husband is capable of.
After half an hour no end seemed in sight and I left to walk outside for a while. Everything and everybody was at peace. I noticed clearly how all the man-made structures, the mud-walled houses and cowsheds, grain stores, tanks, irrigation channels and hay ricks, were at one with the earth and the trees. A poor and backward harmony, some would say, best appreciated from a distance, but surely there must be some middle way . . .
My appointment with destiny was approaching. Raj's father was getting ready to leave for his office in Patna.
'Come,' he said. 'We'll sit in the car.'
We sat turned towards each other, and he said:
'Give me your hand.'
I held it out, and he grasped it as in a handshake, but held it in his grip for several moments. Then, releasing it he gave my thumb a quick backward flip, and murmured, 'Achcha!'
'You have a very determined soul. This also is reflected in your mind.
'You are Jupiter . . .'
Why not, I thought. I like the sound of that.
Trouble with Mars
Officially the journey began at six p.m. on Saturday the sixth of October, 1973. The announcement was to appear the following morning in the Sunday Times. I had just stepped out of the newspaper office with a last armful of film and other oddments, and I had seen the story in proof.
MARATHON RIDER OFF
Ted Simon left England yesterday on the first leg of his 50,000 mile motorcycle journey round the world. Etc, etc.
I really had to go.
It was not an auspicious day, far from it. Unknown to me it was the Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur. More importantly, it was the day chosen by the Egyptian High Command to begin a devastating assault on Israel. Soon after midday the radio began to report massive attacks on Israeli positions in the Sinai. By the end of the afternoon the Middle East was at war again. The 'Yom Kippur' War.
The war lay right across the route I had been planning and preparing for six months. I thought they had done it on purpose. Maybe you know how it is when you have decided to do something really enormous with your life, something that stretches your resources to the limit. You can get the feeling that you are engaged in a trial of strength with the universe. Dock strikes, assassinations, revolutions, droughts, the collapse of the Western world, all those things you usually say 'ho-hum' to in the papers begin to look as though they were designed as part of your personal fate. I mean, I had trouble enough with the Ethiopians over their Moslem guerrillas, with the Triumph factory going on strike, with the Libyans running a holy crusade in their visa department. But a full-scale tank war, I thought, was going a bit too far.
The route of my first seven thousand miles to Nairobi had become so familiar to me that it lit up in my head at the touch of a button like those maps in the Paris Metro with their strings of little coloured bulbs. I knew I was utterly committed to that route by a thousand considerations, climatic, financial, geographic and emotional. War or no war I would have to go through, but it filled me with trepidation. The only consolation I could find was that fate had obviously marked me out for something special. If the omens were dark, they were at least vigorous. It seemed uncanny. I felt blessed and cursed at the same time. Star-crossed.
I stood alone in the gutter with my laden Triumph in the black and rainy night, fumbling with my parcels and wondering where to pack them. I was wearing a lot of clothing I still had not found room for on the bike, in particular an old RAF flying jacket and, over that, a waterproof anorak. The anorak was too tight. To get it on at all I had first to stuff the jacket inside it and then struggle to pull this whole rigid assembly down over my head. It usually took several minutes and made an amusing spectacle at the roadside, but I was sentimentally attached to the jacket and did not want to spend money on another waterproof. The effect, once inside, was