There are certain threads which run
through our lives. Interests which never seem to diminish with the passing of
time. If anything, they tend to get stronger and develop deeper meanings for us
as we get older. My love of Japanese art is one such thread. I first
encountered Japanese paintings and prints when visiting the British Museum as a
child. I remember at the time I bought some postcards of prints by Hokusai and
Hiroshige in the museum shop, postcards which I treasured for many years
thereafter. I’d often look at them and sometimes I’d try to imitate their style
in my own pencil drawings.
Exactly twenty years ago, during
the summer of 2001, there was a small exhibition in the BM’s Japan gallery
titled, 100 Views of Mount Fuji. I lost count of how many times I went
to look at it during my lunch breaks. I found it mesmerising. It showcased
works drawn from the BM’s collection dating from the 17th century to
the present – from the traditional schools of Kanō, Sumiyoshi, and Shijō to
later and more personal interpretations by individual artists, such as
Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige. The exhibition catalogue, by Timothy
Clark, succinctly describes the undying fascination for this enormous yet graceful
and compelling landmark: “Mount Fuji is renowned worldwide as Japan’s
highest and most perfectly shaped mountain. Serving as a potent metaphor in
classical love poetry and revered since ancient times by mountain-climbing
sects of both Shintō and Buddhist faiths, Fuji has taken on many roles in
pre-modern Japan.”
The beauty of Mount Fuji is truly
majestic in whichever season you view it. I’ve seen it in Spring, Summer,
Autumn, and Winter. The first time I saw it though was from a high-rise hotel
in Tokyo’s north-eastern neighbourhood of Ueno in October 2003, just two years
after the 100 Views of Mount Fuji exhibition. It was a tiny but
perfectly white, snow-clad triangle glimpsed in the far distance on the horizon
above the vast metropolis of buildings. I saw it on the last day of my first
trip to Japan, and it felt like a final gift from the Gods, marking the end of
a wonderful journey. I was very fortunate to have Tim Clark as my travelling
companion on that first journey. We were accompanying a BM exhibition to Tokyo’s
Metropolitan Museum. On our arrival we’d had a long wait at Narita Airport
before loading the trucks and finally rolling out onto the road. Jetlag was
getting the better of me. I dozed off while the truck was motoring along,
lulled by the motion of the wheels on the road. Tim gently nudged me awake,
saying: “Sorry to wake you, but I’m sure you won’t want to miss this.” I looked
out of the window to find we were still driving along the highway, but now the
road was arching gracefully up onto the Rainbow Bridge, crossing Tokyo harbour.
The bridge, as befits its name, was lit up brightly in the night sky, changing
slowly through a myriad cycle of multifarious colours. And there, beyond the
bridge and the Odaiba Ferris Wheel, I could now see the glittering cityscape of
Tokyo itself. Tim was right. It was a stunning and unforgettable introduction
to the city which I’d read and heard so much about. It was probably no surprise
that I fell irrevocably in love with the place during that first trip. The fact
I came down with a streaming cold at the end of our time there didn’t dampen my
enthusiasm at all.
My second trip to Japan a few
months later was when I managed to get much closer to Mount Fuji. I’d read
about Kawaguchi-ko in my guidebook and it seemed like the perfect spot to get
some scenic photos of Mount Fuji with the five lakes area in the foreground.
Back in 2001, I’d spent hours studying Tim’s exhibition catalogue, and I’d
turned my own hand to painting views of Mount Fuji in watercolours. Some were
modelled on the paintings and prints in Tim’s exhibition, others were more
free-form efforts, inspired by the styles and schools he described. One
painting which evidently struck me was a view painted by Niwa Kagen
(Yoshitoki), titled ‘Mount Fuji Seen from Hara, Fourth month, 1770.’ Kagen’s
painting looks perhaps more Western than Japanese, which is surprising (as
Tim’s book notes) given that Kagen’s later works are much more influenced by
Chinese styles of painting. It’s thought that this view was probably painted
from life while Kagen was travelling along the Tōkaidō, one of Edo-era Japan’s main trunk roads,
from his native city of Nagoya. My version differs in the foreground,
where I’ve added a scattering of trees and used more green tones in the
landscape at the foot of the mountain, attempting to echo the styles of later artists such as Ishibashi Richō, Oki Kangaku, and Suzuki Nanrei.
At the time I painted this picture
I never dreamed I’d ever go to Japan, at least not so soon after I’d painted
it. I’d always hoped I get the chance to go someday, so when I boarded a bus at
Shinjuku during the Christmas and New Year holidays of 2003-2004, and found
myself journeying alone out to the foothills of this stunningly sublime
mountain which I’d seen so much of in Tim’s book, life seemed to have heeded my
heart and effortlessly followed my dreams, magically taking me along too,
transporting me there. When I got off the bus, just as I was about to set off, an
old man who’d been a fellow passenger hailed me and asked where I was going. In
a mixture of my broken Japanese and his broken English I managed to convey I
was there to view Mount Fuji. He asked if I was staying the night here in
Kawaguchi-ko, or heading back to Tokyo the same day. I said I was heading back
later that day, and so he motioned for me to follow him. He then sought out the
bus stop I’d need to return to and checked the timetable, telling me what time
the buses departed and most importantly when the last one would leave. This was
exceptionally kind and very thoughtful of him, I realised, because he knew better
than I did that the last bus of the day would be leaving in just a couple of hours’
time. If I missed it, I’d be stuck there for the night! – I thanked him very
much and we both bowed low and then went our separate ways.
I took the cable car up the side of
a small hill, called Mount Tenjo, overlooking the town and the lake. There I
managed to get some stunning photos of the wintry sun setting beside Mount Fuji
in a crystalline blue sky. I had a 35mm film SLR camera with me, plus the first
digital camera I’d ever owned, which I’d bought just a week or two before in
Tokyo’s electric town, Akihabara. Reviewing some of the photos I’d taken with
this little digital marvel in the darkness during the return bus ride to
Shinjuku, I saw I’d managed to get some decent shots, firstly through the bus
window whilst on the highway travelling out and also at the top of Mount Tenjo
too. My 35mm photos later came out rather well too. These images seemed to live
up to those I’d seen and studied so intently in Tim’s 100 Views book. In
my mind, while sitting on the bus, driving through the night back to Tokyo, I
recalled the small painting I’d done after Niwa Kagen’s and I decided that the
smaller peak in my rendering of the scene was perhaps a foreshadowing of this
trip to Mount Tenjo, as if it were fated that one day – this day, in fact – I’d
reach this particular place, a region far distant from home, where my
imagination had been transformed into my present reality.
My painting of Fuji, after Niwa Kagen - by Tim Chamberlain, 2001
I have seen Mount Fuji many times
since during my subsequent travels to Japan, either from the highway or from
the bullet train, or from other tall buildings in Tokyo and the countryside
thereabouts, during the times when off-and-on I’ve been staying or living in
Tokyo for extended periods. But I never imagined that one day I’d be able to
see Mount Fuji from the balcony of my very own home here. A home in which my
own little painting of this magnificent mountain now hangs upon the wall. Yet
each morning and evening I make a point of parting the curtains to see if Fuji-san
is visible and not hidden by clouds. It’s always such a magical sight to behold
when the sky is clear, I love to stand on the balcony and gaze at it. Fuji
often seems to hang in the air, emerging from the sky with the most elegant of lines
as if ever so lightly traced by the sharp edge of a soft brush, just like in
the paintings and prints in Tim’s exhibition which I’d first seen exactly
twenty years ago back in London. I was very lucky to have travelled to Japan that
first time with Tim, and again on several subsequent occasions too. He
understood and shared my affinity for Japan, he also encouraged me to learn the
language. Tim retired from the BM last year, and although I told him during our
first trip together to Japan how much I’d enjoyed his exhibition, I’m not sure
if I myself really knew at that time just how deeply his 100 Views of Mount
Fuji had affected and influenced me, because looking back on that time now,
I can see Mount Fuji has certainly remained a constant presence, abiding with
me ever since.
View of Mount Fuji from our balcony, 2021
Like the sacred ropes seen in
certain Shintō shrines here in Japan, that eternal perfect view of Mount
Fuji has become a thread running through my life – tugging me back to the past,
now anchoring me to the present, and very likely pulling me towards the future.
Each time I look at Fuji-san, I thank the Gods (the Shintō Kami)
and my lucky stars that I have been so fortunate to have found myself
allied to this great mountain, like a totem. Perhaps, in some transcendental sense
– Mount Fuji is synonymous with the Japanese character 縁 –
‘en.’ Meaning a sense of fate or destiny, something unseen yet
strong which joins and binds two living things to one another – a
bond which cannot easily be broken. Such are the threads which run on and on
through our lives, after all, leading us wherever we will ourselves to go.
“When I first thought of
visiting Madeira I was advised by my English friends to reconsider. “You’ll
loathe it,” they told me. “No character whatever.”
“Dreary, stuffy little place.”
“Nobody goes there but very
elderly ladies.”
“Madeira! Whatever for?”
“I had a great aunt who used to
go religiously. I believe the poor thing eventually died out there.”
“It’s the absolute end!”
This unanimity of adverse
opinion might have dissuaded me had I not already made up my mind that I was
going there no matter what; besides, it turned out each time that my informant
had not actually been there, but was expressing an opinion prevalent nowadays
in literary London.”
Much the same advice was given to
me some sixty years later when I was first thinking of travelling to Madeira. The
American novelist and composer, Paul Bowles, spent a month on Madeira in 1959
(he wrote the piece quoted above for HolidayMagazine in 1960). At
that time the only way to get there was by ship: “There is no airstrip, and
the seaplane service was discontinued in 1958.” This has changed now. I
would dearly love to have arrived by the imagined genteel Art Deco era elegance
of a large, sleek Aquila Airways seaplane, but nowadays Madeira has a modest yet
very modern airport. The landing approach to which is quite definitely one of
the most spectacular in the world, it’s almost aerobatic in fact!
It is quite a sight. Set in the
midst of the vast flat nothingness of the Atlantic Ocean, seeing the island slowly
rising up out of the white mist was genuinely magical. Approaching the island
from the north, our plane headed towards Ponta de São Lourenço,
the easternmost tip of the main island of Madeira. As we began to descend, the
aeroplane arced around the headland to the island’s east coast, levelling out
and heading south along the rugged sheer-sided shoreline. The plane then banked
steeply round, doubling back upon itself as it zeroed in on the runway of the
new airport, which looks like a tall-stilted balcony clinging to the cliffside
overhanging the sea. Watching the passing coastline rapidly magnifying itself from
far below as the plane dropped its altitude. I could see the white foam of the
dark blue sea breaking on the black rocks, the town of Santa Cruz and the tall
green slopes of the hillside rising high above the town. The plane banked sharply
round first one way then the other. It is quite an exhilarating, rollercoaster-like
way to arrive. I imagine it must be even more ‘fun’ to experience when there
are crosswinds and turbulence; fortunately for us though, it was quite a
tranquil and sun-drenched day when we arrived.
Our first view of Madeira
Madeira means a ‘wood’ in
Portuguese. The island’s name is thought to derive from the fact that when
Portuguese explorers, led by João Gonçlaves Zarco and Tristão
Vaz Teixeira, first took possession of the uninhabited islands in 1419, it was
very densely wooded. The Portuguese first settled on the smaller and flatter
nearby island of Porto Santo. As many of the guidebooks and Bowles recounts, in
a first attempt to tame Madeira, the Portuguese set fire to the impenetrable
woodland on the main island and it subsequently burned for seven years,
decimating the original ancient forest cover. Over the subsequent centuries as
the vegetation recovered, the tropical abundance of the island has been
bolstered by the introduction of numerous plants gathered from all corners of
the earth during those early days by roving Portuguese mariners.
Coming in to land
The mild, stable year-round climate
and plentiful rainfall enable a wide range of trees and flowering plants to
flourish here, so much so that the Portuguese have long described the island as
the ‘Flor do Oceano’ or the ‘Flower of the Ocean.’ The volcanic origins of the
island also mean it has a dramatic topography with soaring hills, precipitous ridges
and sheer cliff-faces. This also means that the island doesn’t really have any
beaches, at least none of the golden sandy sort so beloved of sun-worshipping
tourists, hence perhaps why Madeira is not commonly seen as a young person’s
holiday destination. And the fact that the weather can turn in an instant,
being stuck out in the notoriously changeable and often inclement Atlantic mean
that rain showers are a fairly regular occurrence. Another reason perhaps as to
why the island has been a popular year-round holiday destination for the
British, who are perhaps climatically predisposed not to mind a drop or two of
rain!
Prince Henry, 'The Navigator'
Although the island was first
settled under the orders of Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’ in the 1400s, at the dawn
of the Portuguese ‘Age of Discovery’, intended to serve as a staging post for
further explorations down the coast of Africa, it is thought that the island
was already known about beforehand, having very likely been discovered by Arab
seamen, or perhaps even earlier by the Romans, Carthaginians, or even the
Phoenicians. Madeira was first noted on a Florentine nautical chart in 1351,
but there are various iterations of a myth involving an English nobleman and
woman arriving here which precede this date. The various versions of the myth
describe Sir Robert Machyn (or Machin) and Anne Dorset as ill-fated lovers who
were exiled here in 1346, with one or other of them leaving the island when
their partner died, although another version has them both dying on the island
together. There are no records extant to substantiate any part of this story,
but it is said that Zarco discovered a wooden cross inscribed with the couple’s
story, perhaps marking their joint grave (or the grave of one or other of
them), and that he built a church on the site to honour their memory at the
place now known as Machico, not far up the coast from the modern-day airport.
Christopher Columbus
João Gonçlaves Zarco
Prince Henry was the main reason
why I wanted to visit Madeira, and during my trip there I was engrossed in reading
Peter Russell’s excellent biography. A statue of Prince Henry now keeps a
doleful watch over a roundabout in Funchal, not far from a similar statue
honouring Christopher Columbus, who before his famous voyage to the Americas
came to Madeira as a merchant buying sugar. Columbus lived on nearby Porto
Santo in the early 1480s and there married the Portuguese governor’s daughter,
Filipa Moniz Perestrelo. Another statue in the centre of Funchal honours João Gonçlaves
Zarco, such that Madeira’s long history and its pivotal position in the era of
Portuguese maritime exploration is very apparent still. In a sense, reaching
Madeira was for me a kind of homecoming as well as another step in my own
personal exploration of the globe, given that my first trip overseas was to the
Algarve when I was just eight years old. On that first holiday abroad we
visited the old navigation school at Cabo de São Vicente, a place which had
quite a deep effect upon me and perhaps first seeded my deep interest in the
history of exploration and explorers. The familiar sights, sounds, smells and
tastes of Portuguese architecture, everyday life, and Portuguese cuisine certainly
made me feel instantly at home here on the island of Madeira.
Funchal Harbour
The island’s capital, Funchal, is a
wonderful little town to wander around. Filled with old churches and
picturesque squares with distinctive black and white patterned pavements which also
reminded me a lot of my several trips to Macao. For me, thoughts of Portugal
are always linked to food, and seafood in particular: grilled sardines and
buttery boiled potatoes being a particular favourite of mine. Tastes and smells
are some of the most evocative sparks to memory that we have, and the smell and
taste of grilled fish always reminds me of that first trip I made as a child to
Portugal. In Macao I would always seek out a wonderful family-run restaurant
called Alfonso III, not far from the main square. The food there always
instantly transported me back into my eight-year-old self on holiday long
before in the Algarve. As I get older I’ve come to realise that such sensory
memories have begun to accrue within me like archaeological layers of personal
journeys and places previously visited; because now a plate of grilled sardines
evokes a series of memories which are all linked through the long slow passing of
time from childhood to adulthood, in this instance, running back from Madeira,
through Macao to the Algarve.
Here in Madeira one of the local specialities
is a fish which you don’t come across on the Portuguese mainland and that is
the black scabbard fish, or ‘espada preta.’ The espada is a curious-looking
fish, scaleless and eel-like in appearance with large glassy eyes and a
ferociously toothy mouth, it looks almost prehistoric. It grows up to two metres
or six feet in length and lives roughly 1000m/3300ft below the ocean’s surface
during the day, but rises to around 800m/2600ft at night when it is caught by
local fishermen trailing long lines from their boats. Given the fact that it
normally lives at such depths, the process of hauling it to the surface and the
attendant change in pressure is what kills the fish; hence it loses its
iridescence turning jet black and its eyes acquire that milky-glassy appearance
as they burst inside with the sudden decrease in pressure as they swiftly reach
the surface.
Black Scabbard Fish
The espada are only found
here in the waters off Madeira and curiously also off the coast of Japan
(although I’ve yet to see them on sale in the fish markets there). One of the
best places to see these unusual fish is where they are sold at Funchal’s
‘Mercado dos Lavradores’, or the ‘Peasant’s Market.’ The name rather belies the
reality somewhat, as this is a magnificent Art Deco market hall built in the
1930s. The first part of the hall is split level and sells a colourful
assortment of fruit and vegetables on the ground floor; the top floor has a
fantastic array of candied fruit for sale. It’s a beautiful building to wander
around, with its decorative blue and white tiled frescos. At the rear of the
market hall is the fish market where you can see all sorts of fish on sale from
huge tuna to small sardines, along with all sizes of fish in between, including
the ferocious looking black scabbard fish. It’s well worth a trip to see both
markets when trading is in full flow. The more usual way to see the black
scabbard fish though is probably on your dinner plate in one of the many
restaurants across the island, where it is served in a variety of ways but
usually accompanied by a cooked, locally grown banana – which might sound odd,
but the two tastes complement each other perfectly.
Mercado dos Lavradores
Comparing my impressions of Madeira
in 2017 to those of Paul Bowles in 1959, there were quite a few continuities: “In
one respect my London friends were right: most of the visitors to the island
are British.” He notes that they all seem to stay in ‘British-run’ hotels,
where the food is awful and they spend all their time talking about the weather:
“It was the monotony of the ‘English’ meals which finally decided me to
change living quarters. I moved into town to a Portuguese hotel with a brazenly
Portuguese bill-of-fare, and never looked back with longing on the roast beef
and Yorkshire pudding.” Certainly, some of the best food I’ve ever had
during my travels I ate here on Madeira which has many good restaurants. It’s
true though that most of the overseas visitors to the island come from the UK,
but we did meet a few other Europeans. Most of the people we chatted with
talked about the recent shock of Brexit. There was one English couple we met
who were apoplectic about the UK’s decision to leave the European Union.
Madeira and Portugal have connections to Britain which go back far further than
the founding of the EU. Indeed, in 1660 Catherine of Braganza, daughter of
Portugal’s King João IV, married England’s King Charles II. The marriage
contract secured Britain certain trading rights in Madeira which enabled
English merchants to prosper here and Madeira wine soon became a chief export
to Britain as a consequence. The British also defended Madeira when Napoleon’s
troops occupied mainland Portugal in 1807. It was during this time that the Anglican
Holy Trinity Church and the British cemetery were established in Funchal.
The bust of Philippa of Lancaster, Holy Trinity Church
In the grounds of Holy Trinity Church
there is a bust of Philippa of Lancaster which commemorates an earlier
connection between the Portuguese and British Royal families. Philippa was the
daughter of John of Gaunt and in 1387 she married King João
I, thereby sealing the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance, which is said to be the
longest standing political alliance still in effect between two nations today.
It was also here in the Church grounds that the English chap we met, who was
bereft because of the UK’s Brexit vote, told us that he’d got talking to an
English ‘Ex-pat’ who he said lived permanently here on Madeira. He asked this expat
fellow how he had voted in the referendum and the expat told him he’d very
firmly voted for leaving the EU. “But why?” our new-found friend asked, and the
expat replied that he was “fed up of bluddy foreigners coming to the UK to use
the health service for free.” And so our friend asked him if, as a British long-term
resident of Madeira, he always flew back to the UK when he got ill, or did he
use the local doctors service here on Madeira? – Of course, he used the medical
services there on Madeira, he replied somewhat baffled; clearly he couldn’t see
the irony in this cognitive dissonance, nor the fact that he himself was as much
an EU immigrant as a British ‘expat.’
As Bowles noted in 1959: “Certainly
Madeira is a quiet place. It is too remote to feel the emotional impact of the
world events, and too small to create much agitation of its own. Life on such
an island is necessarily tranquil. But Madeirans somehow manage to get a great
deal of pleasure out of that life, in spite of the isolation of which they
complain.” I can’t help wondering how the British expats living on Madeira are
faring now and whether or not their tranquillity has been upset by the need for
new paperwork and visas given that Britain has at long last firmly thrown off
the burdensome shackles of its former privileges, such as ‘freedom of movement’
and the right to live unhindered in any one of the 27 EU member states,
including Portugal and Madeira? – Perhaps now they are beginning to discover
that ‘leave means leave’ for real and in ways which they might not have
expected?
Jardim Botânico e Loiro Parque
Azulejos, Jardim Tropical Monte Palace
“Here and there on the forested
slopes, two or three thousand feet above the city, are several parks. One of
these is a former private estate which is thrown open to the public on certain
days. […] The park itself was splendid – a great bright cape of
stairways and gardens and balustrades spread out across the lap of the
mountain. I had the feeling there were flowers everywhere: on the ground, in
the trees, in the arms of passers-by.” Like Bowles before us, we too went
to the top of the hills overlooking Funchal, but unlike him – he took a bus –
we rode up the hillside on the ‘Teleférico’, or cable car, in order to
explore the botanical gardens. The ‘Jardim Botânico e Loiro Parque’ used to be the
estate of the English hoteliers, the Reid family, wine merchants who built the luxurious
Palace Hotel in 1877, and which stands looking over the sea on the other side
of Funchal, still welcoming a rarefied clientele to this day. The botanical
garden is filled with both indigenous and imported plants including palms,
bromeliads, succulents as well as medicinal plants, and many beautiful flowers,
including orchids. The old house contains a rather old-fashioned museum of Madeiran
natural history, with simple displays of pressed flora and stuffed fauna, as
well as a collection of fossils.
The Quinta do Palheiro, which I
suspect might be the unnamed ‘park’ which Bowles is referring to, was first
laid out in 1790 by a French landscape designer for the Conde de Carvalhal. A
30-acre estate, it was later redesigned as a park in the style of an English
garden, and so became a curious mix of English and French horticulture. It was
bought by the English family named Blandy in 1885, like the Reids they were
prominent wine merchants, profiting from the export of Blandy’s Madeira Wine. In
1936 they took over the running of Reid’s Palace Hotel, until they sold it to
an international hotel chain in 1996.
Although we were aiming for it, we
didn’t make it quite so far as the Quinta do Palheiro as we spent a leisurely
part of the long afternoon exploring the leafy shade of the ‘Jardim Tropical
Monte Palace’ instead; which is filled with cascades of water, sculptures and ‘azulejos’
– distinctive decorative blue and white tiled panels, here depicting the
history of Portugal. When this eventually closed, we climbed up the hill to see
the Church of Nossa Senhora do Monte.
Nossa Senhora do Monte
This rather modest little church
houses the sarcophagus of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor, Karl I. The last of the
Habsburg dynasty, dethroned, he died in exile here on Madeira in 1922. He was
beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2004, in recognition of his efforts as a devout
Christian peacemaker in the wake of World War I. The church is also a popular site
of pilgrimage due to the story that during the fifteenth century a young girl,
a local shepherdess, is said to have experienced several visions of the Virgin
Mary in the woods nearby. The current Baroque-style church was rebuilt in 1818 after
the previous church was severely damaged during an earthquake in 1748. A Pietà
set in silver in the high altar survives from the previous church. The church
itself sits atop an impressive flight of 68 stone steps and commands an expansive
view of Funchal and the bay looking towards Cabo Girão. At the foot of these
steps you can hitch a ride on one of Funchal’s famous basket sleds.
These wicker toboggans are a tradition
which date back to the nineteenth century. The patrons sit in the spacious
basket while two burly Madeiran men act as both drivers and brakemen, as Bowles
describes: “The two men will run rapidly along beside you, exerting all their
strength to hold the contraption back as it gathers momentum, and straining
like dray horses to pull it ahead along the flatter portions of the course.” The
distance they cover down the steep slopes is around two kilometres and the
toboggans can get up to a speed of around 30 kms in some places. The main thrills
of the ride come from the combination of speed and the hazardous feeling that
the toboggan might tip up or collide with one of the walls which line the road,
or that you might catch up catastrophically quickly with the braking toboggan
in front of you. The fact that the speeding toboggans cross some quite busy
roads with cars driving on them too (although these crossings are watched over
by safety marshals), with the cars’ bumpers at about eye-level with you, is
also quite disconcerting.
The steep slope of the basket sled
ride is nothing compared to some of the roads of the island’s interior. It’s
well worth taking some time to explore Madeira beyond Funchal, to get a taste
of the island’s wild topography, its verdant hills and stony cliffs with
waterfalls plunging straight down to the rugged coastline. Bowles describes it
best: “For a moment it looks like a very expensive production of
‘Götterdämmerung.’ From here on the voyage is down and up, across valleys and
along the edges of cliffs. You swing around a curve and are poised above a
village some two thousand feet below. A half hour later the bus rocks through
its main street; the church bell is clanging in the steeple as you bump across
the sunlit ‘praça.’ There are stops where it is so quiet that from your seat
you hear the water gurgling in the ‘levada’ beside the road. And when you
finally arrive, you have a very clear sensation of being somewhere else, not so
much in place as in time.”
There is certainly something ruggedly
elemental about the rocky coastline and the high interior scarps of the island;
an outpost in the Atlantic, located far enough away from the coast of Africa to
feel truly isolated, as any decent island should make one feel – far from home,
far from the familiar, far away from the rest of the world. For me at least,
despite all its touristy aspects – with its comfortable hotels, and relaxing
restaurants, all providing welcome retreats – there is also something of the
eternal about Madeira. For me that’s what Bowles means when he describes that
sensation of “being somewhere else” not just in place but also in time.
For me, sitting in the gorgeous old
cathedral, the Catedral Sé, in the centre of Funchal, looking up at its
wonderfully antique ceiling (which reminds me of the elaborate ceilings of the ‘Alcazar’
at Segovia), seeing the large Chinese vases flanking the altars in the side
chapels (wondering how and when they first came to be placed there), all serve
to remind you of the long history of this place stretching back to the days of
Henry ‘the Navigator’ and beyond, back into the elemental days when this sharpened
volcanic rock first rose up out of the ocean, and, swathed in white mist, began
to be seeded by the lush, verdant vegetation which made it a rounded little world
impenetrable and imponderable in itself. For me, having long imagined it, now
that I was finally here, Madeira was a place which I felt just as much
as a place which I saw and experienced. And this is the mysterious magic of
Madeira; it is a place which lives long and dwells deep within you.
As our plane lifted us back up into
the vast dome of the blue sky, carrying us away, we looked down upon this small
remarkable ocean-bounded island, now slowly receding from us, set amidst the heaving
dark waters of the Atlantic, I felt myself akin to both the place seen far
below for this last time, and to Bowles’s concluding words about it: “You
know now that such a place exists and that you can get back to it someday if
you want to, and it is satisfying to have that certainty.”
Further Reading
Paul Bowles, Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-1993 (Sort of Books, 2010)
Peter Russell, Prince Henry 'The Navigator' - A Life (Yale University Press, 2001)
