A Slow Learner

Back in the 1980s, during one of Sudan's democratic patches, I lived in Khartoum. Tuesday and Thursday nights, just before nine and almost as a ritual, I glanced to the south. After the blasting heat of the day, Lufthansa glided in like clockwork from Frankfurt via Cairo. I could have set my watch by that flight, except I didn't wear one in Khartoum. Nobody did, except for a Saudi I once saw. The face of his watch was crusted over with diamonds. He wanted everyone to see it, and not so they could tell the time. In the days of the Anglo-Egyptian condominium, clocks had been more useful. Back then, travelers had almost always come up the Nile by train to Aswan, then gone by white-linen ferry to Wadi Halfa. From there, they took a famously gritty train south across the desert to Khartoum. I remember a Sudanese telling me with cheerful humor that the country under the British worked much better than it did now, but he didn't want the British to return. It's like an old cartoon that as a boy I didn't get but which my father found very funny. It showed a curmudgeon sitting in a crate and scowling. The caption had him say, "It's just a box, but it's my damned box." By the 1980s, the river route was impossible. So were lots of other things. I had--probably still have--a 1950s Khartoum phone book. When conversation lagged, I could whip it out and astonish everyone. Outside, on once-paved streets that were now dirt, tangled wires sagged from pole to pole, like Christmas decorations from another century. The amazing thing was that the phones occasionally worked. I know this because once I was asked to make a contribution to someone's medical fund. I did and was then told to try my phone the next day. When I did, I found I had a dial tone. I couldn't call across town, because nobody over there had made a charitable contribution, but I was able to call the United States. For free. For a few days. Practically, entry and exit from Africa's biggest country depended on Khartoum's one runway. Chaotic on departure, the airport was even worse on arrival. Passengers crowded into a small room that was baking hot, even in the middle of the night. You'd hear a truck drive up, then suitcases being shoved through a hole in the wall. Everybody pushed and sweated to get to that hole. Then they pushed and sweated their way back, this time to the Customs gate. Seeing that Lufthansa plane often reminded me of the last helicopter rising from the Saigon embassy. Years later, after that embassy had been demolished and even after Khartoum had a new terminal, I was walking on a deserted beach at Bentota, on the southwest coast of Sri Lanka. Five hundred miles to the west lay the scattered specks of the Laccadives, very easy to miss for anyone on a boat and hard enough to find for anyone up close to the water on Google Earth. Apart from those islands, there was nothing but ocean from here to the Somali coast. The travel industry has very nearly brainwashed the public--me, too--into believing that tropical beaches are the embodiment of paradise, but on this gray, rainy afternoon I thought how I'd feel if the technological net supporting me was suddenly gone. If I knew French, I might now trot out that fine word frisson. Tom Hanks has a movie about this, but there's no need for fiction, because Sri Lanka has a true castaway story. Robert Knox, a British seaman, was shipwrecked on the east coast of the island in 1660. At the order of the King of Kandy, Knox was held captive, first in one village, then in others, for a total of 19 years. He eventually escaped to the coast and made his way back to England, where he became a pet of the Royal Society and wrote a book still in print today. You'd think he would have clung to Albion's shore like grim death, but no, he sailed back to the same waters where he had been shipwrecked. You might think that he was tempting fate, but his luck held. It held even when he made a third voyage. …