The Way of Wanderlust (5 page)

At 4:25 Godfriye leaps up. Takis has been standing for five minutes; now he walks over to us and says, “Come on! We've got to go now or we won't get to the top for the sunrise.”

Oh jeezus . . . I don't want to move. I just want to stay here and my feet and my legs and my arms and my head just lie here and sleep. . . .

We plod on, feet skidding forward, trapped in an interminable idea: climbing Kilimanjaro. Always there are lights in front, always lights behind; more to do, more we have done.

Eventually the pain stabilizes and the mind stops inspecting and only records.

At one point we pass the Germans, the first to get off this morning, slumped in silence on the side of the trail.

We arrive at Gillman's Point—18,635 feet—as the first light of day scales the rim of the Earth. While we watch, the light leads others: Yellow, green, orange, red, blue, purple climb the sky, and the tip of the sun flares into sight. For a moment Earth and sun hang suspended in a web of light.

Alone, we lie back exhausted and content. This sunrise is ours, I think, as arms and legs go limp, something no one else has ever experienced or ever will experience.

People watch it around the world every day, and yet nothing like this—these colors, this feeling, like watching it from another world, our own world, where somewhere underneath the clouds people are doing what they do every day—I'll never have that again.

I roll over. My God, I hurt everywhere.

“Godfriye wants to go back now,” Takis reports, shaking my shoulder. John and I have been asleep for an hour.

“Back? Back where?” John sits up. “We've got to go to Uhuru.”

I wince to my knees, jab my walking stick into a cleft in the rocks, and push up.

Godfriye is arguing with Takis.

“He says it's impossible, there's not enough time.” He wants to get back to Homboro before sunset.

“What the—? We didn't bust our butts passing everybody on the slope for nothing. We're going on to Uhuru, whether he wants to lead us or not.”

Godfriye listens immobile to Takis's translation, then spurts off without a word at a pace double that of before. We follow him along the rim of the crater past three-story ice blocks and ice caves gleaming with stalagmites and stalactites twice my height. I stop every ten minutes.

I reach the summit with John after an hour and a half. We collapse by the plaque that marks the highest point on the continent.

I have never felt so terrible in my life. My head, my lungs, my stomach; thudding, straining, tightening. Everything hurts.

Sky, ice cap, and crater surround us. Unearthly clarity: the taut blue sky striped with white clouds, the black crater crags edged, distinct, demarcating the peak, the brilliant ice white, chiseled into the air, tumbling and rolling and flowing away beyond my own sense of space and time.

Forget pain, forget worry, forget food and sleep; forget question, forget blood, forget breath.

After twenty minutes, Godfriye will say we have to leave to reach the middle hut by sundown. The next afternoon, when we reach the park gates, Godfriye will lead the three of us to the park warden, who will present us with certificates featuring sketches of Kilimanjaro and a baobab in green, black, and white, and signed by Godfriye, the park warden, and the director of Tanzania's National Parks: “This is to certify that Mr. Donald W. George has successfully climbed Kilimanjaro 7th July 1976.”

This article was written for
Signature
magazine in 1981. I'd visited Delos at the beginning of my fellowship year in Athens, and that trip had been one of my most moving experiences in Greece. Happily, I'd written about it at length in my journal and in letters home, so when an editor at
Signature
expressed interest in the piece four years later, I had freshly recorded details from the trip still at hand.
Signature
was a hospitable place for this piece; the editors liked articles that told a story, and gave their authors considerable literary freedom. Of all the pieces I wrote for the magazine—about Tokyo neighborhoods and Kyoto temples and little-visited islands in the Caribbean—this was my favorite, partly because spending the night on a forbidden island was such an unexpected and tantalizing subject, and partly because the circular nature of the piece, which arose organically from my experience there, really appealed to me. Beginning with this story, the notion of creating this kind of circle became a goal in my writing. When the end circles back to the beginning, I discovered, the reader sees the end/beginning in two ways: On the surface the scene looks exactly the same, and yet it is layered with all that has been lived and learned along the way.

THERE ARE NO TAVERNAS, NO DISCOTHEQUES,
no pleasure boats at anchor; nor are there churches, windmills, or goatherds. Delos, three miles long and less than one mile wide, is a parched, rocky island of ruins, only fourteen miles from Mykonos, Aegean playground of the international vagabonderie. Once the center of the Panhellenic world, Delos has been uninhabited since the 1st century
a.d.
, fulfilling a proclamation of the Delphic oracle that “no man or woman shall give birth, fall sick, or meet death on the sacred island.”

I chanced on Delos during my first visit to Greece. After three harrowing days of seeing Athens by foot, bus, and taxi, my traveling companion and I were ready for open seas and uncrowded beaches. We selected Mykonos on the recommendation of a friend, who suggested that when we tired of the Beautiful People, we should take a side trip to Delos.

On arriving in Mykonos, we learned that for less than three dollars we could catch a fishing trawler to Delos (where the harbor is too shallow for cruise ships) any morning at 8:00
a.m.
and return to Mykonos at 1:00
p.m.
the same afternoon. On the morning of our fourth day, we braved choppy seas and ominous clouds to board a rusty, peeling boat that reeked of fish. With a dozen other tourists, we packed ourselves into the ship's tiny cabin, already crowded with anchors, ropes, and wooden crates bearing unknown cargo.

At some point during the forty-five-minute voyage, the toss and turn of the waves became too much for a few of the passengers, and I moved outside into the stinging, salty spray. As we made our way past Rhenea, the callus-like volcanic island that forms part of the natural breakwater with Delos, the clouds cleared and the fishermen who had docked their
caiques
at the Delos jetty greeted us in bright sunlight.

At the end of the dock a white-whiskered man in a navy blue beret and a faded black suit hailed each one of us as we walked by: “Tour of Delos! Informative guide to the ruins.” A few yards beyond him a young boy ran up to us, all elbows and knees, and confided in hard breaths, “I give you better tour. Cheaper too.”

I had read the Delphic oracle's proclamation the night before and wondered what these people were doing on the island. I asked the boy, and he pointed to a cluster of houses on a knoll about a thousand yards away. “I live here. Family.”

At first glance, Delos seemed the quintessential ruin: broken bits of statues, stubby pillars, cracking archways, and isolated walls. Nothing moved but the sunlight, glinting off the fragments like fish scales scattered over a two-acre basin.

Other movements had once animated the alleys and temples before us. Legend has it that Delos was originally a roving island when Leto, mistress of Zeus, landed there racked with birth pains. Poseidon anchored the island in its present position while Leto brought forth Artemis and Apollo, the Greek sun god and protector of light and art. Apollo eventually became the most revered of the Greek gods, and religious devotion, coupled with the island's central, protected situation, established Delos as the thriving center of the Mediterranean world, religious and commercial leader of an empire that stretched from Italy to the coast of Asia Minor.

Wandering the ruins of this once-boisterous center, we found temples both plain and elegant, Greek and foreign; massive marketplaces studded with pedestals where statues once stood, now paved with poppies; a theater quarter with vivid mosaics depicting actors and symbolic animals and fish; a dry lake ringed with palm trees; a stadium and a gymnasium; storehouses and quays along the waterfront; and an ancient suburb where merchants and ship captains once lived: the haunting skeleton of a Hellenistic metropolis.

At 12:45 the captain of the trawler appeared at the end of the dock and whistled once, twice, three times, then waved his arms. He repeated this signal at 12:50 and 12:55. My friend left, but something about those deserted ruins held me, and I decided to spend the night on the island. I watched from the top of Mount Cynthus, the lone hill, as the boat moved away toward the mountains of Mykonos on the northeast horizon. Looking around, I felt at the center of the Cyclades: to the north, Tinos, to the northwest, Andros, then Syros, Siphnos, Paros, and Naxos, and beyond them Melos and Ios—all spokes in the sacred chariot of the sun god.

Below me the ruins were absolutely desolate, shimmering silently in the midday sun. A lizard slithered over my boot. The boat crawled father away. The wind sighed. Droplets of sweat seemed to steam from my forehead.

I walked down the hill to the shade of the tourist pavilion, the one concession to tourism (besides a three-room museum) on the island. I walked inside and asked the owner, a large, jolly man with a Zorba mustache, what he was offering for lunch. He looked surprised to see me. “You miss the
caique
?”

“No, I wanted to spend the night here.”

“Ah.” He looked beyond me into the glaring, baked ruins. “We have rice, meat, vegetables.”

“Do you have any fish?”

“Fish? Yes.” He directed me to a case in the back room, opened it, and took out five different fish, each caked with ice. “Which do you want?” I pointed to one. “Drink?”

“A beer, please.”

He nodded, pointed out the door to a terrace with tables and chairs scattered at random like dancers at a Mykonos discotheque, and said, “Sit, please,” motioning me into a chair.

The heat hung in the air, folding like a curtain over the pillars and pedestals, smothering the palms and reeds. Occasionally a dusty-brown lizard would scuttle from one shadow into another. The owner moved from kitchen to terrace like a man who has never waited, never worried about time, wiping off the table, bringing a glass of cold beer, then fish, fried potatoes, and a tomato salad.

Eventually, two old men dressed in the same uniform as the man who had greeted us that morning walked up carrying two pails filled with water. One went inside and began to talk animatedly with the owner. The other sat down on the edge of the terrace, dipped his callused hands, and pulled out a white and black octopus. He rolled the octopus in a milky white liquid from the other pail, twisting and slapping its tentacles against the cement until he was satisfied it was clean. Then he laid it aside, and dipped in again, pulling out another slippery creature. He cleaned five octopuses in all, leaving them oozing in the sun, their tentacles writhing and their suction cups puckering.