Alma Karlin
Lonely Traveler
Experiences and adventures of a woman in the realm of the Incas and the Far East

Translated by www.germling.com with GPT 5

Prefaces
Preface to the new edition.
The warm and honoring interest shown in my travel book—an interest that spread across many countries—has made a new edition necessary, and so I repeat here, in the foreword, that when I set down my many experiences from my journey around the world, I couldn’t go into detail about what I learned in the realms of superstition, botany, everyday life, and art, because any one of those fields could fill a whole book. I had to limit myself to telling how each country and people affected my innermost feelings in a different way.

Eight and a half years is a long time: I had to decide to bring out only the purely personal—the difficulties I had to fight through, precisely because I was a woman traveling alone; the way I kept earning the money I needed for the journey, instead of begging it like so many other so‑called “round‑the‑world travelers”; and how these struggles, this immersion in foreign mysticism, these long and overwhelming impressions changed me inside.

Of all that I had taken from home in 1919, after countless hardships and dangers I brought back on my return in 1928 nothing but myself and—my beloved typewriter: both badly battered, yet with the awareness that, if not the reward, then at least my goal had been reached. Back then my heart was full of bitterness; today it is full of gratitude for all the kindness I’ve received from countless readers. May the book, in its new form, win me new dear friends!

The author.

Publisher’s foreword to the 11th–30th thousand.
Barely two years have passed since “Lonely Traveler” first appeared and made the name Alma M. Karlin widely known. Hardly anyone in Germany knew her name before this book came out, and even in Austria, where scattered press items about Alma M. Karlin and journalistic pieces by the author appeared in various papers, it was hard to learn much about her. Only by many detours did the publisher, alerted by a press note in a Vienna paper, manage at the time to get in touch with Alma M. Karlin, who, in her hometown of the old Austrian Cilli, now Yugoslav Celje, was writing her great travel work. “Lonely Traveler” was soon followed by “Under the Spell of the South Seas,” and these two books—in which Alma M. Karlin set down the unusual report of her unusual journey—established the name she has made for herself today through her widely recognized and admired achievement.

It says something when, in our time, a work so large and relatively costly finds 20,000 buyers in barely two years, making a reprint necessary. In view of changed times since the first publication, the publisher is issuing the new edition as a popular edition at the lowest price. This step is meant to make Karlin’s books, as a valuable addition to their shelves, accessible to the broadest public for whom purchase had so far been impossible because of reduced incomes. Buyers of the popular edition also have the advantage that, unlike the first edition, it is richly illustrated, with the text uncut.

Everyone who has read “Lonely Traveler” and followed the author halfway around the world over four years of travel will also want to own Alma M. Karlin’s later books: “Under the Spell of the South Seas. A woman alone among planters and cannibals, convicts, sailors, and missionaries” and “A World Experienced—A Woman’s Fate. Through Insulinde and the Realm of the White Elephant, through India’s wonderland and through the Gate of Tears.” In the South Seas volume, the author describes her adventurous experiences in the fabled South Seas, and in the third book she tells of Borneo and Celebes, the Sunda Islands, Java and Sumatra, of Siam and India, and of her return home after an eight‑year odyssey through all the countries and seas of the world—eight years filled with incomparable experiences and the most exciting adventures, but also with the hardest privations, dreadful toil and danger, and endless sorrow.

“What is the adventure life of great men compared to a woman’s life like this,” wrote Deutsche Monatshefte (Berlin) soon after the first appearance of “Lonely Traveler,” giving voice to what all readers felt: deep admiration for this woman.

“Tower‑high above the usual travel literature stands this one‑of‑a‑kind work,” said the Berliner Börsenzeitung in a review—and hundreds of other press voices, in reviews and long feuilletons, say essentially the same. Again and again people acknowledge the unmatched and unique scope of Alma M. Karlin’s achievement. A few examples can have space here:

“… I know many, many travel accounts, but I readily admit that I have only rarely read one that could match these ‘Reports of a Woman.’ These books gripped and shook me and cost me more than one sleepless night …”

Welt und Haus, Leipzig.

“… An unusual book, the sort that rarely appears …”

Koralle, Berlin.

“… That Alma M. Karlin is an uncommon woman goes without saying after her experiences. Uncommon and gripping, too, is her gift for storytelling …”

Düsseldorfer Nachrichten.

“… An unusual book, written by an unusual person …”

Bergstadt, Breslau.

“… The most adventurous travel diary of our time. Alma M. Karlin did not discover new lands; but the adventures of daily life that met her on her world trip are more suspenseful and stirring than the account of many a research expedition …”

Mitteilungen der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft.

“… What she has achieved stands quite alone in the literature of travel writing …”

Neues Wiener Journal.

“This book is quite unique. It fills the reader with boundless respect for this brave little woman …”

Neue Badische Landeszeitung, Mannheim.

“We stand speechless before this woman’s achievements. The book can be warmly recommended. It contains the world journey of a heroine. Where is the explorer who achieved the like?”

Der Erdball, Berlin.

“The book is an experience … This book is one of the most valuable ever written …”

Berliner Volkszeitung.

“… A travel account can hardly be more vivid. Whoever picks up the book falls under its spell …”

Dresdner Nachrichten.

“… This ‘Lonely Traveler’ stands quite on its own, and even more so the way it was written …

Ostsee-Zeitung, Stettin.

“… A work exceptional in every sense … Alma M. Karlin’s gift of expression is extraordinarily strong …”

Pfälzische Rundschau, Ludwigshafen.

“… A work with a character all its own …”

Tägliche Rundschau für Mittelschlesien.

“… This is truly a book that must cause a stir … A rare book, written by a one‑of‑a‑kind woman …”

Darmstädter Tagblatt.

“… The travels of our great explorers, compared with what Alma M. Karlin went through, were comfortable strolls …”

Das Echo, Berlin.

“… An unusual personality, a soul that feels things keenly speaks through them, plain modesty and a humor that triumphs over all the horrors she lived through. Admiration for this woman! May her unusually vivid, grippingly written books find the widest circulation.”

Volksrecht, Zürich.

But enough of that. It is a pleasure for the publisher to leaf through the clippings for a work so widely and enthusiastically praised—and tempting enough to multiply the examples; but there would be no end to it. If one were to print everything written about Alma M. Karlin in the barely two years since the first appearance of “Lonely Traveler,” it would make a volume as thick as the three volumes of the new popular edition together. Not only in Germany and Austria, but also in Switzerland and Czechoslovakia, in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Holland, France, England, and Scandinavia, the press as a whole celebrated Alma M. Karlin’s great achievement. An English and an American edition of the travel work are in preparation. Through lectures in all the big cities and many smaller towns of Europe, Alma M. Karlin became known far beyond the circle of readers of her books; but perhaps the finest reward she carried away after all those years of privation and suffering were the countless spontaneous letters from deeply moved readers who expressed to Alma M. Karlin their admiration and sympathy. The publisher cannot deny itself the pleasure of reprinting here a few samples from such letters to the author:

“In deepest emotion I have read the last chapter of your splendid, original world journey. One feels so close to such a unique person who has written these grand experiences in his heart’s blood that one does not want to take leave of him forever. One must at least tell him he has not lived and suffered in vain, that he has given will‑power and the strength to live to thousands who are now so trodden down …”

Dr. R. G. in Vienna.

“In almost feverish suspense that rose to unheard‑of admiration, I devoured your book. And mixed with that admiration is almost a shudder: how could a single human child achieve, endure, and carry through all that? I am no starry‑eyed schoolgirl, but a 69‑year‑old woman who, in a completely different form and on a very different plane, has endured as much sorrow as a woman’s life can show. But—and I thank you for this, and that is why I write to you—my present suffering seems slight to me compared to what you lived through with exemplary bravery …”

Mrs. M. L. in Wiesbaden.

“I must thank you with all my heart for the hours of deepest feeling your ‘World Journey’ and ‘Under the Spell of the South Seas’ gave me—they have become a precious gift to me, they have given me infinitely much and made a lasting impression on me. Works of such truth and depth should be placed in the hands of all mature women …”

Käthe H. in R.

“I will not presume to judge your work; I only want to tell you that it thrilled me and at the same time moved me deeply. What a testimony to unheard‑of willingness to sacrifice, to a woman’s unique courage that puts all the achievements of men in the same field far in the shade; what skill in narration, what a fluent pen …”

Marie B. in Bamberg.

“One must admire this life force, this thirst for knowledge, this heroism. Your frankness feels very modern and sometimes manly. I believe this is the greatest thing a woman has achieved so far.”

Professor Sch. in Vienna.

“Your work held my wife and me in such a spell, moved and touched us to such a degree, that I have to write to you—to write how much we admire you, your steely energy, your iron will, your courage and, perhaps even more, your warm, noble feeling for all that is good and beautiful, your deep love for all that is. … You have suffered more than enough. For your literary achievements you deserve the Nobel Prize. I have read very many travel accounts, but none, none were written as wonderfully as yours, because they were written in heart’s blood …”

Generaloberst v. M. in E.

“I have the heartfelt urge to write to you after reading your books. I am so shaken that a woman, without complaint, under such heavy privations and sufferings, still reached the goal she had set. It is so hard to express what you have given me with your books, for I have had to go through so many hard things that your book lifted me up …”

Erna B. in B.

“After I read your books, I cannot let go of you; the books are like a spell. One has to keep dealing with them; one is shaken to the core by such experiences—and how they are told! Never again will a woman achieve what you have achieved; the recognition will come, it must come. No one can remain indifferent reading these books. Thank you for this gift of books that contains everything that makes the heart tremble; one will reach for them again and again, always newly stirred and shaken.”

Mrs. E. T. in Lüdenscheid.

May the great work of Alma M. Karlin, in its new form, find its way into the widest circles of those who, when reading a book, not only want to be tense and gripped, but also enriched with deep knowledge and lifted and strengthened in spirit. With this wish, the publisher sends the new edition of Alma M. Karlin’s life’s work out into the world.

The publisher.

Departure

So I will roam around the globe,
to gladly see and savor,
and all the beauty granted me
entrust to these pages.
Cilli.

I am my mother’s only child, and I have always heard it said—by the majority of my relatives, at least—that this limit to a single specimen must be regarded as a clear blessing. Besides, I am, which is said to be a reason for further burden, also a writer. For a few years I even had a madness for languages—that is, I tried to drown my adolescent world‑weariness by plunging into foreign tongues; and although that aim was not achieved, I was left with a good store of knowledge that made me believe I could, if need be, earn my bread anywhere in the world. To prepare myself further for a possible trip to foreign parts, I learned just enough painting to render flowers accurately. When my sketches, poems, and so on began to be accepted by various papers and I sold my first novel in the summer of 1919, I came down with that sneaky ailment called “a swelled head,” showed signs of megalomania, already saw myself, like a modern Columbus, discovering a new world, and began serious preparations for the voyage of conquest.

It was an extremely stormy time, the kind that would have kept people without inflamed imaginations at home. The afterpains of the war were worse than the war itself, but I had not yet realized how hard they were. After being in enemy land—London—at the start of the war, spending a year in Norway and one in Sweden, returning to Austria through allied Germany, and watching the whole misery of the war roll past me there, I had, almost without knowing or willing it, become a citizen of a foreign state.

People were in the grip of a money‑fever craze; they bought and sold currencies; the stock page was my reading, the lira, the dollar, the pound my dream. When I was finally ready to travel, my total funds, earned by teaching languages, came to a hundred and thirty dollars and nine hundred and fifty marks—so little did more than ten thousand Austrian crowns, already in free fall, amount to! The lira had suddenly risen so high my dazzled eye couldn’t make it out anymore. The mark, on the other hand, was almost invisible before I was truly abroad. So only the dollars remained.

It was just as hard to get a visa. India refused, Egypt was tightly closed, Holland demanded gold currency to enter the colonies; only Japan stamped the visa without a fuss. I trusted blindly in what I knew and pushed boldly out into uncertainty—just as a clueless child climbs into a leaky boat. I imagined the world was like Europe …

On November 24, 1919, I said goodbye. In truth, I didn’t want to. In the end it would have been easier to let the current of habit carry me along; but something in me urged: It has to be. What forced me wasn’t a thirst for adventure; it was the call of a set, undeniable task. Since then I have always believed in destiny.

In the dining room of my father’s house (a very old building, partly built onto the former ring wall and standing on Roman ground) the hanging lamp was lit. I took leave of my elderly mother, likely forever. I didn’t cry. In solemn moments I am beyond that. Real grief is like dry lightning, more dangerous than the storm with rain that follows.

Maukerl, my dog, gave me his paws, both of them, countless times. With him I could have cried. He sat there so funnily, windmilling his paws like a windmill with its sails, with no idea we were drifting apart. Later he would search and search and finally forget. It was like the symbol of all being.

The platform was dark, the overcrowded train wailed into the hall. A fine rain, already half snow, chilled me. I stood on the step, my friends around me. I hoisted the beloved Erika into the rack and waved once more.

With a creak the dark train pulled out of the dark hall.

There was only the light we brought with us. A fellow passenger’s candle was stuck in the ashtray. The mutual mistrust of the postwar time weighed on us all. My foot rested heavy on my suitcase, the only one I had taken; my eyes were fixed on the typewriter. Trying to sleep would have been pointless anyway, because every fifteen minutes a hooded figure stuck his head in the door and ordered curtly: “Papers!”

But as soon as they read “Japan” as the destination, they handed back the passport without a word, for each of them probably thought: “There goes a fool who’s better kept out of the country,” and I had peace.

At Steinbrück I had to get out and wait until three in the morning. No one had any idea when the Orient Express would come through. We lay in wait for it, packed together in the smoky waiting room. When at last we sped along in the dark train, I looked out over the snowy fields. Like pleading arms the bare trees stretched their branches out to me, and the moon grinned from breaking cloud. In Laibach we had to change again, and a friendly American, blissful at shaking the dust of ailing Europe off his feet, pulled me into his compartment. I played interpreter at the border, which didn’t stop the customs officer from forcing open my suitcase—with his saber—because in the leave‑taking my friend had likely pulled out the key but hadn’t handed it back to me. My faithful suitcase never quite recovered from that wound.

When day began to break, the express slid downhill from Obcina. The sea was silver‑gray, full of silver‑gray sails. Everything was so eerily still that an unaccountable dread came over me. Nothing but the thickening gray and the dull rolling of the train. I stood on the threshold of my laurel‑rich Columbus future and stayed cool.

Granted—I was frozen through, and my empty stomach was turning. That’s how the body defeats the immortal soul …

Trieste.

That was the first test of my courage and my patience.
I was living with two old aunts and slept in the room of someone slowly dying. Her sighing and groaning threaded through my dreams of the future, and the first whiff of decay hounded me day and night. The growing cold outside, the endless, heart-breaking search for ships—either they didn’t go where I wanted, or they demanded payment in gold—, the fear of spending the hard-earned money already in Europe, clouded the fleeing days. I stood down on the beach, stared at the white-blue water, the wheeling gulls, the red-hot karst cliffs at sunset, the deep red late-autumn leaves in sheltered corners, and tried to crank up my sinking spirits.

Once I poured out my troubles to an old sea dog, and he said:

“Go with a light heart; anyone who speaks so many languages carries a fortune around!”

That may have been quite true, but what neither of us thought of was that not every bank honors that kind of draft. My fortune often resembled a miser’s buried gold…

On repeated advice I decided to travel via South America, for if all roads lead to Rome, surely they would all bring me to Japan in the end as well. It wasn’t the shortest route, but by all appearances the only open one.

All this came about like this: Just as I came home one evening, discouraged, and more than one Italian had whispered that he wanted to accompany me, I learned that a ship returning empty to Japan would take me along for thirty pounds sterling. My enthusiasm knew no bounds. The one of my two aunts who wasn’t yet dying, who was wise and never forbade anything directly, remarked at supper:

“Once you’ve left Trieste, I won’t eat fish anymore.”

“Why not?” I asked, amazed.

“Because I don’t want to turn cannibal, for once you’re alone on the Scotland Maru, the Japanese will abuse you and then throw you into the sea. The various fish will feast on your remains and…” she shrugged meaningfully.

I said nothing. I looked at the ship, the foreign crew, the strange bustle—and hesitated. How many pains and dangers I would have escaped if… but it’s useless to complain. ‘He who is to be hanged will not drown,’ as the saying truly goes. So I collected visa after visa for South America. The one for Chile cost 30 lire, that is, 240 crowns! For that I had the right to tramp Chile from end to end. And then… but why get ahead of things? I grew poorer as my passport grew richer.

All the ships went straight to Argentina, and that government demanded a heap of certificates: that one had never earned a living by begging; that one had no criminal record; that one had no hereditary defects and, above all, that one was of sound mind. That last point had always been doubted in my hometown and even more in the narrow circle of my family, and so my aunt preferred to take me to an Italian doctor, who brushed me with a single glance out of half an eye and certified me as of sound mind. There are still gullible people!

For faster handling I entrusted the matter to my own country’s diplomatic mission. We spoke only French with each other, and later I would have preferred to speak with my fists, for the papers that reached the embassy within eight days were handed over to my aunt after daily reminder visits about eight weeks later (when I was already on the high seas).

After five weeks I went to Genoa. There I had to find what I was looking for.

Behind me vanished the rust-brown hollow tiles, coated with a light crust of salt, that grace every roof, the bare karst, the somber cypresses, the umbrella-crowned pines—vanished, too, the last scrap of home.

Venice.

To find fools you often need only get on a train. Opposite me on the hard bench of third class—it was still new to me then, traveling third—sat a mechanic who kept thrusting his head forward like a startled turtle to see some bay better. Each time he would roll his eyes in delight and cry:

“Ah, I once kissed a girl there.”

And there were bays without end. Truly, the number of kiss-hungry maidens in the coastal land must have been alarming. When we went through a tunnel, I prudently moved away from the window. I’ve never been a fan of mass-produced goods.

Next to the kiss-man sat a pretty brunette who, with her unkempt servant-girl hands, was pouring perfume on her hair, jacket, the opening of her blouse, and so on. I would gladly have said to her: “Beauty, put on gloves and close your mouth, or even the sweet scent won’t work your transformation.” Good advice, however, is like leaves rotting on the ground, and I kept my leaves of wisdom to myself. If only everyone did!

In Venice a nice schoolteacher helped me carry my suitcase to the checkroom; then I wandered through the quiet winter streets, stood alone before San Marco, and blinked into the dim, fog-ringed lights.

Venice is a place for lovers. You can’t get run over, even if in first rapture you stare each other almost to death; you eat well, even if you remain blissfully unaware of what exactly filled you up; lovely shops dazzle eye and purse, and to sit in a gondola must be wonderful—if there are two of you. Especially when it’s cold and the man has a warm coat. My little jacket was thin and I was alone, so from the canals I got not the poetry but only the stench. I had been in Venice once before—in the heavily snowed-in springtime of my girlhood—and the summer brilliance all around had only made me sadder then. On this winter day, as a future Columbus, I was simply melancholy. In my view, Venice belongs to a honeymoon…

Otherwise you can live alone just as well anywhere on earth.

Genoa.

I slept in the unheated compartment, and opposite me on the hard bench a sailor groaned. Those getting on grumbled. Those getting off left the door open; the wind howled.

At last the shadows receded, revealing the frost on the poplar-dotted meadows, and when the sun rose the snow-crowned Alps lay before me in a rosy glow. Like a memory they faded in the distance, golden, hazy, and far, far away. By contrast the Apennines drew near in naked brown. Short yellow-green grass covered some slopes, and cypresses stood close along the line.

At ten in the morning we reached Genoa. The sailor cursed—back then that wasn’t yet forbidden by law—and I, panting, lugged my suitcase and my heather plant to left luggage; I wandered into the city as if I had no worries and already had a room; admired the palms on the shore, the oranges in full bloom, the splendid palaces, and the two-wheeled carts with a cage-like superstructure of wickerwork. A child’s funeral procession slid past me—the horses draped in white, walking one behind the other, their eyes covered with an enormous chamois flap that looked like a black disc; the hearse like a throne chair, also white. Behind it the wailing women, and all around us the strong southern sun and the boundless deep-blue sea.

Genoa is very large and, for all its beauty, still feels dead. Why? Perhaps because the flat roofs look gray and colorless, the Apennines are a dull brownish yellow, the cemeteries and fortifications stand out as barren stone and trail off near the silted-up river. Cypresses and palms seem wrapped in a brownish haze, and the sad, drawn-out whistles of the steamers coming and going, the unceasing, mighty pounding of the surf, filled me with sorrow. Out of it sounded something like warning or grief…

Far too late I began my search for a room. First in larger hotels, then in smaller ones; by sunset already in very small ones; finally in questionable hideouts in narrow crooked alleys. At nine in the evening, with feet rubbed raw, I ended up at the police and asked the inspector to kindly lock me up. Better to spend a night in jail than out on the street. To my regret he did not find me worthy of being locked up, but gave me a chit for a bed in a shelter. Another homeless woman accompanied me there. The place assigned to me was in a dark room, on rags on the floor, under twelve men. I declined.

In the end I bought a ticket and spent the night in the third-class waiting room, the only one that stayed open.

Thick smoke filled the air; in back, by the buffet, the scum of the postwar years jammed together: runaways, tramps, the homeless; soldiers returning home lay sprawled across the benches, a few poor women crouched on crates and suitcases, and a drunk bawled sleepily. A dog whimpered. I found the tail end of a bench, and since I am small, I curled up as best I could—with my handbag under me, the new silk hat on me, the shoes close at hand. When I woke from a brief, agonizing sleep, cheeks burning, my fine traveling hat and the homeless woman were gone. Sic transit…

At six in the morning I began to write a letter and threw the plaid over the bag next to me. All night I had slept head to head with a run-away. Now he stirred.

A few minutes later some policemen entered the hall and asked whose bag had been stolen. I didn’t even look, I was so sure of mine. Then the men asked me personally, and I said proudly:

“Oh no! It’s here under the plaid!” and I flipped it back. The bag was gone!

In slippers, hatless, sleepy, I tottered to the police office. A bystander had noticed the man sneaking off and stopped him. Now the man who had used my head as a kind of prop sat on the defendants’ bench, shaking worse than I was from cold and excitement. The policeman stood right next to me and began every sentence with the solemn “Questa miserabile…”

Of course I melted more and more into self-pity.

After half an hour I was richer by many good lessons, by my passport, and an address to a convent. I was made to understand that future Columbuses and present-day women writers didn’t belong in a waiting room, and that one doesn’t sail around the world if one can’t keep better watch. Then I swapped my slippers for my shoes, which in the meantime had been guarded by the police, jammed a little blue silk cap onto my tousled bob (in that respect I was ahead of the fashion), and stepped—wiser and sadder—out in front of the station building.

Before me rose the splendid Columbus monument. The discoverer points downward with his hand, and his features are furrowed with pain. For the first time it came clearly home to me that—aside from the small fact that the globe is all too well known nowadays—it takes quite a lot to sail off alone into the unknown. I stood a long time before the monument, let this wisdom sink in, and noticed with satisfaction mixed with wistfulness that the disease of the “swollen head” showed signs of improvement.

Then I went to the hostel for young women and placed myself, repentant, under the sisters’ protection.

In the convent in Genoa.

It was a new world to me, not especially pleasant, but instructive. The prices were so low that one could neither ask for anything nor offer much for them, and the girls under the convent’s protection were mostly cooks, chambermaids or better nursemaids, and also salesgirls looking for some sort of work. A single large dormitory on the third floor held us all—fourteen at the time—and between the beds there were neither curtains nor nightstands. You had only to stretch out your hand to touch your neighbor. Gray wool blankets, heavy and without warmth, gave scant protection against the winter nights, but fourteen breathing pieces of humanity with the window closed turned the air into a cozy, if unhealthy, stable heat, and I, who had the bed farthest from the window, let the other thirteen warm me with their breath like the Christ Child in the manger.

Many other memories tie themselves to this dormitory, from which I so badly wanted to be gone, and whose safety I so often longed for afterward. In the evenings we were allowed to go upstairs only after evening prayer, when we knelt on the chairs facing the backrests and prayed in Latin, and after the evening sister had made her rounds, it was silence. It was then I also learned why people say ‘to put a flea in someone’s ear.’ In the middle of one night we woke to the bellowing of a roommate to whom this had happened. She jumped almost as wildly as the flea in her ear, thrashed her head around, and howled like mad for fear that the dear creature would slip through her eardrum into her brain. We tried all sorts of things, which only made flea and flea-holder wilder. We melted with pity and laughter until someone finally had the idea to slide a hair twisted into a noose into the ear canal. The flea grabbed the lifeline and rode out on the hair into the open…

I don’t know how it happened, but suddenly I became the interpreter of dreams. Hardly would someone open her eyes before it went:

“Last bed, I dreamed of a tower, or a goose, or…” and at once I unfurled the events of the future. For that reason I was allowed to stay in bed the longest. My short hair was, besides, the quickest to do, and I used my bed so cleverly that a couple of tugs on the wool blanket gave the whole thing the look of order and being made up. Doing something thoroughly is one of those virtues I only acquired much later, so to speak as ‘Columbus.’ Life educates, and circumnavigations educate twice.

The dining table stood in the kitchen, bare, strewn with thick cups. A mixture that went by the name of coffee and a little corner of bread awaited each of us, and as soon as we had eaten, we had to wash our bowl ourselves. Anyone who skipped this was called down from above to her duty by a little orphan girl.

During the day I sat in the common workroom, where we alternated between embroidery, sewing, chatting and praying, and I wrote. In a certain respect I had a special position and was allowed to go out. At seven in the evening all the little chicks had to be out of the sinful world and in the peace of the convent, for it was convent peace, whether we worked downstairs in the hall while the cold winter sun brushed palms and orange trees, or the bells of the nearby Annunziata rang as it were into the bedroom.

While I was frantically on the lookout for ships, wandering from one Navigazione to another and eyeing with mixed feelings the sailors roaming about, I gradually got to know all of Genoa, got annoyed at the house numbers, of which every building has three or four, and of course you never guess the right one; I wandered through the various alleys—the notorious vicoli—whose names always suggest something that is meant only sarcastically. Thus there is the Alley of Hope, a small, dark, crooked cross-alley down into which wet laundry hangs on old ropes, so named, perhaps, because anyone who visits this maze does best to anchor all hope before entering; the Alley of Mercy, because you need it if you dare go in; the Alley of the White Cross, dirtier than all the others; Jesus Alley, from which, without dagger and revolver in hand, surely only the dear Lord can save you; the Guardian Angels Alley, which looks like the entrance to hell; the Martyrs’ Alley; the Alley of Uncertainty, because it remains doubtful whether you’ll ever emerge at the other end, and so on. In all these vicoli you can receive surprises of the greater sort—a stab in the back—or of the smaller sort, a rotten egg on your head, a bucket of dirty water, filth or the like. How people can live in such rat’s nests has always remained a mystery to me.

It is not my intention to describe the cemetery, which has been overdescribed a thousand times; it lies on the slope of a hill up which the colonnades seem to climb. A fine rain and the yellow-brown of the hills, the wet green of the cypresses, did not make the sight any more comforting. The tomb monuments are magnificent, but they did not move me in the least. Where the eternal begins, the personal should fall away. There stands a mourning widow in marble, knocking in despair at the grave door, her veil cast over all her charms, the prayer book in her hands—and then one learns that the second husband has already kindly helped pay some of the monument’s cost; there stands the mayor with enormous belly and watch chain, a smirk on his lips, and seems even in death to be saying: “Saint Peter, hat off, for I am the mayor of Genoa!”

Down in the valley, like time fleeing, the Terrenta rolls.

As often as I sat down by the sea and stared into the surf, my heart grew heavy. Through the hissing spray of the mighty breakers I saw everything as if through tears, and the future was more impenetrable than ever. Was I, in the end, chasing a will-o’-the-wisp, as someone at times does on the open sea? Or was I called?

Like the surf on the cliffs, the obstacles crashed to pieces against my still unbroken will.

The times were hard. All routes had proved impossible: here my money wasn’t enough, there they demanded special papers. Argentina didn’t want to admit anyone from Slavic countries, because all were regarded as Bolsheviks; most British colonies were still closed. So I was left with a single ship that ran down the west coast of America as far as Chile. I had read so much about the antiquities of the Incas that I wanted to get off along the way and admire them more closely. I also saved, by getting off (how are we Europeans to guess at such distances?), a few hundred lire. I bought a ticket to Mollendo, the last port of Peru. No one said “no,” not even the consul. My later experience taught me that the best countries were always the ones that made the visa hard.

The money had been dripping away for many weeks. At the same time I was so hungry that tears stood in my eyes from longing whenever I saw the cakes, the good sausages, the prepared dishes displayed under the porticos—and worse, when I actually smelled them. In the convent we ate macaroni in water every day, and large as the plate looked, this minestra was so fatless that two hours later I had man-eating urges. One day I went down the stairs in such a state and—oh wonder!—a butter roll sat there in the middle of the stairs as if for me. I thanked all the saints for the find and devoured it ravenously.
All at once life, which until then had only been unpleasant, turned abruptly tragic. One evening a young little thing was sleeping in the bed next to mine—a dear, round-faced child of a human being, still unshaped by life—and coughed a little; the following evening Sister L. sent the two of us to bed before the Rosary (a very significant favor!), and when morning came again and the bells of the Nunziata called across the blooming orange trees into the convent room, they carried my bed-neighbor to the hospital, where she died a few hours later. The next evening I had a fever, and the night nurse herself brought tea and more blankets. I already thought I was entitled to people the most famous graveyard in the world, when the fever left and I picked up my ticket. Shrove Tuesday passed unusually quietly, though for once we were truly full; then came Ash Wednesday, and then, in fact, it was:

“Tomorrow the Bologna sails!”

I feverishly tied up my bundle and spent my last evening on the Ponte Monumentale, from which you overlook the splendid Via XX Settembre, where an endless row of bright lamps flared up; from there you could peer, through curtainless windows, into the gardens of old palaces, into the depths of dusky courtyards, into the simple homes of many small clerks—and behind it all, like a deep-blue, boundless shadow, the sea stretched, beckoning and promising. Clouds, dipped in red, shot past me as monsters of many shapes, and the Apennines looked spattered with blood. Below, life roared the way I knew it. This was Europe. In three years I planned to come home, laden with wisdom and fame…

The sun went down and I hurried home through the Via Balbi, where two carriages could hardly pass each other, and still I dreamed. I kept dreaming in the old church that was our workroom, for everyone already saw in me a hint of what was to be. Golden dreams, like clouds—and like them, they dissolved.

Before departure.

The prioress of the convent accompanied me to the departure hall.

At three o’clock we steerage victims were already behind the barrier. On the other side stood the customs officer, the doctor, the police inspector, the company’s agent, and other powers-that-be, whom the victim had to pass in turn. It was right after the collapse, and anyone who set out into the world had to, so the people anxiously guarding their belongings here were almost all of a better class than what you usually find in the Third. A few Germans from the Reich hurried past me. A dark-skinned man lugged a wooden trunk like a Noah’s Ark.

After a while the prioress blessed me and left me. Slowly, guarding my Erika, I edged forward, and by five o’clock I too went from the customs officer to the doctor, and from him to the police inspector, to the agent, to who knows who else. At last a sailor grabbed my luggage, and I boarded the “Bologna.”

It was a giant ship of the Navigazione Transatlantica Italiana, and because I had once, somewhere, seen pictures of a third class, I fancied I knew all about it—me, who only knew first class, and not too well at that! So when, five minutes later, I stood in an underground room where the beds were stacked three high, and bed against bed besides, my jaw dropped to my chest. That was good, because otherwise it might have dropped to my toes when I saw that the beds were nothing but a mattress, a dark gray wool blanket, and the life belt as a pillow.

On the top bunks lay Arab women in their wide skirts, heavy rings on fingers and in their ears, gold necklaces, and at the same time ragged shoes with which they drummed overhead to the rhythm of their tongues. Only geese can chatter the way these people can.

Sighing, I slid my trunk under the bed assigned to me and tucked my Erika with me under the wool blanket; then I climbed the stairs again with a peculiar feeling in my nose, mouth, and heart.

The lucky ones in First and Second stared at us steerage folk with the arrogance of the well-off—or at least that’s how it seemed to me. With an uncomfortable sense of shame I hid behind the tall pillars and the bulging smokestacks, until my mess group roped me in.

That’s how I met more Bologna delights. Six and six travelers were tied together like calves for slaughter and given a sack to share that wasn’t white even then. Hidden inside were two tin bowls, six tin spoons and forks, and six plates. A ladle and six tin cups completed the outfit; we were not trusted with knives, and there weren’t even tables or seats. Some of my companions found crates or barrels; I swung myself up on the outermost deck bollard and from then on sat reading, writing, and eating on that backless perch, swinging my plate like a sleight-of-hand artist according to the ship’s motion, always with that unbroken, if admittedly somewhat rusty, Columbus feeling.

The head of each group had to go to the ship’s kitchen and fetch the food; he also had to get hot water for washing up, and each member did the dishes once. Whether I looked that chronically incapable, or the others took pity on me, I never found out. God bless them all the same, because no one ever asked anything of me. I ate, and the others took care of the rest.

By about nine o’clock everyone had come aboard, the “Bologna” twitched in her limbs, the first thick smoke rose; slowly the lines were loosed. I stood at the rail and looked back at Genoa. The lights poured down the slopes of the Apennines like a fall of shooting stars, and from time to time a single raindrop fell on my cheek. The sea sighed, the ship blew its farewell, a woman sobbed. Reluctant but unstoppable, the America steamer slid farther and farther out into the open sea.

I stood apart from the others and stared at the vanishing lights. Whether I had chosen rightly or not—now there was no going back! Whatever lay ahead had to be overcome. Better on the shield than without it!

Then I grew moved and whispered the farewell words of the wise Li Tai Pe, which I had learned in the Biblioteca civica:

“I raised my face to the bright shining star
And in that moonlight turned in mind and heart
To peoples and lands that I shall see.
Then, lowering my tired eyes to the ground,
In silence I thought of my homeland
And of the friends I shall not see again.”

The rain increased; the moon, as much of it as had been visible at all, disappeared completely. A gust of wind drove the “Bologna,” dropped her abruptly… That did it. In a few seconds the deck was clear.

The smell from below was nasty, but what good was that as a deterrent to a future Columbus? Screwing up my courage and my nose, I descended into the depths about which one could also have written:

“Abandon all hope, you who enter here”

Out at sea.

My thirty-five fellow victims were groaning in harmony. I would have forgiven them that, since the ship was rolling and I had to give myself quite a talking-to not to groan along; but the fact that they arranged their evening macaroni all past my face onto the floor (for there were no sick bowls) struck me as a tactlessness worthy of punishment. If you have something in your stomach, you keep it in. No one, not even a shipping company, asks for returns.

My not-rosy mood grew even less rosy because a wet, unfinished human child lay half on my bed. You see, a child came for every two adults, and from the child of course came half the wet and the stench. I swaddled my Erika and, through the gray night hours, kept rolling the child toward the mother’s wet side. I could have had that cheaper without Columbus ambition. Cheaper and, as I fancied, better.

The yellow Niagara from above, which with its side streams soon formed a lake on the floor, the damp wave of fragrance behind me, lying on a bed the size of a sheet and being scratched by a rough gray wool blanket were soon supplemented by two new plagues: the half-dead Arab women lamented aloud, and their bedbugs—compared to ours as a mammoth to an elephant—climbed down the bedposts and tried my blood. I hardly need add that I got up somewhat sobered.

It has never been my way to complain uselessly. Whoever complains makes themselves hated, but after breakfast, having tasted the ship’s coffee and vowed “once and never again,” I said to the capitano d’arme, who looked like Bluebeard but had a heart of gold:

“Put me in a top bunk instead, Capitano! I keep what I’ve eaten—even this coffee—though in that regard I’ve no wish to keep anything. It will reduce the Niagara stream from on high.”

So he put me on the top in the next cabin. There I lay between a female walrus and a honeymooner, both very nice in their way. The walrus was going to Chile, the young bride to the far-off Galápagos Islands, not far from Ecuador.

The washroom was open, you could never undress; the men walked past it, the women washed their baby clothes in the metal basins, the sailors stared in as they went by. The worst was a certain place. It had a screen but no door, was chronically overflowing, smelled of everything except anything bearable, and children and adults amused themselves by modeling cheerful shipboard events on the wall in brown plastic. Anyone who wanted to enter, in the best case, gave a warning grunt. Not far from that cubbyhole we took our meals.

I found travel to foreign parts different from what I expected.

I sat on the bollard. Past me slid the beautiful coast of France with its quiet, lovely bays and steep-falling cliffs. Everywhere in the world you sail past either flat shores or cliffs, and yet no two cliffs are exactly alike. These cliffs were white as pictures from fairyland, half gilded by sunlight, half wrapped in a soft silver mist that heightened the magic because you imagined more behind it than was actually there. Sometimes an island floated on the blue water like a swan, sometimes a cluster of cliffs jutted into the sea like an enchanted castle, and always something enchantingly fairy-tale faraway wove about these shapes.

Marseille.

Before us lay the Château d’If. I had to think of the Count of Monte Cristo and dreamed myself into the underground passages. Aloof, proud, with an aristocratic softness you wouldn’t expect, the castle lies on the craggy island right at the entrance, and behind it, lightly veiled, the city spreads—completely different from Genoa, more colorless, without southern charm except for the negroes and the Spahis who throng the harbor. On the hill stands Notre Dame de la Garde and below stretches La Joliette. You’d think you were in Africa, the bustle is so colorful. Something spiritually unhealthy runs through the city; bare trees stand soberly among gray buildings.

That was strictly forbidden ground for me as a German writer, but what you don’t know doesn’t make you hot, as the saying goes, and my SHS passport lent me an innocent hue. It was announced that anyone who wished could go ashore. In the very next moment my unworthy feet were on the not entirely irreproachable pavement of my political enemy; I brushed past Arabs in burnooses, negroes, overseas soldiers, Japanese, Chinese, and a great many Frenchmen still drunk on victory. The women in the market and in the shops were nice. They grieved, just like the defeated, for fallen sons and fallen money.

In front of the cafés the bustle was liveliest. Under oleanders nipped by frost sat the various drinkers of the most various colors and lands, drinking absinthe or black coffee, telling each other the most important little nothings of everyday life that fill all people like water fills a sponge, and in their hearts, behind the soul’s curtain, the grief was stacked high, though you only saw a reflection of it in older women’s faces.

In the evening I sat on the “Bologna,” peered out over the Gulf of Lyons, and ate the simple supper—rice soup with potato sauce and bits of meat—sitting on the bollard. They gave us this hangman’s meal two hours early, because as soon as we put out, the women would stop laughing and do the Niagara act; I, however, would lie stiff on my back like a dead fish and think of my future laurel twigs. Why be afraid? Everything has an end—and only sausage has two.

Next to me on the unwashed deck crouched the poor Italian emigrant woman who was always seasick, whether we stood or sailed, and who had three children, one beside her, one at her dried-up breast, and one on the way…

Barcelona.

When you approach the coast, you see the Montjuich hill to the right, in whose fortress the unfortunate Ferrier was shot. Barcelona too lies, like Marseille and Genoa, at the feet of rising hills or mountains, yet the cities are fundamentally different from one another: Genoa is splendid, southern, warm; Marseille a bustling port, cool, misty, colorless, without palms; Barcelona is more serious than Genoa, more foreign, with a harsh southernness. To be frank, for all the traffic, a bit sleepy.

The America steamers dock in front of the so-called sea station, guarded by soldiers, and no one may leave it without a passport. As I neared the exit, several male beings snapped smartly to attention in front of me, emitting a strange sound that made me recoil in alarm. Then one of them waved like a grand duke at a court fête and, in words that kissed my hands and feet, told me to go on bravely. Since at home in Austria we at most kiss hands, I was especially moved by the foot-kiss…

Through a long avenue of palms you reach the splendid customs house and the Christopher Columbus statue—a tall column, at whose very tip the discoverer points west with outstretched hand, and on whose base you could see fine reliefs from the life of that time. Lions crouch around the monument with faces so haughty you’d think they’d discovered America themselves.

In contrast to Genoa’s alleyways I found Barcelona’s streets conspicuously wide, with tree-lined sidewalks on both sides, finest toward the neighborhood of Garcia. In the narrower old town, flower-decked balconies beautified the houses, and here I saw for the first time the high booths where a man sat like on a throne, making a face like Ferdinand when he received Columbus, and had—his boots shined! The servant crouched humbly at his feet, and the next victim waited patiently on the neighboring throne.

As if I had fallen into the Middle Ages, the tiny kiosks where the letter-writer plied his trade seemed to me just that; he was just then composing a letter for an Andalusian peasant. From this I concluded that there must still be many people in Spain who cannot write.

In the cathedral lie the relics of Saint Eulalia, but since I had no mantilla and a church visit without such a black wrap is forbidden, I couldn’t even pay my respects to the saint.

In the shop windows what caught my eye especially were the colorful castañetas or tambourines, all bearing scenes from bullfights, and when such a fight took place in the afternoon, I observed the beautiful Spanish women who, with the required carriage, a bright shawl thrown about them, flowers in their hands and on their bosoms (there the word is no empty expression!), their fans at the ready (you can express everything with them that moves the heart), and their eyes set to love, proceeded toward the arena. I myself did not want to attend the spectacle.

At the end I asked a porter for a mailbox; for I noticed this useful thing nowhere. He pointed out the streetcar and a little box on the back. I dashed up to it and saw the letter disappear just as the car gave its farewell jolt.

Different countries, different customs.

On foot I reached the harbor. Saved is as good as earned.

Gibraltar.

The ship and my stomach kept rising and falling. A piercing rain swept across the ship. By day you aren’t allowed to be down in the cabin. I tucked myself into an open niche. My cough turned into barking. A shark was scouting, but not for me. I lack the longed-for curves. A turtle floated belly-up—a helpless state; the ship’s waves tossed her back into the right position. The gulls came screeching after us. In the distance shimmered the Sierra Nevada; behind it, they say, one must look for the cradle of the Spanish people—the beautiful, fertile Andalusia.

In the evening the rigging groans. Like smoke from Wotan’s pipe, shadows pull across the moon and let its light fall on the night sea only through black-gray veils. Ships approach, ring the warning bell, whistle. We answer, and each disappears in the opposite direction. That’s how human souls glide past each other.

Before sunrise we were already heading for Gibraltar, and when the light of the cloudy day finally fell on the calmed waves, the steep rock that drops sheer into the sea and could serve as a giant sacrificial altar, but is said to be a lion, lay right before us. The small, dazzling white houses lay at the feet of the black-gray watchman as if frightened, and for miles across the sea drifted fishing boats, barges of all kinds, foreign merchantmen and warships. Far away, infinitely green, infinitely sun-bathed and still, the African coast already showed itself. The buildings were strikingly long, dazzling white, low; the windows looked like narrow black slits, the roofs gleamed reddish and almost flat. Something quiet, sad held the landscape in its spell.

You’re not allowed ashore. Gibraltar was sacred ground even in peacetime, which only the politically chosen were allowed to tread, but the hawkers made up for this bitter loss of freedom. They brought dates fresh from the palms, nuts, lemons, oranges, and figs. First a cord would always fly up onto the deck, with a little palm-fiber basket pulled up; then the money was lowered down on a string, and finally you hauled your purchase up.

A collier anchored next to us. A steam launch towed two lighters, and at once a hundred black workers leaped aboard like monkeys and scrapped over shovels, filled baskets, dumped them into the lighters, shouted, raged, tumbled over one another, worked like savages, and made the coal pile shrink as if a giant had taken a bite out of it. The gulls circled our ship, threw themselves screeching onto the waves, and beat their black wings. Dark clouds doused all the light.

Farewell, Europe!

Off the coast of Africa.

It was already dusk.
Fine mists soon hid every view. The ship rolled horribly. You saw the smokestacks of a nearby ship vanish and shoot up again. Women screamed, children wailed, dishes flew off the tables, and food off the plates of those still eating. Luckily there was stockfish that evening, and that we always threw into the sea anyway. Why bring the poor fish back up? Once it’s boiled, staying in his own realm can’t be any fun anymore! And who likes stockfish? No one I’ve met in my life.

When the coast of Europe had blinked its lighthouse at us for the last time, Neptune greeted us with thunder and lightning and washed the deck clean of the old world’s dust, but the next morning the sea shimmered deep blue and dolphins played around the ship. They always travel in schools and do the funniest somersaults. The sailors claimed they push a drowning man toward land if it isn’t too far away.

Little by little I got more familiar with my fellow passengers. A nice plaster worker, who used to carry his little figures to Germany, was emigrating to Venezuela with his twelve-year-old boy. The Neapolitan barber with the curly mane now wanted to depilate Indian heads, and a famous pastry chef was bound for Riobamba in Ecuador, where people were already craving his sugar crescents. He knew the land from Arica to Caracas, and I dragged his wisdom into the light by every means I could. Much more high-toned, very proud of his knowledge, was the little lawyer traveling to Bolivia to join his brother, always adding his horseradish to everyone else’s sausage of wisdom. The young honeymooner curled her hair every evening, rough seas or not, and her husband, like all the other obedient husbands, brought her coffee and rolls early in the morning. When I didn’t easily clamber past the sick walrus because it was offering a sacrifice to the sea god, another woman’s husband lugged my rolls over to me. So I had something to eat without any further obligations. The wives had to wash dirty shirts and trousers later in payment for these little kindnesses.

Life keeps handing us scenes with mottos from which, if we weren’t so wrapped up in ourselves, we could draw deep, helpful wisdom; but we know how to look, seldom how to read. In my first cabin, with the Arab women, there also lay the wife of a true Peruvian. Instead of inquiring into the trees of the land, the antiquities of the Incas, and the ways of the high Andes, I would have been wise to look at this Peruvian specimen in the light of warning and not amusement; then I might have sailed past the antiquities of the Incas. As it was, I, a silly little European goose, admired the reddish-brown skin, the melancholy eyes in the long face, the odd turns of phrase, and called him the most interesting passenger.

His wife by the grace of God spoke three languages—German, Croatian, and Italian—and all three equally badly. She clung to me as a compatriot, and so I learned that in a sailor’s bar she had discovered the brown magnificence and given him her maiden heart, which was already rather past its prime. Everything she had owned—it wasn’t much—she had given him, and in return he had led her to the altar and from there onto the ship. He’d been advised, you see, to return to his far-off homeland, and the young bride (but old woman) was now satisfying her wanderlust and emigrating with him. They had no trunks (a great relief) and only two dresses: one on their bodies and one more in wrapping paper.

Every night he came down into the cabin—though it was forbidden after ten—and beat her in the bed until she was black and blue and screamed horribly. One day I asked her the reason for this marital massage, and she explained that the ship’s cheese he had received for small favors didn’t agree with him. Why? Because it heated the blood too much. He beat her because she wouldn’t go up on deck to satisfy his lust. Since such things, even if the deck had been empty, were strictly forbidden and the sexes were as if separated by a flaming sword, he shouldn’t have blamed her for chaste restraint. Given her looks and age, the reddish-brown one’s behavior seemed to us to border on stark madness. I laughed, instead of telling myself: “These are the descendants of the Children of the Sun! Give them a wide berth!”

A few Germans from the Reich were on board too. I always figure that it isn’t just me who sailed off into the blue like a crazy Columbus, but people wiser and better than I am. There was a Hamburg merchant emigrating who was only learning Spanish on the way, knew not a word about tropical health rules, and had stowed the trunk with all their clothes deep in the bowels of the ship so that for three weeks he and his wife could change neither dress nor underwear. Highly impractical people, otherwise charming. The poor wife was always seasick, and I called up comfort to her—since she only understood German—from the height of my bunk. Her husband was usually greener than she was; only Martin, the boy, romped about without a care.

Besides them, a young Hamburger was emigrating to Valparaiso and a Danish botanist to Colombia. He already knew tropical life and gradually became my adviser. We formed the German group in a corner. I was the only traveler who visited all the groups, because I understood the languages, and only later did I fully realize how much everyone had spoiled and pampered me. From the Neapolitan barber, who swept the deck with his curls and whose cousin was a cook in first class, I got treats, from others nuts, from the infirmary attendant fruit, from the baker rolls, from my tablemates service, and from everyone love; that is why the “Bologna,” for all its horrors, has stayed with me so beautifully. Nowhere was anyone as sweet to me as on that Italian ship…

Back then I sat on the bollard, the world at my feet, my courage untrimmed, my will unbroken, blind to what lay ahead.

Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

Long mountain chains of reddish-brown rock, curiously torn, broken up by moss-green undergrowth and the light green of huge euphorbias that cover the slopes in tight clumps with their leaf tufts. In the bay, nestled between hills, lies the little town of Santa Cruz, half built in Spanish, half in Moorish style, somehow already touched by the heat and the melancholy of Africa. The good “Bologna” lay far out and a steam launch took us ashore.

I wandered the winding lanes alone. You observe better when you go on your own. Most travelers visit only inns and markets. As I drifted along I got angry at the yellow-brown people of Tenerife riding their donkeys, unconcerned while the woman trudged a few steps behind carrying the loads. The men always wore loose, floppy shoes of brown leather, the women always wore a straw hat over a wide shawl; they always trotted obediently behind the husband.

The houses often had jutting bays and balconies; the sleepy shops stood wide open, waiting for customers like frogs for flies—with their mouths open. The lanes up toward the hills were very winding, almost without doors, painted bluish or lilac, and were almost nothing but walls, over which here and there a splendid, deep violet tangle of blossoms spilled. That was my first encounter with magnificent bougainvillea.

Then—after I had climbed over several rises—I stood in the outskirts and looked for the first time at a banana plantation. The leaves were full and dense, though badly tattered by the wind, and the giant fruit made me stop in reverence. That was the foretaste of the tropics.

In the gardens, the pitiful houseplants we know had become sturdy shrubs; the pepper shrub with its feathered leaves and dull brownish-red berries nodded over a wire fence, and roses glowed in the courtyards of Moorish folk, who closed the gate in envy after a moment. Such houses were windowless toward the street and looked mysterious and forbidding.

In the rushing brook children splashed about and loudly begged for copper coins; stark naked they ran after me. I gave one an Austrian two-heller piece. If nothing else, it was something for a collection.

Beyond the town people live like cave-dwellers. The front wall of the house is brick or stone, the roof and back wall are the rock itself. Tiny little windows allow a scant view. Cooking is mostly done across the road on a charcoal stove.

Those women with their narrow-brimmed, comically down-curved straw hats over their shawls, the men in garments that looked like retired nightshirts, the naked brood of humanity under the broad-crowned dragon trees—all that enchanted me so much I forgot time and place, until I heard the “Bologna’s” triple call and found myself not only far from the ship, but even far from the landing place of the rescuing steam launch. And from here on the old tub wasn’t touching land anywhere before America!

I have never run like that in all my life. Purple with excitement I raced for the harbor, fell into the arms of an official, gasped, “Boat—Bologna,” and got only a smile.

“The ship doesn’t sail till six!” he comforted my panting, sweat-soaked little self. “It only whistled for more cargo!”

That taught me to always pay attention in future to the departure time posted up front on the black shipboard sign. Before that time the steamer isn’t allowed to leave.

Meanwhile we had another adventure in Santa Cruz. In one of the harbors we had loaded a lot of sulfur, and smoking had been strictly forbidden to the men in steerage; how it happened no one could say, but suddenly one of the lighters, full of sulfur sacks and just about to be sent ashore, was in flames. There was a heap of sulfur still to be unloaded lying on our deck. Heaven, how the old crate wailed with its whistle! The lighter, however, pushed off in time, and the steamer was saved.

All day long, for all the sunshine, the clouds had worn a gray crown around the famous peak of Tenerife, and I already feared I’d never get to know it—then, just as we were steaming away from the island, the weight of clouds melted, and in full moonlight, snowy white and pointed like a sugarloaf, the mountain lay before us. You can see it from thirty nautical miles away.

In the glowing night one could sense Las Palmas and other of the Canary Islands, then we held exactly the course that in 1492 poor Columbus is said to have taken, and as then, the wind was always right behind us and drove us toward a new world. For ten days we would now sail, never seeing anything but sky and water.

Only beyond Tenerife did I grasp that I had turned my back on home for God knows how long.

The storm on the Atlantic.

The sea had a strangely violet-blue hue. The ship rolled imperceptibly. I sat in my borrowed deck chair, away from the bollard, and mused about my fellow humans. That I didn’t set it down on paper was because it had just struck two. The feeding of the steerage took place at ten in the morning, to be sure, but the more distinguished second class had only just eaten their fill, and many travelers lay in deck chairs and slept, eyes shut, mouths open, emitting soft, familiar sawmill noises. Their sight strengthened my resolve never to fall asleep in public. It isn’t the moment when our spirit or our charm (if we possess such things!) steps into the light most clearly.

Right in the middle of these thoughts a roaring noise broke out; without warning a true giant wave crashed over the side and across the deck, and the cold saltwater slapped the sleepers in their open mouths. They woke gurgling, spitting, writhing. While I was still indulging in unworthy schadenfreude, just punishment caught up with me. A second, much higher wave broke over us, seized my deck chair, and drove me with it toward the rail. A firm hand caught me by the arm, or else I’d have vanished into the Atlantic and this book would never have been written. Young Martin had almost met the same fate, and on top of all her seasickness Mrs. O. now had the mortal fear for the child. She fainted, and they dragged her into the dining room of second class, for crossing the deck had become impossible. My rescuer pulled me in as well, and when I noticed how all the women, crying or screaming, threw themselves on a man’s chest so they could faint in peace there, I too considered whose chest I should throw myself on, but then I remembered that my purse with money and passport would also get thrown onto a chest once I was knocked out, and so I clung to the banister instead and called my Columbus dreams to mind.

The waves grew higher and higher; the ship went into a St. Vitus dance. A fat man tried to come down, lost his balance, stumbled, and in falling grabbed my arm. Ye gods! That worked better than ten bottles of smelling salts, for the pain took my speech. When I had shaken off the fat man and found my tongue again, they called me to the German couple, who were green as a faded parrot and kept asking me without pause:

“Will the ship go down?”

I didn’t know that any better than the others, of course, but I swore with a certainty as if I were the captain that such storms were as everyday as lice in a Polish fur coat, and I talked to the poor woman so well that she calmed down and I forgot my own sickness.

When toward five it got a little calmer and sailors led us back to third class, Enrique the waiter gave me a big apple as a sign of his esteem.

The storm lasted two days and two nights, and the poor steamer rolled so badly that nothing could be cooked. They brought me dry bread and cheese or fish. My body felt beaten to a pulp, all the more since for the sake of my beloved Erika I could never stretch out my legs, but either had to curl into a Latin S or stick my feet up like poor boxes whenever I settled on my stomach.

The walrus always advised me to brace myself against the bed sides. But since I didn’t have the necessary padding, I was rolled until my ears rang and my eyes blurred. Since then I’ve had no use for Mr. Atlantic.

On the third day the young Galapagos traveler was curling her little locks again, and I clambered past the walrus, down and out into the open. The baker gave me an extra roll, and the fat cook laughed.

Even the lawyer offered me his deck chair; only the Peruvian with the melancholy eyes beat his wife worse than before, for now he ate cheese on top of it and suffered from stormier waves of lust…

On deck they stretched the awning; everyone suddenly appeared in light clothes, and before you knew it the tar in the seams of the deck planks grew soft.

We were nearing the tropics.

In the evenings a circle formed around me—always of men, for I had little interest in women with children—and we ate the sweets from the Neapolitan’s cousin, who lay stretched at my feet singing love songs; the men told of earlier voyages, of dangers survived, of hopes for the future. The moon peered through the rigging and the stars flickered. The sea whispered and murmured, someone played an accordion, and we were so near and yet so far from home. We all wanted to build a new future, and now I know they all looked up to me and pampered me because I was so weak and so small, so blind and so bold. Only after many months did I learn how deeply they pitied me—and still, of all these men, not one spoke a word of warning…

The Great Bear no longer stood in the west but in the north and sank lower and lower. Other, new constellations came to the fore.

And day after day we saw nothing but sky and water, until at last on the tenth evening birds circled the ship and bits of wood drifted toward us.

Then we cheered like Columbus once did, for we knew: land lies ahead.

I felt quite solemn as I lay down to rest.

America.

Barbados, West Indies.

A thunder-like snore from the walrus woke me, and right after that came the second shock: at dawn we were at anchor off a foreign coast, and little boats were swarming around the “Bologna.” Five minutes later I shot up on deck. The Danish botanist was already waiting up there and we at once made a deal with “King Dixie” to take us ashore. We climbed carefully down the ship’s ladder while our fellow travelers reveled in their coffee. We wanted to study flora and fauna and shake off the “general public.”

The harbor of Queenstown is so tiny that only sailing ships can enter, and two wrecked ships at the entrance testified to how much the island is harried by storms, being the first to stand up to the Atlantic from the east.

The black policeman in a white uniform saluted smartly as we went by, and Mr. G. rid himself with admirable deftness of the many little negroes who all wanted a few coppers and were ready to lead us anywhere and do heaven knows what all for us.

Already on the first open square, where the Nelson Monument stood, we saw tropical fruit, especially sugarcane, but since we had no English money we contented ourselves with the sight of the bundles. Everything thrilled me—the little black carriages with a roof but no side walls, the black coachmen under light-brown giant sunshades; the neat negro houses of gray-brown wood whose windows flapped open and shut like the lids of a mousetrap, and from which now and then a negro head poked out to wish us a grinning good morning; the fat negro women in white, stiffly starched dresses and the almost naked youngsters.

The English villas all stood in beautifully kept gardens and were mostly one-story, very airy, and shaded by tall, exotic tropical trees.

A long avenue of royal palms took us in and led us out into the open. In that moment I felt paid for all my suffering, for I saw the true tropics for the first time with their blinding splendor, the magic of the unfamiliar, the heavy heat, without having the least idea of the downsides. That is how it is for many travelers who simply pass through the picturesque equatorial zone. Mr. G.’s warnings not to drink water, not to touch this or that, to bind a cloth over the nape, not to step into high grass, and so on, only heightened the charm of the new. Even the dangers turned into delights…
We reached the sea. Before us lay the treasures of the tropical ocean, countless shells and corals, funny crabs and strange fossils. If Mr. G. hadn’t simply taken them all out of my hands and tossed them away, I would have gone about with a whole heap of stones, I was so enchanted by these indescribable forms. Where the corals shimmered out of the water, it looked pale green and only later turned deep blue, and the dazzling white of the beach with that green and blue made a harmony of colors I have only rarely seen.

My companion told me the names of the trees, the birds, the plants, examined the rock, searched for worms and insects. In one day I learned what I might hardly have learned in months. With growing excitement we went farther inland.

On the old cemetery we saw the first hummingbirds. Tiny as big stag beetles, they bobbed on the very tip of a broad blade of tropical grass and looked completely black until a sudden movement made their feathers flash. Then they gleamed red, green, blue, yellow on their different little parts, changing with each move and angle of light. A little negro offered to catch one and got it hot. The government strictly forbids that. Killing these and other birds (there are white and blue herons, too) is punished with thirty days in jail. Noteworthy are the rudder-tails and the wild pigeons, which are brown with black-edged wings. The white-ringed eyes of the rudder-tails look like big-headed white pins in the dark plumage; the tail always hangs down on one side.

Now we were in the middle of a sugar plantation and both very poor. Mr. G. said that stealing a short cane wouldn’t make anyone poorer, but would make me much richer in knowledge, and so he fetched one which we cut into pieces and chewed, hungry to learn. It tasted sweetish, more dull than anything else, and, apart from two or three later tries, it remained the only cane that ever met my teeth. If I have to gnaw on something tough for that long, it ought at least to taste better. Otherwise it’s just chewing gum for jaw massage.

But back then I could still muster some enthusiasm, and right in the middle of our sinful rejoicing came the punishment. Out of a clear sky (at any rate we hadn’t noticed the clouds rushing up) a tropical downpour crashed down that, although we bolted at once under the sugar cane, taller than a man, drenched us to the skin in a few minutes. Then the wind blew the clouds away, and the hot tropical sun dried two pale figures of misery.

On our walks I discovered a lovely tree, a bit like our acacias, with even more delicate feathery leaflets and a fruit on it. Mr. G. recognized it as tamarind, and soon we were eating the brown flesh from a brown, brittle pod. It tasted sour-sweet, and I stuffed myself to my heart’s content, until my companion said:

“Miss, tamarind has medicinal value! If you don’t want to vanish behind every bush…”

A word is enough for the wise. I threw away the rest of the pods.

At evening we came to a field with a cow. Nothing shattering about that, but Mr. G. suddenly tapped her on the very end of her tail and called her “old lady.” Whether she took offense or simply disliked familiarity, who can say. In any case she turned, caught Mr. G. by his pants, and tossed him into the air. He wasn’t hurt, for he landed on the grass, but I got a whiff of heroism—unfairly, since the cow was tied—because I walked past her anyway.

Dead tired I went home and still more than satisfied. I had received my first tropical consecration. This must be how Columbus felt when, so near Barbados, a new world opened to him. I regretted no sacrifice. I wanted to learn, write, paint, share the marvel I’d lived through in every way.

Once more I felt as if I might be allowed to set the world off its hinges. I rocked on the bollard, tin soup plate in hand, and at my feet lay the obedient subjects.

O Bologna, Bologna!

Trinidad.

On every journey you can feel your mental horizon broaden, how it grows and you with it. In such foreign places the growth is almost painful; it happens far too quickly, it even shakes the body with the flood of impressions, tied to a new setting.

We slid into the Orinoco.

It came down from unexplored heights, knew the innermost secrets of Venezuela, had once seen men like Walter Raleigh on its banks and rubbed its waters against the bitter bark of cinchona. Now here we met it, twenty miles from its mouth, and it was still fresh, untouched by the sea, loaded with logs it had swept along like a lord, flushing snakes, animal carcasses, and all kinds of grasses out into the Atlantic. It was full of jellyfish that shimmered like countless tennis balls in the green water, and touching them gives bathers a sharp pain.

Frigatebirds, long and black-bodied, flew over the ship toward “Port of Spain.” Close as the islands lie, they are so different. Barbados is almost flat, at most little hills; Trinidad is a mountainous, very large island with waterfalls of great beauty and the famous pitch lake, which supplies a good share of the world’s asphalt needs. In the middle it is still liquid, at the edges already solid, but still very hot. The fumes are hard to breathe.

Here, alongside the negroes, you find many Indians from India, brought in as coolies to work on the various plantations. The women wear nose rings as in India itself, but otherwise move about more freely.

Most houses, especially those of poorer folk, are wood with a corrugated-iron roof, and you even find huts built from old tin cans. Thick walls aren’t needed, and anything that keeps out the rain can be used.

Besides the stiff royal palms and the slender coconut palms always bent by wind, you find Mauritia flexuosa, a very beautiful fan palm that comes from Africa. There I drank my first coconut milk, a bland drink I never wanted to touch again. You use the still unripe green nut, as big as one of our pumpkins, cut a hole in the top, and drink that way. But your nose is always in the way, and if you don’t drink carefully, the clear juice drips down and stains your dress.

After Jamaica, Trinidad is the largest of the West Indian islands. It owes its name to the fact that it was discovered on Trinity Sunday.

Late at night I saw the much-admired Southern Cross for the first time. It’s nowhere near as striking as I had imagined, and can only be compared to the Latin cross—the four points. Still, it’s a strange feeling to stand before it. The Great Bear already hung upside down with the North Star beneath it. A few more days and it will be gone. What would I have lived through before I saw it again, the star of my childhood?

Offshore the coast of Venezuela slid by in a blur. The first conquerors had marveled at the pile-dwellings that waded curiously far out into the sea like children hunting shells, and named the whole land after them “Little Venice.” Needless to say it resembles Venice in nothing but water.

La Guayra.

I squinted into the dark, stared hard at the high mountain rising straight out of the water and pressing down on everything, and made out a few little houses climbing up it. Then a red flicker came over the landscape, something grimly grand, and a few seconds later a soft trickle of silver. Right after that it’s broad day—sunrise in the tropics is that fast, sharp at six.

“Nobody may land!” the first officer told us. “Plague is raging, and anyone who went ashore here couldn’t go on to Panama.”

I chewed my breakfast roll sadly. What bad luck! I paced up and down the wide breakwater of the harbor, up and down. A few steps away lay the town, and I wasn’t to go in? Not see the coffee plantations, not go to Carácas? Impossible!

Up and down, up and down, past the guard ten times, always very innocent, always a little nearer an old fence that had lost a few planks. The guard got tired and sat down. I swung back and forth, often stood long and admired the most splendid surf I had ever seen. Twenty meters high the foam leapt over the cliffs and still wet the high breakwater.

I was at the fence again. I’m thin and small. One yank, and I was outside. Without looking back I stepped into La Guayra, ready to swear I had never seen the “Bologna” in my life.

Few places are as hot as this; not a breath of wind gets in. The high mountain grips the town and threatens to crush it. On the bare rocks, torn by earthquakes, washed down by tropical torrents, the sun beats from morning till night with undiminished force. No wonder yellow fever, plague, and cholera wreak their havoc here. A plain church with four saints’ statues in front, all of them looking quite sad, a park that would like to but can’t, a grove of coconuts that yields many nuts but sadly no shade—that’s what you can find in La Guayra. Not far from the coconut grove stands the railway, whose train is made up of two first-class and two second-class cars.

Whites are supposed to ride in first class, but if you’ve got no money you ride just as well in second.

Light brown, mostly mixed-race, are the people. Like tired ants they crawled onto the train with their huge bundles, stowed themselves and their parcels on, over, and under the seats, chewed sugar cane, and gladly gave information about everything. The men under their wide-brimmed straw hats drilled their coal-black eyes into me; in the women’s manner there was something melancholy, tired of life.

As soon as you reach a bit of height, a fresh wind blows and you recover from the dead rock. Palm follows palm, unknown shrubs turn into a green wall. Little by little the coffee plantations unfolded. On the glossy, dark green, lightly notched leaves, the clusters of bright red berries sat like tiny bouquets, extraordinarily charming. Close to the trunk of a thin, jagged-leafed tree hung huge fruits—the praised papayas, from which North Americans get pepsin; cherimoyas, the scaly sugar apples, swung from jutting branches; sapodillas lay in little baskets. They look so much like our potatoes it’s uncanny, and have white, sweetish flesh. Other fruits, still a mystery to me, rested in pretty raffia baskets, which you get everywhere in Venezuela instead of paper cones to carry your fruit home more easily, and everywhere the bougainvillea blazed in its incomparable purple-violet.

Carácas lies a few hundred meters above sea level and trembles almost constantly. Earthquakes are practically the order of the day, and the houses are built with that in mind. Low buildings, small windows, streets that would like to be straight and can’t, a park, a church with as many cracks as an old crone’s face has wrinkles, shops full of sitters from East and West, and behind and above it all the spell of South America, the wind of the mysterious, the unexplored, blowing here from the lowlands of the Orinoco and the far peaks of the Andes. Scents from the Atlantic, the Caribbean, the Pacific, from regions so dreadful and deadly our minds can hardly grasp them … and with that the light swaying of the ground that suddenly, like a memento mori, cuts through all seeing and experiencing …

Late at night I went back to La Guayra, tired, met Mr. G., who had also run off and scolded me soundly for not going with him, and later my own dining group, who said they wanted to see a bit of La Guayra. They had allowed a short going-ashore after all. They took us along and we looked at … the nearest inn.

The first officer smiled when I came, but said nothing. From the bridge you see all sorts, and even the tiniest lady writer who squeezes through the narrowest gap in the planking doesn’t always stay hidden. But anyone who sails between East and West has learned, if need be, to shut both eyes.

Puerto Cabello.

In this lovely harbor, where we now put in only to leave again two hours later, I got another warning that slid off me as unnoticed as the first. The pretty German merchant’s wife, who didn’t understand a word of her future country, leaned next to me on the rail, and together we haggled over parrots and the enchanting sugar birds I saw only there. They are a wonderful blue, like hepatica blossoms in early spring, with a deep sky-blue spot on top of the head and wings very narrow but edged in scarlet. They feed on mealworms and such and are hard to keep, but their beauty thrilled us. Some of the richer folks also bought macaws, the chicken-sized, very colorful tropical parrots whose piercing screech makes them very unpleasant. Someone set such a heavy-beaked monster on my hand, and there I stood—unable to put the creature down.

While we were thus completely taken up with the animal world and watching the tree rats scurry up and down, a brown farmer with a first-rate straw hat planted himself below in front of the ship and began to court the pretty blonde in high style. I became interpreter, and the more in love he got, the more lively I delivered his declarations. Mrs. O. was secretly flattered, and the brown man got so worked up that he seriously urged her to climb down off the ship and stay with him as his wife. All my insisting that she was already married and had a far better husband did no good, and if there hadn’t been so many people around, I really believe he would have torn her off the ship by force and carried her away. Next to me the pastry cook from Riobamba said very gravely: “Indeed, white women have enormous value here.”

I chuckled stupidly to myself. I was pleased that here, like the dollar at home, I was a thing whose value rose constantly. I strutted broadly across the deck.

Someone pressed my hand. It was my countrywoman, the Peruvian’s wife. They had to get off here and wanted to go on foot through the interior to Peru. What that meant, neither of us knew at the time. That was a distance like from Palermo to the North Cape, and entirely through jungle.

She wore a black silk dress with a yellow waterfall of faded lace. They carried nothing in their hands, not even a handkerchief. They went into the new world as if stepping off a streetcar. I watched them walk along the harbor wall; without any hurry. He may have had three or four pesos in his pocket. I’m sure he killed her before a week was over. Then somehow he likely got back to his country. As often as I later fumed at the burden of even my modest luggage, I thought with horror of my countrywoman who went with dangling arms into a foreign land to perhaps meet death before the sun went down.

And even for this encounter, under the circumstances, she would still have had to be grateful.

Willemstad. Curaçao.

After a nine-hour run, once again heading north, we sailed into a river that might just as well have been in Europe. The houses we saw by lamplight were the houses of Amsterdam; the sounds in our ears, those of Holland. We had reached Willemstad.

Early in the morning Mr. G. whispered that we should slip off alone, otherwise we’d learn nothing, and so we vanished early and ghostlike and walked the town, pure Dutch and Dutch dull. Bright colors in the shops, plenty of fruit in the market, but nothing tropical otherwise, for the island is unusually dry and, as a result, healthy, but lacks that lush forest that wetter islands enjoy. It was also the dry season—the winter of the tropics—and the greenery was so sparse even on certain shrubs that I saw a cow eat paper. Her milk was likely to match. All we came across were column cacti, aloes, paddle cacti with dreadful spines, and a few half-withered umbrella acacias.

Seldom have I hiked so long over hills and ridges. Often a wire fence separated one cheerless stretch from the next. Sometimes I crawled under on all fours, sometimes Mr. G. grabbed me and tossed me over, which the sandy ground made possible. Barrel cacti, acacias, and mangroves were all we found. Mangroves grow right by the shore, keep a happy green, bloom red, and drop their long, pointed seed so it sticks itself into the sand or mud. From that a new tree grows. The bark is dark and as rough as a grater. In some places the natives even use it as one. Wonderful fossil shells, crabs, and corals were to be found. A whole hill was made of them.

Then I spotted my first tropicbird. It’s all black and yellow like the old imperial flag, or rather orange.

On the way back we had an adventure. The sun-baked rocks hide quite dangerous snakes, and Mr. G. told me to keep watch. Tired, arms burned, face puffed, I limped downhill when I felt a terrible pain in my left foot and let out a cry. My companion whirled around; I expected to find a sand viper on my leg, but saw instead a disk cactus whose unusually long brown spines had gone deep into my flesh.

“We have to pull them out with a sharp yank, otherwise some tip will break off and the leg will fester,” Mr. G. said, grabbed my hind hoof, and ripped out one spine after another. If I hadn’t had a reputation for heroics to keep up, I would have yelled out loud, but I clenched my teeth and stared bravely into nothing.

“What did you see in Curaçao?” they asked on the ship. After a long cross-examination, they declared in chorus: “The poor things saw nothing, didn’t even drink the world-famous Curaçao. Well, really!”

We both just smiled.

I got to taste Curaçao anyway. They were all kind on the “Bologna.”

Puerto Colombia.

It was St. Joseph’s Day and raw for the tropics. We couldn’t go in because the long pier was occupied for once; more than three steamers at a time can’t be handled. So we wrapped ourselves in blankets and watched the many pelicans walking on the sand and diving now and then. Their tremendously long beaks gave them a comically clumsy look.
We were all quieter than usual. Mr. G. wanted, for research purposes, to go up the Magdalena River, and the German merchant with his wife planned to settle in Medellín or Bogotá. He had brought along a great many German steel goods and sold some to the natives in every port to exchange for foreign currency. His Spanish was weak, his wife very pretty, his good common sense not set up for adventures. I often wondered what became of him.

Only one German stayed on board—Don Luis, nicknamed “the Glutton” because he had such a God-blessed appetite and was fed by the whole crew. He had to make up for almost all the hungry war years. My idealism recoiled at his greed and at his trousers; I didn’t even accept it with proper gratitude when, the next morning, after I had said goodbye to Mr. G., he said to me in a fatherly tone:

“I have been told to keep an eye on you.”

What did he know about plants and birds and the ways of these people? We tramped over hill and dale together, and I grumbled inwardly over my loneliness, not guessing that a guardian angel was walking by my side who, for earthly purposes, had left his wings at home and was wearing a very worn-out sailor’s pair of pants.

Puerto Colombia lies at the foot of fairly high, wooded hills that must look very friendly in the rainy season, but now stood brown and bleak around the little place. The lanes were full of drifting sand, the houses were one-story wooden buildings, the natives’ huts just slapped together from clay and, at best, whitewashed once. Wooden bars lattice the tiny windows, even those of the Europeans’ little houses, whose wooden enclosure calls a cage to mind. Through this cage the women talk to passersby. The roof is palm thatch everywhere. The church itself looks like an airy stable. The organ gives only one note at every fifth key, the sacristy is behind a stretched linen cloth behind the high altar, and in the churchyard, tied to the grave crosses, goats graze.

We looked at the steep ladder up to the pulpit and the little cowbells that hung from a crossbar in front of the church; then we said goodbye to our friends, who were already sitting in the train to Barranquilla, which looked like a rolling wooden box and was surrounded by half-naked natives who were buying razors from Mr. O., trying them out on themselves everywhere, and staring longingly at Mrs. O. A yellow-brown mixed-blood parroted:

“The pretty white lady should go to Medellín, where it’s cooler; here she will turn pale…”

Mr. G. shook my hand. The train went ppppffff and people I had grown fond of disappeared in the growing dust…

Not far from Puerto Colombia lay the village of Sabanilla. Once all ships landed there, but by now the Magdalena had pushed so far out that it had silted up shore and sea far into the distance and the port had been moved. Little coconut groves led that way. On the way we learned—Don Luis stuck it out bravely—that all drinking water was brought from Barranquilla and had to be paid for dearly.

You must not bathe in the Magdalena River or in the adjoining sea. It teems with alligators.

Although the tropical sun beat hot on everything, our hearts grew strangely heavy. Those wretched stakes that fenced off wastelands, not gardens; those dirty children with swollen bellies; those parched brown slopes and above all the countless vultures with their broad black wings and brown-edged feathers, doing all the street cleaning, and sitting as if hungry for human remains on the light, fresh graves. Long-bodied, medium-sized dogs with long, pointed ears slunk shyly behind every stranger, and from the natives’ eyes broke something like aversion, or at least suspicion, and something…

It took me a long time to figure out that “something.”

Fifteen days’ journey upriver lies Colombia’s true capital, beautiful, healthy Bogotá; but Medellín, five days’ travel from Barranquilla, the chief town of Atlántico, is easier to live in than the coast towns so cruelly plagued by mosquitos.

Cartagena de las Indias.

On the island of Barú stands Fort San José.

For the first time I felt the tropical heat almost painfully. Gray clouds dragged themselves lazily over the low hills, and a damp, steam-laden sultriness weighed on this “Carthage of the Indians.”

As everywhere, the first to greet us was the statue of Columbus; then came the monument, so important in South America, to those slaughtered in 1815 (war of independence), who had risen against Spanish rule; the layout of the new park, the archbishop’s residence, the old church of Nuestra Señora de Ladrinal, and the broad avenue that leads to the Europeans’ handsome, gardened villas.

Don Luis and I crossed the wide-flung city to the Popa, the hill that forms, as it were, its core and is partly surrounded by swamps, into which the side-runners flee when people approach. Those are crabs that can only move sideways.

All the huts were roofed with palm thatch, stood open, and allowed a look inside. Women had a high wooden pestle in their hands and pounded maize or rice; others ground the flour on a flat lava stone or cooked bottle-gourd mash in wide clay pots. They were always ready to talk and told of their daily worries and meager joys. The children were pretty, stark naked, shy, and had on their bellies a peculiar swelling that Don Luis and I ascribed to the water, so we didn’t let them serve us anything. In truth these apple-sized bulges were nothing but neglected navels…

The better gardens were full of sumac trees, colorful croton shrubs, trumpet trees, and fiery bougainvillea. Not far from the harbor we found, for the first time, the famous ivory nuts, taken from the tagua palm, so hard they can be cracked only with an iron bar or special tools. We stuffed our pockets with them.

Small black-painted open little carts clattered through the streets as if traffic were huge, and long-eared dogs sniffed for scraps in every corner. For all its tropical splendor, Cartagena feels dead. South America filled me with a melancholy I couldn’t shake off despite all my effort. I felt as if I were falling hopelessly back through the centuries, and something of the hidden wildness, equally great in conquerors and conquered, pressed on me like an invisible load.

Don Luis felt none of it. Even in this heat he ate like a lion after three days of hunger.

Off Limon Bay.

Up to Puerto Colombia the poor German woman had lain in the hospital. Now the sick and the well were brought up on deck, the ship was fumigated, the deck washed, the funnel scrubbed, the rail repainted, the brass polished, and everyone was drilled to look as clean and as fresh as possible—every captain fears the Americans that much.

All passengers were rounded up by class and counted. The doctor, the customs officials, the police came out to meet us. We were looked up and down, and finally, as if grudgingly, released. The authorities whispered together as at a deathbed, and I caught only one word: “Germans.” It was enough. I knew our fate was on the scales. In any case I had a visa for Panama, which most did not have, and felt safe. With that, and with the passport “King Peter by the grace of God,” which no one understood, probably not even the king in question himself, since some entries were in Slovene, I was above all police, even if one suspected me of being a Bolshevist, anarchist, idealist, or some other “trash.”

Someone demanded our oath that we had not set foot in Colombia or Venezuela. My conscience, otherwise fairly tight, stretched like a worn-out garter, and I forgot, for the moment, having seen those countries. Don Luis ate an anchovy roll and forgot too. Memory lapses are common in the tropics.

In the end I did as Wilson did with the Fourteen Points: I stretched them until they fit.

Cristobal–Colón.

Cristobal is the Canal Zone city, belongs to the Americans, has the laws, customs, and habits—only faintly wafted with a touch of southern sin—of the United States. Colón belongs to the Republic of Panama; people speak Spanish, they do what they shouldn’t, and they live in the most depraved city in the world—if one trusts the seasoned.

I wandered, with an Italian who was paying me court now and then, through the peculiar city with its wooden aprons in place of hotel doors, its Japanese and Chinese shops, the Panama-hat sellers on the corners, the covered walkways (the first floor of every wooden house rests partly on pillars, and underneath you can walk unbothered by the tropical sun or the terrible downpours), the coconut groves, the seafront, and there met a monkey (a real one, not human) who instantly fell in love with me, threw his furry arms around me, and absolutely insisted on kissing. Great jubilation from my companion, to whom I had just been giving a speech about the unhealthiness and unappetizing nature of European kissing mania.

The barbershops delighted me. The victims sweated so terribly that they couldn’t sit, but lay stretched out on a kind of operating table and were lathered and shaved like that. Japanese barbers in white sleeve aprons did it quickly and painlessly.

In a fenced-off park stand the quarantine houses, completely wrapped in wire mesh, gray in color, and you can practically see the unhealthiness on them. Here the suspected plague or cholera cases are brought, those dying of yellow fever, and the ones fallen ill with beriberi. The finest buildings are the hospitals, and the dying was so great during canal construction that for every meter of ground in the so-called French canal you could count a man.

The distinctive Gil-Blas Indians landed only near the old harbor and brought their inland fruit for sale. Whites may hardly enter their territory by day for a few hours and must leave again before sundown. These Indians wear their hair loose and long and have melancholy, almond-shaped eyes. Their skin is reddish brown and sometimes they wear macaw feathers in their hair or as a belt at the waist.

In the evening I slipped away from the Italian—was I on Columbus’s trail to listen to love cooing!—and went alone to Colón. Poor Don Luis wasn’t allowed to set foot on shore, and in a way that sweetened my forbidden freedom. I was like a pirate ship that someone had painted white: unrecognizable. All that seemed desirable to me then.

On the way back I did something foolish. Fools always have guardian angels. Only when you get wise do you have to look out for yourself. An American was standing there and invited me to take a launch up the French canal with him. Why? Because I looked clean. Very nice. I was pleased to look washed. How foolish I was, I unfortunately didn’t see. The forbidden tempted me. He would take me gondola-style where Germans weren’t supposed to go…

In the fast little steam launch, from which you saw the thousand lights of the two towns and all the canal’s splendor, the story went the way a person with more sense would have guessed—but because he was a white man, it ended with gentle admonition. Still, in ten minutes I learned that you do not go up a strange canal with a total stranger. In the end I didn’t have the nerve—or the recklessness—to betray to him my inner Germanness, for he was a high port official and could have refused me passage through the canal. Nor did I care to be pitched overboard—less for my own sake than for the passport’s, which rested in my leather bag.

So I stepped out of the launch wiser and quieter, but unharmed. One thing I learned: the Germans would be taken under guard by train to Balboa. No sooner was I back on the old planks than I hunted for Don Luis, who was asleep on a coil of rope. All my calling didn’t disturb his dreams until I let a heavy ivory nut drop on his nose. Then he woke, and I told him they would come for him early in the morning. He made all his preparations and was ready when the police arrived.

In first class there was a Swiss who, by mistake, had been entered on the ship’s list as a German. All his resistance was no use; he had to get on the train in dressing gown and slippers. In Balboa he tore off to his consul and complained bitterly. The consul consoled him:

“Now you’re here—what am I to do?”

But Don Luis, who always had an eye on the practical, went to the Veloce agency and said:

“On the ‘Bologna’ they would feed me. But who’s going to feed me here?”

Veloce gave him a dollar. He bought six bananas for five cents, even brought me one, and was ninety-five cents richer in hard cash. I almost regretted not being police-escorted too, but comforted myself with the thought that at least I had seen the canal. One thing I swore solemnly: I would never live in Panama, never! It was too hot…

How childish we humans are!

Through the canal.

The night before we had loaded 2,000 tons of coal in a few hours. Everything went absolutely like clockwork. The coal came up on high iron frames, above deck level; the containers somersaulted by themselves in the air, the coal fell down, a new container emptied and moved off—until everything was black and all the coal was aboard.

Already through Limon Bay, increasingly silted up by the heavy northers, and especially through the fifty-mile-long canal, often barely 41 feet deep, ships go very slowly. The French canal is so narrow that two steamers can just pass each other. Incredibly dense, light-green undergrowth covers the two low banks. In Lesseps’s time (the builder) two especially dreaded, now already much reduced, species of mosquito raged here: the anopheles, whose bite injects malaria, and the stegomyia, carrier of the dreaded yellow fever. A patient sick with vomito negro, the black vomiting, as yellow fever is called in Panama, infects a stegomyia for only three days, while tropical malaria is still detectable in the blood after three years—even if no new attack occurred—and can be passed on to a female anopheles.

To protect the canal workers as far as possible from these two dangerous attackers, every little house is wrapped in fine wire mesh, and from time to time petroleum is poured on all puddles and, where possible, earth piled up to dry them out.

After the French canal we came to the Gatun locks, where the ship was raised three times until it stood 85 feet above the Atlantic. It’s hard to picture. As soon as the ship stands before the first gate, it is slowly opened, the ship glides in, the gate closes again, and the gate of the second lock is opened; the water accumulated there rushes into the first lock and lifts the ship until it has reached the desired height; then another gate is opened, and at last the steamer glides into the artificial Gatun Lake, formed by the outflow of the Chagres River, and from which—when I went through—you could still see the crowns of the drowned jungle trees sticking up like bleached skeletons. Beyond Gatun Lake comes the Culebra Cut—the cut-in-two mountain—and again the ship, not exactly on the electric leash from shore as in the first canal, but still almost without using its own steam, goes through this narrow ravine. Two days earlier a slide had occurred, and the dredges were working full out, while the whole slope was being sprayed with heavy streams of water to firm the loose earth somehow. The depth in the Culebra Cut is 49 feet.

Through the Pedro Miguel locks, which were to lower us to the Pacific, the two little electric locomotives led us again, after the ship had given up its own will and, like a tame dog on a leash, went along; only this time we came into the already full chamber and sank down into the one that was emptying. Through the Miraflores locks we reached sea level again.

In the evening we fished Don Luis and his two fellow sufferers up at Balboa. Past Naos Island we slid into the Pacific Ocean. The Gulf of Panama was as calm as an inland lake, and a wonderful phosphorescence greeted us.

I lay in the cabin with eyes wide open. The walrus slept, the beauty from Lima, courted by everyone, was braiding her hair, and all the others were dreaming. The bunks had already partly emptied. Was it the heat—was it some kind of foreboding—never again did I feel as I did before the Panama Canal. It was as if I had stepped into a new life.

At the Equator.

Early in the morning Don Luis and I stood at the rail and let the islands go by. From the mainland came a light scent seasoned with a thousand alpine flowers, and the peaks of the Cordilleras greeted us. Fire-spitting mountains simmered there like giant cauldrons, and smoke rose from the pointed summits like from giant chimneys. Ahead everything was deep green and overfertile, and the sea itself so calm and warm that you could scarcely feel the “Bologna” moving.

Toward evening we reached Bahía, in deep Caráquez Bay. The steamer only rarely calls at this deserted place. The mountains all around are densely forested and the splendor of the tropics unfolds here in unusual, deadly beauty. Thick layers of rotting leaves, decaying nuts, oozing juices cover the ground, which you can hardly see through the tangled, liana-hung undergrowth; in the high crowns monkeys swing, bright macaws sway, gray ardillos, or tree rats, leap, parrots and birds unknown to us whirr, snakes hang motionless like lianas that the wind plays with, and only when the tree is fully in sunlight—fifty or more feet from its root—does it set its indescribably large, garishly colored blossoms. Nothing blooms on the ground; everything smiles high above, barely recognizable, in the sunlight, and everything fights for that favored place, smothering the weaker.

The natives, Indians with broad faces and long shaggy hair, make clay pots, gather fruit, bring rattan baskets for sale, and their eyes under bushy brows are now melancholy, now lustful. The whites look tired and lonely, so lonely…

Anyone not driven by the urge to quick money at any price does not go into Ecuador’s treacherous regions.
In this bay, which seemed quieter than any I had ever seen, I was blessed with the most beautiful sunset of my life. Behind the densely wooded, silent hills that formed a half circle, with the sea lying in it like a blue stone in a green setting, bright white clouds like tufts of cotton rose up. The edge of the sky turned fiery red, the sea there dark blue-black, while the clouds above us were pink, over yonder deep yellow. They gathered into splendid sheaves of fire that turned the whole vault into a lake of flame and finally mirrored themselves in a sea gone violet. Little by little everything was washed over by a fairy-like rose-lilac that melted into purple and ended in black-red, and into this the moon sailed like a sharp ink drawing.

In their canoes, each hollowed from a single tree trunk, the Indians came alongside the next morning and sold tapotes, a fruit like a giant apple, with a hard brown-green skin, yellow flesh, and four seeds. Ivory nuts were loaded at a frantic pace. The brown people’s straw huts finally vanished on the blue waters like little sponges drifting away.

It was not unbearably hot, though we were one degree south of the Equator. The day before, at three, we had crossed it. Nowadays only sailing ships still have the baptism. On a steamer you don’t notice a thing.

Island after island slid past us; one of them looked like a sleeping corpse. Even in the open sea you could clearly see the traces of many rivers, for all kinds of timber were washed out, even water snakes could be spotted, and the water was much lighter and smoother at such places. Small white gulls with black wing edges accompanied us.

To the left we saw the island of Santa Clara and to the right Puná Island, famous because its inhabitants once offered Pizarro heroic resistance. Between the two islands the “Bologna,” hooting loudly, entered the Yambeli Channel and took the pilot on board. Santa Marta, where he boarded, is made entirely of wooden buildings that along the edge take the form of stilt houses and wade into the water like curious children. Beside them stand bright green, ball-shaped shrubs between palms, bananas, and scattered maize plots.

At noon we entered the Guayas. It comes from the depths of Ecuador and knows the waters that flow down from the famous mountains of the Cordilleras. It drove countless tree trunks tangled with strange vines past us toward the sea, but also all sorts of carrion, alligators, and fish that looked oddly bright and flat. Little naked boys sat on drifting logs and paddled with their feet, untroubled by all the snakes, alligators, and refuse gathering in the current. The Guayas was still five hundred meters wide here, and the low banks so densely wooded that it was impossible to spot a single clearing. Bananas were said to ripen in such abundance that people gave them away just to be rid of them. All the trees strained upward, the ones farther back even more so, so the banks rose like the seats of an arena. In this case the actors were the birds and monkeys.

From time to time, thatched stilt houses emerged from the green, and the nearer we came to Ecuador’s important port city, the more one sensed the presence of mighty forces of nature. Behind Riobamba the mountains steamed, the ground trembled, the mighty waters from the snows plunged into the ever-damp, rubber- and gold-rich tropics. Men of iron drive dug in the jungle muck, hunting for gold, rubber, plant milk, cinchona bark, and other precious things. If they weren’t treacherously murdered by the natives or cheated by the government, falsely accused or expelled, if they didn’t meet death by snakebite, wild animals, or plant poison, and didn’t die of beriberi—which strikes those who often stand in jungle mud—cholera, plague, or some other tropical disease, then they returned home stinking rich in a few years. But who dared so much? At most a desperate man. Men behind Riobamba are desperate men…

Around three o’clock we neared Guayaquil, and big notices warned us all not to leave the ship, because plague, cholera, dysentery, beriberi, yellow fever, and leprosy raged chronically in this unhealthy, filthy city, and the ship would be put in quarantine. A good mile out in the river the “Bologna” dropped anchor, and even there we weren’t sure of escaping mosquito bites. Any bite, though, could inject us with malaria, yellow fever, or some other scourge of the worst kind. Leprosy also prevailed among the poorer people, so it was not advisable to purchase even the slightest thing. Nobody from the boats was allowed on board.

Something of the tragedy of building a new life brushed past us here. The three Germans had been strong men with money, only the Peruvian and his wife poor wretches, but in Guayaquil you sensed that those who landed here took up a desperate fight. There was the sturdy confectioner, prospector and adventurer who planned to vanish for years in the Chimborazo region; the merchant from Firenze who had decided to try something here; and especially the young married couple who became everybody’s talk when it turned out that the beauty’s former, spurned lover had come along among the emigrants. The two newlyweds—she in lace-trimmed little underthings and with curlers in her hair, spoiled, delicate of health, naive about life, very coquettish; he too young to seem practical—wanted from here to take a sailing ship that would carry them in fourteen days to the most forsaken islands of the South Seas—to the downright enchanted, rather barren Galápagos, visited by no steamer—where she—the young, vain woman—would for years see no one. He was thinking of pearl diving and exploiting a mineral, and together they knew nothing about the islands except that they existed and that some compatriots had once gone there and not returned. What I say about the islands I myself only learned years later, when I—an isolated creature—sailed through the near-boundless South Seas…

Like all half-breeds of the better class in the South American tropics, the Guayaquileños had an unhealthy dark yellow complexion, flickering, often evasive eyes, and a sensual line around the mouth. The crease in their trousers was always impeccable, and it was the only perfect thing about them. Haughtily they trotted across the deck. The real Ecuadorians were pure full-bloods, very ugly, broad-boned, sullen, fat. They offered us tree rats, all gray with white dots at the ends of their long hairs, called ardillos, various parrots, and even puma pelts. There was fruit in overabundance, but for fear of infection it was not bought, or at most acquired on the sly.

The bride, in a black silk dress draped with lace and pink ribbons, took leave of us all and climbed into the boat. She might almost have belonged to any social class—especially as long as she kept quiet; with the man, you saw at once where he belonged. I kept seeing that on the road. The woman goes; as soon as the man steps up, one says at once: “Aha!”

The other travelers also left the ship, but they were not allowed to return. Whoever left the “Bologna” stayed in Ecuador. Questionable luck!

Guayaquil.

From the ship you could clearly watch the crooked streets that, as if laid out by a madman, ran up and down, and had more cobblestones than people. Carts rocked as if in a storm, and Indians crouched everywhere they didn’t belong: on strangers’ thresholds, on other people’s baskets, on the Veloce’s sacks piled high.

Behind the city, already on the first hill, was the water reservoir, so that—if an earthquake brought fire—the masses of water could come crashing down and flood Guayaquil. The smoke of far-off volcanoes often darkened the place for hours; showers of ash were common.

I sat with Don Luis on the extreme bow of the ship. It was a scorching hot night. One by one all the women disappeared, because the plague of mosquitoes grew worse, and a hot, stifling wind whimpered in the rigging. The rasp and clatter of the cranes and the wail of the winches only made the hour more unpleasant. Our talk died. Perhaps Don Luis even snored a little. If so, he didn’t snore long, for a tremendous tropical downpour rattled down on us without warning. Don Luis let fly a few strong words from his navy days, and I ran down the stairs into the inferno.

In the dormitory the light was on—as always. Complete silence reigned. The women lay like the dead on their beds, had stripped off everything, even the last garment, and were puddles of sweat, breathing heavily without moving even a finger otherwise. I climbed into bed, dropped my dress, and slipped on a light kimono. I’ve made it a habit, under all circumstances, to have something on that lets me go among people. You never know in life…

There was no thought of sleep. In the cramped space we must have had fifty degrees Celsius. Green mosquitoes, very big, very beautiful, very whirring, very bitey, flew over us and sipped here and there. The human puddles smelled.

All at once I heard a sound forbidden in the sleeping room. Someone was kissing! Who was the daredevil? And why, if he was breaking the law of men and gods, was he making such a racket about it? I sat up.

My bed was like Chimborazo—raised above the lesser peaks. Only the walrus blocked some of my view. Even kneeling, though, I couldn’t make out a thing.

Again, a smacking crack like a shot! Outrageous! The beauty of Lima, in the remnant of a little shirt, sat up. We looked at each other. Hair-raising! It couldn’t be a ghost, and our earthly eyes saw nothing but emptiness.

Then I happened to peek over the walrus toward the window, and in the opening, filling it, I noticed the ugliest face that had ever horrified me. A brown mug framed by thick, uncombed black hair, a mouth that ran from ear to ear and held a true alligator’s set of teeth, a nose like a trampled men’s slipper, cheekbones jutting in red-brown jowls—and in all that unpleasant flesh mass two black eyes gleaming with hunger, like those of a hungry puma. And this nightmare apparition said to me, in sharp-sounding Spanish:

“I love you!” and after a brief pause, looking at the naked women—“I love you all!”

You don’t keep a flattering remark like that to yourself out of envy. I woke the others so they could share in the luck. In the second and third window opening more admirers appeared, all of equally dazzling charm. Since I couldn’t sleep, I was quite content to watch and listen to the fun, for my fellow females—surprised as Eves—were a little crusty.

The more ardent the declarations of love, the crustier the adored became. “Equatorial ape, son of an ape,” and similar names rang out, and everything that could be found in the way of refuse was flung into the besiegers’ faces. Even the walrus took part in the general skirmish. But when the attackers began pelting us with rotten oranges and the missiles mostly landed on me, I’d had enough of the joke and had the first officer notified. He came and had our hatches screwed shut and the door locked. No protest helped. To start a fight with those people would have harmed the shipping company, and one never knew when the Indians, who could easily pull themselves up to the ship on lighters, might climb aboard and rape or abduct us.

And even that serious warning passed me by—apart from the fun already had. All night we fried in our own fat, and in the morning we climbed onto the deck, more dead than alive. Never had I been that hot before, and only rarely afterward…

Hardly had we finished our breakfast roll when the young Italian who wanted to start a new life in Guayaquil came, quite distraught, to tell us how neglected the place was, how rough the people, how ungrateful the land… He said farewell to every mooring post of the “Bologna,” and I don’t know if he survived our departure very long. Only someone utterly ruthless gets ahead in the lands of the half-breeds.

At half past one we left Guayaquil, and it seemed to me that on the neglected marketplace that reached down to the shore a delicate figure in a black silk dress stood. Just like the Peruvian woman that time. She waved and waved.

We drifted quickly downriver. I stayed up at the bow and felt a slight chill. It was very fine to sail around the world, but quite the opposite to build a new life on a lonely coast. And in a week I too would be standing like that and would have to build a lot before I’d be allowed to go on, for I alone sensed how little money I had left.

“Why are you shivering like an alligator that swallowed a bottle of castor oil by mistake?” asked Don Luis.

“There’s a cool draft blowing over us,” I answered, shivering.

“Yes, yes—no wonder; it’s blowing from the South Pole,” he claimed and coughed.

Such a thing a few degrees south of the Equator! I followed my guardian angel to be fed.

The green ray.

In the evening Don Luis said:

“Look through this spyglass and tell me what you see!”

I did as told. It was a wonderful tropical evening, the horizon quite clear, the sky overhead lightly clouded. Slowly the red sun ball sank, touched the water, disappeared.

But before the sun was quite gone, an indescribably beautiful, emerald-green half-disc showed—a green ray that remained unforgettable.

“Did you see it?” asked Don Luis, for the first time moved.

I nodded.

“It was the green ray—something one can see only in the desert or on a very calm, wide sea. They say whoever has seen the green ray never deceives himself about his true heart’s feelings.”

In the next instant it was dark, and the moon rose. There is no transition in the tropics.

Farther and farther south the “Bologna” steamed. In Callao most of the remaining passengers disembarked. Then…

Lima, in Peru.

Before the harbor basin of Callao lay a small, bare island—the quarantine. On the light-blue, sun-kissed waters rested millions of seabirds. I had never seen such a number before or since. They darkened the sun when they rose, they dotted the sea, they dazzled the eyes. These were the birds that deposited the precious guano on the lonely rocks of the coast.

Our ship stayed well off the harbor, and we went ashore in a small boat. For a while we were the money changers’ terror, because we tried to exchange lire and other devalued cash at a good rate; then with English money we scraped together a trifling sum—it can’t have been large, since at the café we couldn’t even leave a tip—and went to Lima, the capital of Peru, once the City of Kings and half an hour from Callao.

The mountains were stacked in seven layers behind one another. It was a wondrous sight. Beyond them ran the road to the mines of Cerro del Pasco, where hanging bridges crossed the ghastliest chasms and one tunnel followed another until you reached the eternal snows. Alfalfa grew by the wayside, and though it never rains around Lima, but only in winter an incredibly dense fog falls, the maize stood beautiful and almost ripe. The round-leaved Chilean willows alternated with the tall, bushy Peruvian ones.

Lima itself is a city in Spanish style, with a great cathedral from whose gates—this was Good Friday—just then all the dignitaries filed out in a long procession. They wore gold-glinting helmets with red, white, and more rarely blue plumes, and very rich, radiant uniforms. At their appearance four bands began to play, each something different, each in its corner of the Plaza de Armas, and the crowd cheered. In solemn procession they carried Christ to the grave. All the women wore black mantillas, and their brown-yellow faces, framed by the black scarf, looked unbelievably ugly—they seemed like skulls. We did not notice a single one of the famous Lima beauties. If the somewhat lighter faces were powdered to boot, they turned into hideous masks.

Lima’s houses are mostly one-story, and everywhere you find the odd window cages that let light to those inside but bar entry to passers-by. All the women must sit behind such grilles. How necessary that is, I learned much later.

I wandered with Don Luis through all of Lima as if we were being paid, across the Rímac bridge to Cerro San Cristobal and to that district where the arena lies. Strangely enough, the monasteries lay there too. A long avenue bounded them.

In the shops we found small carved calabashes in which maté, or Paraguay tea, is prepared; in the roomy market hall lay great red chile peppers, violet-brown egg plums, bellows of straw, low earthen jugs, butter in corn straw, all kinds of tropical fruit, and neat little baskets all together, and all our questions were answered most willingly. In the zoo I saw the Peruvian bear—completely black, and only around the ears striped yellow—the condor, and many armadillos.

On the “Bologna” among the second-class passengers there had been an agent for a textile firm who had often approached me in unwelcome, later amusing ways, because he plainly imagined I must be traveling for adventure, not for knowledge, and no matter how often I blew him off, he nevertheless invited me, the day before our arrival in Lima, to spend three weeks in Lima at his expense. Now Don Luis, who either wanted to know what I was made of or, being young, was in fact naive, said I ought to accept that invitation. I bristled like a tropical hedgehog and asked him whether he had ever met anyone willing to give something for nothing. We nearly had words when he urged me to look the gentleman up, for he had given us his address when we said goodbye. In three weeks he planned to go on to Chile, in eight weeks home via Argentina and Brazil.

I refused to have anything to do with this “bad man,” took him for a thorough rake, and walked proudly past the house in question. Don Luis said nothing. If he was wise, he probably thought: “You’ll judge differently yet.”
On the “Bologna” he had worshiped a pretty young girl who was being escorted to Chile by her doddering, bow‑legged guardian to be married off to a rich but very elderly man. That of course didn’t stop his ward from enjoying her freedom to the hilt, and I myself watched, highly amused, as Mr. L. and the “red lady,” as we called her, kept slipping behind a crate, a cabin, a ladder, kissing and hiding, while the short‑sighted old gentleman—with his glasses on his nose—searched in despair for the two sinners. Since I was always sitting next to Don Luis, who also wrote, making my notes or reading, the old gentleman thought his niece ought to sit quietly as well, and now and then he cast the most wistful looks my way. Today the red lady had been deprived of her admirer and I of my tormentor …

Don Luis was a real child. Toward evening he begged to go to the pictures. I had a raging headache and don’t like movie houses even in perfect health, but I didn’t want to seem unfriendly, so we sat through the Passion of Christ. Whenever the wicked men came on, the audience whistled, yelled, and stamped, and what amused us both so much was this agitated crowd, living through it all and worked up to the point of wildness.

But we sobered up fast when, half an hour later, we stood on the beach at Callao and looked in vain for any boat at all. Not a man, not a boat, and our ship two miles offshore. Who could say whether the captain hadn’t decided to steam away at daybreak after all?

When we’d half decided to spend the night in a beach skiff—which promised to be neither soft nor warm—a man came up and said he’d row us out. First he lost an oar, then he couldn’t get us moving, then the current shoved us into a reef, and we narrowly missed a propeller when a steamer happened to pull out just as we neared the spot, and Don Luis could only groan:

“They ought to put you in the German Navy!!”

We paid the little wretch the promised two soles (one dollar), and Don Luis pounced on the bowl of sardines and salad a sailor had hidden for him. I went straight to bed. All at once, I was afraid of the future.

Off Mollendo.

The moon—a cold moon—gawked out from behind the funnel. A cold wind, the first messenger of the coming winter in the southern hemisphere, blew up from Cape Horn. The air felt deserted, and the high seas rocked the “Bologna” so hard I was nearer to seasickness than I’d been in the Atlantic storm. Don Enrique, the second‑class waiter, who had lately been serving me on proper plates that set me apart from my scattered gang, gave me nuts and advice; the nurse gave me an orange and an apple and many good wishes. I complained about the mosquitoes in Guayaquil, and he said emphatically:

“God grant you never find worse mosquitoes! Beware the two‑legged insects!”

I nodded and thanked him. That was the only warning anyone gave me.

I crowed to Don Luis:

“At last I’ll be rid of this stinking crate and be able to stretch out in a bed again—something that’s been impossible for 45 days.”

The young man said, quite serious:

“Before a week is out you may wish you were lying in the narrow bunk of the ‘Bologna.’”

But I was dreaming of Inca antiquities, the wonders of Titicaca, the beauties of the high Andes, and I smiled, superior.

In an open canoe, an Indian in front and one in back, I meant to go down the Ucayali, with a puma for a companion on shore and a snake in the treetops as my fellow traveler. Nothing scared me. No one thought to clue me in. Today I think my courage fooled not only me but even wiser people about my future …

All Easter Sunday we saw nothing but the brown, inhospitable coast with the steeply rising mountains; on Easter Monday at eight in the morning the “Bologna” dropped anchor off Mollendo. I had seen a few godforsaken ports, but this was the most godforsaken of all. The fishing village of Mollendo perched high up on a sheer cliff, and all around you saw nothing but bare, reddish‑brown mountains with scattered white patches—the nitrate fields. Since it never rained, these salts accumulated and formed glittering, glacier‑like expanses. Those and the patches of pure white sand heightened the desolation. The surf was so fearsome that the very roomy launch danced like a nutshell and passengers had to be tossed into it. Screaming porters swarmed over the ship and haggled over the price of landing. Like savages they fought over my modest luggage. I said good‑bye to the master‑at‑arms, to the nurse, to Don Enrique. Two travelers for Bolivia also got off. Up at the rail stood Don Luis, waving, waving …

Never again anywhere in the world have I seen the sea whipped into whipped cream—thick and yellow—the way it was off Mollendo. The surf hurled itself furiously at the brown rocks; the Pacific Ocean vented its pent‑up anger on this coast; the agitated waves from Cape Horn only calmed down in front of Callao. The gulls shrieked, threatening.

A contraption, half chair, half basket, was lowered into the launch. My suitcase had already made it safely to the top of the cliffs; I wouldn’t trust my Erika to anyone. She was hidden in my travel plaid because machinery was charged a steep duty that you never got back. Now I held the precious bundle in my right hand, the handbag and the basket ropes in my left, when—whoosh—I shot upward, turned half a circle in midair, and headed for the cliffs headfirst. With a sigh of relief they hauled me out of the basket.

In front of me stood the customs and passport authority. The few travelers held their passports in their hands and looked miserable. I fished my passport out of my bag, when the next official bowed and said:

“No need for the ladies!”

Aha, so here my value as a woman began! I grew two inches taller. The customs officer asked about the contents of my luggage, and the two inches disappeared. I opened the suitcase.

“And that’s your bed?”

I nodded. My heart quaked for the hidden Erika.

“Go on!”

I handed my suitcase to a beach hyena and carried my beloved machine myself, carefully. No rough hand was to touch Erika.

I had luck. The Andes train, which ran only twice a week, was due to leave at eleven. I proudly slid a coin to the clerk at the window. He gave me the ticket and some silver change. As I stood on the still‑empty platform and said good‑bye to the suitcase hyena—a sinister fellow with teeth like an ancient shark—there approached me the oddest creature I had met to that day. It wore women’s clothes, yet had a short scraggly beard, a black wart on its nose, and a sharp yet somehow stunted chin. A pre‑Flood hat sat on its head, and a mantilla hung from its shoulders. Two small brown boys with bundles of sugarcane flanked the wonder.

“Where are you traveling?” it asked.

“To Cusco; today only as far as Arequipa.”

“I’m from Cusco too, a seamstress. How much did you pay for your ticket?”

I showed what I had left.

“And you’re a German? My countrywoman?” (She looked more like anything else.)

I said yes, hesitantly. Her beard gave me a certain dread. Her sex, like her nationality, had to be taken on faith.

“He cheated you! Give me the ticket and the money!”

She bore down on the window and wrenched a smaller gold piece from the man, ranted, raved.

“He claims he made a mistake,” she reported, puffing.

“These men! But I’ll protect you, since we’re countrywomen.”

On the strength of that bond between us, I left her—without too much trust—my suitcase and the Erika to watch and wandered through Mollendo, an assemblage of wooden buildings as brown as the mountains and the hot sand and as unwelcoming as the surf on this coast seems. A dry, paralyzing heat rises from the ground all around. People look at you with curiously greedy eyes, with a sediment of mistrust in them.

From the highest point in town I took one last look at the distant “Bologna.” No one had gone ashore because of the high landing fees. The big ship was the only speck on the endless waters. They were carrying it farther south. Only today did my Columbus voyage begin, for only today was I alone, dependent on myself.

I had to do my best—today and always.

Perhaps at that very moment the bearded oddity of the high Andes was running off with my Erika. Intolerable thought! I flew back to the station.

Toward the high Andes.

The train had only first and second class; I belonged to the penniless riffraff. Indians with giant bundles—containing bedding, lice, and children—clambered into the long car, which had four longitudinal rows of seats, two under the windows, two in the middle with backs meeting, and stowed their belongings (chickens, baskets, little children, dogs underneath; fruit, bundles, and bigger children on the benches) as best they could. The men wore ponchos—a woolen cloth with a hole to stick your head through—the women short blouses that often gave glimpses of questionable charms and very pleated, bell‑shaped skirts of dark red cloth or colorful calico. The children wore their birth shirt and some rag over it. They were all hungry, even the chickens and the dogs, who at intervals—joined by the children—investigated the condition of my legs under the bench. Next to me sat the seamstress from Cusco with her two grandchildren who, even to my untrained eye, were brown as nuts and obvious mixed‑bloods (not to be credited to my late countryman!) and about whom she kept insisting they had gotten so brown from the tropical sun of Mollendo …

To be white in a land where everyone shades from lemon to horse chestnut is a priceless advantage. I exulted in having it. I felt like a dollar among Austrian postwar kronen. Goose!

The grade climbed without letup. The brown mountains, the white fields drew nearer. You had to squint to keep the fine sand out of your eyes and avoid getting sick. The surf thundered along for a while more and then fell silent behind us. Everywhere the travelers pulled out sugarcane to chew. They gnawed patiently at the tough stalks and spat the pulpy remains with great skill out the window over my head. Like swarms of gnats the chewed bits whizzed through the air. I had to chew along for a while myself. When in Rome, do as the Romans do …

The windblown sand formed dunes that looked like graves. Nothing but rock and blazing sun until you reached the fertile, oasis‑like region beyond Cachendo. All sorts of tropical fruits grew there, and saleswomen climbed through the train with fine long baskets and stepped on half a dozen feet before, at the departure whistle, they jumped back out of the already moving train.

At La Joya you could take your midday meal—picante. Old Indian women sat on the ground beside huge clay pots and, shaking their live braids, ladled rice and pounded peppers of all kinds onto tin plates with a tin spoon. Each portion cost 10 centavos, and if the old woman happened to give too much, she tossed the surplus back into the pot with her brown hand. Unwanted extra portions with lice were not charged extra.

Politeness in the high Andes dictates hospitality toward the stranger. You’re supposed to push the choicest bite from your own plate into the guest’s mouth with your own fork or spoon. I found myself the object of broad‑minded goodwill on the train. My zeal as a researcher still allowed me back then to bravely swallow everything offered, hoping, if not convinced, that a louse wouldn’t be adorning that particular spoonful.

At San José, where it began to turn cool (4,848 feet), they brought good butter croissants that took away a bit of the louse‑and‑pepper taste. Incidentally, this is the dreaded verruga region; only at this elevation does that uncanny disease appear. The sufferer has constant fever, ugly blue‑violet spots on the face, feels as sick as with typhus, and dies of it without fail, sometimes quickly, sometimes only after years.

I marveled at the ever more magnificent landscape and waited for the much‑described Misti, Peru’s wonder mountain. Suddenly an Indian waved to me, and I looked out the opposite window. Between two mountain chains rose a splendid, snow‑white mass rounded at the top. The mountain seemed detached from the earth. It greeted, almost waved, and warned. It towered over me, not only in space but inside me. It had a soul, and that soul belonged to the Eternal; it had nothing bound to time. Never again did I have that feeling before a mountain, not even Japan’s sacred mountain, which resembles the Misti. Then and now it feels as if some long‑buried secret tied the two of us together.

It was getting dark. The plain of Arequipa, right at the foot of the mighty volcano, stretched wider and wider. Tiabaya and Tingo faded, and when the last red had left Misti’s snowy head, the train stopped in Arequipa, the second capital of Peru, in the heart of the high Andes.

I lifted my Erika down from the rack.

In Arequipa.

“Now we have to find a room that doesn’t cost too much,” said the seamstress from Cusco, who had stuck to me like a burr, and she spotted a little boy who hoisted the suitcase onto his head and trotted ahead of us. Behind him came the brave bearded lady with two bags, behind her the two boys with the bundles of sugarcane, and lastly yours truly with typewriter and handbag. So we hobbled through the pitch‑dark streets from hotel to hotel, from inn to inn, and everything was full everywhere. With every turn our things got heavier, and I was groaning with fatigue when at last we limped into the Hotel Francia e Inglaterra, where the landlord said:

“I only have one room free, at four soles, with only two beds.”

I would gladly have paid the four soles to sleep alone, but how could I leave my countrywoman, who had taken me under her hairy—no, not feathery—wings, without a roof? So we bedded the two brown boys on a rickety sofa and took possession of the two beds ourselves. I shared my meal with one child, she shared hers with the other. It hadn’t been too much for anyone …

As little as this story lived up to my dreams, I was comforted by at least having a bed to myself, and since it was unusually large, for joy I lay in it once lengthwise and once crosswise; stretched my limbs like a polyp its tentacles and writhed like a lindworm in a new valley; then the seamstress from Cusco wished me “good night,” and I closed my eyes in the mistaken expectation I would fall asleep at once.

The room had no window, but it did have a wired opening that gave onto some kind of vault, and it seemed to me as if someone were speaking right there in a whisper. I listened, but couldn’t make out individual words, and those sounds slowly lulled me into a state between waking and sleep.

“ Jesús de mi corazón!”

I snapped upright. The light was on, and my honorable countrywoman was sitting bolt upright in bed, invoking all the saints. She had a cramp in her right calf. With what I know today I would have told her to get out of bed at once and jump down hard onto the floor—the surest remedy—but back then I just stared at her, exhausted, and didn’t know how to help.

“Up, up, you lazy rascals! That’s the way of it! One starves and works for such brats, and when you need something—up, up, Carlito, and rub my leg! Uiiii, auuuu, corazón de Jesús!”

The sleep‑drunk boy sat on her bed and leg and kneaded her calf. The wailing subsided, the little one clambered back onto the divan, and I closed my eyes.

“ Jesús de mi corazón!”

It was no use; only toward morning did the cramps and the caterwauling let up, and I fell into a short, restless doze, only to dream a truly terrible dream of plague and blindness.

“What a bad omen!” I thought on waking. Would the stay match the dream? I ate breakfast in haste, paid my bill, said good‑bye to the seamstress from Cusco, and started the hunt for a room. This time it wasn’t going to be like Genoa …

Not far from Francis e Inglaterra rose the iron grille gate of Arequipa’s famous cathedral, beneath which the heart of the Misti was said to lie, and which had been destroyed so many times over the centuries. Its sight affected me strangely: I felt a sudden fear, something like a remembering that couldn’t be a remembering. It seemed to me this building, strange to me, was destined to shape my life. I wanted to go in and didn’t dare, because I had no mantilla. But since I still wore a white travel veil over my blue silk cap, a priest beckoned me to enter. The church was plain compared with other churches of Latin peoples, and only a crucifix of considerable size with oddly wandering eyes caught my attention. Morning light lay in red pools on the white tiles, and up in the window arches the ravens croaked.

Quite oppressed, I set out again to look for a room.

By three in the afternoon I was close to going on to Cusco with the bearded seamstress; either people didn’t rent, or the room had no windows, so you were forced to leave the door wide open. Ignorant as I was, I still sensed that was absolutely to be rejected, and I kept struggling to find something better located. Someone suggested a place on Calle Jerusalem, and the woman I told my wish to led me through a tight maze of walls to a windowless hole with no floor and only a plank platform for bedding.

“You won’t need much light,” she said kindly, “because when the donkeys come back to the stables in the evening, the hands burn candles by the doors, and the glow from the stable lanterns will be to your advantage.”

As far as I had lowered my standards, they weren’t that low yet. I tried again to find a room in the heart of the city, made it as far as the market hall beyond the little park, and found lodging in the Casa rosada.

The woman who had recommended the house said to me:

“Good people live there, and bad ones.”

That decided me to steer clear of both the good and the bad people. Wherever you are, you can surely be alone, and it was the only habitable space I had found. Living in a first‑class hotel would have been too expensive for me, and even there it’s more than doubtful I would have come away with fewer dangers.

I moved in.

In the Casa rosada.
My room had a kind of luxury unheard of in Arequipa: two windows! Since it really had what they called a second floor (no higher than a first floor back home), that was possible, but both windows I was so proud of were in truth doors—one opening onto the corridor that led to the stairs, one onto the balcony running along the front of the building. I locked my main door with a padlock, and in front of the veranda door I dragged a sofa of enormous weight that had only three legs. The doors leading to other rooms on the right and left were bolted and barred on my side. I checked my four fortress entrances every day.

Otherwise the room had a broken washstand with a blind mirror, a bed with a mattress, pillow, and a linen sheet, so I spread my travel plaid over it, a table with a chair, and the dead sofa. The view alone was beautiful—out front over the market hall, and in back over the rooftops to the Chachani.

My landlady was a gloomy-looking, shriveled mixed-blood woman, and the child—if it was her child—was named Casimir and waited on me now and then. The certain place, also a luxury in Arequipa, where one prefers to go “like the kings of old” behind the house, had an opaque pane and no latch, so you had to grunt defensively when you heard steps. Mostly, out of politeness, you also called to the person approaching how much longer you meant to remain, and if there was a crowd, the one in more of a hurry got to go first. Gentlemen preferred dark street corners, which in Arequipa tend to serve this very purpose, and Indian women spread out their skirts in the middle of the street—always on the sunny side—and take care of what cannot be put off. They calmly call to passers-by while they do it, ask the price of eggs, discuss family matters, and won’t be chased off by donkey herds. Does a woman have less right to the street dust than a long-ear?

In the evening someone always cranked a barrel organ, and all night long the dogs howled—howled doubly when the bells rang and the ground shuddered because the Misti was boiling.

I decided to stay and worked more diligently than ever before. I even borrowed a broom from Casimir and swept the dust out—a virtue I had never shown until then—and in my free time (between writing) I drew and painted feverishly. An ad in the newspaper brought me a surprising number of replies, and I already saw myself leaving the old Inca realm with bulging sacks. I grinned like a Krampus on a candy box and was “more Columbussy” than ever.

The maize adventure.

In three days I was “de-Columbused,” and my “swollen head” was reduced to its original size. From then on I knew my limits and had learned, besides, how to shudder. +++Die Taupfeilertapferkeit war weg.+++ From then on I went through life as a woman, not as a crazy girl…

And here’s how it happened.

I had to present myself to the most distinguished attorney in the city, since he intended to entrust me with teaching his children—thirteen in all—every subject in the English language, and to make a better impression I put on my best dress, red-and-black silk. Very satisfied—the pay would cover my room and, if I was very careful, even my board—and in my delight I stumbled along heedlessly until someone called to me in front of the cathedral on the Plaza de Armas. It was a fellow passenger from the “Bologna,” who said I must feel lonely in a foreign land and asked if I would like to visit his sister. I was lonely and followed him at once. The sun was bright, it was three in the afternoon, and the young woman’s home was not far.

In the courtyard he had llamas, and my delight knew no bounds. Until then I had seen them at most in a zoo; now I could admire at leisure their soft coat, their long necks, their scornfully wrinkled noses, their tall legs; only touching was forbidden, for they don’t tolerate that kind of familiarity: they simply spit in the face of the foolhardy.

“I’ll show the young lady our fields and trees,” he said, and I went with the young man across the cornfields, which were separated by broad but low stone walls and remarkable because they grew as high as one never sees at home. Some stalks reached a height of three meters, and so I moved along the narrow path as if in a forest.

Back then I always wore gloves and thought as little of taking them off—even on hot summer days—as of taking off my shirt. All the stranger, then, that I suddenly felt an urge to take off my leather gloves and put them in my handbag, which held my passport, money, and a few important letters. But scarcely had I done it when I felt hands seize my shoulders and press me down onto the narrow path. I was still more astonished than alarmed and stared wide-eyed into the brown-skinned man’s face.

After that, things happened fast. I retain only a dark memory of a struggle that quickly landed us off the narrow path down in the ditch, so that my new best dress was covered with a crust of sand, which only increased my fury. From time to time I lost the bag and, as it were, swam back to it, tore it to me, and kept fighting, without the Peruvian letting me get to my feet. All my pleas, all my protests went unheard and earned only a cold “It’s no use!” The human brute knelt on me with all his weight and blocked any movement except with my arms.

I threw back my head and screamed as loud as I’d never believed my lungs could. Loud enough to wake all of Arequipa from the dead, but I woke only a very small boy who peered into the ditch in fright. The human brute still sat on me and clapped his thick, work-hardened hand over my mouth. My teeth are still those hung by Mother Nature; very good ones at that. I sank them into his paw. The beast let go. A shove—just as he was speaking to the child to drive it away—and I was free. Before he could grab me, I had run up the slope and was racing with all my might toward the city limits.

Behind me the man murmured, but I was quicker. Only when I landed in front of a cactus thicket and saw the road five meters below me—I must have lost my way—did he catch up with me on the lower path. I had the humiliation of having to let him lift me down, but there were already so many pedestrians here that I didn’t have to refuse anymore. Wordlessly I walked away from him; he spoke to deaf ears. I no longer reproached him with anything. It must also have been my own carelessness that had made the disaster possible.

As I walked home, I thought without end:

“How strange you are! Such a great fright, such a strong emotional shock and finally a bodily one too, since I’d flown back and forth like an empty sack, and you don’t cry, you don’t faint, you do nothing—in a word, nothing!”

I didn’t understand myself, at least not then. In the moment I kept a calm I couldn’t explain; but all my life the fear of the male human brute remained with me, and some of the childlike trust I had still had—despite all my theoretical knowledge of this territory—was lost for good.

The owl.

The next day, just as I was boiling my tea on the tiny immersion heater, someone knocked on my always locked door. I opened it and saw an old man with a swollen red nose, deep-set eyes, beard hairs like those of a frayed toothbrush, and ears like the fenders of a truck.

“I’m your landlord!” the creature declared.

Until then I’d imagined I only had to pay or answer to the shriveled old woman; however—you don’t shut the door so easily on the landlord, and when he asked to come in, I made way; not over-civilly.

“What are you doing?”

On the table lay my brush and my painting things. The man at once grew insolent and used words such as I had never heard even in my mother tongue. He wanted to touch me, and I dodged; the room was spacious, but it’s one thing to let someone in, quite another to get him back out. My tea boiled over, my precious time was wasted; like two fools, faster and faster, we ran around the table. I was neither willing nor inclined to spend the rest of my life running around other people’s tables. Over my shoulder I threw back:

“Until now I’ve considered Peruvians decent people, but today I see that—as the Chileans rightly say—they’re pigs.”

That worked! The red nose stopped and cursed the blue out of the sky and the brown out of the earth. He ended with:

“I am the rich owner of this whole street and in my life I have had Frenchwomen, Englishwomen, Germans. I will also…”

“Shut this door from the outside—and do it with a bit of snap!”

“I will kill…”

“All the blind and fools—but outside this room!” I cut him off.

“I will…”

“Outside…”

That was a lot to ask, of course, since he couldn’t very well kill me outside while I stayed inside; but logic was neither his nor my strong suit in those moments. He left, and I bolted the door behind him. On the open staircase, which was basically just a broken ladder, I heard him grumble:

“This thrice accursed woman, this proud señorita, I…” and then came every hair-raising description his drunkard’s imagination could muster. I trembled behind the thin wall; for money reasons it was almost impossible for me to move out, and staying seemed dangerous.

Strangely enough, the Owl never again became unpleasant and even did his best to make sure other men didn’t bother me in the house. Even so, a veritable migration kept moving toward my room. Through the curtained window they saw nothing, but they lay on the floor and peered in intently. What on earth could I do but lock the door? In Peru people do everything, even the indescribable, with the door wide open. The pairing of the Indians takes place in the open field.

In three days I had unlearned smiling. Whoever spoke to me I looked in the eye coldly, with a mouth that never twitched. I began to bitterly regret walking around as the only dollar among depreciated currencies.

In La Pacheta.

I suffered from a strange illness. Wherever I was—at home, in the street, in bed, even in sleep—suddenly I had a sharp, violent pain between the shoulder blades and had to throw up. Always only water, even right after a meal. I had no adviser and no money for a doctor. So I waited for it to get better by itself, which it did after a week.

Meanwhile, while I was still walking around with an uncertain stomach (it may have been the dreaded altitude sickness one catches in the Andes, since Arequipa lies 2,301 meters high), I wandered all around the area and most liked to take the path toward the cemetery. In the shade of the Peruvian willows, taller and slimmer than the European kind and often twisted by the wind, nasturtiums bloomed like fiery hearts, and the wide plain stretched from the foot of the Misti to the hills around Tiabaya—a ring of brown rock, only rarely broken by a solitary tree. The long-drawn Pichupichu and the Chachani facing it were snow-crowned like the mighty Misti—a wondrous contrast to the palms on the Plaza de Armas and the gardens of the city.

In the middle of the way to La Pacheta there was a little white church, as abandoned as I was, and over the entrance stood words that moved me in a strange way:

“Times pass, generations die: only God endures forever.”

The cemetery itself was quite small; the poor had only a bit of wood stuck crooked in the earth, while the richer lay sideways in a thick stone wall and had a wreath or a bow in front around the grave plaque. This plaque is glass with a small grille over it, and in the coffin the dead person slowly dries out.

La Pacheta is a long, straggling Indian village with huts jumbled together out of loose stones and a little clay, with irregular thatched roofs—with all kinds of wood thrown on top against the wind—and all of them without windows. The floor is only packed earth, and guinea pigs, chickens, a donkey or a llama take up more space. On old rags crawling with vermin lie the men and women who can’t stand the stench any longer; they stick their heads over the threshold while their bodies stay inside the hut. If you pass by in the evening, you think you’re seeing decapitated people. Vicious black dogs that smell the foreigner—and that you can only keep off with stones—roam such villages and the whole area around Arequipa.

On the way back from La Pacheta a family spoke to me, and I had to taste the famous chicha—the maize beer sacred to the Incas—in a tiny chichería; it tastes sweet-sour, makes you lazy, and looks like water in flood times. As dusk fell, the woman of the house said to me:

“I won’t let you go home; it’s dangerous so late.”

These people, so touchingly kind to me, came from Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca. I spent the night in their stone hut and returned to the city the next day laden with fruit. Now I was no longer alone. I took up my day’s work more bravely.

Teaching.

The following days passed in a regular rhythm. I had been very lucky. In the mornings I taught the attorney’s thirteen children, for whom he had a special little schoolroom that looked out on the quiet palm-filled courtyard every Spanish house has. I taught from eight to eleven, in all subjects except math and physics, and all in English. From eleven to twelve I hurriedly ate bread and made tea; from twelve to half-past I gave English lessons in the Calle Jerusalem to the four stupidest children I have ever met, who were also lazy and rude. From two to five I read in the public library, in all kinds of old writings about the Children of the Sun, and copied old drawings. From five to seven I made my local explorations. I most liked going toward the Misti, where there was also an abandoned graveyard and you could find the strangest pictures and signs on the wind-cocked bits of wood, some still from the suppressed Sun cult. There the gorges of the Misti shimmered like clotted blood, the sky flamed like the mirage of a vast ripe field of grain in the sunlight, the sand crackled under the trot of llamas that raced across the plain like devils, their long ears sticking up like horns. Vultures crouched around fresh carrion, and countless bleached animal bones were scattered over the whole area. From some hole in the rocks fluttered the scarlet cloth that announces a chichería, and guinea pigs ran over the low brush that covered the ground here and there with greenish leaves and yellow flowers. From seven to eight, three times a week, I had another pupil, and as soon as he left I wrote my letters.

Often an earthquake woke me early in the morning. In any case I began my day’s work at six. In any free minute I wrote or painted, and no matter how much I longed for better food, I was never annoyed that for now I could afford only bread and tea to fill my stomach. Whoever has high aims must not shy away from small sacrifices.

In the city.

Arequipa means “beyond the mountains,” and it fits. The city is beyond all contact with the outside world, too. No traveler strays there unless on unavoidable business, and the few whites you see walk the streets with grim faces. I tried in vain to connect with the Reich Germans. There and then they were hostile to me as a former Austrian. I didn’t dare approach the English or the French, few in number, and so in this hostile land I was utterly alone. If I asked for any information, it was given only grudgingly or not at all. Dealings with men were made impossible by the nature of the Peruvians, for every man went straight from the most solemn conversation to the basest behavior. Even on the open street you had to be careful, and any slightly more solitary spot—even in broad daylight—was already a true murder trap. The place was like a witch’s cauldron; from every unguarded crack a two-legged creature burst out, and if after the maize adventure I hadn’t kept all my senses sharp, who knows how often I would have been raped on a public street. Men who met me in the street (in the middle of the business district!) silently held out a handful of gold to me, and offers of that sort pelted down on me. If I bought a candle or a box of matches in a shop, first the shopkeeper himself asked if I was “alone,” the clerk shoved the goods into my hand in an offensive way, a customer tried to draw me into a conversation so he could make propositions, and another waited outside the door. I kept catching myself thinking—comically, at bottom—

“If you speak to me, I’ll kill you!”

No Trappist in his monastery went around with a grimmer memento mori face than the little woman writer who ages ago (so long the time seemed to me!) had imagined herself to be a second Columbus.
In our days, when people believe in “living it out” and “squeezing life dry,” most of my readers will probably find it silly to waste so many words on such things. But I write as a woman, and for a woman the body is an untouchable sanctuary. You may give it, if need be, to the one you raise to a saint; to let savages take possession of it is something entirely different. Besides, I am firmly convinced that a person can produce only base things in art if he strips everything ideal from his inner life. A tavern glass is no altar chalice, and whoever wants to create the highest and purest in art, what most uplifts humanity, must not drag the body through the mire. Giving in, giving myself away, would have smothered my striving, hampered my learning, and driven my work into very different tracks through the change of impressions and the force of new experiences. Reaching any goal depends first of all on never scattering yourself. From the dollar kings to the greatest scholars you find that as the rule guiding their whole being. As a person you may walk apart from the mass of people—perhaps even from the deepest human experiences—but what you have chosen as the guiding theme of your life will in the end sound out pure and clear.

My life belonged to the pen; in modern terms, to my “Erika.” In it I felt—perhaps with self-importance—that I had something to achieve, something to give to humanity that no one else could in just this way, in this particular voice. Not better or worse than others—just exactly like this!

That is why, despite all my privations, I passed by the most glittering offers. I saved my strength for a single goal.

The terrible, merciless sensuality all around was the backdrop to the strangest street scene in the world. The houses sometimes had flat roofs, but usually, because of earthquakes, vaulted ones. They were painted blue or pink, had jutting iron window cages that looked uncanny (how necessary for all women, as my experience shows!), tall archways through which you could see the patio or courtyard, and—in poorer quarters—doors instead of windows, one right next to the other. In those half-dark rooms the residents picked lice off each other, people had sex, girls washed themselves, old Indian women cooked or ladled chicha from clay jugs. Llamas scattered over the bumpy paving, donkeys carried outsized loads or were mounts on which the man often sat facing the tail to chat more easily with the person behind him. In some courtyards, though only rarely because it needs the cold of snowfields, you could also see a vicuña, a little animal the size of a sheep with a light chestnut-brown coat, wonderfully soft and so long it fluttered around the ankles. In old times only the true Incas had the right to have clothes woven from this wool.

When I was in a hurry and wanted to treat myself to an especially good supper, I bought a cheese roll. I only did that once I’d grown fairly hardened and life had knocked me flat. At the entrance to the little park, where sharp-needled araucarias stood—the strange conifers of South America—sat a young woman with a basket and a child. The child was tied to the vendor’s back with rags; she sat cross-legged on the paving and had laid out cheese rolls on a rag that might once have been clean, sniffed by dogs, pawed by the child, brushed by donkeys and llamas, and squeezed by customers testing them. But I was an exception customer, and for me a fresh roll always came out of the basket; the knife used for cutting was drawn from her bosom (in any case it appeared from the loose bodice), and the cheese was unwrapped from a scrap of paper. Such a cheese roll cost five centavos, and if I could I bought two for supper, though even then I often went half hungry.

What drew me most, though—with the same shudder that makes a murderer return to the scene of his crime—was the stream of Arequipa. Cleverly channeled, it ran through the whole place as a canal and was a real treasure trove for children who were always fishing in it. It held everything—from old buttons to the most horrible filth. In the morning little children staggered out to the gate and emptied certain pots into it; old Indian women who kept a chicheria filled their clay jugs from it and washed their glasses in it; dishes were rinsed in it, old trousers washed, the boys made fountains along its bank, and in the evening it served everyone as a toilet. People coming from the mountains who found their holey, bandless straw hat a bit too “alive” dipped it in, rinsed their hair or braids and put it back on. Only the extraordinary dryness of the air—laundry dried in two to three hours in the room, lips split, hands grew rough, the skin in general grew brittle, and hair crackled at the slightest movement because of the strong static—kept the plague from raging; because apart from what this stream carried off, nothing was removed in Arequipa. All carrion was thrown outside the town (only when the house owner could no longer stand the stench at his door) and eaten by vultures, and every night at ten o’clock all refuse, paper, rags, and so on was tossed into the street. The stray dogs rushed up and ate everything—even the most indigestible stuff. Some nights the supply was still too small, then the big dogs attacked the little ones, and you heard the most dreadful howls of fear and pain. From time to time they poisoned these dogs, and then for days you stumbled over decomposing remains…

Although everything became a hindrance to me and I went about my duties constantly alarmed, I learned a lot. Nasturtiums are used in Peru, for instance, against rheumatism by laying flowers, leaves, and stems on the fire, letting them get hot, and rubbing the joints with them. The yellow sand flowers were supposed to increase a woman’s milk in abundance; with soapwort, a low shrub with finely feathered leaves, they washed clothes; the tomatoes grew in the shape of plums, and like those on the branches of a medium-sized tree; granadillas or giant passion fruits decorated arbors like pumpkins sometimes do at home. I got to know and eat Indian figs (prickly pears) (you should pick them before sunrise, because the fine spines on the skin are still soft then and don’t prick your fingers), and I saw on the cornfields the red flower that here is called “servant without a master.” The green tubers of the potato plant are eaten by sheep and used by children to play. When the corn is harvested, people chew the stalks like sugarcane.

Toward evening I walked by the Hospital Goyaneche along the Avenida Libertad toward the Misti. He spoke to me like a very wise, serene father to a very small and stupid child. Still, he was the only one who spoke to me of the eternal and the pure, and so I loved him as something ensouled.

The Indian Attack.

I had now been living in Arequipa for three weeks, and they felt like three years to me. The good people in La Pacheta had asked me to spend Sunday out there with them, and the joy with which I set out is impossible to describe. For once I would be allowed to talk again, eat something warm, be away from all these savages.

The sun poured down in golden waves over the Misti’s snow. Chilean willows with their round, smooth leaves that glittered in the sunlight like tiny mirrors marked the stone-walled fields here and there; the mountains looked brown, then greenish, then violet-blue as the light shifted; in the distance beyond Tingo you could make out the Corapuna (cora = gold, puna = ice); along the stony roadside the Indian figs grew at the ends of their plate-shaped, spiny cactus pads; donkeys with milk carts and vegetables in the two round side baskets trotted past me, and the radiant blue sky arched over the mountain-ringed, brown-sandy plain. In the distance you could make out a low white building halfway up the slope—the Bath Jesus—and below it another, the plague hospital…

I had covered about three quarters of the way when I was overtaken by two young men. They declared they loved all foreign women, asked a thousand questions, and got so pushy that—so as not to provoke any violence—I answered nothing but now yes, now no. When a woman happened to speak to them, I used the moment to stride off quickly; and once I really get into my stride, no one catches up with me in a hurry.

Lunch was over and we were all chatting in the back room that belonged to the two daughters when an unusual kind of noise was heard outside and Mr. P. went out to find the cause. Soon after his wife disappeared, then his daughter; they returned upset only to disappear again, and when I anxiously asked why, they told me, faltering, that a number of cholos (Indians) had gathered in front of the little house and were demanding me. Two men had told them I was a disguised Chilean or Bolivian spy (feeling against both countries was very hostile then), and my short hair alone proved I could not possibly be a woman. They wanted me handed over so they could strip me and…

What should I do, what on earth could I do? Escape across the fields? Unthinkable! They had posted guards everywhere. Step out and reason with the mob? When Indians once go wild, no one can control them. Then they tear the heart from old friends’ living bodies.

And what awaited me was far worse. Death might come only after hours or after a long wasting. Defense was out of the question. Heavy stones were already flying onto the thatched roof of the little house. I had no right to risk these poor people’s lives and goods for my sake. But what to do?

I looked around for a knife. Suicide was the only thinkable way out. My brain failed me. I would so much rather have chosen another kind of death. The gradual bleeding out horrified me. Meanwhile there would still be time…

The three women wrung their hands, the man had gone back to the gate to negotiate through the wooden wall. I grabbed the bread knife that was still lying on the table. Was there no way out?

Even in this hour I did not howl. I stood quite calm beside the table and thought, thought. It was time to act, not to wail uselessly.

Hoofbeats, voices.

My host rushed in. The police inspector was returning from his finca, his country place. Six men accompanied him. He read my passport, spoke with me, went out and calmed the people. Reluctantly, like growling dogs before a higher power, they drew back. They loaded me with fruit, flowers, and treats, and the whole family walked me to the border of La Pacheta. The police inspector and his men covered the retreat. I was advised never to go anywhere alone and not to return to La Pacheta. So ended the friendship with the only good people I had met in Peru.

This time my adventure made a deeper impression on me at once. A peculiar, hopeless gloom fell over me and made me fear I would never be able to leave Peru, or at any rate not as I had entered it. A quick change was out of the question, since my means would hardly have allowed me even a trip to Cuzco or La Paz in Bolivia, and the people there were surely no better, the chances to earn likely worse. I simply had to hold out. Whoever jumps into a river must swim to the shore or drown.

In Front of the Cathedral.

I was too shaken that evening to stay alone. At eight o’clock the band played on the Plaza de Armas under the palms, and under the brightly lit colonnades of the hotels and shops the girls and women walked up and down, were greeted and picked apart, weighed on the scales of their value as women (purely sexual!) and measured in biting remarks. Not so on the dimly lit paving in front of the cathedral, where I could dream undisturbed. In the middle of the long walkway three steps led down to the plaza. Just as I reached them, someone called out nearby:

“Alma!”

Now no one—thousands and thousands of miles around—knew my given name. Disbelieving, eyes wide, I turned.

Down at the foot of the little stone steps stood Davido L…, the “bad Italian,” and, joking, spread his arms, because he knew all too well my dislike of familiarities. It took unbelievable self-control not to throw myself at his chest with a cry. Compared to the Peruvians he was the most golden-winged angel!

So I gave him my hand, and my eyes shone; then, all at once, I began my complaints. Like a child that has found its way home, I poured out my grief, and when he invited me to supper, I accepted without a second thought. Even the idea of parting was unbearable. It wasn’t his person, it was the “Bologna” with all its safety, the beloved Italian language, the kindness all around, the familiar, well-known things. What walked beside me here in striped trousers was Europe, was home…

Perhaps he, the one born at home, understood something of what was going on in me, for as kind as he was to me and as steadily as we went on outings together—especially to Tiabaya, where we ran over a chicken with our car—he never again crossed the line of friendship. He treated me—as I only understood much later—like a child someone had wounded. On the “Bologna” he had said to me more than once, to my boundless indignation:

“I have a daughter, but if she wanted to travel the way you do, I would shoot her! Better that than a life like this!”

Now I had begun to understand him. For a single woman, traveling in such countries was unthinkable, or in any case so exhausting that it would be better to know her dead…

On the eve of his departure we stood before the Pichu Pichu and watched a lunar eclipse. He implored me to travel with him as far as Chile. In Chile I would find Don Luis and, in any case, be more protected.

Out of my own means—even if I had wanted to break my contracts with the pupils—there was no way to think of it. Nor would I travel at his expense, and so, doubly abandoned, two eggs and a sweet memory richer, I stayed behind in Arequipa. He went down to Don Luis and the red lady and back to Europe.

How much would I have to accomplish, to see and learn, before I too could think of that! I was still suffering from homesickness.

Although I did not want to admit it fully, I remained afraid. Two things added to it: a terrible murder had been committed in front of the Molino de Hurtado at seven in the evening in a busy place in the middle of town. A man had not only beaten a decent woman to death with loose paving stones, but desecrated the body. In a nearby side lane I myself had by a hair’s breadth avoided tripping over a stark naked man lying on the paving, and someone always seemed to be creeping behind me, especially toward evening as soon as I left my student. Yes, even that student became a growing danger: I sat with one eye fixed on my escape route, the other on the book, and I watched every movement as sharply as if I were teaching a lion in a cage. That harmed the lesson and my nerves.

The second thing was that in the papers there were constant notices that read something like:

“Twelve-year-old girl, blue dress, red hat, disappeared on San Juan de Dios Street on the such-and-such at ten o’clock. Information that… etc. is requested.”

Boys disappeared, but mostly girls between eight and twelve. Whether tied to the traffic in girls or to idol sacrifices could not be determined. They were never found.

I saw all these dangers more clearly than men, who are less affected by them, or quick passers-through who had no contact with the people and, by staying in a first-class hotel, always had some connection with Europeans. I, who had to live, move, and fight like someone from among the people, I got to know the world without a mask…

The Terror in the Night.

The days passed like a nightmare; but they passed. I learned much about superstition in Peru, heard of witches and enchantment, and could well understand that in such surroundings, and with the heart of the Misti under the cathedral, everything seemed believable. Over the doors of old churches I saw the gods of the Incas—sun and moon—beside the cross, and surely Indians still confessed at the edges of rivers in the open field. At any rate, they would pluck out an eyelash when they happened to greet the sun from a hill, and spat coca leaves in adoration onto a huaca, a strangely shaped stone that became an idol. If they managed to hide from the priest the death of a twin child, they kept the body in a clay pot in the house so it would become a luck-bringing huaca.

The number of students had grown a bit, and I could hope to travel on to Cuzco and La Paz once my three-month contract with the father of the thirteen children ran out. These were basically my dearest pupils, although I also found that the girls’ minds could not rise to anything ideal. The finest works of literature left them untouched, humanity’s highest striving was to them only an empty dream, and even their faith was a mix of ceremony and superstition without depth. It struck me as odd that they never said how old they were, and that, although the oldest was at most a bit over eighteen, they already looked quite faded. They were yellowish, yet in the eyes of the world already counted as “white.”

On Monday, from drinking bad water, I came down with dysentery; a relative of the thirteen gave me a liquid that was treated as a secret, and by it I actually recovered in twenty-four hours. I had to drink ten drops every hour in a bowl of boiling water and absolutely had to fast.

Although the attacks were completely over by Friday, I nevertheless lay down not only in my nightshirt but with my dressing gown on as well, after doing my usual round and checking all the locks. The dogs howled, as every night; the barrel organ played some Spanish dance, and the clatter of passersby followed me deep into sleep.

While I—my ears plugged with cotton so I could sleep at all—lay on my very bedbug-ridden bed, I dreamed of Italy, was just walking with my aunt through a very narrow, very busy street, chatting in Italian, and yet heard behind me, right at my ear, in English, the words: “Wake up! Wake up!”
Against my habit, I obeyed the command at once. My heart was pounding loudly. I pulled the little wads of cotton from my ears and pushed myself up on one elbow. Not a sound around me. Dogs and people had fallen silent, the moon was at the end of its last quarter, and in spite of the glass panes my room was in almost pitch-black darkness.

“How stupid!” I thought, staring hard into the silence. “Why am I sitting here in the middle of the night, staring into the room?”

I was just about to lie back down when a figure—some unrecognizable something—moved silently right in front of the bed. It swayed back and forth like a giant snake hypnotizing its prey. I still felt no fear, only growing amazement. What on earth was wobbling like that?

The next moment I understood. With the doors closed—God alone knew how—a man had gotten into my room. I thought of the killing in front of the Molino de Hurtado and knew I was done for. Three times I screamed, but not like back then in the corn adventure—quieter, more piercing. For the first time I understood why people spoke of the marrow congealing in the bones. Even the man was shaken by it, for he whispered:

“Shh! A criminal has escaped and is wandering over the rooftops! I’m watching him from here!”

The answer stunned me. How had the man gotten into my room? Door and windows were shut, the side doors on my side bolted. Had he come up through the floor? What should I do—what could I do?

I couldn’t reach the light; you turned it on in the middle of the room, and there was no space between me and the stranger to slip through. In the next room someone coughed, without coming to my aid at my cry for help. Now I knew what I had always guessed: that in Peru you were utterly alone—among animals, not among people. The stranger, of whom I could make out nothing but a sort of cap brim, called softly but menacingly, thrusting his hand into his pocket:

“If you scream again, I’ll kill you!” And at once, in the merciless, barbaric way of those men: “I want to enjoy you!” As if I were a sandwich or a glass of beer!!

My boundless horror had left me. I knew that death was the most pleasant thing I could long for, and since I had clearly worked the case out in daylight (I had had enough warnings!), I wasted no brainpower thinking. I wanted one thing: to fight so desperately that he would have to kill me before…

But he would pay dearly for the dubious pleasure!

I have a strange quirk: I can’t do anything in life without shoes. Whether it’s the feeling that barefoot I wouldn’t get five steps, whether it’s something inherited—I couldn’t say; but if a ship seems in danger, a fire alarm goes off, or someone just pulls the bell—first I must at least have slippers on, and before I sold my life dearly I wanted to have shoes fit for fighting. Why? God alone knows.

My childish addiction to slippers saved me; for as I reached out my hand toward my footwear, I grabbed the iron bar I had lying by my bed—fearing further attacks from my landlord—and whose presence I had completely forgotten.

“I want to enjoy you!”

Everything I am describing at length here took place in a few minutes. My brain worked lightning fast, and for a second I wanted to smash the bar down on the beast’s head and be free once and for all, but even then I knew I would never be carefree again—that he, dead, would seem far more disagreeable to me than alive; so instead I drove the heavy bar with all my strength into his chest. He had sensed danger and had not thrown himself on me in his first rush. Now he flew across the room and sank down by the wall. I leapt from the bed and, with a catlike spring, reached the door, tore it open, rushed down the breakneck ladder I only climbed in daytime with extreme care—I think I almost jumped straight from the first floor into the raised patio—and with the iron bar I banged on every single door, found and woke the “Owl,” and the whole time I kept asking myself whether the criminal, once he had lost me, might not in the end run off with my bag and all my papers.

I remember what followed only as if through a veil. The Owl threw herself on the man lying there, and they fought a fight to the death. The landlord was probably sorriest that it hadn’t been he who had been so close to me, and I know I held the iron bar out to him without feeling any human feeling. All the residents formed a ring around the fighters, and someone ran howling for the police. Not a soul would have stirred for my sake.

It was four in the morning before we had peace. The man had cut the pane of glass and quietly opened the padlock from the inside. If I hadn’t had the dream warning, he would have attacked me in my sleep.

On that terrible Saturday I went from court to court, always accompanied by a policeman, who also always, very politely, walked on the left. All the virtue of the Peruvians begins and ends with that. Even the priests would always motion me to walk on the inner side of the houses (the ladies’ side), a courtesy I did not appreciate in this wild land of all places; for in case of an attack it cut off my escape. So, against all rules, I swung along the outer edge of the sidewalk.

At three in the afternoon I landed before the chief judge. The accused wept. He had never been punished before. This was his first offense, and he excused himself by claiming that it had been impossible for him to resist the temptation to visit the white woman who lived next to him. I had never seen him, much less encouraged him. The judge acquitted him. Later I learned that he himself had given a madam a lot of money to supply him with a sixteen-year-old girl, whom he raped. Then I understood his verdict…

This is the country where the good are punished and the bad are rewarded.

I had caught such a chill in the night of the tropics (the air drops twenty degrees) that I couldn’t move. Packing was out of the question. For three days I was “unable to stretch out” and cried with every movement; after that I began yet another difficult hunt for a room; the thirteen children didn’t want to let me go early, and I was too decent to run away.

Those who think only of themselves get on far better in life. That first night a hand slid through the opening. I cried, “Who’s there?” and the arm vanished. No footsteps. I burned light all night. Giant rats marched through the room; the bedbugs had their fun. I examined my conscience, for sleep was out of the question. What had I undertaken? Was any gain worth such sacrifices?

After all that turmoil I hadn’t cried; as usual I went about my various duties, but I lost five kilos in a week, and the fear of sleeping in a completely dark room has stayed with me for life. Even today I sometimes wake and stare in fright into the dark, afraid of a man-beast standing by my bed…

In Yanaguara.

Before I had even found a room, a Frenchman passing through and a local—whose level of mind seemed to promise me some safety—invited me to walk to Yanaguara. It lies beyond Arequipa on the way to the observatory. The houses look as if cut from a picture book—so angular, odd, brightly painted, loaded with stucco; nasty dogs bark after the stranger; curious eyes fix themselves on the walker’s heels. There I first got to know the ink plant with its bluish-red berries, the tauri, a tree with umbels of red blossoms whose bark is used for tanning leather, and other plants.

The rectory is built in old Spanish colonial style, and when the clergyman recognized us he beckoned us to come in. He showed us books more than two hundred years old, one of which contained a gruesome description of the Peruvian plague (the black vomiting). He also told us of an old manuscript in his possession that described in detail a mine in the area of today’s Arica and stated that the rock there held diamonds, emeralds, and rubies in large quantities; but the old gentleman wouldn’t reveal the secret because that region now belonged to Chile and people still hoped to see it fall back to Peru one day. The document is written in a very clear hand and on genuine parchment.

In Yanaguara people admire the tomb of General Moran, and in the ancient church there is a miracle-working image of the Mother of God made of wax, which Emperor Charles the Fifth gave to Cuzco, but on the way, however, she said in Quechua: “Here I will stay!” The Mother of God has a mantle full of silver embroidery and earrings with real diamonds, along with a delicate crown on her head. The church itself is over three hundred years old and shows the ornate, overloaded style that was then customary in Spain. Paintings from the year 1607, and another, newer one showing the terrible earthquake of 1784, adorn the walls, and at the font all the nobles of Arequipa were baptized. In the side aisles there were old paintings too, on which the Madonna’s hair was sprinkled with stars.

Since I had no mantilla, the priest asked me to take off my hat, and the idea of wandering around like that with my hat in my hand (not just figuratively) struck me as endlessly funny, and it only reinforced my conviction that in South America the Christian faith was a soulless fuss of ceremonies. It did not show itself in life, not in art, only in superstitious customs and sensual gestures. As if the dear Lord would find it more pleasing to see me strolling about without a hat!

The priest—himself a picturesque figure, stout, his ruddy face full of stubble, an old straw hat on his head and a long black cassock with a wide collar—showed us his garden with great pride. It was full of pepper and chili bushes, a cherimoya tree, and countless carnations.

In a little general store we ate bread and cheese. In barrels all around us lay cau-cau, or fish roe. Fresh, it is greenish or pale yellow; later, orange.

Before we left the place, we stopped in a chicheria. A little girl set the table with fingers that had known water only by accident since birth, and with a cloth to match the hands, which my companions at once tossed back at the maid—something she took very badly. Then we got picante, salad with small bits of chicken or guinea pig, tripe with blue potatoes, and finally a huge glass of chicha, which we only sipped. Peruvians, they say, start drinking chicha around noon and get lazy from then on. In my view they couldn’t possibly be any lazier than they are in the morning. A turkey got angry at a barrel organ and screamed at it.

When we went home it was cool, and I noticed that Peruvians suffered from it more than we Europeans.

In the new home.

The worst drawback in hunting for a room was the lack of a certain place. People preferred tenants who took care of such business out on the streets. In the end, though, I found a street-side room on Calle Jerusalem, right next to a carpenter’s shop, so I had the refreshing feeling that they were sawing and planing my future coffin.

In the evening I wanted to seek out the luxury in the form of that place. A box of matches in hand, I set off, crossed the courtyard, and opened the door. A turkey ruled the seat and had no intention of troubling himself to climb down for my sake. I could yell, shove, blow… the turkey sat, and since I could hardly leave with nothing done, I finally sat down beside him and let him peck me properly. Luckily he was eaten the very next day, which made my night excursions easier.

In exchange for the then much-sought-after Yugoslav stamps, my landlady invited me to supper. We had Chupo, the natives’ favorite dish, based on chili pepper, water, and salt, with all sorts of vegetables added, and a tart richly filled with quince jam.

The room was quieter, brighter, more pleasant than my burrow in the Casa rosada, yet I couldn’t shake the feeling of danger to come.

The Peg Leg.

On every walk I went like a dog on a leash, unless the Frenchman and his friend were with me. I went most often toward Tingo, because the electric tram ran that way and I could always hope, in case of danger, to jump onto the car. In Tingo, which strongly recalls our market towns back home, there are hot baths. Whoever wants to strips behind a wooden fence and steps naked into the water. Men and women alike. You pay ten centavos for the pleasure. I could have managed the centavos, but not the courage. It was not at all desirable to be a dollar, unprotected, among money muck…

Between Tingo and Arequipa, where the tram crossed the railway, stood a gatekeeper’s hut. It was a wooden shack without furnishings, with a half door and an open window. In front of the house stood a bench, and in front of the bench a man. Good Tutankhamen could have been his contemporary. Old, ancient. Old and legless. He hobbled on crutches and looked three-quarters dead. One day he spoke to me.

We talked about the day’s heat, the dust of the main road, the high prices. He asked me to step into his house and rest. It was half a house, and the man wasn’t even half a man, so I went in. Barely had I sat properly when this figure spoke of love! A pound sterling in gold! I felt like laughing and crying. I wished Tutankhamen’s contemporary a good day and calmly left. Luckily he had no foot. Still, he tried to hobble after me on his crutches. Words like “gold” and “beer” followed me, and finally threats. He would visit me; he would search for me all over Arequipa. Did I perhaps think the absence of his legs and the number of his years…?

For days I anxiously watched out for a man without legs—but with a heart.

I’ve always preferred the reverse combination.

Up to here I can rummage in memories, but then, after all these years, the wave of bitterness rises high, and I let six weeks fall untouched into the well of time—weeks in which my soul learned a lot; above all, that in human life everything revolves around the power of the senses and few—very few—can stand free of the plague of passion, however high-minded they may be; that what a man—any man—seeks is always the woman, not the developed self; that in life it’s not about an individual’s ability to achieve, but about the pleasure or displeasure such an individual awakens in others. Back then I rose up against the whole world’s view, ready to stand alone, and alone I have stood ever since. My art has become my everything; but the men I met claimed I am only capable of friendship at all and know nothing of love.

If love is the same as Peruvian craving, then I say with joy: No—thank God!

Back then, before I left Arequipa, I wrote this in my diary: “Happy are the people who go through the world without higher striving! In the shell of their dull contentment and ignorance they live a contemplative animal life and know none of the sufferings to which a poet, a researcher, or a thinker is exposed. I often wish I were without striving, without wishes, animal; then my body would not today suffer from hunger and cold, and my soul would be spared purgatory. What is the world? A crowd who envy you, are hostile to you, misunderstand you, or pass by you without caring. And for that one sacrifices youth, health, the peace of the soul?! – – And the worst is: One does not act by free will. One follows an inner compulsion, a power that knows no mercy and drives you on. Blessed the one spared from that. All the beauty we see, the ‘more’ that we feel, is paid for over and over with our suffering and our sacrifices. When we sometimes see a little patch of heaven open—what is it? For it we live, in body and soul, in hell. Our searching, our creating are paid for with a thousand sacrifices and tears; our friendships—rare as the green flash at sunset—can easily cost us the peace of the soul, and what do our contemporaries or posterity give us, what does God Himself give us as compensation for such suffering? Nothing. In the best case (and how rare!) a name.”

Before the Misti.

“Fate show thy force; ourselves we do not owe;
What is decreed must be – and be it so!”

Shakespeare.

My time was up; at the same time I knew it would be suicide to travel alone by way of La Paz and Bolivia—no better than Peru—to Chile. My only longing, if after all that turmoil I still had any longing, was to flee to people who spoke English. The nearest place for that was Panama. +++Und obschon altgebacken, besaß ich dennoch das Visum der Republik auf meinem Paß.+++

How feverishly I tried to earn money! In a shopkeeper’s back room I taught English to a poor salesgirl. She could pay only twenty centavos, but I was desperate, determined to get away, and twenty centavos were enough for my daily food.

The only pupil who hadn’t behaved vilely toward me gave me an old Inca treasure—a devil, he called it—which his wife feared. I dined once in his house and looked across to Yanaguara, watched the poplar avenue where they had rolled stones the size of heads down at me to crush me, the river over which I had fled back after the corn adventure, and the Misti, wrapped in bluish haze and far from the earth, smiling down at me. The pettiness of a human life did not touch it…

After getting this Inca treasure I had even more bad luck than before, though I did not blame the idol for it. I know I sat motionless before it for a whole long Sunday and chewed coca to find out whether one truly felt neither hunger nor thirst. A deep indifference took hold of me; I wanted nothing but to sit, sit without moving. The leaves tasted bitter and weren’t to be chewed, but pressed with the tongue against the palate and slowly sucked out. I was without desire, but the next day I was so exhausted that it took great effort to drag myself far enough to buy my daily bread in the market hall.
From the coca that grows only in the Montaña, the so‑called tropical zone beyond the Andes, they make the famous cocaine. Gathering it takes great care, for the leaves must be gently plucked, dried a little but not too much, and loaded into airy double baskets that llamas carry across the immense mountain chain to near the railroad. The Indians chew coca the way we smoke tobacco. Around their belts they wear a long pouch full of greenish leaves, which they push into their mouths from time to time. If they do it regularly, they can carry heavy loads without distress, feel neither sleep nor hunger nor thirst, yet stay very thin. They tell fortunes from how the little leaves fall, they spit the green, chewed mass onto a huaca as their highest act of worship, and the half‑breeds and whites boil tea that also stimulates and is said to chase sleep away. I was probably too undernourished to live on coca alone.

The evening before my departure I wanted to send a parcel to someone. On the way I met a small boy—eight or ten years old—and offered him twenty centavos (a fortune in a child’s eyes) to go with me and deliver the things. He had a frightened look on his face and stood motionless on the threshold. I have never been any good at tying knots, and here too the string failed me, so I called to the boy to help me a little.

“Forgive me, but I don’t dare!” he said, eyes full of refusal.

“The foreigners won’t do you any harm,” I said bitterly, forgetting myself. “You Peruvians are the ones who make every step dangerous for the foreigner, and he alone is the one who has to fear you.”

“Ah, señorita,” he said, apparently inclined to believe my words, “don’t be angry, but I’m so scared. A few days ago a señorita also took me into her house and she…”

She—a woman!—had violated that child! In that moment I could have sunk to my knees and, out of shame for my sex, for humanity, for the whole sinful world, I could have—and wanted to—vomit my soul out.

A few hours later I stood before the Misti, across which slipped the day’s blazing tail of rays like the blood of the righteous. Behind me, distant in space and soul, the snarling dogs barked, the women screeched, the children wailed, the llama herds scattered homeward across the wide, desolate plain like devils before the wind. The mountain gorges yawned dark; the sand crackled, menacing, hostile; and behind the wind‑bent, tousled willows that stuck up from the ground like witches’ fingers, the moon rose slowly…

Then I did what I had never done: I lifted my hands like the prophets of Israel once did and cursed the whole land with a touching impartiality—its soil, its plants, its stones, its animals, its people, and everything that belonged to them. I spared only the Misti, from which something like superior, earth‑distant pity had always seemed to reach me, and the donkeys of Arequipa (but only the four‑legged ones!), for they had it as bad there as I did.

On the way home, in front of the Goyaneche, I met a charcoal burner’s child, struggling to lug a basket home. The girl spoke to me and said—despite her scant fourteen years: “For us women life is very hard here.”

“Ah, child,” I answered, close to tears, “life is hard for us women everywhere…”

All night long in front of my window, which had a giant cage to keep out predators, the hungry curs howled and ate one another. Wild they were, yet nowhere near as wild as the people.

Of the great culture of the children of the sun nothing remained but a few old ruins. The half‑breeds had neither the virtues of their Indian nor their European forefathers. I understood why the North Americans call this country, so wonderful and so rich, the smear of dirt on the map of South America.

Over a shell…

Around Mollendo the heavy dew of the winter season fell, and a sparse green—not grass, not really plant—partly covered the brown rock. The tropical sun shone through a dense web of haze, yet still strong enough to drive sweat from every pore. The expected Imperial had not yet arrived. In the hotel the men’s eyes followed me like dagger thrusts, and to escape them I stepped outside.

I wanted to look for shells on the beach. A woman I asked showed me the way and swore up and down that it was safe to take it. It led over the backs of the cliffs down into a hollow. When I suddenly leaned forward to look down, I saw, a good hundred meters below me, four men sitting on a log. At once I jerked back, as startled as if I had seen four pumas down there, and struck out on the road to Mollendo. The last house was less than a ten‑minute walk away, but the brown sand made walking somewhat hard. In any case I had not gone twenty steps when I found myself face to face with a man in railroad uniform who motioned mysteriously to me to keep calm and whispered:

“Turn back, for four men are looking for you.”

I believed that as gladly as the Gospel. I had seen the pumas below me, and they had looked up at me for a second.

“We must take the lower path along the cliffs,” the man said, and since I could go neither forward nor safely back, I had little choice but to do what seemed best at the moment—trust myself to the guidance of the official. He wore the railroad uniform and that inspired some confidence. I began asking him about his mother and siblings and hinted how glad I was to discover in him someone with better views.

We reached the hollow not far from the sea and I picked up a shell for show while the man looked for a hiding place behind the rocks.

“If only I had a weapon, I’d show those up there,” he muttered.

We did not stay long, for the hyenas appeared not far from us, and in my fear I hurried on. Behind a sand dune we found cover. Then the man said to me:

“It won’t pay me to make enemies of those four men for a stranger’s sake, but if you…”

“Why me? There are a thousand women here…”

“Not white women; no, I’m not after money,” when I offered him my hard‑earned cash, “but a white woman—for that I’ll risk anything! What of it? No one on earth will know!”

There in the hot sand of Mollendo I knelt in the dust before a fellow human being and begged him to help me out of this peril. He did not attack me, but he would not help. He only remarked that he had to be on duty at three o’clock and wanted to leave me to my fate. I searched in vain for a way out. It was two hours’ walk through hot sand to Mejia; behind me, scattered over the plain, were the men; toward the mountains you ran into the feral woodcutters; and back along the cliff path he would escort me only if…

A dull fury seized me, and I told the man he might as well go. I hauled myself up from the ground, grabbed my bag, and steered straight toward the cliffs—the dreadful cliffs of Mollendo. Here the sea was as wild as the people of that accursed land. In a few seconds I would be dead.

“Where are you going?” the official called after me uncertainly.

“That’s none of your business!”

I had almost reached the cliffs when he caught up to me.

“Then I’ll jump in!” I said, and stepped forward.

He must have thought then: in this case money, woman, and possibly a bit of peace of mind would all be uselessly lost; so he asked me to wait a few minutes and hand over all my cash. With it he would buy off the four men and bring me safely along the track back to Mollendo.

I gave him everything; for what use was money down in the yellow foam of the surf? He bought the men off, and ten minutes later I stood in the main square of the wretched fishing village and owned, besides a third‑class ticket (the only one my savings had reached to) and ten American dollars in a little pouch around my neck, nothing but my suitcase and my Erika.

I exchanged five dollars at a loss (after having bought them in Arequipa at a loss as well) that very evening, to pay early the next day my bill and the sharks who lugged my meager baggage to the Imperial; five dollars remained to me, in a foreign land among utterly foreign people, to build a new life…

My last memory is like my first: I had locked myself in tight for the night and lay on the bed, tortured by heat and worry. Would they let me into Panama without showing money? What would I begin there? Why had no one warned me? The clock struck hour after hour in the next room of the inn, and still I tossed on the burning‑hot bed, when, despite my key inside, the door opened easily and a brown head appeared in the gap.

“What do you want?!” I barked at him, ready to fly at his throat.

The head vanished except for a lock of hair.

“I just wanted to ask,” the waiter stammered uncertainly, “whether you need another blanket, because it has turned cooler.”

That, with thirty degrees in the shade! My answer left no doubt about my feelings. Then I shoved a chair against the door and set the water jug on the chair. If anyone came in, the jug had to fall and wake me.

God help the one who would come!

But only the day came, with its thousand worries.

At anchor off Mollendo.

“Land of criminals, farewell! Not for the greatest of the Inca treasure would I visit you again! Land where the senses rule and every better feeling is silent.”

I wrote this then—and with full right—in my diary, as I sat on my trunk on board the Imperial and looked over my fellow travelers. Mostly they were Indians with their giant bundles, with chickens and a tame parrot, with children without end, with bedding rolls that unfolded into bright quilted spreads. I had no bedding, found no seat except on my trunk itself in a vacant corner near the certain place that only men used. Women and girls, without shame, used certain necessary vessels and emptied them over the railing. A few children caught lice off each other—no doubt a memory of those far Inca days when each child had to turn in twelve lice daily to the village elder to get used early to useful work.

After a while they brought the midday meal—a dubious bucket full of even more dubious soup—and ladled it into the bowls that everyone held at the ready. I had no dish—nothing but the little cup of my immersion heater, for I did not know that on this line deck passengers had to bring bedding and dishes. So I could only fill a weak little cupful, with even a bone in it, which made the overseer ask me at once whether I wanted to pay extra for dishes. I might also have gotten better fare for comparatively little money, but all hope crashed on my utter pennilessness. The five dollars had to be kept for Panama.

So I refused all help.

The hours passed all too slowly. I crouched in my drafty corner and hugged my Erika. I had taken the plaid off her and wrapped myself in it, for the heavy dew drenched me and made me shiver. Slowly the anchor came up, the brown, inhospitable roadstead of Mollendo slid back, and through my unceasing tears I saw nothing but the brown rock and the gleaming nitrate fields.

Toward evening one of the officers came, after I had always turned down any offer of better quarters from the lesser seamen, and little by little they drew out of me the tale of my Peruvian adventures. Chile and Peru are old, bitter enemies, and no sooner had they heard how badly things had gone for me in the land of wonderful Inca culture than they did everything to make me forget the horrors of the high Andes. Robbed as I was, they asked no money of me, but brought me on fine plates the fare of first class (there were only deck and salon on the Imperial), and the officer on duty promised to have a bed set up as soon as “those Peruvian animals” had been put ashore in Callas. The first night I lay on a borrowed mattress, face down, the bag pressed to my belly and my outstretched hand on my Erika…

Beyond Payta.

My bed stood in the middle of the deck, and at the opposite end a Jew from Chile had his. He paid little attention to me, for he played poker with the now free crew all day and slept, without snoring, the whole long night, so he was protection without nuisance to me. Luis Ramirez brought me the First’s fare, and the more bitterly I wept, the more sugar he put in the morning and afternoon tea, until nothing was left but sugary sludge. One day I looked with such despair at the wreckage of my dreams and of the life I had hoped for that I found myself deciding to jump over the rail into the mass of waves roaring around the propeller, when I felt his arm on mine and his calm voice said to me:

“I’d feel sorry for the poor soul who fell in here, for it’s swarming with sharks that follow us all the time.”

To end in the waves seemed pleasant enough to me, but to be nibbled at slowly from many sides—that I still shuddered at. I sat on the bed and stared at the floating coast of Peru beyond Payta, that wretched pesthole that had to be burned down four times and that always rises again, with all its disease germs, to new life. It lies there, desolate in desolate, abandoned country, and only when the moon falls on all that rock and the thatched roofs of the rickety huts does a certain charm come out that makes the Peruvian say: “In moonlight even Payta is beautiful.”

Sometimes the young assistant cook came, spoke of love and of his hopes for life, and recited his poems. To me it was as if a child were speaking to his great‑grandmother brought back to life, so far back seemed all that I had once dreamed and the world as I had seen it before Peru. The worst part of the whole voyage had been the short hours before Callas. Now the sky was overcast, a wet, thick fog lay heavy with sorrow on the pale waters, and not fifty meters from us lay the Bologna. Only a single passage lay between my experiences and that life on that ship, and there he rocked so close beside me and nothing was the same—not even the weather!

When we reached the green coast of Ecuador, the order went out for compulsory vaccination. I too was pushed behind the red curtain and was vaccinated, whereupon the ship’s doctor murmured to me (for the sake of the waiting victims):

“Always at your service!”

And then he kissed me.

As a deck passenger one is always pretty powerless, in my situation all the more. So I asked only the crew about his nationality and learned that—to avoid any trouble with the Peruvian port authority—they always chose a Peruvian as ship’s doctor. I had thought as much. Two‑legged creatures with human‑like faces…

In the Gulf of Panama.

At five in the morning Luis Ramirez made it possible for me to take a bath. Around six the ship grew nervous; for the boat with the yellow flag showed up. The American doctor came aboard, and shortly after him the police inspector, with his train.

I was too desperate even to want to cry. That would not have been desirable anyway, for the eye examination’s sake. My life hung on this examination; for if they refused me entry into Panama for reasons of money, health, or passport, I was firmly resolved—sharks or no sharks—to jump into the gulf before the eyes of the authorities. Anything on earth rather than a return to Peru…

Five South Americans, the Jew, a negro, and yours truly were to land as deck passengers. The others spoke no English. They had to show their money and were treated as inferior stuff. Then I told the official that, because of a study trip around the world, I had to save and was on my way to Japan. My English was as it should be, so I was a person.

“Do you have sufficient means?”

I said yes. Would he like to see them?

But he thought, no doubt, that whoever wanted to go to Japan must also have money, and to my relief he turned away. My visa, which I had so much regretted paying so dearly for at the time—old though it was—was a regular visa, and my eyes, kept tearless for twenty‑four hours, looked healthy when the doctor lifted my lid, tugging at the lashes. Down on the wharf another passport officer stood and checked the passports once more. At the moment he was counting the heads of the beloveds of a rich North American who was traveling with no fewer than six women, each like a Mont Blanc. No wonder the official counted the women like Rübezahl once counted his turnips, and the number never seemed satisfactory. I swam close to the Mont Blanc group, slid along in their current toward the official, and slipped past him in the wake of the great ones; reached the exit, found myself outside.

I stood on the soil of the United States among English‑speaking people and was allowed to begin again.

With five dollars in my pocket.

Still, not even the thought, much less the wish, came to me to give up the journey and go home beaten. Just then I thought, like my father once did, when he swam through the Elbe with drawn saber toward the enemy: Win or die!

I’ve never been one for giving in…

With the Three Graces.

It was a terrible search for a room, for in the Canal Zone only canal employees were allowed to live in the dream‑beautiful, flower‑covered little houses, and down in the city you found many empty yet scarcely furnished little rooms. When you found them, they cost far too much for my poor purse. Only in Avenida B did I discover a back hovel for which I had to pay by the day, fifty cents for the night or three dollars a week. I paid at once for a week in advance, so I could move a little, had my luggage brought, and took leave of Luis Ramirez and the crew of the Imperial, whose kindness to me only God can ever repay.
My three housewives—yellow as withered leaves, shaken by life like by the autumn wind—lived on the second floor of a gloomy wooden building, together with a father whose main occupation seemed to be sitting in a certain place (a room whose floor-cracks, it must be said, gave a view into another place of the same kind, through which one could make many interesting observations), a brother who earned nothing and always walked around with his mouth open, and a very young brother whose job seemed to be to support the family. He was a Singer sewing machine rep. For all their poverty, these yellow graces kept a little cook, two shades darker than they were, to whom they paid sixteen pesos (half a dollar) a month and who slept at night on old rags on the kitchen floor. If I went to fetch water after ten, I would see her lying on the tatters, a small mound over which the big tropical cockroaches marched. Next to her lay the two other housemates—two little negroes, the girl nine, the boy twelve years old—who were treated like animals, whipped with the dog whip, and driven to do all the work. When they were given the kitchen leftovers, both ate out of one bowl, sitting on the threshold of my room, using their little paws as cutlery. Such negro children are taken up, quite tiny, out of some trash bin into which a black mother has thrown them alive, and until they are old enough to run away on their own, they must do all the heavy work in the homes of such foster parents. Later the boys often become thieves, the girls streetwalkers.

Early in the morning they made molasses sausages. They bought the thick sugar syrup cheap and kneaded it at home on the veranda. Sometimes, when the dark-brown dough was too sticky, they would spit into their hands to pull it more easily, and after I’d seen that, I didn’t want any of the twisted, golden-yellow sausages anymore—the ones piled up on a board and carried through the streets by boys to sell.

The three weeks that followed have always stayed with me like a nightmare—not the deep horror and constant dangers of Peru, but as murky as wading through a swamp full of poisonous plants and the occasional crocodile. First there was the unbearable heat. Did it torment me twice and thrice over because, despite all my privations, my blood was still not thin enough? Or did the large amount of moisture, which several times a day gathered into clouds, crashed down in terrifying torrents, and rose again from the glowing ground in new vapor, have such a stupefying effect—I still cannot say. I only know that I often had to throw myself on the bed and lie there in utter limpness, and that I tried to rub my face dry until the skin was inflamed. The nights were cooler, though always warm enough to keep me sweaty with no cover, and on top of that came the skin disease that had begun on the “Imperial” and that the ship’s doctor had luckily not discovered. The half-French man I had met in Arequipa had—out of jealousy over a livelihood, I suspect, since he too was forced to teach—poured some poison into the chicha we enjoyed on our trip to Yanaguara. No doctor was able to cure this strange illness, and only three years later, in Japan, did the last little spots disappear. Outwardly it showed itself only through wandering dots, inwardly through an itch that drove me absolutely out of my wits. I scratched like a jungle monkey wherever I went and stood—now my legs, now my arms or chest—and it was worst in the evening, so that for the first weeks from midnight to three in the morning I had to bathe in borax water and only from exhaustion did I finally sink into a restless doze.

That, however, was only the bass to the true soprano of my suffering. Sleeping on the drafty deck bunk had brought me all sorts of aches, sudden toothache tormented me, my shattered nerves wouldn’t calm down, and on top of that I was condemned to the utmost privation just to keep my modest room. Any failure on my part—physical or mental—would have swept me into the gutter, so I let nothing show and pretended I lacked nothing. Once a day I bought bread for 10 cents and trembled before the old woman who sat in the bakery and gave worse weight than the young man, who—because I was a woman—would toss me a quarter-loaf as a little extra. No sooner had I eaten the bread than I dreamed of more bread, and to drink I had nothing but bad, tropically hot water. Once, when it rained at night, I caught the rainwater running off the roof in my jug, and because it was much cooler, I found it pure nectar. Otherwise I was never a friend of water—except for washing…

What Tantalus tortures I had to suffer at every step! Every pharmacy sold iced coffee and ice cream, tempting smells poured out of every eatery, and, to top it all, open stalls sold “hot dogs”—that is, Vienna sausages. Whenever I walked through the Canal Zone, which was like a park throughout and where all kinds of fruit trees had been planted, I would secretly pick up the tiny jobos (strongly fragrant, small fruits like plums, but with a big pit) and suck on them just to have the feeling of eating. Once I picked up a bit of ice the iceman had dropped. The vapor from his goods was so strong he pushed his cart along wrapped in a cloud.

But all these sufferings paled before the worry over money, which grew more crushing by the day. In none of the shops, offices, or markets was there anything to be earned, and after each refusal came the question whether one wouldn’t perhaps be inclined to…

In the end I went to the American Red Cross, received a small loan, and declared myself willing to wash chamber pots in the Zone hospitals if only I could get hired, but even that possibility failed. A man wanted to hire me as a barmaid in his bar, but when he saw me he said I wasn’t suited—too delicate and too refined, as he put it.

The distances I covered each day looking for work would almost have brought me back to Europe on foot, and always I walked on an empty stomach and without joy; always with the temptation to take the easy path that was so close at hand, and always anchored in the thought that with me—the outer me—everything that was ideal and art in me would unavoidably suffocate too. That gave me the patience I needed to keep fighting.

Toward the end of the third week I decided to pawn the little jewelry I owned and asked the owner of the employment office about the best “uncle” in Panama. I had gone almost daily to the old gentleman, who was German and most kind to me, and he suggested we set up a translation office together. I painted the sign in ten languages on a board, which we set outside the door, and though it brought in only a few customers, countless sailors of all nations came in and chatted a bit. In any case, I didn’t lack for language practice. Little by little I took over the office duties—few as they were—entering the openings and the job-seekers, chiefly negro women; listing the houses for sale and their furnishings, which were also entered in a book; answering the telephone; and minding the slow little business when the owner went to the market to buy the daily greens for his wife. For that he offered me board and lodging in his house, and because I had become almost penniless, I was forced to accept against my will.

In the Banana Corner.

If I preface this with so much of my personal experience, it’s with the intention of warning my fellow women not to throw themselves carelessly into similar danger. Traveling in the tropics is something quite different from traveling in Europe, and in the tropics it has lately become far harder for a woman than for a man, since to the general unavoidable ills is added the indescribable immorality of the equatorial region, which shrinks from no crime, and the suspicion that lurks in everyone there that a lone woman is either a spy or a nasty adventuress. First-class travelers, on the other hand, travel like sacks of flour with address labels—they roll through the country and learn nothing, because they move within a magic circle of their own kind and the people drift past them like a movie. The main requirement for such a study journey is not courage, but endurance and the strength to put up with everything. With that you more than pay for everything, even the best the tropics have to offer.

The German’s house lay at the end of Caledonia Street, beyond the negro quarter where Europeans do not usually live. It disappeared behind the tall, light-green banana leaves and was a brown stilt house with three rooms—a storage room that was kept shut, a living room where old furniture stood about at random and dusty books adorned the wall-shelves, chairs, and tables, and the old couple’s bedroom, next to which the kitchen lay. I was given a camp bed in the living room that creaked at every movement, and I must never turn over without hearing a scolding voice; the door to the bedroom stayed open, while all the windows—in that heat!—were closed, and I couldn’t breathe. The bathroom was never to be made wet, so I washed myself in a tub outside on the open veranda when everyone was asleep, and whenever I wanted to visit a certain place, I had to trudge past the marriage beds.

We got up at five in the morning, and if I wanted to dress without being seen, I had to get up then too. It was still pitch dark, and at times the moonlight lay like hoarfrost on the splendid banana leaves. The little leaves of the rubber tree, which had folded in the evening like children’s hands in prayer, opened gently; the tendrils of the fever vine grew taut, and bright yellow birds—a bit larger than our canaries—settled on the veranda railing and stared at us still drowsy. Some zaragüeya—a South American weasel that raids henhouses and carries its young on its back, each baby’s tail wound around the mother’s lowered tail—stole through the tall, prickly grass, laced with nettles and thorn scrub, and in the mango leaves the long tail-feathers rustled, the tropic bird and other feathered guests.

Suddenly the sky flushed a dark red like the reflection of a far-off lava stream, then the whole scene silvered quickly, became liquid gold for a few seconds, and—clear and pure—the sun stood in the sky. From darkness to light the change did not take five minutes.

After coffee I sat on the veranda and painted while the German poked about in the garden and his wife, with embittered looks, made the beds in their room. She never called me by name: whenever she wanted something from me, she would only say, “Now then, little thing, don’t sit there—that’s my husband’s place!” or, “Time to go to the office, little thing!”

He left the house as early as seven-thirty, and I tried to be downstairs a little before nine. Since we didn’t close until six and I never had any free time during the day, that seemed quite enough to me. Never have I seen people who, partly deliberately and surely partly unconsciously, tried so hard to smother everything beautiful in me as these two—who in their way were certainly eager to be kind to me. The East often has a demoralizing effect on us whites, and he had spent twenty years in China, where polygamy thrives, fifteen years in Panama, which is very beautiful, very unhealthy, and very sinful, and in the process my host’s views had unquestionably shifted, for he seized every chance to tell me improper stories, to point out everything bad around us, and to slowly unscrew me from anything that could be an inner support. If I stood in front of my washtub at night and stared at the wondrous flicker of the stars, he called me to bed; if I wanted to read some good book, he did all he could to stop me, and had I not made it a condition that I be allowed to study in the library at night, I too would have had to go to bed at eight, like the couple themselves. That short spell saved me; what unpleasantness had piled up slid off me in my brief free time. I fled to the Canal Zone, lost myself in the enchanting tropical splendor, and became—human.

The grounds were glorious. The croton shrubs shone in all colors by day—mostly yellow, light green, red, and black—the delicate bamboo canes spread their leaves and trembled in the wind; the white blossoms of the temple flowers snowed across the ground, and the dagger-like, bright red bracts of the poinsettia burst from the three-tiered green all around. The tropical stars shimmered like pearls in the moonlight, and a broad stream of silver flowed down the bananas. Palms rustled, banyan trees with many roots blocked the way, calabashes the size of heads dangled from jutting branches, and the so-called love-vine made a sea of rose-pink blossoms on the green-and-white canal houses. Sugarcane and papaya trees, guanábanas with their spiny fruit, flame trees with long brown pods, and other plant marvels of the tropics bordered the broad, nicely tarred, smooth paths, and whoever you met was neatly dressed and European…

The scene down in Panama itself was more stifling. The tiny rooms stood open, and inside women in nightgown-like garments lay on long rocking chairs, fanning themselves lazily and flicking straw slippers with their left toe; little parrots climbed up chairs and chirped weakly. Cookstoves stood in the front halls, and on them fat, cheerful negro women fried fish in revolting-smelling fat; pale-brown women darted into the street and found glowing eyes that desired and took; naked children tumbled over; on every corner sat women’s mummies that life had washed ashore, selling lottery tickets; little boys peddled millet and coconut cakes, monkeys were on show in a Hindu shop, tobacco from Sumatra covered the floor of another room, and Panama hats stood on stands right on the sidewalk. In between, the colorful life of the Canal Zone streamed past—Japanese women tripped by in their kimonos, Chinese women in tight black trousers, Panamanian women in their billowy dress, negro women in their comical starched laundry (even the shirt is starched!), Indian women in their breast patches and wide skirts, and mixed-bloods in European dress, their faces powdered and painted like masks. Men of all countries, peoples, and colors fluttered around whatever here was womanly.

On the driver’s seat of the two-wheeled carts and the small four-wheeled buggies sat a coachman under a giant umbrella almost bigger than the vehicle, and on Plaza Santa Anna were the shoeshine boys, a black guild who by day wandered from street to street with their only movable property, the shoebrush box, and tackled human foot coverings, and by night slept on the sidewalk in front of some Chinese chop-suey restaurant. Now and then the root beer (sarsaparilla) seller gave them a drink or a fruit seller a rotting banana, and as for clothing they were modestly wrapped in the remains of some cast-off man’s trousers. Up to the twelfth year, moreover, such a covering was not needed at all. What on earth was the point of being born into a black skin already.

All of Caledonia Street belonged to the negroes, as did the smaller market hall, where, alongside yam (a tuber), thin, long Chinese bean pods, peitsai (Chinese lettuce), rosella (flowers that, cooked as a vegetable and as a fruit, can be eaten), purple hedge apples, breadfruit, and other tropical things were for sale, and where you could see the giant lizards, or iguanas, tied up—the delicacy of the blacks, said to have white meat—while salted eggs, strung together into yellow rosaries, were sold as a special dish. I too bought a few and ate two boiled. They tasted like hard-boiled yolks and smelled… like Easter eggs come All Souls’ Day. I spent half a dollar on medicines to hatch the iguana out of me again, for it ran up and down in my body until I was green and yellow.

I was thrilled by all the new things despite all my troubles and painted away briskly early in the morning. That infuriated the old woman, and when I came home in the evening, painting supplies—colors, brushes, colored pencils—were all gone. The black laundress’s son had lifted just those out of my drawer in the junk room. I wasn’t allowed to accuse the lady, but I lamented so much over my things that the old man gave me a modest paint box. The chalks I had lost, though, were irreplaceable.

What all I tried! I earned the most with little Christmas cards that I made in English fashion as tiny books with ribbons, for which I received 23 cents apiece—painting and materials included. Painting was what the old man allowed me most readily during the long office hours, and so I slowly put together enough cards to save a little and to afford a sheet of drawing paper, a stamp, or something similar now and then. At that rate I could have sat in Panama for a hundred years! In my desperation I tried to get work from the Catholic welfare society and also wrote a few pieces, but was never paid. The only benefit I got was meeting President Harding, who—just elected—visited the Canal Zone and, as I happened to be at the home, also shook my hand. The Germans hoped endlessly much from him then. Hopes, as is well known, melt away like fog…

Meanwhile my situation in the Banana Corner—never rosy—became completely untenable. When I left the house in the morning, I never knew whether I would return there or kill myself before nightfall. All through the long hours of the day the old man accused me of ingratitude because I had flatly refused his proposal to become his concubine in the office. I was extraordinarily grateful for all the good I had received; but even gratitude has limits, and his Chinese outlook on life didn’t work on me.

“Chinese women are happy even if the man has several wives. He provides for them completely and takes all thoughts about daily life off their hands,” he remarked.

“I have thoughts of my own, and I’m not a Chinese woman!” I answered dryly. That’s how the friction began. One day, against all habit, he locked the door and grabbed me by the arm.

“In my life I have always got what I wanted!” He had said that often before too.
“Every shoe finds its last, and today you’re going to be the last for this shoe and show it that you don’t always get what you want!” A handy rule of wisdom that ought to be beaten in as hard as possible—and with that I simply grabbed hold of his greatest treasure: his long gray beard.

We had about three minutes of very lively time. I’d had practice in such things from Peru. In the end I flew with a crash into one corner and my sparring partner into the other, to the detriment of our ribs and the few rickety office pieces alike.

From then on he wouldn’t let me leave the house, but he treated me like an animal, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell the naked truth to his hard-of-hearing, very jealous wife, who shuffled around weighed down with worry. So I painted feverishly and waited.

Maybe I was too worn down to force a break by sheer will. The post of public interpreter had been advertised; I applied, registered for the exam, and took it, even though it was disproportionately harder for me than for the other candidates, who translated from their mother tongue, while I had to translate two foreign languages into a third, and the standard American legalisms were still pretty unfamiliar to me. Even so, I received high marks.

Praise alone didn’t help, though; the weeks passed, Christmas was nearing, and I heard nothing more. Evening classes for mixed-bloods had fallen through, pay at a newsstand was too little to let me live even the simplest life; for I had to—no matter how much I might go hungry—remain a European, mustn’t live in any negro hole or go after negro side jobs.

A nice American woman, the wife of a railroad employee, who therefore lived in the Zone itself—the most desirable thing there was for me—would sometimes invite me to come to her, but the ban on going out or keeping any sort of company made complying unthinkable. Even so, she managed to whisper to me once in passing:

+++»Wenn Sie sich gezwungen sehen sollten, hier wegzugehen, so steht Ihnen unser Hans offen.«+++

Two days later I remembered it.

It was Christmas. The fiercest tropical sun beat down on Panama and ripened the cotton along the road to Las Sabanas. The trees looked like cherries in bloom or like snow in a green landscape. I was already happy at the thought of walking to Old Panama on Christmas Day. Every second Sunday I had to stay home and wash my laundry, and since I wasn’t used to the work, and was so weakened by the tropics, worries, and hardships, it took such a toll that for a few days I couldn’t write well and couldn’t paint at all. I rebelled more and more against this chore, which not only drained my strength but also stole the one precious day when I could go see something essential for my study trip—for the journalist and the painter in me. Instead of helping me with that, everyone I met preached to me with deep conviction that only the intoxication of the senses could be called true life’s value. The more they stressed it, the more convinced I became of the opposite, and the more eagerly I stared at the sunset from some lonely spot, or lost myself in the sight of tropical plants with their riotous blossoms, the long stalks at whose tips hummingbirds rocked and hummed, or let the moonlight rain down on me while the banana leaves whispered and some night bird croaked. There was art, music, knowledge, beauty—there were many values besides sexual sensuality. From the strong countercurrent I set against this for a year and a half, a disgust remained that flung me to the opposite extreme. That’s why my warning is so emphatic.

Old Panama came to nothing. I was to sit at home and keep the wife company at Christmas dinner, which the master of the house himself did not attend. It was at two o’clock and a gloomy affair of noodles and bad temper. After the meal she sent “the little thing” away, and, all bans notwithstanding, I walked to the ruins.

The ground in front of the ruined monastery, the old church, the wretched inn is time-hallowed ground. Here Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, in 1513, waded into the sea with Spain’s flag unfurled and took possession of the Pacific Ocean for Ferdinand and Isabella—innocent as a child that takes possession of a queen’s jewel box. From the heights of Darién he had seen both oceans.

In Old Panama the Spanish monks, the few converted Indians, and the first adventurers and traders trembled before the famous seafarer Francis Drake, who plundered and burned the place three times. This far the Incas, children of the sun, once came with their loads of gold on llama backs; from here the water stretched unbroken to New Guinea.

The sea is so still here that you feel the dead centuries lie on it like a shroud, and the overgrown ruins look so dead and drowsy—the one-arched bridge, the jungle trees with their white bark and monotonously green leaves. Leaf-cutter ants march in two lines—one coming, one going—along the path, each little black creature holding up a triangularly nibbled leaf like a green parasol. In a few hours they can strip a tree bare. Deeper in the forest the capuchin monkeys leap—yellow with a black cap on their heads—the ai, or sloth, hangs head downward; if you keep still you can see an armadillo, and if you reach a wider river, you can even be surprised by an alligator. The toucan with its heavy bill perches on a jutting branch, and there’s no shortage of snakes. Most beautiful are the green and the multicolored parrots chattering in the palm crowns, and the red cardinal, which seems to drop like a blossom without a stem. And the multitude of insects!

I reveled in the wealth of new things, without losing track of the time; still, try as I might to keep up the quickest pace, it took me a full two hours on foot. In the banana nook there was thunder-muggy weather, and the next morning—right in front of the old woman—the storm broke. If I wouldn’t obey—in everything—then I could leave on the spot…

My total savings, carefully knotted into the corners of a handkerchief, came to eleven dollars—my earnings from months, not weeks! And with these meager means I was to start over in such a hopeless place? Even so, I didn’t hesitate a moment. Instead of dropping to my knees and promising unconditional obedience, I packed my few belongings. The old man’s bitterness knew no bounds.

“You’re leaving? You’re leaving?” he muttered, and something like pain sounded through. Then, seized with fury, he told me to show what I had packed. Who knew me, after all?

Wordlessly I packed my small suitcase and turned it upside down so everything flew in all directions. Ashamed, he turned away and went to the office. I thanked his wife, looked for a room in Panama, and fetched my luggage, which ate up one of those precious dollars.

Behind me the garden gate of the banana nook closed—and with it that chapter of my life in which I had been a slave.

Between Trumpet and Whistle.

Now I lived in a hotel on Avenida B and paid three dollars a week for the dark room. The walls, the floor, the people were brown, and I longed myself sick for the green of the bananas. Next door lived a trumpeter who kept blowing all the time—either his trumpet or, when asleep, his nose. In the tropics there are no full walls—a latticework starts about half a meter or at most a meter below the ceiling to let fresh air blow through all the rooms. Through this lattice you can peek into the neighbor’s place or throw something at him; in any case there’s nothing the ears don’t catch…

Down below, in the inn’s garden, the houseboys whistled or, if they were negroes, sang hymns without a break. No people live so animal-casual as these blacks transplanted to America, and none sing church songs with such persistence. They recite the Lord’s Prayer backward as a charm, they light the candle of the “Holy Anthony of Fire” (the Devil) at the wrong end to summon someone, and for greater effect they stick three black-headed pins into such a candle in the form of a cross. Whoever wants to kill someone has a holy mass sung for the still living person, and if death is to come especially quickly, they put the name of the one to die, written backwards, under a dead person’s pillow in the coffin. There’s no commandment that isn’t broken daily, but both the negroes and their pastors are convinced they’re practicing the strictest faithfulness to belief.

Next to me lived a Russian woman whose fighting words with her husband and whose roast smells always wafted in to disturb me. She carried her child’s ashes around in a little vase in her suitcase, and I always had the feeling she’d make a mistake someday and use them as tooth powder. Though I don’t know if she ever brushed her teeth!

With great difficulty I found two pupils—Americans for Spanish—and one of them advised me to go to a certain photographer and offer him my services. She warned me, though, that he was “a man like all men,” but on that point she was wrong. He took my work after some hesitation—that is, he asked me to come every evening from seven to ten to develop and rinse the plates, and paid me fifteen dollars a month. I told him why I had left the old German and that I wanted no part of that kind of life, and although I had to work with him standing on a crate in the darkroom every night, he never said a word that would have made my staying impossible. He almost always gave me something to eat and was touchingly kind to me. Of all the men in fair and sinful Panama he was the only one who, after our first talk, said to me:

“Don’t pay attention to what people tell you here. What you consider right and have chosen as your own path is—by your lights and for your growth—absolutely right. People can’t grow the way others bend them; every being carries within it the seed of its own unfolding, and no one should work against that.”

He was a Jew, but he stood out most favorably even among most Christians…

So I painted in my little den, wrote and taught, learned to develop, and kept looking for ways to earn.

And New Year came and went.

In the Canal Zone.

I had visited the Scot and his wife, and gradually I spent more and more hours with them in the Zone. Sometimes I even slept out there, because Mr. M. had night duty and Mrs. M. was nervous alone, since there had been many burglaries.

Today it’s different; President Harding, to whom the Zone had been described as an El Dorado, and who had only sweltered there two days, soon did away with the earlier perks for the staff. Back then every canal employee had free housing; the better and older ones even had their own little house, though never a fixed one. The furnishings belonged to the Canal administration, so no employee needed to bring more than bedding and dishes. When the notice came, the wagon showed up twenty-four hours later and you moved. I myself lived, over the next months, in Ancon, Balboa, La Boca, the quarantine area, and lately Ancon again—places scattered over more than ten miles around.

On top of that, canal employees got free firewood delivered; light and water were free; and the much-needed ice cost only two dollars a month for twenty pounds a day. In the commissaries you bought against your canal card and name far cheaper than in Panama, and anyone who fell ill was treated free at the hospital. On the other hand, no one was allowed to be treated at home, and all women had to give birth in the hospital.

Cleanliness inspection was very strict. Nowhere could dirt be visible, standing water be kept, or fruit peels be thrown away. Not only in the Canal Zone but in Panama itself, every house had a large, lidded garbage can that was emptied daily. All puddles were dosed with kerosene, and where the brush was too dense and gave mosquitoes shelter, it was cut back at once. The streets looked washed.

The little houses themselves were the best tropical buildings I saw on the whole trip. The inner framework was wood, but the outer walls were fine wire mesh. A broad, very lovely veranda, always wreathed with flowers, formed the main part of the house and was the common living space. The bedrooms had inside shutters that could be closed, and the kitchen was half wood. The wind could blow through day and night without bringing insects in, and the only nuisance was the fine veil before your eyes, which made everything seem seen through a haze. On the roof of the little portico there would often be an iguana sunning itself under rose-red vine or glowing bougainvillea. The creature, with its spiny back, big head, and long tail, looked like a miniature dragon, but it was so harmless that it was always on guard against the slightest attacker.

In this setting I found myself again for the first time. The quiet, the splendid tropical world all around me, the love of the couple, and on top of that the charming Nelly, the pearl of Ancon—the white miniature pinscher, who filled the place of a daughter in the house and seemed so much to have become human in her twelve years on earth that any dealings with four-footed creatures were out of the question…

Once I was washing my clothes in the sink on the back veranda. For a while Mrs. M. watched me devoutly, though without enthusiasm; then she took the dress out of my hand and said:

“Go out on the veranda, child, where my husband is sitting. Talk with him and paint; that you do wonderfully. But the dress… heaven forbid! I’d rather wash that myself!”

And so it came about that I never had anything more to do with my laundry and preferred to paint flower pictures, which went off to Scotland to the dear couple’s relatives. As a housewife I’ve never shone…

“It’s a long road that has no turning.”

Sleep-dazed, I tottered into the kitchen. Mrs. M. was flipping pancakes, and the charming Nelly watched her as cleverly as only a dog can who has almost become human—and has, besides, a marked weakness for pancakes. Over her shoulder the pancake artist called to me:

“Do you know what they told my husband last night? Your appointment as interpreter for Panama is supposed to be in the paper.”

I was wide awake. Where? How? When?

The commotion ended with me dashing off to the neighbor and reappearing with the Republic’s leading paper. Our pancakes burned and charred despite Nelly’s warning whimper while we read that I had been appointed interpreter for the city and province of Panama. O bliss without end!

The day passed like a dream. I tore down to the post office and found the appointment; I ran to the courthouse and solemnly took my oath of office; I chose the library on the Plaza as my place of stay and was now, so to speak, even paid to sit there and work: I entered my name in the big book and—oh crown of joys!—they handed me the seals. The salary was set at 150 pesos, and for any private matter I could charge extra. There were six courts in which I could be called in Panama itself, and if need be I would have to travel as well.

In the evening I called through the door: “Who’s there?”

“Our dear little girl!”

“Nothing doing! The interpreter for the city and province of Panama!”

Even Nelly barked for joy…

In Circuit Court Four.

When I became interpreter for Panama, one case caused a particular stir. It concerned a certain negro named Samuels, who was accused of murder and had been in custody for three months awaiting trial. I already knew the case from my friends; the Samuelses were neighbors of Mr. and Mrs. M. out in Las Sabanas, where they had a little plot. As is the way with negroes, there were sometimes quarrels, and Mrs. M. told, laughing, that people in the area were convinced the black neighbor woman had buried a bone from Coco Solo (the cemetery) under the house to call down a bad illness in revenge for a chicken misdeed (Mrs. M.’s chickens had eaten corn), a belief confirmed, as it were, by the fact that Mrs. M. really had suffered from malaria and lain there limp as a rag. She, the good soul, said nothing about the bone, but only about the kindness of the negress, who had stood by her during her illness and managed her household. Besides, the Scotswoman always had only good to say about everyone and always described people in such golden light that I often asked myself why such wonders never came my way, until I discovered that all people were the reflection of her own goodness of heart. She called so selflessly into the forest of humanity that even the worst tree sent back a good echo. Since then I knew exactly that people were sometimes no angels toward me because I myself was many miles away from the angel state.

It follows that Mrs. M. described the negress and her lawful man as unsurpassable and took the case very much to heart. So great was everyone’s joy when, at the first big hearing, I sat as interpreter beside the accused. My own delight, however, stayed within very narrow bounds; for as important as I felt, the thought ran cold through me that the smallest mistake, the briefest inattention on my part might cost the accused his life, and so I sweated worse than ever in hot and sinful Panama.

There are no jury trials in the Republic. The twelve jurors are unknown people. The judge always decides the case himself after careful consideration, advised by the defense counsel and the public prosecutor. They have a saying there: “Whoever greases, gets to go,” and they aren’t overly strict with justice in Panama. That shouldn’t surprise, because the whole set of life-concepts there is different, and circumstances shape not only people but authorities as well. Telling is the fact that the Republic has a foreign auditor installed by the United States to make sure payments are made and officials, teachers, and state employees are paid on the dot. Among people of the better class, one lives off another. Whoever has money gives and supports others; and when he is in debt, he too goes and lives off someone else’s money. As with tropical plants, one grows on the other and the lowest is smothered—so it goes among people too.
That is all I—who owe the Republic my thanks—want to say.

The hearing began at two in the afternoon and lasted until six. Next to me, squeezed in and with tears in his eyes, sat old Samuels, and beside him stood the brown pillar of justice with a club. On a high chair that left my feet hanging in the air sat the “Mr. Interpreter,” as I was addressed, and behind me Samuels’s wife and the nearest friends and listeners were snorting rather than breathing behind the cage-like structure that formed the “gallery.” The clerk, another scribe, and the defense were to the left, the public prosecutor to the right of the judge, and outside the window a calabash dangled from a branch and seemed to nod at me.

In short, it was about this:

Every evening Samuels brought coal into town, and since, because of the customs, he was no longer allowed to bring it in after half past eleven, he put the cart away and went home on foot. On the way he met a negress standing in front of her house and chatted with her for ten minutes. While he was idly wasting time here—Warning!—a man (according to the first statement a soldier) entered the shop of a Chinese and began shooting at the three Asiatics inside. The owner was badly wounded, the others hid behind the counter and yelled with all their might. The racket scared the robber off, and when the policeman quickly searched the neighborhood, he found no one except Samuels. He arrested him and dragged him at once to the Chinese, who were half blind and half deaf with fear, and who thought they recognized the robber in the negro. On this statement Samuels was thrown straight into jail, and since his wife was ashamed to see him doing public labor as a prisoner, she carried his food to him twice a day from Caledonia Road to the bay—a good half hour away—gave all the money she had and earned (negresses earn fastest and easiest by “love”) to the defense, who took his time and did not bring the case to trial until January, more than three months after the incident.

The public prosecutor tore Samuels to pieces and produced all sorts of witnesses to prove how worthless the poor man was, among them a Jamaican negro with a speech defect and total inability to get his thoughts out so they made head or tail. I had to interrupt him again and again to condense his senseless claims into something meaningful for the court. He said “h-h-horse” every third word and in half an hour reported what a healthy person would have finished in two minutes—that Samuels once, years ago, did not want to pay damages for a stray horse, and that the horse was later indeed found in a nearby field.

The Chinese was funny too, so confused that he gave the wrong answer to every question.

“How long have you been in Panama?”

“Twenty-one years.”

Surprise, because the man looked young.

“How old are you?”

“Six months.”

Laughter.

“When did you arrive?”

“Samuels good man, innocent.”

In the end the court simply had to chase him away. He stuttered and sweated pitiably, worse than the interpreter or the accused.

The defense cleaned the smeared man, put the pieces the defendant had been chopped into back together, and proved how unthinkable the crime was. At six o’clock Samuels was taken back, and I shot down the stairs. When my work was over, I vanished like greased lightning. It is always wise, as a woman, to sound the retreat quickly.

On Palo Seco.

From La Boca (the mouth) you could see across the canal that runs out here over to the man-made island of Naos and farther out onto the Gulf of Panama with the scattered Pearl Islands. You also saw the low, jutting island of Palo Seco, which you may visit only with a doctor’s permit and under strict medical supervision.

More than on the ruins of Old Panama, here the dead centuries lie like petrified clouds that forgot how to fall and so—as a pall—float close over the quiet island. Like skeletons, the white bark of jungle trees gleams out of the monotone green, and even the glorious deep blue hand-sized butterflies move slowly like pallbearers. We are on the leper island, the place of the living dead.

Up on the low rise are the little houses, a modest picture house, tiny gardens, a tropical park full of strange birds that seem to have veiled voices. The sick work in the garden or sit on benches set out, or lie—an evil-smelling rotting mass—on the beds inside in the airy room, but wherever they may be, death walks invisibly at their side, and they clutch at being, even as they cry for release. The eyes are swollen and red, the tongue thick and disobedient, the face full of whitish or violet spots, and the hands and feet are missing all or some parts. This patient has the scaly kind of leprosy, that one the moist kind, and in the looks of all burns the wish to hear once more from the outside world. No letter reaches them, and among their relatives life rolls on with a thousand new demands and leaves them—the outcasts—untouched, as if they were long since buried.

Once, when I went to Taboga, the first of the Pearl Islands, they brought an eight-year-old girl to the island of the banished. She wore a bright red warning sash and sat in a small boat that was made fast. Nothing more terrible than the final slipping away of that boat off Palo Seco. Coffining a human being alive…

Down below, in Panama, where all the races of the world rub shoulders, there always strides unseen, yet known to all, the many-formed death of horror: plague, cholera, yellow fever that carries you off in a few hours, leprosy, treacherous tropical malaria, and perhaps the burning hunger for life of these people explains itself by the presence of such fearful dangers; Palo Seco alone is a true “Memento mori.”

The black magician.

A travel book that can include only the most personal experiences allows no description of the branching superstitions; I learned enough about Voodoo sacrifices, the +++Indianerdämonenkurs+++, the spirit summonings in jungle caves, the love charms of negresses, and so on to fill a whole volume, so I would like to tell only one adventure in magic circles that had, for me, serious consequences.

As interpreter I came together with all sorts of people. Panama has a sizable population, but the Europeans stand out, and besides, my position threw me very much into the public eye. When I walked in the street, I often heard behind me “el Señor interprete,” which amused me, for no one looked less like a man than I did. The judges called me far more aptly: “the little interpreter,” and the judge of the Fifth District Court always smiled when he saw me sitting like a magpie up on the black chair of dignity, from which I had to slide down like a child whenever I spoke.

Since every criminal in a way counted himself my friend, and I also very often got private translations, I came, among others, to deal with a Colombian who—at a quick glance—was the most insignificant thing in the world and had a huge dislike of washing. Since he always carried on his bike a spotless white, cologne-sprinkled dog, I allowed myself to ask why he didn’t extend this praiseworthy cleanliness to himself, and learned that it did harm to his manliness. “It weakens my love power,” he said. From that time on I always longed to put the whole of South America under water once a day. It would do the people good, body and soul. Are the English such a controlled, grand nation because they wash so much? Long live water!

From time to time that Colombian of strong smell and innocent look brought me translations, which I did cheaply for him. He told me a lot about jungle life, and his knowledge of magic drinks was overwhelming. He could brew love potions, set up magic lamps, drive people into drunkenness or cure them of it, tell fortunes from coffee grounds, poison someone so that he simply died of heart weakness, and various useful things of that sort… I liked listening to him, and Mrs. M. allowed him to come, though in such cases—to spare her sense of smell—she withdrew to the back veranda.

One day he was, as usual, jumping up and down the room again and chatting about magic things, which I, since this was my favorite study, followed keenly and wrote down. Little by little he began to talk about life itself, about the happiness of love and all that stuff, of which my ears were already overfull. To my inner surprise I began to think that he was right, that one possesses nothing of existence but just this sensual pleasure, that one must taste every experience at any price, and only when, alongside these thoughts, a deeper feeling in me, as it were, said, “how strangely alien you are thinking today,” did it become clear to me that the magician was hypnotizing me, from behind and without outward aids. Full marks! However, I set a countercurrent and took my leave. I have seldom seen a more spiteful look in human eyes…

Now, although I had moved into the Zone, partly as a precaution so as never again to get into a dependent position, partly in order not to live in the Canal Zone while I was interpreter of Panama, I had kept the room next to the Russian woman and the trumpeter and worked there at midday. I took a small food parcel out of the Zone and laid it, with a writer’s sense of order, on my bed. But when I wanted to eat it at noon, I felt strangely sick and left it. I also always felt the wish to sleep as soon as I entered my room, but I fought the urge, since I mostly had painting or translating to do. One day Mrs. M. said to me:

“Child, what’s the matter with you? You look so miserable and don’t eat anymore. What’s wrong?”

“I’m not ill; I’m only always tired, most of all down in my room.” And I described to her my feelings when I entered the room.

Mrs. M. was good as gold, but like other Americans she shared the strong prejudice against anything that didn’t speak English and wasn’t white. She at once grew suspicious, went down with me, and searched the room with the face of a secret policeman. We discovered the theft of several things of little value as such, often handled by me, as well as the disappearance of my handbag in which I had kept a collection of poems, whose loss hit me especially hard. Only when we made the bed—it had only two sheets and a pillow on it—did we notice that a fine powder had been scattered over it. Some had been spilled by taking off the bedding, but there was enough left to convince us that it had an unpleasant, stupefying effect. Then Mrs. M. packed my trunks and carried everything at once to Balboa.

Of course I reported the theft to the court. To be the public interpreter and be robbed like an unknown nigger! All the officials had eyes and ears for the little interpreter, but the culprits were not found. From the report, however, there grew one funny and one tragic experience.

Since I had been robbed and almost killed—though I suspect that the black magician had slipped in by the trumpeter, poured the powder through the grating, and hoped to attack me at night in my sleep when I was extremely weakened, not knowing that I never spent the night in Panama—I wanted to leave the room without giving notice, and Mrs. M. agreed. Just as I was weighing the usefulness of moving out, a policeman appeared. The little Russian hid under the bed, his mother fell silent and even took the onion roast off the stove; the trumpeter fell quiet, the houseboy evaporated, and my landlady vanished into the innermost rooms. What a guilty conscience can do! The funny side of it I saw alone; for the policeman by no means came to investigate the theft; he was “a man like all men” and took the chance to come to me with a good excuse and carefully ask whether I—so alone—did not long for protection. Who protects better than a policeman?

I was stupid beyond belief and just as deeply polite. How I smiled at him and spoke nicely to him and got him interested in the theft, how I could not understand his hints. Thick as a plank! In the end we went down the stairs together. The house was a coffin: empty and still. Only when we were out the gate did the trumpeter blow the tune that in sinful Panama corresponds to the German “Es ist im Leben häßlich eingerichtet.”

The second aftermath convinced me that as a woman one cannot live in tropical states unless one means to climb prematurely into the grave on wrecked nerves. I was sitting in the library and doing preliminary studies for Central America when another policeman (they are as like as one egg to another) showed up and asked me with solemn serious gestures to step out into the yard, because he had information to give me in the theft matter. I did as asked, and he told me in the same whisper of confidence that we would never find the criminal (a view I fully shared), and that only one being in all Panama could tell me this. Who? An Obeah man (a negro witch priest). I had already met a whole lot of Obeah men, and besides, I was sure I would get nothing back even through ten Obeah men, and I told the pillar of justice this conviction of mine in a gentle way. He begged me so movingly to accompany him once to such a man that I agreed conditionally and explained that I would come once if my very busy time allowed it.

He handed me a card with his name and asked to be allowed to wait for me at seven o’clock on the corner. We parted in the utmost politeness, and I smiled, for a woman smiles safest when she is not inclined to fulfill a wish.

In the afternoon I stopped in at my photographer’s and showed him the address, asking his opinion.

“I think I know where that is!” he said, “but I’ll go there myself to be sure!”

I thanked him, and in the evening, while we were in the darkroom developing, he said very thoughtfully:

“The thing is quite dangerous for you. The house you’re supposed to visit is indeed lived in by him, but it lies right by the entrance to the street of the red lanterns (the realm of the prostitutes), and you must know that the woman who is found in that street—for whatever reason she got there—has to stay there for a year and … practice her trade. That can be enforced by the police.”

And that is what a policeman of the Republic had wanted to lure me into—me, a sworn public official…

From then on I left the various court buildings faster than usual and, with a heavy heart, made the decision to soon give up the very good position and travel on.

Potpourri.

Every day I went from Balboa to Panama past the tall group of mango trees just before the Halfway House and the notorious Coco Solo. First the young leaves were reddish purple, then light green, now the leaves stood like green daggers in all directions, and on the long fruit stems the golden yellow, often reddish-tinged fruit hung down. Whoever wanted to, could pick them up, but many people broke out in mango sores. The taste is good, but the fibers that cling to the teeth are a bother.

I had gotten to know all the tropical fruits and vegetables, from the yellow-fleshed yucca to the reddish, carrot-like badu, but I liked best the breadfruit sliced, fried, and doused with butter. We never had cow’s butter, though, but coconut fat, because it kept better. Also only tinned butter (from cans), because fresh butter would not keep well even on ice, which is why we joked:

“The cow on the table!”

Tropical cattle are very lean and give almost no milk. Even the meat is tough and not tasty, and the bulls are far from as wild as in Europe. The tropics press down on people and on cattle. In people, that easily turns into a dislike of work.

The May nights were wonderful. It was the so-called dry season (it rained once a day, while otherwise three to four thunderstorms came down), and the Canal Zone meadows were so visited by fireflies that it looked like a fall of stars. I often stood before the mighty gulf and watched the sea phosphorescence; behind me, like shining rain, the glow-worms came down, and above me the stars sparkled as if behind a veil of faintly shining tears. In the distance, sharp and black-edged, the famous Peak of Darién showed…

And unnoticed, broken by small adventures, May slid into June. Samuels had been acquitted after long proceedings. Countless criminals had sat next to me and poured out their sorrow. Richer in money and knowledge, I thought of departure.

Of my court experiences I want to single out only two more: Two children, a boy and a girl, had at carnival time—the wildest and most unbridled even in this city of vice—stolen forty dollars and blown it on crackers and fireworks. The boy was eight, the girl, a little negress, ten years old. These children were locked up with common criminals and were kept in pretrial custody for months.

Another time, at the preliminary hearing, I had two little black prostitutes in front of me. They had been only a month in the red-light district and were thirteen and fourteen years old. When the judge stepped away for a few minutes, I did what I otherwise never did, I asked the accused a personal question. They were so childish, had such good big goggle eyes in round, expressionless faces, that I asked how they liked it in the brothel. Perhaps rescue thoughts shot through my head; in any case the answer surprised me:

“So-so!” they said, pulling their lips crooked.

They had blindfolded a Chilean sailor while the worthy pimp pulled the watch and the purse out of the clothes hanging above the bed. Later the man came before me. For the first time it cost me effort to be completely impartial toward a person and simply do my duty. Most of all I would have liked to kick him down the stairs. But I was a sworn interpreter and sat on my feelings.
The North Americans who were brought before me were always in a state of boiling rage. In the United States drinking was forbidden, so in Panama they made up for the forbidden. They were always dead drunk, so they didn’t even notice what was happening to them. Most of the time their shoes were stolen off them in jail, and what angered them most was that they were left unfed. A young man had gone out in a carriage with ten negro women and only realized that things had not been as they should when he woke up on the open road, in the dust, with a hole in his head. As a rule, a high bail was put up, and then they let it be forfeited. If not the cheapest, it was at least the simplest solution. A very highly paid lawyer got the North Americans off in other matters. But it never went without heavy money losses. The “Gringos” are deeply hated, and if they fall into the hands of a Spanish American …

Before I left Panama, I saw the two prostitutes once more. The older one had been made pregnant by a policeman and had a neglected, coarsened look. In the features of the smaller child there was helpless sorrow.

Off Veraguas.

They had all been very good to me, and my heart was full of thanks; but at the deepest level of my thinking lay the washed-up filth thrown at me, and the bitterness that a man sees in a woman only the object of his passing lust and not a being to whom he opens himself, with whom he lives through life’s ups and downs with deep understanding, whom he loves for her qualities and quirks—in short, for the whole picture—this bitterness has never left me. It gave me a kind of lofty coolness that lets me glide untouched through every danger; for I am too good to be a toy of the moment, but it has broken in me what is essential to feel love, any kind of love. Today, between a man’s physical shell and me stands the invisible protective cage, like the visible cast-iron ones you find in Peru. Through that box I look at his soul without passion. But through it I can never find my way to a companion …

Everything in life has its light and shadow. This doesn’t belong in a travel book. But my account is not only a list of flowers I painted and houses I lived in or countries I traveled through; it also shows the effect such a journey has on a woman’s heart, and it is a warning. Women who want to enjoy a healthy, everyday, and therefore happy life are best off staying at home or at least in Europe, and perhaps, thanks to my frankness, a man will one day learn that the troglodyte’s method—clubbing his wife down to possess her—no longer has a bewitching (or stupefying) effect on the woman of the twentieth century.

I sailed on a Pacific Mail steamer that mainly carried cargo and had only a first and a third class. As usual I traveled third class, and, as when I left Europe, thunder and lightning followed me—I was surrounded by Arab women. A teacher from Jerusalem was emigrating to Honduras with her mother, and she clung to me like a burr. I had been recommended by the director of the Veloce, and when I went down to the never-tempting third-class grub, the first officer told me I would get some of the first-class food. Although, like the others, I had to eat in our sleeping cabin, I had better place settings and more digestible things. The wife of a negro whose friend was the ship’s cook, and who was traveling to San Francisco, was my tablemate and also slept in the bunk below mine. She had a little girl named Beryl, black as a chimney brush and coiffed the same. Mother and child were so clean I bore my fate more easily.

Below me lay three Arab women; in one corner a wreck fused from several races; and at night outside the cabin the sailors lay with as little clothing as the strict American ship authority allowed. Right there were the engine rooms, and on the other side the galleys. When you hear that even in the shade the air temperature was 40 degrees Celsius, you’ll believe me that I got up in the morning as a wet lump, feeling wretched.

The ship’s doctor—these noble gentlemen often don’t have even the brains of a louse, presumably the reason they are ship’s doctors—pried up my eyelid and declared me blind. Since later I wrote at least six hours a day on deck, I hope he convinced himself I had a pair of eyes that saw just fine. He also wanted to vaccinate me, which I took very ill. To be vaccinated three times in a year is more than flesh and blood—certainly more than a woman’s arm that isn’t supposed to look like the face of an Imperial German student—can bear.

Italians are charming—see the “Bologna”!—but dirty they are, God forgive them! On the Pacific Mail there were enough necessary places, even some set aside for women, and all clean! The beds had pillows and white sheets, and there were proper tables you could eat from without having to rock sideways on a rope bollard.

We sailed past the coast of Veraguas. Many wild Indians live there, and there are still devil conjurations of a very peculiar sort. It’s almost like a spiritualist séance, and all kinds of ghastly, dull-shimmering shapes appear on the rock walls of the grotto. Here you also hear the strange bellow of the howler monkeys, which makes the uninitiated fear a lion is nearby.

Costa Rica.

I rolled out of bed like a ball. The wetter the better, because then you stand the heat more easily. An American breakfast—eggs, fried bacon, bread and butter, pancakes, potato slices, and stewed plums—brought me back to strength again, and I climbed on deck to look at the new land.

In Costa Rica, especially on the east coast, the people are lighter-skinned than in the other Central American republics, and the capital, San José, has a better and more pleasant climate than the other cities of importance in that area. Glorious mountains form a scenic backdrop, though their volcanic nature is an undeniable danger.

The main exports are coffee and bananas. Ten million “hands” (that’s what they call the bunches or clusters of bananas in the tropics) are shipped each year, and a single “hand” often has 60 to 100 fruits. The ships of the United Fruit Company come from Panama, call at Puerto Limón, and bring bananas, pineapples, mangoes, and other tropical fruits to New Orleans in four days, from where they are shipped to all parts of the United States. The ships, which carry many practical refrigerators, or rather cold rooms, bring the fruits of the temperate zone back to the tropics.

Around eleven in the morning we passed the Herradura heights and went deeper into the Gulf of Nicoya, and I quickly asked my guardian spirit on board if I might go ashore. He advised me to eat first, but I thought one can eat every day, yet one certainly doesn’t enter a new harbor every day, so I made a deal with a cholo for the trip from ship to shore and jumped into the boat “Europa.” That had a homelike sound.

Puntarenas (Sandspit) is said to have an unhealthy climate, especially for singers, who easily lose their voices while they stay there; but I’m no singer, and besides, traveling so alone, I hardly needed my voice except to ask necessary questions.

The low wooden houses stand on both sides of strikingly wide, sandy streets with good sidewalks, and the little church’s spire peeks picturesquely out of the green of the coconut palms. The Grand Hotel Imperial is large for the place, for among the blind the one-eyed man is king.

After I had walked through the market hall and, under stormy urging, bought sapodillas that tasted like nothing, although they assured me that after the first dozen I’d want to eat two more, I wandered out of town and soon found myself on a narrow path through brush. Whenever I heard steps, I hid. My experience had made me wise. Better to avoid a possible danger than to get into a fight with some sexually excited male animal. That’s where it leads in most cases anyway!

I wasn’t afraid of animals, though there’s no lack of centipedes or poisonous snakes, and when out of the deep green the pointy little face of an ouistiti or titi peeked out, I felt fully satisfied with my outing. These little monkeys of Central America are truly cute. The howler and capuchin monkeys with their dark crown patch are much harder to see, but it was wonderful to enjoy the wealth of butterflies and watch the flight of a bright red cardinal. I stayed very still for a long time to calm the animals, and soon the green-blue lizards ran quite shamelessly over my shoes; on a low branch there appeared a beautiful bird with a deep yellow breast, a little white head, black wings, and a dark tail. A hairy spider let itself down on a sun-glinting thread and crept infinitely slowly toward an iridescent green beetle. In the thicket behind me there was a rustle; probably a snake. That sound woke me, reminded me that our ship would only stay here a day.

The people of Puntarenas stared after me like at the famous lindworm, since most travelers don’t think it worth the trouble to go ashore. The boatmen of the “Europa” met me and grinned at me like old acquaintances and called, “Hallo, Miss!” because they take all white women for Americans.

Almost at the other end of town I saw a brown-skinned woman in a little garden. I stopped at the fence and smiled. She smiled back. As my smile deepened, she came closer and began to speak, invited me +++in das Hänschen zu kommen+++, and told me about the land and the people.

She showed me a kind of grinder made of lava stone, with which she worked corn and other grains on a dark lava slab until it became fairly mealy—fine enough, at any rate, to shape a flat cake that was baked on an ungreased pan over a not too strong fire. For poorer people that was the cheapest bread substitute.

In the garden she later took me into, she had a marañón tree, its deep yellow fruits, very invitingly red on one side and pear-shaped, hanging down just ripening, with the gray kernel at the very tip. Also tamarind trees, a chirimoya, and other fruit. Close to the wooden wall the violet “egg-plums,” or berengenas, were ripening, a very good vegetable.

She gave me a sample of each of these possessions, and when—already on my way—I turned to wave again, she stepped out onto the dusty road and called after me:

“Greet your mother for me, little señorita, for I too have carried children under my heart and I can imagine how the one who now stays alone at home must feel, not knowing where her child is.”

After sunset we headed back out into the open sea.

Nicaragua.

A new passenger had come aboard in Costa Rica—a brown-skinned woman with two children and a Chinese man who was very old and, besides, her husband. Central American women like to marry Chinese shopkeepers because with them they don’t have to do hard physical labor and only have the obligation to bear many children, a duty they are only too happy to fulfill. Now this yellow human ruin was traveling back to his country, presumably so his bones could rest in his beloved native soil, and he took wife and children to the foreign land. I feared for the fate of the good-natured and not unattractive woman who was traveling into a hostile land full of foreign customs and a very doubtful future. She had an amusing habit of saying “God willing” before every remark and, when she was surprised, of exclaiming “Ave Maria purisima.” Her little boy, little Jesús, wore a +++Schnellfeuerhöschen+++ and bawled nonstop. The girl behaved better.

The steam launch that had brought the ninety-year-old Mr. Holtmann, the richest man in the country, to the ship took me ashore. I was a bit wary, because Nicaragua was supposed to be the wildest country in Central America, and I still had Peru fresh in mind. But I wanted to go ashore. You don’t study people or plants from the deck.

Not one first-class passenger, let alone a third-class one, went ashore. Most people travel through the world like their suitcases, and the great crowd of so-called tourists who claim to have seen everything read it all in a book and then simply sit in the hotel and sip iced coffee or take whisky and soda. I won’t deny that it’s more pleasant than walking around in the tropical heat. They urged me to wait for lunch, but I replied that one can eat every day, but one cannot set foot in a new country every day, and so by ten in the morning I was already standing on the shore of lovely San Juan del Sur, a bay as quiet, deep green, and sunlit as I have never again found.

My appearance in the town caused a stir, given the rarity of such guests, and when I bought a carved bottle gourd in the open market square, I at once had a circle of young Nicaraguans around me who told me that the señoritas of San Juan del Sur made these carvings. Cooks left their stoves to stare at me, lazy housewives who, sunk in deck chairs, rocked a slipper with their big toe and fanned themselves awoke to activity and bent over the low wooden railing of the brown wooden porch. After the pretty Panama Canal cottages, these buildings looked infinitely poor.

The church tower stands apart from the main building, and around both the sexton, out of his own pocket, laid out a garden in which many tropical flowers and especially the “volcano flower” bloom. It is soft pink and in the East is called the “foolish virgin.” It most resembles our lilac. The Poinciana regia, or umbrella mimosa, was in bloom, so the scarlet, leafless giant crowns burst like fire umbrellas out of the surrounding green, while on the yellow-white sand the scattered blossoms formed a lovely carpet; and here, on this dreamy beach ringed by hills, I also saw for the first time the notorious manzanillo, or poison tree, under which to fall asleep is said to be your doom. It’s not that bad, but it’s quite possible that the powerful tropical sun heats the fruits and leaves so much that their moisture (that is, the poison sap) evaporates in small amounts and can indeed be breathed in by someone resting under the tree. The fruit is truly extremely poisonous, and many killings are carried out with the sap of the green, harmless-looking apple. They would not even allow me, out of scientific interest, to take a manzanillo with me, although the light green fruit peeked out in quantity under the stiff dark foliage and was easy to reach.

I roamed all around and also took the road that in the dry season leads to Lake Maragua, but now was a sea of mud with a few ruts usable for walkers or riders. When I heard hoofbeats, though, I hid in the nearest brush until the mean-looking rider had passed. I had no intention of repeating the Peruvian experiences. I was also carrying a poisoned dagger now, so an adventure would not only have cost me dearly …

When among beasts, wear claws!

On this road to Rivas I found many women at a blacksmith’s and therefore went over to the place. They had a big gray monkey and invited me to look at it. That gave us enough to talk about, and once we had warmed to each other they told me much about the local conditions and something about the superstitions of the natives, which the half-breeds always seem to look down on, though inwardly they firmly believe in them.

As I later wandered through the village, people called me into many houses, showing me carved gourds here, a millet cake there, and often +++Zainoschweinchen+++, strange little animals that resemble a pig but are thick and stiff-haired and have long sharp claws on their toes with which they climb well. They are easy to tame. Since they grow very fast, though, and love to climb onto chests, doors, and tables, I pictured my future American housewife’s joy at such a “lap piglet” and declined with thanks.

Nicaragua is an extraordinarily rich country in which, however, a foreigner (I knew many who had tried it, in Panama) cannot get ahead. The half-breeds exploit him, act charming, and stop at no baseness behind his back, go after his goods and his life, and by the Indians he is, understandably, just as strongly and more openly hated. Should success bloom for him despite all obstacles, the government always finds a way to rob him of his money before he leaves the country, and only a few people have managed to gain a firm foothold. The North Americans, however, came in masses and pushed ahead with the cold, ruthless drive that is theirs, bribed and dazzled with their money, and had already nearly managed to get possession of the lands around the lakes, since they plan to build a second canal between the Atlantic and the Pacific, better placed for them; for the Panama Canal could be put out of action with a few bombs dropped from the air, and if that happens, the fleet must go around Cape Horn to reach Hawaii and the Philippines, and in that case would arrive far too late for the defense of California itself.

Only in Corinto did the hatred of the Americans really break through, and even the simplest women complained of the hidden power that drove up food prices and ruthlessly suppressed the influence of their own people. In fact you can pay very well with North American money all over Nicaragua.

León is the city of art and learning. Granada enjoys a good reputation, and only then comes Managua, the capital. The country owes its name to the former chief Nicarao.

There is only a two-class elementary school in San Juan, and anyone who wants to know more—though few are so curious—has to seek out a bigger place.

Corinto.

“We are in a harbor.”
The negress, her black jewel in her arms, called out, and I sprang up from my berth like a soldier who has fallen asleep on duty. Drenched in sweat I crawled up on deck. The bath was at the far end of the lower part of the ship and didn’t quite reach the ship’s side, so some cheeky sailor could have his fun suddenly peeking over the partition. That made the bath even less refreshing than sea water already is.

From the ship, Corinto takes you by surprise. The houses are no longer just one-story, they have arcades and look quite presentable, but once you walk along the harbor quay, the illusion fades and you find yourself in a real third-rate tropical town with ground-level wooden shacks, gardens where coconut palms and icacos rise up, swampy ditches edged with thorn scrub, and sand that quickly wears out your feet. As soon as I had helped the Arab woman at the post office and shaken off my tick from the Holy Land, I wandered through town, and a little boy, filling his school-free childhood with mischief, pointed out with a grin the school where the teacher was just thrashing a sacrificial lamb. A little girl, brown as a clay pot and almost as full of sparks, later drew my attention to the church and pointed out the park—a sad place without benches—whereupon, as usual, I headed to the market hall to look over the vegetables and fruit and buy those I wanted to paint later. Hand-painted clay jugs and palm-straw baskets excited me most, but they were too awkward to take along.

Alone as ever I wandered aimlessly through the wide streets where grass serves as paving, and where instead of the usual wooden fences there were dense rows of long-leaved prickly cactus as a barrier. In a garden stood a Nicaraguan woman who spoke to me, gave me icacos, and finally invited me into her hut, where in a whisper she told me a lot about the hated gringos and later a lot about life in general. The room was very simple, held only the most essential pieces of furniture, and smelled strongly of creolin. She said it had to be that way, to keep the snakes from coming into the house. That’s why she never went outside without a light and preferred to keep an oil lamp burning even indoors. If you kill one snake, she said, you must always be ready to find a second one too. The coral snake with its beautiful bright red markings, the rattlesnake, which at least always rattled a warning, the black snake, and the dreaded castellano were the worst, though the woman claimed to have an antidote made from various herbs.

I stayed with her until the first shadows danced away in blue stripes, looked at some fields, bought the refreshing umbrella-like green-berried mañones, and talked with the children who, under tall shade trees, sold rice cakes wrapped in leaves, while old women spread their aprons for me so I could sit among them on the market square and chat with them; they hawked monkeys, periquitos, and large parrots, and each described her province as the best and richest. There was gold and silver in the mountains, marble, copper and other ores, and the forests have splendid woods like palo campeche, rubber trees, and so on. The wildest Indians live on the unhealthy Mosquito Coast on the Atlantic; they count the days by nights, the months by the moons, and call a year “nam.”

The sun sank with tropical suddenness; I sat on deck again and listened in on two politicizing Nicaraguans. The black outlines of the Corro negro still stood out, then Corinto faded away as so much else in my life has faded, and I sat with my load of Nicaraguan blossoms (small tulips with an ugly smell), the jasmine of the Cape of Good Hope, and the dried funeral flowers on the barque’s deck and felt the never-ending loneliness like a shroud upon me. I spoke with others only to learn! I went through life like a Trappist, devoted to silence and work.

Amapala, Honduras.

The Gulf of Fonseca is indescribable; they say it’s grander than the entrance to Rio de Janeiro. The deep tropical blue shadows of night still lay on mountains and waters as we entered, and I owed it to the Arab women’s chatter that I spotted the Coseguina even in the dark. It threw up sheaves of smoke to a great height, and in the prevailing darkness they glowed like fire.

The sun rose—a blazing ball—and dulled the scene for a second, then, shedding its red as a king casts off his purple cloak, it turned the sea into glittering blue stripes from which the little islands emerged like emeralds. They were all very densely wooded, hilly, fluttered around by butterflies, bathed in the brightest sunlight—and then the sterner mountains in the background, the shimmering water, the flight of the gulls, the smoke of the Coseguina, and finally the awareness that three republics meet here—all this gave the landscape an uplifting charm.

They say the gulf was once a closed lake, only later connected with the sea by an earthquake. Its area is about eight thousand kilometers, and its bays look like the twists of a hunted snake. The islands of Zacate Grande, Tigre, Gueguensi, Exposicion, Verde, and Guca belong to Honduras, and opposite Zacate Grande lies the scarcely one-hundred-kilometer-long beach of the mainland. The rest of the shore belongs in the north to San Salvador, in the south to Nicaragua.

Amapala lies on Tiger Island, its lanes climb steeply, and it is so wild that strangers are reluctant to land. Half-naked Indians with frightening shock heads row up and take you ashore. The Arab women got off here too, and the schoolteacher’s mother invited me to her house in Tegucigalpa, which was kind of her. These people and the Chinese are the only ones who can make money in Central America; they think only of earning, are content with any lodging, and because of their race need make no display at all. There are people who live twenty years in one town and never take a walk. They don’t know even the commonest streets, they go home without ever having truly seen the country; by day they work feverishly in the shop, and at night their women are everything to them. In memory of the hot nights they doze through the morning. In that the dark natives are experts.

The street names are a success: the Street of Delight (a wretched maze!), Thistle Street, the Bridge of Courage, the Little Lane of Wealth (in trash), and so on. Men with greedy, blazing eyes in which the beast is already awake, pointed hats pushed almost to the nape; women with heavy bundles, the child on top of the bundle, and usually blouses so short they invite admiration of the stomach.

The ship lay a long time in the Gulf of Fonseca; because ivory nuts and tolu nuts, rubber, snakeskins, hides, and copra were being loaded. From the sea the old imperial road leads gradually up into the almost unknown high valleys of Honduras and finally reaches, on a plateau, the country’s capital, Tegucigalpa, which means “City of the Silver Hills.” That is the political center, Comayagua the historical one. The country is called “the Depths” because the sea on the Atlantic side is unusually deep.

The grandest sights are surely the ruins of Copan, where they say you can find temples with reliefs of winged soldiers, and where monoliths of smooth granite rise from the jungle thicket and prove that a marvelous culture perished here. There are caves there and rock such as you find nowhere nearby, which led some researchers to think this people must already have had flying machines to bring up foreign goods. The ruins stretch so far that some assume the city must have been as large as present-day London. The hieroglyphs, which come from the Maya alphabet or an even older civilization, are undecipherable.

Another, easier-to-visit wonder of Honduras is the Blood Spring. A stream of real blood flows out of a grotto and has not only the look but also the sickening smell of blood, and farther down, where the stream widens and stagnates, many gallinazos or carrion vultures sit and feed on this putrefying blood. The Indians avoid the place, believing the grotto full of evil spirits, but the Europeans have now discovered that millions of bats have their breeding places in it, and that these bats feed on the cattle that graze for three months on the surrounding slopes. The blood thus obtained flows onto the grotto floor and from there out into the open. Even so, the place is uncanny.

Indescribably beautiful are the primeval forests with their dragon’s-blood and silk-cotton trees and various resins, the manacca palms that branch straight from the ground, the precious dye woods, and the copaiba, from which the valuable Peru balsam is obtained; uncanny too are the snakes that swing from long branches in the forest half-light and lie in wait for a victim. At times, if you keep still, you can spot a coatl (a badger-like bear), an ocelot (a small leopard), or an opossum or other marsupial, but most of all you feel the heat and the fear of your fellow men …

From San Lorenzo you can take a small boat back to Amapala.

San Salvador.

The holier the name, the worse the people usually are. We are lying off Cucuco, the port of La Union. Good heavens, what a hole! One is grateful that kindly fate hasn’t sentenced one to stay.

The cholos came on deck wearing the remains of trousers and a wide straw hat, which made a fellow traveler say: “He’s got a shirt that never tears and fits perfectly.” The brown man didn’t seem to consider it waterproof, for he avoided the water like the devil dodges holy water …

The ship’s doctor, dark of complexion, jumped on deck and was greeted by our ironbeard. Soldiers in light brown uniforms, but without shoes, tried to stand at attention, and three curs were looking for their owner.

La Union lies over four kilometers from the little harbor hamlet, but since the ship stayed until evening, I followed some people’s advice and boarded the antediluvian contraption they called a train in San Salvador, which reminded one of a coffee grinder with an attached coffee tin. In this single car sat men and women with huge bundles, discussing coffee prices and other daily news.

“When does the train come back?” I asked the driver of the prehistoric iron horse as I handed him my ten centavos.

“Oh, lots of trains run!” he said. “One comes back here at four o’clock.”

I let that suffice and gave myself over to the view of the landscape.

We went straight through a jungle that kept trying to win back the land taken from it. The mighty roots of the silk-cotton trees formed real benches; the tangle of vines was so enormous you didn’t know whether what dangled and quivered in the dim light or thrust itself out menacingly was just the thick stem maze of lianas or this or that dangerous viper. In Cucuco I had seen many dry skins of giant snakes and therefore suspected the jungle already full of the creatures. At the edge of the deep green burst red flowers, and on the ground lay nuts and seeds the likes of which I had never seen.

The coffee grinder stopped, the countless bundles vanished along with their owners, and I wandered after them toward the town. The lanes were wretched, unpredictably rising and falling, filthy, and only rarely showed gardens. The paving stones were big and uneven, the sidewalk narrow, and the dogs vicious. No animal takes on the character of people as much as the dog. Where the dogs are vicious, the people are too. Oxen pulled clumsy two-wheeled carts, the wheels had no spokes, and the driver seemed to match his oxen in wit. The town hall was guarded by soldiers, and the cathedral was collapsing; earthquakes are frequent in La Union. Pretty was the park with its royal palms, and the market square was interesting because all the shopworn wares of Europe had gathered in the stalls there. The saleswomen were dull or sullen, and what was offered for sale was poor. In giant baskets, flat as a wash basket back home, lay coffee, and the vegetables were wilted. Hats from Charlemagne’s day on poles like the heads of beheaded criminals, and eggs a European hen would surely have been ashamed of as peas.

The men came out of the low, neglected stone buildings and greeted me with sneering remarks. They finally exhausted their stock of English words, and only one particularly fat brown-belly called after me tenderly, “Darling.” I turned and called back “Dummkopf” to usefully expand his language skills. Before his sluggish tropical brain had processed that, I had vanished around the next corner.

After about two hours of wandering I was nearing the station again. It was heading toward four, and the ship was to leave at six. The train needed about a quarter hour, so I had time.

Four o’clock and nothing came. A quarter past five and silence. So I asked the official when the train actually left. “At six!” came the answer. I pointed out that, according to the conductor and also the passengers, it was supposed to leave at four.

“I don’t know!” said the stationmaster and went back into his hole.

After a while I drummed him out again to ask how long it would take to walk.

“Four kilometers!”

It was pointless to ask whether the way was safe. To be absolutely sure, at least as far as direction went, I decided to follow the track. That way I had to reach Cucuco.

I walked and walked. The tropical sun still had its full force. It stripped the skin off my neck where the hat didn’t shade strongly enough; it burned my bare arms until the red skin began to blister; meanwhile the glowing sand burned the soles of my shoes and finally my feet, which I found much more unpleasant. Through my stockings I felt the heat radiating from the ground and the frying of the sun’s rays like a thousand needle pricks, and again and again I had to lift my hat to cool my brain. I put green leaves in the hat because it felt good to the head and gave protection.

But all those sufferings were nothing compared with the secret agony that consumed me. Not only was I walking for the first time all alone through a piece of jungle, I was walking alone as a white woman in a mad country; from the nearby brush that blocked any view a small leopard could spring, a giant snake could stretch, a tropical bear could lunge; vipers might be hidden in the sand holes, and who could tell me that wild Indians hadn’t come down from the inland heights to gaze at the steamer from a safe distance? They could loose an arrow from the thicket, they could ambush me with their spears, and—worst of all—I could meet a half-breed on the lonely way. Unconsciously at that thought I reached for the dagger in my pocket.

To stride out on a clear winter day back home is a pleasure; to fly over ground that burns under your feet in the tropics is quite another pleasure. I snorted like a warhorse before the charge as I reached the deep jungle. Then I felt so far covered by the tall trees and brush that I dared to go a bit more calmly. Twice I thought I heard someone coming behind me, and twice I broke through the brush into the forest to seek cover there. In such moments all wild beasts and all snakes were all the same to me.

With every step the feelings changed. It rustled all around me, and I tried to guess which animal and of what size it might be; there was crashing in the treetops, and I expected some missile from a monkey or a savage; it crackled cautiously, and I asked myself whether it was an ocelot or a hidden foe moving almost soundlessly.

Not only did coconut palms lift their fiery crowns above the variously shaped, impenetrable masts of trees, there often grew by the roadside a thorn thicket and a clump of cactus through which a herd of elephants couldn’t have forced its way, and just as I reached such a wall I saw, at the bend behind me, a two-legged creature of the male sex and for the moment of an indeterminable variety.

If I had been stepping out briskly before, I now put my best foot forward, regardless of the sweat that streamed down me in rivulets. Behind me, hardly gaining, came the two-legged creature.

I flew along the ground—not running, but with a swinging stride I had practiced in Peru, a stride that ate up the kilometers. Behind me the unknown man panted. I had cooled off many a hot admirer of those parts by running them cold in just that way.

All at once the human ocelot called imploringly behind me:

“Signorina!”

I turned. The call wasn’t Spanish, and besides, I was ready to shift from peace to fight. A little bloodletting would pleasantly dampen his ardor.

“Thank God I’ve caught up with you!” the stranger gasped. “I’m trying to get back to the ship too, and that ass of a station official …”

Shared pain is half pain. He was an Italian traveling from Honduras to another godforsaken Central American republic to sell raisins and Florentine water. Together we covered the rest, and he told me what he had suffered whenever he heard a crash right beside him, and showed me his neck, which, like mine, was as red as the comb of an excited rooster.

Half dead, tongues hanging out and feet charred, we stumbled along the harbor quay about half past five, when a strangely creaking noise behind us startled us and drove us off the track.

It was the train, arriving in Cucuco at the same time we did!

The Italian made lavish use of his mother tongue. I slunk back on deck and into the bathroom.

I had no words.

La Libertad.

Ye gods—another hole!

Soft, elongated rises and at the front on the beach, as if taken from a child’s toy box, a number of somehow plunked-down, wind-ske​​wed huts. The surf raging, so that, as at Mollendo, you had to be hoisted ashore by crane and pay the land pirates a dollar for it. But if you want to see things, you mustn’t spare the sacrifices.

The first-class passengers, who had at first shunned me like walking leprosy—they were the rich ones!—had (perhaps because I avoided them like cholera bacilli) come to the conclusion that despite the disgrace of third class I might after all be a human being, and even a thinking one, since animals don’t usually keep a diary—or at most only dogs at favored street corners …
So I had to tell about my country excursions when I got back; nobody wanted to bother going to that uncomfortable coast with its risk of fever. In La Libertad, to my surprise, a gentleman also went ashore to—so he claimed—take a sea bath and to find out when the train to the interior left, and whether one could reach the capital San Salvador in a day, see it, and make it back to the ship.

I’d had an adventure with San Salvador trains and had no wish to have to run back some twenty kilometers. So I looked over the place and its surroundings. People say folks here are more hard-working, and that seems true, since there are already coffee plantings on the slopes, and in the valley you find sugarcane, corn, taro, and yuca. The highlands are healthier and cooler than those of the neighbors, which of course adds to greater efficiency. The best coffee estates are around Sonsonate, which you can already glimpse from outside La Libertad. Beyond that lies San Salvador.

The old Aztecs called the land Cuscatlan, or “land of necklaces,” meaning “of riches.” Behind today’s capital “in the Valley of the Hammocks” (because earthquakes are so much the order of the day) comes Asutuxtepeque, or “place of turtles,” and Sonsonate means “place of waters” and was founded by Pedro de Alvarado in the sixteenth century.

The people are brown, dirty, poor. The swamps of the plain breed fever, and few ships call here. The tiny spice shops are all in Chinese hands; the occasional fabric shop—if there is one—is usually run by an Arab. I was supposed to buy hairpins for my negress, and I tried in three ports in vain before I found this luxury item at a Chinese shop. The women simply let their hair hang loose and now and then wash off the excess of lice.

Toward evening I met my fellow passenger on the beach. He invited me to a sea bath, but I don’t like salt water, and I had no desire to delight the admiring swells of La Libertad in the gentleman’s pants offered to me (they would, after all, have reached up to my armpits, since I’m not five feet tall). But since I also wanted to find out whether one could finally get from Acajutla as far as San Salvador, I agreed to go with him to the agent and bargain in Spanish.

A world trip is a crash course in life if only because people here let the polish flake off faster than at home, and so you learn in a day what in Europe—where the whitewash sticks better—you often don’t learn for months, or, if you’ve had as much bad luck as I have, not for years.

The fellow traveler had on board an unusually beautiful, very stately, and delightfully dressed woman who also had nice manners and some brains. She was without a doubt the most beautiful woman on the whole ship—and of course white. I am small, and at the time I was tanned brown like an Indian child, and my mirror told me every morning that I couldn’t even find myself pretty—and even the devil finds himself pretty. Other people would put me among the undeniably ugly, and the man declared his love to me. Since Genoa I had gained enough age and wisdom to put that declaration in the right drawer, but that was the first time I was glad I’d never married. If every man wanted to cheat on every woman with any scarecrow every time he got loose?!! …

The agent lived on the third floor, and an awkward wooden stairway, unusually steep and neck-breaking, led up. Before I knew it, the American had lifted me off the floor and was puffing up the stairs with me. At first I wanted to resist, then I thought that a little hard-won life wisdom might also do the male two-legs some good, and so I let myself be lugged up three flights. It was 40 degrees in the shade, and I had never been a friend of stair-climbing—even in milder heat. If it amused him to stagger and wheeze like a desert camel, hauling my 47 kilos up three flights, then he could have the physical uplift. Later he’d learn that sometimes in life you do something for nothing, and that even on the sea of love you now and then hit a reef or a breakwater. Good for the soul…

The agent’s answer was unsatisfying. Down, by the way, I took the stairs on my own feet. Modesty is a virtue!

“Did you have a good time, darling?” his wife asked when the crane dumped us out of the basket.

“It was wonderful!” he said.

De gustibus …

Acajutla at the foot of Izalco.

This is the most important port of San Salvador, this little village full of thatched huts, carrion vultures, and naked children. Again we lay far from the beach, and the heat, together with the plague of flies (they flew out to us from shore), was unbearable. On the anchored craft, rocking empty, an ibis perched here and there.

Landing was very expensive. A dollar each ride and another dollar landing tax. In such a hole! The people suffer from self-importance.

Once you do get ashore, though, there is a certain charm. Behind the place three volcanoes rise unnervingly fast and steep in a half circle—Izalco, San Miguel, and Santa Ana. All day clouds like mourning veils wrapped the peaks, but toward evening they drifted seaward, and you could see fire breaking out on Izalco, often called “the lighthouse of Central America.”

Vultures, little gardens, butterflies of every color and shape in the nearby jungle bristling with thorn palms, neglected fields, worn-out women, and everywhere in the village burning lava sand, black and all too easily heated by the sun. From here the train goes to the capital.

No words can convey the gloom that lies over these South and Central American one-horse villages. The sand, the mountains, the people are dead. Each time they seemed to me as if conjured by a spell into a brief, numb kind of life. Always the same green in the background, the same neglected, uncomfortable wooden huts, the hopelessly sad eyes of the women, the lecherous looks of the men—the only living thing in all that dead splendor—and above it, like a seal of doom, the blazing sun of the tropics. Later I saw many villages in even lonelier regions, on scattered islands; but they never seemed as dead to me as these places in the Spanish republics. As if Spain’s dying spirit had breathed death on them.

The poor Costa Rican woman with her Chinese husband sighed:

“God first, if only we were out of these holes already!”

The little black scrap of humanity below me was cutting a tooth and took the world amiss. It robbed me of the meager rest one could find between engine room and galley in the ship’s deep maw in tropical waters. Every leg of the trip became a purgatory for me…

San José de Guatemala.

At five in the morning the ship was already shrieking “good morning,” and I shot up from the sea grass or straw—since even in poetic license I won’t say I got “out of the feathers”—to go ashore. But since the brown pill-roller had not yet carried out the usual shipboard inspection, I waited for my fried bacon, followed by pancakes and prefaced by a grapefruit—a bitter giant orange—the best thing against seasickness.

There is nothing to say about San José, try as I might, except that it has the usual broad streets full of lava sand, sun, vultures, naked children, and hairless dogs, and that the bell in the church tower hangs crooked. The market is made of palm-thatch roofs like sponges, under which the stalls stand. It offers nothing. An egg-shaped dark-colored fruit is said to improve soup a lot. Alligator pears were carried onto the ship. People eat them with whisky poured over, or with salt, vinegar, and oil. I don’t like them.

In the jungle, where I ventured with my old carelessness—reckless in three ways: because of the people, the animals, and the dangerous tropical swamp fever—I found truly splendid butterflies, most of them snow-white in all sizes, some so deep yellow they looked almost brown, and several with multicolored wings. The moths are as big as sparrows and seem very hairy. Now and then the thick-necked black vultures circled me. At a ruined house I startled an iguana, but hardly had I laughed out loud at its flight when fear shot through my limbs, for behind the brush I spotted a saddled horse. Since I didn’t know its temper—and even less that of its master—I sounded a hasty retreat and fled deep into the bush before, by a roundabout way, I reached the beach again. I got to know several new palms and a number of oily palm nuts; but the vicious mosquitoes that attacked me and the hot sand that burned through the leather of my sandals made walking, as always, a torment. Just before San José I met a young mixed-blood woman, and at my request she showed me the viscoyo nuts, which are similar to the real, sought-after coyol nuts and hang from the trunk of a short palm whose fronds, studded with thorns like that, make access very hard. Around the chacras or wooden huts in the area I found gardens with mangoes, bananas, and calabashes.

The people are terribly poor. They rarely have meat. The best they offer strangers is snake meat, sliced and fried like our eel. It doesn’t taste bad—I tried some despite my distaste, for scientific reasons—but since many venomous snakes are eaten, the poison gets into the body and causes an ugly rash that ends in a kind of pus boil. For all their poverty they are hospitable, these poor brown people of Guatemala, ninety percent of whom cannot read!

The “golden virtue” is like that of Peru—haughty without ambition, sensual and at the same time contemptuous of women, rough toward inferiors, quickly cowed by superiors, and filled with a burning hatred of Europeans. Nothing about them is flawless but the crease in their trousers, and their yellow complexion, which they would like to call white, has something unhealthy about it that made me prefer the simple man of the people with his healthy brown.

Champerico.

From there the railway goes to the capital, Guatemala, where it is said to be a bit cooler and nicer. That is to be wished, because in Champerico the heat was unbearable. I had calf cramps, and on top of that a terrible storm had broken in the night. Now the surf roared like a wild animal. No harbor is as treacherous as the wide roadstead of Champerico.

Three volcanoes bounded the view here as well. Mangroves reach far into the sea with their lush green and fiery red blossoms, and the golden-yellow mangoes hang on long strings from the broad-crowned trees. Wind-bent coconut palms are reflected in the blue of the sea, and black lava sand surrounds the light-brown houses. The few shops are in Chinese hands. Meanwhile yellow fever prevails in Guatemala, and travelers are only reluctantly allowed ashore.

Here—deeper in the jungle—you find the “quiet heart,” a beautiful flower, and the tree whose fruit is called “monkey hand.” Sadly I couldn’t find a well-preserved specimen, much as I looked. From the wax of a plant the natives make candles.

In Guatemala’s coat of arms you find the sacred bird, the quetzal. Many centuries ago a radiant teacher once came to these regions, and some of the wisdom he taught remained among the people. The Aztec magician-priests called this master of unknown origin Quetzalcoatl, and his symbol was the feathered serpent.

Before departure the American consul came aboard. He was already aged, and his name was known all down the Central American coast, not just in Champerico. Natives visited him when they came down from the interior, and anyone planning a venture consulted him. Amid the wooden buildings stands a somewhat better, but by no means cozy, wooden house: his castle. He says he’d rather be the first man in Champerico than a nobody in the United States. In his case I’d rather be the last man in North America than the first in Champerico.

The Cemetery Adventure.

Late the next evening we reached the Isthmus of Tehnantepec, and as night fell we anchored opposite the rocks of Salina Cruz. The sailors spoke of this first port of Mexico the way we speak of Vienna or Berlin, and I could hardly wait for daybreak to take a look at this big city with nightlife (all the male travelers had hurried ashore in the evening) at least by daylight. What I saw when I staggered onto deck were steeply rising, sharp rocks, almost bare of forest and showing only, in the cracks, candelabra cacti, plate and snake cacti, aloes, and spiny lichens. The town itself climbed the hill after a short flat, and there was no sign of any size to it, even if the number of houses exceeded all the other ports and the main buildings were indeed of stone.

Dark-skinned people walked past me—much darker than any I had met so far—and the cut of their eyes was almost Mongolian. Something wild and at the same time deeply melancholy lies in their features; perhaps that’s the last trace of their Aztec forefathers.

I had to show my green landing card before I was allowed to leave the harbor area and step onto the short free stretch along which people coming ashore at night were said to be waylaid and robbed. Not inviting on that score.

The warehouses were built by the English and cost over a million, for sugar from Haiti was to be stacked here, but the Panama Canal put an end to the venture. The way from the harbor, past the customs house and the government property enclosed by a high iron fence, stretches on and is unpleasantly sunny; it crosses the tracks of the railroad that goes to Tehnantepec. Salina Cruz lies at the narrowest part of the Isthmus of Tehnantepec, where only 216 kilometers separate the Atlantic from the Pacific, and in the rich province of Oaxaca.

The hot sand again burned my feet painfully before I was in the middle of the town, whose houses were better wooden buildings with decorated verandas and already had a truly Mexican look; but when I reached the far end of the flat part of town and turned left, I was in the midst of wretched little bamboo houses. The walls were so loosely fitted together that you could watch everything inside as if through a lattice, and since the residents were as curious to gape at and question me as I was them, I soon ended up in one of these huts.

Mexican dress is odd. The men wear hats like the Misti—only without snow—a brim like a wheel crowned by a sugarloaf. For a dollar I could have bought such a hat, but at most I could have rolled it ahead of me through the world, for it was not much smaller than I am. Shirt and pants or the remains of such things complete the men’s clothing; the women wore a short-sleeved blouse that ended in front of the belly and, with certain movements, showed part of the breast, while a very pleated skirt hid their most private charms. Head and feet remained bare. The children ran around naked.

Mexico is a poor country despite all its rich ores, its precious plants, its extensive oil fields. So poor that the people are not hospitable at all. Even in Guatemala they offered me tastes of local dishes or fruit, but never in Mexico. Whatever you wanted, you had to buy, and they thought something that cost five centavos was already expensive.

In the hut’s only room, the woman crouched in front of the little charcoal stove, not a foot high, frying tortillas—the Mexican bread—from coarse cornmeal. Her daughter stood at the slanted lava slab and worked the coarse meal with a lava pestle and a little water into a flat mass. As soon as it had set and become smooth enough, she handed such a very thin pancake to her mother, who tossed it into the lightly dusted iron pan (likewise flat) and, without fat, fried it over a gentle fire. The tortilla is quite good but hard to digest and gives you a feeling of being full. In a clay pot the woman had cooked bottle gourds sweetened with the juice of freshly pressed sugarcane. That was the midday meal—perhaps the only meal—of the people.

There was no furniture. Two or three boxes, some rags piled up and no doubt serving as the bed at night, and, stretched across the room, the hammock in which only the master of the house ever lay, while his better half had to slave away. He looked down on her with lofty superiority.

I went from hut to hut, answering questions and asking them. Always the plump women did all the work that had to be done. Their blouse was sometimes cinched below the bust with a knot, but always open in back. The men grumbled secretly about the government and the priests, who demanded so much money for a wedding that many people preferred to live together in free love. Later I also learned from more educated people how much the rich planters, the foreigners, and even the priests exploit the people, and that probably explains today’s persecutions of priests.

On and on. The slopes were full of cacti, and after only a short try I gave up botanical explorations and went back to the better part of town. The calls of the women, who waved to me good-naturedly, and the slap of the men’s sandals in the hot sand followed me. I visited the church, where there was a wooden Christ with real human hair glued on, the Mother of God wore a splendid gown of black velvet, and the saints wore unusually stupid expressions. On the main street all the shops were in Arab or Chinese hands, and even the two inns were run by foreigners (Guasti and Gambrinus). That too is a sign of how unenterprising the people of Central America are. All the mines, all the big trading houses, all the little shops are run by foreigners. The city park had only broken benches.

On board they had often told me not to miss the very interesting cemetery not far from town, and after lunch, despite forty degrees in the shade, I set out to look for it. I found several very pretty, colorful stones, which I collected, and had already reached the low brush in front of the cemetery wall when I noticed a male two‑legged creature coming toward me.
Mexicans, like the other Spanish mixed races, don’t waste time when it comes to love. In two minutes he had offered me his heart, a heap of money, and marriage. Two minutes later I had politely turned down his tempting offers. Then he grabbed me like a sack and hauled me off on the spot to the historic cemetery. I flailed with my arms in front and my legs in back in midair, but for the moment he had the upper hand, for his hat alone was bigger than I was.

He laid me—or rather set me—on the most suitable grave, and hardly had I found the ground again under my leather sandals when I went on the attack too. With a jerk I had the dagger out of my pocket and said:

“Man, this dagger has been dipped in curare, the deadliest of all poisons. If I so much as scratch you with this dagger (which was rusty and looked ghastly!), you’ll have to die in the most miserable way in three hours at the latest!”

He wasn’t entirely convinced that the dagger and the poison were really that bad, but he was scared all the same, and so he started to try a different tune. He took a surprising number of ten-dollar bills from his wallet and laid them down right in front of the gravestone, stammered a lot of nonsense about a quick ten minutes, and whimpered like a dog that sees the stick and still wants a juicy roast. In moments like that I learned a great deal about life, the senses, and men. It left me with a very low opinion of the arrangements made by the good Lord …

“Pick up the money,” I ordered, “and put it away. I don’t need it. Nor do I—praise God—need any male two-leg and that so-called love which is no love. I’m a human being, not cattle! And now march ahead of me toward Salina Cruz, or my dagger goes into your hide!”

In single file—he growling and cursing, I keeping my eyes on his spine—we went back to town, past the colorful stones I had to leave lying there, and so it came to pass that I’d been to the famous cemetery and hadn’t seen a thing of it.

That evening I told somebody or other about my adventure. Once again I learned a lot about people and their ways. All those first-class passengers who had otherwise never bothered with me came to my leper’s corner (I sat a bit apart from the rest) and pumped me. Never out of sympathy, only for the thrill, and from then on they were always eager to hear what I had “experienced” ashore.

Only the Costa Rican woman said:

“God first, life is an enemy to us women.”

Years ago Salina Cruz was so unhealthy that most people who stayed more than eight days died; today things are more tolerable, though far from good. The place is very well fortified, and the wide breakwater protects the entrance. Before this artificial harbor was built, the captain had to maneuver with two dragging anchors.

The higher inland is so fertile that the coffee trees yield up to ten pounds, the lemon trees five thousand lemons a year, the sugar cane grows thirty feet high, and the tobacco leaves reach a length of 50 cm.

My last impression of Salina Cruz was the fat Chinese washerman, puffing as he lugged the bundle of ship’s and officers’ laundry over the gangway, and a Mexican who, grinning, handed the ship’s cook a small kitten. Then we slid past the lighthouse hill out into the open sea …

Acapulco.

The cat decided our ship was an earthquake zone and screamed all night. She wrecked the little chance of sleep we had. The heat was deadly. A new fellow traveler with three children rolled naked and groaning on the floor, the Costa Rican sighed “Ave Maria purísima,” and I helplessly rolled from east to west without being able to close my eyes. Outside, in the passageway, the sailors and stokers were moaning.

A day without landing; thunder in the evening.

Another night of suffering, then we slid through the entrance into the harbor of Acapulco, a most unusual place, the like of which I never saw again. The houses climbed the steep, jagged rock with great grace and skill, and you don’t climb up on soil but scramble on all fours (at least if you weren’t born in Acapulco) over round, huge, perfectly smooth boulders that look like those rocks in far northern Scandinavia polished smooth by ice. The main streets down on the flat—there are two—have, as in Panama, an overhanging upper floor, so you’re under a covered sidewalk—something very useful in sun and rainy seasons—but the countless thatched huts scattered over the hill lie in tiny gardens. I stopped in front of one such garden, and the woman inside called me in. As usual, the room had little furniture, but besides the hammock there was a table, a few chairs, and a cupboard.

I don’t know how it happened, but from that woman I learned more about the land and its people than from all the books I had read beforehand. She told the story of her life, and in it, as in a mirror, the whole of Mexico with its light and shadow unrolled.

She was a widow and belonged to Acapulco like one of the giant stones that make the climb hard. Early in the morning she went into the woods, which here weren’t as lush as farther south, worked the cornfield on the first clearing and checked the sugar cane on the second, gathered firewood on the way home and picked the young leaves of certain trees instead of cabbage or spinach. How simple that sounded! But when she gathered wood, she always kept a sharp lookout for the dreaded coral snake and especially the green snake that doesn’t give way and, coiling up, launches itself at the enemy. I think the proper name is whip snake, because it lashes out like a whip. And when dashing through that little patch of jungle, she had to look up carefully, for at times a giant snake lay in wait and dropped down from the dense foliage and tangle of lianas to ensnare its prey, or a predator crept up on her unseen.

She must have been poor despite the nicer hut and the little garden full of flowers and a few fruit trees, for she told with bated breath about the lucky ones who got to eat the sweet city bread that cost 15 centavos the little loaf. Corn cost 15 centavos the liter, a hundred bananas in season only 25 centavos, marjoram in bunches 5 centavos, plain bread 5 centavos, and sweet rolls two for 10 centavos! Even so, she complained about high prices.

Then—as we grew more familiar—she told me inside the hut about the horrors of the revolution. Enemy troops marched through Acapulco, robbed, murdered, and plundered wherever and whenever they could. Girls and women were dragged along and had to serve the army; boys and men were stabbed; huts were looted and burned. For four days she lay hidden with husband and children, without food or light, in the hut while troops passed through. They didn’t dare cook for fear the rising smoke would betray them, and at night strangers rushed through the dark hut, which was so empty they found nothing—not even those hiding under rotting corn straw. For four years—long time—there had been no civil war, and people were slowly recovering.

Later, as we sat among cotton shrubs and cashew trees in the little garden, she told of the great theater fire in which so many perished, and of the dreaded cyclone in 1910 that carried whole houses into the sea, of the Cordonazo de San Francisco—the terrible wind that at times blew on the fourth of October and did much damage—and all the while piglets ran under our chairs and scuttled through the open hut, where two children lay in the hammock trying to fall asleep.

I gave the woman a coin because she seemed so poor and because her plain tales had unveiled for me the whole year-in, year-out picture of life in Acapulco. Whether word of it spread or the people of Acapulco were simply unusually curious, I don’t know, but I was called from hut to hut, and always the man lay in the hammock, the woman worked crouched by the hearth, and I sat on an upturned crate, answering and asking questions, learning how best to drive off an approaching giant snake with stones, where turtles lay their eggs in the sand, how people search for gold in the mountains, and where to find this and that in Mexico. They spoke of the ocelot, the puma, wildcats, the opossum, the coyote, and so on. When the opossum is chased, it often plays dead, lets itself be tossed around, and lies so still you can’t even notice it breathing, yet as soon as the enemy is gone it jumps up and runs off; hence people all over America say “play possum,” that is, pretend to be dead or ignorant.

At last I had gotten rid of the crowd of curious folk and wandered alone over more rocks and even twistier mountain roads, where pretty pink morning glories and the splendid volcano flowers bloomed, saw parakeets with a yellow spot, though larger than those in Panama, and crawled down into a quebrada, a ravine, where donkeys grazed, not without leaving their calling cards. In the evening, music plays in this quebrada down by the sea, and the feet of the belles step into the donkeys’ reminders.

Past the jiguerillos, whose fruits the natives use to make soap, I reached another hillside where pincones, a laxative plant, grew, and visited a fisherman in his mud hut. He told how he caught turtles by spearing them through the neck and how miserably they screamed when that happened, how tortoiseshell has to be put into water to be worked, and how you can only bend it after it’s been heated strongly but carefully. The giant turtles are eaten only; the shell is worth little. The eggs—often twelve dozen from one animal—are laid in the warm sand and the spot is tamped down well with the feet. Giant turtle eggs taste fishy and are as big as an orange.

My last walk was to the old Spanish fortress beyond the cliffs, where you could still see the former instruments of torture. From the adjoining barracks, reached by a palm grove, there’s a very beautiful long view over the branching mass of cliffs and over Acapulco on the rocky slopes.

Wherever you go in Acapulco, people use the familiar form of address. The mutts are good and—as far as I have experience—the male two-legs tolerable. Of all places, Acapulco was by far my favorite. I often wondered why, and only much later did I learn that Japanese had been coming to Acapulco and settling there for centuries. The people surely owe the gentler, more courteous manner to the admixture from Asia. From here the first Spanish explorers once sailed to the Philippines. Four months out, four months back, if they were lucky …

Around the ship lay many boats with goods for sale—cigars, tortoiseshell wares, fruits, baskets, and pottery. I sat down thankfully at the dining table; I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and it was night.

Manzanillo.

The little apple!

A pretty name for an ugly place. I was glad to get off the ship. On such a long voyage the men go wild—fighting, grumbling, loving; the children, monkeys, and parrots add to the noise; the constant eating of meat makes you ill and the heat brings on aches in your limbs. If I stayed in the same position for a while, my joints turned unruly like the elastic in a jointed doll. The pain lasted day and night. You pay very dearly for a study trip. Whoever just lies in a deck chair has it better, of course. I have to paint or write even when I come on deck dead tired. And I’m a victim of third class …

As I hobbled down the ladder, four boatmen stood ready. Each grabbed me by some part of my body to pull me into his boat, and I saw stars. In the end the brown monkey won, the one who had got hold of my sturdiest part, the stomach region, and with a jerk he wrenched me from the others. We missed falling into the water by a hair. That’s how you land in Manzanillo.

Manzanillo also climbs two hills, which, however, looked only like green snails on a lonely country road, in the middle of the wider plain and the low rises of the hinterland. Far behind them higher mountains push forward, and so a slightly cooler wind blows down. The people were less hospitable or curious; perhaps I—since I felt wretched—had less friendly, inviting nostrils.

Everyone rides mules and donkeys, which even go surely through the dirtiest, steepest little alleys. I didn’t dare venture into the wider surroundings, since the Mexicans use the lasso and not infrequently catch human victims that way too, who then have to run alongside their mounts and follow them blindly, God knows where.

The mutts weren’t vicious, though none had names as pretty as in Acapulco (Butterfly, House-Friend, Joy-Nut).

On the edge of town simple little houses had been built out of old kerosene tins; they had forgotten windows, and the bench in front was a row of old sugar crates. The roof tiles of the better houses look like gently rising wave crests and so already show a certain character. From here the railroad goes to Colima, and in two days you are in Mexico, the capital—Mexico City.

Later I visited, as everywhere, the market, looked at the dark purple, round tomatoes with a green outer husk, the pomegranates, avocados, lemons, and the balloon-like, sometimes red, sometimes blue or green, nut-sized balls that are really chewing gum. You chew one of those, which fills your mouth completely, for three hours. They also sold pickled cabbage, sour cucumbers, and above all bananas and sugar cane.

Pigs wherever you look, and zopilotes that gobble up all the filth; two small cemeteries behind the hill not far from a lake where fever mosquitoes attack you, and above all flies. Millions!

Here you find the dreaded palanca snake and the wine snake, which betrays itself by a strong smell of wine, and in the sea there are mantas, rays, swordfish, and sawfish.

As I sat in the park of Manzanillo, the little poison apple, that evening, someone tapped me on the shoulder from behind. It was a little girl. She smiled at me and asked my name and where I was from. We talked for a while, and the little Mexican girl gave me a candy. I’ve often thought of that child; it was the only gift from Mexico …

On board the captain handed out towels to all the passengers and the crew, and we had to go after the flies. The ship was black with them, and we swept the corpses of the slain into the sea.

Mazatlan.

The place lies on the Tropic of Cancer and is hotter than other places in Mexico.

And flies!!! The captain stayed three miles out at anchor to avoid the brood, and when I went ashore I thought I was walking on raisins. But they were only flies sitting on the sand.

In the market hall everything, absolutely everything, was under nets, and under the nets there were still flies. They went into your nose and ears; they were everywhere. The walls were black with their scribbles and black everything they settled on.

The Colegio Alemán, run by a German, is very prettily situated; the church is nice, the shops already promising, and the large trees cut into spheres on the square decidedly, peculiarly attractive. Whoever loves the heat and the Spaniards can live in Mazatlan. I’m glad to have reached the last port that belongs to Central America. Too bitter has been my traveling through the lands of the half-breeds.

The city—for that’s what it already is—lies in the province of Sinaloa, at the entrance to the deep, hot Gulf of California, where mother-of-pearl oysters and turtles abound and from where you can reach the richest mines in Mexico. Here too you find some ruins from Aztec times, and up on the hill at the entrance lies the observatory.

Right off Mazatlan lie the Revillagigedo Islands, on which a few Englishmen live in bleak solitude; one of the islands is a penal colony, and an American who was once a famous bandit chief in Mexico is there pondering the ups and downs of life.

Off Los Angeles.

A 25-meter whale surfaced near the ship and spouted water and contempt for the world beside us. The coast was bare and desolate right up to San Diego. The weather had changed and was suddenly cold. I wrapped myself in my Jerusalem shawl and shivered till my teeth chattered. Gulls, snow-white with gray wings, passed by, and flying fish shot up out of the water.

Los Angeles is the place of the dying. The people who do good business here are above all the undertakers. Funeral rooms are lit up and rented like hotel rooms. Many believe they can recover in this mild climate in eternal sunshine and rest their bones in the soft brown sand. The various religious sects flourish here for the same reason; with so much burying, the hereafter is of interest. Only in third place do the film companies come.

Beyond Los Angeles lies the Imperial Valley (Kaisertal), and it’s in the middle of the desert. Inside the house in summertime the heat is so tremendous that you can’t lay your bare arm on a wooden tabletop without feeling as if you’re being burned. Far worse than in the tropics is the heat of the subtropics in the short summer months, but in exchange the winter is a long, sunny autumn.

Beyond San Diego came San Pedro and Santa Monica. Early in the morning we sailed past Cape Santa Barbara and toward nine past Point Conception with the best lighthouse on the whole coast. The white smoke of a train slid like a trail of mist along the bare brown coast.

Measles have broken out. That will make landing even harder.

On Angel Island.

With the North Americans, everything is pose: their spirit of progress, which is nothing but a child’s curiosity and quickly dies if big money isn’t the reward; their craving for virtue, which makes the country “dry” and only breeds drinkers, while pouring millions in higher prices into the merchants’ pockets; their urge for knowledge, which shoots over the surface like a flying fish; and their national character (their vaunted democracy), which exists only on paper and in their mouths, for nowhere on earth is the poor wretch who can’t afford first class to America treated so miserably and shamefully badly as in that “free” land. And on the West Coast the North Americans can’t even object that they have to stem and test the flood of immigration. Hardly anyone immigrates from there, and why may the scoundrel who rides first class, for the sake of his few dollars, be bowed ashore, while the poor educated man in third has to put up with every humiliation?
Before landing—it was two in the afternoon, and on a Saturday only first-class passengers could be cleared; the poor devils in third, who truly needed to get out of hell more, were to go to Angel Island—a sailor shoved a pot-bellied bottle into my arm and told me to say “stomach medicine” when I passed customs. At the same time he made off with my typewriter, and for my Erika I would have chased after him through hostile gunfire with ten bottles of schnapps. On the little boat we swapped our treasures. That is American honesty!

Angel Island was soon reached, and through a lovely park we went uphill. All our baggage had been left in a room beside the landing pier. When we entered the dormitory, my hair stood on end. Three tiers of iron beds like in prisons were stacked one atop the other—forty-three beds in all—and not a single chair in that whole wide, unfriendly room!

With the help of the negress we put six mattresses on two of the lowest beds and filled the gap enough that we could safely lay the child between us; otherwise it would surely have fallen onto the hard floor. Gray wool blankets—who knows who and how many had lain in them—were given to us only upon special request, and when I got truly angry they allowed me, as a writer, to fetch something from my trunk at the landing place. Then we were told that leaving the first floor and stepping onto the stairs would be punished with 14 days’ arrest. In the dining hall men and women were strictly separated, and husband and wife were not allowed to speak together. Food was served so fast you had to throw it down and hurry back to the “dungeon.” The handleless coffee cups—meant for Chinese and Japanese women—burned your fingers.

I have seldom enjoyed so many bedbugs in one night as on that night on Angel Island. Beryl cried nonstop and her pee ran over to me despite a wall of cloth. The woman from Guatemala, with her maid, snored like a walrus, and the Costa Rican groaned, “Ave Maria purísima.”

God first—this truly was a trip from hell!

The next morning I set my Erika (which I had recaptured) on one of the lower beds and, standing, wrote my travel reports home. I was the only one who spoke English, apart from the negress, who was too frightened to utter a sound, and so it was always:
“One of your group has … reached the stairs, left the toilet lid open, dumped out the water,” or committed some other mischief. “My group” included Chinese women, women from Central America, dark mixed-race women I had hardly ever spoken to. Among all of them I was the only white woman. In the end we all started laughing about it together; for how did I end up having to stand by devoutly while one of “my group” scrubbed the latrine or mopped the floor after her child?

The whole Sunday passed for us in prison, for as lovely as the grounds were and as blue the sky, we were not allowed to stir from the stale dungeon room and were marched, under police guard like criminals, to the dining hall for the +++halblauen Fütterung+++. Another bedbug night with Beryl as a fountain, and the good-hearted negress to scent the place with her race (all negroes and also the Indians have a distinctly strong racial odor), another morning with the noise of the Asians in our ears, brushing their teeth and scraping their tongues outside the door—then they led us up the hill to the doctor, who nearly tore out my eyelashes during the eye exam, looked into my mouth, throat, and almost down into my stomach, had me move knees and arms, and finally sent me on to the gynecologist. The woman doctor, to her and my health, contented herself with a look at my face. I already thought it would come down to a virginity exam, since this kind of human, in the United States according to my later experience, would likely belong to prehistoric phenomena—and at last I was allowed, as leader of my group, to go on to the next office for further examination. There we had to prove we could read and write. Before me the Costa Rican read, and the rich planter from Guatemala, who bitterly regretted choosing Third Class, and then came I, ready to declare with a gentle smile that I could neither speak nor write any language. The official, however, studied my passport, which said journalist, and asked no question at all. I had, after all, been the unlucky interpreter for my group, from whom I now took my leave. The mother of wet Beryl, grateful to me, recommended a Negro acquaintance, and regardless of any color and race prejudices of others, I followed in her wake to Divesadero Road, where I had a tiny room—the most pleasant I had lived in for years, because it was so absolutely quiet and I am extremely sensitive to noise.

At the Golden Gate.

San Francisco is very beautiful. The streets are like London’s, also the signs and the wealth of advertisements, yet the city—except for the notorious Chinatown—lacks the charm of the unexpected. You know where a street will begin and where it will end, even if it should be three miles long; after the first house you can guess what all the others in the row will be like inside and out; you never run into anything old, odd, out of the ordinary. That makes the city a bit dull.

Most wonderful of all is the public library, where you can borrow books in the most varied languages with the signature of a property owner or a deposit of—I think—ten dollars, and where pleasant tables in the great hall invite serious study. Otherwise you find the usual perks of a big city, but less music than at home and no opera.

The shops had a certain new charm for me. Best of all are the delicatessens, where you can get not only the usual cold cuts and breads but all sorts of ready-made salads (fish, bean, potato, cabbage, and mixed), mayonnaise, hot sausages, boiled lobster, and other treats, so you never need to cook and can still eat well. I lived on crusty rolls and some liverwurst, made tea with it, and ate peaches by the dozen. I rarely had three meals a day. Because of severe joint pains from the sudden cool-down (in August San Francisco seemed an ice cellar to me after the tropics) I worked and studied in bed under four blankets, ate my breakfast only after eleven and thus made it my midday meal, typed two or three hours on the Erika, set out on study walks through the city or to Golden Gate Park, painted if there was still time, traded books at the library, bought more rolls and some sausage, and crawled—with books, sausage, bread, and so on—back into bed to enjoy, painlessly under the four blankets, the bodily and the mental pleasures till near midnight.

The most beautiful thing in San Francisco is undoubtedly Golden Gate Park. It lies within reach of Divesadero Road (reachable to me is what lies within a half hour’s walk) and is like a forest in deep solitude. You would never guess the nearness of a big city. Tall eucalyptus trees with their dull gray-green, stiff, sickle-shaped leaves form a rampart against the street and at the same time a broad grove. Warm sun draws out their resinous scent, so soothing, and moonlight turns them all into shimmering half-moons.

Besides them you find araucarias (conifers with unusually thick, stubby needles), subtropical palms, ornamental shrubs of every kind and country, and flowerbeds that glow in every color out of the green lawn. White columns are suddenly mirrored in small ponds ringed with trees of varicolored leaves, and everywhere you go the gray squirrels of America run up to you tame, even climb onto your arm, and beg delightfully for nuts and treats. Many birds are tame, too, and if you make the effort to cross the park, you reach the uneasy rocky shore and the cliffs where the seals frolic. They are not shy at all and do the most perfect somersaults into the water.

In San Francisco I had two unexpected joys: People had urged me to write for Upper Styrian papers as well and sent me five addresses. One piece appeared much later in the Obersteirer Blatt, three went unanswered and presumably ended up in the wastebasket, and the fifth—and, as I thought, worst piece (in any case I was already a bit tired of the Panama Canal as a topic)—got a very nice reply from the editor of the Knittelfeld Newspaper, who asked for foreign stamps and further pieces and of course wrote, “Dear Mr. Karlin!” Little by little there grew between us a friendship that lasts to this day.

The second joy bore fruit more directly. Dr. Perz, then editor of the Cillier Zeitung, had a sister married in San Francisco, and she had said she would like to meet me if I should, against expectation, come north. I visited her and spent many very happy hours in her home, mostly in her kitchen, for which I developed a great fondness.

Mrs. Rom said to me one day: “San Francisco is gorgeous! It’s never hot here!”
“I can tell, to my pain,” I answered, teeth chattering, “I have never once felt warm.” My first act had been to buy a wool cardigan and warm gloves, and if I ran along the sunny side of a house on a day without wind, I could even imagine it wasn’t absolutely cold. But warm???!

Los Altos.

Through Mrs. Rom I met a great many Austrians and Germans and was driven by car as far as Los Altos. This suburb lies some thirty miles or more outside San Francisco in the hill country, and the drive there under eucalyptus and trees turning color was wonderful. Soon you are among orchards where the plums lie as a blue carpet (peaches are thrown to the pigs). Over it all is a bright blue sky, and the hills are a dull reddish brown, the only dead thing in the picture.

One peculiarity of the United States is that you can pitch a tent and live outdoors anywhere. Wherever there is a vacant lot you may live for a while, and thus a summer getaway with a kettle and traveling walls is very cheap and interesting, if not overly comfortable. We picnicked likewise on such a tree-dotted lawn and enjoyed the beauty all around, before we drove on to Los Altos and were lavishly entertained there too. It was a typical farm with almond, peach, plum, pear, and nut trees. The flowering trees were mainly kinds of acacia and pepper trees.

From Los Altos you can climb Mount Hamilton and visit the famous observatory, but in August rattlesnakes are blind as they shed their skin and thus unable to give their usual warning rattle, so bites are to be feared. For that reason we gave up the climb.

Marvelous are the redwood trees you come upon at some distance beyond Berkeley. Some are so enormous that a horse-drawn wagon can drive through a hole in the trunk near the roots, and forty men can scarcely encircle the largest; but more beautiful and more wondrous than the odd shimmer of their reddish bark in the sunlight and their arrow-straight trunks is their great age. It is thought they were already large trees at the birth of Christ, and that some perhaps are as old as the pyramids. What, then, has such a tree seen! How many times may the earth around San Francisco have split open in jolts only to close again much later? What changes have the sea and the bay here undergone? What might the wind, now blowing down from Alaska, now rushing from Japan and China to finally meet this resistance, have whispered to them? What do their crowns know about the being of the world?

I won’t even speak of the skyscrapers, the drunken Americans, and things everyone knows from a thousand reports. I do want to mention, though, a very fine custom that lets a respectable woman—if she must go alone at night—wrap herself in the flag of Stars and Stripes. If a man insults or molests her then, he insults his own national flag and is punished very severely. For assault—even if the woman should not be respectable—the sentence, when force is proven, is fifteen years’ hard prison. If a negro does it, he is lynched. One walks quite carelessly through San Francisco. In the cold climate—and the wind can make your marrow curdle—the male two-leggers (so called to distinguish them from real men) don’t fly apart so easily.

The fog is really awful. Sometimes I left the library at ten and found the pavement soaking wet.
“Oh heavens, it’s raining!” I cried then, aghast, my thoughts compassionately on my white shoes with flat rubber soles, from which I was no more parted than from my Erika.
“Where would it be coming from, Miss,” some San Franciscan would say dismissively, “that’s only fog!”

Still, enough moisture in the air to get through a coat and give you the feeling of wet cold.

On the “Empire State.”

I stayed two months in San Francisco, got to know the land and its people, and was allowed to prepare in the splendid library for my further journey; for only after thorough preparation is a short stay in a country worthwhile—otherwise you see only the surface and wander forever astray.

At last I chose as my destination the Sandwich Islands, today Hawaii, from where I could either swing off to the true South Sea islands or set my course for Japan.

It was the first ceremonial steamer send-off. I had left Genoa in falling rain in the dark, from Peru I had only taken coastal steamers, but the “Empire State” crossed the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, and so the band played solemn tunes while the lines were cast off. Paper streamers flew through the air. People wept or waved, and once again I set off, utterly alone, into the distance.

And once more in steerage.

On land I am—presumably because somewhere on earth I have a house and vineyard—the capitalist who looks down on the people, not in arrogance, heaven forbid, but with the unmistakable feeling of a boundary. I value cleaned fingernails and noses, I love good manners, and a rough manner, even if accompanied by virtues, has never much appealed to me; on board, by contrast, I am not only a socialist but a furious communist and secret subversive. Why is the one who can’t pay more than fifty dollars for a shorter passage treated like an inferior animal, and the one who pays a hundred and fifty out of his surplus treated like a god-favored prince? Simpler bunks, simpler food, less favorable parts of the ship—of course; but this dismissive treatment of steerage passengers is something that, in our people’s age, ought to be forbidden. The Americans, who are always talking about their vaunted rule by the people, in fact know only First and Third. In Third travels “beast”; in First the nation’s elite.

On these steamers the color line is drawn in First as well. Chinese, even if rich, Japanese, or other “colored,” as they say there, are not admitted. For that reason I too sat below in dreadful steerage with a Russian who had become an American and married a Chinese man, though she had the money for a better passage. Besides the two of us there were only Japanese women, Chinese women, a few Portuguese women (also brown and not white), a Filipina beauty like a shriveled walnut, and some creature poured together from several races.

The Asian women were of course all married, and the men came at every hour of day and night, talked loudly, ate in the cabin, changed clothes. I had, as always, asked for a top bunk and looked down on all that goings-on with my Erika. Things were so insecure that I had to keep my shoes on so as not to lose them overnight, and my trunk—my only trunk—was down in the hold. By mistake they had taken it from me and thrown it in there. In Honolulu they couldn’t find it, swore they had put it on the dock, and paid me no compensation despite all my fury. Meanwhile the trunk went on to Singapore and returned three months later, inglorious and a bit more bent, contents and all. In it was the dictionary in ten languages I had compiled and written out by hand, and the Peruvian idol, so that my joy at the reunion was undivided.

The children’s screaming was nonstop in the dormitory, and Oriental women—especially Japanese—never hit the little ones. They pat them soothingly on the back and that settles it. Once the child has yelled itself out, it goes quiet again on its own.

Worst of all I found the food. We ate at long bare tables, and the dishes were set in the middle. You had to see that you grabbed something, for the Portuguese were like savages. Afraid of not getting enough, they overloaded their plates, and the best bits were gone before you reached the pot. Often they left food, but always on their plates …

And the food was so tasteless that we often begged rice from the Chinese.
The steward and chief steward were very nice, and the officers too—in the few encounters we had—were courteous. Word went around that a woman journalist was traveling Third Class, and soon the ladies brought me baskets of beautiful fruit (farewell gifts from home) to hand out among the poor Asiatic women, and I had plenty of fruit for myself as well. What tempted me most were the little baskets themselves, but in the end, so as not to burden myself, I gave them away too. From then on, little males and females came down to the lower deck, and at first I was delighted. But when an old lady turned me this way and that like some prehistoric dinosaur, asked the age of my parents, and began measuring my head size (which was said to be special), my enthusiasm went down the drain. I felt like a corpse on the dissecting table. Nice as the gifts were, the humiliations stung, because I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t receiving them as an equal. Whatever I was on land—at sea I had become a piece of human scrap, and the excessive interest paid to my hat, badly chewed by time and fate, sent gooseflesh up my back. Nothing on my long journey felt as awful as the stares from First Class down at me in steerage. Up there is where I belonged by background, education, and wishes, and here below, in dirt, ignorance, and roughness, I had to mill about—only because we former Austrians have become an impoverished people …

And yet kindness rules among the wreckage of steerage, and you get to know life a thousand times better. What stories I heard from all those who understood a Western language! And when I left, a Chinese woman slipped a letter into my hand with a secretive gesture. I nodded, hurried off the ship, and put the paper in my pocket. Later, when I wanted to mail it, I saw to my dismay that there was no address on it, and when I opened it to learn more, I found a dollar bill for me! Even the Asiatic woman had gauged how poor I must be to travel steerage as a European. She helped, woman to woman …

Honolulu on Oahu.

Hilo, with the wonderful crater of Hale mau mau, the “house of eternal fire,” which is part of Kilauea, is the largest of the Hawaiian Islands; but Honolulu, on the smaller island of Oahu, is the chief port of the group and is touched by all ships that sail from east to west. So it has an extensive harbor, and you find people there from every country under the sun, all of them feeling they left their customs, and often their heart, back in the motherland. For that reason Honolulu is not much less sinful than beautiful Panama, but you forgive it less easily, because it’s whites who own the group, not mixed-bloods, and because the climate is not as devastating as Central America’s. The islands lie on the equatorial boundary and are pleasantly warm in winter, in summer not unbearably hot (for the tropics).

The island of Oahu is wildly broken, and you can see from the mountains that underground fire raged mercilessly here and the sharp tropical downpours have worked the soil, for all the slopes are cracked and deeply furrowed; the peaks often look sharp as a hair, and the bedrock gleams through everywhere in the light green. There is nothing lovelier than the narrow, rising Nuuanu Valley, where the road is lined with guava trees (yellow fruit with many red seeds, tasty but with an initially unpleasant smell) and long-needled casuarina trees (ironwood), and where it ends in a row of steep cliffs over which the victorious Kamehameha drove his enemies to their deaths on the rocks and into the sea. The meadows look wonderfully light green and smooth, the big, pale tropical flowers bloom sweetly, golden-yellow in the garden shrubs shine the chalices of the allamanda, and with a soft trickle the streams run from fissured rock. Japanese and Chinese work in their gardens, and around the Pali, the upper cliffs, swirl fine white mists where elves are said to live.

Gentler and broader is the Manoa Valley, where it rains almost always, though the rain is more like strong shredding fog, followed by surprisingly beautiful rainbows. Famous, of course, is the beach under Diamond Head—the wide beach of Waikiki (“leaping sea water”), where people bathe and the popular sport of surfing takes place, where guns are built into the mountain, hidden from everyone, and where you find the tanks with tropical fish. I don’t fall into raptures easily, but those fish have always seemed to me the most splendid thing in the South Seas. Their shapes are so odd—like prehistoric frogs, broad ribbons, flat plates, butterflies, pincushions, and other unthinkable things—and at the same time they have colors you could only dream up in an artist’s fever: deep yellow with a blazing black shadow, blue like a summer sky with pink lights, light green like a warm spring forest in May with brown shadows, and golden like melted sunlight. Sometimes they have the eye on their back, often sticking out like a button, at times like a pearl on the black stripe around the body, and they always shimmer in the water as if made of the finest silk. You see the dangerous octopus with its terrible grasping arms, and the sea spider with its countless legs. For hours I could wander through the little gray house and marvel at the wonders of the deep.

Oahu is the most fortified island held by the North Americans, and sixty to eighty thousand men lie in barracks and tents on the plain, ready to defend the group against the Japanese. But deep down every American senses it can’t be held against an enemy fleet. Another circumstance also heightens the interest of the two great Pacific powers in these islands. Around Oahu the sea floor is slowly rising; why, no one knows for sure—probably due to shifting sand and pressure coming down from the Bering Strait. What is certain is that in fifty years an area like today’s California will have been added, and the Americans will thus come into unexpected land, which wouldn’t be unwelcome to the Japanese either.

I lived in a wooden building on Circular Lane. I couldn’t always live where I wanted; I had to put cheapness first. The view looked out on the Punchbowl—an old crater right behind Honolulu, so named because of its shape—and on some gardens. It was green around me all the time, and I needed that in a way I can hardly describe today. Although I seemed to have recovered completely from Peru, two things remained with me: a deep bitterness and irritability that usually ended in long fits of weeping and could not be overcome, and a mental and spiritual cloudiness that showed especially in conversation. I could no longer express my thoughts clearly as before—except in writing—and I did not regain my full mental strength until long after Japan …

This made me thin-skinned and shy of people, and the humiliations I met with in Honolulu were the worst of the whole journey, though in the gentler light of the past they aren’t quite so ghastly. They were all about my clothes.

“My God, why don’t you powder and paint? Why don’t you wear modern clothes? Why not silk stockings?”—in short, the questions never ended. Once a very rich American, whose correspondence I would have gladly managed, said to me:

“I’d hire you if you were dressed like a thousand-dollar doll …”

“I thought you needed someone who can work!” I answered coldly, and left the office.

Another time someone said to me:

“All right, I’ll hire you, but every Sunday you have to drive out with me, and we’ll have a splendid time!”

I turned the offer down. Not out of prudery, as I’ve often said. A woman may give herself—that’s her own right. You trade yourself for higher things. But to “lend” yourself, body and soul, to a superior—that has never crossed my mind, even at the height of hunger. A woman must set a price on herself, especially if she is an artist. A pig roots in the muck with other pigs; an eagle, for all I care, mates in the air or soars alone. He leaves to the mire what belongs in the mire. I left the two-legged males of that ilk there.

The Paper in the Fence.

Meanwhile—despite the lack of powder and paint, which have always been a nasty coating to me, something I avoid like anything false or misleading—and despite my clothes, which were neither nice nor modern—I was not entirely without a certain general recognition. Here’s why:

Even on the Empire State the shipping line had kindly drawn the editor of the Star Bulletin’s attention to me, and for the first time in my life I was “interviewed.” They had written about me already in Panama, but in brief. Here they wrote a long piece about my journey, my experiences, and my plans, and through that every person in the white settlement (in Honolulu, as I’ve said, there are all races and peoples, and Europeans are few in proportion) knew who I was and what I wanted in Hawaii.

One evening I was sitting as usual in the lovely, airy library, studying the early history of the islands, when someone leaned over me from behind and spoke my name. I looked up and recognized an acquaintance from Panama, who had left me his address and asked me to report on the islands as a place for planters to settle. Since I had gained no experience yet, no answer had gone out, and here he was now on his way to the South Sea islands to settle somewhere. When he reached Honolulu and was walking alone through the streets, he saw a rolled-up newspaper in a fence that someone had thrown away, and on the front page, staring him in the face, was my name! Then he knew there were two places where I would turn up sooner or later: the post office and a library. So he went to the library first, and at the first table—still wearing the hat from Panama—there I sat.

He stayed several months in Honolulu, and since he wanted to go to Tahiti, I gave him French lessons in my free moments. I didn’t take any money for it, for we were both poor just then, but now and then he bought me an apple pie from an experienced Japanese woman, which I wolfed down with joy and which—eaten warm—also got digested. Cold, it was more dangerous, but back then I still had a stomach lining like a rhinoceros hide and survived many such pies.

The Sugar Mill.

At first I never dared to go far from Honolulu, I was too rattled; but I liked going into the ravines with the old South Seas settler, and one day a car overtook us on the road to Ewa. The gentleman called to us, said he knew me (blessed Star Bulletin!), and invited us both to ride with him. He was the school inspector, and through him I had the chance to visit many schools, to see how Americans teach in an overseas settlement, and to enjoy all the children sitting on the benches yellow, brown, or pale orange. Some children were not only very bright but sweet, and when I told them about our country—above all describing snow, which they had no idea of—many spoke to me innocently and asked about Europe.

Then the gentleman took us into the adjoining sugar mill; for sugar, along with pineapple and bananas, is Hawaii’s main product. Portuguese work in the fields and Filipinos in the factory, sometimes Chinese too. Naturally they prefer their own citizens and avoid hiring Japanese, who are very capable workers but are too well equipped with eyes and ears that see everything, hear everything, and then make it possible for the Japanese to copy everything the whites do.

Sugar cane is very hard to work. It needs proper planting and tending, enough rain almost up to ripeness and then drought or at least strong, unbroken sun; then the cane turns sweet. It is very hard and can only be cut stalk by stalk with a knife; it is heavy and so hard you carry it to the wagon with effort, and even so the wagons can’t get any closer into the field; once it is cut it must be milled as quickly as possible if you don’t want the sugar content to drop considerably, and all that demands skillful and numerous hands at the right time.

In the factory—I think the biggest of its kind—everything is set up so that neither material nor time is lost. The wagons drive into the high hall, which has a wide, deep trough down the middle, and with a sort of iron rake they pull the cane off the wagons into it. Then this trough moves upward, where on the first floor the workers wait for the mass and quickly feed it into the mills, from which the juice is drawn off into huge vats, the brown sugar into broad tubs, and the rest is separated for making rum. The brown sugar isn’t refined here; it’s shipped to America, and rum can’t be made anymore today. So they use the juice as syrup and put it in cans. What fibrous residue remains goes to the boiler rooms and feeds the fires, so that fuel is saved and everything is used …

The workers get a dollar a day and free housing in small wooden huts. A dollar sounds like a lot of money to us now, but its buying power is much reduced in Hawaii. A loaf of bread (smaller than our twenty-groschen rolls) costs ten cents, five bananas ten cents, a liter of milk twenty cents, an egg five cents, etc. For Europeans there is the added fact that they have certain race obligations, must dress better, must show themselves only in better hotels—a circumstance that leads to painful, hidden privation. I always walked the streets as if I had just stepped out of the best hotel, but my stomach kept up a true jeremiad, for breakfast was tea and bread, and the afternoon meal (standing in for both supper and lunch) was bread with tea. Before going to sleep an apple or a banana, and if things went well, one of those apple pies that weighed the stomach down with enough ballast to bring on a feeling of fullness. You felt like a ship righted against capsizing. Later, when my strength threatened to fail, I bought pork and beans from the Chinese in a fifteen-cent can. The pork was invisible except for a nut-sized bit of fat on top, but the beans were good. I drank unsweetened tea with it, studied, painted, wrote, and walked more than two hours a day in and around Honolulu, without ever breaking into complaints or bothering anyone. I paid my room on time, even if I stayed hungry, and I never let go of the idea of finishing the voyage around the world—but the joy and courage I’d had on the Bologna were gone.

The Mugging.

Little by little I earned something, even in this city, the worst place for earning. Around Christmas I sold various hand drawings, and later I translated for the Sugar Experiment Station, where they paid very well. They were mostly technical pieces from Spanish into English. Much as I liked the work, it was rare. Still, it got me past real want. It remained impossible to save for onward travel, but the translating at least let me live without fear for the immediate future, and invitations here and there helped me bear the daily “beans” with pork smell.

Then disaster struck.

The house where I made my home was occupied by mixed-bloods. I tried to keep my distance from them. (You often don’t know how to get free again, for as good-natured as these human crossbreeds are, they tend to slip into a kind of familiarity unpleasant to us Europeans.

My door didn’t lock well and at best could be bolted securely only from the inside. The fact that the building was wood and the shutters stayed unbarred added to the insecurity, and so it was no wonder that—I hadn’t enough money to use a bank—I carried my whole fortune (all too small!) around in my handbag. In the hot tropics it’s impossible to carry anything under your clothes.

I had gone with two ladies I knew out to the observatory in Kaimuki. We had admired the moon and some planets and got back to Honolulu after nine o’clock. After I said goodbye to my companions, I walked along the broad, brightly lit Beretania Street and noticed, under a lamp, a dark, tall man—apparently a Filipino. I walked past him calmly. A few seconds later I heard footsteps behind me and hurried on faster. All I feared was to be pestered again, for in that regard the “paradise of the Pacific,” as the Americans called it, was almost as bad as Peru. The harassment at times degenerated into vulgarity and made me fear any man who came near me—good, bad, or indifferent. I am small, and it isn’t pleasant to feel, all of a sudden, something like a tiger’s paw on your upper arm and a tiger’s voice, full of passion and its delights (which I strongly doubt), growled into your ear—still less when for days you carry the marks of the paw blue on your arm and the marks of the words black on your heart.

The street was neither deserted nor crowded, though it was one of the main streets. Cars whizzed past me in numbers, and a few pedestrians went into a house not far away. Then I heard the stranger’s steps right behind me, instinctively swerved hard to the side, felt a stabbing pain in my back, another in my left hand, and went down flat on my face on the hard pavement. In my injured hand I held the torn strap of my leather handbag.

Though my back was sore and my front even sorer, I was on my feet in a flash; here someone was running off with my very identity, so to speak. I wasn’t thinking of the money first: my passport was in the bag, and without a passport I was completely powerless in a foreign land. I tore off after the robber as fast as my legs would carry me, shouting at the top of my lungs.
Not a single car stopped, no matter how much I waved; no one came when I called for help, until I ran into a Japanese man. He, being fresher, dashed off after the fellow once I managed a few gasped words; an American joined us a hundred paces farther down. The man turned into a dark side alley; we followed. The American, the freshest of us, caught up just as the thief swung into a pitch‑black hollow lane, ran past him on the rebound, and lost a few precious seconds turning and darting in; the Japanese, who had also closed in on the man, fell into an unseen hole before the cut, and I arrived with my tongue hanging out, breathless, unable to take another step. So there we stood before the gloomy sunken lane—and in spite of it all, we ended up laughing.

Search as we might, the man had slipped us. The police, whom we rang up at once, appeared three quarters of an hour later and did nothing. Poor as a church mouse and without a single paper, I crept home.

Silk stockings.

This is the odyssey of a woman, a young and small one, so I won’t break off the story of the theft here. My fellow women should know what you’re up against when you travel alone in a far‑off country with little money (everyone bows to money), determined to live only for art.

Early in the morning I went to the Star Bulletin—wasn’t I, in a way, the paper’s foundling and therefore obliged to feed the “Star” interesting tidings?—and told my adventure. In the evening edition there was indeed a long piece on the front page, and they suggested to the thief that he at least put the passport in an envelope and send it back to me. A few valuable letters, a black agate, all my money, and all my papers were gone …

If I had thought that the man either couldn’t or wouldn’t read, and that my acquaintances, who unfortunately could and would read, would behave exactly as they did, I truly wouldn’t have given the Star Bulletin my story. The tears I shed over the loss were nothing compared to the tears and annoyance I had to get through the next week. The telephone, which in America is found in every house, rang all day long. And when I shouted the usual “Hello” into it, back came, right down the wire:

“But I just don’t understand! How can anyone carry all their money with them! Any sensible person…!” and so on, until I cut the current and hung up. After the fact, people are always very wise.

Mrs. M., who had always been very good to me, summoned me at once. I rushed over to her. As I climbed the stairs, I must have looked smaller and shakier than usual, for she threw up her hands and said:

“No, this won’t do! You must take a lover, so you’ll be protected!”

With my chronically black‑and‑blue arms—giving me a pleasant foretaste of what “love” with a man must mean, if he had the right to bruise you black and blue all over—you can imagine how thrilled I was by the suggestion. I’ve always taken it as a sign of great self‑control that I only spun on my own axis and, as I left, remarked:

“Of two evils I choose, whenever possible, the lesser!”

That evening the phone rang again, and Mrs. M. apologized.

“You have no idea how weak and small you look!” she cried contritely down the line.

Wasn’t that precisely the first reason she wanted to save me from the black‑and‑blue condition? I probably don’t understand men on that point—but I certainly understand women even less …

The advice was maddening—granted, but the thing that made me snort like some prehistoric dragon, and now makes me laugh the most, was the stocking offer. In Europe, love (or what commonly goes by that name) at least starts with flowers, sweets, or window‑climbing; in America it starts with stockings. Every man of my wide acquaintance who met me during the “thief week” gave a peculiar smile and assured me, in the course of the talk, that I had lovely legs, and that in silk stockings—which it would be a huge pleasure for him to provide—they would look even more enchanting; to which I always maintained that they felt—speaking for me, who as the owner of such lovely legs was surely the main party to the matter—more comfortable in cotton stockings, which were also—thanks be to Providence and the knitting mills!—far easier to darn. If I had accepted all the stocking offers, I could have started a business. Since I declined, I gained not in footwear, but only in knowledge of human nature.

After a week I got rude—rude to the cubic degree! Had I begged anyone for help? Was I under anyone? Did I lack the right to dispose over myself? And I avoided everyone I knew like the plague itself. That worked! I got translation work from the sugar analysis institute that kept me afloat, made extracts from documents for someone else, and translated a book from Danish into English for the Bishop Museum. Since I had to jump high for money, everyone made me jump very high—except the sugar company. They always paid well, and I never asked for more than I had asked as an interpreter in Panama. Any exploiting of another person has always been repugnant to me.

“Your little friend is a goose!” the silk‑stocking donors told Mrs. M., and I was glad of it. Geese are known to go about in their own feathers.

As a surfer.

One evening I was invited out to Waikiki. We got into an outrigger canoe—I in a borrowed coat, for I was always cold—and paddled out to sea in the moonlight. Before us stretched the glittering expanse; behind us the eerie black Pali grinned, and the heavily fortified Diamond Head, and the white beach of Waikiki. Surfing delighted me. We waited far out before the reef break for a wave. When we saw it coming, we all paddled like mad to get ahead of it. Suddenly it rushed in, lifted the canoe, and drove us shoreward at furious speed …

Once, though, we didn’t paddle fast enough, and the wave reared up behind us like a tower. It rose above me like a horribly green wall, then—splash!—down came a Niagara onto us and filled the boat to the brim. We sat there, soaked like a fully loaded sponge.

“Get out so we can bail the boat!” said Mrs. F., and I had to laugh, for the only place we could get out into was the sea. So that’s what we did—I, hat and coat included—which got all the more comical when I tried to get back in; for once my rubber shoes were above the water’s surface they refused, at any price, to go back down, and I had to be hoisted into the canoe like a dead fish.

Later, in borrowed clothes, I lay on the white sand and ate sausages while the Hawaiians played the ukulele and sang their old songs. It sounded infinitely melancholy.

The Hawaiians are very hospitable. Their favorite dish is poi, a soured mash of cooked taro, looking like paste and tasting like paste with sour added. You eat it from a coconut shell with the well‑licked index finger, which is therefore called the poi finger. The shell doesn’t need washing; you rinse it well with your finger anyway. In old times hospitality demanded that you first roll a ball of poi in your own mouth and then push it into the guest’s mouth with your tongue, but the Whites showed such aversion to this Hawaiian feeding method that it slowly died out.

Right there in the pale moonlight they danced the hula‑hula in grass skirts, a forbidden, eerily sensual dance. To show it off better, the women slowly loosen the girls’ flesh from their ribs, making the muscles play more easily. Since the Kanakas (“Kanaka” today means South Sea islander, but it’s a Polynesian word that simply means “man”) grow very fat, these loose masses of flesh hang down quite unbecomingly in later years.

The last prince of Hawaii.

In old times, strange changes appeared in the sky and odd fish on the shore at Waikiki when a prince of true chiefly or royal blood died—and now the last true prince of Hawaii lay on the bier.

For a whole week he lay so, in a very Christian church with very heathen customs. We went in at three in the morning from the beach road and up to the chancel. Below, in the nave, stood the huge bier, and at its head, on a kind of throne, sat the wife of the dead man, surrounded by the nearest of her court. She had to keep vigil day and night and could leave only for brief meals. She was dressed all in white and stood out pale against the green backdrop of the ornamental trees.

Around the bier stood the men of unmixed blood in the magnificent feather cloaks of old times, which now would be worn by the living for the last time. So beautiful and strange are they that one cloak is valued at a million dollars. They are assembled very tastefully from yellow and red feathers. But these little feathers were plucked alive from the tails of the birds by special bird catchers, and the creatures were let fly again to grow more feathers, for a bird had only two feathers! It took almost a hundred years before such a cloak came into being. Kamehameha, the most important chief (usually called a king), wore such a one, and in all there are four or five. The other gentlemen wore feather collars—still beautiful and costly enough—but they covered only the shoulders, not falling to the feet. They all stood motionless, except for the movement of the one arm that waved the kahili. That is a large feather fan, or rather a royal fly whisk, that must be moved to keep spirits away from the corpse. Giant kahilis, three meters high, stood farther out around the bier and were also gently swayed from time to time.

Most beautiful and moving of all was the singing. Old Hawaiian women who still master the uncanny laments let their voices rise, and I have never, never again heard anything so splendid, so bone‑shaking, so ghostly. It sounded like an incantation through the church, thoroughly pagan and wondrously gripping. You felt carried back into the realm of long ago, guessed at the dark villages no one dared to pass through, for the sorcerer‑priest kept secret watch for a victim and took whoever went by to consecrate him to the gods, when, on festive occasions, the little hairless dog—often raised at a woman’s breast—did not suffice. Then—on such a night—the notorious bone‑breaker likely stood on the path to the Pali and, when anyone dared pass, simply crushed his ribs and then his neck in his arms, until the wise youth, naked and well rubbed with oil to be slippery, dared slip past him and killed him in turn. Then you heard the wild war cry, the rush to the long war canoes, the scraping of wood on wet sand, and behind it the wailing of the women …

Through this singing exulted the surf, laughed the sun of the tropics, whimpered the savagery of a primal people, and below, unbroken and silent, the kahilis went back and forth, beside and above the princely corpse. When the women above fell silent, the men below sang, and again you thought of jagged cliffs, of devastating flash floods that often visit the coasts of these islands, and dreamed of Polo, the cruel fire goddess, who slumbered in the Hale mau mau, the house of eternal fire, and waited for earthly lovers whom she lured to ruin.

And then you thought of New Hawaii, of the dying‑out Kanakas, the inferior mixed‑bloods, the foreigners who played the masters here and added new vices to the well‑known old ones; who saddled the old warriors with their new weapons and wrung money out of everything—even out of the sun on the beach at Waikiki, where the leaning coconut palms entrusted their dreams to the waves and the wind, like a mother at a cradle, whispered in the long‑needled casuarinas.

A writer’s joys.

There were days when I wanted to despair. After the mugging I could no longer afford beans with a smell of meat, and my elderly pupil had left. He was looking for a suitable plantation, and in Hawaii there was nothing to be done in that respect, for land was expensive, and even if you worked it well, you never quite knew what to do with the yield. He decided first on Pago‑Pago in American Samoa and ended up on an island not far from Tahiti. With him, the apple pies disappeared from my diet.

And still I sat in the detested paradise of the Pacific and had to hear from every woman that my clothes were out of fashion, and from every male biped looking for a lightning rod, a knockoff heart in the cheapest edition thrown after me.

Then my mother wrote that my book “Mein kleiner Chinese” had finally appeared at the Deutsche Buchwerkstätten, and a few weeks later favorable reviews reached me along with the books. The postal clerk eyed the German address with malicious looks—at that time Reich Germans were still bitterly hated (1921)—but I walked home very cheerfully with the load, covered the bed with books, and imagined once more—though no longer as vividly as back on the mooring bollard of the “Bologna”—that I was destined to tear a leg off the world.

Today, by contrast, I feel that—figuratively speaking at least—the world has torn a leg off me. That’s how it goes on this round little world that is supposed to be the best of all known worlds. If it’s the best, then it’s a badly botched lump of clay.

The witness stand.

Once I had to serve as a witness for an acquaintance. I’ve forgotten the legal business entirely. Suffice it to say that, as a mute piece of furniture, I attended many meetings with court gentlemen. That brought me not only five dollars, but an unexpected offer for which I am still grateful today. The lady offered to lend me the fare to Japan. For there I had letters of introduction from home and was sure I could earn enough with my languages to live.

From San Francisco to Hawaii you may sail only on American ships; from Hawaii to Japan, only on Japanese ships—those are the rules, which no doubt make the companies rich and the travelers poor.

Again I took a ticket—the very cheapest—and on an Oriental steamer at that. There were four classes here: First, Second, Intermediate, and Third. Naturally, with the borrowed money (a hundred for the passage, fifty for the first jolt), I traveled Third.

Maybe my two years of privation and constant worries, shocks, and the heavy studying I pursued beside my bread‑and‑butter work had already worn me down—at any rate I felt the descent into the ship’s underbelly more crushing than ever before. The very smell that hits you—rotten, rancid, full of oil, the leftovers of seasickness, and sweating humanity—is awful. They ought to put the words from the gates of Hell above the stair opening:

“Abandon hope, all who enter!”

What’s certain is that I left my hope outside when I entered the cabin. There were bunks—three or four in a triangular space—but no bedding, no blankets, no pillows; nothing but yawning planks. A half‑crazy female of indeterminate race ran in and out. A servant who didn’t understand a word of English brought a scuffed, handleless cup of green tea. I burst into tears …

My Honolulu friends had all been very kind. Despite my resistance, they had got me into new, modern‑line clothes, pressed what they considered a Christian hat onto my bobbed head, and hung so many leis on me that I looked like a walking flower queen. These leis or garlands are always given to people leaving. They are made partly of fragrant flowers, partly of silk or twisted yellow crepe paper, partly of red lucky beans. Now I sat, a bent flower in all that splendor, on a bed that consisted of nothing but hard boards, and threw my arms around my faithful Erika.

At least the boards didn’t hurt her.

After a good while they called me to supper. I sat all alone at a small wooden table. Two un‑buttered potatoes stared dreamily and without enthusiasm into my face, and watery cabbage mingled its questionable odors with those all around. To the side opened the crew quarters, the storeroom, the washroom, and opposite me, with the ship’s anchor emblem, grinned an important, but not very appetizing, place, half ajar.

In line with Japanese ideas about gender, I had been kept separate from the male passengers—three in all—and when I think of their sad, shut faces, I’m grateful for it. But to sit in a stuffy passageway of the ship, in proud solitude, and eat plain vegetables and a piece of smelly meat lacked all charm, and all I could do was go up on deck and go on crying in a corner.

“Are you seasick?” a ship’s officer suddenly asked, bending over me.

“No, thank you!” I answered, trying to look content and brave.

“Do you belong in First?” he asked, perhaps fooled by the new dress and the lovely garlands—and maybe also by something else that always put me back in my place. Sadly I said I belonged down below.

He went away, and I sat on the edge of the deck hatch and thought that virtue—much praised in copybooks and in church on Sundays between eleven and twelve—seemed to have no practical value at all; for if I had accepted all those silk stockings for my praised leg extensions, I’d now be up in First. Instead I sat—wrapped in virtue and tears—on the drafty deck of the socially outcast. And I would have gladly bet I had learned more than all those yodelers who moved their jaws to music up there. They weren’t eating with their eyes on the place where the table scraps finally got carried!

As already mentioned, at sea I’m a communist.

All at once the breath of a voice touched me again (Japanese don’t touch physically—honor to them!), and a sailor beckoned me mysteriously to follow him. I went down into the depths and threaded the whole inside of the ship until I was dizzy; then a door slid back, finally a curtain—and I stood in a very nice, completely empty cabin, and up there, on the best bed with blankets, sheets, pillows, and so on, sat—my Erika!!!

I had been promoted to Intermediate.

Then I knew what I had always thought: they are good—the Japanese.

The five silent ones.
In second class there were only a few Japanese women with children, one always living on the back, the other at the breast, and five men who were Slavs and might have belonged to a Trappist order—at least when it came to silence. We sat at the same table and ate potatoes and meat that had already turned a bit, day after day; we greeted one another in Russian and otherwise kept silent in all living and dead languages. I crawled into bed next to my Erika and spent my uneasy sea voyage partly on my belly, partly on my back. As much as possible I studied shipboard life and drifted into philosophical musings, interrupted by practical experiments as to why the benjo, or “place of solitude,” had a square hole (why not round?) and why on one long side a porcelain board with a little inward curve was fastened. Since you can’t easily ask the male fellow passengers about such discoveries, nor watch other users, I stayed in the dark until Japan and only much later learned that this uncomfortable projection is meant as a knee rest. In fact, with that model your knees can go weak …

A few days before we arrived, one of the silent men came up to me and ruined my belief in his Trappism by asking me to translate a love letter from Croatian into German. I don’t know a word of Croatian, but my knowledge of Slovenian, though patchy, especially with modern expressions, let me get the gist—and besides, thank heaven, love letters follow a simple form. That’s how I learned we were compatriots.

One thing embittered me greatly. To give the victims of transport—for what were we but crates being shipped?—a little variety, they showed light plays on deck in the evenings when stomachs weren’t churning and the sky stayed clear, and there I saw a film that showed German atrocities in the most horrible way. Rapes, killing and starving children, arson, murder, and so on—and the audience were Asians, who couldn’t know these films were hate propaganda that only worked so-so even during the war and has lost all meaning today. But such a film planted in the minds of millions upon millions the idea that Reich Germans were the vilest rabble on earth. I never understood why Germany never put up stronger resistance to the sale of such films. It was a matter of national honor, and I would have felt called to stop such a thing even toward a hostile nation.

On this voyage I lost a day of my life, for I fell asleep on a Thursday and woke up on a Saturday. I didn’t sleep forty-eight hours, though; we just crossed the 180th meridian.

For eleven days I sailed past distant islands, then I noticed cooler air, even though it was early June, and then they said:

“Tomorrow we’re in Japan!”

In the Far East
A fine rain powdered the tender green of the coast before Yokohama, after we had spent several hours groping in fog for the entrance to the bay. It was the poetic spring rain the Japanese adore, but it didn’t awaken any poetic enthusiasm in me, not least because my travel kit included my Erika but not an umbrella. First, I’m no friend of carrying extra stuff, and second, umbrellas are treacherous things that shove themselves between your legs at the wrong time and endanger those as well as your spinal cord, and besides, they lack the tact to shout “here!” the moment you forget to take them along. And when I’m wandering on poetic heights, leaning against shop counters, I forget something as earthly and secondary as an umbrella. I comfort myself that you can’t get wetter than to the skin, and I’d rather buy hats that don’t mind being soaked now and then.

Hardly had we come ashore when the Russians grew talkative. We ate curry and rice together in a small, European-style inn, wandered all over Yokohama, and only said goodbye in the evening. I went on to Tokyo and spent the night at the Seyvkken Hotel. On the platform I got my first glimpse into Japanese thinking. Porter Number 3 was a nice lad and lugged all our things to different trains. When I was the last one waiting for the Tokyo train, he asked, after some hesitation and with his friendly Eastern smile:

“Please excuse me, but are you a man or a woman?”

Aside from my bobbed hair there’s nothing manly about me except my man’s soul, which has developed few feminine (and my enemies would probably say no) virtues. So I answered, a bit surprised: “I’m a Miss.”

“That’s what I thought,” he said, visibly satisfied, “but you were always standing with men.”

Heaven, if it were that easy to transform oneself, I’d gladly spend the rest of my life always standing with men …

The fulfillment of a wish.

I had wanted to live with Russians to brush up my language, and so I was delighted to read that a room was available in a Russian boardinghouse near the Ginza, in Yurakucho Sanchome. Off I went to find it, but instead of starting like a sensible person by asking questions somewhere, I rode the streetcar round and round for three hours all through Tokyo, always hoping I’d happen to land in the European quarter. I never got there because there is no such quarter.

At last I had a flash of insight when we passed the print shop of the English paper where I’d seen the ad, and there I learned where Yurakucho was. A quarter hour later a very polite Japanese man wearing what at first glance looked like a skirt to me (it was the pleated student trousers called hakama) escorted me right to the house, and another quarter hour later I had a room without board in the Russian boardinghouse. It cost forty yen a month (eighty marks), had only a bed, a table, a small wardrobe, and a single window that looked out on the railway bridge, the gray roofs of Tokyo, and a Japanese inn. From that you can see that life is unusually expensive for Europeans.

The Russian woman was an educated older lady, her daughter very pretty, kind, and very young. They took more care of me than strangers usually do, and the daughter took long walks with me toward evening, showing me all sorts of interesting things.

After paying the rent I had very little left, but I was with good people and, above all, among Europeans, and I knew right away I would like it.

Tea at the office.

Everyone to whom I had letters of introduction welcomed me warmly, especially the Japanese. Viscount Sh. invited me to visit him at his office, and when I arrived, the servant immediately brought us tea in small handleless cups. That’s how it always is with business talks and formal visits. If you empty the bowl, it signals that the visit is over.

The Japanese are very interested in politics, and he asked right away about my own political views. He introduced me to some very charming Poles, and through them I met Dr. B., an Imperial German who treated me extraordinarily kindly, and to whom I owed many kindnesses and later many students. Her husband taught at the School of Commerce, and she worked in the lab of Tokyo’s largest chemical factory. She was good-hearted, but unlike my Honolulu friends, who all saw spirits, she was entirely down-to-earth in her views; when I spoke of physical premonitions, she chalked it up to my stomach—really the emptiness in it—and never to my soul. She stood firmly in the natural world and probably attracted me by that complete contrast, for I’ve always had a certain bent for mysticism, which the East and especially the South Seas with their magic deepened.

The man in the tub.

Through Viscount Sh. I got a summer-course job at Meiji University, which specializes in foreign languages. Mrs. M., a Japanese woman who had grown up in France and had divorced her Japanese husband because she claimed the six years by his side had been wasted (you see how much education works back on racial temperament), had set our first meeting for five o’clock. Five o’clock with Japanese means closer to six, so I couldn’t find a soul in the whole building. I finally reached the big courtyard, where in one corner stood a big barrel and inside it a man. He saw me too and slowly crawled out of the hot water, wearing nothing but the narrowest strip of white cloth as a loincloth. We bowed very formally to each other, and I offered up my meager Japanese, which consisted of “please” and “kindly excuse me!” Since his English matched my Japanese, we spoke only by signs; then we bowed very politely again. He jumped back into the barrel, and I went up one of the stairways to the second floor.

Among duplicates.

The darkest time of my stay in Japan was when I got a job with an Imperial German machine company. The money I earned there let me pay off my Honolulu debt—an honor debt that weighed heavily on my heart—while the income from an evening course on the one hand and some lessons arranged for me in the boardinghouse on the other were enough to cover my room and let me live frugally.

I’ve never been cut out for the business side of anything; I’ve never known how to do the math right or turn my work into money; everything to do with buying and selling goes against my soul. Most of all, machines. And then there was a gentleman at that firm whose very appearance made the marrow in my bones curdle. He tossed around “Schweinehund,” and his eyes went through me like the spine of a candelabra cactus. When he looked at me, every thought in my head froze.

But perhaps I would have found my way in this operation where typewriters clacked nonstop, orders whirred over me, telephones rang, and the Japanese girls scurried—if so many things unrelated to the firm hadn’t pressed in from outside.

First, the summer heat. The tropics are cool compared to Tokyo in July and August. An oven—but not a dry heat, a steam oven! Clothes mildewed and changed color; shoes went green, hair hung in strands, clothes stuck to the skin, and the nights—with their swarms of mosquitoes and too little air—were so awful that lovely Zina and I one evening slept out on the back balcony. First the mosquitoes tortured us to death, and toward morning a heavy, unhealthy, cold wet dew fell so hard that we got aching joints and had to give up the fresher camp. By day we sighed with Mrs. K. whenever we met:

“Ah, kako zarkoje!” (Oh, how hot it is!)

But I had to go to the office—at half past one in the afternoon—after a twenty-minute walk along the sun-baked quay, and there I sat behind a curtain that felt red-hot, making a poor shield for a window facing the sun. I sat there from two until six or half past seven, for with Imperial Germans there is no order in that regard. You stay as long as there’s work, no matter what the clock says. With Americans and English you’re treated much more politely, paid better, and given more perks (discounts, etc.), and you leave exactly on the minute; if you really do have to stay, you get overtime pay.

Third, I was—without fully realizing it—still so shaken in my soul that I couldn’t quite gather my thoughts. Only in writing—presumably because my whole heart was in it—did I forget nothing; otherwise everything blew out of me like chaff before the wind, and holding on to anything took terrible effort.

Fourth, and maybe it was all connected, I was severely undernourished. In San Francisco, bread and tea; in Honolulu, the same; and now, in Japan, the following diet:

For breakfast a piece of Salsen bread for ten sen; at noon, bean rolls—five of them, again for ten sen; in the evening, ten sen’s worth of red peaches, and the man I bought them from knew so well that quantity mattered to me more than quality that he always threw in a number of half-rotten ones as extra weight. But those bean rolls were the most awful thing I could imagine. An unpleasant, thin, sweet, mushy dough with a bluish-black mass of mashed sweet beans inside! But they were cheap and filled the stomach. Still, when I sat across from the terror of the machine office, who had just come from a hearty lunch and was smoking his digestion cigar, I often thought:

“I’d like to know what you’d manage if, after sleepless nights, you had to teach from early morning, clatter on a typewriter in the worst heat on an empty stomach, and in the evening go on two-hour study walks—followed by nothing but hard red peaches and a hot bed!”

No one knew about it, and even back home in the boardinghouse I always kept a face as if I’d eaten my fill.

The “Asahi Shimbun.”

Dr. B. introduced me to the reporter of the Asahi Shimbun, Tokyo’s leading paper, and that meant not only a thorough write-up—which brought me together with many people I could learn from—but from then on I often wrote for the paper or its supplements and earned enough to finally pull myself out of the mire of want. My photo, which ran one day, looked like a frizzy-haired Asian with a mouth like a little oven door, but even so a young man from the north wrote asking to be my travel companion. I was to answer him secretly, since he planned to run away with me because his uncle, who ran a sardine business, wouldn’t let him go. I lovingly advised him to go on being a sardine tamer, thus preserving a precious nephew for his uncle.

O ye, who tread the narrow way
By Tophet flare to Judgement Day,
Be gentle when the heathen pray
To Buddha at Kamakura.

R. Kipling.

An hour from Yokohama lies the quiet fishing village of Kamakura. The long, mighty swells of the Pacific roll in solemnly and wet the beach—except when the powers below rumble, the earth quakes, and the raging spring tide tries to destroy the place.

Kamakura wasn’t always as quiet as it is today. After the fall of the Fujiwara, who had grown too soft, the proud warrior Yoritomo Minamoto came and founded Kamakura, the city of knights. In that time the warrior class took shape with its strengths and weaknesses. To follow one’s lord, to keep faith with one’s prince, to shun all that is weak—these were the guiding ideals. In religion too, the gentle invocation of Amida Buddha of the Jodo sect gave way to fear of hell with all its punishments, for such fearless warriors needed a stronger hold in faith than lofty ideals. The huge ginkgo tree, whose fan-like leaves turn pale yellow in autumn, has seen Kamakura rise and fall, and the red of the newer and older temples and shrines shines out of the deep summer green.

What still makes Kamakura famous today is the Great Buddha, whose temple the spring tide carried off three times, and who, on a slight rise, defies wind, weather, and devastating earthquakes. He sits on an opening lotus bud, and the two offering basins at his feet are as tall as a person. He towers like a mountain, and the longer you linger before him, the more overwhelming the sight becomes.

He is the best expression of Buddhism I’ve seen anywhere. The loosely laid fingers show calm; the posture is natural, free, without stiffness, with a slight sinking-in that I love. The limbs have the soft rounding of the sage and thinker, not the hard swell of the muscle-man that delights most Europeans. From this relaxed posture come the three belly folds, which for the Japanese are the height of artistic expression, for they show how well the artist has captured the calm, the slight slackness of the philosopher, the predominance of spirit in his form. The active West delights like a child in physical strength, but the thinking, inward-turning East seeks the power of the spirit, for which the body is only a vessel, a means and an expression.

Buddhism seeks freedom from the compulsion of the senses: a gradual growing of the soul beyond the purely physical, material realm; a merging (not an extinguishing) in the universal soul, in which alone all experience and all wisdom are found, along with that nirvanic peace that nothing disturbs anymore, that has found within itself everything the world in all its immensity can offer.

All that the Buddha’s face expresses. A supernatural, moving calm lies on the still features, and around the mouth is a fine trace—not a smile, but the hint of gentle amusement that seems to say:

“Nothing that exists in the changeful play of the transient touches me, but from my own experience I know the longing of a human heart, and now I smile at the illusion that holds you captive and darkens all your thinking, and I pity you until you find the path that leads to Nirvana!”

You stand before the immense bronze figure and feel something of that otherworldly calm, which makes us a little heartsick because our weak hearts are bound to the perishable.

Beyond Kamakura a long bridge leads to the shrine of Enoshima, built into the cliffs. Japanese women in kimonos, a child on their back, approach, clap their hands, toss in a coin, and vanish again. Here lives the goddess of beauty, wealth, and art, and her servant is the snake; that’s why devotees of Benten won’t kill snake or lizard—or even a snail.

There’s a soft, sunny quality to Japanese belief. On my wanderings through town and country I often came upon a fox shrine. It’s dedicated to Inari, the goddess of the harvest, and her servants are the foxes. They carry the key to the treasure house in their tails and guard, at night under the scarlet torii, the goddess’s treasure jewel. People pray to them for money, and that’s why there’s always a fox shrine behind a geisha quarter. Whether thanks to the foxes or to fate—anyway, I always had enough money in Japan.
The most beautiful figure in the pantheon is Jizo. He was Buddha’s favorite disciple, and he turns no one away, however sinful. His smile never fades, which is why his image stands on the graves of suicides and murder victims. You find him at street corners, standing on an opening lotus, and mothers tie a little scrap of kimono to his arm or toss pebbles into the stone basin to remind the disciple to help the little ones in the riverbed of heaven when the evil blue demon Oni and the witch Shozuka-no-baba come rushing in to topple the stone piles every child must build for its parents before it may enter eternal peace—always one little stone for a sin of the father, one for a sin of the mother.

The Festival of the Dead.

Most of all I loved strolling up and down the brightly lit Ginza in the evening and enjoying the enichi, or evening markets. You could pick up very pretty things for little money, and all the bustle reflected the character of the people. There you got to know every layer of the population and also the needs of the individual.

In early July they had celebrated the festival of the Oxherd King and the Weaver Princess, and in the grove around Ueno the students had tied poems to the branches in honor of the lovers, for only on this one night could the banished pair reach each other from one end of the Milky Way to the other, and only in good weather, when the magpies formed a bridge over which the lovers could then walk to one another. Shortly after, they celebrated the Bon Festival—formerly on the seventh day of the seventh moon—and on that day the Ginza was full of stalls not only in the evening but from early morning on, and in the pretty baskets you saw all the first fruits, many still unripe, to be dedicated to the dead. Quite fresh, still green tatami or straw mats lay there rolled up, and in bamboo vases stood lotus buds.

Throughout the East the lotus bud is the symbol of the soul; for just as it opens to the light with a pop at the first ray of morning, so the human soul opens to full bloom at the first ray of the eternal light.

On the evening before the Bon Festival the fresh mats are spread before the tokonoma, the place of honor in the main room; the first fruits, along with sake and fresh rice in small cups, are set before the family altar; and in the courtyard, between the gate and the house door, a fire is lit so the smoke will beckon the souls home. These returning spirits are not felt as frightening; they are the nearest kin, sharing in everything, meant to help and advise, and they belong to all feasts as naturally as the living themselves.

Down the Sumida River (through Tokyo) people set little metal or paper ducklings, each holding a lit candle, to drift toward the sea so that the souls of the drowned also receive an offering, and for that reason all the fruits for the dead are finally thrown into the water.

Everywhere you see warm remembrance, but nowhere mourning that might darken other people’s lives. It is a basic trait of the Japanese to keep their sorrow to themselves and not burden anyone with it. Even when they announce sad news, they always do it smiling. They are masters of self-control without seeming severe for it.

My trip to Nikko.

Through Dr. B., the English poet and professor E. Speight heard of me and invited me most kindly to spend several days in Nikko, and as a bank holiday fell pleasantly between Sunday and a weekday, I was able to leave one evening.

It is a four-hour ride from Tokyo to Nikko, always across a fertile plain, slowly toward the northwestern mountains.

The platform was crowded. Mothers jumped into the air to quiet the loudly howling child strapped to their backs; other children, calm and with deep, solemn eyes that shone like glossy coals from their yellow faces, wiped their drooling stub-noses in mother’s freshly oiled hair; others clung to the folds of the kimono, and the ripest little ones of all carried bundles. Men and women tumbled over one another getting on, and no sooner had they found seats than the sandals flew from their feet and the feet disappeared under the kimono. Everyone lit their tiny, small-bowled pipes, took two or three puffs, and cheerfully tucked them back into the sash. Old women, with more bald scalp than hair and black gleaming teeth (in earlier times all married women had to polish their teeth black so as not to tempt strange men), poured sake into little cups they also conjured from somewhere in their folds and drank to each other. From the stowed baskets rose a mingled smell of daikon, bean cakes, and fish.

Kiri trees, with their fan-like leaves and silky, light wood—the wood used to make geta, the wooden sandals—lined the way, and again and again there was a lotus pond with its white and, more rarely, pink blossoms and huge plate-like leaves. They don’t grow lotus only for the sacred bloom. The root, when sliced, is a pretty, tasty vegetable (white and riddled like Swiss cheese), and the roasted seeds (the black kernels, as big as corn) taste good.

Gradually, as the train picked up speed and the air grew warmer, the old men threw back their kimonos, under which they wore only a loincloth, and fanned their bellies; and when that brought no real relief, they stretched their legs, up to the thigh, one after another out the window. Oh, how the fresh air rushed along the heated flesh! Short-lived, however, was this joy; for very soon a humble conductor appeared and begged them “most graciously to deign to draw in their honored legs, for a passing train or some other unexpected regrettable occurrence might carry off the very respectable legs,” and so on. So the thighs went back under the kimonos and only the fans flew.

Opposite me sat a young man with much good will and little English. He stared at me a long time and then asked, dead serious:

“Meinerlieber fährt wohin?”

At first I wasn’t quite sure what he meant, but long practice with foreigners has made me quick with languages, and so I guessed that I was “Meinerlieber,” whereupon I told him I was bound for Nikko. “Don’t say ‘kekko’ (beautiful) before Nikko,”—the Japanese “vedere Napoli e morire”—was of course brought up, and more was asked about Meinerlieber. Suddenly we pulled into a station, and the young man tossed me the blue-and-white fan he had been carrying, calling back over his shoulder in haste:

“Meinerlieber has the fan!”

With that he spoke and vanished forever from my life. I fanned myself for years with my Nikko gift.

To understand Japan’s history, you have to weave in a little mythology whether you want to or not. In old, old times, when a god stuck his sword into the primal mud, he pulled Japan up to the surface, and because the mud still splashed, all the little islands that make approach difficult came into being. Amaterasu-o-kami, the sun, later sent the two heaven-children Izanagi and Izanami down to shape the island properly. Izanagi, being a man, did this conscientiously, but Izanami dawdled and then rushed her work; hence this coast is full of roughness. When the two princes met, he said, “How pleasant to meet a beautiful woman!” and she replied, “How pleasant to meet a handsome youth!” What usually follows such declarations ensued, and from this union came Jimmu Tenno, the first human ruler of Japan, from whom all the others are derived. Amaterasu-o-kami gave him the three treasures—the mirror as her own symbol, the jewel that rules ebb and flood, and the sword, said to resemble Harun al-Rashid’s. These three things are said to be preserved in the holiest of all Shinto shrines, at Ise.

Since the emperor descends from the sun and is holy beyond measure, it was long not fitting for him to set his feet, figuratively or literally, on the earth, and so he was always carried, fed, and remained a figure who had much honor but no power. The shogun—or duke, or prime minister in our sense—ruled in fact through the many centuries, and the house from which he came was, at the time, the most powerful. So it was with the Ashikaga, the Fujiwara, the tragic house of Heike, with the conqueror Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who built Nikko, and with the Tokugawa, whose first rulers, Iemitsu and Ieyasu, are buried in Nikko and who truly make up historical Nikko. While other adherents built magnificent temples (in the wildly overloaded but very effective style of gold-loving Toyotomi), a daimyo planted the splendid cryptomeria avenues in commemoration. They are now three hundred years old and a sight to see. Not as massive as the California redwoods, they are just as straight and of splendid build, and found only in Japan.

Through this long avenue and the fresh, entirely rural town I reached the red bridge that spans the blue mountain water in a scarlet arc, and I wandered through the rising woods, from which you glimpse the temples, to the truly Japanese dwelling of Mr. Speight, who greeted me warmly and with whom I later, and all the next forenoon, sat up on the wooden veranda, chatted about everything under the sun, and listened to his poems. I slept the Japanese way, stretched on quilts on the mats, and found that in summer both soft and cool; only I felt a quiet homesickness for my shoes, which, in the Japanese way, had remained downstairs.

Rare flowers, strange shrubs swayed in the morning mist; at times the stroke of a temple gong cut long and solemnly through the stillness and died away inaudible into the silence, then the white mists circled again and a Japanese finch twittered in the nearby branches.

In the afternoon we climbed higher, saw down in the valley the pale-green rice fields, the whirring ducks, the scattered torii, the brightly dressed people, and admired the figure-laden columns, the sweeping roofs, the shimmering niches of the richest temples of Dai Nippon; yet for me the flowing rite before a peasant cottage meant more than all the temple splendor. That was the soul of the people expressing itself. A mother had died in childbed, and so the husband, as custom dictates, had bought a silk cloth at the nearest temple, tied the four corners to a post, and set beneath it on a bench a bucket and a ladle. Everyone who passed was to say a prayer for the dead woman and pour water over the cloth. When wind and weather had completely destroyed the cloth, the soul would be free…

Until then, though, the child’s wash must not be dried outdoors, for she would come and weep into those little garments, and then the child would wail, pine away, and die as well.

A Japanese forest is peculiar, with its pines and bamboo, foreign-looking shrubs and colored maple. At times you find pale yellow monkeys, though to see them you have to go deeper in. You sense the Tengu—the air-spirit with the long nose, who sometimes hangs his burden from it after resting the tip of his nose on another tengu’s shoulder—and the Shojo, who guards the waters and has, on top, in place of hair, a liquid that gives him strength. He is very dangerous, but he has one weakness: he wants to be as polite as his neighbor, so it is wise to bow deeply, for he must do so too; then the liquid runs out and leaves him powerless, and before it has gathered again you are already across the water and safe.

In the Yoshiwara.

Beyond the evening market lies the Kannon Temple, one of the most visited in Tokyo and dedicated to the goddess of mercy. After the Nara period (around the year one thousand of our era), when people had grown more used to the otherworldliness of Buddhism and the faith was established, it was noticed that the primal force driving the universe manifested not only as something inconceivable, but also through qualities such as light, goodness, mercy, and so on, and therefore these qualities were embodied and in the end became particular deities.

Visitors drifted into the dark temple like brightly colored autumn leaves carried by the wind, tossed coins into the offering box, bowed with a smile, and streamed out through the opposite gate. Each worshiper tugged the gong rope, clapped his hands, let the deity share his joy, and commended himself to it, only to flutter off again, caught in the current of being. Outside, theaters and teahouses lined the temple, and beyond, within walking distance, was the forbidden city, the Yoshiwara.

A painter—my drawing teacher, for I wanted to learn something of Japanese painting—accompanied me. Past the policeman who watched the entrance and past the love temple, where the two symbols of sexual love can be seen in relief, we went through the many streets, and although we were in the place of sensual pleasure, I must praise the fact that the pleasure quarter in Japan is far more decorous than the best district of a South American—especially Peruvian—city in the glaring midday light—and far safer too! I was not bothered, addressed, or stared at unpleasantly by anyone. Only the little toothless old men in the booths at every entrance gate smiled at me and invited me in, naming the price. Even the girls who leaned over the galleries and verandas above were impeccably dressed and looked at me with obvious delight. I wore a pink dress the color of peach blossoms, and so they called to me, “Pretty, pretty.” How very much the opposite I was couldn’t be seen from a distance, and the dress—though above all the light color—was pretty…

The houses differ from the usual buildings in that they have no fence around them, are several stories high, and the two entrances at each corner of the house are connected by a gallery where one can study life-size portraits of the beauties and choose the one one likes best. Formerly the girls themselves sat behind the lattice. The prices vary with the value of the woman. A narrow, smoothly polished staircase leads to the first floor, and the shoes stay below. Upstairs are the rooms, and because the poor girls are inadequately fed, it is the custom for the man to order an evening meal first. There are also regulars who announce themselves during the day. It is also the custom to bring such a girl some small gift; hence the city consists of a broad main street where you can buy anything you want.

The girls are very much exploited—I learned the details only much later, when I lived with a Japanese who dealt with the emancipation of geisha and yoro and was forever at war with the police—for while the contract binds them for only two or three years, they meanwhile incur so much debt (forced by need to do so) that in truth they never become free. If they wish to go out because of a death in the immediate family, they are accompanied by an old woman; otherwise they are forbidden to leave at all. They have one advantage over our unfortunate girls: it is not regarded as a disgrace to serve in the Yoshiwara. Many sell themselves to help their needy parents; many to let a gifted brother study in Europe; and since marriages were formerly always arranged by the parents and the spouses respected but did not love each other, love stories in Japan always take place in the Yoshiwara, and not rarely two lovers go together into the Sumida River so they can remain united in the next life.

My companion kept repeating to me that this was a “naughty place,” and also that one should never greet acquaintances, because, according to Yoshiwara etiquette, you must not acknowledge each other. He often urged me to look at the beauties on the balconies, but he himself screwed his eyes shut or stared straight ahead, no doubt because of temptation.

The seven autumn grasses.

Late September, the season of the seven poetic autumn grasses, which one should seek out on the wide plain around Tokyo, place in the vase of the tokonoma (place of honor), and contemplate devoutly. They belong to the autumn, or harvest, moon, which is always deep red, because the maple tree on the moon’s field turns color and brings good luck.

I had many new pupils and was quite content. Some were learning English, others French, and several, unusually nice ones, German. They were all very polite, diligent, and pleasant, and I learned a lot from them besides. First we read and wrote, but at the end of the hour we had to speak—a painful task for the pupil, since all learners claimed it was so hard—not only linguistically but also mentally—to converse with us Europeans. So I always chose something about Japan, and since the pupil mastered the subject, loved to talk about his country, and did his utmost to gather and lay out all possible knowledge in this field, we were both very satisfied with the lessons. In this way I learned a great deal and came as close to the soul of Japan as any inhabitant of the West possibly can; no one jumps over the barrier.

Then I began to think why we should be so hard to understand, and after long examination I came to the following result:

The Japanese are much less quick-moving in thought than we are, but more persistent and deeper. Often I would begin a conversation, find it hard to move forward because my listener for some reason could not keep up, and drop it to go on to something entirely different. Then my student would certainly stare unseeingly into the corner of the room and, after a good while, answer not what I had been saying for many minutes, but the earlier topic that he had doggedly chewed into shape. The Japanese are not made for quick jumping about. The best way to confuse them—even if they have a good command of the language—is to jump from one subject to a quite different one. They cannot hold ten thoughts at once like a pack of eager hunting dogs on one leash; but we cannot immerse ourselves so deeply. To gather one’s thoughts, to fix them exclusively on a single subject for a long time, and to exclude everything incidental is, for us, just as difficult an achievement.
I had to give up a single student, because I couldn’t bear to look at him any longer. He came early in the morning before breakfast and belonged to the lower class. He too was polite, but he had never heard of a handkerchief. His nose ran like the formations in the Adelsberg caves. My stomach couldn’t keep up with that nose. I said I was too busy and let both the money and the nose run. The other students sniffled as long as they could and then used paper tissues that vanished up their kimono sleeves. In gratitude and helpfulness they were far above the European average, and if I had to count any people among the angels, it would have to be the Japanese.

Whenever I walked in the street, I was never bothered; at any hour people gladly helped me with detailed explanations and practical assistance, and if anyone spoke to me in daytime, it was only a student eager to deliver four sentences of English and feel immensely clever. Then he would bow and vanish, proud to have conversed with a real live foreigner in the foreigner’s slippery tongue.

No less amusing to me, when it wasn’t raining, was waiting for the streetcar. The Japanese don’t stand around like we do; they squat down and feel that as a resting posture. To see all that squatting humanity, some men already in European dress, gathered around a lamppost, was very funny, and today I too can squat and bargain with a vendor a foot above the ground while I feel the goods spread out on the ground (there’s no such thing as “look but don’t touch” in the East) and haggle over the price.

One thing I felt to the point of being unbearable: my food. I no longer worked at the German trading house, had paid off my debt, and earned enough to pay for my room, but not enough to afford the expensive boardinghouse. A bit of rice daily, a soup or some vegetables—I would gladly have treated myself to that, but I couldn’t manage to get such things, for to eat in a second-class Japanese hotel would have caused the kind of unpleasant attention a European likes to avoid, and might have hopelessly lowered me in the eyes of the Yellows, certainly in those of the Whites. I bought sardines until I hated them and ran after European pastries far past the Ginza; then the Russian woman suggested I prepare her daughter in English for her exam, and in return I’d simply be fed by them the way they themselves ate. I jumped at it, and had just settled into writing in the mornings, teaching in the afternoons, and in the evenings experiencing and learning, when my life took an unexpected turn.

In the Shadow of the Eagle.

Mrs. F., my American acquaintance, who was now a correspondent in Japan for a big firm, asked whether I might be willing to take a position with a German concern whose name could not be revealed, and I said a flat “no”; for much as I love Germans in matters of language, the Reich Germans’ working conditions do not inspire me. You have to be born to that. Or perhaps I do have something of the Reich German passion for work, only my field lies far from commerce; for when I am allowed to write, I’m as happy and as absorbed in it as the German is in his business. Since machines and carbon copies bore me stiff, my “no” was very firm.

And yet I wanted very much to earn.

Two days later I ran into the lady by chance again.

“You really don’t want to?”

“Not for anything in the world!”

“Why don’t you actually want to? They pay at least 150 yen for those few morning hours.”

“Ah—and throw in 150 yen’s worth of rudeness! I can’t get used to the tone. At times I’ve typed straight from dictation for Reich Germans. Heavens, how unfriendly they always were and how they growled! The English, by contrast, were charming—cool, calm, and thoroughly polite. I’m not going.”

“It isn’t a trading house. If I knew you would accept— — I’m simply not supposed to— —”

I was content just to teach—a second field of unqualified politeness—and said so. But women stick to an idea, and just as we were about to part, she remarked:

“They would surely be very polite to you. They’re looking for help at the German Embassy.”

At an embassy!! Now I laugh when I think back on what I imagined. Half a heaven! Mystery, magic, intrigue, dangers, veiled ladies and masked strangers, wonder cabinets and a wisdom that more or less spilled out of the cabinets. Luckily this magic picture also included absolute politeness, for only the best of mortals came to an embassy, and that decided me. The Reich German who was to introduce me did add a damper to my suddenly kindled enthusiasm, saying that everything on earth, an embassy included, has its light and its shadow. Of course I took it to mean that one might get murdered on the steps, which wasn’t without a touch of romance—at least for the survivors.

The next morning I showed up at the government building which, not like a machine-torture shop on a dusty street, but properly like a fairy-tale castle, lay behind a high wall in a delightful park, was received by my protector like a loving mother hen, and then led before the chancellor, before whom I obediently folded up, since he looked—at least in my imagination—exactly like a man should who juggles the fates of nations like balls. He fixed me with that eagle gaze which only a Reich German is capable of developing, but won my heart with the wise remark (note the diplomatic talent!) that he had read a review of my novel somewhere and would like to read the book.

Political obstacles stood in the way of hiring me, for even as an Austrian they would have had some hold over me, but as a South Slav I was—outside the embassy—hard to grasp. Since, however, I published my books in Germany, placed my articles in Reich German papers, and no one suitably qualified happened to be in Tokyo, they were willing to turn a blind eye until the ambassador, Dr. Solf, arrived. Would I like to come for a week on trial?

That is how my embassy service began. For a long time the time-honored files inspired great reverence in me, but the more of their contents I received to copy, the more the reverence faded. Even matters that deal with the fate of nations can be quite boring, and the most exciting of all the chancellor looked at entirely by himself. As a foreigner certain things could not be handed to me anyway, and anything, for example, that was half-written and then destroyed had to be torn into tiny bits for the wastebasket or go straight into the fire; for the Japanese are very clever servants and can easily piece files back together. Here I should also add by way of explanation that I certainly credited an embassy with all importance, but was afflicted by no curiosity. My own work was, and still is, what fills me too much, and so I often forgot the enclosure mark—that sacred little line that sticks out past the writing margin to show that an attachment has been added here.

My written account here will insult no authority; indeed those who read it and knew me will gladly sign what is hint and not betrayal. An embassy is something grand. It’s an honor to have worked there; the stay is instructive; but one need not necessarily have too much of that experience in life. Everything has its light and shadow, and where there is so much light, the shadows are dark indeed. Worst of all are the embassy noses. Not the ones in human faces, for those were all well shaped, but the official ones. You forget a comma or a letter or that dreadful enclosure mark, and your immediate superior draws the culprit’s attention to the slip. Then along come the chancellor with it, the legation secretary, the legation counsellor, the embassy counsellor, and at the end, if you have bad luck, His Excellency himself! By the time you’ve gone through all the phases, days have passed and your nose is like a tengu’s—only you can’t hang your loads from it. In an embassy, silence is gold: toward outsiders when they ask, toward your superiors when the noses are being handed out, and in later stories—and I was prodigal with that gold, which is why I was asked to stay three months longer than I wanted. And one more thing: noses without end, for if a Reich German office isn’t grumbling for once, that already counts as “excellent.” It happens rarely! But the noses are given in such a charming way, and you are treated with exquisite courtesy, and you mix with people who truly belong to the best of the nation, not least in that all of them have impeccable manners, that at an embassy—whatever shadows may show up otherwise—you feel at ease. Between machines and diplomacy lies the whole gulf—which, for all today’s views, is unbridgeable—between nobility and common folk. Even the embassy hat racks seem to say:

“I beg the privilege of being allowed to receive your hat!”

In the business house it had been the nail saying:

“You hussy, hang your brain-lid there!”

It was the tone that made me forget everything; I loved to skip through the beautiful park, for whomever you might meet there, he was and remained, even when annoyed, a gentleman.

I had come to know many Japanese, some from very noble houses, and though I had to toil hard for four hours every morning, I spent the evenings by way of compensation on Japanese voyages of discovery (in inns, at home feasts), or sat on the Russian woman’s trunk, listened to her stories and had her tell my fortune, while O Take-san (the honorable Miss Bamboo) raised havoc in the kitchen or grated dried fish for our tailless cat. From time to time the poison spots—remnants of my Peru days—still showed, and a certain weakness in gathering my thoughts clearly too, but otherwise I gradually became again what I once had been …

The September Salon.

Among the loveliest happenings of that time I count my meeting Japanese artists at Tadaichi Okada-san’s. I met the court actress Suzuki there, many modern painters, some high state dignitaries, and, across the board, men and women with a wide outlook and something to say. The young Okada explained Japanese poems to me and told the many legends tied to the tanuki. That is an animal of the country, a cross between a raccoon and a badger, said to have the gift of turning into an old woman or a monk, who, when he feels lonely at night, knocks on a hut with his thick tail, and who has a huge belly on which he drums when he feels content. Many tales are about him, and he fits the glorious Japanese autumn evenings like a star in the vault of heaven: he brings them to life.

Through this acquaintance I gained an insight into the Japanese ideal of art, which is so far from our own and yet, in its way, just as great.

The Japanese ideal, in art as in life, is unity, single-mindedness. In all things he goes back to the impersonal, the eternal, the universal; hence his strongly developed feeling for color harmony. In a Japanese house the mats are yellow-white, the paper windows white-yellow, the wood walls light, the ceiling darker, the pillar very dark brown. A single vase, a single picture interrupts the tone that runs from yellow-white to brown. Even the fire-basin, the hibachi, fits in, and the silk cushions, which serve as chairs and are very thin, lie so that everything makes a pleasing, harmonious impression.

They also paint only one thing at a time, and never in relation to other things. A cherry-blossom branch breaking out of the mist; a bird, a bare twig, a rough rock—concept: winter. All detached from their surroundings, yet without your feeling any lack of background. Most beautiful are the sumi pictures—Japanese ink. There is something mysteriously dreamy in these pictures. In place of our cast shadows they have shadows within the object itself and gauffrage (embossed texture). In place of perspective, reduction; and since there is usually no distinct background, you feel no lack. Finest execution and yet a plastic, far-reaching effect.

They cultivate the sense of beauty in every way: through colorful dress, especially on children; through decorating the shops; through flower festivals; training dwarf trees; painting for pleasure after a festive meal; outings into the open; beauty in one’s own home; buying the inexpensive color prints that belong to the ukiyo-e school and are works by great masters; and through a thousand other things.

Christmas.

Autumn is Japan’s loveliest season, and every day was a joy. It took a good twenty minutes from Yurakucho to the German Embassy, and I cut through Hibiya Park. The maple leaves floated like a red fleet across the pond along which the ducks drifted, and the evergreens on many trees lent the path something summery. The gardeners wrapped the bananas in straw and protected the subtropical palms. The chrysanthemums had been shown in many quickly erected stalls. Such a wealth of flowers is unknown to us. There were plants with two hundred blooms, and single yellow ones trained into a crown, but the chrysanthemums that poured down like a waterfall, and the sparsely flocculent white ones, pleased me best. People came and discussed them matter-of-factly, examined the form of the branches and the number of blossoms, and the little male always looked first and then called back over his shoulder for the opinion of his humbly bowed half. Incidentally, the better halves are not always humbly bowed; for the embassy’s caretaker was very much under the slipper of his nagging old woman, and the commandment of triple obedience—toward father, husband, and son—suffers, for all Eastern humility, more than a few cloudings.

The people of the East, understandably, have no Christmas, but the Europeans won’t let anyone take the feast of peace from them, and the whole embassy was filled with the scent of gingerbread and the joy of anticipation. The Russian women pinched every yen, as they planned to move to Germany and slowly wind down the boardinghouse, yet I did not miss the sight of a Christmas tree. My round of calls on Christmas Eve morning (a Sunday) was a regular pack train. Each of the ladies, and the chancellor too, who was still a bachelor then, gave me gingerbread and marzipan, and from Dr. Solf I got silk to go with all that sugar. For three weeks the three of us (the dear Russian women and I) ate away at that quantity of gingerbread.

It was also custom—I think only in Japan, as I haven’t noticed it among Reich Germans elsewhere—to give soap, and I washed myself and all my things for half a year with Christmas presents.

On Christmas Day only the chancellor worked a few hours in the morning, but on the second holiday everyone came already for the morning, and since I too belonged to the morning crowd, I came as well. I have yet to discover the holiday on which Germans do not work at all. I still remember—with some amusement—once coming in on a holiday I knew nothing about. The two immediate superiors were there, and I worked in full innocence until after eleven, wondering that no one else came into the room. Then the chancellor, with his fine diplomat’s smile, said:

“I forgot to tell you that today is actually a holiday!”

He, who never forgot anything!!

Since he was always good to me (noses aside) and fed me when hostile fate condemned me to stay, I submitted without complaint to the inevitable.

New Year.

That is the biggest feast of the year. All debts must be paid, or you’ll be unlucky in the new year; new kimonos are bought, new resolutions made, the Ginza is one long endless shop full of marvels, and the stores are decked in the finest finery.

In front of every gate there stands a bamboo—the symbol of uprightness, loyalty, endurance—and a pine, the symbol of long life. The straw rope, as it were, bars the entrance and serves to keep sickness away, and the crab, breaking out as a scarlet point from the surrounding green, again recalls the Far Easterner’s heart’s desire: endless years. The bitter orange speaks of “generation upon generation,” and on red lacquer trays you see the handleless sake cups for banzai (cheers) and the god-cakes, or mochi. These are fearsome creations of sticky rice which—the longer you chew them, the bigger they get in your mouth, untearable like rubber and sticky as paste—are offered everywhere at New Year, and which you can hardly avoid if you don’t want to be very rude. The best is to get them into the stomach as quickly as possible with vulture-like gulps, and surrender to the hope that everything will come out of the stomach again.

Everything one does at this time is symbolic. You eat “herring children” (fish roe), because that is the symbol of fertility; you do the cooking before the feast days, but not on New Year’s night, and you do not go to bed either; the house must not be swept, so as not to sweep the good luck out, and from midnight on you expect New Year’s callers. Everyone must drink a little cup of sake, and on this day everyone has the right to be tipsy. As lively as the night market is, as forceful the elbow-jabs the good-humored crowd deals you, so quiet is New Year’s Day itself. Only the male guests ride in rickshaws, with a little flag tied to the back, to make their calls, always the subordinate to the superior. The women of the house only do the serving.

On this first night of the year you must also put a picture under your pillow—of the treasure ship, accompanied by the seven gods of good fortune, three falcons, and at the top a view of the sacred Mount Fuji—in order to dream of one of these things. You visit a temple in the direction that is the lucky one for this period, and you note the animal that rules this year. The cycle consists of twelve animals, adjusted to the zodiac, and according to the animal the character of one born in that year is set. We had just passed from the Year of the Rat into the Year of the Rooster, and all the greeting cards bore that fowl.

In the first week everyone plays parlor games at home with the children, and in the street everyone plays shuttlecock as well. The paddles are sold in special stalls by the hundred, and most are adorned—of real silk and beautifully painted—with the faces of famous actors, though one also finds cherry-blossom branches and other decorations. The size likewise ranges from light children’s paddles to ones like a tennis racket.
The cold hadn’t really set in yet, though Hibiya Park was already pretty bare and the gray haze drifted drearily around the long pine needles. Gray winter clouds hung over Tokyo’s gray roofs, gray streets, the gray-brown Sumida River, the wintertime Japanese in their quilted, cotton‑padded kimonos, with children stuck inside them, peering out bareheaded like forgotten little turnips. People solemnly ate the seven healing herbs, and on the eighth day the year’s prizewinning poem, crowned by the Emperor himself, was read out. The ruler set the theme, and anyone could enter the competition. Princes took part too. The best poems were submitted on the morning of the prize day, and from those the best was chosen and crowned.

Every Japanese gives a gift on New Year’s Eve, and I too received lovely presents from all my students and acquaintances, which I added to my collection: lacquered bamboo boxes, little silk pouches, Japanese calendars, a kakemono (wall hanging), and also practical things like cake, rice, tea. We had a belated Christmas at an Englishwoman’s house, and I was invited so often otherwise that I got to know a heap of unfamiliar dishes. I always sat dutifully on the mats, first on my heels, later with my legs stretched out to the side so I wouldn’t go completely stiff. The worst was getting up, because I always toppled over a few times before I found my balance again and my circulation restarted.

One thing I always disliked: losing my shoes. It felt as if all my self‑confidence stayed behind on the icy threshold with them, and having to push my feet back into the frozen shoes was one of the darker sides of the festivities. When sitting, one hid one’s feet for two reasons: first, for manners and warmth, and second, because one always had a bad conscience about one’s stockings. However new such a knitted thing may be, holes grow as fast as sin.

On the other hand, I sat very adroitly at the little tables, took my never‑before‑used hashi, or chopsticks, out of their paper sleeve, fished everything from the little plates and bowls into my rice bowl, and shoveled the balls deftly into my mouth. I liked eating with chopsticks, and I still miss that wonderful dry rice that takes the place of bread. You had to pass the bowl, with a lift of the flat hand, to the hostess sitting off to the side (even in the grandest houses, the women don’t eat with the men; they serve the men and all the guests), and she had to accept it with the same gesture, raise it to her forehead, and say, “I humbly accept!” I settled for a shortened version, because I didn’t care to see the rice rain down on me and the mats like a shower of shooting stars. I did, however, always kneel properly when the hostess appeared and touch my forehead to the mats three times to the right (to the right, so our heads wouldn’t bump!). That amused the Japanese greatly, because my short hair flew around like a feather duster. They think we have eyes like monkeys (so round and bright), and that we are in general very entertaining (as savages). I’m sure I was often invited just so people could watch my comically foreign behavior up close. But since Far Easterners also struck me as entertaining, I figured our mutual amusement had nothing hurtful about it—we were, so to speak, just “having a laugh at each other.”

The driving out of spirits.

At the beginning of February people roast beans in every house in Japan—the number depends on the age of the head of the household—and in the evening they throw them into every corner with a lot of shouting, to the children’s delight. At temples, by contrast, actors come at the priests’ request. They wear old‑fashioned clothes and masks and throw whole sacks of roasted beans into all the corners, because that’s supposed to drive away the spirits. It’s wildest at Gogoguji Temple.

Something peculiar are the locks of hair you so often see tied to the grating around a Fudo statue in certain temples. They’re from women who have led a dissolute life and now vow to sin no more. If someone—for example a craftsman—wants to become really skillful, he takes a piece of his kimono and ties it with his left hand to the goddess Benten’s grating. Anyone who wants to pass an exam writes the wish on a little slip of paper, chews it carefully, and then spits it, with all his might through the grating, onto the goddess’s biwa, the Japanese lute. If the paper sticks, the wish will come true.

In hand skill the Far Easterners are definitely ahead of us. They have a touching patience for spending a long time on one thing. Their magnificent lacquerwork, where each piece has to be coated and polished twenty, thirty, even a hundred times; their cloisonné vases; their tiny gemstone carvings—all bear witness. But even in daily life they devote loving care to the simplest task and seem to use ten extra fingers, for their toes are almost as useful and nimble as their hands. They praise our technical achievements and make use of them, but their view of work is probably the right one: beautiful, solid, and not rushed. Life is, after all, a journey, and it doesn’t become nicer by doing it on the express. Whoever takes the mixed train sees and enjoys more of everything along the way.

We also reach the goal of our life‑express—the grave—faster; but is that the point of the journey?

In the Japanese house.

It was the middle of winter—the plum, barely in bloom, mixed its white flurry with the whirling snow—when the Russian women set out for home and I lost my lodgings. It came after a big earthquake when the walls of the old house had opened and the houses had moved closer together. A European hotel was too expensive for me, and a Japanese one, with no stoves and only sliding doors, was too cold and uncomfortable. Who might be my next‑door neighbor?

At last, when I had almost despaired, my student Ito said:

“If you’re content with a Japanese room of two and a half tatami, you can live with me for 15 yen a month. I live in my aunt’s house, and only a close relative with her little child lives there too.”

There was nothing else to be found, and since he promised me a gas ring for heating and cooking, and the room had a table and chair so I didn’t have to crouch on the floor, and since I told myself I would learn a lot, even if I didn’t live comfortably, I packed my modest things and moved. It was cheap, and since I later paid for it by teaching, the change increased my savings, though not my body weight, for I have never been one for cooking: first, because I can hardly do anything, and second, because I never have time. In my view there are more important things to do, and in Tokyo I was indeed very strained. I worked at the embassy all day, taught in the afternoons until seven, and then, and on Sundays, wrote my pieces for various papers. Nowhere did it become so clear to me as in Tokyo how harmful it is for writers (not mere journalists) to have money work as a side job or even a main one. In that one year in Japan I didn’t write a single purely literary piece, even though I became special correspondent for one of Germany’s most important textile papers and didn’t lag behind journalistically. Many will say you can write from memory. My Japan novel proves that. Even so, there are momentary moods, small incidental things that carry the deepest magic of life and that one has to catch while they’re still there. A painter remembers a thousand mist landscapes he has seen and surely paints them faithfully from memory too; but the mist from which—his mood exactly right—he sees the sun suddenly pick out the glowing autumn red of a tree and paints it at once, that will be something much more alive. I mention this only to make it clear to the reader why the later necessity of making money not by writing but in other fields embittered me so much. Back then the mark was still invisible, the crown even more invisible, and I was quite ready to earn always and everything abroad.

It sounds so romantic when I write today about living in a paper house, but back then it was February and very cold, even if a Tokyo winter is far milder than ours. I slept in the little room on two of Mr. Ito’s quilts and covered myself with two heirlooms of the Russian woman. An old sofa cushion became a pillow, and in the morning I rolled everything up again and made it disappear into the wall. Leaving the futon out is considered very ill‑omened, because only the seriously ill have an untouched bed.

So close to the floor it was so cold that it always felt to me as if I were falling into a cellar, and when I jumped up in the morning, all my cold misery was over as soon as I stood upright. My breakfast, made on the gas ring, was tea and zwieback, and I washed in the kitchen.

At eight o’clock I had to leave the house in order to be sure of being at the embassy by nine, and running was out of the question, because you rode an hour on the tram. Oh, those rides! The cars were so full that you often couldn’t even reach the footboard. If you did manage to gain a space for one foot, you were safe; the conductor never turned anyone away, and the driver would sometimes make the car kick back like a stubborn horse, which shook the people inside like beans and made space, and outside someone would also fall off and make room that way. You were usually squeezed so tight that you felt every human shape, and nowhere but in Japan would riding like this have been possible. In Peru, people would probably have torn a woman’s clothes off her in their greed, but the Japanese looked right over me with cold fish eyes and seemed unaware that I was a woman. That made the ride bearable.

It was also unpleasant to see my shoes covered in mold every morning from the poetic spring rain. Like green frogs they squatted in front of the door or in the little space between the outer and inner sliding doors that’s meant for shoes. Only the door in the plank fence is locked. In the evening, that is, at sunset, the house, whose sliding walls are all open during the day, is slid shut—with a racket that makes you think the whole thing is collapsing or an earthquake‑shaken furniture van is going by. The same racket announces the opening of the box early in the morning.

The biggest adventure, for me at least, was the bath. With the Russian we had a kind of tub and hot water to pour over ourselves. Here my host cautiously approached with the question of whether I might like to bathe sometime (Europeans have the reputation of being enormous dirt‑pigs who never wash), and when I said yes, he told me I could bathe in his aunt’s house across the backyard, and that he would fetch me. I was content with that.

In the evening he came. I had to carry my shoes through the house, put them on at the back door, and walk through the snow‑wet yard to the outbuilding. In the open corridor the old lady sat in a loincloth, bare‑chested, fanning her shriveled yellow breasts. The bath had made her hot.

There was no light burning in the little bath room, and I could only make out where I was by the frosted glass panel of the sliding door. At last the outline of a wooden tub grew clearer, and I discovered a kind of ladder of three or four steps leading up to the tub’s rim. The tap was over a basin in the corner.

First I washed myself thoroughly with warm water and soap, as is the Japanese custom; then I tried to climb into the tub, from which high clouds of steam were rolling. In vain! Red as a lobster, I pulled back my left leg and tried with my right, had to rescue that one, and stuck the other in again. Forty degrees turned my skin bean‑red.

Never, never would I get into that boiling tub, and yet I longed for this heat, which I had missed so much since leaving the tropics. Then Mr. Ito, laying his hand on the sliding door, asked:

“Is it too hot for you? Shall I pour in cold water?”

That did it! With one leap I was in the tub, red as a lobster and out of breath, but inside. I declined with thanks, glad that if the door opened I would at least be wrapped in steam. From then on I bathed at least three times a week, even though I was the last to bathe. By local custom the men go first, then all the women, and finally came I—because European women are dirty (the Japanese often bathe twice a day) and, besides, can’t stand such heat, so the bath has to be made a little cooler. Even so, I cooked at forty degrees. In public bathhouses the bath‑attendant washes the women. They find that quite natural. My host’s wife (for that is what the “close relative” turned out to be) would have had nothing against his scraping my back too …

Meals stayed minimal. On the way home I bought ten sen worth of bread and ten sen worth of daikon, the long Japanese radish, and made a lunch of it. In the evening I bought zwieback and ate it in bed while I read and drank tea. The gas ring stood next to my pillow, so I had kitchen, bed, and library all within a one‑meter circle. I was often invited out, and that kept me alive. Everything I earned at the embassy I put into the Yokohama Specie Bank, and I lived on what I made by teaching. Souvenirs and necessary clothes I bought with the money from my journalism for Japanese papers.

That reminds me of the undershorts drama. In Yokohama you can find ready‑made underwear for European women. Since I’m unusually small and flat in front like a board and in back like a shutter, all the ready‑mades were sacks I disappeared in. At last I found a child’s undershorts in Tokyo itself, and I had several pieces made to that pattern by my host’s aunt. The three of us—he as interpreter—lay on the mats and discussed the making. After a few days Mr. I. came and brought me the things.

“How many garments do you wear on top of each other?” he asked, for the Japanese wear four, five, or more kimonos one over the other, depending on the temperature. In the evening he asked, with no bad intentions and only out of scientific interest, whether I could show him how the undershorts fit. Unfortunately, I couldn’t very well oblige.

Japanese women wear a red cloth around the middle down to the knees; it’s tied so tight that the legs can’t part and the walk is affected. If a woman commits suicide, she ties a cord around her knees so that even after the death throes she won’t be found in an indecent position. Men wear only a very short loincloth, which they keep on at night. They sleep in their day kimonos, and each sleeper is entitled only to his mat‑length and width. Four or six people can sleep in a medium‑sized room, with the children beside the parents. All the little Japanese children wear gutta‑percha liners in their wet years, so there’s never any smell and the mother’s silk kimono, on which the little parasite lives, is never in danger.

Through spring.

I could fill a whole book with Japan alone, and with an effort I’ll cut short my account of the later months in the Land of the Rising Sun.

In May—when in Hibiya Park the azaleas and wisteria bloom in astonishing masses and beauty—big silk fish fly in front of every house that has boys. Then the Japanese celebrate Boys’ Day. The carp is the symbol of the strong man, for only he swims upstream against all obstacles, as the strong should do in life; but you also see around the family flags the figure of Kintaro, who had a rabbit and a bear as playmates and grew up in solitude, and the Momotaros, the Peach Boy who was given to an old couple in a red peach and later brought them home a captured treasure out of dutiful son’s love. On that day the eyes of mothers who have no sons fill with bitter tears …

At that time it also rains with a persistence that only a Far Easterner takes in stride; everything molds and you get downright stuck in the street mud. The locals admire this fine, threadlike wetness and call it poetic, because it falls so softly on blossoms and fresh green. Even so, people make temple outings, bring back all sorts of amulets, visit the graves of the forty‑seven brave ronin, or wandering knights, who out of love for their betrayed lord all committed harakiri, make offerings before Tenjin, the god of schoolchildren, who was once a wise teacher and is now—for heaven knows what reason—worshiped in the form of an ox, and they make a pilgrimage to Kobo Daishi, the inventor of the Japanese alphabet, the shortened katakana. In that temple you see everywhere on the stalls’ tables Daruma dolls without eyes. You buy such a Daruma, take him home, and paint in the eyes only when the wish you made has been fulfilled. Daruma was a Buddhist sage who sat for seven years facing a wall to think better about the riddles of the world, and since he no longer needed them, his legs withered away. At first staying awake was hard for him, and when sleep kept overcoming him, he tore out his eyelashes and eyelids and threw them angrily on the ground. From them the tea plant sprang up, so people who want to stay awake no longer have to pluck out their lids.

Before Mount Fuji.

Two of my nicest students were two gentlemen who were great friends and in very high positions, yet so modest that I learned only shortly before leaving Japan that one had been appointed Minister of Finance. They were learning German, read Faust, and could laugh as heartily as children. One day they took their cook and I took my camera, and we set out for Odawara, where one of the gentlemen had a country house. Odawara is an ancient town with a fortress surrounded by magnificent ramparts and with little houses and mills like you otherwise only find in picture books (which in Japan are read from back to front and from top to bottom!).

In the ravine we climbed the next day toward Mount Fuji lies the famous spa of Miyanoshita with its hot sulfur springs, and beyond it you disappear into the so‑called Devil’s Valley. The whole gray slope is a single cloud of smoke, for there are many boiling sulfur springs there, and the fumes are so stifling that you have to cover your face as you pass close by, so as not to fall, stunned, into the hot spring where eggs are cooked and water boils in no time.
A ghastly wind blew over the mountain that day, and the higher we climbed, the more the gray of dragging clouds blurred into the strange white of the steaming slopes. As we went down toward Lake Ashi, the storm howled through the tall bamboo, which groaned and cracked uncannily, and the pines crackled as if shaken by mighty ghostly hands. The sacred mountain lay hopelessly buried in a dense mass of fog that thickened into slapping rain, so we were rained in at an inn on the shore. The lake threw waves like a heaving sea, and nowhere could the little boats that usually ply there put out. Afternoon drifted into evening, and still we sat in the hotel room that was also our dining room (in Japan, hotels are divided into many rooms, so every group is by itself, and only the doors opening onto the veranda stay open).

As unremarkable as that spring rain was, it decided a human fate and tied two others into a painful chain. Sitting so cut off in that room, I began urging Mr. A. to travel to Europe and double his knowledge. He asked in detail about the costs to expect, and we got so carried away that we drew up plans, mapped routes, and discussed what to study. Later my student left his young wife—who had just given him a daughter—and went off to Europe for two years, visited my mother, my relatives and friends, and was already back in his country again before I—battered by storms—made it into my own harbor. He, however, gave me a letter of introduction to someone in Formosa… but I shouldn’t get ahead of myself.

Late at night we drove by carriage over hill and dale through pouring rain back to Odawara. We slept in bare Japanese rooms, separated only by sliding doors, and I mention once more, in high praise of the Japanese, that I wouldn’t even have dared that with white people. I lay with four futon under me and four above me, like a pea under mattresses beneath and above all those layers of cloth. Nothing stuck out but a tiny ponytail.

In fishing villages.

Again the days slipped through my fingers like the beads of a rosary. Sometimes I prayed the Joyful Mysteries when a big paper accepted my pieces, at times the Sorrowful Rosary when the feeling of my loneliness overtook me. In the middle of people, I was alone. All those people of my own and other races were only ships the wind of fate drove past my little craft, ships I soon had to lose from sight.

The English poet who says the sun is only one light among millions of stars, and yet all the world’s light dies with the dying sun, is right. The tepid goodwill of all the earth’s people wouldn’t be worth the full love of a single person, and I loved no one, and no one in the world loved me—neither child, woman, nor man. I mean in the measure I alone would have wished, and so I wandered up and down the globe like that rolling stone that gathers no moss: utterly unbound and utterly alone. As often as I made friends, I had to move on. It was that way in my earliest youth, it was that way on my trip around the world, and it will always be so. For a woman’s soul it is bad, because it grows cold and rootless and gradually loses the ability to live joined with other living beings. Today I live in my cell like a hermit. When someone yanks the bell and I open, having to come back from far-off, self-made dream worlds into a setting that has lost all charm for me, I’d like best to shout “Memento mori” and slam the door. But having once spent time at an embassy of the German Reich, where you brush up your youthful lessons about “It isn’t proper,” I bow instead and ask—perhaps not irresistibly sweetly—what the visitor wants.

Once someone took me to a Japanese theater, where I sat on mats in a box like an upended crate and watched a play so utterly unlike ours, with scene changes done by so-called “black men” (stagehands dressed in black), whom the audience is meant to “not see”; with the musicians sitting up on the stage itself, where besides the Japanese instruments the two “harmonic sticks” play a big role; where the characters are mostly courtesans from the pleasure quarter and old knights, or, as in “Kirare Yosaburo,” they glorify a hero who becomes a robber out of love and scorn for the world.

Sometimes I watched dance pieces, and nothing surpasses the expressive power of eastern artists’ hands. Every finger speaks; each movement of the hand has the charm of a melody, and the very fact that the faces remain so unmoved increases the beauty of the performance in my eyes. Tragedy does not lie in grimaces, but in the fine, shaded motions people make in the greatest pain, that hopeless letting go when you realize that it is so, and must always stay so in the future…

Sometimes my students led me out to the coast to learn about the life of the fishermen, to see the charm of hidden temples peering through tangles of pines over the boundless ocean, their gray-green roofs sweeping like the long, gray-green waves of the sea.

Bonito, after head and tail are removed, is dried on airy racks that stand right in the middle of the street, their steeply slanted surfaces catching sun and dust. Little by little the fish grows so hard it keeps for twenty or thirty years without changing in any way. Shaved on a special grater, it’s used to season rice and vegetables. One gives such a hard fish as a farewell gift, a symbol that the person receiving it may keep his health and remain as unchanged as a dried bonito. Every gift must also be fitted with the noshi and a double gift cord. Only for mourning gifts is the cord single, because the dead do not return.

Seaweed, or nori, is also dried and eaten as a vegetable, and another kind of algae seems to be used as well. The cultured-pearl industry, by contrast, is a secret and is carried on not far from the sacred Ise. A tiny thing—a Buddha so small you can make him out only with a magnifying glass, or some other little trinket—is placed inside the oyster, which is put back into the sea (in a fenced-off, well-marked area) and not taken out for three or four years. Then the pearl, or the object wrapped around, is finished. The pearls are genuine, yes—but they are man-made, and they say they’re not as beautiful and strong as the natural ones.

At a spot in the sea near Kotsuura there are bright red fish. They mustn’t be caught, so they dare to come right up to the boat, and people feed them.

At beautiful Nihonbashi, Tokyo’s largest bridge, the fish market is held every day. There they also carry the fish god about, seated on a golden throne in a splendid palanquin, and here rules Ebisu, the faithful god of good fortune, who stays on earth in October and looks after people’s welfare—especially the fishermen’s—while the other gods go up to heaven for their yearly meeting.

Sayonara.

Music, superstition, bonsai, dogs and the beautiful Japanese rooster with its giant tail, fairy tales, ghosts and gods, the Ainu on Hokkaido, the hot springs on Kyushu that I visited, where they pulled a strange skeleton—half human face, half animal—from the hot sulfur, Beppu, where people dyed cloth in different earth springs, and Kokura with its factory, where the girls are housed like in a school and watched over just as well; the magnificent Inland Sea with its thousand islands, Kobe, Osaka—the commercial city, Kyoto, Nara——should they all go unmentioned? No, I mustn’t pass over the last two entirely.

Dr. Solf was not only extremely popular with the Japanese, who found him clever and affable and whose sympathy for Germany he aroused to a high degree. If that friendship didn’t show itself more conspicuously in politics, the reason was that the Japanese are afraid of England and must above all strive to place themselves correctly with that great power. Otherwise, though—surely thanks to the ambassador’s experience and tact—Japan was very willing to accommodate the Germans. In the papers one read again and again about the poverty of students in Germany, and many gifts came in from small and often poor pupils. Indeed, a poor farmer who came to the big city found his way to the embassy and brought his mite to ease Germany’s need; and earlier than other peoples, the Japanese admitted that Germany was too strong in every respect—even in knowledge, spirit, and character, which bring more honor to a country than war power—for it ever to perish.

At Dr. Solf’s request I stayed three months beyond my original time, and, as much as they urged me, I couldn’t tarry longer, for the road ahead of me was stony and long. So I took my leave of the German embassy with a truly heavy heart, glad also to have come to know life at a political mission. Laden with letters of introduction, loaded down with gifts from all sides, I left on July 1, 1923, the country of which, as of no other, I may say:

“No one insulted me, no one did me harm!”

Isn’t that the finest and most honorable monument one can set to a people, and isn’t true love of country precisely to live so that the stranger departs with such thoughts? People ascribe great sensuality to the Japanese. All the more admirable, for that very reason, is their noble reserve in the land of sliding doors! Bless them!

In Kyoto.

Kyoto is the old royal city (Yedo, today’s Tokyo, is the work of the shoguns). The aura of the Mikado surrounds the quiet little town, with its inner ring of old, bent, dark-green pines and its outer ring of blue-shimmering mountains. Here lie drowsy temples at the ends of drowsy lanes, and the untouched past rests like a protective cloak of splendor over everything.

Not far from Kyoto is Uji, where young people catch fireflies in June and try to catch one another’s hearts as well. There, lost in green, stands the loveliest temple of the Fujiwara period, the happy time in Japan when women were highly honored and free, when men donned splendid feminine robes, when it sufficed to call “Amida Buddha” in endless repetition to be saved, and life went by with gentle fan-waving. Ancient frescoes cover the walls, and curving devas, or angels, stand in stone in the half-light. The temple roof, with its adjoining wings, forms a phoenix with outstretched wings, and the whole charm of the Middle Ages lies on everything like a dusty golden mantle.

Nara.

Nara is sacred. This is the site of Buddhism, and the magnificent, gigantic Buddha—though not as appealing as the one at Kamakura—is from the Nara period, over a thousand years ago. Here the people first developed a feeling for art, a new faith, and a sense of their own power. It is the cradle of culture, which here shook off what was foreign and tried to go its own way.

Nara leaves a very special impression even on someone who has nothing to do with religion or art, for the houses are still untouched by the breath of the West that turns all poetry into cold prose, and through the broad yet old-fashioned streets the sacred deer run unhindered. They come out of the vast Nara Park with its countless temples and shrines, trot up to the rickshaws rolling along at an easy pace, sniff at the stranger, give him a good-natured nudge with the nose if he is stingy enough to give them nothing, and run off again. In the past, killing such a deer was punishable by death, and even today injuring one would have serious consequences for the offender. But who would want to do harm to such pretty creatures?

Osaka, by contrast, is the cold trading city, with many streetcars, big stores, and already-rude, hurrying Japanese. Is haste and blind money-chasing really a person’s main purpose? Isn’t the noble calm that shows itself in quieter towns the better, truer art of living?

In the Land of Morning Calm.

Everyone knows Japan, at least from pictures and descriptions, but scarcely eight hours from Moji lies Busan on Korea’s coast, and with that you slip into regions little visited and even less described. We had barely crossed the border and suffered the usual bother of passport and baggage inspection when the returning students, who up to there were wrapped in gray kimonos, changed into the stiff, translucent white of their national costume and smiled for the first time, even with their melancholy eyes under highly arched brows. All peoples who are not free—Korea is now under Japanese rule—have that peculiar melancholy in their gaze. As if they were always looking back at a dead past, and perhaps few are aware of it.

Opposite me sits an old woman in a short white bodice and a very wide, translucent skirt of hemp cloth, beneath which a second, also white and stiff, underskirt peeks out. Under that comes a wide, ankle-tied pair of trousers, and on her feet she wears funny beak-toed shoes, part rubber, part cloth. An old man has only straw ones and flips them up and down with his toes like balls. Children have their hair braided; adults wear it knotted. By the topknot, dissatisfied wives are said to pull their disobedient husbands. Should we introduce that custom at home?

The soft gentleness of Japanese scenery seemed wiped away. Near and retreating ridgelines, oddly shaped and thinly wooded, came into view, and everything felt harsher, fresher, more untouched—even the rice fields, from which cranes often rose. The farmhouses had flat-looking, thatched roofs that seemed covered over with a great fishing net, and some of these huts were thrown together out of clay in any old way. Along the fields, like silent sentries, stood poplars, and naked children alternated with half-naked adults. All the scenes of nature played out in full view of the moving train.

I took an inexplicable, burning liking to Korea. It felt homelike to me, and the impression of the untouched land sent stories flitting like midges through my brain, somewhat withered by sketch-making. There rode men on bumpy field paths on tiny horses, wearing black horsehair hats that sat like overturned stove pipes at the ends of their long yellow faces; or Korean field hands slept in the shade of a hay shed, the long pipe with its tiny bowl beside them, the hat resting sideways on the ear; under the eaves of a plain inn a better-off man ate, flicking rice into his mouth with his chopsticks, with the huge hat on head and shoulders that looks like an upside-down wash basin—a relic from earlier days. In the good old times Koreans so loved to bash one another’s heads in that a wise ruler decided to put a stop to it by ordering everyone to wear an earthenware hat. If a quarrel broke out, the hat was smashed, and since one had to work several months to earn enough for a new hat, people became more mild, and instead of half or fully killing one another, they insulted each other with growing skill—so that, although the hats today are made of horsehair, that fine custom has remained.

All day long the train raced through fertile plains, past stations exuding the peppery scent of unfamiliar food and a foreign people, and by evening we were approaching Seoul (Saul) or, as the Japanese now say, “Keijo.”

An acquaintance of Mr. A.’s, a pretty Japanese woman, awaited me, and in a rickshaw we rolled to her house. Men with the “tsige,” the long backboard to which huge, seemingly uncarryable loads are strapped, stumbled past us; women in their translucent snow-white dresses, baskets on their heads, crossed our path; and in front of the low shops stood mighty iron pots holding the Koreans’ sauerkraut and their strongly smelling pickled foods. On long cord rigs running along walls and across the floor, peppers dried everywhere, and a neat trick let dogs come and go without bothering anyone: a low hole left in the house wall just for them. Cats, despised since ancient times, stood hissing on the thick thatched roofs and were chased by their human and canine enemies.

What I find so appealing and at times so hard in traveling is the constant need to adjust. Today I live Japanese style, tomorrow Korean style, or again like a white woman, and even then never under the same conditions. Hardly had I reached my temporary home when they brought me iced barley tea and then led me into the bath, where a “yukatajikimono” and an obi lay ready in a bamboo basket, and so I appeared, much to my hosts’ amusement and satisfaction, as a Japanese woman. Only I had to close the kimono from left to right (thus “wrong,” in our terms), for from right to left you close it only on the dead—perhaps because the heart, which in life should be free, is covered more.

There’s little danger of that with me; too many people have been trying, since my childhood, to do in the heart effectively. Now it’s the muscle that shoots the blood around—and not even notably good at that…

The next days passed in seeing the sights, and although I actually prefer to wander at random through a strange city and breathe in its foreign scent—bodily and spiritual—I yielded here to higher wishes, sped through the museum, saw the old Buddha paintings (still with round eyes, a sign of how old they were and how foreign the new faith still was), the odd roof tiles with archaic script, the porcelain vases—the pride of Korean art, which excelled chiefly in ceramics—and, guided by hazel-brown officers, I was allowed to visit the beautiful grounds of the royal gardens and even the living quarters in the old palace where the beautiful Queen Ji had been killed. The spring in the park is ringed with well-shaped stones and is called Paradise Spring. The officers drank eagerly, but water has always left me cold. They say if you drink that water you live long, long. God save me from that.
In the Pagoda Park stands the thirteen-story pagoda. The top three stories stand beside it, because the Japanese meant to cart them off. They didn’t manage it, though. Under the pagoda old men sit smoking their pipes—the people here, they say, have always been brilliant at doing nothing—and play a dice game, while children romp around in loose jackets and short little trousers.

I most liked to spend my time at the market. There the slender local men, in their priestly-looking white robes, stood proud and tight-lipped behind shallow, round baskets filled with beans, chestnuts, pasania nuts, sato potatoes, and other produce of the land, or with pale yellow, glaring red, or black sweets that looked like crushed coal shaped like sausages—and, for all my curiosity, I didn’t taste a thing. The vendors never hawked their goods, but if you bought something, they suddenly smiled and were very polite.

From the fishmongers’ hooks hung little fish tied into garlands, dried bonito, fibrous devilfish, and baskets full of shark fins; there were also shops where you could buy bamboo “armor”—arm rests, breastplates, a sort of collar, and leg sheaths—but it had no military meaning; it was only meant to keep the stiff robes off the sweat-wet body so they would stay white and fresh longer. Washing these robes with flat paddles at the riverbank, and the even tapping with smooth sticks with which they must be stroked to be smooth and stiff—daily women’s work—sets the beat, one could say the high song, of Seoul. Everywhere sounded the monotonous clap, clap, clap of the sticks.

The youth-restoring remedy.

Korea has a plant that cannot be successfully grown anywhere else in the world, nor found wild—ginseng. It’s a little root which—with the help of a strong imagination—really does look like a little man with head, arms, and legs, and when boiled into tea is said to have the power to cure all ills and make an old man young again. That is prized above all by the Chinese, for whom life has value only if the three main things—money, women and thereby sons—paired with great age—come into their possession.

At times one finds ginseng wild in the inhospitable mountains, where the tiger still prowls (though he never attacks a drunkard, they say, because such a one makes his skin crawl), and if a man is lucky enough to discover ginseng, he builds a hut beside it, for a genuine ginseng root, +++über die alle Kräuterbäche der Erde gelaufen sind+++ and that for twenty years soaks up the streams of the earth, the Japanese pay a thousand yen (2000 marks!). Ginseng is also cultivated; people make sure it has enough shade, then wait four to five years before taking up the roots, cleaning them carefully, drying them, counting them, and packing them in boxes. Every root has a red paper band like cigars at home, and may be sold only in pharmacies; for ginseng is a state monopoly and brings the Japanese government several million yen. Ginseng is bought in quantity by Chinese, and also shipped to settlements like North Borneo that are largely Chinese-inhabited. The United States tried to grow ginseng—with very mediocre success.

I wanted to drink ginseng too, for though I needed no rejuvenation, a tonic would surely have done me good, and the next morning my kind host actually brought me a bowl of ginseng. The tea smelled like meat broth in which carrots had been cooked, and I think I recall that ginseng truly belongs to the same far-flung family as those roots I don’t overly enjoy. Otherwise the pale yellow drink went down easily, and at the moment I felt no effect; but since that day I walked seven hours in the hot subtropical summer sun without strain, I set it down to enjoying the little old-man’s root. If, however, you turn to this rejuvenator too often, you’re said to go mad.

At a nobleman’s.

Thanks to Mr. Y., who managed to interest a higher official in the idea, I owed my visit to an old Korean nobleman, through which I could get to know the interior of a distinguished house of this reserved race.

The buildings were surrounded by a high, hostile-looking, slightly slanted wall. We stepped through the old gate into a sun-drenched courtyard, and from it into a second, just as still, just as dazzlingly white; and from there, guided by a servant, into the actual master’s house, with its polished floor that was a sight in itself, and across it to the raised, couch-like seat of the master of the house, who had a triangular cushion for a backrest and a wooden frame as an armrest. He greeted us most politely, set his long pipe aside, and personally led us through the lofty rooms to show us the precious old cabinets with their intricate inlay of gemstones and mother-of-pearl. Now the ground was ebony-black, now scarlet, and cranes and turtles chased each other in unbelievable poses through lush flower garlands and tangled leaves. The crane is the symbol of long life, the turtle—at least in Japan—of female obedience, for just as the turtle draws in paws and head at the lightest touch of a hand, so every woman should humbly draw in head and paws when her lord and master touched her.

Splendid kakemono by famous Korean masters, mostly showing animals in symbolic relation to nature, adorned the alcoves, and round or drum-like porcelain stools invited one to rest.

The nobleman, with his long, sparse beard and his longer, thinner pipe, honored us specially by leading us along a long, chilly-feeling corridor to the entrance of the women’s quarters, pointed to a courtyard full of large iron pots, showed dark cracks behind them (from which giggles came), and declared this to be the kitchen. Then he had us turn back; women are not for curious eyes.

Today they enjoy greater freedom than before anyway. They go unveiled, although the truly well-bred still desire that women, at their appearance, throw a wide sleeve over the face. They also take part in conversations. In former times they had to work hard by day, but in the evening, from nine until midnight, they were allowed to visit one another, and that was the “hora regalis” for the men. The gong sounded, and whoever was on the street after the ninth hour got a thorough thrashing from the policeman; for it was “ladies’ hour.”

At parting the gentleman gave me two fine Korean fans, portraying the fundamental law of life, “In Yo,” or light and shadow, rest and motion, the creative and the created.

I thanked him in English, bowed deeply, and held to the rope as I slipped back into my shoes; but then I had to squat down, Western-style, to button them. We cannot very well bring our shoes to heel with the big toe alone.

In Heijo.

Heijo lies another day’s express ride to the north. It was once the capital and is historically much more valuable than Seoul. True, in the time of Emperor Yao in China, around 2332 before Christ, Whanung, the son of the Creator, is said to have descended from the sky, accompanied by 5,000 spirits, and founded, under a paktal tree, the realm of the earth, sending his ministers—Master of Wind, Ruler of Rain, and Teacher of Clouds—to their posts. But only in the year 1766 before Christ does the story become a bit more believable, when the Nero of China, the terrible Emperor Chu, ruled all that was then known of the eastern world. He loved his youngest concubine, the beautiful Tal-geui, and never denied her a wish, however bloodthirsty it might be; therefore the mandarins (ministers) plotted her downfall, but she always found the culprit and had him summarily shortened by a head. Then the wise Ki-dsja followed her from afar when she set out for her monthly walk in perfect solitude, and saw her vanish into a fox den. After she had returned to the palace, he killed all the white foxes inside it and threw their pelts around his shoulders. Thus dressed, when he appeared before Tal-geui and the high council, she recognized her kin, started, transformed in a flash, and leapt as a nine-tailed fox out the window, never to appear again. Chu, however, who could neither have Ki-dsja beheaded for it nor wished to reward him, sent him to what is now Korea and ordered him to subdue it and bring it under cultivation. Thus the sage became the founder of Heijo.

Once the city was very large and went through changing fortunes; today it is small, oddly sleepy and dead. It lies among low hills and picturesque fields broken by small brown villages, and the people are not at all used to seeing a European woman. They stare with all their might, and the children almost shy away from the stranger.

Life flows so quietly that one feels inside a picture. The sun lies weary on the gray-white dust, and the willows whisper drowsily before old gray walls. Cranes rise from the wet rice fields, and the women at the riverbank beat their scattered laundry in monotonous rhythm. Behind a tree stands an ox with a ring through its nose, and on the women’s hips sit naked children, searching for the breast under the loose little jacket that never hides the treasure anyway.

In Pyengyang (Heijo) the bread boys pass by with their baskets and call:

“Yamayo pan!” (There’s bread.)

On a hill there is a pretty park with benches, and in the mornings the students come there to recite their lessons.

Perhaps they tell each other about the three sages who landed on Quelpart, the island, and brought with them everything that belongs to earthly happiness: a pony, a calf, a pig, a dog, and a — — woman! All that is written in the history of Korea. Or they tell of the mole father who sought a husband for his daughter, spoke to Sun, Moon, Sky, Clouds, Stars, and the great mountain, and in the end came to the conviction that a mole is the greatest thing on earth. Or of the Tokgabi, the house goblin, who likes to let the lid fall into the boiling rice pot and hates everything that shines, even silver? Who knows!

I left Heijo deeply imbued with the quiet magic of this unknown land. Once more an iron horse awaited me and my faithful Erika, and once more we rolled toward a new border, new experiences.

Across Manchuria.

I took leave of Japanese politeness and found myself among coarse oafs in Mukden. Perhaps one gets used to the Chinese. That may be. Six months of China were not enough for me, at any rate. I honor much of what I found among them, and their mysterious temples, the shadow of the mystical, grim and gray, the enchanting superstition that transports one to other worlds—those drew me as only the South Seas had; but nothing will keep me from saying that as a people they are rude to foreigners, spit abominably (so that Europeans also adopt the vice over time), and one has no notion of the neighbor’s cleanliness.

Mukden seems strongly European. The plain stone buildings that speak of winter cold, the broad streets with rows of trees on each side, in which nonetheless the foot sinks now in dust, now in mud, the little carts, the porters with their shoulder poles, the fate-tossed Russians, the little girls in Chinese, tight-fitting trousers.

I looked over Mukden from top to bottom, drifted past the old temple that sits like a knowing old stone toad by the roadside, and by a twist of fate just caught the one train that heads for Peking once a day. No one should say it “rolled along,” for it takes its time.

The countryside was so desolate you could sprain your jaw from yawning. Nothing but kaoliang, the Chinese sorghum, cheaper than rice and thriving in the north; later some extensive cornfields, and only before Tientsin gardens and variety, but in between again desolate gray stretches of earth, mud-brick houses, ragged people, and slow-wandering camels. You ride almost twenty-four hours, then the train stops in a hall and you read Chi’ien Men. That is Pe-king, the capital.

By the favor of the gods.

You have to have gone through it. First the customs office, then the hotel touts, the coolies tussling over the luggage, and finally in front of the giant gate, on the giant square, the rickshaws!! One man wanted to show the coolie the way, another to watch my baggage, a third … in short, five men wanted to come along, and on top of that a mangy, bleary-eyed old woman pushed her way in and wanted to fan me. Fan me, while from her toothless mouth rose the smells one finds only in the innermost hold of steerage. No, thank you!

They were unmanageable, and my Chinese ran to the useless question “Are you Chinese?” and the superfluous answer, practiced even before the World War, “I am Austrian!”, which wasn’t even quite true anymore. So I jumped up into the rickshaw, declared in English that I’d rather go on foot, and made as if to pull down my luggage. Rudeness worked; I’d found the right way, and after twenty minutes we arrived at the hotel that had been recommended to me. The human carrion crows wanted two dollars for the ride worth fifty copper coins. The host advised me to give fifty gold cents, and then chased them out with a stick …

Yapping loudest was the mangy old woman who had stunk me up.

The hotel was full. I had no desire to go to a house someone had recommended on the train, where Russians lived cheaply, and I had almost decided on an English boarding house when the gentleman said:

“You know what, try Foo-Lai. It’s very close, in the Chuan Pan Hutong, and it’s run by a nice German lady married to a Chinese.”

I was really thinking more of the English place, but I could at least go take a look. The servant showed me the gate, I slipped through, met a delicate German woman, and was led upstairs to look at the room. It was the house’s attic, with three windows, each of a different position and build; but it was so peacefully quiet up there that I was instantly delighted and, for all my otherwise necessary thrift, paid the high price (I think fifty dollars a month). That was only for the room and included no board, but I was enchanted by the tiny veranda before the window, by the fact that I had no neighbors, and by the wall that enclosed the property like a cloister, as is true of all Chinese houses, so that you really did live like a king in his own realm.

I waited downstairs in the parlor until the room was in order—a small, very dirty figure, for since Heijo I hadn’t managed to wash anywhere—on the train, despite first class, not either, for fear of infection, since in China there are so many skin diseases (leprosy, boils, scabies, the so-called German measles, admittedly more in the south, and the terrible ringworm that leaves a bald spot wherever it attacks the hair)—and my first act was indeed to go down a flight of stairs to the bath.

Such an insignificant step—hesitating between two boarding houses, a passing question—and it often decides a future, a human life. Looking back, these tiny little incidents have often made me melancholy. It cannot be sheer chance that cuts so deep into a life. On the other hand: Is each of our actions already a seed in the womb of the future that only needs to sprout?

Foo-Lai became the paradise of my journey. There were still enough shadows and lonelinesses of the heart, enough sorrow no sun could banish, but I had a quiet room—a longed-for and rare thing!—and people who loved me (or so I fancied). Add to that a mysterious setting, enough saved money to devote myself wholly to my studies for the moment, and good news from home. I was writing for 23 papers and magazines, partly in Germany itself, partly in Austria, and during my Peking stay I worked on a collection of short stories that filled all my thoughts. That already meant a holiday from the true self. Or is the human being in me only a shadow, and the true self the artist who loses herself in creating? Today I believe it is …

The peaches.

What I’m writing here is a glance into the future. The first week in Peking showed none of that happiness. In every shop I was cheated, I always had to pay different prices for the same thing, and the rickshaw coolies always pounced on me when I stepped out of the scarlet gate, for walking is unseemly for whites. But I thank God too warmly for my walking gear, and I love to wander, lost in thought, and too often spin out my work that way, to entrust myself to a louse- or ringworm-ridden coolie—except when ignorance rather than distance made that decision a necessity.

All the same, through constant scrimping and through being forced to rub elbows with the lowest ranks, I had developed an expert eye for cheap goods or honest dealers, and already on the second day I had found a Chinese who, for ten cents that I handed him wordlessly (didn’t I say I have a touch of the Trappist about me?), filled the pink little bag with peaches. True, they weren’t the finest of their kind; true, the stall stood in the middle of Hatamen Street only a few steps from the “Sublime Gate of Knowledge,” which rose gray and threatening from the Peking wall; true, a traveling barber beside my fruit seller shaved his victims and gathered the cut hair on a feather fan held by the victim himself; true, next door an itinerant cook cut up small pieces of meat (possibly from dog or rat, but sold as pork) for his odd dishes that smelled of sesame or fava-bean oil; true, two old crones in a house corner hunted lice, and all the children of the Middle Kingdom spat in every direction, while the heavy-footed camels from the Gobi Desert passed close by, each beast with its nose tied to the tail of the one ahead—but they were peaches for ten cents without any fuss…
With this load of peaches I passed the servants three times a day—the fat gatekeeper, who never stirred from the arched entrance and was responsible for letting no rabble or suspicious person in, and the two boys, or waiters, who looked very fine in their light-blue ischangs (robe-like overgarments) and always bowed deeply. I couldn’t always slip past Mrs. L. unnoticed, and each time she said that in Peking one should eat fruit only with caution and only after rinsing it with boiling water, which I listened to devoutly. But since cooking on a spirit stove in my room would certainly have been forbidden, since I wasn’t allowed to drink water (because it had to be boiled) and therefore didn’t want to eat anything that would make me thirsty, I ate peaches three times a day. In the end my belly felt like the wolf’s, into which they had sewn stones in place of the little goats. Mrs. L., for her part, had had it with the peaches, which seemed like walking cholera inside me and walking around with me, and she proposed having the boy send up a kettle of hot water in the mornings for tea.

At the Embassy.

As promised, the German ambassador in Tokyo had kindly given me a letter of introduction to the envoy in Peking, who, however, was just then at the famous seaside resort of Pei-tai-ho and dismissed me rather coldly, like an unwelcome file. Otherwise, too—except for one lady—people at the embassy were as cold as the proverbial dog’s nose, and after I had gone in past the stone lions a few times and come out again, I remembered the advice I had been given (not without inner pleasure and to my lasting good fortune, so that I am still grateful to the envoy for his coldness today), and turned to the opposing camp, which had been forbidden to me as long as I was still—by any tie—connected with the authorities.

I had, in fact, a letter of introduction to Mr. Erich von Salzmann, the well-known correspondent of the Berliner Morgenpost, the Kölnische Zeitung, and many other German papers, who had been settled in China for twenty years and was a very important figure in the East. Every time I read his name on the brass plate I felt the urge to go in, but the German stone lions, as I must call them, warned me off. Now that I had been dropped like a hot potato, I no longer had to be considerate of anything, and one afternoon, after—as it seems to me—first sending a note, I pulled the bell of the famous journalist.

Call it: from purgatory to paradise! When you consider what it takes in the East to keep up politically—how much sharpness, how countless conversations, either in person or on the wire, what constant overcoming of trickery and deliberate misdirection—and moreover learn that Mr. von Salzmann has such serious trouble with his eyes that he needs a secretary, you can understand how delighted I was that he not only put all his work aside and, that very evening, led me into Peking’s side alleys to explain everything to me, but that his welcome was as warm as one very rarely gives a stranger. He had even had my most recent work in his hands and spoke about it; in short, I floated home from him as if on clouds.

He did—what no authority would have done so quickly for me—he gave me introductions to the three English papers, and although two editorial offices were too poor to pay for contributions, the Far Eastern Times accepted six pieces on the South Slavs and paid a hundred dollars. This also made me somewhat known in Peking and led to further advantages, and the next day the charming correspondent, who barely knew me, proposed that I go up to his wife in Peitaiho for a week …

In Peking’s back alleys.

The select Germans of the Empire who are in any way connected with politics live in the embassy quarter, each on the patch assigned to his office. Mr. von Salzmann lived on the hospital grounds, and the embassy lay about fifty steps further on Legation Street. Many political missions, especially Americans and Japanese, had a lot of military with them and proper barracks attached to the official buildings. Germany had lost many advantages after the peace. Thus Germans had to answer before Chinese courts if they had committed an offense, not before their own authority’s courts, and that led to all sorts of torment and abuse. It didn’t just harm the Germans—it lowered all Europeans in the eyes of the Asians—and may have been the first serious push toward today’s revolt against foreign privileges in China.

Behind the embassy quarter lies the Ch’ien Men, which leads to the real Chinese city, the one you imagine back home. Peking was the only place that didn’t disappoint me. There, red strips with gold characters really did hang from the windows, the carved old gates were green and golden in tone, fantastic animal figures that could never have lived thrust their stone heads from the jutting walls, and the street scene was just as you dreamed it—and as it may have been a thousand years ago: slow-stepping, swaying camels, most dark brown with ragged hair hanging down like wool from a scraped carpet; some animals were white. Hurrying servants with pointed hats ran in front of a private carriage with closed green blinds; rickshaw coolies clattered along, bent over, with some stone-faced fat Chinese in the two-wheeled contraption; a father proudly led his naked little son, who had nothing but a square fringe of hair on the front of his clean-shaven head; lama monks in brown or yellow robes, whom you could smell from far off; and women “who laugh in public,” in wider trousers than are otherwise customary, with heavy-scented flowers in their hair. Above all, beggars, who pushed up with nasty persistence, tugged at your arm, threw themselves in the dust before you, called you “father” and “mother,” and were horribly mutilated, so that you would gladly have bought them off—if handing out alms hadn’t lured them on all the more. Over all this lay the “scent of the East,” that enchanting mixture of smells and stenches you can’t forget: incense, sandalwood, resins, honey cakes, strange spices, all kinds of oils, the sweat of half-naked humanity, filth in the corners, the exhalations of a sick person, the wet fur of mangy dogs, and then again the scent of fine tea, fresh silk, old rosaries, dried fish, and lately down to the breath of corpses and decay. The smells run into each other and are also shot through with the subtle smell of race, which at once tells you that you are among people who somehow are chemically put together differently.

In the back alleys all this dies down, and you see only the forbidding gray walls, which have something mysterious about them. Set into these solid walls you suddenly find heavy brass plaques, surrounded by flowers and fluttering ribbons. Beside them a scarlet gate grins, and in the broad gateway several servants sit. A table appears, and the person just entering lays a silver dollar on it.

Here live the courtesans, more like queens who dispense favor than poor slaves who have to sell themselves. Whoever enters here and pays his dollar is still far from the goal of his wishes. He is simply admitted, receives, in the general salon together with many other gentlemen, his little cup of narcissus—here water-lily—tea, or perhaps a small bowl of rice wine with an unbearably sweet, mushy cake. He is entertained by the beautiful hostess, witty talk flies back and forth, and the one she loves most gets to stay in the end. The others are richer by a fine hour and poorer by a dollar, but their urge for love remains uncooled. All this is more like the Greek world of courtesans. Such women must make their mark as much by their knowledge, spirit, and wit as by their looks. As in Japan, so in China the power of such women is explained by the fact that marriages are arranged, while in freedom the heart may speak.

In Peitaiho.

The little Chinese girl in silk jacket and trousers stood at the open carriage window and made sprinkling motions—the Chinese way of waving, which is more like flicks in the air as if tapping the nose. Two older women, a bit on the heavy side, sat opposite me, and one of them tried to draw me into a conversation which, given my language skills, soon ended up in the ruts of not knowing; but we carried on Neanderthal-style, making all kinds of hand movements up and down and pulling faces like movie actresses. When we stopped in a larger town and people brought peaches, my opposite number bought a few golden-yellow, wonderfully juicy ones—tempting as sin and full of germs—and handed me a fruit.

Again and again I have had the chance to see that the women of the whole world, with only small exceptions, are kind at heart—and the lower their social standing, the kinder. Either poor people can more easily come out of their shell, or are they so good because they have known want in their own bodies? When I had already given up all hope and fallen out with God and the world, such an example of charity kept saving me from complete collapse of the soul. It was always as if, on the desolate road of a limitless desert, I had suddenly found an oasis with flowers.

I ate the peach without regard for its cholera possibilities, with the soothing thought that my stomach had already digested iguana eggs, snakes, okalehau, and Japanese mochi, and in fact the consequences were only a “Tutsehe buhau” (disturbance below the belt).

Right beside the villages you could see round mounds half the size of a house, the unadorned graves of the dead, black pigs, trotting camels, countless mules and donkeys, and funny two-wheeled carts with blue canopies, whose heavy, clumsy wheels sink into the ruts, and in which travelers can only sit hunched, legs tucked under. On a handcart a man took his two wives along with a trunk to a neighboring village, and the two better halves (do two halves make a whole in that case?) sat very skillfully over the single broad wheel.

Only in the evening, when your bones already feel the nine-hour ride, and the mountains across the wide plain move toward you slowly and with dignity like wandering monks, does the train stop at a tree-shaded station, and someone calls:

“Peitaiho!”

That is the most famous seaside resort of the North. All Europeans flock to it with enthusiasm, but one must by no means think of Ostend or Abbazia. +++Die kleine Zweibahn, der ich mich anvertrauen mußte, lud mich im ersten Abendschatten vor einem Ort ab, der aus sehr gewöhnlichen, zerstreuten Bauten bestand und in keiner Weise großartiger als die üblichen Landdörfer schien.+++ I took the two bottles of strawberry juice entrusted to me and stepped out into the open …

My load served outside as a sign of recognition.

Even the next morning, viewed in clear light, Peitaiho was no spa. Between fields of corn and kaoliang lay single-story little houses with strikingly wide terraces and roll-down straw mats meant, on the one hand, to keep out the almost unbearable heat and, on the other, the pouring masses of rain. It’s true there was, at a bend in the road, a kind of market which I gladly visited (for even rummaging aimlessly through all that Chinese splendor was pleasant), yet there was no spa park, no spa salon, not even a general meeting place. The beach stretched on for three miles, and just as scattered were the little country houses the Europeans lived in. The road itself was deeply rutted and dusty, and the soft sandy part belonged exclusively to the donkeys. In Peitaiho you ride in rickshas or on horseback, and only the truly seasoned go on the good Lord’s gifts—their own walking machines. Undernourished, overtired donkeys like to express their contempt for the world by suddenly dropping their heads and helping the unpracticed rider to a somersault, and the rickshaw coolies smell of Adam’s sweat down to this very day.

What you need comes to the house—perhaps more than you would wish. The water coolie fills the big wooden barrel in the yard, the vegetable woman lays the vegetables on the scale at the veranda step and cheats if there’s any way to, the wood carrier brings his load, the lace man—oh, temptation!—shows up just when, in your postprandial doze, you’re inclined to look at everything he spreads out on the floor—and you buy, whether you want to or not …

The money is confusing. A silver dollar has one hundred silver cents, but a fluctuating hundred eighty to hundred ninety copper tungsel. The dragon money in circulation only in Shanghai has a higher rate. A tungsel can be large (2), small (1), or a post copper coin with a hole, and in the last case it can only be used again at the post office. The dragon ten-cent piece has 20, the ordinary ten-cent piece only 13 to 19 tungsel. The fruit sellers count by four, others by five tungsel units, and there is always shouting when you get it wrong.

In China women never cook, and so one has only male servants—a sore subject. They steal, they are disobedient, and if you dismiss the cook, all his mates usually disappear. Also you have different servants for different tasks, and no Chinese does more than what falls into his line. The washman washes the laundry and tears it to pieces with great skill, the waterman brings the needed washing and drinking water, the porter calls the rickshaw coolies, guards the entrance, pays arriving messengers, takes letters; the houseboy delivers, runs errands, and learns. The house coolie carries coal, mops the floors, runs errands, waters the flowers; the servant waits at table, keeps the gentlemen’s laundry in order, opens doors, brings tea. The amah looks after the children, keeps the ladies’ laundry in order, and performs light services when she can get away from the children. She hates the bath and wears padded garments in winter, which are rarely changed. Each servant receives 12 to 15 dollars a month, but feeds himself. The cook is a chapter unto himself. From every dealer who sells anything, the boy demands a percentage, and whatever you buy is always charged a few cents higher. Nowhere—perhaps only in India—is the European exploited so unbelievably, and yet one seldom lives anywhere as royally comfortable as in China. Or lived, for today the foreigner is the zero before the digit …

Finally, you also have to suffer from the servants’ illnesses. Boils in the neck are probably the mildest affliction. They start to discharge pus, a fly settles on them, poisons the boils even more, and the Chinese dies of filth. Then cholera can break out, all kinds of worms appear, or the boy is an opium smoker, has a yellow, gaunt face, his mind remains confused for hours, he is tired, unwilling to work, and often malicious. No one is as treacherous, as thirsty for revenge, as a Chinese; but he can keep a calm face for a long time after an insult. Treatment by whites, by the way, left very much to be desired and explains today’s hatred.

The Storm.

I have seldom lived with anyone whose views on life were so fundamentally different from mine as Mrs. von S. Nevertheless, we got on very well; for her pronouncedly materialistic view of the world made me more attentive to the practical side of everyday life than I otherwise was, and shook me a little out of my idealistic daydreaming and my then longing to give everything to everyone; and she found entertainment in my nature, which probably seemed to her like a modern Don Quixote. In the evening, by windlights, when the moon swam up over the black of the trembling willows like a reefed sail, we talked about being—she anchoring it in the visible, I, with my leaning toward the mystical deepened by living among dark-skinned people, in the invisible.

One afternoon, while I was writing or painting on the terrace, but Mrs. von S. was asleep, the straw mats flapped so threateningly that, as the darkness grew, I withdrew into the room. Soon it hissed, whirred, rasped, and boiled out there, as if the sky had turned into a witches’ kitchen. The ropes holding the mats moaned and cracked, lightning followed lightning, thunder followed thunder, and the lead-black sky, which seemed about to fall on our little house, spewed out a stream of warm water that roared down like a lake bursting its dam. Within a quarter of an hour, however, it was so clear that we dared to walk through the puddles and under scudding clouds toward the main part of town. The closer we came, the more we marveled, for everywhere the roofs had been swept away or splintered, the windows lifted off their hinges, and the villas’ little towers dragged into the gardens. Huge trees lay uprooted, and to our astonishment we learned that not a mile from us the tail end of a typhoon had raged, joined heaven and earth for ten minutes, and that a whirlwind had done all this devastation. Many stall owners found only rubble, and a great many people were homeless. Many Europeans packed up and went straight back to Peking or Tientsin. We proved that journalism was in our blood, for Mrs. von S. threw herself onto paper to inform her husband, and I flew, breathless, to my Erika, which of course I had brought to Peitaiho and which at night stood on the chair next to my bed.

Among temples.
If I had only one country to describe, I would gladly linger over the temples above all; for every temple is a poem in stone that reaches back into past centuries and holds a part of the people’s history within it, revealing a page of the people’s thinking—but my hands are tied. The Temple of Heaven alone could easily swallow volumes. So quiet and stately it lies in the middle of the wide, sun-drenched plain behind the notorious Thieves’ Bridge, where the “finds of the night” are often hawked before dawn for a laughable price. The cobalt-blue roof with a violet cast rises out of a green wall, for blue is the symbol of heaven, green that of the fruitful earth. Everything belonging to the gods is round; everything belonging to the human realm is square or firmly bounded. To that is joined the wondrous Chinese number symbolism, almost as grand as that of the Hebrews and likewise seeing 3 x 3, that is, nine, as the holiest of all numbers. Hence there are sets of three and three steps up to the Altar of Heaven, with the symbols of the earth—wind, clouds—of the higher layers of air—phoenixes—and of heaven—the dragon—on the broad marble middle platform, across which the emperor, too dignified to climb steps, had to walk. On this altar, facing south—because the sun may rise in the east, but reaches its greatest strength in the south—the emperor offered, on New Year’s night, a flawless black animal, usually a goat. The central stone is surrounded by nine rows of marble slabs that together make 36 stones. Next to the Temple of Heaven stands the Harvest Temple, also thoroughly symbolic: in its outer red lacquer columns the twelve months, in its four splendidly decorated inner columns the four seasons, and in the square built into the dome the blessing of heaven upon the earth, without which nothing can succeed.

That is perhaps the most distinguished temple, precisely because the faith—so reminiscent in many ways of that of the Incas—has died out, unless one wants to name the Five-Cornered Temple outside the gate on the way to the Jewel Pagoda. In the Lama Temple there is too much greed—monks again and again thrusting out a dirty, long-nailed claw—and despite its many sights (the laughing giant Buddha in the forehall, the strange Buddhas under glass in darkening chapels, the sor or the butter-dough offering pyramids, and the monks who rap inattentive disciples with flywhisks made of yak tails), it is not as mystically alluring as, for instance, the Mahakala Miao (Shiva in his aspect as destroyer of all sensual things), where larger-than-life figures, embodying all kinds of spirits and taking bird, animal, or human form, burst from the uncanny twilight of vast temple halls. A woman knelt before an unbending man and silently held out the offering bowl to him. It was the feminine that sacrifices everything to the masculine, waiting for the gift of begetting, the only thing that keeps the world alive …

The Ta Chung S’su, where one is said to learn the secret of life, has the largest hanging bell in the world. Its strike says: Schie, Schie (my shoe, my shoe!), because a loving daughter threw herself into the casting to make the bell succeed, which could happen only through a virgin’s blood. The servant who rushed up caught nothing but one shoe. That is why the maiden laments, when the bell rings, for her lost little slipper.

In Tung Yü Miao, opposite the Temple of the Rising Sun, unhappy women kneel before the Princess of the Colored Clouds, and the goddess—who once, in the endless chain of rebirths, was a woman too—remembers that one experience with the most understandable horror and cannot refuse any woman’s plea. A niche is dedicated to Yüh Hsia Lao Erh—the Man from the Moon—who ties the feet of future spouses together with a red thread, and to whom one should give thanks for the knot. Since he forgot my feet, I passed him without a greeting. Next to the entrance door hangs a huge abacus, and if creditor and debtor cannot agree at all, they sleep at night in front of the abacus, and in the early morning the right number is set on top. Then they silently accept the judgment.

In the niches of the inner passage you see the judges of the underworld and their decisions, but the most dreadful of this kind is the adjoining Shi Pa Yü, or the eighteen hells of Buddhism, where, with terrifying realism, bodies are cut apart, heads roasted, eyes torn out, and tongues split. The thirteenth hell shows children being cut up, strangled, or kicked to death before their parents’ eyes and seems to me the most horrible of the eighteen places of torture.

In Po Yün Kuan, a Taoist temple, they show—without asking for a tip—the beautiful old stone inscriptions, the temple halls, and the gardens with their rockworks, and here the third of the Eight Immortals hands out money, on the Day of the Hundred Gods, to those he favors. And here I must return to my idol from Peru. Dr. Lessing, the well-known German archaeologist who was in China then and living in Foo-lai, recognized my soapstone figure as Li Tie Guai, precisely the third of the Eight Immortals, about whom I have since written a lot and who is, moreover, the hero of my novel “The Idol.” As I walked through the peaceful courts of the old monastery, I couldn’t help thinking it was Li Tie Guai’s duty (Li with the iron crutch) to give me money for all my devotion, but he kept silent. Writers belong to that class of beings to whom no one likes to give money (much less give it as a gift).

The deepest impression on me was made by the Yellow Temple, “Huang Ssu,” beyond one of the mighty Peking gates, which always consist of two parts and are built quite crooked (that is, have slanting courtyards) so the spirits cannot find their way through. The wide plain spreads out before it like a yellow carpet of sand, and the Western Hills shimmer like sapphires through the light veil of a woman’s dress. The temple dome pricks into the clear autumn air, and the weeping willows drop their yellow little leaves like scattered gold on the still, greenish waters of the canal, over which mandarin ducks swim with light movements that draw soft half circles.

A lama monk with black claws—nails that, like those of the sage on the legendary Eyebrow Mountain, had already grown almost all the way around him—opened the gate. We slipped through. Everywhere decay, the wasting away of the greatness of bygone days. In the temple halls the silk cloths, brought by worshipers from far-off Tibet, still hung, moldering, and the gods in their glass coffins seemed to mourn the dead past with them. Gate after gate opened, and at last we were in the innermost court, facing the snow-white pagoda with reliefs, under which, in a golden box, rest the cast-off garments of the holy lama who died of smallpox, and whose body was sent back to Tibet in a golden coffin. A reclining stone lion wipes his eyes, and a gilded dome crowns the thirteen-story pagoda.

Worse than going in was coming out; for now the claw-rich monk in his stinking habit stood in the middle of the threshold and blocked the way to extort a generous tip. Once someone outside bolted the gate, and then he was in for it. Frau von S. looks at life from the human, not the ghostly standpoint, and it was a near thing: the lama monk would have felt, on his holy fingers and perhaps on his even holier head, the hard stick of good German wood. So he opened gate after gate, and only before the last gate did we give him twenty cents. With less extortion we would have given more.

I had a longing for the Tsan-tsan—the part of me that craves secrets anyway—and although my companion was usually more for the purely physical, she let herself be persuaded to visit the Tsan-tsan with me. We went through sand-swept, crooked lanes made only of winding walls until at last we reached a gate which—opened by an even dirtier monk whose nails were full spirals—led into a courtyard that seemed nothing but a coal yard. Beyond this heap of small coal balls (dust coal is dampened, kneaded into balls, dried in the sun, and sold that way) we found another gloomy wooden temple. When the key grated in the lock and the door flew open, a strong smell of decay came toward us. In the dim room, which even the golden autumn sun could hardly reach, chest stood next to chest. They all had yellow lids and recalled broad night chests, though they were a little lower. In each chest sat a decaying monk. For when a monk of the Hoang Ssu feels death approaching, he climbs into the coffin while still alive and immediately takes the posture he wishes to assume, springing from the lotus, in the other world. As soon as he is dead, the monk who makes the rounds closes the lid, and the decay goes on until the stench can no longer be endured and they burn chest and contents out in the yard. For that, the nearness of the coal dealer—whose nerves and nose must be of a very special kind—is very advantageous. The monk said something to me, and Frau von S. translated that he would be willing, for a few copper coins, to lift a lid. Then I jumped from the Tsan-tsan out into the open air, much to my companion’s amusement, who had already assumed I meant to look for the lama monk’s soul in the rotting mass.

My Chinese girl.

Father and mother had studied in Germany for a long time and were tinged with the West. They often came to Foo-lai and finally asked me to give her lessons in English. She was a delicate young girl of about twenty and pretty even by European standards. Her long black hair was well oiled and twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck. She wore a tight, side-fastened silk jacket that reached to the hips, tight black silk trousers, and often a short, tight silk skirt—the latest fashion—colorful silk stockings, and charming little slippers in which she surely couldn’t have gone twenty steps on a dusty road—but she didn’t go. She came in her own rickshaw and rode back in it. When she was naughty sometimes, her mother said:

“Just wait, I’ll get you married!”

That threatens the worst thing you can hold over a female being, for then you are under a man you have never seen, with a mother-in-law toward whom you have many duties and no rights, and forever separated from your own. Even when the young wife later visits her own mother, which may happen only once a month, she must bring needlework and stitch at it as a sign that she no longer belongs at home, but is the labor, the property—in short, the goods—of another house. That is why, at home, they wear white, the color of mourning, and sweep the house after her as after a dead person as soon as the young bride has been carried into her new home.

If I hoisted myself up to the third of my windows, the one high up in the wall, I could look over three courtyards, and once there was a wedding in the house next door on the right. In front of the entrance stood the canopy, the musicians drummed, fluted, whistled, shrieked, and fiddled away briskly, and at last, in front of the scarlet, gold-embroidered sedan, the veiled bride appeared with a magnificent crown and the red silk cloth before her face. Here she was allowed to get in alone, but in the new home the servants would carry her over the threshold and set her down before the household altar, and she would see the face of her future lord and master only after they had emptied the three cups of sake that were joined with a red thread.

Nothing is so sad as a sonless family. If the jewel is missing, the household happiness is missing too, and I often asked myself how much secret sorrow might be hidden in the heart of my little pupil’s mother; for she had only three daughters, and because of this lack they always called the youngest daughter “little brother.” That way they gloss over the unavoidable.

Their home—I visited once—was on the ground floor, and the doors and windows opened onto the well-kept garden so that no one could flirt with the street. In the garden there were dwarf pagodas and imitations of rocks, little temples, rice fields—everything very lovely and very foreign—and in the rooms the black furniture (all carved ebony) stood solemnly stiff against the walls. The most striking things were the red spittoons.

On the girls’ silk jackets one often saw the animal of the birth year embroidered. Their feet were not crippled, but naturally small, and though well formed, they took no joy in walking. That is the case in China even among Europeans. Rickshaws are the true mischief-makers, for they rush at you, and you really have to be determined if you decide to do the winding, dusty streets on shank’s pony.

So much for Chinese families.

Now a word about mixed marriages. The only happy marriage was the one I got to know in Foo-lai, and it may have been due to the fact that this Chinese had lived twenty years in Europe and was steeped in the views of the whites. Even there, in his capacity as a father, things came to light that seemed unthinkable to Western minds. All the other marriages—there were sixteen in Peking alone—were without exception unhappy. Yet some of these Chinese were, in themselves, very lovable, most agreeable acquaintances (not husbands!). I’ll mention two cases—without names. One lady was Austrian and had met her husband at the legation in Vienna. She lived sixteen years at his side without becoming fully conscious of why they were slipping farther and farther apart. Then she gradually learned that he had not only a concubine but three different families in three different districts of Peking. She left him; for divorce in China is endlessly difficult, and the European woman becomes Chinese by the marriage itself. With today’s immorality in Europe, this may not seem a striking case; but one must have lived in China to understand that a white woman cannot remain the heart- and bed-beggar of a man who enters into the closest union with unwashed, perhaps infected women on a far lower level in every respect, and later demands from the white wife what only a slave may be willing to do …

The second case was that of a very pretty Frenchwoman. She became pregnant, and at the birth of a stillborn child the husband—and she herself—were told that she must not have children if she did not wish to die in lasting madness. The husband wanted a son, regardless of the woman’s welfare, and to satisfy him she consented. The child—a girl—was born, and on the ninth day after birth the mother went through the hospital with a broom: hopelessly insane. She is spending the rest of her blooming youth in the asylum.

I mention all this to warn young European women who, in Europe, are drawn by the spell of the eastern world. Not only do the characters not match—the European woman who marries an Asian also loses her caste among her own people and lives as a social pariah. That is far more bitter than one imagines at home. She is also defenseless against the hatred of the foreign race, and if she turns for help to the authorities of the whites, the answer, involuntarily, is:

“For heaven’s sake, how could you…!”

Walks.

Most of all I liked to stroll toward evening up on the Peking wall. Between the Hata Men on one side and the Chien Men on the other, Chinese are not allowed to set foot on this stretch of the wall, guarded by Belgian troops, that looks down on the Legation Quarter, for from here shots were fired at the refugees in the Europeans’ gardens. Only a few amahs in white dress with their little white charges walk up and down there; otherwise you have the broad, sunlit path to yourself, or share it at most with the Peking crows, which are found everywhere and are even more brazen than crows usually are.

Nowhere on earth—so it seemed to me—does the sun shine as it does in autumn in Peking. The sky is cloudless blue, the Western Hills shimmer into misty violet, the desert stretches as far as the Ming tombs, glittering yellowish with their row of enormous stone animals, and close at your feet lies the city itself with the Tartar quarter, where Europeans and other non-Chinese are allowed to live, and the Chinese City, reserved only for the Sons of the Middle Kingdom. You see the dome of the Ancestral Temple beside the gleaming Altar of Heaven, the gates that loom menacingly and whose open arched windows are meant to let the spirits pass unobstructed, the streets with all their indescribable rush and bustle, their smells, and their charm of the strange.

One evening I found the gate closed and didn’t know how to get down from the wall. Then an evil fat spirit in the shape of a woman advised me to squeeze through the iron bars, since I was so slender, and when I had stuck my head through to try, I was sure I could slide the rest of my body through as well. The moment I had successfully pushed my weight through, the Belgian guard arrived and arrested me. After long, polite explanations in French, and a promise to keep the rendezvous the next day without fail, I was released, and for a long time the Peking wall with the pretty tsao, the Chinese date shrubs, didn’t see me again …
I wouldn’t have written half my stories if I hadn’t wandered so much through all those back alleys where hidden things seethed. There lay a dead man in a narrow room, and they were just now shooing the animals (dog and cat) anxiously out; here a Chinese sat on the dusty ground, sealing ordinary willow baskets with a thin paste that—once dry—made the basket watertight; over there two men were sawing wood, one high up in the air, the other down on the ground. They pulled a long saw, one up, the other down. I peered into a cloisonné factory, saw the dazzling colors, noticed how carefully the tiny bits were set in and how quickly they were wiped smooth over them; I watched the little sugar seller with his honey sweets, with more flies than honey on them, and stopped in front of the rice shop whose sign was a white hair switch, to watch how the rice was poured, weighed, rolled out of mat sacks. I also wandered through the famous arcade where one could buy everything that existed in China at all: the most charming little figures the size of a fingernail, larger clay figures of beggars, fans, silk gods, silk lanterns, jewelry, lacquerware (not as simply elegant as in Japan, rather overloaded, yet very beautiful in its way), and above all the lovely, heavy Chinese gold and silver brocades.

At the time of the autumn moon they celebrated the Moon Princess. So one saw little figures of the legendary one set up by the dozen on the ground for sale, and in scarlet clay basins white cakes in the shape of a full moon were sent out. Long ago, a wise man had given an old and cruel husband an elixir of life, which he handed to his wife for safekeeping before he lay down to sleep, but she—seized by curiosity—tasted the precious drops, which made her feel strangely happy and light, and before she knew it, the little bottle was empty. The enraged husband chased her with raised slipper from room to room. In the last room the window stood open, and she flew out—flew and flew and, in her fear, did not stop flying until she recognized the nearby moon and landed on the white disk, where the Moon Hare welcomed her kindly and the moon fairies chose her as their princess. In autumn she still remembers the earth and blesses the fruits, and when the moon has turned red, the Chinese give her thanks …

Once we also experienced a sandstorm. First the sky turned pale yellow, so that it dazzled the eyes and filled the heart with a strange fear; then enormous sulfur-colored clouds rose behind the western mountains, massed into menacing heaps, and in Beijing itself became a fine rain of sand. One had to stop up all the window cracks and cover everything, yet this sand, the breath of the Gobi Desert, crept through the finest openings and made even breathing hard. Outside the storm howled and whirled like a madman in its death dance. It grew so dark one had to burn lights, and against the windows the crackling cloud beat in an eerie rhythm. After a few hours the danger was past, and everything, everything was yellow.

Another time I stood in the street and noticed how all the passers-by were watching a cloud in the sky—or a swarm of swallows, I first thought. Then the cloud drew near and thinned—it was locusts, and they fell like rain down into all the courtyards. Mushi, the little Pekingese, gathered them and ate them up, but the children most eagerly and laughingly collected them in baskets and sacks. At home the spiky legs and the head were torn off, and the finger-long, thick green body was roasted. They are said to taste very good. I took part in neither the catching nor the eating. In the morning the crows ate this green roast with enthusiasm off the outer wire screen of my window, where the locusts had clung.

The death in the family.

It would be too cruel to call it a blessing; but it was a good piece of luck for me that my landlord’s father (if he was going to die anyway) died just while I was in Beijing; for that way I could gain insight into the thousand customs that come to light then and that one would never learn otherwise—you simply have to be favored by chance to see them.

The East is peculiar. In our clear, sober, very materialistic West, certain views do not fit, particular happenings remain unexplained; but the East, with its mysticism, speaks to the deeper self in a way that, for me at least, stands above everything the disenchanted West (or is it merely the unenlightened?) admits in this realm.

Mr. L.’s father, an old diplomat who had studied the devious ways of popular leaders in many lands, was in his late seventies, very spry, very kind-hearted, and still fond of life. One morning, as usual after distributing alms to the blind in his quarter in the Chinese city, he went for a walk and happened to pass an old temple that lies in one of the crooked back alleys and where one can learn what place a deceased has in the shadow world. Just as he walked past the great gate, he felt a sudden chill run down his spine and, when he returned home, he said to his servant:

“Ring my son and ask him to come here, for I shall soon leave this world.”

“Is my master unwell?”

“I am not feeling bad, but it has been made known to me that the summons has gone out and my place is set.”

He lay down, and the houseboy, obeying a sudden unease, did not ring until seven the next morning. Mr. L. went around eight to the Chinese city, found his father apparently quite well, and laughed at the story. At ten the old gentleman succumbed to a stroke.

Then came the mourning rites. The wife had to be called from Shanghai, and here they set to work making mourning garments. Furs and silks were packed away, as well as all jewelry, which could not be worn for three years. During this time neither of the two girls would be allowed to marry. The first mourning clothes were for everyone of the coarsest hemp cloth, not hemmed but left to hang in fringes (equanimity toward all earthly things). No one was to wash, comb, or clean their nails, and before a visitor came, Mr. L. would always tousle his hair. One was to eat only with the fingers and not sleep at all. In the mourning house the music played without a break to drive away all spirits, and the son had to kneel without ceasing at the end of the coffin behind the long green curtain. Whenever a person of rank made the formal bow before the coffin, he usually also pushed back the curtain and lifted the mourner up.

And in the room separated by the wide curtain, where as a visitor you saw only the head end of the high coffin—how many preparations! All nails had to be pulled out of the wall or wrapped in scarlet silk; for in the evening the guardian came with the soul, which took of the scent of the offerings, and if a nail was uncovered, the spirit guardian would hang the soul on it and prefer to eat the food himself. In front of the table had to stand the brazier for burning paper money; for the more paper money was burned, the richer and more noble the spirit became in the next world, and on the offering table, beside the food, incense sticks and scarlet candles were burning. The choice of scarlet is explained by the spirits’ fear of that color.

Next comes the transfer to a temple, where the coffin must be coated with plaster nine times and covered with costly lacquer nine times before it may be laid to rest, and this too does not depend on one’s own will but is set by the sorcerer for the luckiest day for the dead. Often the coffin has to stand for months before it finds its grave, and if the costs grow too great, it may remain standing altogether, so that finally, wrapped in cobwebs and dust (a disgrace for the dead and even more for the survivors), it stays in a hidden niche, where sunlight and moonbeams gradually affect the contents of the coffin until it supposedly grows wings and can roam about at night. People who die on an unlucky day have their head unfinished, carry it under their arm, and cause all sorts of harm.

The coffin itself is a sight. First, it should be of good catalpa wood, roomy, dry, and comfortable. An attentive son gives his parents a coffin in good time, which is kept in the house like any piece of furniture, and into which the owner lies now and then to try it. One also likes to buy the silk shroud while still alive and oversee the making of the ten quilts, all of which must have silk covers and belong in the coffin—five under the dead, with the red quilt on top, five above, with a cutout for the face. Jewelry, keepsakes, garments are often sent along, and so that the corpse cannot move, plaster rolls wrapped in silk are laid inside on each side. With the finest glue, without a nail, the coffin is closed. A silver peg, hammered into a star shape, must be driven into the coffin by the relatives, three blows each.

On set days receptions are held—one bows to the dead and is entertained by the living; honor ribbons of silk are sent, at each new visit the music plays, and the mourning son is always kneeling by the coffin. Money is also given to reduce the funeral costs, which are extraordinarily high. Besides all that already mentioned, at the solemn burial all the items being sent to the next land must be made of paper and burned: a house with full furnishings, a horse, a motorcar, women, fruit, favorite dishes, male and female servants, and the burning of these fine objects, which are only paper and bamboo yet made with great taste, is something very solemn. It usually takes place on the eve of the burial.

The flag, lantern, and lamp carriers and so on are all beggars in borrowed green uniforms with a red feather in their pointed hats. The hearse is of splendid red silk, richly embroidered with gold, and under a canopy walks the son, supported by two men, for in his grief alone he would find neither the way nor the strength. Lama priests in white go ahead, the music whistles its shrillest, and the sounds really are suited to rouse belief in spirits; they have something eerily nerve-jangling. The drums roll, the dust swirls in fine clouds around the procession …

Mary.

Everyone was kind to me at Foo-lai, even the guests who came there, and nowhere on the whole trip were the Reich Germans nicer. For when they are nice, they are nice to an unusual degree …

But the dearest figure in Foo-lai—though I was very fond of Charlotte, whom I taught, and my kind hostess, who regarded me as quite one of the family—is Mary. She shone quietly, as only genuine things shine, modestly, but recognizable even in the dark. She always stepped back to let others go first, she was the conscience of the house, she settled accounts in the evening with the fat, cheating cook (there were many of them, but they were all fat and all cheated, so they surely had to smear honey on the lips of the kitchen god Zao Wangye when he rode up to the yearly assembly of the gods), and gradually it became my habit to sit by and listen. It was good for my insight into Chinese ways and doings, and into the language, and it gave me a feeling of importance when Mary’s eyes met mine.

Since I was teaching Charlotte, I dined downstairs in the evenings. That not only took away the burning feeling of loneliness that comes over me only late at night, it was also good for my body, which made do with bread, tea, and peaches, yet did not gain in strength or roundness. At times they sent me a tidbit upstairs during the day, but what I valued most was the love shown to me. I blossomed in it. The mystique of Beijing and life at Foo-lai drew me so strongly that I was half decided to spend the winter there. The earthquake in Japan, which made the hard-saved yen fall, and the fact that I would have had to outfit myself completely, since the Beijing winter was said to be extraordinarily cold, moved me—but more than all that, the awareness of having set out on something that had to be carried through—to leave at the beginning of November after all.

Toward midnight the gentleman, lady, and Miss L. drove home; Mary, the eldest daughter, Tsinling, the little Gold Bell, a true brown Pekingese with an enchanting snub nose, and myself stayed behind and tiptoed past the guests’ doors up into our attic quarters. Tsinling and I received another cake or a leftover from the feast, Mary lay down because of stomach cramps, and by the light of a candle we chatted as only two young girls can chat about life, I speaking somewhat out of the bitterness of my travel experiences.

Tsinling lay devoutly at our feet and from time to time acted as if a flea had bitten him, a plebeian gesture we immediately discouraged.

In the afternoon we often went out together too, each sitting in a rickshaw, a warm foot rug thrown over us, for it was cold. Mary played the piano at friends’ houses while I had a little nip (people nip terribly in the Far East!) and gave myself over to art. Or we visited the market together and were glad if we came out again without dirt stains. We went to the theatre, and Mary let her ears jingle full of Chinese music for my sake, and once Mr. L. took us to a Chinese restaurant, where we all sat around a round table and, with chopsticks, fished something from every dish to drop it into our own bowl. Bones flew underneath, juice onto the table. When I modestly expressed my amazement at this way of eating, I was told that in old times the host had to taste every dish first to convince the guests that nothing was poisoned, and so the custom had remained to this very day. At large Chinese banquets, custom also requires that one belch, to prove one has eaten enough. One begins with cakes and ends with soup. Actually everything is very well seasoned and tasty, and whatever you eat is said to be duck. It’s best to eat and not ask much, for “who asks much gets much answer,” says the English proverb …

What wouldn’t I still like to tell—about the hot towels in the theatre that you can order for five copper coins, which are thrown over all the heads from the direction of the orchestra and with which you are to wash your face and hands (they are pulled out of hot water); about the sugared lotus slices being hawked, the heavy fragrant flowers in the hair of the Chinese women, the peculiar hair ornaments, the symbolism on the stage, and many other curiosities. Or shall I report on the Great Wall, which stretches from the seacoast at Shanhaiguan to the border of Tibet and reaches its most splendid form at Nankou Pass, not too far from Beijing, where the train stops at Qinglongqiao (the Bright Dragon Bridge) and from where you can see the plain of Zhili and, in the distance, the snow-covered mountains. Two centuries before Christ, a ruler had this wall built in order to give an army that otherwise would have wandered about as robber bands work and discipline again. Seven hundred thousand men worked on it, and today, after two thousand years, you hardly notice a change.

Or shall I rave about the Summer Palace, the huge stone boat, the magnificent colonnades, the artful bronzes by the entrance? Or about the magic of the jewel pagoda and the quiet of the villages you walk through? Or about the Forbidden City, part of which one may enter each year with special permission and where I saw the beautiful Buddhist pagoda? About the chrysanthemum show, to be sure nowhere near as lovely as in Dai Nippon, my beloved Japan, or the wonders of the Confucius Hall, where the great philosopher is revered?

Much rather I would like to tell of superstition, of the steps of the fox fairy, the gu that takes the lives of unborn children, the spirit wall … yet the best of that is recorded anyway in my Beijing tales. For now I tell only of what—on this endless study trip—has deeply moved my heart and how people’s lives unfolded precisely before me.

Farewell.

It was mid-November, and the blue autumn sky wore a fine veil of mist, which is otherwise seldom seen, when I was escorted to the train and, after saying goodbye to everyone, looked once more into Mary’s good eyes. Then the train rolled past the wretched brown mud huts of the villages and at last reached Tianjin, the city in which “my little Chinese,” the hero of my first book, was to live. But since I wasn’t sure with what kind of knife he would slit my throat if we met, I contented myself with strolling only through the European quarter, a doubtful pleasure with the sharp wind from Siberia around my ears, made even more doubtful when it began to snow.

The Maru (some Maru or other, for every Japanese boat belongs to this Maru association) didn’t leave until the next day, and my bad mood about this, as I lay freezing in bed, was eased only by the tirade with which an American, the only other fellow traveler, gave vent to his feelings at ten o’clock at night within earshot. That spared me from making a racket in the universe too.

Tianjin is as typically an eastern port as Yokohama or Shanghai, not really European, not really Chinese, but both from the most unflattering side. I shall keep silent about it. My fellow traveler told me on the first evening all his love adventures (at least enough of them to suffice for one lifetime), and I listened devoutly (a treasure trove for a writer) but coldly with fish eyes, like those of the Japanese in the streetcar, until he was, as it were, hypnotized by it and surely swore into his pillow that either I had sat beside him in my astral body, the unfeeling spirit of a drowned woman, or that I belonged to the coming generation—which would be neuter and thus, strictly speaking, not count as sexed.

Just as expected, after so much erotic poetry came the prose of everyday life, and while I have forgotten the poetry, the prose, perhaps because of frequent repetition, has stayed well in my memory, for it consisted of deep sighs that scarcely changed and went:

“Will the strap I buckled around the big trunk hold or snap?”

Since the lamented trunk lay in the ship’s depths and nothing could be changed about it, the jeremiad seemed unnecessary to me. It spiced our meals, and I can report for the readers’ peace of mind that the strap, just as I assured him, really did hold …
Through the Yellow Sea.

A saying goes: “You howl when you come to Beijing, and you sob when you leave,” and it proved true. All through the cold journey I saw only Foo-lai and, for the first time, felt bitterness that something kept driving me on just when I had found friends, that highest earthly good.

Toward noon the Maru crawled past Takoo, the headland with its snipe and wild ducks, the countless seagulls and the crabs on the muddy bottom. The wind blew harshly from the already snowy north, sailboats made distant white dots, the coast fell away behind us, and we steered northeast toward Manchuria …

After a very long time I was traveling First again, which, however, unfortunately resembled a poor Second.

Twenty-four hours later the much-fought-over Port Arthur lay before us, with its soldiers’ graves and gray rocks, over which the broad-crowned Japanese pines spread, and from there the hills rolled evenly inland to Dairen, the main harbor of Manchuria, which does belong to China, but had to cede Dairen and Port Arthur to Japan. The Manchurian railway is also in Japanese hands.

And again, right after landing, I learned how justified my enthusiasm for Japan was. I had bought a small thing in a shop and left my purse behind, and a complete stranger of a boy ran after me with it for a whole city block. I had a letter of introduction to a bank official, and he insisted, most kindly, on taking me ashore, as the “Kohoku Maru” was shipping bean-cake—this useful but terribly stinking fertilizer—for three days. Early in the morning, in his role as language guide, he led me right to the bathroom door, had me kneel down, then opened the door to point out sponge, tooth powder, hot water, and so on, and commanded, “Wash!” Even better was when, in the evening, before his wife unrolled the soft silk futon for me, he gave an equally peremptory “Go to the toilet!” I went and found the straw sandals in the first room, the men’s room, put them on because of the stone floor, stepped into the higher true sanctum, and found, as always, the basin for washing hands by the door and the blue-and-white towel. As always the shoes stood outside the door, I played with the fire in the hibachi, and everything I had once laughed at like a child had now become dear and familiar.

On the third day we left this port of oils (beans, peanuts, etc.), which is very handsome and thoroughly modern and visited by many steamers. Fine, wide streets lead to the circular center, and despite the Japanese shops and Chinese rickshas the city makes a refined, European impression. It lacks, however, any of the East’s magic, except in small side alleys.

Oh, this Yellow Sea! Never was my sorely tried stomach more weary of life than off Chifu, the famous lace place where every house turns out filet, off Weihaiwei, where there is an excellent school for European children, and off what was once Imperial German Tsingtau, whose port works still bear witness to German efficiency. Wrapped in every blanket I could reach, I lay on my bed and cursed the gods who made the earth and left too many wretched puddles …

After three days (luckily, everything ends on this curved world) the sea turned muddy and calmed down. Sailboats and steamers gathered around us, shores drew closer; we were in the Yangtze Bay and passed Wusong. Ships of all countries all around, low clay huts on the banks, ragged willows: that is Shanghai.

People advised me not to take a rickshaw and to watch my direction. Anyone not well acquainted with Shanghai could easily be rolled into a wrong district by some coolie, and you could not trust what strangers told you. I thanked the well-wishers for the warning, the good Lord for my feet, and set out on foot—a good half hour of steady walking. The “Bund,” the main street right by the water, has tall European buildings and looks inviting from the river. The streets that run off it start out tall as well, with fine shops on the ground floor, but gradually turn into little Chinese huts. What disappointed me so much about Shanghai was that both the European and the Chinese parts are like a stage set, give the feeling of something contrived, and satisfy neither our side nor the Asian side.

Tourists may admire the shops or the pagoda across the river; I find the French mission remarkable, which embroiders such splendid vestments and other things that orders come in from the whole world. The orphans who find a home there grow up into embroidery, which suits the Chinese. They embroider as children, as young people, as husbands and wives (for men embroider too), and they only stop when their eyes have become dim like lanterns blinded by rain. Some boys also carve the famous Chinese cabinets from precious woods in ancient patterns. The children of the well-to-do also go to this convent to learn the usual school subjects. Abandoned girls are very often found near the convent, especially in times of famine.

It need hardly be said that Shanghai, like other great seaports of the world, has its opium dens, underground music halls, and places of vice, where sailors from the four ends of the world trade experiences; but what saddens one today is the number of Russian women—eighty thousand, if I’m not mistaken—who live exactly like the lowest Chinese women, squat in the most dreadful holes among Chinese, and—though white—are available to any yellow man. Poverty is much to blame, but even where such women are offered other work, one meets refusal. The presence of these Russian women is not only a danger from a moral point of view, but also a political one. With their views they push into the lowest—and therefore largest—social strata and stir them up; and they also—this is the worst cancer—lower the Asian’s respect for the white man as white, endangering the future of the white race in the East, perhaps in the world at large.

In the happy region.

In Shanghai, missionaries (English Presbyterian Church) and an American globe-trotting couple came aboard, who took themselves very seriously and sniffed the world properly with the help of Cook and Son. They went on to Siam and Burma and grazed everything by the book—saw just as much of the country as someone at a cinema show: nothing but pictures with no soul under them.

We kept close to the coast for two days, then the captain steered straight at a mountain, threatened to split its belly, and slipped—not like the Pied Piper of Hamelin into an opening in the mountain—no, only into a broad river. That was the Min River.

Brown sails of a strangely broad shape, patched a hundred times, tied off picturesquely, crossed our path. Many-sailed, broad junks, the big sailing ships of China, came closer, and we saw the painted eyes at the bow. No ship sails out to sea without eyes, and usually the ship is depicted as some monster—dragon, ghost, snake, scorpion, or mermaid—has the dreadful head in front and the spiky tail in back, and thus inspires the sea powers and the winds with due respect. The mountains are high, the villages at their feet long and strung out, surrounded by rice fields where the three-quarters-naked farmer works with his water buffalo. Horseshoe-shaped graves gleam white out of the golden brown and juicy green. A long bridal procession moves along the field road.

Broad as a lake, the Min winds from headland to headland, disappears to reappear wider, and carries the endless number of sails with warm, fatherly pride. Hawks fly over the broad-crowned pines, buffalo wallow in the mud—it is already the South calling …

After hours of a magnificently beautiful trip into a new world you turn a corner and see the wide view of Sharp Peak, which ends like a sugarloaf and where the people of Foochow seek relief from the heat in summer.

Foochow (Futschau) means “happy region.” It lies on a hard-to-reach tongue of land. Here the big steamer can go no farther, and steam launches and sampans vie for passengers. These sampans are little boats with bamboo roofs and the start of a room underneath. Pretty pictures of gods hang on the walls, and sometimes even a bench is covered with a dragon-patterned cloth. This is the boatman’s living room. That’s where they eat, live, sleep, and die. The kitchen is in the stern, with a charcoal stove and a few boxes and bowls. The dog and the youngest child are kept on a leash, so they can be pulled out quickly if they fall into the water. Mostly men row, but here only women came up. And how they screamed at each other, yes, even flew at each other’s hair, when one tried to snatch a passenger from the other! How they grabbed the limbs of travelers and tugged them back and forth like a piece of cloth! The missionaries asked me to come along, and gladly I jumped into the nimbler launch with them. An hour later we landed on Nantai Island, and from there the “Bridge of Ten Thousand Years,” which looks a bit battered but still bears the immense traffic, leads to Foochow itself.

We visited the hospital first (the man with the dubious strap stayed outside because he was afraid of infection) and saw the patients on simple wooden benches with a straw mat on them. That is not for lack of money. The Chinese simply do not want to rest on soft beds. It is incredible what pain they endure and how endlessly calm they are under operations. Their nerves are not like ours—or is it in the end because of heavy use of opium? I saw photographs (so, not drawings!) of men whose chest was ripped out of the body (punishment for parricides) and who looked as calm as if someone were simply removing a wart.

They seem to feel lingering illness most keenly. Through bodily help the foreigner also gains the greatest power over them. Only then do they ask why he is actually helping them …

Later, after a very good snack, we went on our round, looked at the gloomy temples on whose gates long-nailed gods stood in conversation, slipped through oddly round gates that formed a perfect stone circle, read blurred inscriptions from Chinese books of wisdom, and admired the hidden little gardens with blood-red poinsettia shrubs and camel’s-hoof trees (Eugenia).

Foochow itself is the dream of a poet of the grotesque. Streets so narrow you can almost touch the opposite walls with outstretched arms; coolies with hats like a straw sugarloaf and darker-skinned than North Chinese; girls with flowers in their hair peering down from the darkening upper stories; in the street, limping with effort, old women on foot stumps in pretty little slippers, perhaps still charming a man’s heart with those golden lilies; sedan-chair carriers with their loads, rickshas with loud bells, all around the perfume of the East, the enticing shops, the hanging signboards, the eateries with pots, bowls, and dishes and the people squatting on the ground, tossing the most questionable foods into their mouths with chopsticks. Everything is more southern, barer, stranger, more colorful than in Beijing, more steeped in sandalwood and incense, still more untouched, still more old-fashioned. Here men sit and rub on lacquer on small stools, making bowls and vases; over there silversmiths file away at delightful filigree things; there they make furniture from unknown, strange-smelling woods and carve gods with uncanny grimaces. The apothecary, with its dog and tiger bones, ginseng, turmeric, seaweed, and other infallible remedies, is full of people; in a dim booth a professional storyteller tells his marvelous ghost stories, while across the way an old man with the start of a beard (hence terribly venerable) throws someone the fortune sticks. Wherever you look, gold characters on red ground, gold-sparkling actor dolls in silk-bursting shop windows, sausages of cat meat, flattened smoked ducks, garish red candy in stick form—and over it all that shouting!

In Foochow you also see the southern women field workers, who are looked down on because they have to do such hard physical labor, but who hold a special position because they are freer and do not look up to the man as such a sacred being. They wear their hair knotted not quite so low in the nape and also have very beautiful long silver pins in it, which make the knot into a spider in a broad silver web.

An excellent supper (not to be despised) at the mission, then a quiet ride past silent junks across the broad Min, where the moon washed its train—and back to the “Kohoku Maru.”

The Island of Dreams.

“Formosa”—the beautiful one—the Portuguese called the island the Japanese today call Taiwan. The storm that drove us toward it was terrible. I have rarely experienced anything like it. The good Maru had piled the deck high as far as it could with heavy logs, and even so I saw, since my window looked out on deck, how the waves not only leapt over this wall and crashed down hissing into the tiniest hollows of the logs or the deck, but how they also tried to move those forty-meter-long masses. More than once I feared they would stab right through my porthole into the interior. The Chinese, who night after night had ruthlessly set the gramophones going and played their noisy mahjong, lay (all Asiatics are poor sailors) motionless in their cabins, and the joy of seeing my noisy enemies thus laid low helped me overcome seasickness. Again and again I stood at the little window and looked into the pearl-gray night lit by the moon, in which the crests of the clouds rose like silver bows behind the masses of wood. The “Kohoku Maru” groaned and creaked and panted like mad before the wind …

But as it grew light, many jagged, densely wooded mountains showed themselves, and a never-felt sense of happiness shot through me. Here I had to experience something lovely! I ran onto deck, delighted.

The missionaries landed here too, to go on by train to Tainan, the southern capital. I, however, was to go to Taihoku, the seat of government and true center, to the friend of Mr. A., my pupil, who was already on his way to Europe. All I knew about the unknown man was that he was “a sort of Christian,” which, as I took it, meant he was subject to some kind of religious craze. That bothered me little—me, who thinks people should be allowed to get saved by their own faith. Getting saved was, in any case, in this world or another, a devilishly hard business …

On the platform that ran along the harbor mole someone spoke to me and said briefly:

“I am Mr. I.”

He had been kind enough to come and meet me.

The luggage was fetched quickly, but I did not get away so quickly from a police force that wanted to know everything: “Where from? Where to? Why? How long? For what reason? For which papers? And why the guest of Mr. I.? How did I know him? What did I know about him? Nothing?!!”

Only later did I learn that Mr. I., who freed geishas, took up the cause of the Formosans, brewed plans to bless the world, and made speeches on street corners that were more world-loving than stoutly patriotic, was not above suspicion in the eyes of the police. In happy ignorance I gave the right answers and showed the letter of introduction to the authorities in Taihoku that the Japanese minister in Beijing had given me at Mr. von Salzmann’s request and that stood me in very good stead.

We left Keelung around ten in the morning and reached Taihoku around noon. In a rickshaw I rode to my new home.

In the realm of the colored hens …

The house was of stone and stood at a street crossing. A wide veranda ran around the first floor, and the front part of the building was in European style with modest European furnishings, while the back was Japanese. I lived in the front house, and at night my futon rested on a wooden bench. Below me were the schoolrooms where a teacher was trying to play “Long, long ago.” One hundred and fifty poor Formosan children, who could get no education anywhere else, were taught here free of charge, and anyone who was in trouble could come to this house to ask advice, receive help, and even find refuge. Geishas who wanted to give up their terrible life, which hid behind such a smiling, glittering surface, were not seldom hidden there, and house searches were part of the daily routine. In this circle I moved, cut off by language, in my own aura, and only gradually did I learn what was going on around me.

If I looked out the window, I saw into Chinese homes and learned more about the East than if I had lived three years in a first-class hotel. Not everything is fit to repeat, but everything was human and comic and tragic at once, including the little girls, often hardly eleven, who already wandered the streets and were already “rented out.” Only very young did they have value …

The colonnades diagonally across the way were also a source of wisdom for me. There a brown-and-white cow would often rest, pushing pedestrians aside; there rice or kaoliang was cooked in big kettles; there the cobbler patched shoes made of nothing but patches; there children were washed and men cured of back pain by someone jumping around on their backs or by having a large black plaster stuck on, which had to be warmed in the sun until it did its job. Ducklings crawled out of their eggs and were thrown into shallow baskets to be fed under a net, and in the evening the night watchman went through the streets with his “harmonic sticks” and scared off the thieves—supposedly. What I know is that he punctually scared off one’s sleep every hour …

One thing I couldn’t explain to myself: why the chickens, which back home had modest colors, were blue, violet, and flesh-red in Taihoku. At last I asked Mr. I.

“So their owners can tell them apart!”

And I had imagined I had discovered a new zoological subspecies …

Before higher powers.

In the evening Mr. I. sat down opposite me and we discussed what there was to see. I was mainly interested in the headhunters in Kapansan and the tales of the savages. Also in textiles, the tea industry, and otherwise in the people’s life, doings, and thoughts. As for the animal and plant world, I meant to take care of that myself as best I could.
The next day, a Sunday, we visited the museum, and the director, in the kindest way, showed me all the island’s treasures, explained the different peoples with the help of maps, discussed their weapons, described their customs, and recommended the books I should study in the public library. He also gave me a piece of a textile sample, still made in the old-fashioned way and patterned with human limbs. Once again I melted with emotion over the Japanese.

However, when we went to the ministry the following day and, on the strength of my recommendation, I asked for the privilege of visiting the camphor factory, which is a state monopoly, that emotion nearly froze solid, for we were sent from pillar to post, and people were of a downright heart‑breaking politeness (like armor) and a still more patience‑breaking passion for asking questions.

At last I stood before the Almighty of Formosa in his Holy of Holies and even remained alone with him. I had already answered about thirty questions and had even given my great‑grandmother’s baptismal name, and I felt my patience snap like an old corset lace, when the Mighty One, to whom I would gladly have said something rude, rose most solemnly and remarked:

“Would you give me the pleasure of having a little snack with me downstairs in the building?”

Then I knew how wise it is, when traveling, to hold your tongue, even when your patience is already cracking apart.

Mr. H., who knew many Europeans and hinted that we were a highly entertaining race because we were completely unpredictable, showed himself from then on to be my guardian angel. He took a liking to the particular madness that broke out in me and suggested I continue teaching him French and German, a suggestion I accepted all the more gladly since, with the fall of the yen, my savings did not promise to last as long as I had hoped. He also recommended another student from the chemical laboratory who—like all Japanese—was a most pleasant, diligent pupil. Suddenly I found myself surrounded by new friends, honors, and money. Even a government post would not have been impossible if I decided to stay, to which Mr. I., who claimed it was all the same whether someone slept in my room or it stood empty, urged me strongly. The Formosa sky had not a cloud, and instead of the planned fourteen days (the steamer left for China from the southern tip only every two weeks) I decided, with such favorable offers, to stay a few months, although an inner urge spurred me to move on.

It was very lovely, and I rejoiced, but innocently. The “swollen head” was a disease I had overcome. Blindly I lived from day to day. As is well known, whom the gods would destroy, they first strike blind.

In the Camphor Factory.

Every morning Mr. I. and I went to see something new. Every afternoon I wrote or painted in the little room with the view of the mysterious colonnade. Hot tea always stood on my table, and I gathered from the fact that I was often served a schnitzel with cabbage salad (or the Japanese equivalent of that dish) for breakfast that we Europeans bore the scent of meat‑eaters. At that time I could digest anything, and, starved as I usually was, I could always eat.

A small fly fell into the ointment of my Taihoku happiness when I was told that people far and wide called me “the red woman.” Me! With my genuinely chestnut mop of hair! But to the Japanese all fair women are red, and red I remained. I also wore a rust‑brown velvet dress, made by a Chinese tailor in Peking, approved by Mrs. L. and Mary, and almost new. My only warm dress. But red is considered a children’s color by the Japanese and is not liked. Still, my feelings splintered like kindling when Mr. I., who was a world‑benefactor with his head far from earth, wore shoes like boats and looked for his kimono sash under the chest—thus supposedly indifferent to women’s charms, especially in white women, to the point of dullness—asked me one morning:

“Don’t you have… don’t you have anything nicer to wear?!”

In Honolulu I had been half tortured to death, at the German embassy gently teased, in Peking lovingly admonished and even supplied with new clothes, but the true shove toward eternal reform in matters of dress came from the world‑benefactor. If even an apostle asked:

“Don’t you have anything nicer?”

So I dove into the depths of my trunk and bobbed back up with a blue wash dress with little buttons. Personally, I liked the rust‑brown velvet dress best, and for warmth it was the right thing for a December day that was cold even in Formosa, but the world‑benefactor thought I looked “like a fairy,” and for this fairy status I later paid with a head cold like a typhoon and a 38‑degree fever for more than a week…

Apostles may have a sense of beauty; practical sense they have as little as writers.

In this blue dress I went to the camphor factory for the first time. Formosa is the hearth, the homeland, the land of camphor. Japan supplies the world annually with 2,000,000 pounds, Formosa with 9,000,000, China with 1,000,000 (together with synthetic camphor), so that Formosa is the leading camphor power. An area of 60,000 morgen of land is covered with camphor trees. A single large camphor tree with a circumference of 26 feet can keep a distillery busy for years and brings in an income of over 8,000 yen (16,000 marks).

It was probably the camphor trees that made Japan so inclined to wrest Formosa from the Chinese at any price. But even on the island itself the production has already cost a lot of blood; it took a very long time before the wild Tayalen accepted that foreigners would fell trees in their forests. Many, many heads were taken before the Japanese, through numerous small wars, cleverly introduced barter trade, and finally by installing an electric fence around the most dangerous headhunter area, got so far as to settle at least on the edge of these zones. The interior of the island at this (the northern) end is not yet entirely explored.

The camphor factory, the only one in Formosa, lies in Taihoku itself, not far from the huge and splendidly built government building that could just as well stand in London or Paris, and on some days it spreads a scent far and wide, though not unpleasant to me.

The director himself led us. The Formosans receive one yen twenty a day, the supervising Japanese, of course, much more. Let me add here that by Formosans are meant Chinese who have been settled in Formosa for centuries and who—in isolated cases—have married the gentler of the natives. They are South Chinese and of darker complexion than people of the north, also not quite so water‑shy and just as fond of work and used to hardship.

It is a beautiful sight to see the piled‑up powdered camphor in the great iron chambers. It snows down from the ceiling, it lies in mounded heaps on the floor, and the smell is so strong that it stupefies and causes headaches. Women are not hired, because camphor production is said to make women sterile, and the men have to accustom themselves for a while before they can do their duties without headaches. When you consider that, the pay is indeed very low.

The oil is shipped in the usual tin cans, the camphor in boxes lined with tin. The director gave me a packet of genuine Formosa camphor in cubes and a little bottle of camphor perfume. The tour had lasted over an hour.

Among the Headhunters.

A gentleman from the ministry and Mr. I. accompanied me into the much‑talked‑about headhunter area. There are nine different tribes on the island, of which the Tayalen, said to number eighty thousand souls, are the most dangerous. In earlier years they took over a thousand Formosan heads annually, but the Japanese put a stop to that—heads are more valuable there—and today such losses are rare. The headhunter area may only be entered with police protection, and getting that is not easy.

Opposite me in the carriage sat a Buddhist priest, a gold‑embroidered silk square on his chest, he himself fat and self‑satisfied. The other travelers were true Formosans with palm‑straw hats and baskets. Outside, the plain beyond Taihoku slid by with the shrubs used to scent tea—jasmine, ylang‑ylang—and some tea bushes as well. In Toyen we left the train and boarded the pushcar, a broad, square board on wheels, with one or two boxes as seats, and in some cases even with a sail. Our car had no helpful sail. The Formosan, with his sugarloaf‑shaped roof and a mere suggestion of trousers, jumped on backward after first getting the car well rolling by running and pushing fast. The fields already lay fallow, and a few crows flew over them. The hills drew in curiously, gradually swallowed us, pulled us up onto the ridges. Here stood love trees, so called because the leaves sat on the branches in pairs. They were a kind of willow with a crooked trunk. Later, in the warm hollows, we met tea‑picking women with a white cloth shaped like a hat and bottle‑shaped baskets on their arms, and at last we crossed a bridge whose piers were of bamboo, set up square and filled with pebbles.

We had lunch at the clubhouse in Taikoi, where we were very well served and from where we looked out over the Tamsin River area with the irrigation canals of the rice fields, the water buffalo on them, and the half‑naked peasants. But soon after Taikoi the scrub swallowed us, with its camphor trees, wild bananas, unknown flowers, and, in open spots, the Suzuki grass, whose long stalks moved in an odd way and whose long, whitish, feathery seed sheath reminded one of a ghost’s whisk. Hidden behind such grass, often stretched out motionless for three days, the Tayalen lie in wait until a victim goes by. Then they first shoot an arrow at him, then rush at the stricken one and cut off the head, leaving the body. For no youth can marry who has not brought home at least one head; that is the sign of his maturity, just as no girl becomes a wife before she has received the strange tattoo mark. It runs from the ear to the mouth and back again in two large, broad, blue‑black bands.

There are more than two hundred kinds of poisonous snakes in Formosa, and whenever the car startled a big grasshopper, one of the big blue butterflies, or anything else alive, I already thought I was meeting a snake. The car itself gave one pause; it hurtled down the zigzag paths at a mad pace to keep a bit of momentum for the climb, and each bend showed a new picture, for we were traveling behind the hills into ever farther hill chains and gradually climbing into the real mountains. Sentan shrubs with yellow berries bordered the path, broken by mighty primeval trees or the long‑leaved bananas. So we reached the warning sign: “Danger!”

We were now in headhunter country, and it felt to me as though my companions grew more and more silent…

In the distance, parts of the slopes were burning. The smoke rolled toward the road like a lindworm. That is how the savages worked their fields. A few women, small, brown, with round eyes, stood in a hemp field. We reached a very simple camphor still and got out. In an oven like our charcoal burners use, the camphor wood, chopped fine, was boiled out. The hot liquid flowed through pipes lying in water to cool quickly, and the oil dripped into the containers chosen for shipping. The crude camphor sank to the bottom of the pipes and was likewise taken out and put into containers. Everything was processed only in Taihoku.

Higher and higher, farther and farther, from picture to picture. Early in the afternoon we reached the police village of Kapansan. There are no women there. Nor any civilians. In the thirty little houses, including the roomy school in which a policeman also teaches those Tayal children who wish to come and live with him, live only Japanese, who stand guard here on the worst border of the headhunter areas. They cook, wash, mend, and clean for themselves, and we all slept on the mats in the police inspector’s house, the gentlemen in the first room, I, behind sliding doors, in the second. Never did even the slightest feeling of insecurity come over me. I did have a very unpleasant adventure, not one I would wish for myself in every country, before going to bed. As always, we all filed into the bath one after the other. The bathroom had light and was very clean, the tub, since it was meant for such fairness, strikingly large. I undressed, laid my things on a little bench, climbed the few steps, and vanished—after several “Aiis” and “Auus”—into the hot water. Whether it was the jolt of someone passing by or the sliding door not properly set—at any rate, I had hardly sat down in the tub when the door fell with a crash. As often as I wanted to jump out to put it back, I heard footsteps and hopped back into the water. What was I to do? I had to call for help and—head in a cloud of steam—politely ask that the door be slid back in. No one thought anything of it, and I tried to look as if I attended such a scene daily without clothes. From then on I always inspected the sliding doors before getting into the bath.

At my request we climbed all the way down the high mountain into the valley until we reached one of those uncanny suspension bridges made of rattan vines that span the river like a swing. Two narrow planks were all you had underfoot, and to hold on there was, at the height of your fingertips, a rope that of course gave way. You swayed across the bridge like a tightrope walker, and the more people walked, the more desperately the bridge swung. To discourage me, the inspector bowed and let me go first, expecting to see me turn back in tears, but at the time I thought nothing of it—or at most that one simply had to go there and I would therefore go.

Never in my life did the feeling master me of being somewhere completely far from the world as it did here in this place, the “Meeting of the Rivers.” The round‑roofed little houses, the bright green bananas, the green, rushing river, the high, high mountains that blocked every view, the sun on the farthest slopes, the golden silence… there I longed to stay with the headhunters and forget the world, full of trickery and editorial boards. To live without ambition, without purpose, sunk only in oneself and the nearest of worlds.

But the Japanese, who wished to keep their heads and longed to return to the restless world, soon drove me out of paradise again, much as I would have liked to look longer at the Tayal women with their black faces, piercing gaze, and stiff hemp garments. The mountain before me seemed to grow, and the longer we climbed, the more eagerly the guards urged us on, the higher it seemed. Underfoot it rose into the steel‑blue of the evening sky.

“If it gets dark before we reach the top, the headhunters can come! By day they dare nothing, but at night…”

So I gritted my teeth again, and at last we stood on the small plateau and looked back at the black of the forests through which, far below, like a dull silver ribbon, the river wound…

The Joys of the Savages.

Early, early I crawled out of the soft, warm futons and went outside. The square was swept with sun, and two men approached me. They were wrapped in a cloth like a poncho and had their long hair braided into a queue. On the middle of the head sat a woven piece which, as I later noticed, served every purpose: as a hat, as a drinking cup, as a food container, as a grain measure, and as a nest for lice. Their eyes were gentle and melancholy. You would never have guessed in them a taste for heads.

Down in the small trading post many of them sat, all queued, gentle and quiet. They brought tsuso, the beautiful stalk from which what we know as rice paper is made, cut with a curved, round knife, a splendid, silky‑shimmering paper that the Chinese painted with little figures. The stalk reaches a height of five meters and, in the best case, the thickness of a man’s arm (Aralia papyrifera). They also brought the unusually tough hemp cloth and some fruits from the heights and asked in exchange for tobacco, rice, matches. Empty bottles seemed to them as valuable as gold.

Their huts are very simple, almost unfurnished, with the hearth in the middle and a few boards as a sleeping place. The dead are buried in the four corners of the house, and when all the corners are full, the house is considered unlucky and a new one is built. Young people who wish to spend their honeymoon unseen withdraw into the air—that is, they live in a structure twenty feet above the ground.

A head is received very solemnly. The handsomest youths stand honor guard around the spirit house and sing and dance in honor of the high guest. After a week a feast is held; guests come from far and wide; they pour millet beer between the head’s lips; they give thanks for the honor; they beg the spirit to lure the friends as well; and later the head is kept in the spirit house, or, as among the Bunum, walled into the stone of the house, but always visible to one approaching. I was half tempted to leave my head there, for where else would anyone do such things with it? But the envoy of Poland, who had just arrived in Kapansan that morning, preferred to carry his head down, and the Japanese, who felt responsible for mine, were of the same prosaic opinion, and so after the midday meal I, together with my head, was lifted onto the crate of the pushcart and shshsh! off we went down the valley through the unforgettable camphor groves. A breath of autumn and of dying, wistfully beautiful in the golden December light, lay even over this tropical landscape, and in the high Suzuki grass the wind whispered warnings…

In the Tea Houses.

The biggest tea firm is the Mitsui Company. Merchants come from all parts of the world, mainly from the United States, to take the annual tea tasting and place substantial orders. A large part of Daito‑tei, the true Formosan quarter in which I also lived, belongs to the tea companies, and one morning Mr. J. led me through those halls as well, where many women and children were busy perfuming the tea and packing it. They worked there about twelve hours a day and received twenty sen for it.
The best kind of tea is Oolong tea. They tell how a farmer from Fujian in South China climbed Mount Bui one morning and found a black snake coiled around a tea bush. He took some of those leaves home and found the taste excellent.

Oolong means “dragon” or “snake as black as a crow.” Along with Ceylon tea it holds the American market. The best Oolong costs 2 yen a pound in Formosa. The Chinese, however, prefer scented teas, so they take fresh blossoms of tropical jasmine and another yellow‑white flower that smells like tuberose, mix them with the finished tea, gently dry everything over the hibachi, the warming brazier, and pack it as “Wrapper Tea,” the pound from 80 sen up to one yen.

The best flower tea is called Hoshi cha or Po shien cha.

It was wonderful to walk beneath the dim columned arcades and breathe in the scent of all those rooms; I didn’t just watch the tea trade, I saw a thousand things that thrilled me: a sacrificial pig before a little altar, the entrails and the heart in separate vessels, and a golden‑yellow orange in its snout! I caught a man picking up a false tooth with his big toe and letting it drop into his hand; in a side shrine, lit by the pale glow of a red candle, Chinese women tossed the oracle blocks, two little wooden “horns” with one rounded and one flat side. If both landed “right,” the wish had been heard; if one was right and the other not, the god was wavering, and more paper money had to be burned in the wide, yawning offering oven. If both blocks landed wrong, the gods were and stayed silent. In a nearby field (rows of houses suddenly broke into fields and closed up again) I saw a little water buffalo, still pink and clumsy, and behind a straw curtain a little girl ate bean noodles as deftly and gracefully as a Neapolitan his macaroni.

The Abyss.

Before my hours with Mr. H., the island’s almighty man—times that were always very pleasant—I most liked to wander through the botanical garden and sketch the rich native plant life; or I studied the textiles in the museum, or after my morning lessons I strolled through the city streets, because there you always saw something new to learn from. In the shops you saw people’s lives: they ate, sewed, talked, read, sang, and even died there; under the arcades people made offerings to the gods, made all sorts of beautiful and useful things, and set out cakes and other wares for show. Once there was worship before the pig‑god altar—really the goddess who likes to receive pigs—once a funeral procession passed by, and once the favorite god had an outing. Banners with pictures and embroidery of the richest kind were carried ahead of him. Dragons, phoenixes, gods, demons with flying beards and silk bodies filed past me. The musicians beat drums, wailed on flutes, clashed cymbals, and men in godly robes and fearsome masks danced in front, while their hair, made of strips of yellow paper, whipped through the air like a dragon.

After lunch I wrote and painted, from four to six I taught, in the mornings I went exploring with Mr. I. and in the evenings on my own. I used to work straight through until ten at night, but lately Mr. I. would come and tell me about the superstitions of the Atayal, among whom he had lived for years, about their tales and legends, and I wrote down what he told me. Sometimes I corrected his English. With his aged mother, who made me a little uneasy, and his cold, formal sister I could exchange only the drilled polite phrases I had learned. With them I felt, despite very attentive service, a definite racial prejudice against me.

I am a goose. I’m sorry to have to say that, and sorrier not to be able to put it at least in the past perfect, but I don’t dare. In some things you can not only be a goose, you can, sadly, also remain one.

But I flatter myself that I’m psychic, that I can feel soul‑waves. When I once again turned from the mighty red gate out of the Japanese into the Formosan quarter, full of romance and full of dangers, I was so overcome by the feeling of impending pain that I whimpered up to the gods and was seized by a real grief that I hadn’t taken the last ship that had sailed that day. And yet everything was so utterly sunny: I was earning, I had various honorable prospects, I was learning, and Formosa was a fairy‑tale land.

But alas—witches are known to roam in fairy‑tale lands, and one stumbles on fairy‑tale princes …

I am a goose, and of course I tripped over the fairy‑tale prince in a country where there are only sliding doors.

The Flight.

It was Peru all over again, only somehow transposed from the bass into a high minor key. Still, it was so nerve‑racking that after forty‑eight hours awake I came to the conviction that my emotional cords couldn’t go along with it, nor resist it either, if it went on. I asked a German woman who was married to a Japanese if I might come to her. What I suffered at her place defies description. I couldn’t go to a hotel, because in this case, under such circumstances, a hotel would have offered no guarantee of protection from others or from myself. I remembered the missionary in Taiwan. He invited me to come to him.

This is not the story of my affairs of the heart, but when you have to bother the governor of a foreign race on a foreign island with it, the story is a tragicomedy. In memory, anyway. At the time I cried buckets of tears, precisely because the Japanese, even in the height of passion, keep self‑control, and that very quality wrings my deepest admiration from me.

But we white women must not betray the race. It won’t do! It’s a crime against us and against the others. It also never, never leads to happiness. I had to give up everything and run. All my pupils gave me, a walking Niobe, handkerchiefs as parting gifts, big linen ones! Mr. I. fell ill. Even so he brought me to the train.

Whatever the future held—I had to gain perspective. Live among Europeans and only then make the decision. And he too. In seven months a man forgets ten women, not just one. That was my comfort.

And once more I went on into the unknown world—alone, with dwindling means, followed by the curse of my sex.

How infinitely easy a man travels, by contrast!

In the Shadow of the Temples.

The cars were long, with double seats like in the United States. They brought passengers slippers so they could take off their Western leather shoes and tuck their feet under their legs as they pleased. Outside there was nothing but rice fields, sugar plantations, later bamboo and tea with receding mountains. A young girl sat on a hand‑warmer brazier. On a lonely country road, suddenly a sedan chair. Strange grasses, probably for making tatami, covered long stretches. Then again a temple not far from a town. I looked at it all dully. I would have liked better to look into myself, where life itself was plowing its unexpected furrows, but my duty held my eye fixed on the rolling picture. That was what I had come for; that was why I suffered. The clear wisdom I had to gain along with it was the sad extra from the gods, one not always spared even to those who stay home and bake strudel.

In moments of great inner upheaval I have always envied those of my countrywomen who shone in womanly virtues and sought to master only the secrets of cooking, not those of the universe.

In Tainan the missionaries were touchingly kind to me. I ate with the ladies and stayed in the general mission house, which the locals called the “house of the morning sneeze,” probably because the cold, damp air coming in from the garden made anyone who stepped too early onto the open veranda start sneezing.

The temples of Tainan are older than those of Taihoku, since Tainan used to be the capital; their stamp is purely Chinese, and there is no lack of stone dragons, cloud and wind symbols, and small shrines lit only by smoldering incense sticks, where offerings are made to a goddess who is good at making people fertile. What does a Chinese woman wish for more than jewels to lay humbly at her husband’s feet? That gives her power over all the concubines—or, if she is more fertile than the primary wife, power even over her.

From here you go up into the mountains to the Amis, who live on the cliffs that, extremely steep and high, drop straight into the sea; to the Bunun, whose houses all have slate roofs; and to the Tsou. But I don’t know exactly which of these three tribes once came down to the mission (in the good old days before the Japanese settled and had objections to cannibalism and headhunting) and were entertained by the missionary, who would gladly have won the poor heathens. Above all, the fatty pork was the star of the friendship feast, and the enthusiastic chief invited the missionary with a few English gentlemen to come up to him in the mountains as well, to share a peace meal. The gentlemen went, and the whole tribe was assembled. The smell of roasting bananas filled the air, and the leaves that were to serve as plates made inviting, promising piles. The chief praised the unforgettable pig, and the missionary looked out the hut window, where the chief’s son, a chubby boy of about twelve, was running around. So sturdy were the young legs and so supple the movements that the missionary turned and said to the chief:

“What a beautiful, strong child!”

The chief said something to one of the men present, who left the hut, and a minute later the horrified missionary witnessed a murder. The big warrior swung his club, and the little one fell mid‑game, gasping.

“Heavens— —they’re killing— —!”

“Never mind,” the chief remarked coolly, “you shall not be able to say that we Bunun fall short in hospitality. In a short time he’ll be roasted and taste no less crispy than your pig!”

They say the five gentlemen, the missionary in the lead, tore down the mountain and didn’t stop until they were back in Taman. For a long time afterward no more peace feasts were held, with or without pig …

Only among the Yami on Botel Tobago, the last island beyond Formosa, who already show kinship with the Filipinos, has there never been cannibalism. They live in houses they build below ground level and in which they hide.

On Pirate Waters …

In Takoe I went on board. The Soshiu Maru, an old tub that should have been sent to the breakers long ago, put out in the afternoon and came back in the evening, because it was blowing out at sea and the tub had no sea legs. So I had a six‑hour free ride. At six in the morning it set out again and, after some wheezing, covered the hundred and eighty nautical miles to Amoy. It’s the most dreaded pirate hole on the whole coast. You can tell by the ships that ply there. The cabins (I always traveled first here; for Europeans no other class was really an option) all have heavily barred windows, and before reaching Amoy the boy brought me a key I first took for Saint Peter’s key to Heaven’s gate, which turned out to be only my cabin key, and said:

“Can do!”

This cryptic remark merely meant I would do better to lock myself in my cabin with this key. What did the poor fellow know of the sad lot of traveling journalists! I chose to “can do” from outside and looked at the pirate hole from the deck. It lay stretched over low hills, quite picturesque, and one could easily understand how the caves in the cliffs, the branching of the bay, and the steepness of the climbing town would make a good school.

When a coolie showed up with a boat and we had haggled for a quarter of an hour over the price—it builds mutual trust—I climbed down into his sampan and had him row me ashore. What can you learn about Amoy from the water?

Sadly, you don’t learn very much on land either. I’m so small, and my enemies claim there’s something so Asiatic about my looks (they mean an indefinable ugliness, I suppose) that I hardly ever stand out like most Europeans. I also always walk the streets as if I had grown up in them, and so I was never attacked, nor was I stared at excessively. Eyes narrowed, I hurry through the narrow maze and still see everything. In Amoy I saw mostly dogs: many, hungry, mangy. The dogs seemed even dirtier to me than the people, and that was really hard to tell. The whole city stank like a deluxe edition of cholera, but the charm couldn’t be denied. Those narrow streets, climbing up here, down there without a plan; the red sedan chairs, the silk shops, the wax shops, the dried fish, the sausage shops, the women with their unfathomable features, showing neither sorrow nor joy, and revealing in their screeching voices only a seemingly angry agitation; the artificial flowers, the catalpa coffins already standing on the street waiting …

The main industry (besides outlawed piracy) is duck raising. Ducklings are hatched in large numbers in incubators, killed on the 26th day, stuffed, and sent to Osaka, from where they go out as Japanese toys to the American market.

After a while I couldn’t bear the sight of the mangy dogs, blood running down their skinless limbs, and every trader driving them off with stick blows, and I made my way back toward the harbor over the slippery wet paving. In a butcher’s shop, alongside smoked, flattened ducks, hung smoked frogs—poetically called “earth rabbits”—and lychees, longans, persimmons, and pomelos covered the fruit stalls.

The few Europeans whom an unfriendly fate has banished to Amoy live on another island in quite nice little houses.

Because there was fear that pirates could attack us, and because you never know whether the harmless‑looking third‑class passengers might suddenly turn into pirates and storm the upper deck, a proper strong barred gate is closed before the stairway to first class, a guard stands before this gate, and the captain keeps a sharp lookout. All the Japanese are armed, the cabin windows must be kept shut, and so I locked and screwed myself into my little realm and slept the sleep of the just …

Only it wasn’t so very peaceful. My stay in Formosa had lately been rather like hurdling. So I wiped my eyes and nose on the nice handkerchiefs my Japanese pupils had given me in friendly appreciation. And the governor had gained one more example of Western folly, which hadn’t been my intention at all.

Even so I say: between South America and Japan lies the whole vast scale of an ascending culture. So it was a Japanese who gave me back faith in the best in a man. I thought of the proverb from my first reader:

“To wage war on oneself is the hardest war,
To conquer oneself is the finest victory.”

Must a man really have to be an apostle before he can pull off that trick?!

In Swatow I bought a pair of low shoes. That in itself is not something that can only happen while traveling, but I mention it because it would have been next to impossible on Formosa. In Tokyo it was a feat already, but in Taihoku, where everybody who wore European shoes was of the opinion that one should also be able to shoot out of them without untying them, it would have been impossible to find size thirty‑four. In China, where Chinese crippled feet had forced people to shorten shoes, I found what I was after. Unfortunately they were shorter at the back as well than we are used to, and so I wore them only where I couldn’t go in flat rubber shoes: in cold, wet places. They therefore lasted three years. Other shoes I destroyed in three months.

I also had great fun burying my old shoes, which I was ashamed of. I threw them away, and they turned up again; I wanted to throw them overboard, even at 2 a.m., and there was always someone at the rail; in the end I stuffed them into a ship’s hole, where I hope they stayed until nothing about them reminded anyone of a European foot anymore, but the urge to get rid of them was like a criminal hiding his corpus delicti.

Swatow has beautiful old temples, over whose strongly curved roofs (supposedly the shape of the original nomad tent) green dragons run in fearsome coils. Otherwise the street scene is like in any South Chinese city—mangy dogs, half‑naked, dirty men, women with long silver pins in their hair or modestly with pomaded heads and pale silk slippers riding in a ricksha, venerable old men in sedan chairs, and working folk at their thousand tasks.

Swatow produces two specialties: the fine cutwork, similar to Norwegian Hardanger, and postcards assembled from clipped stamps. All sorts of Chinese craftsmen are cleverly shown using stamps of various kinds and colors, and each card costs twenty cents. The pretty painted squares made from tsuso ( Aralia papyrifea) are sold everywhere in the south.

In the Fragrant Harbor.

“Place of stench reduction” would have been a possibly forgivable name; the translation above, though correct, is too high‑flown. The bay is magnificent—hence why it was so welcome to the English!—and easy to defend, because it’s enclosed in a wide arc by hills and ends with the Peak, up which the city climbs. The night view is even more beautiful than by day, because then a thousand unexpected lights make a waterfall down from the top of the notable mountain, whereas by day a fine gray haze too often veils the scene. The Soshiu Maru lay there for two days, and I had a chance to examine the city closely. The lanes—except for the European waterfront with modern shops and open squares—are very narrow and entirely Chinese. The road up to the Peak is very broad and fine, but most Europeans have themselves carried up. My first stop was Cook and Son, where I bought the ticket to Australia, with options to break the journey in Manila and in North Borneo, to know roughly how much I would have left, because for the second time I dreamed of pushing into the hard‑to‑reach South Sea islands. Once I had the cannibals behind me, the hardest would be over—that ran through my mind like a prophecy.
A hope I had nursed for several years dissolved in Hong Kong. Bundle of letters in hand—oh, the magic of a post office!—I strolled slowly through the lanes. Here boys chopped wood for the little household, there women sewed, over yonder beggars picked the pesky inhabitants out of their rags, and wherever you went, the laundry hanging from bamboo poles fanned you with air and… aroma. In the butcher stalls you see the usual air-smoked ducks, dogs, frogs, birds, and sausages made from unknown stuff, always flattened like a poor rattan cane and strung in endless cords where the flies make their camp for the night, thickening the meat curtain even more.

Hong Kong is eerie for the solitary. I was glad and sad at once that my Maru was moored right at the quay, because anyone who took a sampan alone to row back to a steamer lying farther out often did not return. Who knew which of all the little boats he had taken? When? From what spot? His body rarely turns up; the fish keep it; what he owned, the robbers keep…

But Hong Kong is lovely early in the morning, when you walk up Peak Road and look into all the glory of bougainvillea, poinsettias, and quivering tree ferns, reach the heights past fan palms, and see the bay with its thousand ships spread before you. In no other harbor in all Asia can so many big ships gather at once. A whole fleet could find room there.

Fighting around Guangzhou kept me from going on by rail, so I waited patiently for three days until the good Maru was unloaded and moved on toward evening. People are mistaken who think the capital of South China lies right behind Hong Kong. You spend a whole night on the wide “Pearl River” before you come near Guangzhou. It was eight in the morning when we dropped anchor. The ship stayed midstream.

Fa Fong Hsüh—the Fragrant Village.

Through Mr. von Salzmann once again I had a letter of introduction to Mr. Wohlgemuth, head of the Berlin Mission in Guangzhou, and I’d been granted permission to wait at the mission house for my Manila steamer. I now peered out over the river and didn’t know where to look for Fa Fong Hsüh.

The police inspector knew. He pointed it out across the river, where two pointed towers stood out and a green landing stage could be seen, and soon I was in a sampan rowing toward it. I found Mr. Wohlgemuth at breakfast and soon disappeared myself into coffee and buttered bread. The welcome was so warm that I quite forgot how hard they were fighting around Guangzhou and how terribly the black smallpox raged. Later I stared from the window of my temporary quarters out at the Pearl River, on which not only many of the three thousand sampans that float on it constantly drifted past, but where you also saw things that killed any appetite for tea—even triple-filtered, as they comforted me—at a stroke. Bodies of shot soldiers, donkey and other animal carrion, tiny discarded bodies of children, filth and refuse of every kind floated here toward the sea.

Toward noon the gentlemen of the mission took me under their wings and led me across the Pearl River to Shamian, literally “on the sand,” the curious foreign enclave laid out entirely on an island and ringed by a dirty moat strewn with sampans. After the Boxer Uprising the Chinese wanted to fill in this ditch, but the British consul is said to have drawn his revolver and ordered the moat to stay, whereupon one of the Chinese also reached for his weapon. However bitter the yellow-faced still are about it, I can well sympathize with the British consul. The ditch separates Shamian from the mainland, Asia from Europe, dirt from cleanliness…

All men are brothers. Granted: but it’s still nice when each brother has his own bedroom, and even as a child I answered the question “Would you like a sister?” with deep worldly wisdom: “Yes, but in another house!”

I personally prefer Beijing. The high wall, the yellow sand, the scarlet gates, the camels ambling softly, and the lama priests to whom—the same as the camels—the scent of Mongolia clings, all that puts you in a special mood. Yet Guangzhou has its utterly original charm too, and had I stayed, as many stories would have grown in me as up north.

Just riding the houseboats was a pleasure for me, because in the tiny boat room where you sat to cross, there was always some gruesome god painted on the wall, or a light burned under a pot-bellied god of good fortune in the darkest corner; outside they cooked, and on a stretched line—flattened and skinned just like ducks—fat rats hung to dry. That was the cheapest air-smoking. The sun did the drying, and smoke often curled up from the coal stove. Those narrow, often slightly roofed streets behind Shamian, which you reached after crossing a camel-back bridge, those shops behind ancient carved archways, defy description. In the ivory shops, for instance, all kinds of balls, always one inside another, and no way to say how they got in; or in the shop next door, fans of gloriously blue kingfisher feathers, brooches of nephrite, amber pendants, oxblood porcelain, cloisonné, chains and combs of mother-of-pearl, silks with crane and flower patterns, gold-embroidered slippers, and so on. Some streets begin and end with a single craft, such as the ebony and the furniture streets in general, where you can pick up the finest goods of the kind at low prices (low in terms of value).

That is the inside of the shops, but the magic is just as strong outside as in. Men with straw hats like Mount Fuji, with broad shoulder poles and even broader boxes push through, sedan chairs want to squeeze along the narrow slippery lanes, children wedge themselves past your legs, in one house there’s a wedding, in another a corpse lies so close to the door that I nearly stumbled over the dead feet, and amid all this jostling, stench, and shouting you suddenly remember the lurking plague and cholera, the dreaded tropical dysentery, the black smallpox raging just then, malaria and other tropical fevers—yet I walk on unbothered through the tight, foul-smelling tangle of houses, for on my travels I fear only two utterly different things: a two-legged male with passion-red rims to his eyes and—ringworm.

In the City of the Dead.

Guangzhou has its own city for the dead. The living spend the year round on sampans or in miserable mud huts, worse than our stables, and even the houses of the rich Chinese are, at least by our lights, far from cozy. The City of the Dead, however, which you enter through a white gate, is very pretty and with its many low buildings and countless cells looks more like a sprawling monastery. In each cell stands a coffin, and in front of the coffin an offering table with the deceased’s favorite dishes, here mostly imitated in sugar paste or wax; secondary wives flank the head of the big coffin (which always faces the visitor), and silk ribbons hang on the walls with the dead man’s virtues, his name, and so on written on them. Incense, in stick and coiled snake form, hangs from the ceiling and burns in wide basins, and here and there they still burn paper money. The cells plus attendants cost as much as a good Chinese hotel—three to four dollars a day. It’s a deep disgrace not to “treat” the dead in style. The priest keeps postponing the burial and looks for months for the auspicious day. Many a relative is ruined before he has buried his father, and many save all their lives to be buried with great pomp.

In life anything is good enough; that is typical of Asia.

A pound for the heart.

The next day Mr. Schwarm and I visited some of the temples, which are sadly quite run-down. All the money goes up in powder (as we had heard rifle shots not far from the City of the Dead during our walk across a more open stretch), and nothing is done to preserve precious antiquities.

In the Temple of the Five Hundred Luohan you see them all sitting there carved in wood—gods with faces so serious and bored that it’s hard to see them as bringers of luck and protection—and at the very start of a row, still quite recognizable in the dusk of the vast hall, stands—Mungo Park, the explorer and traveler, also among the gods. Will I be set up somewhere as a guardian spirit one day? Hm, not even among cannibals, who in me would see only the specter of famine… In any case, Mungo Park owed this honor less to his spirit than to his beard.

The Five Immortals Temple is almost destroyed. It takes its name from the five genii who supposedly came swimming over the water one day, rode into Guangzhou on rams, and gave the people five precious grains—rice, kaoliang, coffee, and perhaps even opium. After them the city is called the “City of Rams.” When the Berlin Mission wanted to put up the two pointed towers of the church, the Chinese refused, claiming it could bring disaster, but the missionary quickly said, “Why, those are just the ram’s horns!” and all resistance vanished on the spot.

In general, the thinking of Asians (not lower, as prejudiced people believe) moves in different circles from ours. That opens up a gulf that keeps yawning before you and makes you recoil. A missionary was to travel into the interior, but the Chinese authorities (because war had been declared) would not give the requested permit. All begging, all greasing suddenly did no good. Food was scarce here; inside, everything was easier. Mr. S. then said earnestly to the Chinese official:

“I have to leave—I can’t stay here any longer, and if my wish is not granted, I shall simply commit suicide here, on your threshold.”

Early next morning the permit came. Nothing frightens the Chinese more than a “ghost” at the door. At home, criminals do the opposite: they turn people into ghosts so they won’t have to fear them anymore.

Very interesting is the remnant of the former city gate not far from the City of the Dead, from which you can admire the White Cloud Mountains and look at the five‑story pagoda that was once the rendezvous of all the poets and thinkers of the South and now, like everything in Guangzhou, is falling into ruin.

In the only well-preserved Flower Pagoda, amid charming little gardens, we had dim sum—“a pound for the heart”—that is, a snack without rice for strength. Cute miniature trees surrounded us, and in front of the glass veranda the camellias were already in bloom. It was January.

What did I eat? Stuffed Chinese bread, soft and warm and reminiscent of noodle dough, sweet pancakes, and dough stuffed with pork (taken on faith), a little pie whose filling I did not fathom but that tasted good, and water‑spirit tea.

In the sea‑flavor shop.

I loved best being in the Chinese city. Once we went into the hoi mei, or sea‑flavor shop, where you could buy everything that came from the sea—shark fins (two to eight dollars per kan), dried oysters to cook in soup, bean noodles and lotus seeds, melon seeds and hong tse (a kind of rose hip), crabs, cuttlefish, “sponges” (wood ears, as the Chinese call them), fut tsey, a strange grass that felt like chopped horsehair, bao yu (a shellfish cut into tough slices), bamboo shoots, “earth chickens” (frogs), and matai (horse hooves).

In a porcelain shop I bought the tiny figurines made in Shiwan that employ 40,000 workers and got to know all sorts of gods. In a tea shop they treated me to Dragon Well tea and showed me (also by scent) the water‑spirit, the maple, the jasmine‑blossom, the brick tea from Henan that is said to be excellent for washing your hair, and other teas whose names were the loveliest thing about them.

In the shop “At the Five Blessings” I saw very fine door carvings and signs.

The black smallpox.

I stayed five days in Guangzhou, and the smallpox kept increasing. Europeans fell ill and died within a few days. Before I was allowed to leave, I had to be vaccinated for the eighth time. Nothing worked! I could show my scars all I liked. The German doctor insisted he could not give me a certificate without an actual vaccination. In the end he said:

“If your arm pains you, I can always vaccinate your thigh!”

But I didn’t want to have another as‑yet‑spared, if very hidden, part of myself marred. I was vaccinated on the arm and bandaged, and while they were scraping away at me we talked about China. The vaccination made me a dollar poorer and no richer otherwise, but the opinion about Chinese married life that I was given at the same time was worth the dollar, and I set it down here without any marginal note (since, thank God, I was married to a Chinese only in my novel).

“The Chinese,” said the doctor, rubbing carbolic into my arm, “may have many wives, but I know one thing from personal experience: he has more time for his seventh wife and treats her better than the average European treats his first and only one.”

Despite this assurance I was and am of the opinion that I would much rather be the first and only wife of a European than the seventh (or even the first!) of an Asian. Our white men (especially when they open the door for us, carry the jacket, or lift the bag from the luggage rack) have advantages that at least please my eye. I also forgot to ask whether the Chinese has time only for the seventh (as the last and newest, and presumably youngest, of his wives).

An unresolved point.

I did not fall ill with smallpox (naturally), nor with malaria, which was easy to catch in the Fragrant Village too.

A sedan chair and a bad consul.

The missionaries had all been very kind to me, and I left with the warmest gratitude to Mr. Wohlgemuth and growing thanks to Erich von Salzmann, who, without any obligation, still stayed my guardian angel from afar.

In Hong Kong I went to the American consul. Why are all authorities, except the British, usually so bristly when you go to them? Are the authorities abroad for the change of air for their own people or for the traveling public? The consul was a boor—God rest his soul! I hope, for the good of his nation, that he already wears green clothes near Hong Kong.

At the last minute, two hours before the steamer sailed, he drove me to a photographer. In a sedan chair, since I didn’t know the way, I was carried up the hill—an interesting motion and experience, though I prefer walking on my own legs—and on foot, at a gallop, I tore back downhill, faster than all the rickshaw coolies. I left him the slip that proved I’d been taken, shaken down, taken for a ride, and so on. I hope my picture was twice as ugly and gave him a stomach cramp when it arrived.

Down below, passport in hand—which had cost me twenty dollars!—I paused for breath thinking how best to curse him lastingly and effectively. All at once I said:

“May you be reborn a woman, you human bristle from the land of stars and stripes, and may you have to sail around the world as a journalist!”

That satisfied me. I smiled the way only someone can who knows the other fellow is “taken care of” in this case.

Departure from the Far East.

A slow coolie, a slower sampan brought my luggage and me to the ship. The first officer grabbed Erika by one ear and me by the other, hauled us up, and declared he had been waiting only for us. The steamer whistled “Good‑bye” three times, and we left the bay. The Far East lay behind me.

Closing word.

After nearly four years of an unusually dangerous journey of research full of hardship and privation, I was finally to set foot in the longed‑for South Seas and meet experiences such as one can have only where peoples at the lowest stage of development live, as it were, a prehistoric existence, where the strangest customs and usages prevail, cannibalism has not yet died out, and where—only there on this spent globe—you remain completely cut off from the outside world.

I entered this very peculiar, dangerous, and for the most part extraordinarily unhealthy region weakened in body and soul, with means all too scant and with inadequate foreknowledge of the enormous difficulties of getting around. I intended to spend only six or eight months in the South Seas; I left them only after more than two years of unimagined adventures, with a health forever broken and after hair‑raising terrors, but every single day was a school, a widening of my horizon. The people, the animals, the plants are so utterly unlike those in every other part of the world, and the superstition of many centuries lies like a cloud of incense over these countless islands and islets of the Pacific.

I would therefore like to give myself to the hope that readers who have patiently followed my fortunes this far will now also accompany me on the further stages of my research journey, the experiences of which are set down in the two books “Im Banne der Südsee” and “Erlebte Welt – das Schicksal einer Frau.”