Digby is one class below, with his own tiny cabin. A maharajah is on board he and his retinue have booked all of First Class. He peeks into a first-class stateroom, ashamed of his curiosity yet awed by the sofas and plush chairs, the thick brocade curtains and the pocket doors that allow valets and maids to attend to their employers. The horizon rises and then dips the salt spray is cool on his face he has the sensation of standing still while plunging toward his future. The shifting moods and colors of the Arabian Sea-azure, blue, and black-mirror the ebb and flow of his thoughts. He paces the deck in a broad-brimmed hat, though it can’t keep the sunlight from bouncing off the water and tanning his face, highlighting the pale, jagged scar that creases his left cheek from the corner of his mouth to his left ear. Under his feet, the ship is alive, making groans and sighs. And his land is a place where he can no longer stay. All water is connected and only land and people are discontinuous. Save for a three-month posting in London, he has spent his twenty-five years on earth in Glasgow and might have spent the rest of his life there, never seen this confluence of waters, never discovered for himself that the English Channel, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean, despite their individual personalities, are one. Off one bow, he sees Djibouti off the other, Yemen. This narrow strait, barely eighteen miles across, connects the Red Sea with the Indian Ocean. By the time he recovers, they’re out of the Suez Canal and passing through the Bab-el-Mandeb, the Gate of Tears. “Travel broadens the mind and loosens the bowels.” A street vendor’s lamb kebab in Port Said drops Digby to his knees, confining him to his cabin for two days, enough time to appreciate Professor Alan Elder’s parting words in Glasgow.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |