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Eco-lodge versus loggers

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The viewing tower pierced the rainforest canopy. Standing foursquare on its wobbly top deck, some 30 feet above the billowing florets, I felt as if I was clinging to a rock in a milky-green ocean. From all around came the suggestive whistles of canopy birds: circular saws, beery whoops, novelty ringtones, life-support machines, and an infectious rippling murmur like funeral ululations. Fabiano Oliveira, a 27-year-old Brazilian biologist, tapped his ear.

'An Amazonian pygmy owl is calling right now,' he whispered. He listened again: 'A yellow-rumped cacique and it is mimicking the voices of several other birds'. Then he fixed his scope on a red dot among the motionless green waves and invited me to look. 'Red-fan parrot. A unique species. No relatives.'

The 150ft-high galvanised steel tower is in the forest reserve surrounding Cristalino Jungle Lodge in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. Cristalino is a modestly-sized ecotourism project with an international reputation. More than five hundred bird species have been spotted here (and new ones are being discovered all the time, most recently a type of hermit hummingbird), making it 'the number one place in the whole of the Brazilian Amazon for birdwatching,' according to Fabiano.

As dusk fell, the sky was turning the palest lilac, the trees were becoming silhouettes. The soundscape - cicadas and distant river rapids as well as bird calls - seemed infinite, all-enveloping. There was no man-made noise (bar appreciative sighs and gasps from our five-strong group of English and Italians). No cars, planes, sirens, i-Pod hiss. The oceanic rainforest canopy looked and felt as if it went on forever. But that was an illusion.

'From here to the north, the Amazon is in pretty good shape,' said Fabiano, whose cheery demeanour disguised great passion for the rainforest. 'But to the south...' He pointed the other way across the darkening treetops. 'This is the 'arc of deforestation'. Here in Mato Grosso you are in the place that cuts the most trees on the whole planet.' He shook his head at the continuing destruction of so much primary rainforest by ranchers, loggers and soya bean growers

Visitors to Cristalino - almost exclusively Europeans and Americans - witness the extent of the destruction for themselves in the course of journeys here that entail several flights, 50 minutes by road and a half-hour boat trip (the irony of burning so much fuel in order to support eco-tourism projects such as this was a topic of uneasy conversation among guests).

On the second of two domestic flights from the Brazilian capital, Sao Paulo, I flew over many thousand acres of denuded rainforest, the land looking like scooped and scraped avocado skin. Some logging is deemed 'properly sustainable' and thus legal; much isn't. But in any case, the lines between the two are fluid and corruptible.

From the frontier town of Alta Floresta (next stop Amazonia), where hoardings advertise hardwood flooring and decking, the Cristalino minibus slalomed along red-dirt roads, past timber yards and sawmills and freshly cleared forest, the ravaged earth pimpled with termite mounds. At one point we were almost driven off the road by a gigantic Mercedes truck hauling a load of freshly cut logs.

The symbolism of this encounter was inescapable. As one Brazil-based conservationist, who wished to remain anonymous, said to me, 'A soy farmer [or logger] controlling as much land is probably making 20 times what an eco-lodge can make.'

The announcement in August 2008 that the Brazilian government is inviting foreign states to contribute to a conservation fund for the Amazon is a welcome but belated acknowledgement of the acuity of the problem. The goal is to raise more than �10 billion by 2021 to promote alternatives to cutting down trees and planting crops for biofuels.

Cristalino has been valiantly fighting this battle for more than a decade. It is the property, and brainchild, of Vitoria Da Riva Carvalho, who has dedicated her life to saving her own neck of the woods. 'Cristalino Lodge started [in 1997] all this movement of conservation in the area,' she told me. 'I feel very proud of that. We were like a candle in the dark, as I like to say.'

As the President of the Cristalino Ecological Foundation she is campaigning 'to form a corridor of protected areas' across the southern side of the Brazilian Amazon. The plan is to link her lands with tracts owned by indigenous peoples and the military to create a buffer zone of millions of acres of untouchable rainforest, thus halting the northward spread of deforestation. 'If we don't have this corridor we will not have success,' she said simply.

Cristalino Jungle Lodge occupies just 1,730 acres of primary rainforest (that is to say, the trees have never been felled) in a bend of the Rio Cristalino, whose waters find their way, via various other rivers, 600 miles north to the mighty Amazon itself. Set amid palms and banana groves are 12 bungalows - built of sustainable hardwood, to a chic spec - which attract an international crowd of dedicated birders and eco-tourists.

During my visit these included Bob and Nancy, from Florida ('We live on a bayou. A manatee gave birth to twins right next to our dock'), Stefano and Arianna from Florence, and Tracey and Richard from Hampshire.

Over a buffet lunch of baked aubergine and rice in the communal dining room we acknowledged the thumping carbon footprints we had made in getting here. 'Do I feel guilty?' said Tracey. 'Not really. At home we look after our own back yard, so when we're on holiday we like to look at other people's back yards.'

Tracey's husband, Richard, is a warden on a nature reserve. At weekends he and Tracey do volunteer conservation work or lead birdwatching trips around Britain. At Cristalino they were very generous with both their knowledge and their binoculars, acting as auxiliary guides on various rainforest and river excursions with the excellent Fabiano on which we spotted tapir, capybara and caiman as well as enjoying the astonishing biodiversity of birds.

Each day we started at dawn to beat the enervating daytime heat. On the first morning we walked the Brazil Nut Trail, named after the 150ft-high Brazil nut trees that are found here. The light is flat, impassive, on the rainforest floor - except for the dazzling play of sunlight. The morning sun filtered down in random blobs and streaks, burnishing branch and frond and leaf litter as if the tree canopy had been cropsprayed with saffron. Every so often, a cannonball-sized brazil nut crashed to the ground, splintering the undergrowth as it fell.

A vibration by my ear: I turned in time to see a hummingbird stop-starting through the air like a tiny, iridescently besuited spaceman propelled by a jetpack. Every second of the way there was something like this, something marvellous.

The syncopated flight patterns of butterflies had something in common with freeform jazz. Seedpods shaped like dugout canoes were miracles of micro-engineering, containing circular seeds with transparent wings. From aerodynamic seeds to giant trees, the fragile interrelatedness of things within primary rainforest struck me with an almost religious force. It was only then, standing in that strange submarine light, that I grasped just how vandalistic and undoable deforestation is.

It was on the final evening that we climbed the viewing tower. Watching dusk fall over the Amazon was an enchanting experience, until the conversation turned to the future. Trying to sound positive, Fabiano pointed out that despite continuing deforestation 84 per cent of the Amazonian rainforest in Brazil remains intact. 'And in 2006 the rate of deforestation reduced for the first time in six years.'

So was he optimistic? Brazil has in place 'highly sophisticated wildlife and environmental laws,' he said. 'But in developed countries you have no idea of the problems we have. Change takes time.'

At this point, with the dying sun slipping from view in the dry-season haze while a threequarter moon climbed the eastern sky, there was a squall of activity in the rainforest canopy below our feet. Starfish limbs, a compact, irate face peering up. It was a male spider monkey, checking out the trespassers in his back yard.

Walking with the Bedouin

Sat, 17 May 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Carolyn, from Clapham, south London, had the decorators in. 'Blinds, not shutters,' she said firmly into her mobile, 'it's most important.' Then she folded her phone - the last time it would receive a signal for several days - and raised her eyes to the encircling pink mountains.

One of these peaks is the Biblical Mount Horeb (now called Mount Sinai), where Moses received the Ten Commandments. We had travelled to the heart of the high mountain area of South Sinai in Egypt and were about to trek up on to its giddy trails. It is exhilarating terrain: summits of more than 6,000ft, bone-dry river gullies, blinding sun and chilling shadow.

And it struck me then, as I slipped my Motorola to the bottom of the rucksack and slapped on the factor 50, that we were merely doing what hermits and mystics have done here since the 4th century AD: forgo the known for the unknown. In the case of this group of seven women - plus four ancillary males, counting me - the known happened to be the posher postcodes of SW London.

Aged mid-40s to mid-50s, this loose grouping of girlfriends included a physiotherapist, a business consultant, a charity fundraiser and an interior designer. For the next five days they would be swapping school runs and competitive theatre-going for that unique blend of physical exhaustion and interesting mental perspectives that only mountain trekking can bring on.

Guiding our way through this wilderness were two English-speaking Bedouin from the local tribe, 27-year-old Salama - smart and funny, with 'eyelashes to die for' (observed Tess) - and the laconic and dependable Hosein, in his early 40s. Seven Bedouin tribes - some 7,000 people - live in or near this region of the South Sinai, which was designated a 'protectorate' in 1996. Salama and Hosein belong to the 3,000-strong Jebaliya tribe, who live in and around the mountain village of St Katherine where we were now stamping our booted feet.

The Jebaliya are, or at least were, 'pastoral nomadics' - every summer they would take off for the high pastures with their animals, moving from valley to valley. But for many years they have been rooted in St Katherine eking a living from tourism and and living in stone houses.

These treks with Westerners are a chance for the Bedouin guides to rehearse their old ways and rhythms, and they were to be closely observed by the third man in the group. Steffen Strohmenger is an Arabic-speaking anthropologist from Berlin University currently living in Cairo and studying the Bedouin. He is also the representative of the small travel company through which the group had booked the trek in the UK.

Bedouin Paths - which was set up by an Englishman, Mark Knutton, in September 2007 - diverts a fifth of the cost of these treks to projects that benefit the Bedouin (at the moment the money is paying for an English teacher who has 40 pupils aged from six to 16). Our base in St Katherine was the camp owned by Sheikh Mousa and his son, Sala, who organise all the trekking in this area. As we waited to move on that first morning Sala said, 'When I walk in the mountains I feel like I clean my mind,' and made a scrubbing motion of his skull. The idea of Bedouin Paths is that while benefitting from this psychic detox we give something back to the people who make it possible.

So, after valedictory visits to a proper toilet, our crocodile of breathable fabrics pulled out of town and up into a landscape that repaid careful reading. At first the mountains seemed merely pink and dusty, like an old lady's face powder. Light glittered harshly from oblique planes of rock. But soon the eye saw other colours, and pattern - black lava fields, green seams of copper ore, custard-yellow cliffs honeycombed by ancient seas and daily winds. Silver quartz bulged like pie filling from a terracotta boulder.

Ominously, the trail was scattered with the severed legs and bleached bones of donkeys and goats, which seemed to emphasise just how lifeless and alien this arid environment is. Another illusion: for then we noticed the shoots on an apparently dead shrub, came across a blossoming tree in the midst of seeming barrenness, its roots foraging far for water. And the secret of the mountains, and the people who call them home, was finally revealed: orchard gardens.

The Jebaliya tribe claims a unique descent, from 200 families sent here by the Roman Emperor Justianian in the sixth century AD from Alexandria and Macedonia. Their job was to serve and defend St Katherine's Monastery, which still stands near modern-day St Katherine on the spot where Moses was addressed by the Burning Bush. From the monks of the monastery, the Jebaliya learned how to cultivate mountain gardens.

Dotted through the ravines and crevasses surrounding St Katherine are walled splashes of green and - in March, when we visited - frothy almond and fruit blossom. The increasingly precious commodity of water is drawn from deep wells and brought down from mountain springs in plastic pipes to irrigate orchards of peaches, apricots, mulberries, almonds, figs, quince, and a dispensary of herbs.

'These gardens have been here hundreds of years,' a visiting charity worker called Susie Drummond told me. I met her at our lunch stop on the first day: the orchard of Salama's uncle, Oda, which appeared miraculously through the rocks. Susie works for the Makhad Trust, based in Cheltenham, which is helping to restore these mountain gardens by extending the depth of wells to keep pace with the rapidly dropping water table.

'The older men grew up in the gardens and they feel terrible when the trees die,' she said as we ate almonds and drank oregano and mint tea amid a nimbus of blossom. 'They feel exhausted with the struggle to get water.' Alongside us, Oda, in his tribal lavender headdress, crouched happily over a smoke-blackened kettle perched on the fire.

We all loved these garden lunches, with their lashings of delicious oily houmous and feta, fire-baked bread and gallons of herb tea from those bottomless kettles. In fact the entire group, men and women, gelled effortlessly and no one complained about the hardships of the trail, even though we walked a good nine hours a day and some of the boulder-scrambling was challenging to both fingernails and geometry (one passage involved ascending through a corkscrew-shaped rock chimney).

Over the days the group's conversations ranged across reading groups, children's gap year adventures, good schools, bad yoga teachers, why women wear bowler hats in Peru and the formula for prolonging the wearability of knickers ('Inside! Outside! Back to front!'). Just occasionally the mix would be salted with the darker subjects of betrayal and divorce.

And sometimes Salama (rallying catchphrase: 'Good, very good. Number one!') would command us to three minutes' silence in order to appreciate a vista of rocky summits, or the snowy white sandfalls that flow like glaciers from the red-rock ravines. In these moments I always expected to hear voices from the valley below, or goatbells. But there was only ever the wind, or a trickle of water. Once I watched a small lizard pass soundlessly by my dusty boots.

Camp was just a garden, where we chose our own sandy shelf on which to throw a sleeping bag and the Bedouin guys - the camel drivers whose beasts transported our gear, as well as Salama and Hosein - were at their happiest, sitting round the fire drinking tea, cooking chicken and rice and making bread under the stars.

Just once we slept indoors, at the Al Karm Eco-Lodge, a minimalistically stylish place in a remote valley, designed by a French architect and built on the ruins of an old Bedouin settlement. It opened in 2003 and receives a mere 150 tourists a year, a scandalous waste of a beautiful place.

Here, sitting around the camp fire, Salama pointed to the starry night sky: 'Small Bear. Seven Sisters. You see? The Bedouin used to tell the month by Seven Sisters. Some months it doesn't appear till two or three o'clock in the morning.' And that set Hosein off talking of the good old summer days, when the men and boys took off to the high mountain valleys with their camels.

The last time had been 30 years ago, when he was 12. They drank camel's milk, which tasted nothing like camel's milk today: it was lent a fragrance by all the mountain herbs they ate. And this got him on to potatoes, how you could once smell a spud from 10 metres but now you have to bring them right up to your nose to smell anything at all. (Hosein, I realised, is a Grumpy Old Man.)

This trek was as much about people as about landscape. One evening Steffen asked me if I found the Bedouin 'near or far away'. It was an interestingly phrased question, and by the end of the trek - actually before the end - I had my answer: 'Near'. For the strange thing about this coming together of such disparate groupings - affluent, urban Westerners and materially poor mountain nomads - was that the barrier between us was flimsy.

The Bedouin, reckoned Steffen the anthropologist, were not like 'the Egyptians', who tend to have a confused attitude to Westerners. Salama and Hosein did not begrudge us our salaries or lifestyles. 'For me,' said Steffen, 'the most relaxing thing is to meet people who are not restless and confused. They want to be nothing else but what they are.'

This is not easy in present-day Egypt, where the Bedouin are looked down upon by the rest of the population, and routinely persecuted by the authorities, who accuse them of drug-running and general criminality. When I asked Salama how the Bedouin differ from 'Egyptians' he said, 'We have more tenderness.'

They even kiss their camels, and are considerate to the mountains' other life forms. It was Hosein's soft-heartedness that was responsible for the most dramatic moment of the trek, when we were awoken in the middle of the night by a bloodcurdling racket of snarling and howling and in our padded sacks felt as vulnerable as Moses in his basket.

Hyenas, we speculated over morning tea, or wolves. Or even leopard (there have been unconfirmed sightings). 'Foxes,' said Hosein matter-of-factly. 'I put out the chicken bones for them.'

'Foxes?' said Carolyn, burrowing out of her sleeping bag. 'We have those in Clapham.'

Published in The Daily Telegraph on May 17, 2008

Unmasking the Ripper myth

Sat, 17 May 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

It is a repulsive and fascinating item and true obsessives will make a beeline for it. 'This is the original 'Dear Boss' letter,' confirmed Julia Hoffbrand, the curator of a new exhibition dedicated to Jack the Ripper. The letter marks the point in the Ripper story at which reality turned into myth.

It was sent to the head of a London news agency on September 25, 1888 following the murders of three women in a month in the East End. Written in red ink, it starts 'Dear Boss', warns that 'I am down on whores and I shunt [sic] quit ripping them till I do get buckled' and is signed, 'Yours truly, Jack the Ripper'.

This was the first time the name had been used and it was swiftly adopted and ascribed to the unidentified serial killer who committed savage murders of women (the exact number remains, like so much, a matter of speculation) in Whitechapel and Spitalfelds a decade or so before the turn of the 20th century. Since then the name and his deeds have developed into a bloated myth which this excellent exhibition at Museum Docklands - barely a hansom cab ride from the Ripper's killing fields - aims to expose and dissect.

It seems amazing, given the continuing and frenzied industry in books and films about Jack the Ripper, that this should be the first ever serious exhibition on the subject. But, discounting waxworks and other horror tableaux, it is indeed the first time that Ripper-related artefacts - more than 200, many original and not seen by the public before - have been brought together in a rigorous context.

Scrupulously avoiding any whiff of sensationalism (even if some of the marketing is of questionable taste), the exhibition steers a consistently thought-provoking line. 'What's different here is that we are looking beyond the murders to the world in which they took place,' said Julia Hoffbrand. 'What they can tell us about London and life at the time.' She and her team are also anxious to give the story back to its rightful owners - the women who were murdered.

'Usually they are bandied around as foils to Jack the Ripper himself,' she said. 'In the exhibition we've always referred to the murdered women by their names.'

The bare facts are that between April, 1888 and February, 1891, 11 murders were investigated that may or may not have been committed by one man, Jack the Ripper. Within those 11, five are regarded by 'Ripperologists' - the fanatics who continue to speculate on the Ripper's identity and to fuel the myth - as 'canonical'.

By this they mean that these murders in particular bear unmistakable Ripper hallmarks, but Julia Hoffbrand finds the word canonical distasteful. 'It is not historically appropriate,' she said. Neither is she impressed by the undoubted 'iconic' status of the red-ink letter in which the name Jack the Ripper was first used - and not just because it could well have been a hoax.

'The 'Dear Boss' letter is iconic,' she conceded. 'Whereas the police reports aren't as sought-after. But for me as a curator, when you read the documents it becomes real. It wasn't a game - which Jack the Ripper has turned into. A game, a myth.'

The exhibition debunks that myth, relating the story murder by murder and placing it in a series of contexts. By a coincidence that no doubt boosted the myth, the Ripper killings happened at a time of growing public interest in both the criminal mind and the possible means of understanding and thwarting it.

In 1887, the year before the killings started, the first Sherlock Holmes story had been published, and during 1888, when most of the murders took place, a stage adaptation of RL Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was playing in the West End. The exhibition features a double-exposure photograph of the actor Richard Mansfield, playing both the good doctor and his malevolent alter ego.

At the same time social reformers and journalists were beginning to realise that the land that lay immediately to the east of the great City of London was an affront to the world's most powerful nation. The publicity surrounding the Ripper case was to expose once and for all the reality of one of Britain's darkest corners..

The few square miles of Whitechapel and Spitalfields in which the killings took place were a maze of back alleys, courtyards and common lodging houses haunted by the desperately poor and vulnerable. The infant mortality rate was 20 per cent and alcoholism and prostitution - all the Ripper's victims were alcoholics and prostitutes - were a way of life.

One of the highlights of the exhibition is the 'poverty map' of London - compiled by the social scientist, Charles Booth, and first published in 1889 - on which streets and neighbourhoods are coloured according to the wealth of the people who lived there. 'It goes from yellow, which is very wealthy' - Julia pointed to the West End - 'to dark blue and black, the very poorest.'

And now her finger hovered over the dark shaded areas to the north and south of Whitechapel Road, representing what she called 'the abyss'. Its denizens are captured in a series of photographs never seen before. Retrieved from the archives of the Museum of London - of which Museum Docklands is an offshoot - they show streets and back alleys peopled by defiant, proud, sometimes downtrodden looking women in threadbare bonnets and shawls. 'Somebody could have murdered any one of these women,' said Julia.

The press cut its red-top teeth on the Ripper murders, revelling in details that today's tabloids would not be allowed to publish. The Birmingham Daily Post reporting on the killing of Mary Ann Nichols, gloated that 'The throat was gashed in two cuts, penetrating from the front of the neck to the vertebrae.'

The original police reports, written in black ink on yellowing official forms, are no less chilling for being drily written. Detailing the death of Mary Ann, Inspector John Spratling noted that '[the doctor] arrived quickly and pronounced life to be extinct ... she had been disembowelled.'

The final part of the exhibition consists of an oval gallery with white walls into which are recessed a series of postcard-sized photographs. A notice warns that the images are of 'a distressing nature'. Here, finally, we see photographs of the women murdered by the man known as Jack the Ripper. Needless to say, no one took these women's photographs while they were alive. These are police pictures taken in death.

'When you see these images, you see what this is about,' said Julia. 'These are real women and their lives were cut short and this is what's important. There's nothing glamorous about Jack the Ripper and there's nothing glamorous about what happened. I hope people will leave contemplating that.'

My route home from this brilliant exhibition took me through Whitechapel so I decided to visit Mitre Square, where the body of Catherine Eddowes was found in the early hours of September 30, 1888 with a pawnbroker's ticket in her pocket. The old buildings have been replaced by modern offices but the square is still cobbled, and towering over it is the glass skin of the office block known as The Gherkin.

I sat on a bench and studied a copy of the original police map of the murder, trying to orientate myself. And a shudder ran through me as I worked out I was sitting on the very spot where Catherine was found.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on May 17, 2008

Iran through the needle's eye

Sun, 6 Apr 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The flight landed in Tehran early in the morning. Those first few hours were fluidly dream-like, setting the tone for the rest of the trip. I slid through immigration, with a stamp for my passport and a smile for me, then Mr Sassan - my fixer, minder and joker on this ten-day journey through Iran - scooped me up and tore me round his sprawling, honking, snow-bound capital.

Mr Sassan had the craggy good looks of a veteran film actor and wore a New York Yankees beanie hat he said he had found somewhere. In the National Museum, in front of a wall-mounted, papier mache model of Iran, he used a pointer like a snooker cue to indicate regions and give a potted history lesson. 'The English play devil face,' he said with a twinkle in reference to some suave political sleight committed by my colonial forebears. As we drove past the British embassy he said cheerily, 'This is where we throw friendly stones. For instance, when your queen knighted Salman Rushdie.'

Mid-morning, our feet touched ground in Naderi Cafe 'where the intellectuals and freedom thinkers come.' The pot of tea came with a slice each of fruit cake, daintily served with a miniature fork and spoon. 'Shall I be the mother?' said Mr Sassan, pouring the tea. Then he noticed a man with extravagantly quiffed hair sharing a joke with a waiter. 'See that man with the dead cat on his head?' he whispered, and launched into a story, the first of many. This is the story of a journey laid end to end with stories.

The biggest of all is the story we think we know about Iran: hotbed of religious zealotry, hater of the west, sponsor of terrorism, and so on. This precis prevents more than about 5,000 British tourists going there each year but it bears little relation to the reality. What I found, on a winter journey that took me from the sweet orange blossom of the south to the frozen waterfalls of the north, was a subtle and improbable place, with a hatful of world-class historical and architectural sites and politely curious people. Though the authorities keep an eye on foreigners at all times - which can feel uncomfortable - I felt completely safe, which is more than I feel on an English high street on a Friday night.

In my backpack - and frequently cross-referenced - were the accounts of two previous English visitors to Iran: The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (early 1930s) and Mirrors of the Unseen by Jason Elliot, first published last year and surely destined to be as highly regarded as the Byron.

Mr Sassan, in addition to his fund of stories, carried with him a bottomless supply of analogies. 'We are flying from Paris to Nice,' he said over tea. 'Nine hundred kilometers.' He meant Tehran to Shiraz. And leaving the intellectuals and the stuntman - the one with the hair - to it we dashed for the domestic airport for the afternoon flight to the desert south, forsaking smog and snow for brilliant winter sunshine.

Every town in Iran is known for something: for making mullahs' robes, or tents, or mattresses, for growing pomegranates, or sweet lemons the size of cricket balls; or, apocryphally, for dishonesty, sexual potency or, even, in the case of the northern city of Qazvin, for homosexuality ('Don't bend over,' Mr Sassan warned me, with a lot of camp mugging, when we arrived there later in the trip). Shiraz is the city of poetry.

Born in Shiraz in the 14th century, the poet known as Hafez is the Shakespeare of Iran, his work quoted and consulted, in soothsaying fashion. His tomb in Shiraz is a site of pilgrimage. At the entrance gate, amid a crush of vehicles, an albino man sold me a card bearing a Hofez homily in Farsi which Mr Sassan translated: 'Some people are very jealous of you. Please pray for them.'

Inside, I found a spectacle for which I had no ready comparison in my own culture. The gardens surrounding the marble-topped tomb swirled with mooning youths in multicoloured scarves clutching volumes of Hofez's works. 'They close their eyes and make a wish,' said Mr Sassan. And having made the wish, they open a page at random and read from it, divining the future in Hofez's words. Mr Sassan grabbed a book from one young man - who smiled at such affrontery - and read out, 'I am a patient looking for the medicine. And you are the medicine.'

The following morning our estimable driver, Morteza, drove us north-east from Shiraz to Persepolis, the showcase and soul of the First Persian Empire. Mr Sassan's history briefs were succinct and memorable. 'Triple five BC we establish an empire,' he said, meaning that of the Achaemenid dynasty. 'Triple three, it was gone' - at the hands of Alexander the Great, who burned Persepolis to the ground.

For the next 2,300 years its pillars, friezes and fantastical stone carvings, spread over a stone platform the size of several mainline railway termini, remained silted up with sand. 'They used to call it City of the Minarets,' said Mr Sassan, 'because all you could see were the pillars.'

Twentieth-century excavations unearthed the full scale and beauty of the place - and a taxonomy of exotic stone creatures, from the two-headed gryphon (used for the logo of Iran Air) to the pair of composite animals guarding the entrance gate which have the body of a bull, the wings of an eagle and the head of a bearded man.

Bar a trickle of tourists from Hong Kong, who took photographs and left, and a narrow-skulled white cat, I had Persepolis to myself; passed alone and unremarked among the forests of pillars which invite the eye to pole-vault into the blue; was sole observer of the eternal struggle between lion and bull, depicted time and again on friezes throughout the sacked and humbled city.

Humanity breathes from the old stones of Persepolis. Fifty miles north-east along Highway 65, there is an ancient site that exudes only desolation. Pasargadae was built before Persepolis by Cyrus the Great, the most revered of Persia's ancient kings. Its straggling ruins stand on a vast plain surrounded by an inner circle of hills, and an outer embrace of snowy mountain peaks.

The gardens and lakes which made this a paradise on earth have turned to rust-coloured scrub. The wind moans through telegraph wires. On the king's tomb, covered in scaffolding when I was there, the inscription reads: 'Oh man, I am Cyrus who founded the empire of the Persians and was the king of Asia. Grudge me therefore not this monument.'

On the far side of the tomb are the remains of a concrete platform where, in 1971, the last Shah of Persia, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, made a hubristic speech comparing himself to the great king. 'Cyrus the Great you are asleep,' declaimed Mr Sassan, imitating the Shah. 'I am your son and I am awake.' (Later, in a pizza parlour in Esfahan, a man repeated this story and linked it to an obscene, unrepeatable joke about Ayatollah Khomeini, the cleric who returned from exile eight years later to replace the ousted Shah.)

'Bale,' said Mr Sassan - 'Fine, good': a version of the Spanish Vale - and invited me to return to the little silver Peugeot, for we had yet a long journey that day, past pisctachio orchards and through lilac-pale snowy mountains, to the city of Yazd.

It was in Yazd - with its strange wind towers and subterranean water courses, designed to neutralise the fierce desert climate - that I made a discovery about Mr Sassan. He knows everyone in Iran. For everywhere we went he ran into a long-lost friend and they would proceed to embrace, swap (doubtless) ribald banter and roar with laughter.

Iranian streets are not like our streets, where we ignore strangers, and hurry, and are often fearful. Here people stop and talk, often to strangers, and a Western face was sufficient of a novelty that if I stood still a friendly crowd would gather, full of questions.

On a street in Yazd a passing soldier spoke to me from the corner of his mouth: 'Welcome to Iran mister.' And in the Yazd Cotton Scarf and Shawl shop, next to the mosque, I had an unusual encounter with a young woman.

In public women are unlikely to even look a male foreigner in the eye, let alone shake their hand - though in private it is '180 degrees different,' as a Tehrani friend put it. In that shop in Yazd a fashion student called Safieh sold me two scarves and told me she would like to go to London but, being single, has had difficulty getting a visa.

'Do you have a solution?' she said, batting her eyelashes. And when I asked if I could take her photograph (usually another strict no-no), she replied archly, 'On one condition...', before posing for my camera.

Despite such spontaneity and friendliness, Westerners are watched - the authorities would say, for their own safety - and there is no ignoring the fact that one is in a country ruled by a repressive theocracy: giant billboards of Khomeini, Khamenei and 'the martyrs of the revolution' - meaning those who died in the Iran-Iraq War - are everywhere. Television channels are clogged with dreary propaganda and English language newspapers have headlines of the 'Iran breaks oil output record' variety.

This version of the country was at odds with the way it felt at street level. My friend in the Esfahani pizza parlour - who had earlier asked if one million dollars would be sufficient to secure citizenship of the UK - summed up this duality with a gnomic utterance (or I think he did). 'This is why we call Iran the country of the needle-hole and the gate,' he said. 'Sometimes it is easy to go through the needle-hole. Sometimes it is hard to go through the gate.'

The eye of the needle is always the more interesting portal. On my first afternoon in Esfahan, a streetwise-looking guy homed in on me outside the Iman Mosque in Iman Square and asked me where I was from. When I told him he said, 'Do you know Jason Elliot?'

I laughed, producing Elliot's book as if it were a white rabbit from my backpack, and the man said, 'I am in it. Page 302. I am Zizou.' He was indeed the 'wiry, keen-eyed young man from Luristan' with whom Elliot discusses the geometry and asymmetry of Iman Square, one of the most beautiful public spaces in the world.

The pedestrianised square, with its pools and fountains, picknicking families and excitable school groups, is graced by some of the Islamic world's finest architecture of which the greatest is the small, exquisite Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque on the eastern side. 'I have never encountered splendour of this kind before,' wrote Robert Byron in The Road to Oxiana before declaring this early 17th-century building to be even more splendid than Versailles, the Doge's Palace in Venice or St Peter's in Rome.

When I walked in under the tiled and shimmering dome I realised what he meant. The space is lanced with light pouring from the lacy windows, seems buoyed up and half-built with the stuff. The play of light on tile swirls and mesmerises. After gazing for many minutes I realised, when I saw my breath condensing, that it was freezing in here. I hadn't noticed.

My last day in Iran coincided with the annual commemoration of the Islamic Revolution which brought Khomeini to power in 1979. Many thousands, perhaps a million or more, people took to the streets of Tehran. Others, up in the affluent north of the city, ignored the occasion, choosing instead to go hiking in the mountains or to picnic in the snowbound parks.

I did both, starting with the demo. 'Nuclear power is our right!' they chanted in Farsi. 'Down with USA, down with Israel!' and, 'Oh Muslims reunited, it is a shame to be oppressed!' There was a holiday atmosphere. I was handed free tea and a slice of cake. A woman tapped me on the arm and invited me to take a photograph of her daughter, whose face was made up to look like pussycat and who carried a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini. As we returned to the car an old lady with a walking stick eyed me shrewdly and then spoke - with a smile, not remotely hectoring. Mr Sassan translated: 'She says, 'Go and tell your nation what is happening here'.' I nodded that I would.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on April 12, 2008

Civil war and civil rights

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The concierge in the Sheraton Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, wasn't happy about us walking to Auburn Avenue, less than a mile away. 'It's not a nice area,' he said, recommending a taxi. Under the Atlanta Expressway we hurried, and were duly accosted - by a tiny old lady in sunhat and popsocks, sitting at a bus stop. 'Good mornin',' she said. 'Y'all have a great day now.'

Not a nice area? This eastern neighbourhood of Downtown Atlanta, known as the Old Fourth Ward, just happens to have produced two of the great figures of modern American history. Born in 1900, Margaret Mitchell, the author of Gone With the Wind, grew up at 179 Jackson Street. In 1929, round the corner in Auburn Avenue, Dr Martin Luther King Jr was born at number 501, his father shouting 'Hallelujah!' as he came into the world.

It feels incongruous to put them in the same paragraph: the black civil rights activist who was assassinated by a white racist in 1968, and the white author of a novel in which black Americans are depicted in ways that make us wince today. You would be forgiven for thinking their association begins and ends with an accident of birthplace, but you would be wrong. The lives of Dr King and Margaret Mitchell were to intersect most improbably and controversially.

The Auburn Avenue area, now known as the Martin Luther King Jr National Historic Site or, more succinctly, 'Sweet Auburn', consists principally of a visitor centre, Dr King's tomb and his 'birth home'. Back in the early 1930s it was a respectable, deeply religious black neighbourhood in which crime was low and folk relaxed in wicker swings on the porch as they chatted with nextdoor neighbours.

Now the restored 'shotgun' houses - rooms arranged in a line from front porch to back yard - privet hedges and well-tended lawns have a sleepy, museum-like air. Residents of a nursing home were taking the morning sun out front. Outside the new Ebenezer Baptist Church a sign wished Happy Birthday to Dr King's sister, Christine King Farris.

The house, wooden and shuttered, in which King was born and grew up is painted cream and brown and surrounded by tidy low hedging. As our guide, John Roberts, led us past a succession of railed-off rooms he told stories of King's childhood. 'Blacks were only allowed to stay in certain hotel rooms in the city,' he said. 'When these were full up word got around: just go to 501. There were so many cots on the landing they had to put up a partition.'

Inspired by his upbringing in this house, King was to evolve and inspire a brand of peaceful protest which succeeded in throwing off what he called the 'manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination'.

Sweet Auburn is a place that inspires contemplation. Back on Auburn Avenue Roberts recalled that Gerry Adams had spent 'three or four hours' here. 'You got prime ministers and stuff coming from China. Because they want to make a difference.' Then he pointed across the street. 'That sign there on the grass ['No trespassing'] is where the white man had his store.'

This was a reference to a life-changing experience King had when he was six years old and best friends with the son of the white man who owned a shop on Auburn Avenue. The friendship was ended by the shop-owner because he didn't want his son to associate with a black boy - King's first experience of racism.

At the time of this incident, in a basement apartment a couple of miles north in the Midtown area of Atlanta, Margaret Mitchell was bashing away day and night on a 1923 Remington portable. Mitchell, a former society debutante and newspaper reporter, was completing the manuscript of a sprawling novel about the Civil War and its devastating effect on the Deep South which came to be known as Gone With the Wind.

The apartment where she wrote it, which she called affectionately 'The Dump', is now part of a museum called the Margaret Mitchell House which is dedicated to the writer, her book and the film. The companionable and witty Russell Caldwell made an appropriate guide to the museum, being related to Mitchell's first husband, Berrien Upshaw, known as 'Red'.

'He was a bootlegger,' said Caldwell. 'As they say, you can't choose your relatives.' He was also, more than likely, the model for Rhett Butler. The story goes that when their marriage failed Margaret asked Upshaw what she should do, and he replied, 'Frankly my dear...'

The apartment is small, with a pea-green settee and a small desk and chair. 'Margaret sat here,' said Caldwell, indicating the desk and typewriter, 'and basically wrote the novel in three years. She didn't want people to know she was writing it. She had a towel on the back of the chair that she would drape over the desk when people came round.'

Gone With the Wind was published in 1936, to immediate, dramatic success. 'My grandmother said that you couldn't swing a cat on 10th Street for people carrying copies of the book,' said Caldwell. The film, starring Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara and Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, was completed three years later.

The Margaret Mitchell House has fascinating memorabilia from the film. 'That's the doorway to Tara from the movie set,' Caldwell pointed out. 'And that's the portrait [of Scarlett O'Hara] that he [Rhett Butler] threw the whisky glass at.' The exhibition also notes that 'Images from both the novel and the film continue to prompt questions about gender, race, war and memory in the South.'

Certainly, the use of the N word and the portrayal of African-Americans, which seems patronising to modern sensibilities, make uncomfortable reading and viewing today. And it seems grotesque that when the film received its premiere in Atlanta in December 1939 the two principal black actresses, Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen, were barred from attending due to the segregation laws. But someone else was notable by his presence during those three days of celebrations: the 10-year-old Martin Luther King Jr.

The movie was first shown on December 15 at Loew's Grand Theater. The evening before there had been a celebratory ball in which the choir of the Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue performed. A photograph in the Margaret Mitchell House captures the occasion. Dr King's father, the pastor of the church, is holding a guitar. Martin Jr wears a white hat. The amazing thing is that they are all dressed as plantation slaves. 'There was a big backlash in the black community,' explained Caldwell. 'But Martin Luther King Sr said that not everything we do is political.'

Margaret Mitchell said of Gone With the Wind - which still sells a quarter of a million copies each year - 'The one thing I've always wanted to avoid is the stirring up of old hates and prejudices, because I wrote my book with no hate and no prejudice.' What has come to light only recently is the covert support she gave to black people in Atlanta with the proceeds from the novel.

'She gave a lot of money and time to the black community which was highly irregular at the time, her being a prominent Southern white woman,' said Caldwell. 'She gave money anonymously to set up a clinic and 50 scholarships to Morehouse College [which Dr King attended]. It was all done under the radar.'

Margaret Mitchell died on August 16, 1949 in Atlanta after being hit by a car. One likes to think that, had she lived, she would have lent her support to her fellow Atlantan, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, in his struggles and triumphs of the next two decades.

On April 4 1968 Dr King was shot dead in Memphis. In the words of the exhibition at Sweet Auburn dedicated to his life, he 'pitched his voice into that mysterious chamber of light and dark, the soul. The response he got transformed America.'

'Sweet Auburn' and 'The Dump' The Martin Luther King Jr National Historic Site (001 404 331 5190, www.nps.gov/malu) is at 450 Auburn Ave NE: open daily, 9am-5pm in winter, to 6pm in summer (register in the visitor centre for the birth home tour); admission free. The Margaret Mitchell House and Museum (001 404 249 7015, www.gwtw.org) is at 990 Peachtree St (corner of Peachtree and 10th): open Mon-Sat 9.30am-5pm, Sun noon-5pm; admission $12. 'Road to Freedom', an exhibition of photographs of the civil rights movement, is at Atlanta's High Museum of Art (www.high.org; 1280 Peachtree St NE) from June 7 to Oct 12.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on March 29

Jaguar tracking and the alpha male

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The walkie-talkie crackles. The boatman kills the engine and our own wash rocks the speedboat gently as Charles Munn listens in. 'They have two jaguars at the mouth of the Three Brothers,' he announces. 'A male and a female. Hold on to your hats.'

We turn round and zip back the way we have come. To left and right the boilerplate backs of caiman slip into the water as we pass. Beneath my binoculars my heart is racing in my chest - the jaguar is one of the world's most elusive animals and I may be on the verge of my first sighting. 'The male is the one the brain surgeon threw the piranha to,' shouts Charlie, referring to a jaguar yarn he had told the previous evening over high-octane rum cocktails called caipirinhas.

Bouncing across the corrugated waters of the Three Brothers River, we are in the heart of one of the wildest landscapes on the planet. Hard against the border with Bolivia, in the bull's eye of South America, is the region of Brazil known as the Pantanal -150,000 square kilometres of rivers and streams, seasonally flooded grasslands, riverine forests and bumpy airstrips, the runways marked out with the top halves of old tyres painted white.

The Pantanal is home to between 4,000 and 7,000 jaguar. The presence of these amber-eyed, luxuriantly liveried creatures lends romance to a primordial landscape already brimming with biodiversity. The pull of the jaguar is a powerful thing. In the northern Pantanal it has proved irresistible both to masters of the universe - a ranch was bought recently by the American owner of a Bolivian silver mine - and saviours of the planet. Charlie Munn, despite being the scion of one of America's elite families, is firmly in the latter camp.

His grandfather may have been known as 'Mister Palm Beach' but Charlie is happy to be called 'The Real Macaw', being a world famous bird biologist and conservationist who has spent much of the last 25 years in the Peruvian and Brazilian jungles studying those big-beaked canopy clowns and generally trying to stop bad people burning, killing and corrupting planet earth to hell. A persuasive, charismatic 52-year-old who loves to talk in movie analogies, he believes that 'saving the world isn't heavy weather. It should be fun. That's the premise.'

Now he has turned his attention to 'jag-wahs' because they make the perfect flagship species around which to rally conservation support. Panthera onca, to use the scientific name of the world's third biggest cat, is listed in Appendix 1 of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which means it is among the most threatened creatures on the planet (there are thought to be only 50,000 mature breeding cats left).

Through tourism he plans to demonstrate to the ranchers, farmers and loggers who continue to erode the jaguar habitat and have them killed that they are worth more alive than dead. 'If you give the jaguar a bully pulpit they can do some heavy lifting here,' he says.

In the summer of 2007 Charlie and his German-Peruvian wife, Mariana Valqui, set up the Jaguar Research Centre near the meeting point of the Cuiaba and Three Brothers Rivers (visitors divide their stay between a tented camp in a forest clearing and an air-conditioned houseboat, the Pira Miuna). He admits that 'jaguar tourism' is untested but, like the Kevin Costner character in the baseball allegory, Field of Dreams, he believes that 'if you build it they will come'.

Describing this new set-up as 'the world's first and only guaranteed destination' for jaguars, he claims that from July to mid-October you stand a 97 per cent probability, over three days, of viewing the largest cat in the Americas. And the end-of-season figures look promising - 125 sightings in the course of 81 days of searching.

On the first morning, as we head back to the mouth of the river, there's more radio activity. 'Francisco has them again,' says Charlie. 'This time they're lying down on the river bank.' Charlie's team of trackers are former jaguar hunters - that simple but brilliant trick of recycling poachers as gamekeepers.

We reach the scout boat driven by Francisco and he and Charlie consult. The male cat has gone but the female remains. 'He says she's underneath the tree with the vines coming down...,' reports Charlie, scoping the bank with powerful binoculars. The boatman turns off the engine and we drift slowly downstream towards the spot. '... And he's right,' he whispers.

He points. I stare through binoculars. Deep cover but no movement. I can't see a thing. But it's as if your mind, as well as your eyes, has to focus. Suddenly I am looking at my first ever jaguar. On the ridge of the bank, in the dappled under-tree light, a pale disc of head with triangular eye sockets and an interrogator's stare, relaxed but penetrating. She doesn't move.

We are not very close, maybe 18 metres away. But I feel an immediate, involuntary frisson of excitement and a desire to remember every moment. It is like finding yourself in a lift with someone both famous and attractive. Charlie reckons it's down to species respect.

'The jaguar is a very beautiful animal but there's a lot more to it than that,' he tells me later. 'I think we [humans] instinctively know we're both top of the pyramid. It's like two gang leaders facing off.' Soon, too soon, the capo di tutti capi of the Latin American animal kingdom is gone, melting back in to the green and black.

That evening on the houseboat - over more caipirinha cocktails, bowls of excellent Peruvian squash soup made by Maria from Lima, and a decent Argentinian red - we discuss my first sighting. How near did we get? How long did we stay? Did you see her eyes? Already I'm spinning stories, succumbing to that grip on the human imagination exerted by jaguars that Charlie likens to gold fever. 'You know that movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?' he says. 'It brings out some of the best but alot of the worst in human nature, this jaguar searching.'

He's right. My ambition had simply been to set eyes on a jaguar - a privilege in itself as Charlie says he'd be surprised if a thousand people per year manage to see one. But already I'm feeling dissatisfied. I want a better view. I also want quantity. By coincidence someone I know was here three weeks ago and he saw seven. It's an unprecedented number in a two-day trip but I mean to better it. And I have an extra day.

Things are starting well. Our conversation that evening is interrupted by the crackle of two-way radio. Two jaguars on the Three Brothers River again. It is after supper and fully dark but we mobilise a speedboat and scud upriver in an icy wind tunnel, Charlie strafing the riverbanks with spotlight.

When the engine is cut we drift to within about 15 metres of where the cats lie in long grass next to a small tree. One soon slinks right and drops from view but the other stays. Partly hidden by stalks of grass, and by its own markings, the jaguar's face looks grainy and monochrome in the spotlight. Directly above it, as if mindful of symmetry, a full moon hangs in the Southern Hemisphere sky. A spectacled owl hoots. It is a mesmerising encounter.

One day, three sightings. Like Bogart in Mexico, I'm feeling lucky. The next morning dawns beautiful. Our houseboat is moored on the west bank of the Cuiaba River. Water hyacinths float downriver in clumps. Amazon parrots are squawking on the far river bank. A red-capped cardinal, bandbox smart in his military policeman's uniform, lands on the breakfast table of the open deck and pecks at chocolate-cake crumbs. Apart from Charlie, the crew, Isabel and Patty from Peru, and my partner Miren, there is not another human being for many miles.

I run through the photographs I have taken on my digital camera, reflecting on the wildlife of the Pantanal that the jaguar has all but blotted from my mind - the birds, from comically huge jabiru storks to iridescent hummingbirds little bigger than bumblebees, snaggle-toothed caimans which look like nursery-rhyme villains, blunt-snouted capybaras snoozing on the sandy beaches of the Three Brothers River, rare giant otters 'like aquatic Keystone Kops' (says Charlie). Improbable and beautiful creatures all.

Then the walkie-talkie burps and everyone looks expectantly at Charlie. Half an hour ago, at 7am, we sent a scout boat up the Three Brothers. The scout is calling to say he's found fresh jaguar tracks on one of the beaches. Charles shrugs. 'Tracks are a dime a dozen,' he says, and the tension breaks.

There are estimated to be between six and nine jaguars per square 100km and Charlie's boats patrol an area two or three times that size. 'I guess we are dealing with a population of 17 to 25,' he reckons, 'but there are five or six we see more regularly than others.' Their prey are capybaras and caiman - on a trail near the tented camp we find a jaguar killing field with a couple of caiman skulls lying in the leaf litter. They have been known to kill humans, and are certainly partial to human flesh. Traps of white sand are laid across paths into the camp to show if jaguars are on the prowl.

Later that morning, while we are out in the speedboat, we get another call. The driver, Jinho, reports that four jaguars have been sighted in a narrow channel off the main Cuiaba River. He bellows 'Yee-haa!' in cowboy fashion as we set off and I literally have to hold on to my hat. Forty minutes later, when we reach the spot, the jaguars have vanished.

In the afternoon we cruise downriver to the settlement of Porto Jofre to talk to the fishermen who fish these waters for catfish. 'We're bored stiff of seeing jaguars,' says Nelio, standing at the rail of his boat Cruzeiro do Sol (Southern Cross). As he translates Nelio's swift Portuguese, Charlie throws back his head and laughs at the irony.

'We're nauesous, we're so bored,' Charlie amplifies. It seems that jaguars are attracted by fishing boats. The fishermen throw the guts of the fish they catch on to the river banks rather than into the water, so they won't attract piranha. The jaguars wait while the vultures feast then move in to polish off the gills, the only bit the vultures can't manage.

There will be no sightings today - a salutary reminder that this is not a theme park, that Charlie can't turn the jaguars on as if they were what he would call a faucet. In any case their absence is like withheld love. It feeds the fever. According to Charlie no visitor so far - bar possibly the Englishwoman who insisted on leaving the camp early so she could wash her hair properly - has been immune to this fever.

He speaks entertainingly of alpha male types who are used to be being in control: the Nobel laureate, the neurosurgeon and the man with 'issues of competitiveness' for whom failure to see a jaguar would have been insupportable (when he did see one his joyous bellows scared it away). 'The jaguar is king,' Charlie says and sends us to our bunks with the tantalising prospect of finding the rare one who is replete and relaxed and will remain in the same place for hours while you watch. He calls it 'the golden jag-wah'.

At 10.15 the following morning, while cruising the Three Brothers, we receive a report of a 'massive male' sleeping near where the four were spotted yesterday. As we make tracks, Charlie is in ebullient mood. 'Ramming speed, captain,' he shouts as the boat slices through a thick patch of water hyacinth. And to the caimans which thrash away on either side: 'You guys are all jag-wah bait.'

It takes us nearly an hour. The huge male is still there but is scarcely visible - the merest blur of cream and orange. After failing to coax him out we move on. The atmosphere in the boat is suddenly flat. I'm thinking that was probably my last chance of a jaguar sighting. I check the pictures I just took. Hopeless. And that, when we think hope is lost, is when we see her: the golden jaguar.

At first she is behind a screen of vines set back from the river bank and she seems relaxed and even mildly animated. She stretches her paws out in front and flicks her tail, watching us languidly. Then Jinho, the boatman, whistles and the jag stands. Gasps from the boat. Her black-and-gold flank ripples along the ridge of the bank; she glances sideways with each whistle, until she is on the river's edge, staring at us, less than 6m away.

Silence, bar the lizard-blinks of digital cameras. It is hard to discern respect in the jaguar's reaction to the cargo of furless, breathless creatures staring back at her in all-weather leisure wear. We mean roughly nothing to her. And I suddenly understand: in the terror of this realisation lies the thrill we have been seeking.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on January 19 2008

The landscape of pity

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The actor starts to speak and our group of 22 hears the deadly patter of enfilade fire. Some of us may even flinch inwardly, imagining the impact and the toppling back. Something thrilling and incongruous is happening in this copse in northern France. A poem is being re-connected to the moment of its birth 91 years ago.

No sun today, just sombre September clouds, but the hell is recoverable. For we are gathered where, on July 1 1916, Sassoon was supplementing his bully beef rations with Vitamin C while modern Europe slouched into being. To either side of us are grassy shell holes. The actor, John Aston, stands on the ivy-covered spit between them and recites Attack, by the fox-hunting toff who became the war's most coldly eloquent critic.

It is about going over the top at dawn: 'With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,/Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.' In the rat-a-tat rhythm of bullet-hail, Sassoon evokes the sunlit, hellish events he witnessed here. As John reaches the final anguished phrase, 'O Jesus, make it stop!', one of our group stoops to pick a souvenir from the wound that never quite heals: the drive-band of an artillery shell.

People are avid for the Great War. As it recedes into history - literally so: there are now only a handful of men alive who were there - it exerts fresh fascination, fuelled by the online genealogy craze. The lanes of this corner of Picardie are full of cars with GB stickers, driven by peering families with ancestors buried somewhere close.

Any number of outfits - from the reputable to the cynical - offer tours. The tour we're on is different, unique even. It is not about regiments or events or dead relatives - or even war, per se. It is about poetry. Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling and many others used the brevity and heightened emotion of poems to distil the 'pity' (Owen's choice of word) of this most particularly dreadful war.

The idea of returning the poetry - familiar from syllabuses and armchair contemplation - to the fields where it was forged belongs to Andrew Spooner, a 52-year-old former fireman who has been leading bespoke tours here for nearly 20 years. 'I see it all, superimposed on the landscape,' he says as our coach trundles through hamlets with blooming hydrangeas and ominous names: Serre, Beaumont Hamel, Mametz. 'I see the wire. I see the shrapnel bursting.'

Over four days we too will see these things as Andrew sets the scene and John, the actor, brings it to life in the extemporised language of trench slang, military nomenclature and sheer, bug-eyed horror that became characteristic of Great War poetry.

The landscape is imbued with poetry, as a matter of fact. Men were buried where they dropped so the cemeteries of Portland stone headstones scattered so starkly white against the green mark the progress of the fighting. They contain many graves of unidentified bodies, each of which bears the inscription written by Kipling: 'A soldier of the Great War/Known unto God'.

In Serre No.1 Cemetery John reads Two Fusiliers by Robert Graves, about friends who died together: 'Show me the two so closely bound/As we, by the wet bond of blood...'

'I have chosen this poem in particular to match an event on a battlefield,' says Andrew after a reflective silence. He points to a single headstone marking the joint grave of the French-Canadian Destrube brothers, Charles and Paul, who enlisted in the Royal Fusiliers and were killed here on February 17, 1917.

'In those last moments they crawled to one another, they embraced one another, and died,' he says. 'They were found arm in arm. How could you part those men for burial when they were found together?' There is no evidence that Robert Graves knew, or knew of, the Destrube brothers. The connection is Andrew's.

This is how he works. In his cargo pants, linen shirt and sunhat he is part-squaddie part-troubadour, cajoling landscape and poetry into a kind of psychic alignment: what you might call the landscape of pity. Along the road from Serre No.1 Cemetery he asks Len, the driver, to stop the coach and we stumble onto the edge of a newly ploughed field looking quizzically at one another. There is nothing here. But there was.

From battlefield records Andrew has worked out the precise location of the 'old Boche dug-out' which features in Wilfred Owen's The Sentry. The hole has been filled in and ploughed over, but we are standing at the spot in No Man's Land where, in January 1917, Owen and 24 others spent '50 hours of extreme hell,' according to Andrew. As John reads the lines about the sentry who was blinded - 'Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids',/Watch my dreams still' - I pick something from the soil: a ceramic fragment that, Andrew tells me later, is probably part of the insulator of a field telephone.

We are all hopeful of finding a memento. The group - including a Knight of the Realm, an eminent physician and a female Master of Wine - has some unexpected, oblique connections to the Great War. One woman knows the son of Field-Marshall Haig, another the grandddaughter of the poet Robert Frost, friend and mentor to Edward Thomas. One man is the great great grandson of the Sassoon family doctor.

At the end of each reading by John there is silence that no one wants to be the first to break. At Hamel Military Cemetery at the bottom of 'Jacob's Ladder', the notorious communication trench where many were killed, the reading is preceded by a piece of theatre. Andrew holds up a green bottle. 'Here's the villain,' he says with a flourish. 'Fortunately it's empty now but it would have contained mustard gas.'

John then turns to Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est. While he reads those searing lines about a gas attack - 'Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,/As under a green sea , I saw him drowning' - I look up and to the south-east, visible above Thiepval Wood, is the top of Lutyens's monument to 'The Missing of the Somme' - 73,000 men, a virtual full house at Old Trafford, whose bodies were never identified.

'And if you want to know why I've chosen this spot for the Owen poem...,' says Andrew, and gestures at the headstone of Private T Grimsey of the Essex Regiment who died on August 16 1916. His epitaph is 'Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori.' Fiona, from East Lothian - the friend of Haig's son - gazes at the inscription, then looks away. 'He was 18!' she exclaims. 'When will we ever learn? As Marlene said.'

A poem comparing the River Wye with the River Ancre, which wound through No Man's Land; lines scribbled on scraps found in dead men's pockets; poems knowing oblivion was coming; excellent poignant stuff written by people you've probably never heard of, who died pitifully young. In our four days, all are given back to the place they came from.

We end the tour at La Boiselle where, at 7.30am on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 'the 34th Division rose as one' and the earth turned red. More than 6,000 fell dead or wounded in the first two hours, most in the first 30 minutes. Still, today, bodies are unearthed at an average of five a year.

'I have found fragments of skull and jaw here, a complete hand and, a few weeks ago, a shinbone,' says Andrew (if you are wondering what he does with such human remains: he throws them back to the soil). Feeling both horrified and guilty, we scan the chocolate clods with bowed heads as John reads Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth: 'What passing bells for those who die as cattle?/ Only the monstrous anger of the guns...'

After a longer-than-usual pause, Andrew says: 'Men tucked their chins into their chests and walked into the fire as if it was lashing rain.' And we look at each other, lost for words.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on January 12 2008

Secrets of the tomb dwellers

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

To see the excellent photographs by Eduardo Martino which accompanied this article in The Sunday Times Magazine, visit www.eduardomartino.com/qurna/index.html

We are standing in the interconnecting tombs beneath Mohammed Ismail’s old house when he mentions the mummies, as one knew he would. The story of how the Abd el-Rassoul brothers discovered the “cachette” (everyone uses the French word) of bandaged pharaohs and flogged them off, confounding the authorities, is the defining narrative of this singular and roguish community: “They are clever, they not tell anybody they find,” says Mohammed admiringly. “Forty mummies, necklaces, gold.”

Mohammed Ismail, a congenial gent in a grey galabiyya and white headdress, and his neighbours are the last of a unique breed. They live in a village called Qurna, just a donkey dash from the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Their houses are pharaonic tombs and they once traded in stolen antiquities and were experts in the manufacture of fake treasures. Under cover of more legitimate touristic pursuits - the village receives a steady stream of Westerners visiting the 3,000-year-old Tombs of the Nobles, which are interspersed among Qurna’s houses - some still cling to such practices, as I would discover.

The Egyptian government has wished them gone for a century or more so it can properly excavate the archaeology of the site. Now it has finally decided to put an end to their anachronistic way of life by destroying their bizarre habitat and frogmarching them into the 21st century. To some commentators, both in Egypt and abroad, the eviction is not before time as beautiful tombs and priceless treasures may be awaiting discovery. To others the destruction of Qurna village and its unique way of life is nothing short of a tragedy. This is the story of the last of the tomb raiders, and it reaches surprisingly close to home.

By the time you read this, almost the entire village of Qurna will have been razed to the ground by bulldozers and earth-movers and the villagers moved to an estate of brand-new bungalows four kilometres away on the edge of the Sahara Desert which has cost US$20 million to build and service.

The houses they are leaving are strange, ramshackle affairs, sprouting from ancient tombs in agglomerations of mud-brick that barnacle the mountainside in shades of ochre and aquamarine. The houses they are going to are laid out in geometrical lines and have every modern amenity - notably running water, a right denied the old village because piped water would have damaged the tombs.

Some villagers are ready to leave their ancestral homes - one woman gives the thumbs-up sign and says that, “Inshallah”, in five days’ time her house will be flattened and she will be re-housed in “New” Qurna - but many are unhappy about the deal they have been offered. They say the new houses are not big enough for their extended families (Mohammed Ismail has to shoehorn nine people into his two-bedroom bungalow), and they claim their livelihoods, which are rooted here in alabaster workshops, guesthouses and cafes (not to mention antiquities, both fake and real), are being taken away. Those with most to lose - such as the memorably named Mohammed Snake, who runs a 12-room guesthouse and restaurant - are preparing to stay until physically removed.

The descendants of Bedouin nomads have lived in Qurna for hundreds of years, developing a complicated relationship with the burial sites and treasures which abound. Their tomb houses have evolved by a principle known as bait hajr, literally “stone house” in Arabic. It is a template of human civilisation itself: nomads use caves/tombs for shelter from heat and sandstorms, eventually settle in one place, establish a relationship with the land around them, build permanent structures above their holes in the ground, and form a community.

Picking our way through the rubble of smashed houses, the photographer and I find a woman who is undergoing this civilising process in reverse. Being unmarried, 63-year-old Zeinab is not entitled to a house of her own. She emerges from a gash in the debris and leads us down into a compartmentalised hole. It is the tomb that was colonised by her ancestors and she has lived in it alone since the extended family home that stood above it was destroyed three weeks ago and 30 of her relatives were rehoused.

In the dark back chamber is a wickerwork divan covered in a rough blanket, an old wooden radio covered with a cloth, a photograph of her on the wall as a young woman, in plaits. Oranges in a tin bowl seem to glow in the sepulchre-gloom. “If you’re poor they don’t help,” she says. “Why? We don’t know why.”

A short clamber up the hill over piles of smashed mud-bricks, Mohammed Ismail’s house has also gone. It was a two-storey dwelling with eight rooms for his nine family members, “When it fell down, it is like me falling down,” he says. His brother’s, to which his was attached, is still standing. Feeling cramped and purposeless in his two-bedroom bungalow in “New” Qurna, Mohammed, who is 53, returns each day to his brother’s house and gazes on the rubble to which his birthplace has been reduced. He says he ran a “small bazar” from his house. “I know everyone here. I know every tomb. But there.” He gestures into a vague distance, meaning the new village in the desert. “Nothing.”

Running beneath both houses, the burial chambers are intact. The first ones Mohammed shows us are small and unexceptional - the oblong cellar which served as his kitchen, the storeroom where he kept ducks. Now he pushes at an ancient wooden door with a wooden lock, flicks a light switch and takes a cursory look inside. He is about to close the door when I poke my nose through.

This is my Howard Carter moment. Where I had expected a broom cupboard, there is a passageway about 10 metres long and 3m high. With eyes adjusting to the puny light from two bare bulbs I tiptoe over white feathers and bird droppings (Mohammed kept his pigeons here until the move) to a chamber 6m square with a niche in the back wall containing a damaged statue. The weight of history makes me feel momentarily giddy - this is a classic pharaonic tomb design of courtyard, transverse hall, passageway, chamber and niche.

The floor is littered with polystyrene packaging, a tea strainer, a broom head. The stucco, and any cartouches or paintings that would have been applied to it, disappeared long ago, leaving bare, jaggedly hewn limestone blackened by fires and oil lamps. “My grandfather lived here,” says Mohammed. He indicates the back wall of the niche, which is hung with a flouncy pelmet of cobwebs. “I think maybe it is bricked up, and there are more tombs there behind.”

Pharaonic tombs, and the undreamt-of treasure they may contain behind false walls, are the key to this stand-off between the people and the government. Qurna is situated on the West Bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt, facing the tourist town of Luxor across the river. It is plum in the middle of the Theban Necropolis, so-called because the ancient city of Thebes, on the site of modern-day Luxor, buried its dead here - and did so with a flamboyance and ingenuity unmatched by any civilisation before or since.
These barren limestone terraces and ridges are honeycombed with thousands of tombs. The Valley of the Kings - site of the royal burials - contains the most spectacular and famous, from that of Tutankhamun to the astonishing plunging chamber of Seti I. A kilometre south across the mountain ridge, there is another concentration below the 2,500 houses, spread across seven settlements, that make up the village of Qurna. At least 600 or 700 tombs on the site have never been explored, according to Dr Mansour Boreik, the General Director of Southern Upper Egypt for the Supreme Council of Antiquities (others put the figure even higher). “Every one of these houses has a tomb underneath it,” Dr Boreik tells me. “It is one of the major archaeological sites in the world.”

For the SCA’s Secretary General, the internationally famous archaeologist and “latter-day Indiana Jones” (see press profiles, passim), Dr Zahi Hawass, “The fact that archaeology is re-gaining its rights here is the dream of my life.” He is convinced “hidden treasures” will be found.

This is the justification for the eviction of the Qurna villagers and the destruction of their houses. “We need to finish emptying the mountain of people, then we will put in place the masterplan for the site management,” Dr Boreik says. He talks of “modifying” and preserving some 60 houses (without the people) “so you can see how they were living, how they were sleeping. How they did harmony by the tomb and the house.” There will be a walkway, a visitor centre, cafes.

A 25-year-old Belgian egyptologist, Pierre Coussement, who has been visiting the village for eight years, is cynical about the motives. “For the government, archaeology is a small thing, tourism is a big thing - and the people are nothing,” he tells me. He believes Qurna is being turned into a sanitised open-air museum for the benefit of tourists and the financial advantage of the government, and he points out that the bulk of the funding has come not from the Ministry of Culture (of which the SCA is a part) but from the Ministries of Tourism and of Housing.

This is not the first time the government has tried to evict the villagers. In 1948 an architect called Hassan Fathi created a “model village” for them some two kilometres south, using traditional materials. Some moved, but many stayed or drifted back to the only place they have known. A decade ago another attempt was aborted when four villagers were killed resisting eviction. Now the government means to finish the job.

The widespread belief is that the people of Qurna are being removed as one would remove a thorn from one’s side. They are bandits who have made a fool of the authorities for centuries, and now they are paying for it. Few in positions of authority are prepared to say any of this publicly - one man appeared to be terrified when I spoke to him - but somebody who can be said to know what he is talking about described the end of Qurna village as a “catastrophe”.

Nobody has been more successful at making monkeys of the powers that be than the Abd el-Rassouls. The story of the cachette, which brings a glint to Mohammed Ismail’s eye in the half-light of his old mausoleum-house, has a Whisky Galore! air to it. In the 1870s two Abd el-Rassoul brothers discovered a stash of mummies and other objects hidden at the bottom of a vertical shaft between Qurna village and the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut.

Mohammed Ismail offers to take us there. In the punishing midday heat, the braying of a donkey and the plaintive call of the muezzin are the only indications of life amid the rubble of the half-destroyed village. We cross a bleached valley, climb a rocky hillside and stop at the jagged lip of a smooth-sided shaft. It’s impossible to see the bottom without running the risk of overbalancing, but this hole - the famous cachette - is said to be 10 to 12m deep, with side chambers running off horizontally from its base. “Forty mummies here,” Mohammed repeats. “Gold.” He opens his arms and grins. “Everything.”

The Abd el-Rassouls managed to keep their find a secret for several years while cannily slow-releasing pieces on to the antiquities market. Among the mummies eventually rescued from the cachette in 1881 were the remains of some of Ancient Egypt’s greatest rulers from the XIX Dynasty (c1300-1200BC): Ramses I, Ramses II and Seti I. Along with other artefacts, they had been removed from their tombs in the Valley of the Kings by priests some 3,000 years ago and hidden here - ironically, so they wouldn’t be stolen by tomb robbers.

Such a tale may seem to belong in the pages of Rider Haggard, but tomb robbing, the trafficking of stolen antiquities and the passing off of fakes remain hugely lucrative activities involving individuals and syndicates all over the world, including Britain. Recently a pharaonic statue said to be 4,000 years old, for which Bolton Museum had paid nearly £440,000, was found to be bogus and a couple in their 80s were charged with conspiracy to defraud.

One theory is that the razing of Qurna may even lead to an upsurge in tomb robbing, as villagers plunder the newly uncovered tombs and take what they can as a final act of defiance. The week before our visit, a German national was arrested at Luxor airport with a suitcase containing more than 100 pieces. “He was found with some objects from Qurna,” confirms Dr Boreik. “He didn’t say where from.” If convicted, the man faces a stiff jail sentence.

Mohammed Ismail bats away questions about illegal booty with a practised air: “If I find, I am rich now,” he points out. So we go to the horse’s mouth - a member of the Abd el-Rassoul family. Mahmoud Abd el-Rassoul’s great-grandfather and great-uncle, Mohammed and Ahmed, were the two who found the cachette. His father, Hosain, was present as a 13-year-old boy when Howard Carter discovered the Tomb of Tutankhamun.

Mahmoud, plump and expressionless, offers us sweet tea but precious little else as he fiddles with a bag of medicines on the table in front of him. No, he has no stories about the cachette. No, his father never talked about the King Tut discovery. And no, the house near his which has just been knocked down, revealing what the site inspector called “an important model of a XXVI Dynasty tomb with some intact inscriptions” and a sealed burial chamber, did not belong to an Abd el-Rassoul family member (this is untrue).

Another villager is more forthcoming. After rather theatrically checking that the window shutters are properly closed (“The government man is very clever. He come and check in every house”), this man leaves the room, with its whitewashed ceiling and swishing fan, and reappears with bundles of newspaper. From these he produces scores of objects, from a medicine jar with a handle in the form of Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the dead, to shabti figurines (left in the tombs to perform the bidding of the deceased). He spreads the items on the table where they mingle incongruously with bottles of Fanta and Sprite and a packet of Cleopatra cigarettes.

These are almost certainly fakes, but 19th-century ones - works of art in their own right, with asking prices to match (scores of US dollars). When we start to make our excuses and leave, the man says, “Also I have a friend who has wooden things. Very old. I show you.”

In another house in the village, the man with the wooden things offers tea then he leaves the room and returns with a black plastic bucket covered in an old purple cloth. Like a conjurer’s, his hand delves beneath the cloth to produce object after object which he lays out on the green plastic tablecloth. He is emphatic that they are not fakes. His patter is good too. He claims a stone head with exquisitely wrought ears was found in the Asasif Tombs, between Qurna and Hatshepsut’s Temple. It would cost me “one thousand U.S.” For a ram’s head which he says was found at the Ramesseum, the mortuary temple of Ramses II, he wants US$800.

The man brings more and more objects: a monkey figure with an enormous phallus and fragments of mummy shroud attached, from the Tomb of Ay (US$300); a limestone hippopotamus “from the time of Amenophis III” (c1400BC). But his most precious piece - for today anyway - is a superb 50cm high wooden statue of Queen Hatshepsut, with her comical long beard. It can be mine for “two thousand American”.

And in case we are worried about getting the stuff out of the country, he has reassuring news. The authorities, he says, “only look for Egyptian people. Tourists no problem.” He sweeps his hand over the table, offers the use of a magnifying glass. “All pharaonic,” he assures us. “You see if you are interested after tea.”

Ever since the tombs were built, the temptation their treasures have exerted over anyone with both access and opportunity has created kleptomaniacs of the best of us. Tomb robbing started with the men who built and decorated the tombs - and thus knew where the best stuff was. Sheikh Hosain Abd el-Rasoul, the one present at the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, recalled that Howard Carter’s patron, Lord Carnarvon “took a little something” for himself.

But the heyday of pharaonic filching was in the first half of the 19th century.

Some 200m south-east of the village, across the tarmac road that carries endless tourist buses to the Valley of the Kings, stands the temple known as the Ramesseum. It contains the fallen red-granite colossus of Ramses II which inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet, Ozymandias (‘Half sunk, a shattered visage lies...’).

It also reflects Europe’s industrial-scale involvement in tomb-robbing and temple-stripping. Europe’s collectors and its beau monde had been avid for pharaonic exotica since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 had prised open the country and and its astonishing ancient culture. White adventurers (Dr Boreik calls them “hunters”) went out to ancient Thebes in droves to supply the demand.

The names of some of them are carved - with evident disdain for the cartouches they were effacing - on the stones of the Ramesseum. Prominent among them is “Belzoni 1816” written vertically in capital letters. Giovanni Battista Belzoni, a former circus strongman known as “The Patagonian Samson”, shipped many antiquities from Egypt to London. These include the alabaster sarcophagus of Seti I (Seti’s mummified remains, removed from the sarcophagus and hidden in the cachette, would later find themselves in the safekeeping of the crafty Abd el-Rassoul brothers). Sir John Soane, the architect and collector, snapped up Seti’s sarcophagus in 1824 when the British Museum baulked at Belzoni’s asking price of £2,000 and it still lies in the crypt of Sir John Soane’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London.

But Belzoni’s biggest prize was the bust of Ramses II - known as The Younger Memnon, weighing more than seven tons and standing 2.7m tall - which he retrieved from the Ramesseum in 1816 with the considerable help of the villagers of Qurna. It caused a sensation when it was first shown at the British Museum, and the “egyptomania” it generated inspired Shelley, who never set foot in Egypt, to write Ozymandias.

Facilitated by the muscle power and local knowledge of the people of Qurna, Giovanni Belzoni made a killing but he remained ungrateful to the villagers. He called them “the most unruly people in Egypt” and criticised them for being lazy and neglecting agriculture. “They would never take a spade in their hands, except when they go to dig for mummies,” he wrote, somehow overlooking his own motive for being there.

Across nearly 200 years, Belzoni’s views on Qurna are echoed in some of the comments of Dr Mansour Boreik of the SCA. Our interview is conducted at the office of the Antiquities General Inspectorate near Qurna with four of his colleagues sitting in silent, unsmiling attendance. At one point Dr Boreik, a dapper 46-year-old in pressed jeans and a striped shirt, uses an adjective to describe the villagers which he hastily adds is not for publication. He accuses critics of the eviction of spreading disinformation and says some villagers are trying to hoodwink the authorities by pretending to still live in Qurna, thus having a right to a new house, when they actually live elsewhere.

He also dismisses concerns about their livelihoods. “Think about New Qurna, then think about the poor place they are living with the snakes and the scorpions,” he says. “The business they are doing with the tourists is a dirty business.” He means unhygienic. Perhaps he also means nefarious. He looks momentarily disgusted, at any rate.

In this place of legends and hiding places it is sometimes hard to know what is true. But one thing is clear: in conserving a dead civilisation Egypt has destroyed a living one. Out on the edge of the village, an artist called Sid Ahmet works in the long shadows of late afternoon. “I have six child,” he says. “If I go there [to the new bungalow development] what do they do? Do they eat stones?” Of plans for Qurna he says drily, “It will be a good museum. But let me eat.”

For 17 years Sid Ahmet worked as a conservator in the Valley of the Kings, before the acetone used to clean and preserve the tomb inscriptions damaged his health. Now he makes skilled replicas of tomb objects. He also makes fakes. He shows us how, dipping a wooden priest-figure in a solution of “ammonium”, “carbon sodium” and stewed tea, then turning it across the floor of the workshop till it is furred with dust.

Now comes Ingredient X. He produces a black plastic bag and folds down the top to reveal what looks like a jumble of old nylon tights: mummy shrouds, which are still found on the mountain. He rubs the dusty figure vigorously with a piece of shroud. “This gives me the blood of the pharaoh,” he says. “It makes old.” As his fingers move he recites a line of poetry I remember from a classroom far away: “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” Then he grins and shakes his head in mock-disbelief: “It is a story from Ozymandias,” he says.

The photographs were taken by the photojournalist Eduardo Martino – see http://www.documentography.com/feature_view.php?arid=172&phid= for more pictures.

Published in the Sunday Times Magazine on June 3 2007

Where Skellig really lived

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

The author of Skellig, that magical tale of rebirth, is driving me over the Tyne Bridge in his Volvo. Below us are the totems of his home city's reinvention as a vibrant metropolis: The Baltic art gallery, The Sage concert hall, the arc of the Millennium Bridge which soars across the Tyne to fuse Newcastle with its non-identical twin, Gateshead.

'It's such a vast change,' says David Almond. 'But I love physical change. Things being broken down, turned to dust, and new things being built on top.'

It's kind of how his books work: a breaking through darkness and decay into beauty and light. So successful have his novels been since the publication of Skellig in 1998 that Almond has become something of a totem himself, part of the cultural regeneration that parallels the post-industrial transformation of this city built on shipbuilding and coalmining.

'When I was a kid most people worked in industry,' says Almond. 'Workers' buses everywhere and people walking back from shifts. And all the stone was black from smoke.'

Now they work in call centres and shop in Gateshead's Metrocentre, and the stone is pristine, especially down on the Quayside where it combines with stainless steel and glass to create an architect's paragon of riverside redevelopment. Still, Almond, who is in his fifties, tends to set his novels either well before or just on the cusp of this regeneration.

In Heaven Eyes three kids escape from an orphanage by sailing a raft down the Tyne, which 'stank of oil and something rotten'. They fetch up in a derelict warehouse where 'Moonlight poured in wedges through the shattered skylights'.

The day before meeting Almond I had heard a serendipitous tale about this fictional warehouse from a woman called Mary Briggs. She is the chief executive of a new visitor attraction in Newcastle called Seven Stories dedicated to children's literature - the only such resource in the country.

The centre is housed in a converted mill and former print works alongside the Ouseburn, a sludgy river gully that snakes into the Tyne just east of the Quayside. Writing Heaven Eyes some six years before Seven Stories was opened, Almond had had that very building in mind. Unwittingly he had sailed his raft right into the place that would become, in Mary's words, 'the heart of a network of children's writers and illustrators.'

The centre is the brainchild of Mary and of Elizabeth Hammill, children's book enthusiasts who grew dismayed that so much original material by British authors and illustrators was disappearing abroad. 'This was part of our heritage,' Mary told me, 'so we decided to do something about it.'

Seven Stories is the result - a bustling shrine to the magic of books as well as a collection of original manuscripts and artwork. It's called Seven Stories for two reasons: because its storytelling spaces (complete with fairytale-ish chairs for authors to read from), exhibition galleries, reading areas, cafe and bookshop occupy seven floors; and because there are said to be just seven basic story lines in literature.

One of them is 'rags to riches', which you could say is exemplified by the story of the project itself. 'We opened a joint bank account with �10 each and our turnover is now one and a half million,' Mary had told me proudly. Theirs is 'an amazing achievement,' according to Almond.

Other prototypical story lines include 'voyage and return' and 'quest', both of which I'm embarking upon on this bright winter's morning in David Almond's reassuring Swedish estate car. Crossing the Tyne on the famous green girder bridge, we head away from the beauty and light of the new riverfront developments towards a grittier reality.

On the south side of the bridge we turn left into Sunderland Road. 'This is Felling now we're just coming into,' he murmurs. Felling-on-Tyne is a hillside sprawl of housing estates reaching from the south bank of the Tyne to a wild open area at the top called Windy Nook. During his childhood in the fifties and sixties Almond lived in four different houses here.

When he started writing he toyed with more grandiose locations and themes than those of his own back yard. Then he realised: 'This is what I can write about. This can actually be quite exotic.'

So Felling pours out in a jumble in his books, true events and people mingling with made-up ones. His alchemy is in the way he transmutes it all into something astonishing - the sphere of angels, monsters and magic - just as the painter Stanley Spencer exalted the sleepy Thames Valley town of Cookham.

'This was our church. St Patrick's,' he says. 'It was a massive influence. I was an altar boy like Davie in Clay.' His latest novel features an astonishing passage in which the hero, Davie, leads a monster made of clay through these very streets at night:

'He plods beside me like a massive faithful pet ... I find my voice, a simple stupid voice.

'This is Felling,' I say ...'

And now I am the thing made of clay, being shaped by David/Davie's life here. 'This is Felling High Street, which Davie walks with Clay,' says Almond, echoing the novel. 'There's Dragone's Coffee Shop.' We pass the faded signboard of May's Fashions, with the word 'Men'swear' just legible. 'It has the most spectacular apostrophe,' he says. 'That sign's been there since I was a teenager.'

We kerbcrawl around Rectory Road ('Where my grandparents lived. My uncle Maurice still lives there'), Chilside Road ('We were always on this street, seeing friends and relations'), Watermill Lane: 'Down here is where Clay happens. I imagine Crazy Mary living in one of these houses.'

We reach the heights of Windy Nook, 'A sense of wilderness on the edge of civilization'. The views to the North Sea are spectacular on this day of scudding clouds. 'Felling's a small place but there's a sense of immensity around it,' he says. 'You could see the shipyards going all the way to to the sea. You can see the Cheviots from further up here.'

Back down the hill, in the graveyard of St Mary's, Heworth, is the memorial to the victims of the Felling Colliery disaster of 1812 which features in Kit's Wilderness. The names of the 91 dead, recorded on brass plaques, include 'Thomas Gordon 8' and George Reay and Thomas Craggs, both nine years old.

'We used to play here, scare each other dancing around it,' says Almond. 'Then when you start writing you realise what you were dancing round.' I ask him about the spectres of illness and death which haunt his books and he tells me that his mother was chronically ill during his childhood. 'She had arthritis, just like Skellig,' he says. 'But she had this amazing strength.'

Then he drives us to a grid of streets named after Cumbrian lakes. 'That pebbledashed one on the right. It's the house where my sister died.' A red Fiesta is parked in the drive. 'It's always been a powerful force,' he muses. 'The image of her in the window, sitting in her pram.'

It all seems so ordinary - ordinary and suddenly terrible. 'If there's going to be an evil force, then it has to be in an ordinary place,' he says. 'Felling-on-Tyne.'

And with that he drives me back towards the light, deftly resting on the steering wheel to sign my copy of Skellig as the traffic lights change to green on the Tyne Bridge.

Published in The Daily Telegraph, April 14 2007

How transport shaped London

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

A disgruntled commuter from Kent sent a letter to The Times complaining of the cancellations and delays he and his fellow passengers endured on their train service into London. 'Do, please, let our cry be heard in the columns of your all-powerful journal, so that we may have at least some hope of help,' he wrote, signing himself anonymously, 'Ill-used traveller'.

The letter was written in 1864. Twenty years later the first terrorist attacks on the London Underground took place when Irish Nationalists planted three bombs on the Inner Circle line, one of which injured more than 60 passengers.

Angry commuters and terrorist outrages are nothing new on London's maddening and glorious transport network - like trains on the Circle Line, they just come round again. Such disclosures are part of the fascinating story of the development of transport in the capital, as analysed and celebrated in the revamped London Transport Museum.

The museum, which has re-opened following a 'major transformation' that took two years and cost £22 million, still occupies the former flower market on Covent Garden Piazza - 'essentially a cast-iron and glass greenhouse,' in the words of the museum's director, Sam Mullins. But the number of exhibits has tripled, from 400 to more than 1200. 'We've also made a lot more use of film and multimedia,' said Mullins.

I never visited the old museum, assuming it to be just a bunch of buses. By all accounts that view wasn't far off the mark, and indeed the buses - and trams and trains - are still there. But these venerable old vehicles are now complemented by dazzling computer-generated projections, child-friendly touch-screen displays, Tube train simulators that kids will love, and ingenious installations that border on conceptual art. Buses can be cool.

All this clever stuff, besides looking great, is making a serious point - that transport in London has been a defining social and cultural force. As Sam Mullins said, 'Transport creates the identity of cities.' And nowhere is this more true than London, home of the world's first underground railway.

The exhibition opens with a giant installation, featuring plenty of red neon, on world cities which, said Mullins, 'pushes the viewfinder back from London' to show the common experience of metropolitan travel, incorporating video clips 'harvested from Facebook' of commuters in cities such as Paris and Shanghai.

From here you ascend a ramp to a contemporary photograph of Blackfriar's Bridge. 'Now we get in the lift here,' said Mullins, and when we get out we'll see the same view but 200 years earlier.' As the lift drops one floor, the digital display counts back to 1800 and the lift doors open to reveal a blown-up print of Blackfriar's Bridge in 1798, when there was no public transport and most people had to walk everywhere.

Over the next 100 years, developments in transport - principally, the invention of the railway - transformed London and the lives of its people. An illustration from 1836 shows the construction of the London and Birmingham Railway through Camden - the cutting as wide as a motorway, the houses on its brink, the swarming navvies. By 1900 London had 15 mainline railway termini and at least 100,000, mostly poor, people had had their homes destroyed in the process.

As these mainline stations were on the edge of town, means had to be found of transporting people into the heart of London. Various schemes were proposed - there are diagrams of elevated railways and subterranean roads which look like the work of a mad professor- but the plan decided upon dictacted both the shape and the spirit of modern London. In order to avoid the wholesale demolition of buildings, passengers would travel on underground railways.

At this point we descended another floor. 'The idea is you go down into the world's first underground railway, which was started in 1861,' explained Mullins. That railway was the Metropolitan which linked Paddington in the west with the City in the east - and remains in use as the Metropolitan Line.

Amid the rolling stock and noise of that first venture below ground, an original list of fares shows that from Praed Street (Paddington) to King's Cross it cost sixpence in First Class, fourpence in Second and threepence in Third, with a special low fare on 'workmen's' trains of tuppence ha'penny. An exquisitely detailed scale model shows the shallow, 'cut and cover' method of tunnel building that was used.

The first deep-level Tube was the Circle Line, built in the 1880s using improved tunnelling technology. 'A journey from King's Cross to Baker Street is a form of mild torture,' reckoned The Times. Certainly, train carriages were primitive. Sam Mullins and I sat among mannequins (one modelled on himself) in an upholstered carriage from 1890 that ran on the City and South London Railway. He calls it 'the padded cell'. It put me in mind of a communal coffin. The windows are mere slits, but earlier versions had no windows at all.

The fledgling underground network was not a commercial success. 'The three Tube lines built in the Edwardian period didn't make money,' said Mullins, 'so they developed a map to pull it all together. They also needed to encourage off-peak travel, which is where the posters came from.'

This 'branding' of transport coincided with, and encouraged, population spread into the countryside. I had always wondered why the Tube (unlike, say, the Gas Board) has been so closely associated with a consistency of striking and elegant design, from the famous roundel - copied the world over - to those lovely posters.

It stemmed from the need to encourage more people onto trains but was carried to improbable heights by the genius of one man, Frank Pick, whose job was to advertise the Underground. 'He created an identity by inspired commissioning,' said Mullins. 'Everything is very considered, from the moquette [upholstery fabric] on the seats to the light fittings.'

By now we were standing in what Mullins considers 'the crown jewels' of the museum - the space dedicated to design. Here - besides lots of roundels projected onto the floor in a dizzying swirl - are the earliest versions of one of the world's greatest works of design, the London Underground map.

Its creator, Harry Beck, rendered the Tube network topologically, sacrificing scale, distance and direction to mathematical clarity. 'That's the little presentation drawing he did for the publicity department [in 1931], for which he was paid five guineas,' Mullins said, pointing at a small, neat - and immediately familiar - handpainted diagram.

Nearby is a beautiful poster by the surrealist artist, Man Ray, from 1938 which shows the famous roundel as an icy white planet, spinning through space. The museum's poster collection is one of the finest in the world. Once they were plastered along Tube platforms, extolling the virtues of 'Metroland' - that Arcadia stretching out into the Chilterns along the Metropolitan Line - of 'Theatreland', and of wholesome hikers on country walks. Now they stand in their own right as pieces of period art.

The size of the main hall comes as shock after the intimacy of the gallery spaces. Dominating it is the exhibit called Connections, a giant, shield-like scale model of Central London made of white plastic on to which are projected moving coloured lines marking the journeys to work of real Londoners.

As it pulsed to life, London looked bizarrely like a jellyfish with glowing multicoloured arteries. Round the back of the exhibit - beneath the surface of the city, as it were - I studied the tube lines in their convoluted reality, shorn of Beck's topological simplifications.

Ten minutes later I was on one of those lines, the Piccadilly at Holborn, waiting to go west.The platform loudspeaker crackled to barely audible life in order to say there were 'delays', and this ill-used traveller of the 21st century smiled inwardly, feeling kinship with the disgruntled commuter of 1864. As this dynamic new exhibition demonstrates, London may have changed dramatically since the advent of mass public transport, but its spirit is immutable.

Published in The Daily Telegraph on November 24 2007