“What am I afraid of ?” I asked myself not long ago. Not many things. A traveller can’t afford to carry fears with him, leaping into the unknown on every trip. The only things I could think of were snakes, which sometimes fill my dreams–and heights, which induce in me a mad impulse to take a running jump. And the previous year I’d been involved in a near-fatal car crash in Bolivia, my taxi almost plunging off a ravine, at 12000 feet, as it rolled and rolled after being driven into a mountain at high speed, all its passengers (but me) ending up in the hospital. I’d been wary of narrow and unpaved roads ever since.
Five days later, I was being driven–at very high speed–on the wrong side of a two-lane road, bicycles and blaring trucks and overfull buses and children coming at us, towards a sheer rock face in the center of Sri Lanka. Sigiriya is reached by 1300 steps, straight up, it seems, and my guidebook had told me that the ascent of the great rise was “not for the faint-hearted,” perhaps better appreciated from the ground. Half way up the rockface, climbing a vertiginous spiral staircase–bought, I later learned, from the London Underground in the 1930s–I looked down and saw nothing but air. A three- or four-hundred foot drop at my feet, if I slipped, and jungle all around.
“Are there accidents here ?” I asked my guide, fumbling along the guide-rail, and wondering why my job demanded such trips of me.
“Oh, too many,” he said. “So many people are so crazy.”
We climbed up and up, passing some half-sensible travellers who had decided to climb part way, but not ascend further, through a staircase set between a sculpted lion’s paws. Signs everywhere warned against what my guide told me were swarms of “killer bees.” At the top of our ascent, he said, it was mostly snakes.
“Snakes ?”
“Only pythons, sir. No problem.”
Chameleons turned red and white and green in the sun at the top of the rock face. Huge lizards who might have been iguanas–“land monitors,” someone said–breathed evilly among the outcroppings. A man with a small wicker basket looked at me and said, “You want see cobra ?”
It could have been a compendium of my nightmares. “Leopards, wild elephants,” my driver had said, listing the occupants of the jungle we were driving through. “Also guerrillas, Tamil guerrillas, very close. You see the trucks ? They always drive together, too close, because of the wild elephants.”
Ten months before, when I’d volunteered to take the trip (to an editor who had offered me the chance to go anywhere from Iran to Mongolia), a cease-fire had been in place in Sri Lanka and it had lasted three years. A tsunami had swept through the ill-starred island less than two years before, but that, in my crazy logic, meant that the odds were against any other calamity visiting. Westerners were buying up property in the walled fort in Galle and deluxe six-star hotels were opening up everywhere.
Almost the minute I chose Sri Lanka as my dream destination, and began making plans to go there, a new hard-line government came into power, after elections, and fighting resumed with new intensity. My editor wrote to me excitedly that war made our story more exciting and topical than ever; I, not knowing where to turn, and with a sinking and unfamiliar feeling in my stomach, went to a chapel high in the hills two days before I left California and prayed for something and then, the next day, went again, as if for insurance.
Never, in a lifetime of travel, had I felt so uneasy about leaving the certainties of home behind; something, I was sure, was telling me not to go.
At this point, on the road next to the place where the guerrillas and elephants were said to lurk, our vehicle broke down. Then the car was started up again, by a wild-looking mechanic dressed in nothing but a sarong and an explosion of frizzy hair, and the driver started going faster, into the path of oncoming cars, swerving and then veering off at the last minute. “No problem,” he said. “I have never had accident.”
But–I didn’t need to remind him–it didn’t matter if he was a flawless driver himself. If anyone else on the road, many of them driving without licenses, or while drunk, made a mistake, we would be history, and if we hit anyone else, the blame would fall on us. The sensation of rolling and rolling in the car, ever closer to the precipice in Bolivia, came back to me with unwanted intensity.
“You have brothers and sisters ?” I said, to distract myself.
“One sister, sir. But she died, fifteen years old. Driver, too many drinking, hit her on the road.”
Then the car gave out again. Night began to fall over the jungle. The people riding bicycles began to fade away. We were alone in the chattering darkness.
For twenty years now, I’d taken great pains not to visit Sri Lanka, paradisal though it was said to be; it was the one spot in the world where I was directly implicated in a savage revolution. My father was a Tamil, after all, from South India; my name, my very face branded me as a member of the group tearing up the island with terrorist attacks. I’d decided, when I made my plans, that such issues were irrelevant: but now, in the weeks since I’d bought my ticket, new outbursts of violence, on both sides of the war, brought Sri Lanka into the headlines every day. A kind Englishwoman who had invited me to look in on her when I visited Colombo–her life had been changed, she said, after she found herself on holiday in Sri Lanka when the tsunami arrived and decided to abandon her job and work on the paradise island–had come down with dengue fever. Indeed, most of the ambassadorial corps in Colombo was said to have contracted the rare and famously horrible disease.
My first day in the country, two days before, the third highest man in the Sri Lankan army had been picked off by a suicide bomber only minutes away from where I was having breakfast. Only weeks before, six sightseers had been shot dead in a national park, and sixty-four more civilians died when their bus ran over a mine. The Temple of the Tooth, the previous day–the holiest shrine in the country–had been more full of soldiers and of guns than monks.
Now it was pitch-black, and the absence of lights coming from our car matched the absence of lights all around. The leopards, the wild elephants, certainly the guerrillas–all the attributes of what the newspapers called the “teardrop island”–seemed very close indeed. The driver tried to use his cell phone, but all he heard was static.
“You have phone, sir ?” he asked.
“On the far side of the world.”
The trip that followed–a man had emerged out of the darkness from a barn of rusty spare parts and had done something, after an hour of fumbling, to jump-start the car–never happened, I tell myself now. We were able to drive, so long as we never slowed down and didn’t turn our lights on. Through the teeming darkness we careened, like kids on a roller-coaster, into the face of coming trucks, down narrow country roads crowded with bicycles and cows and children walking back from school, around turns, the driver taking both hands off the wheel to demonstrate how he’d slept with the guerrillas, closing his eyes in his delight at his bravery.
Faster and faster, because to slow down meant what sounded to me like death.
The roads grew narrower as we climbed up into the hills around Kandy, the curves grew more frequent. Children, it seemed to me, were everywhere–not least behind the wheel of our car and in the passenger seat. I didn’t travel in search of fear, and yet here I was, still unrecovered from my bloody moment in Bolivia.
By the time–somehow–we got back to the hotel, snakes and precipitous heights seemed very far behind me. I had had enough of the teardrop island, though in fact my trip was just beginning, and I had ten days of driving across it still ahead. I wondered why I travelled to such places, except maybe to take myself through my fears and come out the other end.
And then I thought of the driver, risking his life every day on the same roads that had already claimed his teenage sister. I thought of the man in the rusty garage, surrounded in the dark by guerrillas every night. I thought of the children walking along the roads every day, on their way to school or back again, in between cars that never slowed down and had no headlights on. It didn’t have anything to do with me and my everyday fears, I thought; travel was the only way I knew to find out what life was like for most of the rest of the human race.
More than six billion neighbors in the global village, and for most of them my day of terrors had been just one more day among ten thousand such.
注：本栏目重在收集一些海外留学文书的题目，以便加加留学编辑深入了解海外教育方式与发展形势，从而拓展个人陈述、推荐信等文书的写作思路。
