Jupiter's Travels

He and his six brothers, he says, fled to Uganda when the Muslims killed his parents in the war. They lived by hunting in the bush. Now all his brothers are famous. So he says. Why not believe him, until it becomes important?

I had launched myself on a journey to circle the globe, but I seemed to be on another journey as well, a great voyage of discovery into my own subconscious. And I trembled a little at the thought of what monsters I might encounter there.

"I suppose I can always try," I say.His smile is the one reserved for troublesome idiots."Yes. You may try."

The girls are rehearsing, hands linked in a line, singing a chant and making little runs across the sand. The men insist on posing for endless group shots, faces set in the sternest expressions, except for Minderbender, who fools about constantly in his khaki shorts, ruining the fake authenticity and making it real.

Well, we're all just acting out other people's fantasies, aren't we? Maybe we're not much good for anything else.

For three days and two nights I drift up the Nile along Lake Nasser. The sunrises and sunsets are so extraordinarily beautiful that my body turns inside out and empties my heart into the sky.

What happened on the way, who I met, all that was incidental. I had not quite realized that the interruptions were the journey.

It struck me that everywhere in the world I would meet people to whom being there would be an ordinary, everyday event. Was my journey really nothing more than a state of mind?

Perhaps there are men raised in peace and lucidity, with no phantoms on their tails, who see nothing in a storm cloud but convection currents and water vapor. In any case I would not change places with one of them. What grandeur there is in my life blossoms out of my own mean beginnings. What times of peace I know are a thousand times more precious