Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph by Ted Simon Page A

seen something too terrible to be borne.
    The ferry ties up in the night somewhere south of Abu Simbel, and the Turk is taken ashore, but after much discussion he is brought aboard again and we continue. When we land at Wadi Haifa at midday he is quiet.
    I meant to ride from Wadi Haifa, but the police say I must take the train at least as far as Abu Hamed, and I cannot get petrol without the help of the police. I have made friends with a Dutch couple, and once on the train I might as well go with them as far as Atbara. What's a few more miles in the whole of Africa?
    The train rattles on through beer, supper, songs, sleep, tea and English breakfast. In the oval, engraved mirror of a colonial dining car I actually take notice of my face for the first time in a long while. Action has freed me from self-consciousness, and I am becoming a stranger to my own appearance. It is a very satisfying feeling. I no longer think of people seeing me as I see myself in a mirror. Instead I imagine that people can see directly into my soul. It is as though a screen between me and the world has dropped away.
    Through the carriage window the desert has been sweeping past, almost unbroken, for hours. I stare at it mesmerized, trying to imagine myself riding over it. Now there are signs of life: some animals more thorn trees, tents and huts. The train slows. Atbara Station. The corridor is jammed with people and bundles. My mind is in gear again. To meet trouble halfway, what disasters shall I anticipate now? Perhaps e bike has vanished off the train somewhere en route? Maybe half of it will be missing? Or I will be asked to bribe someone to unload it?
    The wheels screech on the rails. The crowd tumbles off. The bike is still there. Nothing is missing. There are no problems. To me this is a sort of miracle. I wheel it to where my bags are heaped on the platform and pack them on as children peer into the speedometer where they believe the soul of the machine to reside. I flood the carburettor. For God's sake start! Don't give me any trouble. It's too hot to wrestle with you now.
    One kick and she starts. You lovely machine.
    First to the police, to be registered as an alien. The locomotive is hissing and panting in the station. I can hear it across the road. It howls and clanks into action. Plunk, plunk, plunk-plunk-plunk-plunk as the train's vertebrae stretch. It rolls away to Khartoum, but now there is more noise, and agitation continues with a taxi for my friends, and the bike following, to find a hotel. The hotel.
    Atbara is a frontier town; mud houses, wooden facades, and the enveloping dirt road filling all the spaces between like a brown flood ready to reclaim it all. Here is a more imposing street, red brick and cement. Is this the hotel? We stop. The taxi leaves, but the travelling noise goes on in my head. We're not there yet. The building looks abandoned.
    'Hotel?'
    An old man sweeping leaves shakes his head angrily, and points down the street.
    Alongside the next building is an alley. It debouches into a garden with tables and chairs rooted here and there among the weeds. A cemented veranda at the back of the building gives access to a series of closed green doors. Hotel!
    At a round iron table sit five men.
    'Hotel?'
    'Hotel, yes. Come and sit.'
    One last effort, to fetch the bike into the garden, park it against the veranda , close the petrol tap, walk to the table . . . and sit. The noise stops.
    The sun is getting low now, the light is yellow and grainy. The five men are gathered like a conspiracy of pantomime pirates. One has a black eye-patch, another a vivid scar. The one next to me, an Arab in galabeia and turban, has a squint and a thin-lipped smile of artless evil. Every child in the audience knows he has a dagger under his robe.
    The table is laden with date sherry bottles, all empty but one. With exaggerated hospitality the Arab sweeps up the sleeves of his galabeia and pours out glasses for the Dutch couple and myself.