Trio's Trek: A short review
I'm always amazed at how perceptions change too. Went I went to Giza, I could find hardly a visitor that wasn't disappointed with the size of the Pyramids there. Yet Mary writes:
- The Pyramids of Gizeh, however well prepared for them one may be, are utterly breath-taking in their overwhelming immensity. Nothing one has ever read or been told, or has seen in pictures, can take away that shock which their size alone compels. No superlative in a description of them is quite enough - they are indescribable.
Might the sky-scraper have tainted our imagery a little, or the expectations we collect from rampant publicity and media hype?
It may be an old point, but it brought a smile to my face all the same to read of a Greek driver in the Belgian Congo:
- Our driver was very gay and sang at the top of his voice as we went along, making his beautiful car dance the Samba. The car was so comfortable that we wished the journey longer. But the Greek was amorous as well as gay, so perhaps it was just as well!
But then Mary writes: I'll do anything once!, so I'm not sure what she had to fear.
The Spain they describe is one that will be very foreign to any modern visitor. Travellers, and women travellers were so rare in 1949 that they draw attention everywhere they go. Mary describes crowds of people in almost every Spanish village they pass through, following them around staring ceaselessly as though these girls were from some distant planet.
Still, she wins little sympathy with me in the end, writing of the Nilotic peoples in southern Egypt:
- Their reasoning could hardly be akin to Western thought and must, perforce, be retarded by bigotry and callousness
which is a near perfect expression of the very bigotry she's accusing others off. But then the idea that Western thought was implicitly higher than that of others was perhaps vogue at the time, or if not so completely it highlights Mary's conservative side rather well.
And if criticising the morality of native peoples wasn't enough, those that she liked, she poisoned:
- We were quite sorry to leave these little people [the pygmies of the Belgian Congo], and, wanting to give them something, I tentatively offered a cigarette. They were overjoyed and little brown hands were stretched out from all directions
Though I'll confess that a multitude of smokers today might not view this
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