How To Travel

Kapuscinski died this January, aged 74. Travels with Herodotus is his last book, a memoir about his early travels, the struggle with language, and the importance of reading to understand a culture. Books, which were so scarce in post-war Poland during his student days, accompany Kapuscinski throughout his travels. In Old Delhi he picks up a Hemingway novel and a nineteenth-century account of Hindu ways of life. On the streets of Tehran days before the Islamic Revolution, after angry demonstrations have marched past and secondhand booksellers have returned to display their collections, he picks up two albums about Persepolis.

But the volume that he dips into repeatedly during his journeys to India, China, Sudan, the Congo and elsewhere is the account of the Greek historian Herodotus. Seweryn Hammer’s translation of The Histories is gifted to Kapuscinski by his editor just before his first experience of “crossing the border”. The book goes with him on his journeys to the boiling points of the world — amid the emaciated refugees at Calcutta’s Sealdah Station, lying so still that they seem “a lifeless component of this dismal landscape”; to Nasser’s Cairo, at that moment “the hub of Third World liberation movements”; to Africa during the terrible Congolese conflict, where an encounter with two armed gendarmes prompts him to write: “I have only ever felt true loneliness in circumstances such as these — when I have stood alone face-to-face with absolute violent power. The world grows empty, silent, depopulated, and finally recedes.”

Waiting in his room in the uncertain days that precede such historic transformations, the young Polish reporter reads the Greek’s involved accounts of a world that existed 2,500 years ago. Herodotus, called “Father of History” and sometimes “Father of Lies”, writes not only about the great conflicts but also about the customs of different cultures, the paradoxes within them, and the whims, intrigues and often gratuitous cruelty of all-powerful monarchs. He describes how a man is stoned to death for the crime of speaking out in a Greece that was famed for its freedom of speech; he writes of the slaughter, beyond belief, of thousands of Babylonian women by their men in order to conserve supplies for a rebellion against Darius of Persia. He describes the failed attack led by Darius against the Scythians behind their “white curtain of snow”, and finally, the historic conflict between the East and the West, between Persians and Greeks, which rages across the Hellespont even as Xerxes of Persia, having lost interest in the war, is busy having an affair with his daughter-in-law.

As he reads, Kapuscinski identifies the “rules” of Herodotus’s history, including the terrible first law of aggression and retribution which can set off an unending chain of events across the centuries. For Kapuscinski, the curious, cosmopolitan Herodotus was the world’s “first globalist”, the first to understand the multiplicity of the planet: “That there are many worlds. And that each is different. Each is important.” This was the wisdom that sustained Kapuscinski’s work as well.