THE JGURNEY
65
the very last, I think, of the pirate radio ships: a true child of the
declining century, of its "ideals," its concepts, its wars.
Few of my readers will have seen these places, or any part of the
great curving Mediterranean littoral. But these notes will give some
idea of the conditions under which we live.
It
will, for instance, take
us
six
days and over a thousand miles to go these scant five miles
from ship to shore, Seguros and
I.
This because not only the Free City
but the Provisional Republic behind and surrounding it forbids any
provisioning of the ship, "any embarking or disembarking of personnel
for whatever purpose," any cutting of tapes or records or printing of
speeches to be broadcast. The
Agracorinth,
4350 tons, ancient and
obscene and listing some five degrees, immobilized in its own filth, lies
in plain sight of the city and of the green and olive coast: interdict
and repudiate, broadcasting on five hundred watts, twenty-four hours
a day. Call the white unruined Free City what you please: Nizza,
Heraklion, Villafranca, Carthage. Almost a hundred thousand people
still live there (once there were a quarter of a million), and many
of these are exiles, the victims of revolutions or coup d'etats in small
baked seaports or smoldering jungle capitals. There remain, for them,
the Municipal Casino (though no gambling after dark, when the
puritanic
Forces Libres
take over) and several decaying luxury hotels.
Seguros, fund-raiser and recruiter of revolutionaries, is as much
concerned with these exiles as I: he out of political conviction, I for
the successful operation of my ship. So on our recent journey we
watched the listing
Agracorinth
and the white city recede under a
midsummer haze: saw our precise near destination dwindle, dislimn,
vanish; then waited for the first appearance, to the south, of our
supply island and its volcanic cone. Our journey to cover five miles
would take us south, then east, then north, then west: by trawler
and schooner, on foot, by a tramp train engaged in the barter of
parched crops (flagged down by anyone with produce to sell, and
crawling at last to a stop at the border of an intransigent city-state,
the very tracks going under the barrier of barbed wire); by an old
plane, to overfly a Zone of Interdiction; and again by tramp train,
by gasogene truck, by smoking autobus, and on foot once more-to
reach at last my villa on the green cape. Five miles in six days!
First then Sangiorgio's trawler, the weekly supplier of the
Agra–
corinth.
Through the long afternoon little Seguros crouched at the
