Читать книгу A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East - Tiziano Terzani - Страница 7

In one of the many fine passages in Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, the prince – soon to become Buddha, the Enlightened One – is sitting on the riverbank. It strikes him that once the measurement of time is waived, the past and the future are ever-present – like the river, which at one and the same moment exists not only where he sees it to be, but also at its source and at its mouth. The water which has yet to pass is tomorrow, but it already exists upstream; and that which has passed is yesterday, but it still exists, elsewhere, downstream.

Sitting high on the Wat Pusi hill in Luang Prabang in the golden peace of sunset, I looked down at the heart-stirring confluence of the small, impetuous Nam Khan River and the broad, majestic Mekong, and thought of Siddhartha’s vision. It seemed to me that that conjunction and mingling of muddy waters was, like life – mine included – made up of so many streams. It seemed that past, present and future were no longer distinguishable one from another: they were all there, in that relentless flow. Fifty-five years had slipped away like the great river rolling towards the China Sea; the rest of my time on earth was already welling up in the Himalayan slopes, already underway, moving towards me along the same channel, clearly defined and counted to the last hour. If I had had a higher perch than that hill I might have been able to see more of the river, in both directions. And thus could I have seen more past, more future?

I was alone, and as can happen when one is surrounded by nature, far from any other human presence, the mind slips free of the bonds of logic, and the imagination runs wild. The most absurd thoughts arise at the threshold of consciousness. Yes: perhaps what we call the future has already happened, and only because our view is limited do we fail to see it. Perhaps that is why some people can ‘read’ it as easily as we see the light of a star which has been extinct for centuries. Perhaps the secret lies in breaking away from the dimension of time – time as we normally conceive it, made up of years, hours, seconds.

Laos was an ideal psychological preparation for my decision not to fly, and thus in a way to place myself outside time. As a country it has for years instinctively chosen to do just that. Without access to the sea, sheltered by impenetrable mountains that isolate it from China and Vietnam, protected by the Mekong which separates it from Thailand without a single bridge to link its two banks, Laos, despite wars, invasions and pressure from its neighbours, has continued in its ancient, detached rhythm of life. Though even there the calendar says one is in the twentieth century, the mind of the Laotian people remains in an epoch all their own, and they have no intention of leaving it.

In recent years the Thais have built superhighways leading to their bank of the Mekong, and have suggested to the Laotians in a thousand ways that just one bridge would enable them to link up with the Thai road system, giving them direct access to Bangkok and creating a point of easy access for tourists loaded with dollars. The Laotians have remained unconvinced. ‘No, thanks. We don’t need a bridge,’ they have replied every time. ‘We want to carry on living our own way.’

Sadly, however, that way of life is on the wane. Not because the Lao have suddenly changed their minds, but because in our day a country at the crossroads between modernization cum destruction and an isolation that would preserve its identity has no real choice: others have chosen on its behalf. Businessmen, bankers, experts from international organizations, officials of the UN and half the world’s governments are passionate prophets of ‘development’ at all costs. They believe unanimously in a kind of mission not far removed from that of the American general in Vietnam who, after razing a Vietcong-occupied village to the ground, said proudly: ‘We had to destroy it to save it.’

The same thing is happening to Laos: in order to save it from underdevelopment, the new missionaries of materialism and economic progress are destroying it. The hardest blow has been dealt by the Australians. With the kindest intentions, their government has built a fine big bridge over the Mekong River. It has cost the Laotians nothing – except their last virginity. With their innate suspicion of everything new and modern, they are already calling it ‘the Bridge of AIDS’.

At heart the Lao belong to the past, and it is only by the accident of being located in the middle of Indochina that they have been forced to live amidst the violence of the contemporary world. They have paid a very high price for it. To supply the Vietcong guerrillas in South Vietnam, the Hanoi Communists opened through the forests of Laos what became famous as ‘the Ho Chi Minh Trail’; and to close that path, between 1964 and 1973 the Americans ‘secretly’ dropped more bombs on Laos than fell on Germany and the whole of occupied Europe during the Second World War: two million tons of explosive.

Even now, in peacetime, Laos is prevented by its geographical position from living the life it desires. It is forced to become ‘modern’, to serve as a link between China and Thailand, a corridor between two powerful neighbours obsessed with the idea of progress.

Still, for the moment, one need only set foot in Laos to feel that there is something uniquely poetic in the air. The days are long and slow, and the people have a tranquil sweetness that is not found elsewhere in Indochina. The French, who well knew the peoples they ruled, used to say: ‘The Vietnamese plant rice, the Khmer stand there and watch, and the Laotians listen to it growing.’

I set foot in Laos for the first time in the spring of 1972. On a small balcony of the Hotel Constellation in Vientiane a blonde hippie girl was smoking a marijuana joint so strong you could smell it all the way up the stairs. Seeing me approach, she whispered to me, as if to confide a secret formula for understanding all things, ‘Remember, Laos is not a place; it is a state of mind.’

Indeed, I never forgot it, and twenty years later I wanted to see Laos again before it too became ‘a place’ – a place like all the others, lit by neon, full of plastic and cement. I found a journalistic excuse in two news items: one on the opening of the Ho Chi Minh Trail to tourism, the other on the construction of the great trans-Asian motorway from Singapore to Peking. The Laotian section, after the building of the Mekong bridge, was to run through the old royal capital, Luang Prabang, cutting in two one of the most peaceful and romantic places in Asia, one of the last refuges of the old charm of the Orient.

I found Luang Prabang as fascinating as I remembered it, huddled in its moist green valley, surrounded by peaks that seem painted by a Chinese brush, dominated by the hill of Wat Pusi from which the temples, built in artful disorder on the strip of land between the Mekong and the Nam Khan, shine with a seemingly eternal splendour.

At dawn I saw once more the moving spectacle of hundreds of monks as they issued from their monasteries and filed along the cobbled main street to receive offerings of food from the population kneeling on the pavements. Yes, that very street: the one destined to become part of the Asian superhighway. Fortunately, I learned, some old residents had found the courage to oppose the project, and the governor himself had pronounced in favour of an alternative route. Will Luang Prabang be saved, then? Not at all. Another plan, opposed by no one, will transform the present modest landing strip into a large airport capable of receiving jumbo jets full of tourists.

What an ugly invention is tourism! One of the most baleful of all industries! It has reduced the world to a vast playground, a Disneyland without borders. Soon thousands of these new invaders, soldiers of the empire of consumerism, will land, and with their insatiable cameras and camcorders they will scrape away the last of that natural magic which is still everywhere in this country.

In Asia, when an old man sees a camera pointed at him, he turns away and tries to hide himself, covering his face. He believes the camera will deprive him of something that is his, something precious which he will never recover. And is he not perhaps right? Is it not through the wear and tear of tens of thousands of snapshots taken by distracted tourists that our churches have lost their sanctity and our monuments their patina of greatness?

Tibet, to protect its spirituality, for centuries forbade anyone to cross its borders; that is how it preserved its very special aura. There it was the Chinese invasion that broke the spell; in the name of modernization, of course. One of the most disturbing bits of news I have read in recent years is that the Chinese, to facilitate (what else?) tourist access, have decided to ‘modernize’ the lighting of the Potala, the Dalai Lama’s palace-temple, and have installed neon lights. This is no accident: neon kills everything, even the gods. And as they die, the Tibetan identity gradually dies with them.

The great Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki, in a particularly moving passage about the disappearance of the old Japan that has been swept away by modernity, eulogizes the shadows that contributed so greatly to creating the atmosphere, and thereby the soul, of the traditional houses of wood and paper. The dim interior of the Potala served the same purpose: you had to penetrate the recesses of that extraordinary palace in penumbra, and only by degrees did you discern, by the flickering light of butter lamps, the grimaces of the ogres and the benign smiles of the Buddhas. Neon holds nothing back. It clips the wings of anyone who still yearns to let his spirit take flight.

At the beginning of this century Pierre Loti arrived with the trepidation of a pilgrim at Angkor, in Cambodia, on a cart pulled by black oxen, to ask hospitality of the monks who lived in the temples. Twenty years later Cook’s Travel Agency were organizing tours and dance shows by night amid the ruins, and selling centuries-old stones to tourists as souvenirs.

The man who in 1860 ‘discovered’ Angkor for humanity – and for tourists – paid for that conquest with his life. Few know that his grave is still there, east of Luang Prabang. I wanted to go and pay my respects to that adventurous scientist, whose story had always fascinated me. His name is Henri Mouhot. He was a French naturalist who travelled in Indochina when it had just become a colony. His plan was to go up the Mekong to China. Before setting out he had read an account written ten years earlier by a monk who had seen strange ruins in the jungle not far from the town of Siem Reap.

In a letter Mouhot tells how one day he was walking through the forest, humming La Traviata to keep himself company, when suddenly, amid thick foliage under gigantic trees, he felt himself observed by two…four…ten…a hundred stone eyes, all smiling at him. I have often tried to imagine what he felt at that moment, a moment that made his journey and his death worthwhile. After spending some time amid the ruins of Angkor, Mouhot resumed his walk northward. He passed through Luang Prabang, but while he was marching along the Nam Khan River, beyond the village of Naphao, he fell ill. On 19 October he wrote, ‘I am stricken by a fever.’ Then for some days there are no entries in his diary, till on the twenty-ninth we come to the last words, written in a shaky hand: ‘My Lord, have mercy on me.’ Mouhot died on 10 November 1861. He was thirty-five years old.

Going to visit him was a much simpler matter: it took half an hour by car from Luang Prabang towards Ban Noun, then about ten minutes on foot down an escarpment, and up an overgrown path. When I reached the grave I felt as if Mouhot were dying at that very moment. Nothing had changed. The river ran with the same quiet murmur, the forest whispered with the same thousand voices, and in the distance a solitary woman was walking with a wicker basket on her shoulders – a woman of today, but also a woman of then, over 130 years ago.

The grave is where Mouhot died, in a fold of the hillside about thirty yards above the bed of the Nam Khan, as if his companions had wished to make sure the current would not carry him away. There is a mound of cement, behind which a great tree stands guard. To the left, waving like a banner, is a tall, joyous tuft of green bamboo.

The Italian poet Ugo Foscolo was right, in his poem in praise of tombs. They are a great inspiration, and I have always felt attracted by these simple, touching traces of life left by Westerners as they travelled the world. How many hours I have spent in Asian cemeteries for the foreign dead – in Macao, Chiang Mai, Nagasaki, Yokohama – trying to feel my way into the lives of these people who died far from home, trying to retrace the stories locked within the few formal words carved in stone. Ships’ captains struck down by fever when barely in their twenties, young mothers who died in childbirth, sailors from one ship who succumbed in the space of a few days, obviously to a sudden epidemic. Sometimes an old man, mourned by children and grandchildren, whose life – so the epitaph says – was an example to many others. Adventurers, missionaries, traders: unknown names.

What is the strange fascination of tombs? Can it be that they really hold something more than bones? Perhaps with the memory of the dead there also remains some stamp of their presence. Perhaps the stone itself is imbued with their history. The grave of Mouhot, a silent, solitary presence, forgotten on the bank of the Nam Khan, truly seemed to speak. The mere fact of my going there had somehow given it life. Or was it that without the dimension of time, this past was always there, present for anyone willing to be moved, to be inspired?

I had chosen Laos as my last destination of 1992 because it was a place from which, if I decided not to fly, I knew I could easily return overland to Bangkok. From the first moment my visit was marked by curious new thoughts. The fact that in some way I had begun looking into the less usual side of experience made me notice all sorts of things that would have escaped me at other times. Suddenly, everything appeared to have a link with the other world; people whose acceptable social faces were all I normally saw now revealed a second nature, and moreover, one that was much more in tune with what interested me.

On my last day in Luang Prabang I took a boat up the Mekong to the caves of Tham Ting with their seven thousand Buddhas. During the war these famous caves in the steep mountainside high above the river had come under fire from the Pathet Lao, the Communist guerrillas who controlled the whole surrounding area, and I had never succeeded in getting there. By now many of the old statues had been stolen and sold to Bangkok antique dealers, but I wanted to go there nonetheless. Was my future not symbolically flowing down the Mekong towards me? I wanted to go and meet it.

In the main cave a group of Laotians were kneeling before a stone Buddha, enquiring about their future. I did the same. The process is simple. Slowly, with hands joined, you shake a boxful of little bamboo sticks until one of them falls to the ground. Each stick bears a number corresponding to a slip of paper with a message. Mine was eleven, and the message was:

Shoot your arrow at the giant Ku Pan. You will certainly kill him. Soon you will have no more enemies and your name will be known in every corner of the earth. Your people need you and you must continue to help them. If you go in for business you will lose every penny. You will have no illnesses. Travel is a very good thing for you.

I did not think much of this, but later, when I pulled the little scrap of paper out of my pocket during the Christmas dinner at the French embassy in Vientiane, it was like the spark that ignites a great blaze. Soon, around that very formal table served by silent waiters in livery, the talk was all about fortune-tellers, prophecies and magic. Everyone had a story, an experience to tell. Perhaps because we were dining by candlelight, in a great white house surrounded by bougainvillaea and orchids, nestling in a mysterious garden populated with old statues of explorers – or perhaps because Europe and its logic seemed further away than ever – it was as if my slip of paper had opened a Pandora’s box and this were an hour of unwonted confessions.

‘A fortune-teller really changed my life,’ said a beautiful, elegant woman of around forty, recently arrived from Paris, who sat opposite me. While still at university she had become pregnant by a fellow student, who had died immediately afterwards in a skiing accident. A common friend had stayed by her side, and a great love had developed between them. But one day this friend’s mother had been to a fortune-teller who had said, ‘Your son is about to become the father of a child which is not his, and he must absolutely not do it. It would ruin his life.’ When the mother told her son this he was so shocked that he called off the wedding. ‘And that,’ said a gentleman sitting to the right of the ambassador’s wife, ‘is how I became the father of that child.’

This sounded to me like a typical case: the mother had somehow got the fortune-teller to say what she herself could not say to her son, and thus, through the authority of the occult, obtained the result she wanted. But the other diners were rather impressed, and the woman herself was totally convinced of the fortune-teller’s powers. As for my fortune-teller in Hong Kong, everyone agreed that I must heed his warning and refrain from flying.

At dawn I left, by air, for the Plain of Jars, a strange valley amid the mountains of northern Laos, which is scattered with huge, mysterious stone vessels, some over seven feet high, all beautifully carved. But by whom? To hold what? Anthropologists say they were funerary urns of an ancient population of Chinese origin, now extinct, but the Laotians prefer to believe their legends. ‘They are amphoras for wine,’ they say. ‘The giants made them. At the top of the mountain there is an enormous stone table where, from time to time, the giants meet for their banquets.’ But no one had ever managed to reach it.

I spent three days in the region. The ripe opium poppies were beginning to shed their red, purple and white petals, and women were cutting open the bulbs to collect the precious sticky black juice in old bowls. The Muong, the mountain people, were celebrating their New Year. Young people were at their most popular sport: playing ball as a way of finding a mate. In each village rows of girls in traditional dress stand for hours on end opposite rows of boys and throw cloth balls back and forth while chanting an old ditty: ‘If you love me, throw better. If you want me, improve your looks.’

I was accompanied by a very special guide, Claude Vincent, a cultivated Frenchman of about fifty who had lived in Laos since he was a boy. He had married a Laotian woman, and remained in the country even after the Pathet Lao seized power in 1975. In the years of the war we had often met, but had never known each other well; for him I was one of the many journalist-vultures who descended on Laos, attracted by its dead. Now it was different, and Claude wanted to make me understand his love for a land to whose ancient, beautiful soul he is fervently attached.

I realized this when, tired after an afternoon exploring the Plain of Jars, we retired for the night to an inn without electricity or water. We talked about the Communists: wherever they went, in China as in Cambodia, the first thing they did was to abolish the popular traditions. They fought against superstition, eliminated fortune-tellers and banned the old ceremonies. I asked Claude how the Pathet Lao had behaved. In reply he told me about something that had happened to him a few years before.

It was a Sunday in 1985 in Vientiane, and Claude and his family planned to have a picnic on the bank of the Mekong. One of his nieces was very excited about the trip, but she went down with a high fever and they decided to leave her at home. She was terribly upset and insisted that she must, absolutely must go to the river. Not to take her was out of the question.

They found a place on the bank, the adults eating and the children playing by the water. Only when it was time to go did they realize that the little girl was no longer there. They searched for her everywhere, but she had vanished. In desperation they consulted a famous clairvoyante, who went into a trance and told them: ‘Next Friday, at 3.45 in the afternoon, go to the bend in the river. There, in front of the pagoda, you’ll find her. She will have blue marks on her body: one under her arm and one on her chest.’ The family went, and at the appointed hour the child’s body floated to the surface, bearing the blue marks described by the woman.

Claude told me that the clairvoyante had made contact with the Spirit of the River and asked it to yield up the child’s body in return for the sacrifice of seven chickens and a pig. The family’s problem was how to give the Spirit the promised reward. These were the hardest years of the Communist regime. There were informers in every neighbourhood, and Claude was afraid of getting into trouble if he organized the ceremony. He went to ask the advice of a high party official. The response surprised him. ‘You absolutely must make the sacrifice. You promised it to the Spirit of the River and you can’t break your word,’ he said, and reminded Claude that during the war every time the Pathet Lao crossed a river, the last man in the patrol had to turn back and call to a non-existent comrade. The Spirit of the River habitually carries off the last of a line, and in that way the guerrillas hoped to deceive it. ‘Today that practice has become a military order for all patrols crossing watercourses,’ said Claude in conclusion.^* The idea that in Laos even the Marxist-Leninists had remained above all Laotians, and in their own way outside time, was enormously pleasing.

The next day we travelled north by jeep. The area around the Plain of Jars was one of those most devastated by the American war. The old capital, Xianghuang, literally no longer exists: it was obliterated by carpet bombing from B-52S. The new settlement, Phongsovane, is so far only a sprawl of wooden shacks.

To escape the bombs, the people of the region lived for years in the caves. Now they are rebuilding the villages with whatever materials the war left behind. The shells of cluster bombs – giant eggs that burst in the air and released dozens of murderous little booby-traps – are used as fencing or animal feeding troughs; artillery shells serve as water containers.

‘How old are you?’ I asked a woman in the market at Phongsovane. She looked at me, perplexed. ‘When were you born?’ I persisted. ‘Before the war,’ she replied. Which of the many wars was unclear. In human memory Laos has always been at war.

Thirty miles from Phongsovane is a fork in the road: one road stretches eastward towards Vietnam and the port of Vinh, the other continues north towards the old guerrilla capital Sam Neua and the Chinese frontier. Alongside the latter, about six miles from the fork, is the cave of Tarn Piu. You can only gain access to it on foot, following the course of a little stream. An unexploded bomb is still lying in the middle of a meadow. The place is deserted.

Halfway up the steep cliff of whitish stone is a big, black, semicircular hole. The meadows are sweetly scented with fresh flowers, but the Laotians with us do not want to continue, because they can smell the odour of death. On we go, up an overgrown path, and venture inside this mouth in the mountainside. The walls are blackened by fire, with traces of phosphorus and pockmarks made by splinters of rock from a huge explosion that smashed the cave and brought great boulders crashing down. You walk amidst the debris – charred fragments of kitchen utensils, a sewing machine, the rags of the long-dead.

This was one of the famous caves where people lived during the war. Here, in the stone bowels of the mountain, the bombs of the B-52S could not penetrate. But in 1968 a T-28, a small plane used by the pro-American government forces, sighted the cave and scored a direct hit with a phosphorus rocket. The explosion within the stone walls was tremendous. Over four hundred people died. There were no survivors.

About thirty yards from the entrance the cave dipped, and only by the light of my pocket torch could I penetrate any further. Soon I realized I was walking on bones – some of them small, presumably children’s. In the absolute silence I imagined that I could hear, muffled as if by a veil, the cries of the dead. I thought of the participants’ different perspectives at that fatal moment: the pilot, tense and excited, aware of having scored a bull’s eye; the havoc below, the cries of the wounded as they crawl to the depths of the cave, never to come out of it again.

Of course it was because I felt so moved that I ‘sensed’ all this. But does not such a tragedy, or any other great sorrow, leave some sort of residue in the air and in the soil? What did the ancients mean by the spiritus loci, if not that something remains hovering in a place where something exceptional has happened?

On the way down the mountain we passed a group of children cutting wheels for one of their imaginary cars from the stump of a banana tree. ‘Have you been in that cave?’ I asked them. One and all, they drew back from me, as if in terror. ‘No!’ they cried. ‘You can’t go there! It’s scary, the phii are in there!’ The spirits, ghosts.

In the West, this would be called something like ‘the Cave of the Martyrs’, and annual ceremonies would be held in their memory. Their story would be taught in schools. For the Laotians history does not bear this kind of meaning. In that hole are not the remains of their relatives, but only ghosts that have saturated the walls with wailing, suffering, horror. From this they must simply keep away.

In their vision of the world the relation between cause and effect is not the same as in ours. Shortly before my visit, near the Plain of Jars, a group of American experts had spent some weeks looking for MIAs (Missing in Action), pilots of planes shot down during the war whose deaths had never been verified. They dug in the jungle, sifting the earth to retrieve the least splinter of bone, and spent their evenings in Phongsovane. The Laotians did not show the least hostility towards them. Nobody even tried to show them one of the many children who even today are born deformed because of the chemicals released there by the Americans a quarter of a century ago.

The wife of the photographer of Phonsovane held one of these in her arms – a three-year-old child with a large square head and stubby hands with the fingers all stuck together. ‘Karma,’ she said, Buddhistically attributing the horror of that child to some sin committed in his previous life.

To go from Xianhuang to Pakse’ in southern Laos I had to take another plane: the usual bouncing Chinese-made Y-21 with a pilot, a co-pilot, seventeen seats and a baggage compartment where the only toilet was. When I boarded the plane it was crammed full of mysterious floppy blue plastic sacks: they were in the aisle, on the empty seats, stacked to the ceiling in the baggage-toilet, piled against the emergency exit. I tried to lift one: very heavy. They were full of meat – pork and beef. In Vientiane meat costs twice as much as in the Plain of Jars, and thus it was that the pilots supplemented their meagre socialist wages. I remembered how, a few weeks earlier, in an airfield in the north, a Russian Antonov, just back from an engine overhaul, had been unable to take off and had caught fire. All the passengers had saved themselves by climbing out in time.

I wondered how anyone could get out of this plane, as every escape route was blocked by those heaps of flaccid bundles. I disliked the thought that if disaster struck, my flesh would be mixed with the meat in the sacks and nobody would be able to tell who had been who. But then I thought with relief of the Americans. I had heard that in the labs in Hawaii where they send what they find in their search for the MIAs, the Americans can determine whether a bone fragment belonged to one of their soldiers or not.

The sky grew dense and grey, and we threaded through heavy rainclouds and flashes of lightning among the steep, dark green mountains. The landscape had an extraordinary primitive beauty, but I could not enjoy it. Between one bounce and another I vowed that if this plane ever landed in Savannaket, where it was due for a stop-over, I would get off and continue my journey by boat. And so I did.

The Mekong was flat and undramatic, its opaque surface broken now and then by great bubbles of mud. We glided slowly between the two banks that summed up the contradiction I would have liked to resolve: on the left the Laotian shore with villages shaded by coconut palms, dinghies moored below rough bamboo ladders, oil lamps gleaming softly in the silence of evening; on the right, the Thai shore with neon lights, canned music and the distant rumble of motors. On one side the past, from which everyone wants to tear the Laotians away, on the other the future towards which all and sundry believe they must rush headlong. On which shore lies happiness?

On 31 December I was in the forest of Bolovens, on a high plateau three thousand feet above sea level, with the Mekong to the west, the Annamite range to the east, and the Khmer plain to the south. This was the most heavily bombed region in the history of the world, because it was the assembly point for all the supplies coming from Hanoi along the Ho Chi Minh Trail before they were redirected, either towards Cambodia in the direction of Saigon or towards central Vietnam. Not one building has remained standing from the colonial period, not one pagoda, not one village. Everything was demolished in the relentless earthquake of American bombs. Nature itself has been obliterated: the forest has become a scrubland, and even today you seldom hear a bird’s call. Only here and there on the fertile red earth have some Japanese and Thai companies begun to revive the famous coffee plantations.

I stayed in a wooden hut built over a waterfall. The roar of the water was deafening, and I spent New Year’s Eve pleasantly awake, imagining the strange 1993 that had reached its birth-hour. An omelette of red ants’ eggs seemed perfectly suited to marking the occasion. By the time the hands of my watch casually swung past midnight, the decision not to fly had turned into an obvious one. With that slow, ancient descent by boat along the Mekong my days had already acquired a new rhythm. And yet I felt as if I were doing something bold, almost illicit. After a lifetime of sensible decisions, I now allowed myself a choice based on the most irrational of considerations. The limitation I was imposing on myself made no sense at all.

On the morning of 1 January 1993, to give my decision a symbolic flourish, I took my first steps of the new year on the back of an elephant. The route to Pakse’ crossed a valley which long ago had been the crater of a volcano. The grass was tall and very green, punctuated here and there by brilliant silvery plumes of the lulan that barely stirred in the wind.

The elephant basket was shaky and uncomfortable, but its height gave me a perfect opportunity to enjoy the world from a different perspective.