God’s Fugitive. Andrew Taylor

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the frontier town of Tourcoing a few weeks later, was to note the inconvenience that such political activity caused the independent traveller. ‘Stayed there that night having no passport, as I had not heard it was become necessary. Thiers elected President the day before …’

      Paris itself, a city which had in the last few months experienced defeat at the hands of the Prussian forces, which had seen tens of thousands of its citizens flee as the revolutionary Commune was established, and thousands more killed or arrested as it was put down, he described as ‘brown, cold, humid, deserted, uncheerful looking’.

      After such a political cataclysm any city could perhaps be excused for being slightly less than cheerful. Doughty’s undoubted patriotism and sense of civic pride took little account of what he perhaps saw as the mere passing fads of a moment, like revolutions; his mind was set on a longer, greater timescale. And anyway, he might have thought, this was not England.

      But he was not staying in Paris. It was now early autumn and, planning to take lodgings for the winter in one of the small towns dotted along the Mediterranean coast, he set off hopefully in the late summer sun, trudging from settlement to settlement.

      For a man who complained frequently of his frail physical condition and his lack of robustness, a journey by foot of over 150 miles eastwards from Marseilles, through Cassis, Cannes and Nice, must have been a painful struggle anyway – and one after another they fell short of his exacting standards of comfort and cleanliness. There would be many more times in Doughty’s life when he would complain of his weakness and demonstrate his hardihood.

      But at length he arrived in the town of Menton, where he seems to have felt at once that he could happily pass the winter. His room at the Pension Trenca, Beau Rivage, looked south over the sea, the mountains towering behind, and here he stayed for several months. For the first time a note of real enthusiasm comes into Doughty’s writing as he describes

      happy long family voyages and hungry, beautiful, and aromatic wanderings in the mountains … The vineyards, the orchards of oranges and odoriferous lemons, everywhere open to be traversed by a thousand paths; the hundred happy and sheltered valleys, smiling with every gift of nature …

      He was still complaining querulously of his ill-health and his weak constitution, but according to his diary, he was also deep in his studies throughout the winter. When he left his books, he would tramp along the mountain paths to see the tiny villages, the meadow flowers, the tumbling rivers and, most of all, ‘the antique caverns and relics of human habitation’. Doughty already had in mind the outline of the epic poem he saw as his greatest work, which would deal in part with the struggle of the ancient Gauls for conquest in northern Italy.⁷

      In his wanderings during his five months in Menton Doughty built up such an affection for the region that, twenty years later, he would return to live just a few miles up the coast. But once the winter was over, he set out on foot again through the mountains.

      It was a solitary time: the occasional references to family outings from Menton, to some ‘agreeable Germans’ he met later in Pisa, or to the ‘many excellent and agreeable persons, the librarian Dr Snellaert and others’ he remembered from Ghent, only serve to emphasize how lonely his travelling generally was. Solitude, after all, was what he was searching for.

      Doughty pressed on with his hard and energetic journey: thirty miles or so up into the Piedmontese uplands one day, another forty miles the next, a brief day’s rest in the cool of the mountain valleys, and then another thirty miles down a river valley to the coastal town of Ventimiglia. It was the country plantations, the flowers and the oranges, the twisting mountain paths overlooking the sea, that caught his imagination; when he reached the cities of Genoa, Livorno, Pisa and Florence, the treasures of the Italian Renaissance were jotted down in his diary with more of a sense of duty than of enjoyment.

      But when Doughty arrived in Naples sometime in April, it was to witness a more terrifying example of the forces of nature than he had ever seen before. The nearby Mount Vesuvius had already been rumbling ominously for several months, with occasional minor explosions of rocks and stones, and trickling rivulets of lava bubbling from its crater. It was not at first a cause for great consternation in the surrounding countryside – the last time lava streams had run down the mountainside, four years earlier, joyful local villagers had celebrated the onrush of visitors they confidently expected in their restaurants, cafés and boarding houses.

      But this time was different. On the night of 26 April Professor Paride Palmieri, a scientist who had made a career out of observing Vesuvius, was settled in his observatory near the summit. Shortly after midnight he observed a small group of curious tourists passing by with an inexperienced guide on their way up the mountainside – and then, some three hours later, the summit of Vesuvius exploded. A cloud of smoke and a hail of flaming rocks and stones enveloped the unfortunate tourists, who were close to the lava torrent. Some were engulfed in it, and disappeared for ever; two dead bodies were found later, but at least eight people, and probably more, are known to have died.

      Doughty, though, was even closer than Professor Palmieri, although it was another fifteen years before he was to write down his description.⁸

      In the year 1872 I was a witness of the great eruption of Vesuvius. Standing that day from the morning alone upon the top of the mountain, that day in which the great outbreak began, I waded ankle deep in flour of sulphur upon a burning hollow soil of lava … I approached the dreadful ferment, and watched that fiery pool heaving in the sides and welling over, and swimming in the midst as a fount of metal – and marked how there was cooled at the air a film, like that floating web on hot milk, a soft drossy scum, which endured but for a moment, – in the next, with terrific blast as of a steam gun, by the furious breaking in wind of the pent vapours rising from the infernal magma beneath, this pan was shot up sheetwise in the air, where, whirling as it rose with rushing sound, the slaggy sheet parted diversely, and I saw it slung out into many greater and lesser shreds …

      It is the writing of a man spellbound by both the beauty and the mechanics of what he sees – but Doughty was clearly also aware of the danger.

      Upon some unhappy persons who approached there fell a spattered fiery shower of volcanic powder, which in that fearful moment burned through their clothing and, scorched to death, they lived hardly an hour after. A young man was circumvented and swallowed up in torments by the pursuing foot of lava, whose current was very soon as large as the Thames at London Bridge …

      The account is an impressive tour de force – the more so as it came so long after the event. Doughty’s vivid, awestruck description, with its everyday similes and references, such as the skin on boiling milk, the shredded sheet, or the width of the river Thames, could almost have been written as he watched the eruption.

      His fascination is clear: it overcomes any attempt at scientific detachment. And yet there is something disquieting about the writing – something beyond either his infectious enthusiasm or his undoubted physical courage. For all the perfunctory sympathy of his expressions, there is a gloating quality about the way he dwells on the ‘spattered fiery shower’ and its terrible effects; his attitude towards the suffering and dying tourists seems disturbingly cold, almost like a biologist focusing his microscope on the death-throes of a beetle. Not for the first time or the last, the need of the shy, retiring man to keep his distance had left his emotional responses seeming suspect, his human sympathy oddly lacking.

      The eruption continued through the day, with the whole region plunged into darkness by the clouds of smoke and ashes that were hurled some four or five thousand feet into the air. By now, any gleeful anticipation of a minor tourist boom in the surrounding towns was forgotten. The prospect of further eruptions had brought panic to the local people, and on the СКАЧАТЬ