruit at the
same time. Our northern spring-blooming iris and our fall-blooming
chrysanthemums were in full blossom side by side. Tropical plants and
tropical trees thrived. Climbing geranium plants, with their roots in the
rich earth of the garden, bloomed all the way up the three-story walls and
covered with pink blossoms the arbor on the roof, where we had our quiet
breakfast every day looking at the great Andes, at Chechani,
at El Miste the great extinct volcano and at the
Alto Toledo, all peaks of eighteen to twenty thousand feet.
When we arrived there from Lima,
Manuel the major domo, refused us entrance at the
garden gate, saying that there was no room. I insisted on seeing Tia even though Manuel growled that she was ill. He ushered
me into her bedroom which was very noisy with a large Spanish family arguing
over where they should go since there was no room for them in the quinta. Tia beckoned me to her
bedside, where she whispered into my ear, "Son, I'm in a hell of a mess.
People come to my hotel and they won't ever leave."
She was about seventy-five at the time and she looked just like Queen Victoria. On the
bed-stand beside her was her gorgeous strand of large Peruvian emeralds and a
loaded Colt revolver.
It was in that lovely establishment that we met for the first time our
friends and traveling companions of many years, Alice and Meyer Greenbaum. Ten years later they asked us to fly up the
Amazon River with them, a thousand miles to Manaos
and to go down again to Belem at the delta, by Booth
Line steamer. A problem could have been hotel accommodations, but a
state-encouraged Brazilian insurance company had just built and opened the
six-story Hotel Amazonas in Manaos,
air-conditioned. Manaos is the old rubber boom town
of fifty years ago, with a great and famous opera house built, in those
prosperous days, of imported Italian marble. The city was now hardly
surviving in its struggle against nature and the river, but the hotel was
built for the air travel trade, the entrepreneurs of that day believing that Manaos could be a half-way stop for the four-engine
planes on their way overland form Caracas to Rio de Janeiro, because until
that time air travel had gone around the coast of Brazil rather than risk
crossing the jungles of the Amazon valley. Unfortunately for the investors,
the traffic went to jets which can fly non-stop overland from Caracas to Rio, with no
possible need for the airfield or air-conditioned hotel at Manaos.
But it was new and sumptuous when we were there and after a hot day of
boating on the enormous river, or bargaining for leopard skins or blow-guns
in the steaming market, it was wonderful to come back into the artificial
coolness of the Amazonas. The hotel was new, the
staff was new and the bar-boy knew nothing about mixing a drink. Meyer does
and he was very ready and willing to step behind the bar to show the
bartender how to do it. But Meyer's Spanish and my English and the
bartender's Portuguese did not mix as well as did the gins and the whiskies and
the grenadines. The bartender did not get accustomed to the English names of
the cocktails. One night the four of us enjoyed a delicious cool
old-fashioned, reciped by Meyer and executed with
skill by the bartender and the chit came up to the dining room marked,
"four old fish."
Another fascinating inn is also on the banks of a great river and that is the
Victoria Falls Hotel on the Zambesi
River in Rhodesia. It is a large pleasant
building in the typical British colonial style, very comfortable, very
efficient, serving well the tourists who come for stays of two or three days
to see the wonder of the world, Victoria Falls, named by the local tribespeople, "the smoke that thunders."
When we were there one walked from the hotel about three or four hundred
years to the terminal of what was called "the trolley." There was
no trolley, but there were steel tracks and a car; the car held about eight
tourists. It was propelled by two agile natives who sweated like fury pushing
the small loaded car up grades, but jumped aboard with great glee and
satisfaction on the down grades. The engineering was excellent.
The other terminal was at the entrance to the rain forest along the fearsome
and beautiful banks of the falls, and there everyone got soaking wet. After
getting drenched one day and trolleying back to the
hotel, we stopped to watch, only a hundred yards from the hotel veranda, a
pack of about fifty baboons scampering about in a great banyan tree.
Somewhere along the track there was a small signboard, absurd in the jungles
of central Africa, "Look out for the
trolley car." And there is that other amazing sign, when the sightseeing
jeeps push through the brush in Queen Elizabeth Park in Uganda,
"Elephants have the right of way." I will not mention the lodge in
Queen Elizabeth Park, where we played bridge one night in the lounge, with
the entire ceiling above us alive with lizards on the alert for mosquitoes
and sandflies.
The most pleasing and most satisfying inn in Africa, for the tourist or even
the traveler, was the Ruwenzori Inn, in the upper Belgian Congo. On the slopes of the Mountains of the
Moon an entrepreneur from Brussels,
tired of the bourse, had built, with imagination, a lovely resort. The
rambling buildings and gardens faced away from the mountains. Sitting on the
veranda, one looked out over thousands of acres of the beautiful green hills
and green forests of the verdant Congo.
The owner had guided a mountain stream through his carpet of lawns and used
it to feed three huge pools. The same stream gurgled through a small pleasant
flower garden behind the inn, and was used to irrigate a large vegetable
garden that was manicured as carefully as if it were located in Ghent.
After dinner the first night, with Belgian sophisticated recipes adapted to
local fruits and vegetables and wines, we teased the caged lemur for a bit
and then sat in lawn chairs to wait for the moon to accomplish its rendezvous
with its mountains. There were some distant eerie alarming sounds, explained
to us as a pride of lions roaring their displeasure over hunger or boredom,
and then a forest fire flared up in a gully on the mountainside and spread a
little and moved slowly down the slope, tortuously and threateningly in our
direction. As we half dozed in our chairs in the moonlight and the soft night
air brought midnight all too soon, we wondered whether the fire might later
spread and engulf the lovely valley where we were, but it never did. Africa is so big.
If one were writing about African lions and inns, the tale would be short
without mention of the Tree House at Nyeri, but it
must be skipped in this report because we were in Kenya at the tail end of the Mau Mau disturbances and the Mau Mau
had destroyed the famous Tree House. When we registered at the Norfolk Hotel
in Nairobi, a
barefoot black porter, in a white gown with a red sash and wearing a red fez,
carried our bags across the courtyard to our room. There was a sign posted
conspicuously on the door, telling us in large black letters, "Lock your
door. Lock your windows."
Our last port of call that year in Africa was Addis Ababa, where we stopped for a week at
the Roth Hotel. I enjoyed its German cuisine in the dark heavy-beamed dining
room on the second floor and the location was delightful, because in the evening
one had to walk only a few steps to see the cattle being driven home from
pasture, across the white marble terrace of the Opera House.
The strange schizophrenic city, mostly ancient Hamite,
but with splotches of modern western business architecture, was very
international during that period. The hotel teemed with salesmen from France, Germany,
the United States, the
U.S.S.R. and Israel, and
in the midst of this appeared a company of ballet dancers from Peking. They were young and handsome, both male and
female, and they were dedicated to their art. In fact, they practiced the pas
de deux up and down the corridors all day and all
night. Whenever you opened the elevator door and stepped out, you bumped into
a Communist pirouetting on one toe. Most distressing of all were the
accompanists, the musicians, who all night long played throbbing rhythms on
their drums and Manchu minors on their flutes.
But the unkindest cut of all came as we were leaving. The embassy had
arranged for the four of us to have an audience with the King of Kings,
dressed us up in borrowed striped trousers and cutaways, and transported us
in the embassy's shiny black Cadillac limousine. Afterwards, as we
disembarked smugly at the Roth, at the same time another shiny black Cadillac
limousine flying the red flag of China was taking aboard four or five of the
Chinese ballet youngsters, not clad in their rehearsal pants and soft- soled
slippers, but the boys in striped trousers and cutaways and the girls in long
black satin Peking gowns, splendid with cultured pearl ear-bobs. We thought,
"What is Communism coming to?"
If they had not been Communists, we would have loved them for being young,
for being dedicated ballet dancers and for being Chinese. We had met this
same type of person when we had visited in Peking
many years ago, before the Japanese invasion and had found them stimulating,
gracious, intelligent and full of pleasant humors.
One of our hotel experiences has to do with that visit. Our host, Laurence
Salisbury of the American Embassy, had loved in the Orient for many years and
he arranged a very adventurous itinerary for us. It included a jaunt to the
Yung Kang caves at the edge of the Gobi
Desert, where the early Buddhists,
caravanning into north China
form India,
camped underneath the sandstone cliffs and spent their time religiously
cutting caves in the soft cliffs and sculpturing on the walls thereof a
thousand Buddhas.
Our first stop was to be overnight in Kalgan, in
the province of Chahar, where the powerful war lord,
Sung Che Yuan, ruled loyally in the name of Chiang
Kai Shek as the occasion demanded, or disloyally
likewise. The war lord, temporarily prosperous, had shown fit to construct a
new hotel for the New China and had named it the Grand Hotel de Chahar. Salisbury had
written ahead for a reservation there for the three of us, but the mail was misdelivered that day (it happens in Chicago in the year 1966) and the
reservation was received by the Grand Hotel de Kalgan,
in error.
When the express train came to a steaming halt at the dingy railway station
at Kalgan at
midnight, a blousy Russian woman greeted us and ordered her huge Mongolian
porter to carry our bags. But Salisbury jumped off the train with great
liveliness, stopped the porter, insulted the astonished woman by telling her
that her hotel was full of bugs and that he would not bring his friends into
it at any price, pushed Alice into a rickshaw for hire, me into another,
found one for himself and shouted in loud Mandarin, "Pronto to the Grand
Hotel de Chahar!"
By this time the train had pulled out, the station was pitch dark, there were
no lights except the tiny kerosene lanterns swinging on each rickshaw and our
boys started trotting off in the darkness and silence, the only sounds being
the squeaking of the unoiled rickshaw wheels and
the angry scolding of the chagrined Russian hotel proprietress.
Alice's
rickshaw boy was the best sprinter and soon outdistanced us. She became
alarmed as her vehicle swung around sharp corners in the dark narrow streets
and she could see nothing but an occasional figure in a long blue gown
slinking in a doorway, or a pair of rats slithering down the gutter. She
feared that she might be thrown out and called for Salisbury but he was out of earshot and of
course did not answer. She knew that the two phrases "Man man-di" and "Kwai kwai-di" meant "Go slower" or "Go
faster" to a rickshaw boy, but in the excitement she forgot which meant
which and so hesitated to use either.
The frightening trip lasted about fifteen or twenty minutes, and at the end
of it we seemed to have come out of the city streets and were in more or less
open country. Down the road ahead of us was a cluster of lights. At about
this time, Salisbury's rickshaw passed me and then passed Alice, with Salisbury
noisily urging all of us and our rickshaw boys to hurry, and a couple of
other speeding rickshaws appeared from out of the darkness and we all seemed
to be in a desperate race to reach the refuge of the lights.
Of course the lights were the hotel and of course the race was to get to the
hotel desk first to get the last room available, Salisbury leaping from his rickshaw and
dashing through the doors while the rest of us were still gasping for breath.
Alice and I got the presidential suite, provincially elegant with new heavy
mission- style oak furniture. I fell asleep immediately, forgetting how
puzzled I was over the very bad odors in the very modern bathroom. In the
morning, as I walked in Chinese slippers over the tiled bathroom floor and
felt it give slightly under my weight, I realized that the plumbers of Chahar had never seen this wondrous kind of thing before,
and had installed the washbowl and the tub and the facility without arranging
for any drainage or sewerage or septic tanks. Water was brought in in pails for washing, bathing and flushing, but there was
no place for it to go, and so it was all there, under the floor.
My essay on inns will come to an end, after wandering over several
continents, with my report on the two weeks which we spent in the fragrant
languid courtyard of the puri or palace of Tjgorde Gede Agung in the tiny village
of Ubud in
the rice fields of Bali.
The palace, or establishment, contained a number of separate buildings, which
were used for various purposes, for worship, for entertainment, for sleeping,
for cooking, for spinning and weaving, for housing the master, the various
members of his family, the relatives, the servants, and the paying guests,
and the cows, and the goats, and the ducks. There was an antique motorcar
also, which we loved, because Barata, the Balinese
youth assigned to us as companion and guide, and the chauffeur drove us in
it, slowly but surely, to many lovely places on the island.
There were doors and doorways in the puri but no
locks or latches, and the fascinating human traffic going past our quarters
in the courtyard seemed never to cease, day or night.
I comment on this, because it is necessary to note that night is not
dedicated to sleeping in Bali. We were
exhausted from difficult travel our first afternoon un Ubud,
for the Indonesians in Djarkarta had cancelled our
reservations for the flight to Denpasar, and it had
taken many hours of effort, a practically sleepless night in a screened cage
in a hot room in the old Duta Indonesia Hotel,
determination and gall, to get aboard the Garuda
plane bound for Bali. Nevertheless, when Barata
suggested going to the dance that night, we agreed enthusiastically and asked
at what hour. He replied that we ought to start at ten o'clock if we wished
to see the dancers being made up for the dance.
We ambled down the unpaved village street at ten, the hairdressers and the
tailors and the seamstresses and the manicurists began working on the dancers
at eleven, the people of the village and their little children began
gathering at the informal theater at midnight, the gamelon
musicians began to tune up at once, the dancers appeared gorgeously and
beautifully and dramatically at two, and we went to bed at four. This happens
all the time.
The villagers are all rice farmers. They get up early and go to the fields
and paddies with their long-handled spades and their cattle. They come home
about four in the afternoon, walk down to the river to bathe, eat a little,
enjoy a cockfight, sleep, get up in time to take part in the dance at night,
or to be in the orchestra, or in the audience, and of course the dance may be
in the village of Ubud or it may be in a village
several miles away across the rice fields.
When we woke in the morning the daylight was clearest blue and the duck boy
was leading his file of ducks through the courtyard, one by one over the
stile, on their way to their happy insect-devouring day in the rice paddies.
Waking, one looked up at the ceiling, which was covered with a room-size, Chinese
silk embroidery, picturing the ideal pastoral life along the banks and gorges
of an imaginary Yangtze River.
A servant boy did everything for us, cleaned our lovely rooms, made our beds,
raised and lowered our nettings, washed our garments and served our meals. We
ate little, for the weather was very hot for us, but what we ate was nectar
and ambrosia. Principally we had thin clear chicken soup, bowls of rice and magosteens, the most fragrant fruit in the whole world.
Agung, the young patriarch, scion of a princely
house, civic leader, patron of the arts, counselor for the members of his
family and for the villagers, student and philosopher, seemed to like us and
he always visited us at meals, not eating with us, but sitting cross-legged
on a cane chair, always in a different sarong and talked to us about the
village and the big city and the island and the enemies in Java and the
impact of the modern industrial world on the perfect, completely satisfying,
pastoral and aesthetic life of Bali.
One day he held forth for an hour on predestination and souls and other
manifestations of Hindu faith. He told us of the cycles and phases of the
infinite history of the universe and stated that we were going through an
unhappy phase, a phase of war and of revolution and of social turbulence,
with men and nations fighting with one another, unable to agree or to
compromise, unable to understand one another.
"What a pity!" he sighed.
He looked at us for sympathy.
"Just think," he said, "how wonderful the world would be if
people would only try to understand one another. Just think how much more
peaceful the puri would be if my two wives would
only try to understand one another!"
Agung staged a farewell dinner for us in stately
fashion. It was held out of doors, in the sacred Tooth-Filing Pavilion, was
lit by flares and attended by a number of hurrying, barefoot servants. Alice
and I were the guests of honor. Other guests were a professor of economics
from the University at Jogjakarta and a
horticulturist from the gardens at Bogor in Java
and the horticulturist's young wife, charming in her sari, but too
frightened, or too conscious of woman's place in a man's world, to speak a
single word. Agung's two wives were not invited,
neither the mature, competent one, nor the pretty, petty one. Great
quantities of princely food were served, in many courses, most of it so
highly peppered that Alice
and I could only choke out a few words of flattery and then reach frantically
for the teacup. We can never forget that hot evening under the Balinese
stars.
There are so many evenings to remember, so many mornings to remember, so many
inns to remember. I may not, in this short essay, dare to recall in memory
old Shaw Park in Jamaica, before the German war prisoners ruined it in
re-doing it, with its cool tea-house over the tumbling mountain stream and
its view of the three-masted schooner at anchor off
the shore of Ocho Rios; nor the luncheon table
under the palm trees at Lone Pine Inn on Penang,
the adroit Chinese waiters dodging the dropping cocoanuts, the Indian snake
charmer and his cobra begging for permission to enter the grounds and the
Straits of Malacca bright blue through the screening row of Australian pines.
Sitting in the vast silent theater in Stratford in Ontario last summer, I
heard Falstaff rumble, in Henry the Fourth, the line "Shall I not take
mine ease in mine inn?" and shutting my eyes for a fleeting moment
recalled the flowing fields of elephant grass at Ruwenzori,
the pudgy figure of Madame Bhandari and toasted
truffles with white wine at the Hotel Palacio dos Sete Ais.
Let me quote some doggerel which I found in a copy of Punch many years ago.
Why does one travel? One
goes
From hotel to hotel,
The last like the first;
And the journey is darkened and cursed
By the weary recurrence of doubt.
Will anyone answer the bell?
Or attend when you shout?
Will the water be hot
Or not?
Will the night be made sleepless by dogs or by cocks,
Or church clocks,
Or a fiend with the wireless next door?
Will he snore?
Will the room be as dark as the grave,
Or as icy as Acheron?
What hopes of a bath or a shave?
And so on and so on.
Pack and unpack,
Arrive and depart,
Go and come back,
End where you start.
Why does one travel? God knows.
Why does one travel? Because,
Just once in a way
At the spiring shape of a hill
Or the swept curve of a bay
The heart will stand stricken and still
And the breath will be ravished away.
Or perchance in the pause
Between noonday and eve
The land will be lit with a light
So sweet and so strange
A man could believe
That sight
For the first time came to his eyes.
Or the moon of all moons will rise
Over misted lake or battlement mountain range
Or forest of nameless trees,
So great a moon and so bright
That a new thing moves in the skies.
Yes, there are moments like these
When Beauty flutters her unpredictable wings
And the whole earth suddenly sings
And all bad fairies die.
Why does one travel? That's why.
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