journal entry snippets
step back in time with these travel musings:
30 / 01 / 1953
“Immediately when you arrive in the Sahara, for the first or the tenth time, you notice the stillness. An incredible, absolute silence prevails outside the towns; and within, even in busy places like the markets, there is a hushed quality in the air… Then there is the sky, compared to which all other skies seem faint-hearted efforts. Solid and luminous, it is always the focal point of the landscape. At sunset, the precise, curved shadow of the earth rises into it swiftly from the horizon, cutting it into light section and dark section. When all daylight is gone, and the space is thick with stars, it is still of an intencse and burning blue, darkest directly overhead and paling towards the earth, so that the night never really grows dark.”
Paul Bowles, Travels
05 / 02 / 1905
“To those bred under an elaborate social order few such moments of exhilaration can come as that which stands at the threshold of wild travel. The gates of the enclosed garden are thrown open, the chain at the entrance of the sanctuary is lowered, with a wary glance to right and left you step forth, and, behold! the immeasurable world. The world of adventure and of enterprise, dark with hurrying storms, glittering in raw sunlight, an unanswered question and an unanswerable doubt hidden in the fold of every hill.”
Gertrude Bell, The Desert and the Sown
10 / 03 / 1921
“This Italy is a strange, sloppy country as we find it to-day … You cannot even find the exact hour of a train. Everything fluctuates, nothing is fixed. Your train may start to meet a train which, with luck, may leave the station two hours after the time marked in the guide-book.”
Agnes Castle, The Way It Was
13 / 04 / 1934
“These are the best times, the times when neglected senses expand to an exquisite sensitivity. You stand on the Barrier, and simply look and listen and feel. The morning may be compounded of an unfathomable, tantalising fog in which you stumble over sastrugi [wind-blown waves of ice] you can’t see, and detour past obstructions that don’t exist, and take your bearings from tiny bamboo markers that loom as large as telephone poles and hang suspended in space.
Richard Byrd, Alone (Antarctic Skies)
19 / 05 / 1831
“Next day we went to Capri. This place has something Eastern in its aspect, with the glowing heat reflected from its rocky white walls, its palm trees, and the round domes of the churches that look like mosques.
But above all, I must tell you of the blue grotto… The colour is the most dazzling blue I ever saw, without shadow or cloud, like a pane of opal glass; and as the sun shines down, you can plainly discern all that is going on under the water, while the whole depths of the sea, with its living creatures are disclosed. You can see the coral insects and polypuses clinging to the rocks, and far below, fishes of different species meeting and swimming past each other… Every stroke of the oars echoes strangely under the vault, and as you row round the walls, new objects come to light. I do wish you could see it, for the effect is singularly magical. On turning towards and opening by which you entered, the daylight seen through it seems bright orange, and by moving even a few paces, you are entirely isolated under the rock, in the sea, with its own peculiar sunlight: it is as if you were actually living under the water for a time.
Felix Mendelssohn, Letters from Italy and Switzerland
30 / 06 / 1867
“This is Royal!… Tangier is the spot we have been looking for all the time. Elsewhere we have found foreign-looking things and foreign-looking people, but always with things and people intermixed that we were familiar with before, and so the novelty of the situation lost a deal of its force. We wanted something thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign — foreign from top to bottom — foreign from centre to circumference — foreign inside and outside and all around — nothing any where about it to dilute its foreignness — nothing to remind us of any other people or any other land under the sun. And lo! in Tangier we have found it. Tangier is a foreign land if ever there was one; and the true spirit of it can never be found in any book save the Arabian Nights.
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
