The Last Train to Zona Verde Read Free Page A

case.” After a lifetime of traveling, Evelyn Waugh spent the winter of 1959 in East and Central Africa and wrote an account of it in
A Tourist in Africa
. He died six years later. Both Laurens van der Post and Wilfred Thesiger spent their later years in African travel — van der Post in the Kalahari Desert, Thesiger in upcountry Kenya — and wrote about it. Hemingway’s ultimate safari, his last serious journey, was to East Africa in 1953–54, and though he shot himself six years afterward, his fictionalized version of the safari,
True at First Light
, edited by his son Patrick, was published posthumously in 1999. After V. S. Naipaul published his
Masque of Africa
, a lengthy interrogation of “the nature of African belief” through six African countries, he made it plain that it would be his last travel book.
    Africa can be fierce, and some of it frankly scary, but as Naipaul’s experience showed, it can also be kind to an ailing and elderly traveler. You might expect people to say, “Go home, old man.” But no — in general, Africa turns no one away.
    And so this, the greenest continent, would seem the perfect landscape for a valedictory trip, a way of paying respects to the natural world and to the violated Eden of our origins. “All the hungers of life are blankly stated there,” the English writer and traveler V. S. Pritchett wrote about Spain fifty years ago. But what he said could be an assessment of Africa too. “We see the primitive hungers we live by and yet, by a curious feat of stoicism, fatalism, and lethargy, the passions of human nature are sceptically contained.” In Africa we see human history turned upside down, and it is possible in Africa to see where we have gone wrong.
    “Africa gives one back the necessary feeling that the world is vast, prodigious and noble,” wrote another traveler, and to this very region,Jon Manchip White, in
The Land God Made in Anger
. “In spite of what the pundits say, our planet is neither congested nor contemptible.”
    All solitary travel offers a sort of special license allowing you to be anyone you want to be. There are many endangered countries, or places whose futures are threatened. I think of the radioactive Ukraine, or anarchic Chechnya, or the overburdened Philippines, or tyrannized Belarus. Each of them could use a helping hand, but when the celebrity or ex-president or glamorous public figure wishes to make a charitable appearance it is nearly always in Africa, for the sake of the exotic — or is it the drama of high contrast in black and white, or its being hypnotically unintelligible? In Africa the traveler’s license is unlimited, and Africa itself magnifies the experience in a way no other place can.
    When I was following the spirited, fleet-footed Ju/’hoansi people through the low sunlit bush of Nyae Nyae, I knew I was where I wanted to be. And that kind of traveling was a way of recovering my youth, because as a twenty-two-year-old teacher at a small school in rural Africa I had spent some of the happiest years of my life — years of freedom and friendship and great hope.
    If I had a sense of foreboding about this trip, it was because travel into the unknown can also be like dying. After the anguish of the goodbyes and the departure itself, you seem to diminish, growing smaller and smaller, vanishing into the distance. In time, no one misses you except in the casual, mildly mocking way of “Whatever happened to old so-and-so, who threatened to beetle off to Africa?” You’re gone, no one can depend on you, and when you’re only a dim memory, a bitterness creeps into the recollection, in the way that the dead are often resented for being dead. What good are you, unobtainable and so far away?
    And that makes you two ghosts, because in the distant country, too, you’re like a wraith, with your face pressed to the window ofanother culture, staring at other lives. And much of what you see, like the harmonious life in the bush, has