Travel:The Donegal storyteller Charles McGlinchey, writing, or rather telling his tale, in the middle of the last century, relates how a woman from the remote and beautiful district of Urris in Inishowen was forced through some circumstance to make an unaccustomed journey from her parish to a fair in Derry.
Though she was in middle life, this was to be the first time she had wandered more than a few miles from her hearth, and the journey was to be on foot.
After no more than an hour or so walking she had reached the top of a considerable hill, from which she could see spread out below her and around her not just the remarkable rundale patchwork of Urris itself but a wide vista round to Malin Head, Muckish mountain 20 miles to the south and, in the blue distance, even the coastline of Derry and Antrim. Overcome by the immensity and beauty of it all, she turned to her companions, exclaiming: "Who would ever have thought that the world was so big?"
Ryszard Kapuscinski, the distinguished Polish foreign correspondent and travel writer, who died in January this year, did not manage to leave his native country, to "cross the border" as he puts it, until his mid-20s, when he was suddenly sent by his newspaper to "cover" India. By his own account he had little clue as to what that "covering" might involve or how to go about it, either in India or in China, his next posting. Still, he was not that keen to return home and continued his wanderings, chiefly through Asia, Latin America and Africa, throughout his long working life, sending home to his housebound compatriots and eventually to a wide international readership regular dispatches on the bigness, strangeness, beauty and terror of the world.
HE WAS IN Algeria for the coup that overthrew the charismatic post-independence leader Ahmed Ben Bella, in the Congo for the murderous chaos of the early 1960s and in China in the 1950s during its "liberal" Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom period (Mao, it turns out, only wished the flowers to blossom so he could see them to cut them down). Anyone, however, who is looking for deep insights into these places and periods is reading the wrong book, for Kapuscinski's focus is far less on his travels than on his travelling companion, the ancient Greek scholar Herodotus, whose Histories goes with him everywhere and is a comfort and a balm in times of frustration, exhaustion and enforced idleness.
Kapuscinski is fascinated by Herodotus's compulsion to travel, to collect tales and knowledge, to describe, distinguish, enumerate, anatomise. Where did this passion come from, he asks. Man is by nature a sedentary creature, happily settling on his own little patch of earth, fencing it around with a wall or ditch and prepared to defend it, if needs be, with his blood. But "Man" here of course means only "most men". There have always been the others, those who, though adults of a sort, are yet still inhabited by the child they once were, who asked "where does the ship come from?", and who now stare full of useless longing at the train station departures board: "Leipzig? What would that be like? Ostrava? Perhaps Lvov?"
MOST OF US will probably never have studied Herodotus, though it strikes one reading Kapuscinski's copious extracts and paraphrases that the Greek writer has of course been pored over in public school, lycée, and Gymnasium by generation after generation of Europe's ruling classes in waiting, who would have imbibed his lessons on military strategy, the necessity of ruthlessness in matters of politics and colonialism and, one hopes, the ultimate insufficiency and vanity of power and wealth, for, as Nero's tutor is reported to have told his young charge, a tyrant, no matter how bloody, cannot murder his successor.
If you are looking for an easy route into ancient history, and in particular the story of the wars between the fierce and quarrelsome Greeks and the cruel Persians, this volume will do just nicely. Then again, if you are planning to travel this summer, perhaps to that warm sea where, Kapuscinski reminds us, peaceful, thoughtful men first began to sit around long tables, drink wine, eat olives and bread and explore together what the world might be then you will find the Pole as pleasant and engaging a companion as he found the Greek.
ON THOSE FEW occasions in Travels with Herodotus when Kapuscinski actually touches on his professional duties and practices (the "excuse", let us say, for his wanderings across the world) his tone is normally marked by an engaging and humorous self-deprecation. We would be unwise to take these protestations of innocence and incompetence too seriously: as his other, denser books of reportage attest, he was a journalistic master. And he is a very fine writer. He not only quotes, but also obviously lived by Thomas Mann's marvellous maxim: "A writer is a man for whom writing is more difficult than it is for others."
Last month the small men who currently run the large nation of Poland absurdly "outed" Ryszard Kapuscinski as a state informant, that is to say that he was forced, as a condition of his employment, to supply information to the state, but the information he chose to supply did not harm anyone. These people would do more for their country were they to more actively promote Kapuscinski's reputation, and that of other great contemporaries, such as Czeslaw Milosz, to a western Europe that still knows them far too little.
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist and joint editor of the Dublin Review of Books ( www.drb.ie )
Travels with Herodotus By Ryszard Kapuscinski Penguin/Allen Lane, 288pp. £20