NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules Read Free

and it is generally true. One of the more anticlimactic experiences in a Mediterranean market is surveying the fish goggling on marble slabs. There are not many, they are rather small, and the larger proportion have been caught outside theMediterranean. Tuna is the exception, because it makes an annual journey through the Pillars and across the Mediterranean to spawn in the Black Sea. Dolphins are protected. With the exception of illegal drift-net vessels that use nets up to ten miles long (for example, Greenpeace France detected and documented 137 illegal Italian drift-netters between April and June 1994), fishing is small-scale and unrewarding. Deep-sea fishing in the Mediterranean is almost unknown, apart from the illegal drift-netters and the competition for the migrating tuna.
    It is not a fishy sea, but it is blessed with a beautiful climate, and though Mediterranean storms and high winds can be devastating, it has been noted for its calm waters. The very word Mediterranean signified sunny skies and balmy weather, and for thousands of years these shores had been a kind of Eden, fruitful with grapes and olives and lemons.
    But soon after I set off, I mentioned my itinerary to a young French student on a train. Pointing to my map, I remarked on how it was so easy to travel around the Mediterranean.
    “Croatia! Albania!” the student said. “And what about Algeria—are you going there?”
    “Of course. I’ve always wanted to see the souk in Algiers, Albert Camus’ Oran, taking the night train from Tunis to Annaba.”
    “In the past two years, twenty thousand people have been killed in fighting in Algeria, most of them on the coast,” he said. “You didn’t know that the most recent election was annulled and the Muslim fundamentalists have a policy of killing all foreigners?”
    No, I did not know that.
    “Maybe I’ll skip Algeria.” And I thought: Maybe they’ll stop killing each other before I get there.
    Gibraltar is tiny, just two square miles of it, mostly uninhabited cliffs, and there are almost as many apes as there are humans. The name is from Tarik el Said, the Moorish conquerer who named it “Geb-el-Tarik” (Hill of Tarik). I arrived on a cheap flight from London sitting with Mr. Wong, from the People’s Republic. We looked at the rock.
    “Like a small mountain,” Mr. Wong said.
    Like a beheaded sphinx, I thought, all buttocks and trunk, crouching with its paws on the water, and the more impressive for there being no other monstrosities or mountains near it.
    Mr. Wong told me he was planning to start a Chinese restaurant in the town. “And why did you come here?”
    “Because I’ve never been here before,” I said.
    I had never been to Spain either. Once I had been to the south of France, to see Graham Greene in Antibes. That tiny fishing port was all I knew of the Riviera. I had seen a little bit of Italy and had spent one day in Athens, but apart from that had not traveled in the Mediterranean, not even to the most obvious places. Israel, no. Lebanon, no. Egypt, no—had never seen the pyramids. Most English people I met had been to Mallorca; I had never been there. Because I had not been to any of these Mediterranean places I had vigorous and unshakable prejudices, and those prejudices amused me and kept me from wanting to visit the places.
    And in the way that you don’t really understand great novels until you are older and experienced, you needed to be a certain age to appreciate the subtleties of the Mediterranean. I had reread
Anna Karenina
and felt that it was a different novel from the one I had read when I was twenty-one. I had also reread
Tender Is the Night
, and
The Plague
, and
The Secret Agent.
I wondered whether they would have the same impact. They did, but for different reasons; they were different books, because thirty-odd years later I was a different man.
    By a happy coincidence these books all had Mediterranean connections. Dick and Nicole Diver single-handedly invent