These tales make me yearn for rare, genuine discovery, for a time when you could clap on a pith helmet and gaze upon cities with eyes untainted by TripAdvisor reviews. I love old travel yarns, like John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley or Gertrude Bell’s diaries. All the Arabic and hijabs I had in my possession did not shadow my constant awareness that to everyone I met, I was yet another bumbling tourist. I remember how much I loved its foreignness, and also how aware I was of how foreign I was in it. I backpacked around Morocco a few years ago, even visiting the Paul Bowles museum in Tangier and without fail, Bowles’s book whisks up memories of the dry heat, the acrid scent of hot urine on brick, constant sunburn, and the emptiness of an uneasy gut lined only with Coca-Cola. The Moresbys’ journey is feverishly bleak the north African landscape “a tortured scrub of hard shells and stiff hairy spines that covered the earth like an excrescence of hatred” an empty bar is “full of the sadness inherent in all deracinated things”.
Photograph: Jerry Cooke/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Imageīowles began writing The Sheltering Sky in Fez in 1948 and, apparently fuelled by a cocktail of hashish and majoun (cannabis jam), he finished it while moving around Morocco and Algeria, setting the path himself that his doomed characters would take. Paul Bowles, reclining in bed with his paper and pen. It is not Port but Kit who achieves true isolation, one far greater than her husband’s lofty pretensions, as she glides through the desert, truly alone for the first time. Suffocating tension builds like a pulse, until the book’s audacious, haunting climax two thirds in.
They’re desperate to be satisfied, yet satisfied by nothing: every town they try, the Moresbys sniff at Arab culture and retreat to their unhappy shelter of hotel-room lunches and English speakers.Īs they flit across Algeria, Port becomes more and more thrilled by the idea of the remote, while Kit becomes increasingly hysterical as they move further from recognisable society. Indeed, would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.īut for all his highbrow aspirations, Port is a bad traveller and his wife Kit no better two culturally-indifferent Americans with too much baggage (literally and emotionally), and no aims in life except their desire to not be wherever they are at the time. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveller belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. The first time I picked up Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, I was amused and embarrassed to find my unearned snobbery reflected back at me in the first few pages, where upon arriving in north Africa, the male lead Port Moresby loftily observes:
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