Arabia continued

(This post continues an earlier one.)

It was late afternoon one day after visiting the vast area of Roman ruins just next door. I strolled through modern-day Jerash, searching for a tea house that would let me watch the World Cup game that had just started. With every step I took, I kicked up the dust that the town was heavy with. As my lung slowly filled with warm powder, I remembered a friend who had once declared that the only honest tagline to advertise Jordan would be "The finest dust on earth". That evening in Jerash, I saw no reason to argue.

As I walked by decapitated goats sluggishly dangling in the breeze of powdery sand that hung in the air, I realized that I wasn't in just another god-forsaken place decaying into a mystic netherworld. The shop fronts on both sides were bright windows in crumbling walls, but the bulk of the dust came from a complete municipal infrastructure upgrade that the city was undergoing. The blacktop had been stripped from streets and sidewalks, optimistically and entirely, as if just starting the project would ensure its completion. But the new surface was nowhere in sight yet, and what remained of the foundations of the streets was disintegrating.

Half an hour into my walk, the sunset prayer ended and crowds spilled into the streets, kicking up even more dust. The fruit vendors took the opportunity to flog their wares right at the main gate of the mosque. Noisy little cars honked their way through the madness. By now, the oppressive heat of the day had subsided, but the dust was deathly dehydrating. Settling on clothes and skin, on the tongue and in the lung, it was a real killer – and it made Raban's descriptions of car dodging and old-town expeditions in Sana'a come to life, though otherwise the Yemen has not much in common with Jordan.

The search for a tea house did eventually prove futile. Driving back to my friend's house, I was manically scanning the frequencies on the car stereo to find a station that would broadcast the game live. There was nothing. Instead, I was treated to the news, read in English on Radio Jordan, and experienced a feature of Arabic culture that has prevailed since ancient times. "His Royal Highness Prince Faisal received the Pakistani Air Force Chief and a delegation for talks concerning cooperation in military fields", claimed the first item.

Brilliant clouds of hot air such as this are apparently de-rigueur in Arabic countries, where the press is not free as we understand it and where the status of the printed word (and by extension the radio and TV news) is different from that which we accord it. Raban noted that for a devout Muslim "ideas of 'the book' and 'the Koran' were indissoluble. Written language for him meant the language of scripture. It meant the revealed truth of God, and the printed words were there as objects of mystical contemplation. [...] the news on television, like the newspapers, told the Truth about events by avoiding any description of them."

It was for this reason that Raban's idea to write a book was greeted with much suspicion. Many acquaintances he made on his trip just shook their heads when they heard of his intentions. The Saudi authorities did one better: They wouldn't even let him into the country. My favorite reaction came from Raban's Arabic teacher in London who cautioned that haktab kitab (I will write a book.) can also mean I'm getting married (as in: I'm signing the contract of marriage).

Raban didn't get married, but he wrote his book as planned. It ends with the author's return home. What hit him most, on his drive back from the airport, was "the silence of London. The roll of traffic down the M4 from Heathrow seemed like a funeral cortège after the hooting din of every Arab city. There was a sleepy placidity in the way we shifted lanes all the way along the Cromwell Road, without a single horn being sounded. Home was a grave, staid place."

I finished reading the book as my plane from Amman descended into Heathrow. On the tube ride to West Kensington, I found myself living the last pages of the book. Boring civility and the complete lack of the extraordinary soothed my nerves. Plus, it was raining – slowly, unimaginatively, in a very English way. When the doors opened at Osterley, a whiff of wet air and fresh grass entered the carriage, leaving everyone else untouched but wiping from my mind any remnants of desert dust that might still have laid there. Enormous was the contrast between where I had come from and where I was going.

Some say that traveling is dead, that all is the same and true adventures cannot be had anymore. They say that all has been explored and the exotic is just an extension of the familiar, with most differences in the world homogenized by the flattening forces of globalization. They say that today's travelers are merely tourists. This is emphatically not the case. With instant communication and jet travel, the world might feel smaller. But it's still a big place, full of curiosities and oddities, outrageous and mind-blowing.

I've just returned from a friend's wedding, enjoying the comfort of an instant and wholly undeserved family connection, but had I been a bit more adventurous, I could have traveled much like Raban described it more than thirty years ago. His book serves as a potent reminded that time doesn't kill traveling. Go out and explore!