Read Online Contact! by Jan Morris - Free Book Online

these magical creatures were making for, and was answered in one short tingling word: ‘Rio!’
    Makings of a microcosm
    I did not want to be rude, but I could not help eyeing my neighbour with interest, for she seemed to me to have the makings of a microcosm. More than most cities, Stockholm projects two images–the one you have been led to expect and the one you discover for yourself–and this plump but not unalluring citizen, wearing a pink linen dress and a white straw hat, her eyes bluish but somehow glazed, her mastication rhythmic and her bosom calmly heaving to the flow of the salad–this lady of Stockholm, evocative partly of Chanel and partly of disinfectant, slipped into my preconceptions like a plug into a socket. She was eating alone, with a half bottle of Niersteiner and what appeared to be the financial page of Svenska Dagbladet . Her lunch was large but looked obscurely colourless, as though it had been bleached in some anti-fattening lotion. Her gaze now and then wandered from her victuals and paraded slowly, resting at last without excitement on somebody else’s pudding. Her expression was content without being joyous, and beneath her loose blonde curls, I told myself, all kinds of Swedish neuroses surely festered: anxieties of opulence, spinsterhood or free love, occupational frustrations and suicidal impulses. She seemed to express all that I expected of Stockholm, and when at last I engaged her in conversation, and boldly asked her what she did for a living, I could almost have hugged her in gratitude. ‘I am a juvenile social welfare worker,’ she replied with a sweet smile, taking a delicate last sip of the hock.
    The only place for him
    When the US Supreme Court ended racial segregation in American schools, all the simmering discontent of the white Southerners boiled over, and I spent the day in Atlanta listening to angry men and women. The abuse they used was at once so theatrical and so repetitive that I could scarcely believe it had not been plucked wholesale from some common phrasebook of prejudice. I joined a conversation, in a coffee shop, with the manager of the place and a man who told me he was a senior police officer. They spend some time reminiscing about race riots of the past, talking comfortably of niggers bashed and beaten in the streets; and of one especially, hounded by the mob, who had thrown himself into the doorway of that very coffee shop, only to be pushed back on to the pavement. ‘The only place for a nigger,’ said the manager with finality, ‘is at the back door, with his hat in his hand.’
    Flowers and the tribesmen
    Clumps of a rhododendron-like bush brightened the fresh meadows as we drove through the Qara tribal country of south-east Arabia, and I asked the Arab driver to stop while I jumped out of the truck to pick some blossoms.
    â€˜What do you want them for?’ he asked when I returned with the flowers. ‘Are they good for diseases?’
    â€˜I don’t think so. I just thought they looked nice.’
    â€˜So they do, so they do. But the Qara people eat them, for the stomach.’
    â€˜Are you sure ?’
    â€˜Quite sure. The Qara people know everything about flowers and things. They are very strange people, like the animals. By Allah! They are very like the animals.’
    As if to bear him out we saw at that moment three strange fuzzy tribesmen standing on a bank beside the road, leather thongs around their foreheads, dark robes slung over their shoulders, daggers at their belts. My driver shouted them a ribald greeting. Two of them, with long, beautiful faces, did not respond, but simply stood there stiffly, like childish elocutionists waiting to perform; the third, a younger man, ventured to wave his short stick at us, and then, seeing that his companions remained impassive, lowered it shamefacedly as though guilty of some desperate solecism.
    When we had passed I leant out of the window to look