When the spectrum or rainbow of human cultures has finally sunk into the void created by our frenzy; as long as we continue to exist and there is a world, that tenuous arch linking us to the inaccessible will still remain, to show us the opposite course to that to enslavement; man may be unable to follow it, but its contemplation affords him the only privilege of which he can make himself worth; that of arresting the process, of controlling the impulse which forces him to block up the cracks in the wall of necessity one by one and to complete his work at the same time as he shuts himself up within his prison; this is a privilege coveted by every society, whatever its beliefs, its political system or its level of civilization; a privilege to which it attaches its leisure, its pleasure, its peace of mind and its freedom; the possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists – Oh! Fond farewell to savages and explorations! – in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society: in the contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.

In that mythic age, man was no freer than he is today; but only his humanness made him a slave. Since his control over nature remained very limited, he was protected – and to some extent released from bondage – by a cushioning of dreams. As these dreams were gradually transformed into knowledge, man’s power increased and became a great source of pride; but this power, which gears us, as it were, to the universe, is surely little more than our subjective awareness of a progressive welding together of humanity and the physical universe, whose great deterministic laws, instead of remaining remote and awe inspiring, now use thought itself as an intermediary medium and are colonizing us on behalf of a silent world of which we have become the agents.

But if he is honest, he is faced with a problem: the value he attaches to foreign societies – and which appears to be higher in proportion as the society is more foreign – has no independent foundation; it is a function of his disdain for, and occasionally hostility towards, the customs prevailing in his native setting.

Now that he had come back with a halo of glory – the explorer whose presence was in demand at every society dinner – he alone knew that the fame he had bought at such cost was founded on a lie. There was nothing real in all the experience he was credited with having lived through; traveling was a snare and a delusion; the whole thing could appear true only to those people acquainted with the reflection, not the reality.

Perhaps, then, this was what traveling was, an exploration of the deserts of my mind rather than of those surrounding me?

Above all, he asks himself questions: Why has he come here? With what hopes or what objectives? What exactly is the nature of anthropological research? Is it a normal occupation like any other profession, the only difference being that the office or laboratory is separated from the practitioner’s home by a distance of several thousand kilometers? Or does it result from a more radical choice, which implies that the anthropologist is calling into question the system in which he was born and brought up? It was now nearly five years sine I had left France and interrupted my university career. Meanwhile, the more prudent of my former colleagues were beginning to climb the academic ladder: those with political leanings, such as I had once had, were already members of parliament and would soon be ministers. And here was I, trekking across desert wastes in pursuit of a few pathetic human remnants. By whom or by what had I been impelled to disrupt the normal course of my existence? Was it a trick on my part, a clever diversion, which would allow me to resume my career with additional advantages for which I would be given credit? Or did my decision express a deep-seated incompatibility with my social setting so that, whatever happened, I would inevitably live in a state of ever greater estrangement from it? Through a remarkable paradox, my life of adventure, instead of opening up a new world to me, had the effect rather of bringing me back to the old one, and the world I had been looking for disintegrated in my grasp. Just as once they were in my power, the men and landscapes I had set out to conquer lost the significance I had hoped they would have for me, so for these disappointing yet present images, other images were substituted which had been held in reserve by my past and had seemed of no particular importance when they still belonged to the reality surrounding me. Traveling through regions upon which few eyes had gazed, sharing the existence of communities whose poverty was the price – paid in the first instance by them – for my being able to go back thousands of years in time, I was no longer fully aware of either world. What came to me were fleeting visions of the French countryside I had cut myself off from, or snatches of music or poetry which were the most conventional expressions of a culture which I must convince myself I had renounced, if I were not to belie the direction I had given my life. On the plateau of the western Mato Grosso, I had been haunted for weeks, not by the things that lay all around me and that I would never see again, but by a hackneyed melody, weakened still further by the deficiencies of memory – the melody of Chopin’s Etude no. 3, opus 10, which, by a bitterly ironical twist of which I was well aware, now seemed to epitomize all I had left behind.

But, in executing this forced march, we had forgotten about the forest. It was as dense as our towns, and peopled by other creatures forming a society which had held us more securely at arms’ length than the deserts through which we had advanced with such frenzy, whether they were high mountain slopes or the sunlit hills of Provence. A community of trees and plants keeps man at a distance and hurriedly covers up his tracks. The forest, being often difficult to penetrate, demands of anyone venturing into it the same concessions that the mountains, more peremptorily, require of the walker. Its horizon, being less extensive than that of the great mountain ranges, soon closes in on a limited world, creating an isolation as complete as that of the desert wastes. There, a population of grasses, flowers fungi and insects pursues and undisturbed and independent existence, to which we can only be admitted if we show the proper degree of patience and humility. A few dozen square yards of forest are enough to abolish the external world; one universe gives way to another, which is less flattering to the eye but where hearing and smell, faculties closer to the soul than sight, come into their own. Blessings such as silence, coolness and peace, which we though had vanished, reappear. Intimate communion with the vegetable world grants us what the sea now refuses and what the mountains provide only at too high a price.

And yet, at the present time, I am forced to admit that although I am conscious of no change in myself, my love of mountains is ebbing away from me like the tide receding across the sands. My thoughts have remained the same; it is the mountains which are leaving me. The same pleasures are no less keenly felt through my having cultivated them too long and too intensely. Along paths that I have often followed, even surprise has become familiar; I no longer clamber up among ferns and rocks but among the ghosts of my memories. The latter are losing their appeal for two reasons: first, because use has robbed them of their novelty, but mainly because, as the years go by, I have to make a greater effort to achieve a pleasure which each time is rather less keen than before. I am growing old, and the only warning I have of this is the blurring of the once-sharp outlines of my plans and projects. I am still capable of repeating them, but it is no longer in my power to ensure that their realization gives me the satisfaction that they used to bring so often and so faithfully.

It follows that I like mountains more than the sea, and for years this fondness took the form of a jealous love. I hated those who shared my preference, since they threatened the solitude by which I set such store.

But being neither a sailor nor a fisherman, I feel baulked by all this water which has stolen half my universe and even more so by the fact that its great presence can be felt well inland and often makes the countryside more austere. The diversity customary on land seems to me to be simply destroyed by the sea, which offers vast spaces and additional shades of coloring for our contemplation, but at the cost of an oppressive monotony and a flatness in which no hidden valley holds in store surprises to nourish my imagination.

It may be thought that such enthusiasm was inappropriate in the twentieth century. However little was known about the Indians of the Pimenta Bueno, I could not expect them to make the same impact on me as they had made on the great chroniclers, such as leery, Staden and Thevet, who set foot on Brazilian territory four hundred years ago. What they saw then, no Western eye will ever see again. Although the civilizations which they were the first to observe had developed along different lines from ours, they had nevertheless reached the full development and perfection of which their natures were capable, whereas the societies we are able to study today – in conditions which it would be illusory to compare with those of four centuries ago – are no more than debilitated communities and mutilated social forms. In spite of the vast distances involved and the operation of all kinds of intermediary agents (the sequence of which is often disconcertingly bizarre when one manages to work it out), they have been shattered by the development of European civilization, that phenomenon which, for a widespread and innocent section of humanity, has amounted to a monstrous and incomprehensible cataclysm. It would be wrong for us Europeans to forget that this cataclysm is a second aspect of our civilization, no less true and irrefutable than the one we know.

My attempted escapism had turned to bureaucratic routine.

Perhaps they [the Tupi tribe] had started off on their wanderings a few hundred years before the discovery, because of the belief that they might, somewhere, find a land free from both death and evil.

How we got though I do not know; the journey remains in my memory as a confused nightmare . . .

The ground is so level and the incline so gradual that there is an unbroken vista to the horizon dozens of kilometers away: it takes half a day to cross a landscape that one has been looking at since morning, and which is an exact replica of the one traversed the day before, so that perception and memory are fused in a kind of obsessive immobility.

What wear and tear, what useless irritation, we could spare ourselves if we agreed to accept the true conditions of our human experience and realize that we are not in a position to free ourselves completely from its patterns and rhythm.

Unlike those European tourists who sulk when they cannot find another thirteenth-century cathedral to add to their ‘bag’, I am happy to adapt myself to a system with no temporal dimension, in order to interpret a different form of civilization.

It was as if I had been transported from an ordinary village to an archaeological site in which every stone, instead of being simply a component part of a house, bore witness to the past.

There was a time when traveling brought the traveler into contact with civilizations which were radically different from his own and impressed him in the first place by their strangeness. During the last few centuries such instances have become increasingly rare. Whether his is visiting India or America, the modern traveler is less surprised than he cares to admit. In choosing his goals and itineraries, he feels especially free to select a particular date of European penetration, or a particular rate of influx of mechanization, rather than another. The search for the exotic boils down o the collecting of earlier or later phases of a familiar pattern of development. The traveler is like an antiquary obliged, by the dearth of material, to abandon his collection of Negro art and to fall back on bargaining for quaint pieces of junk as he tours the flea markets of the inhabited world.

Finally, the state of open-mindedness which accompanies arrival at a new port of call, and the unsolicited opportunities that one feels obliged to take advantage of, create an ambiguity conducive to the suspension of one’s usual self-discipline and produce an almost ritual outburst of prodigality.

A journey occurs simultaneously in space, in time, and in the social hierarchy. Each impression can be defined only by being jointly related to these other three axes, and since space is itself three-dimensional, five axes are necessary if we are to have an adequate representation of any journey.

A steamer landed us on a marshy beach, where the hull of an old wreck lay rusting away: no doubt it did not date from the sixteenth century, but it introduced an historical dimension into those empty spaces, where there was nothing else to show the passage of time.

And when we got to the far side of the oceanic depths, would all the marvels seen by the old navigators still be there to greet us? When the latter traveled through these unexplored regions, they were less concerned with discovering a new world than with verifying the past of the old. They confirmed the existence of Adam and Ulysses. When Columbus landed on the coast of the West Indies after his first voyage, he may have though he had reached Japan, but he was still more certain of having rediscovered the earthly paradise.

. . . since they had, in any case, been made too soft by sleeping in the mornings and by lazy meals which, for a long time now, had ceased to bring any sensual enjoyment but were looked forward to as a diversion (provided they were exorbinantly protracted) with which to fill the emptiness of the days.

Remembering is one of man’s great pleasures, but not in so far as memory operates literally, since few individuals would agree to relive the fatigues and sufferings that they nevertheless delight in recalling. Memory is life itself, but of a different quality.

I also remember the satisfaction and reassurance – I might almost say the serene happiness – of being dimly conscious in the middle of the night of the throbbing of the engines and the rustling of the water against the hull, as if movement were creating a sort of stability more perfect in essence than immobility; indeed when one was suddenly wakened up at night by the sensation of having stopped in some port, motionlessness aroused a feeling of insecurity and discomfort, and one was disturbed by the alteration in what one had become used to as the natural course of things.

While remaining human himself, the anthropologist tries to study and judge mankind from a point of view sufficiently lofty and remote to allow him to disregard the particular circumstances of a given society of civilization. The conditions in which he lives and works cut him off physically from his group for long periods; through being exposed to such complete and sudden changes of environment, he acquires a kind of chronic rootlessness; eventually, he comes to feel at home nowhere, and he remains psychologically maimed. Like mathematics or music, anthropology is one of the few genuine vocations. One can discover it in oneself, even though on may have been taught nothing about it.

For a long time I was paralysed by this dilemma, but I have the feeling that the cloudy liquid is now beginning to settle. Evanescent forms are becoming clearer, and confusion is being slowly dispelled. What has happened is that time has passed. Forgetfulness, by rolling my memories along in its tide, has done more than merely wear them down or consign them to oblivion. The profound structure it has created out of the fragments allows me to achieve a more stable equilibrium, and to see a clearer pattern. One order has been replaced by another. Between these two cliffs, which preserve the distance between my gaze and its object, time, the destroyer, has begun to pile up rubble. Sharp edges have been blunted and whole sections have collapsed: periods and places collide, are juxtaposed or are inverted, like strata displaced by the tremors on the crust of an aging planet. Some insignificant detail belonging to the distant past may now stand out like a peak, while whole layers of my past have disappeared without trace. Events with any apparent connection, and originating from incongruous periods and places, slide one over the other and suddenly crystallize into a sort of edifice, which seems to have been conceived by an architect wiser than my personal history. ‘Every man’, wrote Chateaubriand, ‘carries with him a world which is composed of all that he has seen and loved, and to which he constantly returns, even when he is traveling through, and seems to be living in, some different world.’ Henceforth, it will be possible to bridge the gap between the two worlds. Time, in an unexpected way, has extended its isthmus between life and myself; twenty years of forgetfulness were required before I could establish communion with my earlier experience, which I had sought the world over without understanding its significance or appreciating its essence.

In short, I have only two possibilities: either I can be like some traveler of the olden days, who was faced with a stupendous spectacle, all, or almost all, of which eluded him, or worse still, filled him with scorn and disgust; or I can be a modern traveler, chasing after the vestiges of a vanished reality. I lose on both counts, and more seriously than may at first appear, for, while I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveler, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see. I am subject to a double infirmity: all that I perceive offends me, and I constantly reproach myself for not seeing as much as I should.

Then, insidiously, illusion began to lay its snares. I wished I had lived in the days of real journeys, when it was still possible to see the full splendour of a spectacle that had not yet been blighted, polluted and spoilt; I wished I had not trodden that ground as myself, but as Bernier, Taverneir or Manucci did . . . Once embarked upon, this guessing game can continue indefinitely. When was the best time to see India? At what period would the study of the Brazilian savages have afforded the purest satisfaction, and revealed them in their least adulterated state? Would it have been better to arrive in Rio in the eighteenth century with Bougainville, or in the sixteenth with Leery and Thevet? For every five years I move back in time, I am able to save a custom, gain a ceremony or share in another belief.

In exploring all this, I was being true to myself as an archaeologist of space, seeking in vain to recreate a lost local colour with the help of fragments and debris.

Can it be that I, the elderly predecessor of those scourers of the jungle, am the only one to have brought back nothing but a handful of ashes? Is mine the only voice to bear witness to the impossibility of escapism? Like the Indian in the myth, I went as far as the earth allows one to go, and when I arrived at the world’s end, I questioned the people, the creatures and things I found there and met with the same disappointment: ‘He stood still, weeping bitterly, praying and moaning. And yet no mysterious sound reached his ears, nor was he put to sleep in order to be transported, as he slept, to the temple of the magic animals. For him there could no longer be the slightest doubt: no power, from anyone, had been granted him.”

The savages of the Amazonian forest are sensitive and powerless victims, pathetic creatures caught in the toils of mechanized civilization, and I can resign myself to understanding the fate which is destroying them; but I refuse to be the dupe of a kind of magic which is still more feeble than their own, and which brandishes before an eager public albums of coloured photographs, instead of the now vanished native masks. Perhaps the public imagines that the charms of the savages can be appropriated through the medium of these photographs. Not content with having eliminated savage life, and unaware even of having done so, it feels the need feverishly to appease the nostalgic cannibalism of history with the shadows of those that history has already destroyed.

The fact is that these primitive peoples, the briefest contact with whom can sanctify the traveler, these icy summits, deep cavern and impenetrable forests – all of them august settings for noble and profitable revelations – are all, in their different ways, enemies of our society, which pretends to itself that it is investing them with nobility at the very time when it is completing their destruction, whereas it viewed them with terror and disgust when they were genuine adversaries.

It is obvious that this ‘quest for power’ enjoys a renewed vogue in contemporary French society, in the unsophisticated form of the relationship between the public and ‘its’ explorers. Our adolescents too, from puberty onwards, are free to obey the stimuli which have been acting upon them from all sides since early childhood, and to escape, in some way or other, from the temporary hold their civilization has on them. The escape may take place upwards, through the climbing of a mountain, or downwards, by descending into the bowels of the earth, or horizontally, through travel to remote countries. Or again, the desired extreme may be a mental or moral one, as is the case with those individuals who deliberately put themselves into such difficult situations that, in our present state of knowledge, they leave themselves no possibility of survival.

In the old days, people used to risk their lives in India or in the Americas in order to bring back products which now seem to us to have been of comically little worth, such as basil or brazilwood (from which the name Brazil was derived) – a red dye – and also pepper which had such a vogue in the time of Henry IV of France that courtiers used to carry the seed in sweetmeat boxes and eat them like sweets. The visual or olfactory surprises they provided, since they were cheerfully warm to the eye or exquisitely hot to the tongue, added a new range of sense experience to a civilization which had never suspected its own insipidity. We might say, then, that, through a twofold reversal, from these same lands our modern Marco Polos now bring back the moral spices of which our society feels an increasing need as it is conscious of sinking further into boredom, but that this time they take the form of photographs, books and travelers’ tales.

So I can understand the mad passion for travel books and their deceptiveness. They create the illusion of something which no longer exists but still should exist, if we were to have any hope of avoiding the overwhelming conclusion that the history of the past twenty thousand years is irrevocable. There is nothing to be done about it now; civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species which may have seemed menacing because of the vigour of their growth, but which nevertheless made it possible to vary and revitalize the cultivated stock. Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man’s daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item.

Now that the Polynesian islands have been smothered in concrete and turned into aircraft carriers solidly anchored in the southern seas, when the whole of Asia is beginning to look like a dingy suburb, when shanty towns are spreading across Africa, when civil and military aircraft blight the primeval innocence of the American or Melanesian forests even before destroying their virginity, what else can the so-called escapism of traveling do than confront us with the more unfortunate aspects of our history? Our great Western Civilization, which has created the marvels we now enjoy, has only succeeded in producing them at the cost of corresponding ills. The order and harmony of the Western World, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.

It was perhaps then, for the first time, that I understood something, which was later confirmed by equally demoralizing experiences in other parts of the world. Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield up their treasures untarnished. A proliferating and overexcited civilization has broken the silence of the seas once and for all. The perfumes of the tropics and the pristine freshness of human beings have been corrupted by a busyness with dubious implications, which mortifies our desires and dooms us to acquire only contaminated memories.

For this audience, platitudes and commonplaces seem to have been miraculously transmuted into revelations by the sole fact that their author, instead of doing his plagiarizing at home, has supposedly sanctified it by covering some twenty thousand miles.

Amazonia, Tibet and Africa fill the bookshops in the form of travelogues, accounts of expeditions and collections of photographs, in all of which the desire to impress is so dominant as to make it impossible for the reader to assess the value of the evidence put before him.

I hate traveling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions.