#River Island red wide leg trousers

[thestylesplash]

Denim Days - April's Thrifty Six Challenge

Happy Monday! I hope you had a great weekend. The weather has been all over the place these last few days – typical April weather I suppose. We even had thunder and lightning in the early hours of this morning. Fortunately, there was a break in the rain long enough to take these photos over the weekend. Shelbee chose this month’s Thrifty Six theme of Denim Days, which gave me the opportunity of…

[villanellescloset]

Villanelle wore:

ETRO printed silk blouse

ETRO striped silk-satin wide-leg pants

You can wear:

Forcast Zaniyah floral printed bodysuit - The Iconic ($AUD69.99)

Red print long sleeve embellished sheer shirt - River Island ($AUD70.00)

Satin floral print button-up pocket shirt - Express ($AUD39.99)

Slim fit floral Portofino shirt - Express ($AUD39.99)

Two Step burgundy striped wide-leg trousers - Lulus ($USD58.00)

ASOS DESIGN wide leg pants with clean high waist ($USD40.00) - Also in plus size

Ribbed velour trousers - H&M (£14.99)

[emsartwork]

I hope its not too much of an ask, but what would be like a "typical traditional dress" of each of the winx home planets? Like, I know modern and interplanetar fashion is mostly worn, but what about like a dress that just screams *insert planet*?

omg yes!!! ive been wanting to talk about this for a while lol thank you for indulging me

all of the girls are drawn as the princesses of their respective planets(even the ones who aren’t princesses), excluding tecna who is drawn as the queen of zenith because the royalty there is based on intelligence and not bloodline.(and also because tecna will def become queen lbr)

lynphea has very temperate climates, not too cold but not too hot. the land is primarily covered in forests and prairie, with a moderate level of variation in hill and valley heights. the costline is ragged with many inlets and port cities, as well as many many sources of fresh water inland. Lynphean clothing is primarily made with natural fibers and dyed with various plant and animal substances. though many dyes of lynphea could produce VERY vibrant colors, they prefer to leave their cloth in more subdued colors. 

lynphean traditional dress consists of a light colored stand up collar shirt with lighter cuffs, dark loose pants gathered at the ankle, and simple flat bottom shoes(or none at all), and is all gender neutral. in warm weather they wear cotton or linen as a short sleeve shirt, with loose and breathable silk pants, with flats usually made of bees-waxed fabric(to water proof) with a leather sole. in cooler weather they wear a long sleeve silk shirt over a woolen undershirt, with wool pants and leather boots. Lynphean royal dress(floras outfit here is based off of krystal’s dress at the sovereign’s council) consists of a loose shirt/dress over pants with metal accents, and a sleeveless floor length coat featuring a high detailed collar. The lynphean circlets are two parts, one on the head and one around the shoulders, both are tied in the back with cords and are made of a uniquely flexible metal called lynphenite. The heir’s circlet’s have an orange stones and the sovereign’s have blue.

lynphea is the only one that i didn’t base off of another culture, which might be why its a little more plain lol

Melody has a varied climate, leaning a little more towards cold than warm, but some areas can approach tropical. The topography is full of mountains and valleys, and people live where they can. the coast has many many small islands scattered around it before stretching out into open sea. fresh water is available primarily in the form of rivers. Melodian clothing is primary made of silk and hemp equivalents that leave the cloth in strong colors from the beginning. They can produce very strong dyes, but a sign of wealth is having clothing in pure white which is very hard to achieve with traditional methods.

Melodian traditional clothing consists of a wrapped tunic/robe with a belt, over tight or wide legged pants, and slippers. Its mostly gender neutral, thought men tend not to wear as wide belts/sashes.  In warm weather they wear a short robe over fitted capris and slippers, they tend to wear brighter/warmer colors in the summer and spring. In colder weather they wear a long robe, usually layered over another robe or wide pants(not pictured), with an unfastened coat of thick woven fibers. Melodian royal dress (i VERY VERY loosely based what musa is wearing off of Galatea’s outfit at the sovereign’s council) consists of many many layers of snow white cloth trimmed in gold, its really hard to do anything in traditional royal dress so its only really worn for ceremonies and hyper formal events.

I based Melodian clothing off of chinese and japanese clothing.

Solaria has a warm to VERY WARM climate.  The land is very largely covered in desert, the only spots of life are surrounding a river or oasis. the coast is full of river deltas and is the where the most cities are located. Solaria has a near constant rain storm at the northern pole due to their wonky rotation. It is the source of most of their rivers, and living in that area is considered impossible. their clothing is primarily made of linen and is incredibly light. They have mostly blue or orange/red dyes.

Solaria traditional dress consists of a light linen dress fastened at the chest or shoulders, a belt of leather or metal, and leather strap sandals. It is all gender neutral. In warm weather, solarians wear short tunics draped from the shoulder. In the odd cool weather, they wear a long, short sleeved dress, with a draped vest. leather is more common than metal in cold weather. Solarian royal dress(stella’s dress here is based off her episode 1 dress before she and blood get to alfea) consists of a long long dress or short tunic, with a long, colored sash/wrap over it. metal accessories at the waist and collar are common. the crown  of the solarian heir has no jewels, but the sun and moon crowns feature white/blue and yellow/orange gems.

I based the solarian clothing off of ancient greek, roman, and egyptian clothing

Andros is MOSTLY ocean, and has a climate similar to earth’s, warm in the middle cold at the poles. Islands are spread all over the planet but most of the population lives on the largest cluster and have a lot of bridges and ferries through them. Their clothing is made of linen and silk, as well as a planet specific fabric called tidal-web which is mostly water resistant. a lot of it is actually knitted instead of woven leaving no seems. They have MANY dyes and prefer bright colors.

Androsian traditional clothing is a bright thigh or knee length shirt, is belted at the waist, over darker pants gathered into a cuff below the knee, with leather, strapy sandals or boots; there is gold embroidery everywhere. Gender neutral. In warm weather the shirts are sleeveless and the pants shorter, both are made of linen or tidal-web. in colder weather they wear a short sleeve tunic over a cuffed long sleeve. the pants are thicker and have more fabric but are still gathered into a cuff. the leather androsians use is generally seal leather, and is used for shoes and belts, and sometimes coats. Androsian royalty wear a longer tunic over silk pants. The tunic is usually more complex with more embroidery or a different cut to the sleeves. The heir and the king/queen related to the ocean also wear a draped, pinned, floor length vest. 

I based these outfits off of other androsians I’ve drawn, but I think i based the original version of Aisha’s parents off of Afghan clothing.

Zenith has a very cold climate, most of the planet is tundra or glacier. where there is land, they have some impressive mountain ranges and a lot of the zenithian cities are actually inside the mountains in cave systems. the coastline suffers frequent cold storms in the winter and much of the population there are summer only. Zenithian clothing is made of cotton, wool, fur, and leather. They use knit as often, if not more, than woven material. They have very few plant based dyes, and are limited to purple and green. 

Zenithian traditional clothing consists of a front fastened, collared, shirt, a fur lined coat, and wool trousers with leather boots. they’re pretty gender neutral, women will sometimes wear a skirt instead of pants, but this isn’t preferred as its leaves legs cold. In warm weather they wear a light coat over a cotton long sleeve, the pants are a loose wool, and the boots are water proofed leather.They usually wear darker colors in the summer. In cold weather they wear fur hats, wool scarves, knitted undershirts, sweaters, a fur lined wool/leather coat, wool thermals, leather/wool pants, and waterproofed leather boots with metal grits on the bottom to grip ice. Zenithian royalty is determined by intelligence, so even if your dad is the king of zenith you might not be the prince/princess. The King/Queen formal wear consists of the Spark of Zenith head-dress(the crown basically), a collared shirt, with metalic fibers woven in, a fur lined, metal accented coat, a metal collar/chest plate, pants, and leather/metal boots.

I based the zenithian clothing on russian and mongolian traditional clothing.  

Domino has a unique climate as its totally dependent on the topography. The planet is covered in high, high mountains, and most peaks are uninhabitable. The people of domino live in the more temperate valleys between the mountain ranges. The coast line is a lot of sheer cliffs, but where some valleys meet the ocean there are thriving port cities. Their clothing is made of cotton, linen, leather, and wool, as well as a planet specific clothing called dragon’s-breath, which is light while still being very warm. They have access to a few dyes, and mostly stick to light/bright colors, or leave cloth undyed.

Dominian traditional dress for women consists of a shirt and skirt, made of either linen, cotton, or dragon’s-breath, with a leather corset and shoes. The men would simple substitute pants and a vest. In warm weather, they wear the most basic set of shirt and skirt, with a leather under/over bust leather corset, and water proof leather shoes. the sleeves are often rolled up and the skirts are occasionally hiked up to the knee depending on the heat. IN cooler weather the shirt and skirt are made of dragons-breath, providing warmth with out heaviness. the shirt is ruched and fastened up all the way. an over skirt is also added consisting of moisture wicking wool and a contrasting trim. the corset is leather and lined with cotton. Dominian royalty (bloom’s dress is completely made up here) have a shirt with invisible fasteners, and a long skirt. The over skirt is replaced by a draped floor length vest under the embroidered leather corset. The sleeves are full and gathered along the upper arm with a ribbon that matches the cuff holding the sleeve to the wrist. Dominian royalty hand make their crowns so each one is different.

I based Dominian fashion on medieval europe, specifically scotland/ireland, with a few chinese aspects thrown in(because the great dragon looks more like an eastern dragon despite being associated with fire???) 

lmao this was probably more than you wanted but i love worldbuilding so much sry

[let-love-run-red]

Dancing Fire

The celebration when Vaehra met with the rest of the flock near Kings Landing was unlike any Jon had seen before. They danced and drank like Westerosi men and women, but the music was different, the drink was not wine, it was a drink he'd never tasted before. It was strong and smelled like something you could use to clean wounds. Christar had been given a spare change of clothes and Vaehra had fixed his hair the way she'd fixed Jon's.

He was now draped in a thick white cloak, one with a soft black ruff of fur around his neck that reached up and tickled his throat. The black scales that crept up his neck contrasted starkly against the white cloak and his green eyes. Vaehra had pulled his hair back into a series of braids, pulling his hair away from his face.

The steps were unfamiliar to Jon, but the riders pulled him in anyway, spinning him around and passing partners. Behind them, the dragons danced as well. They pranced around a bonfire in a circle, twining tails and bowing heads, hopping from foot to foot, dipping their wings and dancing in the air. It was joyous, it was fun, it was accepting.

"I've never danced like this before." Jon said, approaching Christar where he stood at the fire. There was a large pot, large enough to fit an entire ox, suspended over the fire. It had been there since they met with the flock. The first thing Christar had done once Vaehra wrestled him into a cloak, was go out hunting. He'd brought back two deer, cleaning them and butchering them quickly and dropping them into the pot with a few seasonings, potatoes, and chopped vegetables. The meat had released juice as it roasted, and the smell rising from the pot was making Jon's mouth water. Christar tapped the metal spoon off on the edge of the pot, turning to Jon with a smile.

"No? It's a common one in Valyria. We all had to learn it as children in school." Christar said. He hung the spoon from the edge of the pot, grabbing the fire poker and jabbing at the dying flames. He looked towards the group of dragons, spotting Ataim looping around the red dragon, Matanyx.

"Ataim!" Christar yelled. The blue dragon whipped his head around, prancing gleefully towards Christar. He glanced at the fire, lowering his head and breathing a small jet of flame onto the wood before nuzzling his nose against Christar's chest in a search for attention.

"Good dragon, off you go now, you fuckin' nut." Christar said. Ataim chittered happily, loping back towards the group of dragons who welcomed him with open wings. Jon watched as Christar eyed the pot, reaching in with a large fork and stabbing the meat.

"Do you always cook?" Jon asked, settling himself on the ground next to Christar, looking up at him quizzically. Christar pulled the fork from the pot with a carrot skewered onto the end, placing it in his mouth and chewing thoughtfully. He hummed, licking his lips before taking another carrot on the fork and offering it to Jon.

"Try that." He said. Jon ate the carrot off the fork, licking around his mouth to get the bit of juice that had dripped into his beard. Christar chuckled at him.

"That's why I shave mine. Anyway, good or no?" He asked. Jon tilted his head, thinking.

"It's good, but it's almost missing something." He said. Christar nodded, turning to the pack on the ground and rifling through it before pulling out a small vial and uncapping it, swirling the bottle and lifting it under his nose. He took a deep breath and smiled before holding the bottle out to Jon.

"Smell that." He said. Jon took it hesitantly, sniffing lightly. He was surprised to smell roasting meat from the bottle.

"What is that?" Jon asked, handing the bottle back to Christar. Christar let the smallest bit of the brown liquid drip from the bottle into the pot, reaching in with the large fork and stirring the roasting meat and vegetables.

"I call it liquid smoke. It gives everything a stronger smokey flavor, we do most of our cooking in pots and sometimes I miss a good spit-roasted cut of venison like mum used to make." Christar said, pulling out a chunk of potato and biting into it.

"ah fuckin' beautiful." Christar said, offering Jon the rest of the potato. He took the fork, biting off the potato and sighing.

"You sir, are a fucking genius." Jon said, handing the fork back with a hearty laugh. Christar thanked him, mocking the bow that the players do at the end of their performance and smiling.

"So my question earlier," Jon continued. Christar set the fork down, sitting next to Jon on the ground and crossing his legs in front of him. "do you always cook?"

"When we go on trips, yes. Vaehra always takes me, I joke its because she misses my food too much." Christar said, jostling Jon with his broad shoulder. Jon chuckled, watching as Christar's green eyes glinted mischievously.

"Normally, no. I'm not sure if you could tell by looking at me, but I get kicked out of the kitchen quite a lot." Christar said, looking to the group of dancing Valyrian's, Vaehra twirling in the center, her black cloak whipping around her as her hair flowed effortlessly.

"You? No." Jon said, bumping Christar the way he'd done earlier. Christar smiled at Jon.

"The kitchen maids don't like me in there. But once a week, Vaehra forces them to let me cook a meal. I use about seven of those pots, it's enough to feed the whole of the Valyrian capitol, and I take it to the poorer towns." Christar said. He pushed himself to his feet with a huff. He'd long ago discarded his cloak and Jon could see the way his muscles rippled under his tunic.

"My mum used to feed the people in the poor region of the capitol. It was the most she could do, she'd use our small kitchen to feed about 200 or so people." Christar peeked into the pot before grabbing the fire poker and returning to where he sat with Jon, drawing pictures in the snow with the fire poker.

"When Vaehra took over the kingdom from Queen Vysenya and made me Lord commander of her Queensguard, I took full advantage of my access to the kitchen." Christar said. Jon looked up to the Valyrians still dancing around the fire, watching one twirling a staff that was flaming on both ends above his head, tossing it in the air and doing a flip before catching it and blowing on one end of the staff. A fireball shot from the end of the staff around the circle.

"I took what mum had done and extended it. I had the means to help, so I did." Christar said. Jon finally recognized the peninsula of Asshai, with the shadowlands above it. Christar was drawing the map of Valyria, every town, every path, river, even the great volcano Vaehra had spoken about.

There were dozens of cities, spaced out everywhere from the Bleeding Sea to the Shadowlands and the Grey Waste. There were even a few in the Mossovy forest and on the snow covered chain of the Thousand Islands. And nestled at the furthest North end of the Shadowlands between the great volcano and the mountains, he drew a large circle.

"It's a beautiful Kingdom." Christar said, standing up again and poking at the roaring fire. He brushed a few loose curls behind his ear, smiling into the pot of food. Jon watched the way he moved, the way he smiled into the pot, the way he worried his bottom lip between his teeth while thinking, and wondered for the first time what it would feel like to kiss a man. He quickly shook his head, snapping himself out of his thoughts. It wasn't natural.

"Are you two going to be hermits over here all night?" Jon heard an unfamiliar voice say. He looked up to see one of the female riders approaching. She had long dark brown hair held back in a single braid. She wore tight trousers and thick boots. Her cloak was a dusty brown color with a gray and white marbled fur ruff.

"Yes Jaerla we are." Christar joked, grabbing the fork and sticking it into the pot, pulling it out with a few vegetables and a chunk of meat skewered onto it.

"I know why you're over here Jaerla, take it and go." Christar said, handing Jaerla the fork. She ate the meat and vegetables off it, sighing happily.

"Missed you at dinner last night. It was good, but Vaehra can't make it the way you do." Jaerla said, handing the fork back to Christar. He chuckled, sticking the fork back into the pot and handing a piece of meat he'd skewered to Jon.

"Sorry Jearla, I was a bit preoccupied last night. What with the Northern 'Queen' trying to make me her bitch." Christar said. Jon tilted his head, chewing thoughtfully and handing the fork back to Christar. Jearla chuckled and walked back to the group of dancing Valyrians.

"What are you talking about?" Jon asked Christar. Christar cocked his head to the side, looking at Jon quizzically.

"What did Sansa do?" Jon continued.

"Ah, she made me an offer. A proposal, actually. Invited me to marry her, help her create heirs, and in exchange she wouldn't behead me." Christar said. Jon was taken aback. After the ordeal with Tyrion and Ramsey he couldn't imagine Sansa wanting marriage or children.

"I of course refused. I'd prefer to marry the person or people I marry because I love them. Not because there's the threat of beheading. Besides, I'm not ready to take care of any munchkins yet." Christar settled himself back on the ground next to Jon. He wasn't married yet and he was how old?

"What do you mean people? You're not married?" Jon asked. Christar looked at him bewildered, then burst out laughing.

"No Jon, oh by the great beast no, I'm not married. Happily not married yet." Christar said, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes.

"I'm only 25 of course I'm not married. I've got time, besides, the only person I'd consider marrying so far is busy reintroducing dragons to the world." Christar said, shifting his gaze to Vaehra with a content smile. Jon followed his gaze. Vaehra spotted the two looking at her, breaking into a wide grin and waving to the two men.

"W-what do you mean by people?" Jon asked, still confused.

"I mean people. More than one person. Do you not do that here?" Christar asked, seeming taken aback. Jon shook his head.

"Well if more than two people all love each other they can all marry. Vaehra's cousin has two mothers and one father." Christar laid back in the snow, sighing happily. The locks of hair that had escaped from the braid made him look like he had a lions mane as his hair flared around his head. He closed his eyes, one arm under his head and one resting over his stomach. Jon looked down at him, wondering why it was he wasn't married yet. He then shook his head, it didn't matter what he thought.

"Isn't it a sin to, y'know." Jon said. Christar cracked one eye open, looking at Jon with a raised eyebrow.

"Continue." Christar said smoothly. Jon hesitated, watching as Christar's chest rose and fell with each breath. He fought the urge to lie down next to him with his head on Christar's chest. He looked warm.

"Well I mean, they dragged Loras Tyrell down to the sept and imprisoned him for loving Renly Baratheon." Jon said as he remembered the events of the sept explosion. Christar sat bolt upright, a growl in his throat.

"You may think it's a sin here Jon Snow, but in Valyria, you live by your own rules. God's don't have a say." He said. Jon looked at him, wondering what it was like in Valyria. To live somewhere where the rulers were kind, the religion accepting, and dragons roamed the sky.

Christar stood from the ground, returning to the pot. He peeked into it, reaching up to grab the metal handle. Jon expected him to draw back at the heat of it, but Christar simply lifted the heavy pot one handed from the hook it was hanging from and set it aside the fire in the snow.

"Jon, do you think the Gods exist?" Christar said over his shoulder. Jon stood from his position and stood next to Christar.

Jon stood quietly, reminiscing on his time in the realm of the dead. There had been nothing. There were no gods, no land, no sea, no life after death, no reincarnation even, as some believed.

"No. I don't believe the Gods exist. If they did, why would they allow war." He said, watching as Christar reached into the pot with a fork and dagger to carve the two deer.

"Then why live by the laws of something you don't believe in?" Christar questioned. Jon opened his mouth to respond before realizing he couldn't add anything to that. Christar turned towards the group, whistling sharply. The group stopped their dancing and the two riders who had been playing instruments stopped playing.

"Dinner's ready!" Christar called. The group ran over with whoops and hollers, the dragons chattering in glee as well as they followed the group. Christar stepped back as the riders grabbed bowls and forks, using the large spoon Christar had set out to scoop meat and vegetables into their bowls before retreating to where their dragons sat to sit beside them and eat.

"Come on Jon, don't be shy." Vaehra said, gently pulling Jon towards the pot and handing him a bowl.

"This is one of Christar's better dishes, if I do say myself." Vaehra said. Christar chuckled and Vaehra ran her hand up his back, pausing at his right shoulder where the scales covered.

"Even better than last night?" Jon questioned. He didn't know if anything could top the Capon soup he'd eaten the night before.

"Oh so much better. Did you use that, what was it, liquid smoke?" Vaehra addressed Christar. Christar filled his own bowl with the meat and vegetables, scooping some of the broth at the bottom in as well.

"And some smoked salt." Christar said, handing the spoon to Vaehra. She smiled and filled Jon's bowl first, then her own. Jon followed Vaehra and Christar to the dragons. Vaehra settled herself on Vilor's foreleg and began eating her dinner, while Christar did the same with Ataim. Jon spotted Dessaly pressed against Aligosa's purple side. Jon approached her with a warm whistle. Dessaly whipped her head around and chortled happily to him. Jon patted her nose as he approached before leaning against her shoulder to eat.

Soon after dinner was done and the leftovers had been divided among the dragons, the riders all settled down to sleep. Christar seemed slightly lost, before picking up his cloak and resting his hand on Ataim's foreleg as he walked with the dragon to the spot they'd slept before. Ataim walked ahead of Christar, breathing a concentrated jet of fire onto the ground as he spun in a circle, settling down and curling himself on the heated patch of stone. Christar climbed onto Ataim's foreleg, shifting and struggling to make himself comfortable.

Jon had forgotten that Christar likely used to sleep with the large black dragon, Daeragon, rather than Ataim. Daeragon had been a stocky dragon, with broad shoulders and large wings. Ataim was lean and smaller than Dessaly. Jon felt pity for a moment before squirming out from under Dessaly's chin where she'd nestled him for the night. Dessaly lifted her head and hummed sleepily. Jon rested his hand on Dessaly's nose and whispered quietly to her before walking over to Christar.

"Christar, are you alright?" Jon asked. Ataim was watching Christar squirm uncomfortable, and looked like he was debating just dumping the rider onto the ground and finding somewhere else to sleep.

"I'm fine. Just, not used to sleeping on Ataim." Christar grumbled.

"Well, It's not much, but Dessaly's a little bigger, she's got plenty of room, if you want." Jon offered. Christar sat up, looking at Dessaly, who was curled happily into a ball, and back to Ataim who looked mildly uncomfortable.

"Sure." Christar said, sliding off Ataim's foreleg and patting the dragon's shoulder. Ataim sighed in relief and rolled onto his side, tucking his forelegs against his chest. Christar followed Jon as he walked towards Dessaly. Jon patted Dessaly's shoulder and she lifted her head to peer at him.

"Hey Dess, mind if we share with Christar?" Jon asked. Dessaly chirped, shifting herself to allow Jon to curl up near her chest. Christar climbed onto her foreleg, lying down and shifting to get comfortable. He'd sat still for merely five seconds, when Dessaly rolled Christar onto the ground between her forelegs and next to Jon. Christar landed with a huff and was about to sit up when Dessaly curled herself tighter around the two riders.

"I forgot that about vixen's." Christar grumbled. Jon squirmed to roll over and face Christar.

"They're very broody." Christar said, turning to face Jon as well. Jon wasn't sure how he felt about being this close to Christar. He wasn't sure if his unreasonable desire for him was just due to the mysterious nature of the man, or if it was something more. Christar took a deep breath, turning his gaze away from Jon.

Dessaly sighed deeply, tucking her chin further and pushing Christar closer to Jon. So close their chests were touching. Jon held his breath, waiting for Christar to make the first move. Jon finally let out the breath he was holding and tucked his chin against his chest. Christar rested his chin atop Jon's head.

"Sorry, if I'd known she was going to do this I wouldn't have brought you over." Jon said quietly. He heard Christar's chest rumble against his own.

"Don't worry about it." He said calmly. Jon let out a sigh of relief and settled in to sleep.

***

Tag List: @goth-pigeon​

[classyfoxdestiny]

FREEZE! Animals on the Prowl

FREEZE! Animals on the Prowl

If you thought human beings were expressive, take a look at these animals; they beat us hollow!

And, to prove that, it is that time of the year again — The Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest.

Developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London, it offers a peek into the lives of various animal species from around the world.

The exhibition, which is held at the Natural History Museum, opens on October 15, 2021.

This year’s competition attracted over 50,000 entries from professionals and amateurs across 95 countries.

The winners will be announced via a virtual awards ceremony, streamed from the Natural History Museum on October 12.

Take a look at some of the stunning entries.

  Please click on the images below for a better look.

The Great Swim

IMAGE: When the Tano Bora coalition of male cheetahs leapt into the raging Talek River in Kenya’s Maasai Mara, Dilini feared they would not make it.

Unseasonable, relentless rain (possibly linked to the changing climate) had, by January 2020, caused the worst flooding local elders had ever known.

Cheetahs are strong (if not keen) swimmers and with the prospect of more prey on the other side of the river, they were determined.

Dilini followed them for hours from the opposite bank as they searched for a crossing point.

Male cheetahs are mostly solitary but sometimes stay with their brothers or team up with unrelated males.

The Tano Bora (Maasai for ‘magnificent five’) is an unusually large coalition, thought to comprise two pairs of brothers, joined later by a single male.

‘A couple of times the lead cheetah waded into the river, only to turn back,’ says Dilini.

Calmer stretches — perhaps with a greater risk of lurking crocodiles — were spurned. ‘Suddenly, the leader jumped in,’ she says.

Three followed and, then, finally the fifth. Dilini watched them being swept away by the torrents, faces grimacing.

Against her expectations and much to her relief, all five made it. They emerged onto the bank some 100 metres (330 feet) downstream and headed straight off to hunt.

Photograph: Buddhilini de Soyza/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2021

  Net Loss

IMAGE: In the wake of a fishing boat, a slick of dead and dying herrings covers the surface of the sea off the coast of Norway.

The boat had caught too many fish and when the encircling wall of the purse-seine net was closed and winched up, it broke, releasing tons of crushed and suffocated animals.

Audun was on board a Norwegian coastguard vessel, on a project to satellite-tag killer whales.

The whales follow the migrating herrings and are frequently found alongside fishing boats, where they feed on the fish that leak out of the nets.

For the Norwegian coastguard — responsible for surveillance of the fishing fleet — the spectacle of carnage and waste was effectively a crime scene. So Audun’s photographs became the visual evidence in a court case that resulted in a conviction and fine for the owner of the boat.

Overfishing is one of the biggest threats to ocean ecosystems. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, more than 60 per cent of fisheries today are either ‘fully fished’ or collapsed; almost 30 per cent are at their limit (‘overfished’).

Norwegian spring-spawning herring — part of the Atlantic herring population complex — was in the nineteenth century the most commercially fished fish population in the North Atlantic; by the end of the 1960s, it had been fished almost to extinction.

This is regarded as a classic example of how a combination of bad management, little knowledge and greed can have a devastating and sometimes permanent effect, not only on the species itself but on the whole ecosystem.

The Atlantic herring came close to extinction. It took 20 years and a near-ban on fishing for the populations to recover, though it is still considered vulnerable to overfishing.

The recovery of the herring has been followed by an increase in the numbers of their predators, such as killer whales, but it is a recovery that needs continued monitoring of herring numbers and fisheries, as Audun’s picture shows.

Photograph: Audun Rikardsen/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2021

  Raw Moment

IMAGE: Bright red blood dripped from her muzzle – oxygenated blood, indicating that her wildebeest meal was still alive.

Perhaps being inexperienced, this young lioness had not made a clean kill and had begun eating the still struggling animal.

Now, with a paw holding it down, she gave Lara an intense stare.

More than two million wildebeest move through the north of Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park on their annual migration in search of greener grass, providing the Serengeti lions with a seasonal glut of food.

Lara had spotted the lioness just as she pounced.

Lions’s primary hunting strategy is stalking, but this one had just been resting in the long grass when the wildebeest wandered by.

‘She was already quite full,’ says Lara, ‘probably after feeding the night before, but she grabbed the opportunity for an easy meal.’

Though most successful when hunting with a pride, a single lion can bring down an animal twice its weight.

A lion would usually pull it down backwards or sideways and then lunge for the throat or nose, gripping firmly until the victim could no longer cause injury with flailing horns or hooves.

Lying in a specially adapted vehicle, with the sides folded down, Lara framed her low-angle close-up. Her arresting portrait captures the rawness of the moment and the intensity of the lioness’s stare.

She didn’t eat much, says Lara, before leaving the kill to walk off with the male whom she had been lying up with, seemingly more interested in mating than feeding.

Photograph: Lara Jackson/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2021

  Apollo Landing

IMAGE: As dusk starts to fall, an Apollo butterfly settles on an oxeye daisy.

Emelin had long dreamed of photographing the Apollo, a large mountain butterfly with a wingspan up to 90 millimetres (31/2 inches) and now one of Europe’s threatened butterflies, at risk from the warming climate and extreme weather events.

In summer, on holiday in the Haut-Jura Regional Nature Park, on the French-Swiss border, Emelin found himself surrounded by alpine meadows full of butterflies, including Apollos. Though slow flyers, the Apollos were constantly on the move.

The solution was this roost, in a woodland clearing, where the butterflies were settling. But a breeze meant the daisies were moving.

Also, the light was fading.

After numerous adjustments of settings and focus, Emelin finally achieved his emblematic image, the whites standing out in stark contrast and just daubs of colour — the yellow hearts of the daisies and the red eyespots of the Apollo.

Photograph: Emelin Dupieux/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2021

  Lockdown Chicks

IMAGE: Three rose-ringed parakeet chicks pop their heads out of the nest hole as their father returns with food. Ten-year-old Gagana, on the balcony of his parents’ bedroom, in Colombo, Sri Lanka, was watching.

The hole was at eye level with the balcony, in a dead areca-nut palm in the backyard, which his parents had deliberately left standing to attract wildlife.

In the spring of 2020, during the long days of the island-wide lockdown, Gagana and his older brother had hours of entertainment watching the parakeet family and experimenting with their cameras, sharing lenses and a tripod, always mindful that the slightest movement or noise would stop the chicks from showing themselves.

When incubating the eggs, the female stayed inside while the male foraged (for fruit, berries, nuts and seeds mainly), feeding her by regurgitating the food.

When Gagana took this picture, both parents were feeding the growing chicks. Only when they fledged did Gagana realise that there were as many as five chicks.

Also known as ring-necked parakeets, these medium-sized parrots are native to Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan as well as a band of sub-Saharan Africa, but feral populations are now found in many countries including the UK.

These are often found in urban settings, where they sometimes even breed in holes in brick walls.

Photograph: Gagana Mendis Wickramasinghe/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2021

  Beautiful Bloodsucker

IMAGE: The best way to photograph a female ornamented mosquito, says Gil, is to let it bite you.

The elegant Sabethes mosquitoes, found only in Latin America, are just 4 millimetres (0.16 inches) long and skittish.

Only the females bite — they need a blood meal to produce eggs — and, in doing so, can act as vectors of tropical diseases such as yellow fever and dengue fever.

Their long legs sport brushes of hairs (possibly important in attracting mates) and their hind legs are typically raised and waved around as they bite.

With large compound eyes and sensitive, feathery antennae, they can detect the slightest movement.

So when this one, in central Ecuador, landed on Gil, he kept stock-still as he framed it, head on, proboscis poised to pierce his finger knuckle.

Focus-stacking six exposures, he captured it in perfect symmetry, highlighting its jewel-like body and iridescent wings against the neutral background of his hiking trousers.

Its bite, he admits, was rather painful.

Photograph: Gil Wizen/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2021

  The Gripping End

IMAGE: Clutched in the coils of a golden tree snake, a red-spotted tokay gecko stays clamped onto its attacker’s head in a last attempt at defence.

Named for their to-kay call, tokay geckos are large — up to 40 centimetres (16 inches) long — feisty and have powerful jaws.

They are also a favourite prey of the golden tree snake.

This snake, common in the lowland forests of South and Southeast Asia, also hunts lizards, amphibians, birds and bats and is one of five snakes that can ‘fly’, expanding its ribs and flattening its body to glide from branch to branch.

Wei was photographing birds at a park near his home in Bangkok, Thailand, when his attention was caught by the loud croaking and hissing warnings of the gecko. It was being approached by the golden tree snake, coiled on a branch above and slowly letting itself down.

As the snake struck, injecting its venom, the gecko turned and clamped onto the snake’s upper jaw.

Wei watched as they wrestled but, within minutes, the snake had dislodged the gecko, coiled tightly around it and was squeezing it to death.

While still hanging from the loop of its tail, the slender snake then began the laborious process of swallowing the gecko whole.

Photograph: Wei Fu/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2021

  Storm Fox

IMAGE: This fox was busy searching in the shallows for salmon carcasses — sockeye salmon that had died after spawning.

At the water’s edge, Jonny was lying on his chest, aiming for a low, wide angle.

The vixen was one of only two red foxes resident on the tiny island in Karluk Lake, on Alaska’s Kodiak Island, and she was surprisingly bold.

Jonny had followed her over several days, watching her forage for berries, pounce after birds and playfully nip at the heels of a young brown bear.

Taking advantage of the window of deepening atmospheric light created by a storm rolling in, he was after a dramatic portrait.

But working with a manual flash, he had to pre-set the power for a soft spotlight — just enough to bring out the texture of her coat at relatively close range.

Now he was hoping she would come closer. As she did, his companion and fellow researcher raised up the diffused flash for him.

It was just enough to pique her curiosity, giving Jonny his atmospheric portrait — studio-style — moments before the deluge of rain.

Photograph: Jonny Armstrong/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2021

  Deep Feelers

IMAGE: In deep water off the French Mediterranean coast, among cold-water black coral, Laurent came across a surreal sight — a vibrant community of thousands of narwhal shrimps.

Their legs weren’t touching, but their exceptionally long, highly mobile outer antennae were.

It appeared that each shrimp was in touch with its neighbours and that, potentially, signals were being sent across a far-reaching network.

Research suggests that such contact is central to the shrimps’ social behaviour, in pairing and competition.

In such deep water (78 metres down — 256 feet), Laurent’s air supply included helium (to cut back on nitrogen absorbed), which enabled him to stay at depth longer, stalk the shrimps and compose an image at close quarters.

Against the deep-blue of the open water, floating among the feathery black coral (which are white when living), the translucent narwhal shrimps looked exceptionally beautiful, with their red and white stripes, long orange legs and sweeping antennae.

Between a shrimp’s bulbous stalked eyes, flanked by two pairs of antennae, is a beak-like serrated rostrum that extended well beyond its 10-centimetre (4 inch) bodies.

Narwhal shrimps are normally nocturnal and often burrow in mud or sand or hide among rocks or in caves during the day, which is where Laurent was more used to seeing them.

They are also fished commercially.

When shrimp-fishing involves bottom-trawling over such deep-water locations, it destroys the slow-growing coral forests as well as their communities.

Photograph: Laurent Ballesta/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2021

  Toxic Design

IMAGE: This eye-catching detail of a small river in the Geamana Valley, within Romania’s Apuseni Mountains, took Gheorghe by surprise.

Though he had been visiting the region for several years, using his drone to capture images of the valley’s ever-changing patterns, he had never come across such a striking combination of colours and shapes.

These designs — perhaps made sharp by recent heavy rain — are the result of an ugly truth.

In the late 1970s, more than 400 families living in Geamana were forced to leave to make way for waste flowing from the nearby Rosia Poieni mine — a mine exploiting one of the largest deposits of copper ore and gold in Europe.

The picturesque valley became a ‘tailings pond’ filled with an acidic cocktail, containing pyrite (fool’s gold), iron and other heavy metals, laced with cyanide.

These toxic materials have infiltrated the groundwater and threatened waterways more widely.

The settlement was gradually engulfed with millions of tons of toxic waste, leaving just the old church tower protruding and the sludge still piling up.

His composition — ‘to draw attention to the ecological disaster’ — captures the elemental colours of heavy metals in the river and the ornate radiating banks of this shockingly toxic landscape.

Photograph: Gheorghe Popa/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2021

  Up For Grabs

IMAGE: In southern California, USA, a juvenile white-tailed kite reaches to grab a live mouse from the clutches of its hovering father.

A more experienced bird would have approached from behind (it’s easier to coordinate a mid-air transfer if you are both moving in the same direction), but this cinnamon streaked youngster had been flying for just two days and still had much to learn.

It must master aerial food exchange until it is capable of hunting for itself (typically by hovering, then dropping down to grab mainly small mammals).

Later, it needs to perform aerial courtship rituals (where a male offers prey to a female).

To get the shot, Jack had to abandon his tripod, grab his camera and run. The result was the highlight of three years’ work — the action and the conditions came together perfectly.

The fledgling missed but then circled around and seized the mouse.

Photograph: Jack Zhi/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2021

  Mushroom Magic

IMAGE: It was on a summer night, at full moon, after monsoon rain, that Juergen found the ghost fungus, on a dead tree in the rainforest near his home in Queensland, Australia.

He needed a torch to keep to the track, but every few metres he would switch it off to scan the dark for the ghostly glow.

His reward was this cluster of hand-sized fruiting bodies.

Comparatively few species of fungi are known to make light in this way, through a chemical reaction: luciferin oxidising in contact with the enzyme luciferase. But why the ghost fungus glows is a mystery.

No spore-dispersing insects seem to be attracted by the light, which is produced constantly and may just be a by-product of the fungi’s metabolism.

Juergen crouched on the forest floor for at least 90 minutes to take eight five-minute exposures to capture the dim glow at different focal points, which were merged (focus stacked) to create one sharp-focus image of the tree-trunk display.

Photograph: Juergen Freund/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2021

  The Nurturing Wetland

IMAGE: Houses on the edge of Kakinada city reach the estuary, buffered from the sea by the remains of a mangrove swamp.

Development has already destroyed 90 per cent of the mangroves — salt-tolerant trees and shrubs — along this eastern coastal area of Andhra Pradesh, India.

Mangroves are now recognised as vital for coastal life, human and non-human.

Their roots trap organic matter, providing carbon storage, slow incoming tides, protect communities against storms and create nurseries for numerous fish and other species that fishing communities rely on.

Flying his drone over the area, Rakesh could see the impact of human activities — pollution, plastic waste and mangrove clearance — but this picture seemed to sum up the protective, nurturing girdle that mangroves provide for such storm-prone tropical communities.

Photograph: Rakesh Pulapa/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2021

  Lynx On The Threshold

IMAGE: A young Iberian lynx pauses in the doorway of the abandoned hayloft where it was raised, on a farm in eastern Sierra Morena, Spain. He will soon be leaving his mother’s territory.

Once widespread on the Iberian Peninsula of Spain and Portugal, by 2002 there were fewer than 100 lynx in Spain and none in Portugal.

Their decline was driven by hunting, killing by farmers, habitat loss and loss of prey (they eat mainly rabbits).

Thanks to ongoing conservation efforts — reintroduction, rewilding, prey boosting and the creation of natural corridors and tunnels — Iberian lynx have escaped extinction and, though still endangered, are fully protected.

Only recently, with numbers increasing, have they begun to take advantage of human environments. This individual is one of the latest in a family line to emerge from the old hayloft.

After months of waiting, Sergio’s carefully-set camera trap finally gave him the picture he wanted.

Photograph: Sergio Marijuán/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2021

  A Caring Hand

IMAGE: After a feed of special formula milk, an orphaned grey-headed flying-fox pup lies on a ‘mumma roll’, sucking on a dummy and cradled in the hand of wildlife-carer Bev.

She was three weeks old when she was found on the ground in Melbourne, Australia, and taken to a shelter.

Grey-headed flying-foxes, endemic to eastern Australia, are threatened by heat-stress events and destruction of their forest habitat where they play a key role in seed dispersal and pollination.

They also come into conflict with people, get caught in netting and on barbed wire and electrocuted on power lines.

At eight weeks, the pup will be weaned onto fruit, then flowering eucalyptus.

After a few months, she will join a creche and build up flight fitness, before being moved next to Melbourne’s Yarra Bend bat colony, for eventual release.

Photograph: Douglas Gimesy/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2021

  Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/ Rediff.com

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[nowontheroad]

PART FOUR

1

I came into some money from selling my book. I straightened out my aunt with rent for the rest of the year. Whenever spring comes to New York I can't stand the suggestions of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I've got to go. So I went. For the first time in our lives I said good-by to Dean in New York and left him there. He worked in a parking lot on Madison and 40th,, As ever he rushed around in his ragged shoes and T-shirt and belly-hanging pants all by himself, straightening out immense noontime rushes of cars.

When usually I came to visit him at dusk there was nothing to do. He stood in the shack, counting tickets and rubbing his belly. The radio was always on. "Man, have you dug that mad Marty Glickman announcing basketball games -up-to-midcourt-bounce-fake-set-shot, swish, two points. Absolutely the greatest announcer I ever heard." He was reduced to simple pleasures like these. He lived with Inez in a coldwater flat in the East Eighties. When he came home at night he took off all his clothes and put on a hip-length Chinese silk jacket and sat in his easy chair to smoke a waterpipe loaded with tea. These were his coming-home pleasures, together with a deck of dirty cards. "Lately I've been concentrating on this deuce of diamonds. Have you noticed where her other hand is? I'll bet you can't tell. Look long and try to see." He wanted to lend me the deuce of diamonds, which depicted a tall, mournful fellow and a lascivious, sad whore on a bed trying a position. "Go ahead, man, I've used it many times!" Inez cooked in the kitchen and looked in with a wry smile. Everything was all right with her. "Dig her? Dig her, man? That's Inez. See, that's all she does, she pokes her head in the door and smiles. Oh, I've talked with her and we've got everything straightened out most beautifully. We're going to go and live on a farm in Pennsylvania this summer-station wagon for me to cut back to New York for kicks, nice big house, and have a lot of kids in the next few years. Ahem! Harrumph! Egad!" He leaped out of the chair and put on a Willie Jackson record, "Gator Tail." He stood before it, socking his palms and rocking and pumping his knees to the beat. "Whoo! That sonumbitch! First time I heard him I thought he'd die the next night, but he's still alive."

This was exactly what he had been doing with Camille in Frisco on the other side of the continent. The same battered trunk stuck out from under the bed, ready to fly. Inez called up Camille on the phone repeatedly and had long talks with her; they even talked about his joint, or so Dean claimed. They exchanged letters about Dean's eccentricities. Of course he had to send Camille part of his pay every month for support or he'd wind up in the workhouse for six months. To make up lost money he pulled tricks in the lot, a change artist of the first order. I saw him wish a well-to-do man Merry Christmas so volubly a five-spot in change for twenty was never missed. We went out and spent it in Birdland, the bop joint. Lester Young was on the stand, eternity on his huge eyelids.

One night we talked on the corner of 47th Street and Madison at three in the morning. "Well, Sal, damn, I wish you weren't going, I really do, it'll be my first time in New York without my old buddy." And he said, "New York, I stop over in it, Frisco's my hometown. All the time I've been here I haven't had any girl but Inez-this only happens to me in New York! Damn! But the mere thought of crossing that awful continent again- Sal, we haven't talked straight in a long time." In New York we were always jumping around frantically with crowds of friends at drunken parties. It somehow didn't seem to fit Dean. He looked more like himself huddling in the cold, misty spray of the rain on empty Madison Avenue at night. "Inez loves me; she's told me and promised me I can do anything I want and there'll be a minimum of trouble. You see, man, you get older and troubles pile up. Someday you and me'll be coming down an alley together at sundown and looking in the cans to see."

"You mean we'll end up old bums?"

"Why not, man? Of course we will if we want to, and all that. There's no harm ending that way. You spend a whole life of non-interference with the wishes of others, including politicians and the rich, and nobody bothers you and you cut along and make it your own way." I agreed with him. He was reaching his Tao decisions in the simplest direct way. "What's your road, man?-holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?" We nodded in the rain. "Sheeit, and you've got to look out for your boy. He ain't a man 'less he's a jumpin man-do what the doctor say. I'll tell you. Sal, straight, no matter where I live, my trunk's always sticking out from under the bed, I'm ready to leave or get thrown out. I've decided to leave everything out of my hands. You've seen me try and break my ass to make it and you know that it doesn't matter and we know time-how to slow it up and walk and dig and just old-fashioned spade kicks, what other kicks are there? We know." We sighed in the rain. It was falling all up and down the Hudson Valley that night. The great world piers of the sea-wide river were drenched in it, old steamboat landings at Poughkeepsie were drenched in it, old Split Rock Pond of sources was drenched in it, Vanderwhacker Mount was drenched in it.

"So," said Dean, "I'm cutting along in my life as it leads me. You know I recently wrote my old man in jail in Seattle- I got the first letter in years from him the other day."

"Did you?"

"Yass, yass. He said he wants to see the 'babby' spelt with two b's when he can get to Frisco. I found a thirteen-a-month coldwater pad on East Fortieth; if I can send him the money he'll come and live in New York-if he gets here. I never told you much about my sister but you know I have a sweet little kid sister; I'd like to get her to come and live with me too."

"Where is she?"

"Well, that's just it, I don't know-he's going to try to find her, the old man, but you know what he'll really do."

"So he went to Seattle?"

"And straight to messy jail."

"Where was he?"

"Texas, Texas-so you see, man, my soul, the state of things, my position-you notice I get quieter."

"Yes, that's true." Dean had grown quiet in New York. He wanted to talk. We were freezing to death in the cold rain. We made a date to meet at my aunt's house before I left.

He came the following Sunday afternoon. I had a television set. We played one ballgame on the TV, another on the radio, and kept switching to a third and kept track of all that was happening every moment. "Remember, Sal, Hodges is on second in Brooklyn so while the relief pitcher is coming in for the Phillies we'll switch to Giants-Boston and at the same time notice there DiMaggio has three balls count and the pitcher is fiddling with the resin bag, so we quickly find out what happened to Bobby Thomson when we left him thirty seconds ago with a man on third. Yes!"

Later in the afternoon we went out and played baseball with the kids in the sooty field by the Long Island railyard. We also played basketball so frantically the younger boys said, "Take it easy, you don't have to kill yourself." They bounced smoothly all around us and beat us with ease. Dean and I were sweating. At one point Dean fell flat on his face on the concrete court. We huffed and puffed to get the ball away from the boys; they turned and flipped it away. Others darted in and smoothly shot over our heads. We jumped at the basket like maniacs, and the younger boys just reached up and grabbed the ball from our sweating hands and dribbled away. We were like hotrock blackbelly tenorman Mad of American back-alley go-music trying to play basketball against Stan Getz and Cool Charlie. They thought we were crazy. Dean and I went back home playing catch from each sidewalk of the street. We tried extra-special catches, diving over bushes and barely missing posts. When a car came by I ran alongside and flipped the ball to Dean just barely behind the vanishing bumper. He darted and caught it and rolled in the grass, and flipped it back for me to catch on the other side of a parked bread truck. I just made it with my meat hand and threw it back so Dean had to whirl and back up and fall on his back across the hedges. Back in the house Dean took his wallet, har-rumphed, and handed my aunt the fifteen dollars he owed her from the time we got a speeding ticket in Washington. She was completely surprised and pleased. We had a big supper. "Well, Dean," said my aunt, "I hope you'll be able to take care of your new baby that's coming and stay married this time."

"Yes, yass, yes."

"You can't go all over the country having babies like that' Those poor little things'll grow up helpless. You've got to offer them a chance to live." He looked at his feet and nodded. In the raw red dusk we said good-by, on a bridge over a superhighway.

"I hope you'll be in New York when I get back," I told him.

"All I hope, Dean, is someday we'll be able to live on the same street with our families and get to be a couple of oldtimers together."

"That's right, man-you know that I pray for it completely mindful of the troubles we both had and the troubles coming, as your aunt knows and reminds me. I didn't want the new baby, Inez insisted, and we had a fight. Did you know Marylou got married to a used-car dealer in Frisco and she's having a baby?"

"Yes. We're all getting in there now." Ripples in the upside-down lake of the void, is what I should have said. The bottom of the world is gold and the world is upside down. He took out a snapshot of Camille in Frisco with the new baby girl. The shadow of a man crossed the child on the sunny pavement, two long trouser legs in the sadness. "Who's that?"

"That's only Ed Dunkel. He came back to Galatea, they're gone to Denver now. They spent a day taking pictures."

Ed Dunkel, his compassion unnoticed like the compassion of saints. Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance. "Good-by, good-by." Dean walked off in the long red dusk. Locomotives smoked and reeled above him. His shadow followed him, it aped his walk and thoughts and very being. He turned and waved coyly, bashfully. He gave me the boomer's highball, he jumped up and down, he yelled something I didn't catch. He ran around in a circle. All the time he came closer to the concrete corner of the railroad overpass. He made one last signal. I waved back. Suddenly he bent to his life and walked quickly out of sight. I gaped into the bleakness of my own days. I had an awful long way to go too.

2

The following midnight, singing this little song,

Home in Missoula,

Home in Truckee,

Home in Opelousas,

Ain't no home for me.

Home in old Medora,

Home in Wounded Knee,

Home in Ogallala,

Home I'll never be,

I took the Washington bus; wasted some time there wandering around; went out of my way to see the Blue Ridge, heard the bird of Shenandoah and visited Stonewall Jackson's grave; at dusk stood expectorating in the Kanawha River and walked the hillbilly night of Charleston, West Virginia; at midnight Ashland, Kentucky, and a lonely girl under the marquee of a 'closed-up show. The dark and mysterious Ohio, and Cincinnati at dawn. Then Indiana fields again, and St. Louis as ever in its great valley clouds of afternoon. The muddy cobbles and the Montana logs, the broken steamboats, the ancient signs, the grass and the ropes by the river. The endless poem. By night Missouri, Kansas fields, Kansas night-cows in the secret wides, crackerbox towns with a sea for the end of every street; dawn in Abilene. East Kansas grasses become West Kansas rangelands that climb up to the hill of the Western night.

Henry Glass was riding the bus with me. He had got on at Terre Haute, Indiana, and now he said to me, "I've told you why I hate this suit I'm wearing, it's lousy-but ain't all." He showed me papers. He had just been released from Terre Haute federal pen; the rap was for stealing and selling cars in Cincinnati. A young, curly-haired kid of twenty. "Soon's I get to Denver I'm selling this suit in a pawnshop and getting me jeans. Do you know what they did to me in that prison? Solitary confinement with a Bible; I used it to sit on the stone floor; when they seed I was doing that they took the Bible away and brought back a leetle pocket-size one so big. Couldn't sit on it so I read the whole Bible and Testament. Hey-hey-" he poked me, munching his candy, he was always eating candy because his stomach had been ruined in the pen and couldn't stand anything else-"you know they's some real hot things in that Bible." He told me what it was to "signify." "Anybody that's leaving jail soon and starts talking about his release date is 'signifying' to the other fellas that have to stay. We take him by the neck and say, 'Don't signify with me!' Bad thing, to signify-y'hear me?"

"I won't signify, Henry."

"Anybody signify with me, my nose opens up, I get mad enough to kill. You know why I been in jail all my life? Because I lost my temper when I was thirteen years old. I was in a movie with a boy and he made a crack about my mother- you know that dirty word-and I took out my jackknife and cut up his throat and woulda killed him if they hadn't drug me off. Judge said, 'Did you know what you were doing when you attacked your friend?' 'Yessir, Your Honor, I did, I wanted to kill the sonofabitch and still do.' So I didn't get no parole and went straight to reform school. I got piles too from sitting in solitary. Don't ever go to a federal pen, they're worstest. Sheet, I could talk all night it's been so long since I talked to somebody. You don't know how good I feel coming out. You just sitting in that bus when I got on-riding through Terre Haute-what was you thinking?" , "I was just sitting there riding."

" "Me, I was singing. I sat down next to you 'cause I was afraid to set down next to any gals for fear I go crazy and reach under their dress. I gotta wait awhile."

"Another hitch in prison and you'll be put away for life. You better take it easy from now."

"That's what I intend to do, only trouble is m'nose opens up and I can't tell what I'm doing."

He was on his way to live with his brother and sister-in-law; they had a job for him in Colorado. His ticket was bought by the feds, his destination the parole. Here was a young kid like Dean had been; his blood boiled too much for him to bear; his nose opened up; but no native strange saintliness to save him from the iron fate.

"Be a buddy and watch m'nose don't open up in Denver, will you, Sal? Mebbe I can get to my brother's safe."

When we arrived in Denver I took him by the arm to Larimer Street to pawn the penitentiary suit. The old Jew immediately sensed what it was before it was half unwrapped. "I don't want that damn thing here; I get them every day from the Canyon City boys."

All of Larimer Street was overrun with ex-cons trying to sell their prison-spun suits. Henry ended up with the thing under his arm in a paper bag and walked around in brand-new jeans and sports shirt. We went to Dean's old Glenarm bar- on the way Henry threw the suit in an ashcan-and called up Tim Gray. It was evening now.

"You?" chuckled Tim Gray. "Be right over."

In ten minutes he came loping into the bar with Stan Shephard. They'd both had a trip to France and were tremendously disappointed with their Denver lives. They loved Henry and bought him beers. He began spending all his penitentiary money left and right. Again I was back in the soft, dark Denver night with its holy alleys and crazy houses. We started hitting all the bars in town, roadhouses out on West Colfax, Five Points Negro bars, the works.

Stan Shephard had been waiting to meet me for years and now for the first time we were suspended together in front of a venture. "Sal, ever since I came back from France I ain't had any idea what to do with myself. Is it true you're going to Mexico? Hot damn, I could go with you? I can get a hundred bucks and once I get there sign up for GI Bill in Mexico City College."

Okay, it was agreed, Stan was coming with me. He was a rangy, bashful, shock-haired Denver boy with a big con-man smile and slow, easy-going Gary Cooper movements. "Hot damn!" he said and stuck his thumbs on his belt and ambled down the street, swaying from side to side but slowly. His grandfather was having it out with him. He had been opposed to France and now he was opposed to the idea of going to Mexico. Stan was wandering around Denver like a bum because of his fight with his grandfather. That night after we'd done all our drinking and restrained Henry from getting his nose opened up in the Hot Shoppe on Colfax, Stan scraggled off to sleep in Henry's hotel room on Glenarm. "I can't even come home late-my grandfather starts fighting with me, then he turns on my mother. I tell you, Sal, I got to get out of Denver quick or I'll go crazy."

Well, I stayed at Tim Gray's and then later Babe Rawlins fixed up a neat little basement room for me and we all ended up there with parties every night for a week. Henry vanished off to his brother's and we never saw him again and never will know if anybody's signified with him since and if they've put him away in an iron hall or if he busts his gaskets in the night free.

Tim Gray, Stan, Babe, and I spent an entire week of afternoons in lovely Denver bars where the waitresses wear slacks and cut around with bashful, loving eyes, not hardened waitresses but waitresses that fall in love with the clientele and have explosive affairs and huff and sweat and suffer from one bar to another; and we spent the same week in nights at Five Points listening to jazz, drinking booze in crazy Negro saloons and gabbing till five o'clock in the morn in my basement. Noon usually found us reclined in Babe's back yard among the little Denver kids who played cowboys and Indians and dropped on us from cherry trees in bloom. I was having a wonderful time and the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams. Stan and I plotted to make Tim Gray come with us, but Tim was stuck to his Denver life.

I was getting ready to go to Mexico when suddenly Denver Doll called me one night and said, "Well, Sal, guess who's coming to Denver?" I had no idea. "He's on his way already, I got this news from my grapevine. Dean bought a car and is coming out to join you." Suddenly I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparking flames shooting out from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again. There was no chance to send money to either wife if he took all his savings out of the bank and bought a car. Everything was up, the jig and all. Behind him charred ruins smoked. He rushed westward over the groaning and awful continent again, and soon he would arrive. We made hasty preparations for Dean. News was that he was going to drive me to Mexico.

"Do you think he'll let me come along?" asked Stan in awe.

"I'll talk to him," I said grimly. We didn't know what to expect. "Where will he sleep? What's he going to eat? Are there any girls for him?" It was like the imminent arrival of Gargantua; preparations had to be made to widen the gutters of Denver and foreshorten certain laws to fit his suffering bulk and bursting ecstasies.

3

It was like an old-fashioned movie when Dean arrived. I was in Babe's house in a golden afternoon. A wore about the house. Her mother was away in Europe. The chaperon aunt was called Charity; she was seventy-five years old and spry as a chicken. In the Rawlins family, which stretched all over the West, she was continually shuttling from one house to another and making herself generally useful. At one time she'd had dozens of sons. They were all gone; they'd all abandoned her. She was old but she was interested in everything we did and said. She shook her head sadly when we took slugs of whisky in the living room. "Now you might go out in the yard for that, young man." Upstairs-it was a kind of boarding house that summer-lived a guy called Tom who was hopelessly in love with Babe. He came from Vermont, from a rich family, they said, and had a career waiting for him there and everything, but he preferred being where Babe was. In the evenings he sat in the living room with his face burning behind a newspaper and every time one of us said anything he heard but made no sign. He particularly burned when Babe said something. When we forced him to put down the paper he looked at us with incalculable boredom and suffering. "Eh? Oh yes, I suppose so." He usually said just that.

Charity sat in her corner, knitting, watching us all with her birdy eyes. It was her job to chaperon, it was up to her to see nobody swore. Babe sat giggling on the couch. Tim Gray, Stan Shephard, and I sprawled around in chairs. Poor Tom suffered the tortures. He got up, yawned, and said, "Well, another day another dollar, good night," and disappeared upstairs. Babe had no use whatever for him as a lover. She was in love with Tim Gray; he wriggled like an eel out of her grasp. We were sitting around like this on a sunny afternoon toward suppertime when Dean pulled up in front in his jalopy and jumped out in a tweed suit with vest and watch chain.

"Hup! hup!" I heard out on the street. He was with Roy Johnson, who'd just returned from Frisco with his wife Dorothy and was living in Denver again. So were Dunkel and Galatea Dunkel, and Tom Snark. Everybody was in Denver again. I went out on the porch. "Well, m'boy," said Dean, sticking out his big hand, "I see everything is all right on this end of the stick. Hello hello hello," he said to everybody. "Oh yes, Tim Gray, Stan Shephard, howd'y'do!" We introduced him to Charity. "Oh yass, howd'y'do. This is m'friend Roy Johnson here, was so kind as to accompany me, harrumph! egad! kaff! kaff! Major Hoople, sir," he said, sticking out his hand to Tom, who stared at him. "Yass, yass. Well, Sal old man, what's the story, when do we take off for Mexico? Tomorrow afternoon? Fine, fine. Ahem! And now, Sal, I have exactly sixteen minutes to make it to Ed Dunkel's house, where I am about to recover my old railroad watch which I can pawn on Larimer Street before closing time, meanwhile buzzing very quickly and as thoroughly as time allows to see if my old man by chance may be in Jiggs' Buffet or some of the other bars and then I have an appointment with the barber Doll always told me to patronize and I have not myself changed over the years and continue with that policy-kaff! kaff! At six o'clock sharp.'-sharp, hear me?-I want you to be right here where I'll come buzzing by to get you for one quick run to Roy Johnson's house, play Gillespie and assorted bop records, an hour of relaxation prior to any kind of further evening you and Tim and Stan and Babe may have planned for tonight irrespective of my arrival which incidentally was exactly forty-five minutes ago in my old thirty-seven Ford which you see parked out there, I made it together with a long pause in Kansas City seeing my cousin, not Sam Brady but the younger one . . ." And saying all these things, he was busily changing from his suitcoat to T-shirt in the living-room alcove just out of sight of everyone and transferring his watch to another pair of pants that he got out of the same old battered trunk.

"And Inez?" I said. "What happened in New York?"

"Officially, Sal, this trip is to get a Mexican divorce, cheaper and quicker than any kind. I've Camille's agreement at last and everything is straight, everything is fine, everything is lovely and we know that we are now not worried about a single thing, don't we, Sal?"

Well, okay, I'm always ready to follow Dean, so we all bustled to the new set of plans and arranged a big night, and it was an unforgettable night. There was a party at Ed Dunkel's brother's house. Two of his other brothers are bus-drivers. They sat there in awe of everything that went on. There was a lovely spread on the table, cake and drinks. Ed Dunkel looked happy and prosperous. "Well, are you all set with Galatea now?"

"Yessir," said Ed, "I sure am. I'm about to go to Denver U, you know, me and Roy."

"What are you going to take up?"

"Oh, sociology and all that field, you know. Say, Dean gets crazier every year, don't he?"

"He sure does."

Galatea Dunkel was there. She was trying to talk to somebody, but Dean held the whole floor. He stood and performed before Shephard, Tim, Babe, and myself, who all sat side by side in kitchen chairs along the wall. Ed Dunkel hovered nervously behind him. His poor brother was thrust into the background. "Hup! hup!" Dean was saying, tugging at his shirt, rubbing his belly, jumping up and down. "Yass, well-we're all together now and the years have rolled severally behind us and yet you see none of us have really changed, that's what so amazing, the dura-the durability-in fact to prove that I have here a deck of cards with which I can tell very accurate fortunes of all sorts." It was the dirty deck. Dorothy Johnson and Roy Johnson sat stiffly in a corner. It was a mournful party. Then Dean suddenly grew quiet and sat in a kitchen chair between Stan and me and stared straight ahead with rocky doglike wonder and paid no attention to anybody.

He simply disappeared for a moment to gather up more energy. If you touched him he would sway like a boulder suspended on a pebble on the precipice of a cliff. He might come crashing down or just sway rocklike. Then the boulder exploded into a flower and his face lit up with a lovely smile and he looked around like a man waking up and said, "Ah, look at all the nice people that are sitting here with me. Isn't it nice! Sal, why, like I was tellin Min just t'other day, why, urp, ah, yes!" He got up and went across the room, hand outstretched to one of the bus-drivers in the party. "Howd'y'do. My name is Dean Moriarty. Yes, I remember you well. Is everything all right? Well, well. Look at the lovely cake. Oh, can I have some? Just me? Miserable me?" Ed's sister said yes. "Oh, how wonderful. People are so nice. Cakes and pretty things set out on a table and all for the sake of wonderful little joys and delights. Hmm, ah, yes, excellent, splendid, harrumph, egad!" And he stood swaying in the middle of the room, eating his cake and looking at everyone with awe. He turned and looked around behind him. Everything amazed him, everything he saw. People talked in groups all around the room, and he said, "Yes! That's right!" A picture on the wall made him stiffen to attention. He went up and looked closer, he backed up, he stooped, he jumped up, he wanted to see from all possible levels and angles, he tore at his T-shirt in exclamation, "Damn!" He had no idea of the impression he was making and cared less. People were now beginning to look at Dean with maternal and paternal affection glowing in their faces. He was finally an Angel, as I always knew he would become; but like any Angel he still had rages and furies, and that night when we all left the party and repaired to the Windsor bar in one vast brawling gang, Dean became frantically and demoniacally and seraphically drunk.

Remember that the Windsor, once Denver's great Gold Rush' hotel and in many respects a point of interest-in the big saloon downstairs bullet holes are still in the walls-had once been Dean's home. He'd lived here with his father in one of the rooms upstairs. He was no tourist. He drank in this saloon like the ghost of his father; he slopped down wine, beer, and whisky like water. His face got red and sweaty and he bellowed and hollered at the bar and staggered across the dance-floor where honkytonkers of the West danced with girls and tried to play the piano, and he threw his arms around ex-cons and shouted with them in the uproar. Meanwhile everybody in our party sat around two immense tables stuck together. There were Denver D. Doll, Dorothy and Roy Johnson, a girl from Buffalo, Wyoming, who was Dorothy's friend, Stan, Tim Gray, Babe, me, Ed Dunkel, Tom Snark, and several others, thirteen in all. Doll was having a great time: he took a peanut machine and set it on the table before him and poured pennies in it and ate peanuts. He suggested we all write something on a penny postcard and mail it to Carlo Marx in New York. We wrote crazy things. The fiddle music whanged in the Larimer Street night. "Isn't it fun?" yelled Doll. In the men's room Dean and I punched the door and tried to break it but it was an inch thick. I cracked a bone in my middle finger and didn't even realize it till the next day. We were fumingly drunk. Fifty glasses of beer sat on our tables at one time. All you had to do was rush around and sip from each one. Canyon City ex-cons reeled and gabbled with us. In the foyer outside the saloon old former prospectors sat dreaming over their canes under the tocking old clock. This fury had been known by them in greater days. Everything swirled. There were scattered parties everywhere. There was even a party in a castle to which we all drove-except Dean, who ran off elsewhere-and in this castle we sat at a great table in the hall and shouted. There were a swimming pool and grottoes outside. I had finally found the castle where the great snake of the world was about to rise up.

Then in the late night it was just Dean and I and Stan Shephard and Tim Gray and Ed Dunkel and Tommy Snark in one car and everything ahead of us. We went to Mexican town, we went to Five Points, we reeled around. Stan Shephard was out of his mind with joy. He kept yelling, "Sonofabitch! Hot damn!" in a high squealing voice and slapping his knees. Dean was mad about him. He repeated everything Stan said and phewed and wiped the sweat off his face. "Are we gonna get our kicks, Sal, travelin down to Mexico with this cat Stan! Yes!" It was our last night in holy Denver, we made it big and wild. It all ended up with wine in the basement by candlelight, and Charity creeping around upstairs in her nightgown with a flashlight. We had a colored guy with us now, called himself Gomez. He floated around Five Points and didn't give a damn. When we saw him, Tommy Snark called out, "Hey, is your name Johnny?"

Gomez just backed up and passed us once more and said, "Now will you repeat what you said?"

"I said are you the guy they call Johnny?"

Gomez floated back and tried again. "Does this look a little more like him? Because I'm tryin my best to be Johnny but I just can't find the way."

"Well, man, come on with us!" cried Dean, and Gomez jumped in and we were off. We whispered frantically in the basement so as not to create disturbance with the neighbors. At nine o'clock in the morning everybody had left except Dean and Shephard, who were still yakking like maniacs. People got up to make breakfast and heard strange subterranean voices saying, "Yes! Yes!" Babe cooked a big breakfast. The time was coming to scat off to Mexico.

Dean took the car to the nearest station and had everything shipshape. It was a '37 Ford sedan with the right-side door unhinged and tied on the frame. The right-side front seat was also broken, and you sat there leaning back with your face to the tattered roof. "Just like Min 'n' Bill," said Dean. "We'll go coughing and bouncing down to Mexico; it'll take us days and days." I looked over the map: a total of over a thousand miles, mostly Texas, to the border at Laredo, and then another 767 miles through all Mexico to the great city near the cracked Isthmus and Oaxacan heights. I couldn't imagine this trip. It was the most fabulous of all. It was no longer east-west, but magic south. We saw a vision of the entire Western Hemisphere rockribbing clear down to Tierra del Fuego and us flying down the curve of the world into other tropics and otherworlds. "Man, this will finally take us to IT!" said Dean with definite faith. He tapped my arm. "Just wait and see. Hoo! Wheel"

I went with Shephard to conclude the last of his Denver business, and met his poor grandfather, who stood in the door of the house, saying, "Stan-Stan-Stan."

"What is it, Granpaw?"

"Don't go."

"Oh, it's settled, I have to go now; why do you have to do that?" The old man had gray hair and large almond eyes and a tense, mad neck.

"Stan," he simply said, "don't go. Don't make your old grandfather cry. Don't leave me alone again." It broke my heart to see all this.

"Dean," said the old man, addressing me, "don't take my Stan away from me. I used to take him to the park when he was a little boy and explain the swans to him. Then his little sister drowned in the same pond. I don't want you to take my boy away."

"No," said Stan, "we're leaving now. Good-by." He struggled with his grips.

His grandfather took him by the arm. "Stan, Stan, Stan, don't go, don't go, don't go."

We fled with our heads bowed, and the old man still stood in the doorway of his Denver side-street cottage with the beads hanging in the doors and the overstaffed furniture in the parlor. He was as white as a sheet. He was still calling Stan. There was something paralyzed about his movements, and he did nothing about leaving the doorway, but just stood in it, muttering, "Stan," and "Don't go," and looking after us anxiously as we rounded the corner.

"God, Shep, I don't know what to say."

"Never mind!" Stan moaned. "He's always been like that."

We met Stan's mother at the bank, where she was drawing money for him. She was a lovely white-haired woman, still very young in appearance. She and her son stood on the marble floor of the bank, whispering. Stan was wearing a levi outfit, jacket and all, and looked like a man going to Mexico sureenough. This was his tender existence in Denver, and he was going off with the naming tyro Dean. Dean came popping around the corner and met us just on time. Mrs. Shephard insisted on buying us all a cup of coffee.

"Take care of my Stan," she said. "No telling what things might happen in that country."

"We'll all watch over each other," I said. Stan and his mother strolled on ahead, and I walked in back with crazy Dean; he was telling me about the inscriptions carved on toilet walls in the East and in the West.

"They're entirely different; in the East they make cracks and corny jokes and obvious references, scatological bits of data and drawings; in the West they just write their names, Red O'Hara, Blufftown Montana, came by here, date, real solemn, like, say, Ed Dunkel, the reason being the enormous loneliness that differs just a shade and cut hair as you move across the Mississippi." Well, there was a lonely guy in front of us, for Shephard's mother was a lovely mother and she hated to see her son go but knew he had to go. I saw he was fleeing his grandfather. Here were the three of us-Dean looking for his father, mine dead, Stan fleeing his old one, and going off into the night together. He kissed his mother in the rushing crowds of 17th and she got in a cab and waved at us. Good-by, good-by.

We got in the car at Babe's and said good-by to her. Tim was riding with us to his house outside town. Babe was beautiful that day; her hair was long and blond and Swedish, her freckles showed in the sun. She looked exactly like the little girl she had been. There was a mist in her eyes. She might join us later with Tim-but she didn't. Good-by, good-by.

We roared off. We left Tim in his yard on the Plains outside town and I looked back to watch Tim Gray recede on the plain. That strange guy stood there for a full two minutes watching us go away and thinking God knows what sorrowful thoughts. He grew smaller and smaller, and still he stood motionless with one hand on a washline, like a captain, and I was twisted around to see more of Tim Gray till there was nothing but a growing absence in space, and the space was the eastward view toward Kansas that led all the way back to my home in Atlantis.

Now we pointed our rattly snout south and headed for Castle Rock, Colorado, as the sun turned red and the rock of the mountains to the west looked like a Brooklyn brewery in November dusks. Far up in the purple shades of the rock there was someone walking, walking, but we could not see; maybe that old man with the white hair I had sensed years ago up in the peaks. Zacatecan Jack. But he was coming closer to me, if only ever just behind. And Denver receded back of us like the city of salt, her smokes breaking up in the air and dissolving to our sight.

4

It was May. And how can homely afternoons in Colorado with its farms and irrigation ditches and shady dells -the places where little boys go swimming-produce a bug like the bug that bit Stan Shephard? He had his arm draped over the broken door and was riding along and talking happily when suddenly a bug flew into his arm and embedded a long stinger in it that made him howl. It had come out of an American afternoon. He yanked and slapped at his arm and dug out the stinger, and in a few minutes his arm had begun to swell and hurt. Dean and I couldn't figure what it was. The thing was to wait and see if the swelling went down. Here we were, heading for unknown southern lands, and barely three miles out of hometown, poor old hometown of childhood, a strange feverish exotic bug rose from secret corruptions and sent fear into our hearts. "What is it?"

"I've never known of a bug around here that can make a swelling like that."

"Damn!" It made the trip seem sinister and doomed. We drove on. Stan's arm got worse. We'd stop at the first hospital and have him get a shot of penicillin. We passed Castle Rock, came to Colorado Springs at dark. The great shadow of Pike's Peak loomed to our right. We bowled down the Pueblo highway. "I've hitched thousands and thousands of times on this road," said Dean. "I hid behind that exact wire fence there one night when I suddenly took fright for no reason whatever."

We all decided to tell our stories, but one by one, and Stan was first. "We've got a long way to go," preambled Dean, "and so you must take every indulgence and deal with every single detail you can bring to mind-and still h won't all be told. Easy, easy," he cautioned Stan, who began telling his story, "you've got to relax too." Stan swung into his life story as we shot across the dark. He started with his experiences in France but to round out ever-growing difficulties he came back and started at the beginning with his boyhood in Denver. He and Dean compared times they'd seen each other zooming around on bicycles. "One time you've forgotten, I know-Arapahoe Garage? Recall? I bounced a ball at you on the corner and you knocked it back to me with your fist and it went in the sewer. Grammar days. Now recall?" Stan was nervous and feverish. He wanted to tell Dean everything. Dean was now arbiter, old man, judge, listener, approver, nodder. "Yes, yes, go on please." We passed Walsenburg; suddenly we passed Trinidad, where Chad King was somewhere off the road in front of a campfire with perhaps a handful of anthropologists and as of yore he too was telling his life story and never dreamed we were passing at that exact moment on the highway, headed for Mexico, telling our own stories. O sad American night! Then we were in New Mexico and passed the rounded rocks of Raton and stopped at a diner, ravingly hungry for hamburgers, some of which we wrapped in a napkin to eat over the border below. "The whole vertical state of Texas lies before us, Sal," said Dean. "Before we made it horizontal.

Every bit as long. We'll be in Texas in a few minutes and won't be out till tomorrow this time and won't stop driving. Think of it."

We drove on. Across the immense plain of night lay the first Texas town, Dalhart, which I'd crossed in 1947. It lay glimmering on the dark floor of the earth, fifty miles away. The land by moonlight was all mesquite and wastes. On the horizon was the moon. She fattened, she grew huge and rusty, she mellowed and rolled, till the morning star contended and dews began to blow in our windows-and still we rolled. After Dalhart-empty crackerbox town-we bowled for Amarillo, and reached it in the morning among windy panhandle grasses that only a few years ago waved around a collection of buffalo tents. Now there were gas stations and new 1950 jukeboxes with immense ornate snouts and ten-cent slots and awful songs. All the way from Amarillo to Childress, Dean and I pounded plot after plot of books we'd read into Stan, who asked for it because he wanted to know. At Childress in the hot sun we turned directly south on a lesser road and highballed across abysmal wastes to Paducah, Guthrie, and Abilene, Texas. Now Dean had to sleep, and Stan and I sat in the front seat and drove. The old car burned and bopped and struggled on. Great clouds of gritty wind blew at us from shimmering spaces. Stan rolled right along with stories about Monte Carlo and Cagnes-sur-Mer and the blue places near Menton where dark-faced people wandered among white walls.

Texas is undeniable: we burned slowly into Abilene and all woke up to look at it. "Imagine living in this town a thousand miles from cities. Whoop, whoop, over there by the tracks, old town Abilene where they shipped the cows and shot it up for gumshoes and drank red-eye. Look out there!" yelled Dean out the window with his mouth contorted like W. C. Fields. He didn't care about Texas or any place. Red-faced Texans paid him no mind and hurried along the burning sidewalks. We stopped to eat on the highway south of town. Nightfall seemed like a million miles away as we resumed for Coleman and Brady-the heart of Texas, only, wildernesses of brush with an occasional house near a thirsty creek and a fifty-mile dirt road detour and endless heat. "Old dobe Mexico's a long way away," said Dean sleepily from the back seat, "so keep her rolling, boys, and we'll be kissing senoritas b'dawn 'cause this old Ford can roll if y'know how to talk to her and ease her along-except the back end's about to fall but don't worry about it till we get there." And he went to sleep.

I took the wheel and drove to Fredericksburg, and here again I was crisscrossing the old map again, same place Marylou and I had held hands on a snowy morning in 1949, and where was Marylou now? "Blow!" yelled Dean in a dream and I guess he was dreaming of Frisco jazz and maybe Mexican mambo to come. Stan talked and talked; Dean had wound him up the night before and now he was never going to stop. He was in England by now, relating adventures hitchhiking on the English road, London to Liverpool, with his hair long and his pants ragged, and strange British truck-drivers giving him lifts in glooms of the Europe void. We were all red-eyed from the continual mistral-winds of old Tex-ass. There was a rock in each of our bellies and we knew we were getting there, if slowly. The car pushed forty with shuddering effort. From Fredericksburg we descended the great western high plains. Moths began smashing our windshield. "Getting down into the hot country now, boys, the desert rats and the tequila. And this is my first time this far south in Texas," added Dean with wonder. "Gawd-damn! this is where my old man comes in the wintertime, sly old bum."

Suddenly we were in absolutely tropical heat at the bottom of a five-mile-long hill, and up ahead we saw the lights of old San Antonio. You had the feeling all this used to be Mexican territory indeed. Houses by the side of the road were different, gas stations beater, fewer lamps. Dean delightedly took the wheel to roll us into San Antonio. We entered town in a wilderness of Mexican rickety southern shacks without cellars and with old rocking chairs on the porch. We stopped at a mad gas station to get a grease job. Mexicans were standing around in the hot light of the overhead bulbs that were blackened by valley summerbugs, reaching down into a soft-drink box and pulling out beer bottles and throwing the money to the attendant. Whole families lingered around doing this. All around there were shacks and drooping trees and a wild cinnamon smell in the air. Frantic teenage Mexican girls came by with boys. "Hoo!" yelled Dean. "Si! Mariana!" Music was coming from all sides, and all kinds of music. Stan and I drank several bottles of beer and got high. We were already almost out of America and yet definitely in it and in the middle of where it's maddest. Hotrods blew by. San Antonio, ah-haa!

"Now, men, listen to me-we might as well goof a coupla hours in San Antone and so we will go and find a hospital clinic for Stan's arm and you and I, Sal, will cut around and get these streets dug-look at those houses across the street, you can see right into the front room and all the purty daughters layin around with True Love magazines, wheel Come, let's go!"

We drove around aimlessly awhile and asked people for the nearest hospital clinic. It was near downtown, where things looked more sleek and American, several semi-skyscrapers and many neons and chain drugstores, yet with cars crashing through from the dark around town as if there were no traffic laws. We parked the car in the hospital driveway and I went with Stan to see an intern while Dean stayed in the car and changed. The hall of the hospital was full of poor Mexican women, some of them pregnant, some of them sick or bringing their little sick kiddies. It was sad. I thought of poor Terry and wondered what she was doing now. Stan had to wait an /entire hour till an intern came along and looked at his swollen arm. There was a name for the infection he had, but none of us bothered to pronounce it. They gave him a shot of penicillin.

Meanwhile Dean and I went out to dig the streets of Mexican San Antonio. It was fragrant and soft-the softest air I'd ever known-and dark, and mysterious, and buzzing. Sudden figures of girls in white bandannas appeared in the humming dark. Dean crept along and said not a word. "Oh, this is too wonderful to do anything!" he whispered. "Let's just creep along and see everything. Look! Look! A crazy San Antonio f pool shack." We went in. A dozen boys were shooting pool at three tables, all Mexicans. Dean and I bought Cokes and shoved nickels in the jukebox and played Wynonie Blues Harris and Lionel Hampton and Lucky Millinder and jumped. Meanwhile Dean warned me to watch.

"Dig, now, out of the corner of your eye and as we listen to Wynonie blow about his baby's pudding and as we also smell the soft air as you say-dig the kid, the crippled kid shooting pool at table one, the butt of the joint's jokes, y'see, he's been the butt all his life. The other fellows are merciless but they love him."

The crippled kid was some kind of malformed midget with a great big beautiful face, much too large, in which enormous brown eyes moistly gleamed. "Don't you see, Sal, a San Antonio Mex Tom Snark, the same story the world over. See, they hit him on the ass with a cue? Ha-ha-ha! hear them laugh. You see, he wants to win the game, he's bet four bits. Watch! Watch!" We watched as the angelic young midget aimed for a bank shot. He missed. The other fellows roared. "Ah, man," said Dean, "and now watch." They had the little boy by the scruff of the neck and were mauling him around, playful. He squealed. He stalked out in the night but not without a backward bashful, sweet glance. "Ah, man, I'd love to know that gone little cat and what he thinks and what kind of girls he has -oh, man, I'm high on this air!" We wandered out and negotiated several dark, mysterious blocks. Innumerable houses hid behind verdant, almost jungle-like yards; we saw glimpses of girls in front rooms, girls on porches, girls in the bushes with boys. "I never knew this mad San Antonio! Think what Mexico'll be like! Lessgo! Lessgo!" We rushed back to the hospital. Stan was ready and said he felt much better. We put our arms around him and told him everything we'd done.

And now we were ready for the last hundred and fifty miles to the magic border. We leaped into the car and off. I was so exhausted by now I slept all the way through Dilley and Encinal to Laredo and didn't wake up till they were parking the car in front of a lunchroom at two o'clock in the morning. "Ah," sighed Dean, "the end of Texas, the end of America, we don't know no more." It was tremendously hot: we were all sweating buckets. There was no night dew, not a breath of air, nothing except billions of moths smashing at bulbs everywhere and the low, rank smell of a hot river in the night nearby-the Rio Grande, that begins in cool Rocky Mountain dales and ends up fashioning world-valleys to mingle its heats with the Mississippi muds in the great Gulf.

Laredo was a sinister town that morning. All kinds of cab-drivers and border rats wandered around, looking for opportunities. There weren't many; it was too late. It was the bottom and dregs of America where all the heavy villains sink, where disoriented people have to go to be near a specific elsewhere they can slip into unnoticed. Contraband brooded in the heavy syrup air. Cops were red-faced and sullen and sweaty, no swagger. Waitresses were dirty and disgusted. Just beyond, you could feel the enormous presence of whole great Mexico and almost smell the billion tortillas frying and smoking in the night. We had no idea what Mexico would really be like. We were at sea level again, and when we tried to eat a snack we could hardly swallow it. I wrapped it up in napkins for the trip anyway. We felt awful and sad. But everything changed when we crossed the mysterious bridge over the river and our wheels rolled on official Mexican soil, though it wasn't anything but car way for border inspection. Just across the street Mexico began. We looked with wonder. To our amazement, it looked exactly like Mexico. It was three in the morning, and fellows in straw hats and white pants were lounging by the dozen against battered pocky storefronts.

"Look-at-those-cats!" whispered Dean, "Oo," he breathed softly, "wait, wait." The Mexican officials came out, grinning, and asked please if we would take out our baggage. We did. We couldn't take our eyes from across the street. We were longing to rush right up there and get lost in those mysterious Spanish streets. It was only Nuevo Laredo but it looked like Holy Lhasa to us. "Man, those guys are up all night," whispered Dean. We hurried to get our papers straightened. We were warned not to drink tapwater now we were over the border. The Mexicans looked at our baggage in a desultory way. They weren't like officials at all. They were lazy and tender. Dean couldn't stop staring at them. He turned to me.

"See how the cops are in this country. I can't believe it!" He rubbed his eyes. "I'm dreaming." Then it was time to change our money. We saw great stacks of pesos on a table and learned that eight of them made an American buck, or thereabouts. We changed most of our money and stuffed the big rolls in our pockets with delight.

5

Then we turned our faces to Mexico with bashful-ness and wonder as those dozens of Mexican cats watched us from under their secret hatbrims in the night. Beyond were music and all-night restaurants with smoke pouring out of the door. "Whee," whispered Dean very softly.

"Thassall!" A Mexican official grinned. "You boys all set. Go ahead. Welcome Mehico. Have good time. Watch you money. Watch you driving. I say this to you personal, I'm Red, everybody call me Red. Ask for Red. Eat good. Don't worry. Everything fine. Is not hard enjoin yourself in Mehico."

"Yes!" shuddered Dean and off we went across the street into Mexico on soft feet. We left the car parked, and all three of us abreast went down the Spanish street into the middle of the dull brown lights. Old men sat on chairs in the night and looked like Oriental junkies and oracles. No one was actually looking at us, yet everybody was aware of everything we did. We turned sharp left into the smoky lunchroom and went in to music of campo guitars on an American 'thirties jukebox. Shirt-sleeved Mexican cabdrivers and straw-hatted Mexican hipsters sat at stools, devouring shapeless messes of tortillas, beans, tacos, whatnot. We bought three bottles of cold beer-cerveza was the name of beer-for about thirty Mexican cents"; or ten American cents each. We bought packs of Mexican cigarettes for six cents each. We gazed and gazed at our wonderful Mexican money that went so far, and played with it and looked around and smiled at everyone. Behind us lay the whole of America and everything Dean and I had previously known: about life, and life on the road. We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic. "Think of these cats staying up all hours of the night," whispered Dean. "And think of this big continent ahead of us with those enormous Sierra Madre mountains we saw in the movies, and the jungles all the way down and a whole desert plateau as big as ours and reaching clear down to Guatemala and God knows where, whoo! What'll we do? What'll we do? Let's move!" We got out and went back to the car. One last glimpse of America across the hot lights of the Rio Grande bridge, and we turned our back and fender to it and roared off.

Instantly we were out in the desert and there wasn't light or a car for fifty miles across the flats. And just the dawn was coming over the Gulf of Mexico and we began see the ghostly shapes of yucca cactus and organpipe on all sides. "What a wild country!" I yelped. Dean and I were completely awake. In Laredo we'd been half dead. Stan, who'd been to foreign countries before, just calmly slept in back seat. Dean and I had the whole of Mexico before us.

"Now, Sal, we're leaving everything behind us and entering a new and unknown phase of things. All the years and troubles! and kicks-and now this! so that we can safely think of nothing else and just go on ahead with our faces stuck out like this you see, and understand the world as, really and genuine! speaking, other Americans haven't done before us-they were here, weren't they? The Mexican war. Cutting across here with cannon."

"This road," I told him, "is also the route of old American 1 outlaws who used to skip over the border and go down to old Monterrey, so if you'll look out on that graying desert and picture the ghost of an old Tombstone hellcat making lonely exile gallop into the unknown, you'll see further . . ." "It's the world," said Dean. "My God!" he cried, slapping the wheel. "It's the world! We can go right on to South America if the road goes. Think of it! Son-of-z-bitch! Gawd-damm!" We rushed on. The dawn spread immediately and we began to see the white sand of the desert and occasional huts in the distance off the road. Dean slowed down to peer at them. "Real beat huts, man, the kind you only find in Death Valley and much worse. These people don't bother with appearances." The first town ahead that had any consequence on the map was called Sabinas Hidalgo. We looked forward to it -eagerly. "And the road don't look any different than the American road," cried Dean, "except one mad thing and if you'll notice, right here, the mileposts are written in kilometers and they click off the distance to Mexico City. See, it's the only city in the entire land, everything points to it." There were only 767 more miles to that metropolis; in kilometers the figure was over a thousand. "Damn! I gotta go!" cried Dean. For a while I closed my eyes in utter exhaustion and kept hearing Dean pound the wheel with his fists and say, "Damn," and "What kicks!" and "Oh, what a land!" and "Yes!" We arrived at Sabinas Hidalgo, across the desert, at about seven o'clock in the morning. We slowed down completely to see this. We woke up Stan in the back seat. We sat up straight to dig. The main street was muddy and full of holes. On each side were dirty broken-down adobe fronts. Burros walked in the street with packs. Barefoot women watched us from dark doorways. The street was completely crowded with people on foot beginning a new day in the Mexican countryside. Old men with handlebar mustaches stared at us. The sight of three bearded, bedraggled American youths instead of the usual well-dressed tourists was of unusual interest to them. We bounced along over Main Street at ten miles an hour, taking everything in. A group of girls walked directly in front of us. As we bounced by, one of them said, "Where you going, man?"

I turned to Dean, amazed. "Did you hear what she said?" Dean was so astounded he kept on driving slowly and saying, "Yes, I heard what she said, I certainly damn well did, oh me, oh my, I don't know what to do I'm so excited and sweetened in this morning world. We've finally got to heaven. It-couldn't be cooler, it couldn't be grander, it couldn't be any-thing."

"Well, let's go back and pick em up!" I said.

"Yes," said Dean and drove right on at five miles an hour. He was knocked out, he didn't have to do the usual things he-would have done in America. "There's millions of them all along the road!" he said. Nevertheless he U-turned and came by the girls again. They were headed for work in the fields;, they smiled at us. Dean stared at them with rocky eyes. "Damn," he said under his breath. "Oh! This is too great to be true. Gurls, gurls. And particularly right now in my stage and condition, Sal, I am digging the interiors of these homes as we pass them-these gone doorways and you look inside and see beds of straw and little brown kids sleeping and stirring to wake, their thoughts congealing from the empty mind of sleep, their selves rising, and the mothers cooking up breakfast in iron pots, and dig them shutters they have for windows and the old men, the old men are so cool and grand and not bothered by anything. There's no suspicion here, nothing like that. Everybody's cool, everybody looks at you with such straight brown eyes and they don't say anything, just look, and in that look all of the human qualities are soft and subdued and still there. Dig all the foolish stories you read about Mexico and the sleeping gringo and all that crap)-and crap about greasers and so on-and all it is, people here are straight and kind and don't put down any bull. I'm so amazed by this." Schooled in the raw road night, Dean was come into the world to see it. He bent over the wheel and looked both ways and rolled along slowly. We stopped for gas the other side of Sabinas Hidalgo. Here a congregation of local straw-hatted ranchers with handlebar mustaches growled and joked in front of antique gas-pumps. Across the fields an old man plodded with a burro in front of his switch stick. The sun rose pure on pure and ancient activities of human life. Now we resumed the road to Monterrey. The great mountains rose snow-capped before us; we bowled right for them. A gap widened and wound up a pass and we went with it. In a matter of minutes we were out of the mesquite desert and climbing among cool airs in a road with a stone wall along the precipice side and great whitewashed names of presidents on the cliff sides-ALEMAN! We met nobody on this high road. It wound among the clouds and took us to the great plateau on top. Across this plateau the big manufacturing town of Monterrey sent smoke to the blue skies with their enormous Gulf clouds written across the bowl of day like fleece. Entering Monterrey was like entering Detroit, among great long walls of factories, except for the burros that sunned in the grass before them and the sight of thick city adobe neighborhoods with thousands of shifty hipsters hanging around doorways and whores looking out of windows and strange shops that might have sold anything and narrow sidewalks crowded with Hong Kong-like humanity. "Yow!" yelled Dean. "And all in that sun. Have you dug this Mexican sun, Sal? It makes you high. Whoo! I want to get on and on-this road drives me!!" We mentioned stopping in the excitements of Monterrey, but Dean wanted to make extra-special time to get to Mexico City, and besides he knew the road would get more interesting, especially ahead, always ahead. He drove like a fiend and never rested. Stan and I were completely bushed and gave it up and had to sleep. I looked up outside Monterrey and saw enormous weird twin peaks beyond Old Monterrey, beyond where the outlaws went.

Montemorelos was ahead, a descent again to hotter altitudes. It grew exceedingly hot and strange. Dean absolutely had to wake me up to see this. "Look, Sal, you must not miss." I looked. We were going through swamps and alongside the road at ragged intervals strange Mexicans in tattered rags walked along with machetes hanging from their rope belts, and some of them cut at the bushes. They all stopped to watch us without expression. Through the tangled bush we occasionally saw thatched huts with African-like bamboo walls, just stick huts. Strange young girls, dark as the moon, stared from mysterious verdant doorways. "Oh, man, I want to stop and twiddle thumbs with the little darlings," cried Dean, "but notice the old lady or the old man is always somewhere around-in the back usually, sometimes a hundred yards, gathering twigs and wood or tending animals. They're never alone. Nobody's ever alone in this country. While you've been sleeping I've been digging this road and this country, and if I could only tell you all the thoughts I've had, man!" He was sweating. His eyes were red-streaked and mad and also subdued and tender-he had found people like himself. We bowled right through the endless swamp country at a steady forty-five. "Sal, I think the country won't change for a long time. If you'll drive, I'll sleep now."

I took the wheel and drove among reveries of my own, through Linares, through hot, flat swamp country, across the steaming Rio Soto la Marina near Hidalgo, and on. A great verdant jungle valley with long fields of green crops opened before me. Groups of men watched us pass from a narrow old-fashioned bridge. The hot river flowed. Then we rose in altitude till a kind of desert country began reappearing. The city of Gregoria was ahead. The boys were sleeping, and 1 was alone in my eternity at the wheel, and the road ran straight as an arrow. Not like driving across Carolina, or Texas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into the places where we would finally learn ourselves among the Fellahin Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world from Malaya (the long fingernail of China) to India the great subcontinent to Arabia to Morocco to the selfsame deserts and jungles of Mexico and over the waves to Polynesia to mystic Siam of the Yellow Robe and on around, on around, so that you hear the same mournful wail by the rotted walls of Cadiz, Spain, that you hear 12,000 miles around in the depths of Benares the Capital of the World. These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of silly civilized American lore-they had high cheekbones, and slanted f eyes, and soft ways; they were not fools, they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it. The waves are Chinese, but the earth is an Indian thing. As essential as rocks in the desert are they in the desert of "history." And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land; they knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment. For when destruction comes to the world of "history" and the Apocalypse of the Fellahin returns once more as so many times before, people will still stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well as from the caves of Bali, where it all began and where Adam was suckled and taught to know. These were my growing thoughts as I drove the car into the hot, sunbaked town of Gregoria.

Earlier, back at San Antonio, I had promised Dean, as a joke, that I would get him a girl. It was a bet and a challenge. As I pulled up the car at the gas station near sunny Gregoria a kid came across the road on tattered feet, carrying an enormous windshield-shade, and wanted to know if I'd buy. "You like? Sixty peso. Habla Espanol? Sesenta peso. My name Victor."

"Nah," I said jokingly, "buy senorita."

"Sure, sure!" he cried excitedly. "I get you gurls, onny-time. Too hot now," he added with distaste. "No good gurls when hot day. Wait tonight. You like shade?"

I didn't want the shade but I wanted the girls. I woke up Dean. "Hey, man, I told you in Texas I'd get you a girl- all right, stretch your bones and wake up, boy; we've got girls waiting for us."

"What? what?" he cried, leaping up, haggard. "Where? where?"

"This boy Victor's going to show us where."

"Well, lessgo, lessgo!" Dean leaped out of the car and clasped Victor's hand. There was a group of other boys hanging around the station and grinning, half of them barefoot, all wearing floppy straw hats. "Man," said Dean to me, "ain't this a nice way to spend an afternoon. It's so much cooler than Denver poolhalls. Victor, you got gurls? Where? A donde?" he cried in Spanish. "Dig that, Sal, I'm speaking Spanish."

"Ask him if we can get any tea. Hey kid, you got ma-ree-wa-na?"

The kid nodded gravely. "Sho, onnytime, mon. Come with me."

"Hee! Wheel Hoo!" yelled Dean. He was wide awake and jumping up and down in that drowsy Mexican street. "Let's all go!" I was passing Lucky Strikes to the other boys. They were getting great pleasure out of us and especially Dean. They turned to one another with cupped hands and rattled off comments about the mad American cat. "Dig them, Sal, talking about us and digging. Oh my goodness, what a world!" Victor got in the car with us, and we lurched off. Stan Shephard had been sleeping soundly and woke up to this madness.

We drove way out to the desert the other side of town and turned on a rutty dirt road that made the car bounce as never before. Up ahead was Victor's house. It sat on the edge of cactus flats overtopped by a few trees, just an adobe cracker-box, with a few men lounging around in the yard. "Who that?" cried Dean, all excited.

"Those my brothers. My mother there too. My sistair too. That my family. I married, I live downtown."

"What about your mother?" Dean flinched. "What she say about marijuana."

"Oh, she get it for me." And as we waited in the car Victor got out and loped over to the house and said a few words to an old lady, who promptly turned and went to the garden in back and began gathering dry fronds of marijuana that had been pulled off the plants and left to dry in the desert sun. Meanwhile Victor's brothers grinned from under a tree. They were coming over to meet us but it would take a while for them to get up and walk over. Victor came back, grinning sweetly.

"Man," said Dean, "that Victor is the sweetest, gonest, franticest little bangtail cat I've ever in all my life met. Just look at him, look at his cool slow walk. There's no need to hurry around here." A steady, insistent desert breeze blew into the car. It was very hot.

"You see how hot?" said Victor, sitting down with Dean in the front seat and pointing up at the burning roof of the Ford. "You have ma-ree-gwana and it no hot no more. You wait."

"Yes," said Dean, adjusting his dark glasses, "I wait. For sure, Victor m'boy."

Presently Victor's tall brother came ambling along with some weed piled on a page of newspaper. He dumped it on Victor's lap and leaned casually on the door of the car to nod and smile at us and say, "Hallo." Dean nodded and smiled pleasantly at him. Nobody talked; it was fine. Victor proceeded to roll the biggest bomber anybody ever saw. He rolled (using brown bag paper) what amounted to a tremendous Corona cigar of tea. It was huge. Dean stared at it, popeyed. Victor casually lit it and passed it around. To drag on this thing was like leaning over a chimney and inhaling. It blew into your throat in one great blast of heat. We held our breaths and all let out just about simultaneously. Instantly we were all high. The sweat froze on our foreheads and it was suddenly like the beach at Acapulco. I looked out the back window of the car, and another and the strangest of Victor's brothers-a tall Peruvian of an Indian with a sash over his shoulder-leaned grinning on a post, too bashful to come up and shake hands. It seemed the car was surrounded by brothers, for another one appeared on Dean's side. Then the strangest thing happened. Everybody became so high that usual formalities were dispensed with and the things of immediate interest were concentrated on, and now it was the strangeness of Americans and Mexicans blasting together on the desert and, more than that, the strangeness of seeing in close proximity the faces and pores of skins and calluses of fingers and general abashed cheekbones of another world. So the Indian brothers began talking about us in low voices and commenting; you saw them look, and size, and compare mutualities of impression, or correct and modify, "Yeh, yeh", while Dean and Stan and I commented on them in English.

"Will you d-i-g that weird brother in the back that hasn't moved from that post and hasn't by one cut hair diminished the intensity of the glad funny bashfulness of his smile? And the one to my left here, older, more sure of himself but sad. like hung-up, like a bum even maybe, in town, while Victor is respectably married-he's like a gawddam Egyptian king, that you see. These guys are real cats. Ain't never seen anything like it. And they're talking and wondering about us, like see? Just like we are but with a difference of their own, their interest probably resolving around how we're dressed- same as ours, really-but the strangeness of the things we have in the car and the strange ways that we laugh so different from them, and maybe even the way we smell compared to them. Nevertheless I'd give my eye-teeth to know what they're saying about us." And Dean tried. "Hey Victor, man -what you brother say just then?"

Victor turned mournful high brown eyes on Dean. "Yeah, yeah."

"No, you didn't understand my question. What you boys talking about?"

"Oh," said Victor with great perturbation, "you no like this mar-gwana?"

"Oh, yeah, yes fine! What you talk about?"

"Talk? Yes, we talk. How you like Mexico?" It was hard to come around without a common language. And everybody grew quiet and cool and high again and just enjoyed the breeze from the desert and mused separate national and racial and personal high-eternity thoughts.

It was time for the girls. The brothers eased back to their station under the tree, the mother watched from her sunny doorway, and we slowly bounced back to town.

But now the bouncing was no longer unpleasant; it was the most pleasant and graceful billowy trip in the world, as over a blue sea, and Dean's face was suffused with an unnatural glow that was like gold as he told us to understand the springs of the car now for the first time and dig the ride. Up and down we bounced, and even Victor understood and laughed. Then he pointed left to show which way to go for the girls, and Dean, looking left with indescribable delight and leaning that way, pulled the wheel around and rolled us smoothly and surely to the goal, meanwhile listening to Victor's attempt to speak and saying grandly and magniloquently "Yes, of course!

There's not a doubt in my mind! Decidedly, man! Oh, in­deed! Why, pish, posh, you say the dearest things to me! Of course! Yes! Please go on!" To this Victor talked gravely and with magnificent Spanish eloquence. For a mad moment I thought Dean was understanding everything he said by sheer wild insight and sudden revelatory genius inconceivably inspired by his glowing happiness. In that moment, too, he looked so exactly like Franklin Delano Roosevelt-some delusion in my flaming eyes and floating brain-that I drew up in my seat and gasped with amazement. In myriad pricklings of heavenly radiation I had to struggle to see Dean's figure, and he looked like God. I was so high I had to lean my head back on the seat; the bouncing of the car sent shivers of ecstasy through me. The mere thought of looking out the window at Mexico-which was now something else in my mind-was like recoiling from some gloriously riddled glittering treasure-box that you're afraid to look at because of your eyes, they bend inward, the riches and the treasures are too much to take all at once. I gulped. I saw streams of gold pouring through the sky and right across the tattered roof of the poor old car, right across my eyeballs and indeed right inside them; it was everywhere. I looked out the window at the hot, sunny streets and saw a woman in a doorway and I thought she was listening to every word we said and nodding to herself-routine paranoiac visions due to tea. But the stream of gold continued. For a long time I lost consciousness in my lower mind of what we were doing and only came around sometime later when I looked up from fire and silence like waking from sleep to the world, or waking from void to a dream, and they told me we were parked outside Victor's house and he was already at the door of the car with his little baby son in his arms, showing him to us.

"You see my baby? Hees name Perez, he six month age." "Why," said Dean, his face still transfigured into a shower of supreme pleasure and even bliss, "he is the prettiest child I have ever seen. Look at those eyes. Now, Sal and Stan," he said, turning to us with a serious and tender air, "I want you par-ti-cu-lar-ly to see the eyes of this little Mexican boy who is the son of our wonderful friend Victor, and notice how he will come to manhood with his own particular soul be­speaking itself through the windows which are his eyes, and such lovely eyes surely do prophesy and indicate the loveliest of souls." It was a beautiful speech. And it was a beautiful baby. Victor mournfully looked down at his angel. We all wished we had a little son like that. So great was our intensity over the child's soul that he sensed something and began a grimace which led to bitter tears and some unknown sorrow that we had no means to soothe because it reached too far back into innumerable mysteries and time. We tried everything; Victor smothered him in his neck and rocked, Dean cooed, I reached over and stroked the baby's little arms. His bawls grew louder. "Ah," said Dean, "I'm awfully sorry, Victor, that we've made him sad."

"He is not sad, baby cry." In the doorway in back of Victor, too bashful to come out, was his little barefoot wife, with anxious tenderness waiting for the babe to be put back in her arms so brown and soft. Victor, having shown us his child, climbed back into the car and proudly pointed to the right.

"Yes," said Dean, and swung the car over and directed it through narrow Algerian streets with faces on all sides watching us with gentle wonder. We came to the whorehouse. It was a magnificent establishment of stucco in the golden sun. In the street, and leaning on the windowsills that opened into the whorehouse, were two cops, saggy-trousered, drowsy, bored, who gave us brief interested looks as we walked in, and stayed there the entire three hours that we cavorted under their noses, until we came out at dusk and at Victor's bidding gave them the equivalent of twenty-four cents each, just for the sake of form.

And in there we found the girls. Some of them were reclining on couches across the dance floor, some of them were boozing at the long bar to the right. In the center an arch led into small cubicle shacks that looked like the places where you put on your bathing suit at public municipal beaches. These shacks were in the sun of the court. Behind the bar was the proprietor, a young fellow who instantly ran out when we told him we wanted to hear mambo music and came back with a stack of records, mostly by Perez Prado, and put them on over the loudspeaker. In an instant all the city of Gregoria could hear the good times going on at the Sala de Baile. In the hall itself the din of the music-for this is the real way to play a jukebox and what it was originally for-was so tremendous that it shattered Dean and Stan and me for a moment in the realization that we had never dared to play music as loud as we wanted, and this was how loud we wanted. It blew and shuddered directly at us. In a few minutes half that portion of town was at the windows, watching the Americanos dance with the gals. They all stood, side by side with the cops, on the dirt sidewalk, leaning in with indifference and casualness. "More Mambo Jambo," "Chattanooga de Mambo,"

"Mambo Numero Ocho"-all these tremendous numbers resounded and flared in the golden, mysterious afternoon like the sounds you expect to hear on the last day of the world and the Second Coming. The trumpets seemed so loud I thought they could hear them clear out in the desert, where the trumpets had originated anyway. The drums were mad. The mambo beat is the conga beat from Congo, the river of Africa and the world; it's really the world beat. Oom-ta, ta-poo-poom-oom-ta, ta-poo-poom. The piano montunos showered down on us from the speaker. The cries of the leader were like great gasps in the air. The final trumpet choruses that came with drum climaxes on conga and bongo drums, on the great mad Chattanooga record, froze Dean in his tracks for a moment till he shuddered and sweated; then when the trumpets bit the drowsy air with their quivering echoes, like a cavern's or a cave's, his eyes grew large and round as though seeing the devil, and he closed them tight. I myself was shaken like a puppet by it; I heard the trumpets flail the light I had seen and trembled in my boots.

On the fast "Mambo Jambo" we danced frantically with the girls. Through our deliriums we began to discern their varying personalities. They were great girls. Strangely the wildest one was half Indian, half white, and came from Venezuela, and only eighteen. She looked as if she came from a good family. What she was doing whoring in Mexico at that age and with that tender cheek and fair aspect, God knows. Some awful grief had driven her to it. She drank beyond all bounds. She threw down drinks when it seemed she was about to chuck up the last. She overturned glasses continually, the idea also being to make us spend' as much money as possible. Wearing her flimsy housecoat in broad afternoon, she frantically danced with Dean and clung about his neck and begged and begged for everything. Dean was so stoned he didn't know what to start with, girls or mambo. They ran off to the lockers. I was set upon by a fat and uninteresting girl with a puppy dog, who got sore at me when I took a dislike to the dog because it kept trying to bite me. She compromised by putting it away in the back, but by the time she returned I had been hooked by another girl, better looking but not the best, who clung to my neck like a leech. I was trying to break loose to get at a sixteen-year-old colored girl who sat gloomily inspecting her navel through an opening in her short shirty dress across the hall. I couldn't do it. Stan had a fifteen-year-old girl with an almond-colored skin and a dress that was buttoned halfway down and halfway up. It was mad. A good twenty men leaned in that window, watching.

At one point the mother of the little colored girl-not colored, but dark-came in to hold a brief and mournful convocation with her daughter. When I saw that, I was too ashamed to try for the one I really wanted. I let the leech take me off to the back, where, as in a dream, to the din and roar of more loudspeakers inside, we made the bed bounce a half-hour. It was just a square room with wooden slats and no ceiling, ikon in a corner, a washbasin in another. All up and down the dark hall the girls were calling, "Agua, agua caliente!" which means "hot water." Stan and Dean were also out of sight. My girl charged thirty pesos, or about three dollars and a half, and begged for an extra ten pesos and gave a long story about something. I didn't know the value of Mexican money; for all I knew I had a million pesos. I threw money at her. We rushed back to dance. A greater crowd was gathered in the Street. The cops looked as bored as usual. Dean's pretty Venezuelan dragged me through a door and into another strange bar that apparently belonged to the whorehouse. Here a young bartender was talking and wiping glasses and an old man with handlebar mustache sat discussing something earnestly. And here too the mambo roared over another loud* speaker. It seemed the whole world was turned on. Venezuela clung about my neck and begged for drinks. The bartender wouldn't give her one. She begged and begged, and when he gave it to her she spilled it and this time not on purpose, for I saw the chagrin in her poor sunken lost eyes. "Take it easy, baby," I told her. I had to support her on the stool; she kept slipping off. I've never seen a drunker woman, and only eighteen. I bought her another drink; she was tugging at my pants for mercy. She gulped it up. I didn't have the heart to try her. My own girl was about thirty and took care of herself better. With Venezuela writhing and suffering in my arms, I had a longing to take her in the back and undress her and only talk to her-this I told myself. I was delirious with want of her and the other little dark girl.

Poor Victor, all this time he stood on the brass rail of the bar with his back to the counter and jumped up and down gladly to see his three American friends cavort. We bought him drinks. His eyes gleamed for a woman but he wouldn't accept any, being faithful to his wife. Dean thrust money at him. In this welter of madness I had an opportunity to see what Dean was up to. He was so out of his mind he didn't know who I was when I peered at his face. "Yeah, yeah!" is all he said. It seemed it would never end. It was like a long, spectral Arabian dream in the afternoon in another life-Ali Baba and the alleys and the courtesans. Again I rushed off with my girl to her room; Dean and Stan switched the girls they'd had before; and we were out of sight a moment, and the spectators had to wait for the show to go on. The afternoon grew long and cool.

Soon it would be mysterious night in old gone Gregoria. The mambo never let up for a moment, it frenzied on like an endless journey in the jungle. I couldn't take my eyes off the little dark girl and the way, like a queen, she walked around and was even reduced by the sullen bartender to menial tasks such as bringing us drinks and sweeping the back. Of all the girls in there she needed the money most; maybe her mother had come to get money from her for her little infant/ sisters and brothers. Mexicans are poor. It never, never occurred to me just to approach her and give her some money. I have a feeling she would have taken it with a degree of scorn, and scorn from the likes of her made me flinch. In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; it was the same unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same reluctance and fear to approach. Strange that Dean and Stan also failed to approach her; her unimpeachable dignity was the thing that made her poor in a wild old whorehouse, and think of that. At one point I saw Dean leaning like a statue toward her, ready to fly, and befuddlement cross his face as she glanced coolly and imperiously his way and he stopped rubbing his belly and gaped and finally bowed his head. For she was the queen.

Now Victor suddenly clutched at our arms in the furor and made frantic signs.

"What's the matter?" He tried everything to make us understand. Then he ran to the bar and grabbed the check from the bartender, who scowled at him, and took it to us to see. The bill was over three hundred pesos, or thirty-six American dollars, which is a lot of money in any whorehouse. Still we couldn't sober up and didn't want to leave, and though we were all run out we still wanted to hang around with our lovely girls in this strange Arabian paradise we had finally found at the end of the hard, hard road. But night was coming and we had to get on to the end; and Dean saw that, and began frowning and thinking and trying to straighten himself out, and finally I broached the idea of leaving once and for all. "So much ahead of us, man, it won't make any difference."

"That's right!" cried Dean, glassy-eyed, and turned to his Venezuelan. She had finally passed out and lay on a wooden bench with her white legs protruding from the silk. The gallery in the window took advantage of the show; behind them red shadows were beginning to creep, and somewhere I heard a baby wail in a sudden lull, remembering I was in Mexico after all and not in a pornographic hasheesh daydream in heaven.

We staggered out; we had forgotten Stan; we ran back in to get him and found him charmingly bowing to the new evening whores, who had just come in for night shift. He wanted to start all over again. When he is drunk he lumbers like a man ten feet tall and when he is drunk he can't be dragged away from women. Moreover women cling to him like ivy. He insisted on staying and trying some of the newer, stranger, more proficient senoritas. Dean and I pounded him on the back and dragged him out. He waved profuse good-bys to everybody-the girls, the cops, the crowds, the children in the street outside; he blew kisses in all directions to ovations of Gregoria and staggered proudly among the gangs and tried to speak to them and communicate his joy and love of everything this fine afternoon of life. Everybody laughed; some slapped him on the back. Dean rushed over and paid the policemen the four pesos and shook hands and grinned and bowed with them. Then he jumped in the car, and the girls we had known, even Venezuela, who was wakened for the farewell, gathered around the car, huddling in their flimsy duds, and chattered good-bys and kissed us, and Venezuela even began to weep-though not for us, we knew, not altogether for us, yet enough and good enough. My dusky darling love had disappeared in the shadows inside. It was all over. We pulled out and left joys and celebrations over hundreds of pesos behind us, and it didn't seem like a bad day's work. The haunting mambo followed us a few blocks. It was all over. "Good-by, Gregoria!" cried Dean, blowing it a kiss.

Victor was proud of us and proud of himself. "Now yo-a like bath?" he asked. Yes, we all wanted wonderful bath.

And he directed us to the strangest thing in the world: it was an ordinary American-type bathhouse one mile out of town on the highway, full of kids splashing in a pool and showers inside a stone building for a few centavos a crack, with soap and towel from the attendant. Besides this, it was also a sad kiddy park with swings and a broken-down merry-go-round, and in the fading red sun it seemed so strange and so beautiful. Stan and I got towels and jumped right into ice-cold showers inside and came out refreshed and new. Dean didn't bother with a shower, and we saw him far across the sad park, strolling arm in arm with good Victor and chatting volubly and pleasantly and even leaning excitedly toward him to make a point, and pounding his fist. Then they resumed the arm-in-arm position and strolled. The time was coming to say good-by to Victor, so Dean was taking the opportunity to have moments alone with him and to inspect the park and get his views on things in general and in all dig him as only Dean could do.

Victor was very sad now that we had to go. "You come back Gregoria, see me?"

"Sure, man!" said Dean. He even promised to take Victor back to the States if he so wished it. Victor said he would have to mull this over.

"I got wife and kid-ain't got a money-I see." His sweet polite smile glowed in the redness as we waved to him from the car. Behind him were the sad park and the children.

6

Immediately outside Gregoria the road began to drop, great trees arose on each side, and in the trees as it grew dark we heard the great roar of billions of insects that sounded like one continuous high-screeching cry. "Whoo!" said Dean, and he turned on his headlights and they weren't working.' "What! what! damn now what?" And he punched and fumed at his dashboard. "Oh, my, we'll have to drive through the jungle without lights, think of the horror of that, the only time I'll see is when another car comes by and there just aren't any cars! And of course no lights? Oh, what'll we do, dammit?" "Let's just drive. Maybe we ought to go back, though?" "No, never-never! Let's go on. I can barely see the road. We'll make it." And now we shot in inky darkness through the scream of insects, and the great, rank, almost rotten smell descended, and we remembered and realized that the map indicated just after Gregoria the beginning of the Tropic of Cancer. "We're in a new tropic! No wonder the smell! Smell it!" I stuck my head out the window; bugs smashed at my face; a great screech rose the moment I cocked my ear to the wind. Suddenly our lights were working again and they poked ahead, illuminating the lonely road that ran between solid walls of drooping, snaky trees as high as a hundred feet.

"Son-of-a-bitch!" yelled Stan in the back. "Hot damn!" He was still so high. We suddenly realized he was still high and the jungle and troubles made no difference to his happy soul. We began laughing, all of us.

"To hell with it! We'll just throw ourselves on the gawd-damn jungle, we'll sleep in it tonight, let's go!" yelled Dean. "Ole Stan is right. Ole Stan don't care! He's so high on those women and that tea and that crazy out-of-this-world impossi-ble-to-absorb mambo blasting so loud that my eardrums still beat to it-wheel he's so high he knows what he's doing!" We took off our T-shirts and roared through the jungle, bare-chested. No towns, nothing, lost jungle, miles and miles, and down-going, getting hotter, the insects screaming louder, the vegetation growing higher, the smell ranker and hotter until we began to get used to it and like it. "I'd just like to get naked and roll and roll in that jungle," said Dean. "No, hell, man, that's what I'm going to do soon's I find a good spot." And suddenly Limon appeared before us, a jungle town, a few brown lights, dark shadows, enormous skies overhead, and a cluster of men in front of a jumble of woodshacks-a tropical crossroads. We stopped in the unimaginable softness. It was as hot as the inside of a baker's oven on a June night in New Orleans. All up and down the street whole families were sitting around in the dark, chatting; occasional girls came by, but extremely young and only curious to see what we looked like. They were barefoot and dirty. We leaned on the wooden porch of a broken-down general store with sacks of flour and fresh pineapple rotting with flies on the counter. There was one oil lamp in here, and outside a few more brown lights, and the rest all black, black, black. Now of course we were so tired we had to sleep at once and moved the car a few yards down a dirt road to the backside of town. It was so incredibly hot it was impossible to sleep. So Dean took a blanket and laid it out on the soft, hot sand in the road and flopped out. Stan was stretched on the front seat of the Ford with both doors open for a draft, but there wasn't even the faintest puff of a wind. I, in the back seat, suffered in a pool of sweat. I got out of the car and stood swaying in the blackness. The whole town had instantly gone to bed; the only noise now was barking dogs. How could I ever sleep? Thousands of mosquitoes had already bitten all of us on chest and arms and ankles. Then a bright idea came to me: I jumped up on the steel roof of the car and stretched out flat on my back. Still there was no breeze, but the steel had an element of coolness in it and dried my back of sweat, clotting up thousands of dead bugs into cakes on my skin, and I realized the jungle takes you over and you become it. Lying on the top of the car with my face to the black sky was like lying in a closed trunk on a summer night. For the first time in my life the weather was not something that touched me, that caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me. The atmosphere and I became the same. Soft infinitesimal showers of microscopic bugs fanned down on my face as I slept, and they were extremely pleasant and soothing. The sky was starless, utterly unseen and heavy. I could lie there all night long with my face exposed to the heavens, and it would do me no more harm than a velvet drape drawn over me. The dead bugs mingled with my blood; the live mosquitoes exchanged further portions; I began to tingle all over and to smell of the rank, hot, and rotten jungle, all over from hair and face to feet and toes. Of course I was barefoot. To minimize the sweat I put on my bug-smeared T-shirt and lay back again. A huddle of darkness on the blacker road showed where Dean was sleeping. I could hear him snoring. Stan was snoring too.

Occasionally a dim light flashed in town, and this was the sheriff making his rounds with a weak flashlight and mumbling to himself in the jungle night. Then I saw his light jiggling toward us and heard his footfalls coming soft on the mats of sand and vegetation. He stopped and flashed the car. I sat up and looked at him. In a quivering, almost querulous, and extremely tender voice he said, "Dormiendo?" indicating Dean in the road. I knew this meant "sleep."

"Si, dormiendo."

"Bueno, bueno" he said to himself and with reluctance and sadness turned away and went back to his lonely rounds. Such lovely policemen God hath never wrought in America. No suspicions, no fuss, no bother: he was the guardian of the sleeping town, period.

I went back to my bed of steel and stretched out with my arms spread. I didn't even know if branches or open sky were directly above me, and it made no difference. I opened my mouth to it and drew deep breaths of jungle atmosphere. It was not air, never air, but the palpable and living emanation of trees and swamp. I stayed awake. Roosters began to crow the dawn across the brakes somewhere. Still no air, no breeze, no dew, but the same Tropic of Cancer heaviness held us all pinned to earth, where we belonged and tingled. There was no sign of dawn in the skies. Suddenly I heard the dogs barking furiously across the dark, and then I heard the faint clip-clop of a horse's hooves. It came closer and closer. What kind of mad rider in the night would this be? Then I saw an apparition: a wild horse, white as a ghost, came trotting down the road directly toward Dean. Behind him the dogs yammered and contended. I couldn't see them, they were dirty old jungle dogs, but the horse was white as snow and immense and almost phosphorescent and easy to see. I felt no panic for Dean. The horse saw him and trotted right by his head, passed the car like a ship, whinnied softly, and continued on through town, bedeviled by the dogs, and clip-clopped back to the jungle on the other side, and all I heard was the faint hoofbeat fading away in the woods. The dogs subsided and sat to lick themselves. What was this horse? What myth and ghost, what spirit? I told Dean about it when he woke up. He thought I'd been dreaming. Then he recalled faintly dreaming of a white horse, and I told him it had been no dream. Stan Shephard slowly woke up. The faintest movements, and we were sweating profusely again. It was still pitch dark. "Let's start the car and blow some air!" I cried. "I'm dying of heat." "Right!" We roared out of town and continued along the mad highway with our hair flying. Dawn came rapidly in a gray haze, revealing dense swamps sunk on both sides, with tall, forlorn, viny trees leaning and bowing over tangled bottoms. We bowled right along the railroad tracks for a while. The strange radio-station antenna of Ciudad Mante appeared ahead, as if we were in Nebraska. We found a gas station and loaded the tank just as the last of the jungle-night bugs hurled themselves in a black mass against the bulbs and fell fluttering at our feet in huge wriggly groups, some of them with wings a good four inches long, others frightful dragonflies big enough to eat a bird, and thousands of immense yangling mosquitoes and unnamable spidery insects of all sorts. I hopped up and down on the pavement for fear of them; I finally ended up in the car with my feet in my hands, looking fearfully at the ground where they swarmed around our wheels. "Lessgo!" I yelled. Dean and Stan weren't perturbed at all by the bugs; they calmly drank a couple of bottles of Mission Orange and kicked them away from the water cooler. Their shirts and pants, like mine, were soaked in the blood and black of thousands of dead bugs. We smelled our clothes deeply.

"You know, I'm beginning to like this smell," said Stan. "I can't smell myself any more."

"It's a strange, good smell," said Dean. "I'm nor. going to change my shirt till Mexico City, I want to take it all in and remember it." So off we roared again, creating air for hot. caked faces.

Then the mountains loomed ahead, all green. After this climb we would be on the great central plateau again and ready to roll ahead to Mexico City. In no time at all we soared to an elevation of five thousand feet among misty passes that overlooked steaming yellow rivers a mile below. It was the great River Moctezuma. The Indians along the road began to be extremely weird. They were a nation in themselves, mountain Indians, shut off from everything else but the Pan-American Highway. They were short and squat and dark, with bad teeth; they carried immense loads on their backs. Across enormous vegetated ravines we saw patchworks of agriculture on steep slopes. They walked up and down those slopes and worked the crops. Dean drove the car five miles an hour to see. "Whooee, this I never thought existed!" High on the highest peak, as great as any Rocky Mountain peak, we saw bananas growing. Dean got out of the car to point, to stand around rubbing his belly. We were on a ledge where a little thatched hut suspended itself over the precipice of the world. The sun created golden hazes that obscured the Moctezuma, now more than a mile below.

In the yard in front of the hut a little three-year-old Indian girl stood with her finger in her mouth, watching us with big brown eyes. "She's probably never seen anybody parked here before in her entire life!" breathed Dean. "Hello, little girl. How are you? Do you like us?" The little girl looked away bashfully and pouted. We began to talk and she again examined us with finger in mouth. "Gee, I wish there was something I could give her! Think of it, being born and living on this ledge-this ledge representing all you know of life. Her father is probably groping down the ravine with a rope and getting his pineapples out of a cave and hacking wood at an eighty-degree angle with all the bottom below. She'll never, never leave here and know anything about the outside world. It's a nation. Think of the wild chief they must have! They probably, off the road, over that bluff, miles back, must be even wilder and stranger, yeah, because the Pan-American Highway partially civilizes this nation on this road. Notice the beads of sweat on her brow," Dean pointed out with a grimace of pain. "It's not the kind of sweat we have, it's oily and it's always there because it's always hot the year round and she knows nothing of non-sweat, she was born with sweat and dies with sweat." The sweat on her little brow was heavy, sluggish; it didn't run; it just stood there and gleamed like a fine olive oil. "What that must do to their souls! How different they must be in their private concerns and evaluations and wishes!" Dean drove on with his mouth hanging in awe, ten miles an hour, desirous to see every possible human being on the road. We climbed and climbed.

As we climbed, the air grew cooler and the Indian girls on the road wore shawls over their heads and shoulders. They hailed us desperately; we stopped to see. They wanted to sell us little pieces of rock crystal. Their great brown, innocent eyes looked into ours with such soulful intensity that not one of us had the slightest sexual thought about them; moreover they were very young, some of them eleven and looking almost thirty. "Look at those eyes!" breathed Dean. They were like the eyes of the Virgin Mother when she was a child. We saw in them the tender and forgiving gaze of Jesus. And they stared unflinching into ours. We rubbed our nervous blue eyes and looked again. Still they penetrated us with sorrowful and hypnotic gleam. When they talked they suddenly became frantic and almost silly. In their silence they were themselves. "They've only recently learned to sell these crystals, since the highway was built about ten years back-up until that time this entire nation must have been silent!"

The girls yammered around the car. One particularly soulful child gripped at Dean's sweaty arm. She yammered in Indian. "Ah yes, ah yes, dear one," said Dean tenderly and almost sadly. He got out of the car and went fishing around in the battered trunk in the back-the same old tortured American trunk-and pulled out a wristwatch. He showed it to the child. She whimpered with glee. The others crowded around with amazement. Then Dean poked in the little girl's hand for "the sweetest and purest and smallest crystal she has personally picked from the mountain for me." He found one no bigger than a berry. And he handed her the wristwatch dangling. Their mouths rounded like the mouths of chorister children. The lucky little girl squeezed it to her ragged breastrobes. They stroked Dean and thanked him. He stood among them with his ragged face to the sky, looking for the next and highest and final pass, and seemed like the Prophet that had come to them. He got back in the car. They hated to see us go. For the longest time, as we mounted a straight pass, they waved and ran after us. We made a turn and never saw them again, and they were still running after us. "Ah, this breaks my heart!" cried Dean, punching his chest. "How far do they carry out these loyalties and wonders! What's going to happen to them? Would they try to follow the car all the way to Mexico City if we drove slow enough?"

"Yes," I said, for I knew.

We came into the dizzying heights of the Sierra Madre Oriental. The banana trees gleamed golden in the haze. Great fogs yawned beyond stone walls along the precipice. Below, the Moctezuma was a thin golden thread in a green jungle mat. Strange crossroad towns on top of the world rolled by, with shawled Indians watching us from under hatbrims and rebozos. Life was dense, dark, ancient. They watched Dean, serious and insane at his raving wheel, with eyes of hawks. All had their hands outstretched. They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it. They didn't know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, and stretching out our hands in the same, same way. Our broken Ford, old thirties upgoing America Ford, rattled through them and vanished in dust.

We had reached the approaches of the last plateau. Now the sun was golden, the air keen blue, and the desert with its occasional rivers a riot of sandy, hot space and sudden Biblical tree shade. Now Dean was sleeping and Stan driving. The shepherds appeared, dressed as in first times, in long flowing robes, the women carrying golden bundles of flax, the men staves.

Under great trees on the shimmering desert the shepherds sat and convened, and the sheep moiled in the sun and raised dust beyond. "Man, man," I yelled to Dean, "wake up and see the shepherds, wake up and see the golden world that Jesus came from, with your own eyes you can tell!"

He shot his head up from the seat, saw one glimpse of it all in the fading red sun, and dropped back to sleep. When he woke up he described it to me in detail and said, "Yes, man, I'm glad you told me to look. Oh, Lord, what shall I do? Where will I go?" He rubbed his belly, he looked to heaven with red eyes, he almost wept.

The end of our journey impended. Great fields stretched on both sides of us; a noble wind blew across the occasional immense tree groves and over old missions turning salmon pink in the late sun. The clouds were close and huge and rose. "Mexico City by dusk!" We'd made it, a total of nineteen hundred miles from the afternoon yards of Denver to these vast and Biblical areas of the world, and now we were about to reach the end of the road.

"Shall we change our insect T-shirts?"

"Naw, let's wear them into town, hell's bells." And we drove into Mexico City.

A brief mountain pass took us suddenly to a height from which we saw all of Mexico City stretched out in its volcanic crater below and spewing city smokes and early dusklights. Down to it we zoomed, down Insurgentes Boulevard, straight toward the heart of town at Reforma. Kids played soccer in enormous sad fields and threw up dust. Taxi-drivers overtook us and wanted to know if we wanted girls. No, we didn't want girls now. Long, ragged adobe slums stretched out on the plain; we saw lonely figures in the dimming alleys. Soon night would come. Then the city roared in and suddenly we were passing crowded cafes and theaters and many lights. Newsboys yelled at us. Mechanics slouched by, barefoot, with wrenches and rags. Mad barefoot Indian drivers cut across us and surrounded us and tooted and made frantic traffic. The noise was incredible. No mufflers are used on Mexican cars. Horns are batted with glee continual. "Whee!" yelled Dean,

"Look out!" He staggered the car through the traffic and played with everybody. He drove like an Indian. He got on a circular glorietta drive on Reforma Boulevard and rolled around it with its eight spokes shooting cars at us from all directions, left, right, izquierda, dead ahead, and yelled and jumped with joy. "This is traffic I've always dreamed of' Everybody goes.'" An ambulance came balling through. American ambulances dart and weave through traffic with siren blowing; the great world-wide Fellahin Indian ambulances merely come through at eighty miles an hour in the city streets, and everybody just has to get out of the way and they don't pause for anybody or any circumstances and fly straight through. We saw it reeling out of sight on skittering wheels in the breaking-up moil of dense downtown traffic. The drivers were Indians. People, even old ladies, ran for buses that never stopped. Young Mexico City businessmen made bets and ran by squads for buses and athletically jumped them. The bus-drivers were barefoot, sneering and insane, and sat low and squat in T-shirts at the low, enormous wheels. Ikons burned over them. The lights in the buses were brown and greenish, and dark faces were lined on wooden benches.

In downtown Mexico City thousands of hipsters in floppy straw hats and long-lapeled jackets over bare chests padded along the main drag, some of them selling crucifixes and weed in the alleys, some of them kneeling in beat chapels next to Mexican burlesque shows in sheds. Some alleys were rubble, with open sewers, and little doors led to closet-size bars stuck in adobe walls. You had to jump over a ditch to get your drink, and in the bottom of the ditch was the ancient lake of the Aztec. You came out of the bar with your back to the wall and edged back to the street. They served coffee mixed with rum and nutmeg. Mambo blared from everywhere. Hundreds of whores lined themselves along the dark and narrow streets and their sorrowful eyes gleamed at us in the night. We wandered in a frenzy and a dream. We ate beautiful steaks for forty-eight cents in a strange tiled Mexican cafeteria with generations of marimba musicians standing at one immense marimba-also wandering singing guitarists, and old men on corners blowing trumpets. You went by the sour stink of pulque saloons; they gave you a water glass of cactus juice in there, two cents. Nothing stopped; the streets were alive all night. Beggars slept wrapped in advertising posters torn off fences. Whole families of them sat on the sidewalk, playing little flutes and chuckling in the night. Their bare feet stuck out, their dim candles burned, all Mexico was one vast Bohemian camp. On corners old women cut up the boiled heads of cows and wrapped morsels in tortillas and served them with hot sauce on newspaper napkins. This was the great and final wild uninhibited Fellahin-childlike city that we knew we would find at the end of the road. Dean walked through with his arms hanging zombie-like at his sides, his mouth open, his eyes gleaming, and conducted a ragged and holy tour that lasted till dawn in a field with a boy in a straw hat who laughed and chatted with us and wanted to play catch, for nothing ever ended.

Then I got fever and became delirious and unconscious. Dysentery. I looked up out of the dark swirl of my mind and I knew I was on a bed eight thousand feet above sea level, on a roof of the world, and I knew that I had lived a whole life and many others in the poor atomistic husk of my fl'esh, and I had all the dreams. And I saw Dean bending over the kitchen table. It was several nights later and he was leaving Mexico City already. "What you doin, man?" I moaned.

"Poor Sal, poor Sal, got sick. Stan'll take care of you. Now listen to hear if you can in your sickness: I got my divorce from Camille down here and I'm driving back to Inez in New York tonight if the car holds out."

"All that again?" I cried.

"All that again, good buddy. Gotta get back to my life. Wish I could stay with you. Pray I can come back." I grabbed the cramps in my belly and groaned. When I looked up again bold noble Dean was standing with his old broken trunk and looking down at me. I didn't know who he was any more, and he knew this, and sympathized, and pulled the blanket over my shoulders. "Yes, yes, yes, I've got to go now.

Old fever Sal, good-by." And he was gone. Twelve hours later in my sorrowful fever I finally came to understand that he was gone. By that time he was driving back alone through those banana mountains, this time at night.

When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes. "Okay, old Dean, I'll say nothing."

PART FIVE

Dean drove from Mexico City and saw Victoi again in Gregoria and pushed that old car all the way to Lake Charles, Louisiana, before the rear end finally dropped on the road as he had always known it would. So he wired Inez for airplane fare and flew the rest of the way. When he arrived in New York with the divorce papers in his hands, he and Inez immediately went to Newark and got married; and that night, telling her everything was all right and not to worry, and making logics where there was nothing but inestimable sorrowful sweats, he jumped on a bus and roared off again across the awful continent to San Francisco to rejoin Camille and the two baby girls. So now he was three times married, twice divorced, and living with his second wife.

In the fall I myself started back home from Mexico City and one night just over Laredo border in Dilley, Texas, I was standing on the hot road underneath an arc-lamp with the summer moths smashing into it when I heard the sound of footsteps from the darkness beyond, and lo, a tall old man with flowing white hair came clomping by with a pack on his back, and when he saw me as he passed, he said, "Go moan for man," and clomped on back to his dark. Did this mean that I should at last go on my pilgrimage on foot on the dark roads around America? I struggled and hurried to New York, and one night I was standing in a dark street in Manhattan and called up to the window of a loft where I thought my friends were having a party. But a pretty girl stuck her head out the window and said, "Yes? Who is it?"

"Sal Paradise," I said, and heard my name resound in the sad and empty street.

"Come on up," she called. "I'm making hot chocolate.," So I went up and there she was, the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for and for so long. We agreed to love each other madly. In the winter we planned to migrate to San Francisco, bringing all our beat furniture and broken belongings with us in a jalopy panel truck. I wrote to Dean and told him. He wrote back a huge letter eighteen thousand words long, all about his young years in Denver, and said he was coming to get me and personally select the old truck himself and drive us home. We had six weeks to save up the money for the truck and began working and counting every cent. And suddenly Dean arrived anyway, five and a half weeks in advance, and nobody had any money to go through with the plan.

I was taking a walk in the middle of the night and came back to my girl to tell her what I thought about during my, walk. She stood in the dark little pad with a strange smile. I told her a number of things and suddenly I noticed the hush in the room and looked around and saw a battered book on the radio. I knew it was Dean's high-eternity-in-the-afternoon Proust. As in a dream I saw him tiptoe in from the dark hall in his stocking feet. He couldn't talk any more. He hopped and laughed, he stuttered and fluttered his hands and said, "Ah-ah-you must listen to hear." We listened, all ears. But he forgot what he wanted to say. "Really listen-ahem. Look, dear Sal-sweet Laura-I've come-I'm gone-but wait-ah yes." And he stared with rocky sorrow into his hands. "Can't talk no more-do you understand that it is-or might be- But listen!" We all listened. He was listening to sounds in the night. "Yes!" he whispered with awe. "But you see-no need to talk any more-and further."

"But why did you come so soon, Dean?"

"Ah," he said, looking at me as if for the first time, "so soon, yes. We-we'll know-that is, I don't know. I came on the railroad pass-cabooses-old hard-bench coaches-Texas- played flute and wooden sweet potato all the way." He took out his new wooden flute. He played a few squeaky notes on it and jumped up and down in his stocking feet. "See?" he said. "But of course, Sal, I can talk as soon as ever and have many things to say to you in fact with my own little bangtail mind I've been reading and reading this gone Proust all the way across the country and digging a great number of things I'll never have TIME to tell you about and we STILL haven't talked of Mexico and our parting there in fever-but no need to talk. Absolutely, now, yes?"

"All right, we won't talk." And he started telling the story of what he did in LA on the way over in every possible detail, how he visited a family, had dinner, talked to the father, the sons, the sisters-what they looked like, what they ate, their furnishings, their thoughts, their interests, their very souls; it took him three hours of detailed elucidation, and having concluded this he said, "Ah, but you see what I wanted to REALLY tell you-much later-Arkansas, crossing on train-playing flute-play cards with boys, my dirty deck- won money, blew sweet-potato solo-for sailors. Long long awful trip five days and five nights just to SEE you, Sal."

"What about Camille?"

"Gave permission of course-waiting for me. Camille and I all straight forever-and-ever . . ."

"And Inez?"

"I-I-I want her to come back to Frisco with me live other side of town-don't you think? Don't know why I came." Later he said in a sudden moment of gaping wonder, "Well and yes, of course, I wanted to see your sweet girl and you-glad of you-love you as ever." He stayed in New York three days and hastily made preparations to get back on the train with his railroad passes and again recross the continent, five days and five nights in dusty coaches and hard-bench crummies, and of course we had no money for a truck and couldn't go back with him. With Inez he spent one night explaining and sweating and fighting, and she threw him out. A letter came for him, care of me. I saw it. It was from Camille. "My heart broke when I saw you go across the tracks with your bag. I pray and pray you get back safe. ... I do want Sal and his friend to come and live on the same street. ... I know you'll make it but I can't help worrying-now that we've decided everything. . . . Dear Dean, it's the end of the first half of the century. Welcome with love and kisses to spend the other half with us. We all wait for you. [Signed] Camille, Amy, and Little Joanie." So Dean's life was settled with his most constant, most embittered, and best-knowing wife Camille, and I thanked God for him.

The last time I saw him it was under sad and strange circumstances. Remi Boncoeur had arrived in New York after having gone around the world several times in ships. I wanted him to meet and know Dean. They did meet, but Dean couldn't talk any more and said nothing, and Remi turned away. Remi had gotten tickets for the Duke Ellington concert at the Metropolitan Opera and insisted Laura and I come with him and his girl. Remi was fat and sad now but still the eager and formal gentleman, and he wanted to do things the right way, as he emphasized. So he got his bookie to drive us to the concert in a Cadillac. It was a cold winter night. The Cadillac was parked and ready to go. Dean stood outside the windows with his bag, ready to go to Penn Station and on across the land.

"Good-by, Dean," I said. "I sure wish I didn't have to go to the concert."

"D'you think I can ride to Fortieth Street with you?" he whispered. "Want to be with you as much as possible, m'boy, and besides it's so durned cold in this here New Yawk ..." I whispered to Remi. No, he wouldn't have it, he liked me but he didn't like my idiot friends. I wasn't going to start all over again ruining his planned evenings as I had done at Alfred's in San Francisco in 1947 with Roland Major.

"Absolutely out of the question, Sal!" Poor Remi, he had a special necktie made for this evening; on it was painted a replica of the concert tickets, and the names Sal and Laura and Remi and Vicki, the girl, together with a series of sad jokes and some of his favorite sayings such as "You can't teach the old maestro a new tune."

So Dean couldn't ride uptown with us and the only thing I could do was sit in the back of the Cadillac and wave at him. The bookie at the wheel also wanted nothing to do with Dean. Dean, ragged in a moth-eaten overcoat he brought specially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walked off alone, and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again. Poor little Laura, my baby, to whom I'd told everything about Dean, began almost to cry.

"Oh, we shouldn't let him go like this. What'll we do?" Old Dean's gone, I thought, and out loud I said, "He'll be all right." And off we went to the sad and disinclined concert for which I had no stomach whatever and all the time I was thinking of Dean and how he got back on the train and rode over three thousand miles over that awful land and never knew why he had come anyway, except to see me.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

[thestylesplash]

The Thrifty Six in Graphic Prints

Welcome to this month’s instalment from The Thrifty Six! We are a group of international women with a passion for preloved fashion who meet once a month in our little space on the internet to share our thrifty outfits. On the third Monday of every month, we all share an outfit based on a theme that features second hand pieces. Shopping preloved clothing is so much better for the environment and…

[iamandco]

   Brown pants are the perfect catch-all fashion item. They're low maintenance. They don't ask for much and yet they give us effortless ensembles appropriate for casual, business casual and cocktail hour settings. This unchallenged relationship with brown pants is a double-edged sword. Sure, it's great to be able to throw on a pair and go. But, the ease makes us complacent. There's no need to impress brown pants. There's no need to go all out and add cheeky prints to the equation. This arrangement is fine, for a while. Until one day you're over the monotony of black blouse-brown pants-black shoe outfits. You decide you want to do something special for your brown pants. It's time for a wardrobe renaissance . It's time to put together a cool outfit that'll welcome compliments from onlookers. But it's tough to know where to begin. You're not alone, this is a common problem faced by fashion girls all over the world. What the hell do you wear with brown pants nowadays? We've answered your question in twenty chic street style outfits. Our "it girl" fashion inspiration includes outfit ideas ranging from casual days on-the-go to the avant-garde spectacle and ensembles fit for every season. Here are twenty ideas for what to wear with brown pants and shake things up.    Sophia Bush stepped out in a brown pants outfit that's both business casual and subtly sexy.   White Crew Tee, $18, Everlane Ponte Blazer, $88, Bloomingdale's Black Transparent Heel, $113, Revolve A.L.C. Jackson Pant, $255, Revolve  This casual brown pants outfit swaps flats for strappy sandals and adds a navy blue blazer perfect for making power moves. Get the look by teaming up brown pleated cropped pants , with a casual basic tee , strappy sandals , a navy blue blazer , and brown belt.   PHOTO: COURTESY GETTY  This edgy-fall brown pants ensemble is one of the best fall outfits looks from New York Fashion Week.   Black Vegan Leather Shirt, $139, Pixie Market Kenneth Cole Leather Wedge Booties, $199, Nordstrom Standard Collar T-Shirt Black Braid Belt, $17, Target  Get the look for less by combining a black vegan leather shirt , with a braided belt to cinch the waist, black wedge booties , and brown turtleneck .   PHOTO: COURTESY SHUTTERSTOCK  This moody spring/summer brown pants look effortlessly combines a comfy black casual tee with brown cropped pants and strappy heels.   Black Crew Tee, $18, Everlane Josseana Sandal, $170, Nordstrom Decorative Pleat Pants, $80, Mango Oversized Round Sunglasses, $10, Nasty Gal  Get this affordable look by shopping Everlane’s black crew tee, cork strappy heels, brown pleated cropped pants from Mango and oversized round sunglasses.   PHOTO: COURTESY GETTY  If you’re wondering what to wear with brown pants, remember style icon Victoria Beckham gliding through New York streets in this outfit. Consider joining a free-flowing blue blouse and oversized wide-leg brown trousers for a comfortably chic aesthetic.   Pocket Flowy Shirt, $40, Mango Pleat Front Pants, $103, ASOS Wanda Large Sunglasses, $26, Topshop Work Clutch, $105, Cuyana  We found all the essential pieces to help you achieve this look by combining the pocket flowy shirt from Mango , pleat front brown pants , a brown leather work clutch from Cuyana and oversized tortoise sunglasses .   PHOTO: COURTESY GLAMOUR MAG  A transitional, summer to fall, brown pants look that takes a conservative approach of enveloping black pieces around brown trouser pants. The black backdrop forces the brown pleated trousers into the spotlight making them a statement piece.   Audri Bodysuit, $58, Reformation The Page Pant, $178, Revolve Knitted Longline Cardigan, $60, Topshop Steve Madden Corey Flat, $56, Zappos  Get this look by combining brown pleated trousers with a black casual bodysuit , black cardigan , and black peep-toe flat sandals .   PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES  When considering what to wear with brown pants here’s one simple solution. When in doubt pair your brown pants with every animal print piece of clothing you can find. This daring ensemble relies on brown cropped pants to play support for flourishing-fun zebra, snake and cheetah prints in various shades of brown.   Danielle Corduroy Blazer, $56, Revolve Brown Zebra Print Blouse, $34, River Island Rouge Tan Snake, $150, Steve Madden Leopard Slouch Tote, $60, Topshop  Get this exotic fall look by teaming brown cropped wide-leg pants with an animal print blouse, slingbag, snakeskin booties, and brown corduroy jacket.   PHOTO: COURTESY GETTY  Rihanna's throwback Fall brown pants look is eternal style inspo. The monochromatic outfit couples various camel shades for an elegant statement.   Cream Sweater Dress, $39, ASOS Camel Co Ord Wide Leg Pants, $47, Missguided Louis Vuitton Speedy Bag, $1,050, Shopbop Yaro Ankle Strap Sandal, $120, Nordstrom  You can copy this look by combining camel wide-leg pants , with a cream sweater dress , strappy tan heels , and Louis Vuitton mini tote bag .   PHOTO: COURTESY GETTY  This "old money" brown pants outfit screams "I have a trust fund and heirloom jewelry in a bank's safe deposit box." This look is a lesson in what to wear with brown pants that also appears indisputably rich.   Victoria Beckham Front Pleat Pants, $192, Shopbop Western Denim Shirt, $58, Topshop Faux Fur Mink Coat, $349, Urban Outfitters Brown Fur Tote Bag, Urban Outfitters  Get the look for less by combining brown front pleat trouser pants , with a western denim shirt , brown linen blouse, faux fur mink coat , and faux fur tote bag .   PHOTO: COURTESY GETTY  Olivia Wilde's chic Fall brown pants outfit merges instant style with maximum ease. Seriously, the suit set does all of the work for you. Your only job is to sit back and collect compliments. Still, the style tip to pay the closest attention is what's happening below her ankle. Yeah, the quickest way to spice up brown pants it's to punctuate them with a spicy pair of red heels.   Heidi Cordi Suit Set, $56, Revolve Mid Sleeve Top, $45, Frank & Oak Semi-Circle Bag, $235, Cuyana Daisie Red Suede Heel, $90, Steve Madden  Finding a brown corduroy suit set was no easy task, but we managed to find one that is incredibly affordable courtesy of Revolve. Get the affordable version of Olivia's look by teaming up the Heidi Cordi Suit Set from Revolve , with Frank and Oak's mid sleeve basic tee , Semi Circle bag at Cuyana and Steve Madden's red suede heels .   PHOTO: COURTESY SHUTTERSTOCK  This brown pants ensemble is perfect for casual hipster brunch or hours worth of window shopping.   Skeleton Tarot Tee, $39, Urban Outfitters Belted Poplin Trousers, $75, Topshop Madewell Transport Bag, $128, Nordstrom '70s Black Chuck Taylor, $85, Zappos  Copy this look by combining a vintage-inspired black tee , brown poplin trousers , retro Chuck Taylors , and Madewell's Transport Bag .   PHOTO: COURTESY GETTY  Priyanka Chopra was spotted out in New York in a trendy fall-transitional brown pants look. This outfit is a classic case of "neutral fever."   Knit Tank Top, $49, & Other Stories Axel Suede Pant, $84, Revolve Louis Vuitton Mini Bag, $1,377, Farfetch Mesh Pumps, $89, Lulus  Copy Priyanka's outfit by joining a knit tank top with brown pleated pants, mesh pumps and a Louis Vuitton mini bag.   PHOTO: COURTESY GETTY  This brown pants spring street style outfit capitalizes on free-flowing silhouettes for understated class.   Sleeveless White Blazer, $125, Nordstrom Brown Cropped Pant, $30, Revolve Tortoise Shell Block Heel, $40, ASOS Coach Dreamer 36 Bag, $595, Nordstrom  You can nail this look with a sleeveless white blazer , brown cropped pants , tortoiseshell block heels , and a camel leather Coach tote bag .   PHOTO: COURTESY GETTY  Combining earth tones with brown pants is always so satisfying, and this fall-winter transitional outfit is a great example.   Green Cropped Sweatshirt, $48, Topshop Wide Leg Corduroy Pants, $38, ASOS Cat Eye Sunglasses, $39, & Other Stories Bucket Crossbody Bag, $48, ASOS  Add a forest green sweater with wide-leg corduroy pants, nude sunglasses , and a black crossbody bucket bag.   PHOTO: COURTESY GETTY  When you’re pondering what to wear with brown pants sometimes less is more. A classic casual brown pants ensemble with a utility twist can be an easy achievement with the right elements.   White Crew Tee, $18, Everlane Straight Leg Crop, $68, Everlane Monaco Leather Booties, $95, Topshop Black Belt, $14, Amazon  Get this look for cheap by teaming a white crew Everlane tee with brown cargo pants , Monaco leather booties , and a classic black belt .   PHOTO: COURTESY GETTY  Ever the fan of brown wide-leg trousers, Victoria Beckham provides yet another coveted brown pants ensemble. This time, she offers a powerful fall-winter transitional look that incorporates a camel wool peacoat.   Rust Essential Peg Trousers, $76, Topshop Camel Cocoon Coat, $250, Everlane Oversized Long Sleeve Striped Shirt, $27, ASOS Taupe Sleeveless Turtleneck, $26, Lulus  Mimic this look for much cheaper by combining rust peg trousers , a camel cocoon coat , long sleeve striped shirt , and sleeveless turtleneck .   PHOTO: COURTESY TRACEE ELLIS ROSS VIA INSTAGRAM  Like Olivia Wilde, Tracee Ellis Ross took advantage of the red suede pump and brown trouser combo to enliven an otherwise subdued look.   Daria Binding Wide Trouser, $340, Need Supply Phoena Pump, $79, Nordstrom Tim Tim Striped Long Sleeve Shirt, $30, ASOS Glitter Turban Beanie, $29, & Other Stories  You, too, can get this look by teaming together brown wide trouser pants , red suede pumps , and a white striped long sleeve crew neck tee . Bonus points for including a jazzy glitter beanie .   PHOTO: COURTESY GETTY  Kendall Jenner was spotted out on the town in L.A. in the perfect Spring casual brown pants ensemble. This edgy look utilizes a trendy black leather moto jacket and plunging bodysuit with fresh white sneakers for comfort.   Plunge Neck Bodysuit, $15, PrettyLittleThing Brown Wide Leg Trousers, $37, Missguided Black Vegan Leather Biker Jacket, $95, Topshop ECCO Soft 7 Sneakers, $160, Zappos  Sport this chic look by joining a black vegan leather moto biker jacket with a black plunge neck bodysuit , tan wide-leg trousers , and white sneakers .   PHOTO: COURTESY GETTY  This bright fall outfit employs mustard yellow to both blend and contrast with the brown wool trousers and a taupe leather jacket.   Mustard Turlteneck, $120, Everlane Equipment Alloisa Pants, $395, Shopbop Mankind Clutch in Yellow, $57, 7 For All Mankind Simone Peep Toe Bootie, $268, Nordstrom  Mimic this chic mustard yellow and brown ensemble with the proper yellow turtleneck , classic brown trousers , yellow clutch , and white peep-toe booties .   PHOTO: COURTESY GETTY  Who would've thought that the perfect-dainty spring to summer transitional brown pants ensemble could incorporate so much pastel? Break from the norm of blacks and browns and test drive lilacs, pinks, and metallics with your brown pants.   Pegno Slim Knit Crop Pants, $595, Nordstrom Ruched Air Blouse, $55, Everlane Day Market Tote, $175, Everlane Sheena Sandal, $148, Zappos  Pull off this look with a casual ruched air blouse , brown knit crop pants , sleek gold metallic slide heels , and a brown tote bag .   PHOTO: COURTESY GETTY  This show-stopping Avante Garde winter style is walking art. If you're going to go the typical black-brown ensemble you may as well go big or go home. Now, this outfit looks incredibly expensive, but it doesn't have to be.   Brown Wide Leg Trousers, $90, Topshop The Sister Long Sleeve Top, $15, Cotton On Featherless Liner Jacket, $180, Need Supply Sebille Fashion Boot, $100, Amazon  Copy this incredible outfit without breaking the bank by teaming brown wide leg trousers with a sister long sleeve top from Cotton On , a featherless liner jacket from Need Supply and black platform leather booties .   PHOTO: COURTESY GETTY  If you're all out of ideas for what to wear with your brown pants, you can always go monochromatic. Head to toe shades of brown will never go out of style, so naturally, we included this look as a great example.   Mock Neck Sweater, $98, Lulus Lemaire Straight Trousers, $642, Farfetch Brown Woven Heels, $99, Boden Everett Square Sunglasses, $38, Anthropologie  Achieve this super-chic monochromatic brown outfit by joining together a brown mock neck sweater , brown straight trousers , brown woven heels , and nude square sunglasses .

[weedwaiter45-blog]

New kid on the block

Ok so it's not new new, in fact it's almost as traditional as you can get.  But it's something I've always really struggled to get my head round.   However, you know when something suddenly CLICKS!  And yes, I've had my click breakthrough moment.  Ok I appreciate that I've hardly found a cure for a rare disease here but - well, this is a blog about fashion and lifestyle and how I'm working out how to be a woman in her 40's when I still feel 28 and YES - it's sometimes the very small things that make the big things more manageable.  So yes, finding an awesome pair of shoes that works for all occasions and makes me feel really good and smiley and happy, may seem incredibly shallow but if it means a confidence boost makes the daily grind and challenge of life a bit more manageable, then I'll take that.  Which is why I am now doing an inner yee hah over the loafer.  Chances are you may already have a pair in your wardrobe (of any make) that you either love, or aren't quite sure what to wear with.  *hands up here*.  I - as you may have noticed - have been experimenting with my old Gucci pair that I've had and haven't really fallen in love with.  And then it happened.  No, I didn't reinvent the wheel - I just wore them with outfits that I wouldn't usually have worn them with and loved them.  A replacement option for my trainers.  An alternative to a pair of ankle boots.  The ideal transitional piece of footwear, now that sandal weather seems to have passed (errr how is it September by the way?!). So when I remembered that I had a Net a Porter voucher than friends had given me for my birthday, burning a hole in my account (seriously - HOW can I not find anything to buy there?  A pair of Burberry gold heels that made me look like I was auditioning at a strip joint went straight back, as did a whole slew of clothes I had ordered in the sale), I ordered the Princetown backless pair in black straight away. These have been on my "will I or won't I love them and will or I won't I wear them" list for a couple of years.  I went in.  And I ADORE them.   And it made me think - these ARE a lot more versatile than I had thought.   It was only a couple of years ago that trainers with dresses and skirts were thought the height of super weird and "fashion".  Yet now, everyone wears them.  I remember turning up at the school gates with more than a couple of side eyes being given, whereas now, it's verging on standard fare.  So it's not that big a jump to replace them with a different sort of footwear.  And chances are, you already own a pair.  If you don't - I have some options here to suit all budgets - and I should also point out, they come into their own with cropped trousers too.  We all know I am a huge fan of the cropped pant - it's usually the wide leg but the straight leg made a comeback in the Spring and this AW, I have tried on more than one pair of kick flares that I have loved.  I'll be bringing you them shortly but in the meantime - have a look at the loafers and let me know what you think. And obviously with jeans... Gucci Princetown horsebit loafer from Net a Porter £515

Brixton collapsable heel loafer from Gucci £540 I love them in the white.. (do not need, do not need...).  Gucci Brixton Horsebit Loafers £540 Another pair at a minimalist price with a minimalist look at Mango.  Quite different from above and a teensy step away from a traditional loafer but perfect for those who are looking for a style between a more androgynous loafer and a ballet flat.  Leather moccasin from Mango in black £49.99 again with a foldable heel In white - again £49.99 from Mango Or the metallic silver again £49.99 Classic black leather at ASOS £35 Similar at Kurt Geiger.  Karima Black Flat Loafers £119 Key Trim Loafers at Topshop £46 Green at River Island in the sale were £45 now £36  You could easily be forgiven for thinking these were the Gucci ones.  I did a double take! Red Suede leather at ASOS. ASOS DESIGN Magnet red suede ring loafer £35 White at Kurt Geiger - Kenner2 Loafer £129 Kenner Tan Suede Loafer from Kurt Geiger £129 Autograph Leather Block Heel Ring Loafers from M&S £69 Back to the backless.  These.  Now I know it sounds bonkers but these are insanely versatile.  Throw them on with jeans during the day but they are simply the perfect dressy shoe when you're not looking to wear a heel.  They would look sublime with longer skirts or dresses and transform a suit from day to night. Kaiser Crystal Metallic in gold from Kurt Geiger London £150 Also available in the black again £149 More traditional metallic at Miss KG. Nessie Metallic Flat Loafer £44 Perfect for the inbetweeny seasons at Topshop. Woven Loafer Mules £32 Woven Loafer Mules £32 Red ponyskin at ASOS.  ASOS DESIGN Movie Leather Mule Loafers £35

And finishing with my favourite pair which are again very expensive so are definitely an investment.   I probably would have gone for these - apart from the fact that my gift voucher was for Net A Porter and they didn't have them on there.  So it was either - virtually free or not.  Not a surprise at which one I went for. Hamelin Loafers from Bally £430

And here I am in them yesterday - trip to London with all three children.  Seemed like an awesome idea at the time.  It was.  Now that I think about it the day after.  But at the time, not going to lie - there were more than one or two fraught moments (son with ASD and teenager who decides to do a running commentary on how appalling my parenting is, is bound to make anyone lose their shizzle...!).  However the moments WERE few and far between - we did have a great time and got a lot packed in (three different requests for things to do).  My request - which they all agreed to actually - was to go to the National Gallery.  A genius suggestion from someone on Instragram was to go to the shop on the way in, each pick a postcard of a painting you loved and then we had to go and find each painting.  Are my children now complete art experts?  Have I converted them to the finer things in life?  Not remotely.  But I'm a great believer in putting enough in at the top of the funnel and some of it will filter through.  There are definitely more attune to art than they were when we went in so I am taking that as a parenting win.  And some vaguely cerebral conversations were had (there was also a lot of chat along the lines of "I can't how small that willy is"... obvs.) The face here though, is most definitely at a "losing my shizzle" moment... Tee - FWP by Rae (gift aw17) Leather Trousers - Autograph by M&S (part of paid partnership) Bag - Balenciaga (2yrs ago) Loafers - Gucci from Net a Porter (current) Coat - ASOS (sale ss18) Sunglasses - M&S (part of paid partnership) Am now about to continue with a parenting moment of doom - try to get them all to go for a walk.  I have even bribed them with cake at the end.  What could possibly go wrong and how long do we reckon it will take for us to leave the house?  HA!!  Source: http://doesmybumlook40.blogspot.com/2018/09/new-kid-on-block.html

[fashiontrendin-blog]

The Best New Menswear Pieces To Buy Right Now

http://fashion-trendin.com/the-best-new-menswear-pieces-to-buy-right-now-51/

The Best New Menswear Pieces To Buy Right Now

Salvatore Ferragamo Uomo Signature

Popping on a fragrance before leaving the house in the morning is like finishing a salad with a dash of dressing. You can go without, but you’ll always have that feeling something’s missing. Make this fragrance from Italian fashion house Salvatore Ferragamo your daily salad dressing, with notes of sexy tonka bean and the zingy freshness of grapefruit and mandarin.

Buy Now: £44.50

Reiss Douglas Dogtooth Overcoat

It’s the first day of September, which makes it just about the right time to think about investing in a quality winter coat, one you’ll never want to take off as you’re plunged into an icy tundra. This dogtooth overcoat from Reiss is a good bet to keep you looking elegant as you’re freezing your nips off underneath. Wear it with a black rollneck for maximum menswear points.

Buy Now: £295.00

Burton Blue Untitled Rugby Polo Shirt

Your dopey mate Jasper who could down eight Jagerbombs in a row on the rugby social despite not being part of the university rugby team might have sported one, but so has Chance the Rapper, Snoop Dogg and Mick Jagger. Don’t judge the rugby shirt then on Jasper alone; judge it on all the other cool guys who’ve worn the style. This slick retro-tinged version from high street store Burton would work well as a casual Sunday get-up over some relaxed denim.

Buy Now: £25.00

Auxillary Infra Leather Trainers

Inspired by skate culture, new British footwear brand Auxillary is attempting to encroach on ground previously owned by Common Projects – mainly top quality minimalist luxury trainers. With minimalism, the devil is in the detail and so you get thick rubber soles, high-quality suede or leather uppers and a textured collar all in a multitude of hazy neutral shades.

Buy Now: £240.00

American Apparel Mix Modal Pink Lounge Pant

It’s about time you binned those sticky, crumb-adorned joggers that you still inexplicably hang about the house in, and invest in something that doesn’t drive the ladies away when they come round for Netflix and chill. The new Mix Modal collection of loungewear from American Apparel is a great start in a silky, luxe fabric at an affordable price point.

Buy Now: £26.00

Oliver J. Woods Formentera Salt Spray

Controlling your mane can be a nightmare some times, which is where sea salt spray comes in handy. By harnessing the power of Poseidon, a couple of spritzes can control the waves in your hair adding texture and lift, while this option from Oliver J. Woods will also leave your locks smelling of bergamot, amber and sandalwood.

Buy Now: £18.00

Carhartt WIP Arch Coach Jacket

Lads, we’re just going to come right out and say it – this is a boss jacket, the sort of garment that makes you feel like you own the whole street as you strut down it, all eyes on you like it’s your personal catwalk. Although you can also look like a bit like a spring lamb if you’re not careful, so get some contrast into the outfit by wearing some black skinny jeans down below.

Buy Now: £124.00

Canali Blue Tumbled Leather Card Holder

Canali craftsmanship is world-renowned, with over 80 years of impeccable menswear to back it up. It’s AW18 collection continues the fine work with blazers, suits and jumpers we’d give a sizeable chunk of our wallet for. But while we accumulate the funds we’ll settle for keeping our cash in this fine leather cardholder from the Italian brand which comes with a contrasting yellow stitch detail and an embossed Canali logo.

Buy Now: £110.00

Dickies 873 Work Pant Chinos

The trouser is going through a renaissance in menswear at the moment. Wide-legs, slim fits, and array of fabrics – no one size fits all and it’s as good a time as any to experiment and revolutionise your collection. A pair of chinos from Dickies make a good entry point. While remaining affordable their distinguishing shape and pleat sets them apart from the jeans wearing brigade.

Buy Now: £33.59

Nike Heritage Hip Pack

Hip pack, cross-body bag, fanny pack – whatever you like to call it, everyone’s wearing them so maybe you should too. This one from Nike has a bit of the 1990s about it with its simple, breast beating sloganeering, while it can be worn across the body or the on waist. It’s also a lot more understated than the ones being touted over festival season this summer.

Buy Now: £19.00

Adidas Warped Stripes T-Shirt

The September rain might put a dampener on any late summer BBQs you were planning on having but you can still get wavy with the boys in your back garden in this kaleidoscopic tee from Adidas. In an oversized fit and an eye-catching geometric pattern it’s got late summer streetwear down to a tee.

Buy Now: £35.00

Uniqlo Slim Fit Jacket

Even the most casual of men need to have a blazer up their sleeve – arguably the most transformative piece you can have in your wardrobe. And so if you’re not the type to shell out on a suit, at least invest in this slim fitting blazer from Uniqlo. Heck, you don’t even need an Oxford shirt, just throw it over a white tee with your smartest trousers and you’re ready to roll into that all-important job interview.

Buy Now: £89.90

Montblanc TimeWalker Manufacture Chronograph Limited Edition

Released to commemorate the golden age of motor racing, this new chronograph from luxury goods manufacturer Montblanc, is designed to look like the dashboards of classic race cars with its beige face and three sub-dials. The rotor – which can be viewed through the sapphire crystal case back – is designed in the shape of a steering wheel too, for those of you really driven crazy by the idea of Jackie Stewart flying down the tarmac.

Buy Now: £4,400.00

River Island RI 30 Navy Slim Fit Joggers

As high street chain River Island celebrates its 30th birthday with a limited edition collection, it’s hard to imagine the British mainstay is only that young. The capsule collection has a strong Versace influence running through it with elaborate, baroque linings galore, while these slim fitting joggers with a velvet-like side stripe are perfectly suited to knocking around the palace in.

Buy Now: £40.00

Mango Man Cotton-Linen Blend Jumper

A white jumper is a must-have item for any man looking to swap his summer tee for something rather more practical when the season is over. This one from Mango Man is ideal – clean-cut and minimalist it’s a basic neutral that can be paired with any colour, whether that’s a bold printed bomber jacket or a thick winter coat.

Buy Now: £35.99

Dune Client Lace-Up Boot

You’ve probably been giving your toes some much-needed breeze this summer (although we hope you’ve only resorted to the flip flops on holiday and not in the office) but now it’s time to give them some hard wearing protection. These boots from Dune are more than suitable, with contrasting texture panels and a chunky round toe, they’d look great with some worn-in denim.

Buy Now: £115.00

Cheap Monday Boxer Stripe T-Shirt

A Breton stripe tee doesn’t necessarily have to be worn on a yacht in the med. Swedish clothing label Cheap Monday has added its rock and roll stylings to the shirt, and with a ribbed neck, a black stripes and its skull logo on the chest, it would look far more comfortable under a leather jacket then above some chino shorts.

Buy Now: £25.00

BoohooMan Disney Mickey Mouse Sweater

Unfortunately for Mickey the red shorts and large yellow shoes look never caught on, but perhaps this jumper with his grumpy likeness on from BoohooMan will. In a rich shade of red and with his elegant signature down the side, we’d certainly sport this 100 per cent cotton number beyond the trip to Disneyland with the little ones.

Buy Now: £16.50

Stüssy London Capsule Collection Cap

As if there was any doubt that skatewear has now fully taken over the fashion world, monolithic streetwear brand Stüssy are opening a flagship store in London’s Soho district just around the corner from where Palace and Supreme both have stores. To celebrate the launch it has released a special capsule collection including this branded cap. Expect labyrinthine queues.

Buy Now: £50.00

Wrangler X Vans Cowboy Cut Jeans

Wranglers high calibre denim meets the Vans check in this new collaborative capsule collection between the two American brands. Tough and hardwearing these jeans will last you a lifetime (or a good while at least) and remember to roll them up at the hem to show off that lining which would like ace with a pair of, well, Vans.

Buy Now: £80.00

[kaitlinrheanne-blog]

I don’t know about you but summer is my favourite season. The sun, the heat, the BBQs! There’s so much about it I love, and obviously, that includes the trends. And there have been so many types of shoe and sandal I’ve rocked over the summers but I’ve not found one quite as perfect as this.

Now it’s not a revelation (except maybe for me) but who knew how versatile espadrilles were?? I remember thinking how ugly I thought the shoe was when I first saw one, completely not me. Or so I thought. Skip to a few years later and here I am, loving this boho chic style in all types and colours. I’m a lover of an easy flat in the summer, something comfy and not too constricting yet stylish, on trend and something that goes with everything. And these really do go with everything. I’m wearing them right now with bright orange peg leg trousers and love it.

These ones from H&M are just a dream. So comfy, a gorgeous colour that’s neutral enough to go with anything but not your plain blacks or whites and different to any other pair of shoes in my wardrobe. The quality is great and so wonderfully affordable I wish I’d got them in the yellow too. Although there is still time…

Shop these below, along with some of my other favourites at the minute

x

http://www2.hm.com/en_gb/productpage.0581154003.html

http://www2.hm.com/en_gb/productpage.0485495001.html

http://www.asos.com/asos-tall/asos-design-tall-crinkle-cami-with-lace-insert/prd/9021114?CTAref=We%20Recommend%20Carousel_10&featureref1=we%20recommend%20pers

    http://www.revolve.com/soludos-suede-tassel-mule/dp/SOLU-WZ267/?d=Womens&page=1&lc=18&itrownum=6&itcurrpage=1&itview=01&plpSrc=%2Fr%2FSearch.jsp%3Fsearch%3Despadrilles%26d%3DWomens%26sortBy%3Dfeatured

http://www.asos.com/miss-kg/miss-kg-out-of-office-tie-up-espadrilles/prd/9041214?clr=cream&SearchQuery=espadrilles%20women&gridcolumn=1&gridrow=4&gridsize=4&pge=2&pgesize=72&totalstyles=369

http://www.revolve.com/kaanas-santa-helena-sandal/dp/KAAR-WZ90/?d=Womens&page=1&lc=73&itrownum=25&itcurrpage=1&itview=01&plpSrc=%2Fr%2FSearch.jsp%3Fsearch%3Despadrilles%26d%3DWomens%26sortBy%3Dfeatured

http://www.revolve.com/soludos-platform-tennis-sneaker/dp/SOLU-WZ202/?d=Womens&page=1&lc=17&itrownum=6&itcurrpage=1&itview=01&plpSrc=%2Fr%2FSearch.jsp%3Fsearch%3Despadrilles%26d%3DWomens%26sortBy%3Dfeatured

http://www.asos.com/asos/asos-jasia-espadrille-sandals/prd/9271528?clr=khaki&SearchQuery=espadrilles%20women&gridcolumn=2&gridrow=8&gridsize=4&pge=1&pgesize=72&totalstyles=369

http://www.revolve.com/soludos-elephant-beaded-smoking-slipper/dp/SOLU-WZ270/?d=Womens&page=1&lc=12&itrownum=4&itcurrpage=1&itview=01&plpSrc=%2Fr%2FSearch.jsp%3Fsearch%3Despadrilles%26d%3DWomens%26sortBy%3Dfeatured

https://shop.nordstrom.com/s/steve-madden-arran-r-platform-espadrille-sandal-women/5047365?origin=keywordsearch-personalizedsort&color=silver

https://shop.nordstrom.com/s/vince-camuto-carran-platform-sandal-women/4845942?origin=keywordsearch-personalizedsort&color=red%20hot%20rio%20stripe%20canvas

http://www.revolve.com/soludos-ciao-bella-smoking-slipper/dp/SOLU-WZ239/?d=Womens&page=1&lc=4&itrownum=2&itcurrpage=1&itview=01&plpSrc=%2Fr%2FSearch.jsp%3Fsearch%3Despadrilles%26d%3DWomens%26sortBy%3Dfeatured

http://www.asos.com/asos/asos-junction-sandal-espadrilles/prd/9013048?clr=naturalblackmix&SearchQuery=espadrilles%20women&gridcolumn=1&gridrow=12&gridsize=4&pge=2&pgesize=72&totalstyles=369

http://www.asos.com/lost-ink-wide-fit/lost-ink-wide-fit-white-denim-flatform-espadrilles/prd/9126968?clr=whitedenim&SearchQuery=espadrilles%20women&gridcolumn=3&gridrow=8&gridsize=4&pge=2&pgesize=72&totalstyles=369

http://www.revolve.com/soludos-knotted-wedge-90mm/dp/SOLU-WZ253/?d=Womens&page=1&lc=3&itrownum=1&itcurrpage=1&itview=01&plpSrc=%2Fr%2FSearch.jsp%3Fsearch%3Despadrilles%26d%3DWomens%26sortBy%3Dfeatured

http://www.asos.com/asos/asos-design-thear-espadrille-flatform-sandals/prd/9158119?clr=lemonprint&SearchQuery=espadrilles%20women&gridcolumn=2&gridrow=5&gridsize=4&pge=3&pgesize=72&totalstyles=369

http://www.revolve.com/sam-edelman-oakley-slide/dp/SAME-WZ579/?d=Womens&page=1&lc=19&itrownum=7&itcurrpage=1&itview=01&plpSrc=%2Fr%2FSearch.jsp%3Fsearch%3Despadrilles%26d%3DWomens%26sortBy%3Dfeatured

http://www.asos.com/river-island/river-island-espadrille-mule-loafer/prd/9867191?clr=yellow&SearchQuery=espadrilles%20women&gridcolumn=3&gridrow=13&gridsize=4&pge=5&pgesize=72&totalstyles=369

http://www.asos.com/pullbear/pullbear-espadrille-with-tie-ankle/prd/9906228?clr=nude&SearchQuery=espadrilles%20women&gridcolumn=1&gridrow=15&gridsize=4&pge=1&pgesize=72&totalstyles=118

  The perfect summer shoe I don't know about you but summer is my favourite season. The sun, the heat, the BBQs!

[wp-yahoo-style-1042-yahoopa-blog]

How to dress for spring, according to your zodiac sign

If you’re struggling with what to wear this spring, looking to your zodiac sign can inform your wardrobe decisions more than you’d think.

Although Mercury was in retrograde recently since the third day of spring (in case you were wondering), the days when nothing seemed to go as planned and inspiration was nowhere to be found are finally behind us. Now the planet that rules communication is back on track, and your highly anticipated spring outfits should follow. Whether you’re a fire, air, earth, or water sign — or even if astrology is not your thing — choosing a wardrobe that reflects your personality can help you feel more confident and comfortable in your own skin.

With that in mind, we’ve paired spring’s most coveted trends with each of the 12 zodiac signs. So whether you’re a fiery Aries or a tell-it-like-it-is Sagittarius, there’s a hot spring look just for you.

Read More from Yahoo Lifestyle:

• This teen took his mom to prom because she missed hers—and the photos are so glam  • The most fashionable looks at Coachella worn by regular people  • Plus-size influencers recreate Meghan and Harry’s outfits, proving you can look like royalty at any size 

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.

How to dress this spring according to your zodiac sign

If you’re struggling with what to wear this spring, your zodiac sign can inform your wardrobe decisions more effectively than you’d think.

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

Aries (Mar. 21-Apr. 19)

Oh, Rams, spring is off to a rocky start for you, with Mercury in retrograde in your season and all. However, the key to getting through the hard times this spring is taking things head-on with a bold and bright outfit that matches your go-getter personality. That’s why color blocking à la Isabel Marant or Cinq à Sept spring/summer ’18 collections will look good on you, Aries — especially if you pair fiery colors. Zara, Checked Sweater, $36, zara.com ATP Atelier, Abra White Vacchetta, $336, atpatelier.com Susan Alexandra, The Merry Bag, $225, susanalexandra.com Alexa Chung, Red Wide-Leg Jeans, $325, alexachung.com Le Specs, Outta Love Sunglasses, $59, lespecs.com

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

Taurus (April 20 – May 20)

For Taurus, spring 2018 is the best time to mix things up and work toward your goals. You’re no stranger when it comes to persistence and determination, so it’s a no-brainer that you should amp up your power suit game this season. Bonus points if you opt for pastel colors like Victoria Beckham’s spring/summer ’18 collection. H&M, Single-Breasted Blazer, $50, hm.com Stella McCartney, Straight-Leg Trousers, $610, matchesfashion.com Urban Outfitters, The Little Brother Tee, $20, urbanoutfitters.com Creatures of Comfort, Gloria Heel, $395, needsupply.com Justine Clenquet, Lana Hoops, $55.45, justineclenquet.com

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

Gemini (May 21-June 20)

Geminis, you’re all about versatility and adaptability. Instead of searching for what to buy next, work with what you’ve got. Cue socks and sandals. This detail will make your spring outfits anything but boring. And if any sign can rock this trend, which was spotted down MSGM’s and Marc Jacobs’s spring/summer ’18 runways, it’s yours. Mango, Ruffled Linen-blend skirt, $60, mango.com Lisa Marie Fernandez, Pouf Eyelet Cotton Blouse, modaoperandi.com Maryam Nassir Zadeh, Olympia Wedge Sandals, $443, shopbop.com Happy Socks, Hysteria Lily Rib Ankle Socks, $18, happysocks.com Tuza, Masha Hoops, $88, tuzajewelry.com

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

Cancer (June 21-July 22)

You’re tired of waiting for things to change on their own, Cancer. This spring, it’s time to embrace your intuitive and imaginative persona and take matters into your own hands. And you’ll need a wardrobe that’s up for the challenge. It’s time to dabble in the luxe streetwear trend and give chunky sneakers a try. Trust us, you won’t regret it. Mango, Peaked-Lapel Suit Blazer, $60, mango.com Kenzo, Striped Crepe Track Pants, $395, netaporter.com Poppy Lissiman, Le Skinny Sunglasses, $98, poppylissiman.com Nike, Air Max 97 Silver Bullet, $160, nike.com Kara, Void Pinch Wristlet, $295, shop.karastore.com

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

Leo (July 23 – Aug 22)

Leo, despite (and in spite of!) the highs and lows you’ll face this spring, your closet should be prepared, literally. Asymmetrical necklines like the ones in Prabal Gurung’s and Haider Ackermann’s spring/summer ’18 collections should rule in your spring closet and will reflect your awareness of your desires and personality. Reike Nen, RJ2-SH002, $298, reikenen-shop.com Zara, Minimal Collection Top, $30, zara.com Everlane, Kick Crop Jean, $78, everlane.com Opening Ceremony, Medium Plaid Tote Bag, $30, openingceremony.com Laura Lombardi, Curve Earrings, $105, lauralombardi.com

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sept. 22)

As usual, this spring Virgos will be efficient, bright, dynamic, and creative, which means you have exactly what it takes to achieve all your goals — and your outfit shouldn’t slow you down. That’s why you should opt for all things utilitarian this season, as seen in Prada’s and Tod’s spring/summer ’18 collections (tiny bags, which complement this trend, are optional). & Other stories, Belted Denim Dress, $125, similar version on stories.com Whistles, Cora Buckle Slingback, $199, whistles.com Common Muse, Greta Chain Earrings, $42, commonmuse.com Urban Outfitters, Gird Plastic Shopper Tote, $29, urbanoutfitters.com

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

Libra (Sept. 23-Oct. 22)

There’s just something about spring, with its flowers and pastel colors, that exudes romance and charm. So this season, embrace your own gracious qualities and make sure to have plenty of blouses and dresses with puffy sleeves that add the perfect amount of statement to any quaint outfit. Ganni Bliss Cropped Tulle Top, $540, netaporter.com River Island, White Mila Wide-Leg Jean, $84, riverisland.com Topshop, Fever Strappy Slide Sandal, $65, topshop.com The Common Knowledge, Mini Prism, $210, thecommonkowledge.com Crap Eyewear, The Sweet Leaf Sunglasses, $85, crapeyewear.com

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 21)

Your intuition is an excellent guide, so be sure to listen to your gut feeling this spring, Scorpio. You follow your own rules, and that’s why denim-on-denim should be your uniform this season. It’s a classic that can’t be beat but one you can always add your own cool Scorpio flair to. Take notes from Alexander McQueen’s and Y/Project’s spring/summer ’18 collections. & Other stories, Denim Overall Jumpsuit, $125, similar version available on urbanoutfitters.com Vintage Virginia Slim Cat-Eye Sunglasses, $18, urbanoutfitters.com Mari Giudicelli, Leblon Mule, $591, needsuply.com

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 21)

As a fire sign, you’re known to be quite straightforward. However, this spring learn to go with the flow and make sure your outfit transmits those vibes as well. Opt for sheer garments that go with your extroverted personality, all while adding a touch of vulnerability to your outfits, like Molly Goddard‘s spring/summer ’18 Vaish dresses and Dior‘s dreamyspring/summer ’18 maxi skirts. Ganni, Fairfax Georgette Maxi Dress, $294, ganni.com Everlane, Tank Bra, $22, everlane.com By Far, Day Approach sandals, $468, garmentory.com Gogo Phillip, Banana Earrings, $47, gogophilip.com

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 19)

If Capricorns could be any clothing item, they would be a classic trench. Luckily for you, this wardrobe staple is one of spring 2018’s biggest trends. From versions by Céline to Chloé and Max Mara, this light layer will compliment your independent and reliable persona. Mango, Linen Trench, $150, mango.com Topshop, Broderie Mini-Sundress, $75, topshop.com Charles David, Strappy Patent Leather Slide Sandals, $199, bloomingdales.com Coach, Rose Buddies Silk Hanky, $65, zappos.com Urban Outfitters, Catelyn Mini Bucket Bag, $34, urbanoutfitters.com

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 18)

A creative force, such as yours, Aquarius, is the only one who can make Bermuda shorts a thing this season. First seen in Tibi’s and Off -White’s spring/summer ’18 collections, this trend is something Aquarians can definitely bring from runway to real life — and actually make it work. Aspesi, Checkered Bermuda Shorts, $238, farfetch.com Aritzia, Sedum Camisole, $65, aritzia.com H&M, Sandals, $35, hm.com The Frankie Shop, Black Wooden-Ring Handle Bag, $134, thefrankieshop.com Rachel Comey, Factor Earrings, $115, rachelcomey.com

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

Pisces (Feb. 19-Mar. 20)

Pisces’s otherworldly nature makes you gravitate to all things fun and daring, so this spring you should be all about mixed prints paired together. Polka dots with stripes, animal prints with checkers — no matter which combo you decide to style, don’t think twice about it: Just do it, like Emporio Armani’s and Burberry’s spring/summer ’18 collections. Ganni, Polka-dot Silk Satin Skirt, $395, mytheresa.com Skechers, D’Lites, $65, skechers.com Bershka, Fanny Pack With Chain, $26, bershka.com Madewell, Basil Striped T-shirt, $50, netaporter.com Fox & Feather, Ichi Sanne Socks, $15, trouva.com

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

[jonathanbelloblog]

Mountains Climbed Lions Tamed

The bad thing about starting out on your first great South African off-road driving and safari adventure is that you and your camouflage pants, lug-soled hiking boots, and zebra-trimmed bush hat look unbelievably stupid clomping through the gleaming marble lobby of Cape Town’s prestigious Table Bay Hotel. Hmm. Those childhood “Tarzan” movies might not have been the best source of wardrobe tips.

Once outside, we blend in so much better. Lining the hotel’s circular drive are a row of rugged Land Rover LR3s, one in Zambezi silver and four in Tangiers orange (painted in the livery of the recent G4 global adventure challenge), each accompanied by official instructor/guides dressed in matching uniforms of blue long-sleeved shirts and gray trousers. Behind them is a coterie of Land Rover North America handlers, complete with camera crew ready to record the five-star safari ahead.  

This is why we’d traveled halfway around the world. Automobile Magazine had been invited to join a band of well-heeled American adventurers who’d ponied up $8995 each (not including airfare) for the privilege of being terrified into a state of adventure nirvana for the next six days and nights. They are dressed like me, with the exception of a Bottega Veneto handbag here and a pair of Gucci loafers and Prada sunglasses there.

No, you will not meet beer-swilling, skinny-dipping, Jeep Rubicon- type revelers on the Land Rover trail. Our fellow travelers are retired captains of industry and entrepreneurs in aircraft maintenance and real-estate development. But make no mistake: over the course of the next week, in between the gourmet meals and fine wines of the Western Cape, men and women alike will slip from luxurious 1000-thread-count cocoons to muscle their pricey SUVs over perilous mountain passes, to ford rivers presumably teeming with crocodiles, and to part the dense swamp- grass home of black mambas, puff adders, and spitting cobras. Then drink.

There are a few off-road paradises left in the world, and Land Rover knows where to find them, partly because its stalwart products have already blazed those trails and can still be found merrily rolling along where pack mules fear to tread. If you own a Land Rover, you have the keys to it all, and Land Rover culture encourages you to partake.   Dealerships (called Land Rover Centres) have little on-site mountain test courses to try before you buy. Afterward, you can attend one of three magnificent off-road driving schools—at the Quail Lodge in Carmel Valley, California; at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina; or at Fairmont Le Chateau Montebello in Quebec. The next stop is a full-blown Land Rover Adventure.

South Africa, a country three times the size of Great Britain, is perfect for adventure. It splits the frigid Atlantic from the warm waters of the Indian Ocean at the Cape Point, and depending on which side you’re on, offers subtropical vegetation, rugged mountain ranges, semi-desert, rain forest, scrubby bushveld, and perfectly groomed vineyards.   Its cities are modern, the political climate is fairly stable given its tumultuous past, its little towns are quaint, and the well-marked road system of the Western Cape is in better shape than Michigan’s. All that, and wild elephants in the backyard, too.

  What could be more perfect? That would be our guides, the staff of Kwa-Zulu Natal Land Rover Experience, the world’s first franchised Land Rover off-road training group, led by the irrepressible Rob Timcke, a chain-smoking, Red Bull-slugging firecracker. Timcke is a born raconteur who nevertheless inspires utter confidence in his ability to bring everyone back alive.   Not just a talker, Timcke was raised in a hunting camp in the old Eastern Transvaal on the Mozambique border, where his first language was Zulu. He spent time in the Congo during the really bad years as a South African army intelligence officer and became a professional hunter until 1993, when Communist Party leader Chris Hani was murdered and trophy hunters stayed home. Next, he set up tourist dives to view tiger and great white sharks. Without the cage.  

Timcke then jumped into teaching people the fine art of off-road driving. “I was always a bush person,” he says, “never a sea person. After nine years of getting really seasick, I found some idiot of a bank manager to buy my operation.” His cohorts include his stunning Akrikaaner wife, Carina. (“I slept my way into a job,” she cracks. “Unfortunately, my previous job paid much more.”)   Her brother Pierre Versfeld and top fly-fishing guide Antony Diplock complete the group. Diplock is not a big talker, but then he lives alone on an island near Namibia and, at the age of eighteen, participated in the tribal coming-of-age circumcision ritual with his boyhood Zulu friends. He doesn’t need to talk much.

Handshakes and hellos out of the way, we climb behind right-hand-mounted steering wheels and head south in convoy. To acclimate us to driving on the wrong side of the road, Timcke has sent us down the coast road past the rugged Twelve Apostles mountain chain flanking our left and the beach towns of Camps Bay and Llandudno on our right.   We climb the Chapman’s Peak toll road clinging to seaside cliffs and rumble through the shrubby natural fynbos (“fine bush”) habitat of the Cape of Good Hope nature reserve splashed with the bright spikey blooms of protea.

South Africans are rightfully proud of this, the densest of the world’s six floral kingdoms, counting between 8500 and 9000 species packed in an L-shaped area centered around Cape Town, no more than sixty miles wide. The camera car just misses a turtle in front of us. “Ooh, a fynbos tortoise,” chuckles Timcke. “They’re quite rare.”

The plan for a brief mountainside sojourn in the dirt is scratched due to a hard, fast storm blowing in from the south. This brings fond memories to Timcke: “Carina and I ran a safari in Botswana. We were camping when massive, massive thunderstorms rolled in. You could see lightning for miles.   She was setting the table with white linen, and I noticed the ground was alive. Scorpions and spiders. ‘You take me home and you take me home now!’ she yelled. This other time we were scouting in Zambia, and I sent her out to check the depth of the river crossing. She was chest-deep and turned and yelled, ‘What if there are crocs?’ I told her, ‘Don’t splash.’ ” What a gal.

We carry on to the mountain-ringed Cape Winelands surrounding Paarl, Franschhoek, and Stellenbosch (founded by Dutch and Huguenot settlers in the late 1600s) for a world-class lunch at Bosman’s Restaurant at Grande Roche, Africa’s only Relais Gourmand.   We taste the superb wines of Grand Roche, Boschendal, and Spier. Instructors become chauffeurs. Back in Cape Town, a native choir welcomes us to dinner at the prime minister’s historic residence. It seems that there’ll be no end to the eating and drinking. And drinking.

Real off-roading comes early the next day, and it is very, very good. Our LR3 has a 300-hp V-8 that shifts through a six-speed manu-matic and a hill-descent control system that won’t let the vehicle roll downhill unchecked with your foot off the brake—which is most helpful when it gets dicey. Terrain response allows the perfect tractive selection with the spin of a knob. I select the rock icon to climb into the pines, spotting a mongoose and a few klipspringers, which look like tiny reindeer perched on clothespins.   It looks like Colorado, I think. Baboons run out. Colorado, but with baboons. A sentry male barks and moves toward us, menacing, while the rest of the troop flees. “I raised four baboons,” says Timcke. “They ran loose at our safari lodge. The males are domineering and see humans as other primates. There will be one alpha male and lots of beta males. My mom, they hung on her leg. My dad was the dominant male. At maturity, they challenge the troop. This one, he’d demonstrate his strength to the weaker part of the troop. That would be my sister. He eventually nipped her, drew blood, and I got out the revolver and shot him.” OK, then.

Once through the forest, we dive into a thicket of grass and find that the rain has made a lake of our trail. Knowing that an LR3 can push through water high enough to break over the hood, I press confidently along, completely forgetting I am on highway tires. No problem. We come out in the fynbos, a riotous blast of purple, pink, yellow, and blue spikes, flowers your florist would die for.

Back to Stellenbosch for an open-air Indonesian and Cape Malay buffet with delicacies such as springbok saut and gnu stew. (I made that last one up.) In the city center, there’s a great crafts market, but I’ve decided to not tell you about buying the Congolese mask from the Zairian merchant, whom I somehow bargained up from 280 to 300 rand, about fifty dollars. Rob is suffused with mirth as I climb in with my precious cargo. The guy was sweating. He pleaded. I felt sorry for him. Forget it.

Luggage stowed, we head for an overnight in the coastal town of Knysna. We of course go the longest, most difficult way. There is a dirt trail all the way from Cape Town to Knysna, but we don’t patch into it until we turn off just west of Mossel Bay on Route 327, pass ostrich farms that line the road on both sides, and head into the Centre Valley of the Western Cape, the arid red earth and rocklands of the Little Karoo.

In the distance, two wild ostriches haul tailfeathers across the bleak plain. “Damn quick little buggers,” says Rob. “Sixty kph [37 mph] at full speed.” The road turns to lane, the lane to trail, and soon we are climbing past a sign that reads, ‘Men remove dentures, ladies fasten your bras.’ It’s the oxwagon autobahn, the path of Dutch settlers between 1689 and 1869. If they could do it, so can we.

We see wild Boerperds—native horses—and the most colorful birds imaginable. When we can look. Because now we are creeping downhill. The rocks are loose and have sharp edges, it is scary steep, and in some places the holes are so deep that both rear wheels lift off the ground in a pirouette straight from hell, which gives me shallow breathing. As I crawl from that horror, I loosen my sweaty stranglehold on the wheel, letting it spin free in my hands.

“You mustn’t do that or the ruts in the road will dictate where your tires will be,” Rob corrects me. I forgot he was even there, focusing as I am on the sharp rocks that line the downward slope of this path. I feel six inches too close to everything—the steering wheel, the pedals, the brakes, God. “Take the brake off,” says Rob. Huh?   I have to unhook all ten toes from their death grip on the pedal. I don’t want to. But the LR3 slowly finishes the gradual descent without my feet. We are at Bonniedale, a 1650-hectare guest farm that was named one of the top 4×4 destinations in South Africa for two years.   It’s open to the public for anything from a day’s driving fun to camping and horse trekking. Nico Hesterman, a former conservation officer, and his wife, Danette, have lived in this wilderness for eighteen years and have a traditional outdoor barbecue, or braai, waiting in camp for us. A cold, Namibia-brewed Windhoek lager would have to wait ’til that evening.  

We were sorely ready for the rain forest town of Knysna and its ultraluxurious, ultrachic Pezula Resort. Again we arrive with the camouflage pants, lug-soled hiking boots, and zebra-trimmed bush hats, tromping through someone’s hushed art gallery of a hotel lobby.   But this time, we throw ourselves on the nearest beer bottle, nearly weeping with relief for having made it thus far unscathed. Okay, maybe that really nice lady with the Bottega Veneto bag and Gucci loafers, who rode serenely down that same awful hill, confident in her young son’s ability at the wheel, sipped white wine.  

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[jesusvasser]

Mountains Climbed Lions Tamed

The bad thing about starting out on your first great South African off-road driving and safari adventure is that you and your camouflage pants, lug-soled hiking boots, and zebra-trimmed bush hat look unbelievably stupid clomping through the gleaming marble lobby of Cape Town’s prestigious Table Bay Hotel. Hmm. Those childhood “Tarzan” movies might not have been the best source of wardrobe tips.

Once outside, we blend in so much better. Lining the hotel’s circular drive are a row of rugged Land Rover LR3s, one in Zambezi silver and four in Tangiers orange (painted in the livery of the recent G4 global adventure challenge), each accompanied by official instructor/guides dressed in matching uniforms of blue long-sleeved shirts and gray trousers. Behind them is a coterie of Land Rover North America handlers, complete with camera crew ready to record the five-star safari ahead.  

This is why we’d traveled halfway around the world. Automobile Magazine had been invited to join a band of well-heeled American adventurers who’d ponied up $8995 each (not including airfare) for the privilege of being terrified into a state of adventure nirvana for the next six days and nights. They are dressed like me, with the exception of a Bottega Veneto handbag here and a pair of Gucci loafers and Prada sunglasses there.

No, you will not meet beer-swilling, skinny-dipping, Jeep Rubicon- type revelers on the Land Rover trail. Our fellow travelers are retired captains of industry and entrepreneurs in aircraft maintenance and real-estate development. But make no mistake: over the course of the next week, in between the gourmet meals and fine wines of the Western Cape, men and women alike will slip from luxurious 1000-thread-count cocoons to muscle their pricey SUVs over perilous mountain passes, to ford rivers presumably teeming with crocodiles, and to part the dense swamp- grass home of black mambas, puff adders, and spitting cobras. Then drink.

There are a few off-road paradises left in the world, and Land Rover knows where to find them, partly because its stalwart products have already blazed those trails and can still be found merrily rolling along where pack mules fear to tread. If you own a Land Rover, you have the keys to it all, and Land Rover culture encourages you to partake.   Dealerships (called Land Rover Centres) have little on-site mountain test courses to try before you buy. Afterward, you can attend one of three magnificent off-road driving schools—at the Quail Lodge in Carmel Valley, California; at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina; or at Fairmont Le Chateau Montebello in Quebec. The next stop is a full-blown Land Rover Adventure.

South Africa, a country three times the size of Great Britain, is perfect for adventure. It splits the frigid Atlantic from the warm waters of the Indian Ocean at the Cape Point, and depending on which side you’re on, offers subtropical vegetation, rugged mountain ranges, semi-desert, rain forest, scrubby bushveld, and perfectly groomed vineyards.   Its cities are modern, the political climate is fairly stable given its tumultuous past, its little towns are quaint, and the well-marked road system of the Western Cape is in better shape than Michigan’s. All that, and wild elephants in the backyard, too.

  What could be more perfect? That would be our guides, the staff of Kwa-Zulu Natal Land Rover Experience, the world’s first franchised Land Rover off-road training group, led by the irrepressible Rob Timcke, a chain-smoking, Red Bull-slugging firecracker. Timcke is a born raconteur who nevertheless inspires utter confidence in his ability to bring everyone back alive.   Not just a talker, Timcke was raised in a hunting camp in the old Eastern Transvaal on the Mozambique border, where his first language was Zulu. He spent time in the Congo during the really bad years as a South African army intelligence officer and became a professional hunter until 1993, when Communist Party leader Chris Hani was murdered and trophy hunters stayed home. Next, he set up tourist dives to view tiger and great white sharks. Without the cage.  

Timcke then jumped into teaching people the fine art of off-road driving. “I was always a bush person,” he says, “never a sea person. After nine years of getting really seasick, I found some idiot of a bank manager to buy my operation.” His cohorts include his stunning Akrikaaner wife, Carina. (“I slept my way into a job,” she cracks. “Unfortunately, my previous job paid much more.”)   Her brother Pierre Versfeld and top fly-fishing guide Antony Diplock complete the group. Diplock is not a big talker, but then he lives alone on an island near Namibia and, at the age of eighteen, participated in the tribal coming-of-age circumcision ritual with his boyhood Zulu friends. He doesn’t need to talk much.

Handshakes and hellos out of the way, we climb behind right-hand-mounted steering wheels and head south in convoy. To acclimate us to driving on the wrong side of the road, Timcke has sent us down the coast road past the rugged Twelve Apostles mountain chain flanking our left and the beach towns of Camps Bay and Llandudno on our right.   We climb the Chapman’s Peak toll road clinging to seaside cliffs and rumble through the shrubby natural fynbos (“fine bush”) habitat of the Cape of Good Hope nature reserve splashed with the bright spikey blooms of protea.

South Africans are rightfully proud of this, the densest of the world’s six floral kingdoms, counting between 8500 and 9000 species packed in an L-shaped area centered around Cape Town, no more than sixty miles wide. The camera car just misses a turtle in front of us. “Ooh, a fynbos tortoise,” chuckles Timcke. “They’re quite rare.”

The plan for a brief mountainside sojourn in the dirt is scratched due to a hard, fast storm blowing in from the south. This brings fond memories to Timcke: “Carina and I ran a safari in Botswana. We were camping when massive, massive thunderstorms rolled in. You could see lightning for miles.   She was setting the table with white linen, and I noticed the ground was alive. Scorpions and spiders. ‘You take me home and you take me home now!’ she yelled. This other time we were scouting in Zambia, and I sent her out to check the depth of the river crossing. She was chest-deep and turned and yelled, ‘What if there are crocs?’ I told her, ‘Don’t splash.’ ” What a gal.

We carry on to the mountain-ringed Cape Winelands surrounding Paarl, Franschhoek, and Stellenbosch (founded by Dutch and Huguenot settlers in the late 1600s) for a world-class lunch at Bosman’s Restaurant at Grande Roche, Africa’s only Relais Gourmand.   We taste the superb wines of Grand Roche, Boschendal, and Spier. Instructors become chauffeurs. Back in Cape Town, a native choir welcomes us to dinner at the prime minister’s historic residence. It seems that there’ll be no end to the eating and drinking. And drinking.

Real off-roading comes early the next day, and it is very, very good. Our LR3 has a 300-hp V-8 that shifts through a six-speed manu-matic and a hill-descent control system that won’t let the vehicle roll downhill unchecked with your foot off the brake—which is most helpful when it gets dicey. Terrain response allows the perfect tractive selection with the spin of a knob. I select the rock icon to climb into the pines, spotting a mongoose and a few klipspringers, which look like tiny reindeer perched on clothespins.   It looks like Colorado, I think. Baboons run out. Colorado, but with baboons. A sentry male barks and moves toward us, menacing, while the rest of the troop flees. “I raised four baboons,” says Timcke. “They ran loose at our safari lodge. The males are domineering and see humans as other primates. There will be one alpha male and lots of beta males. My mom, they hung on her leg. My dad was the dominant male. At maturity, they challenge the troop. This one, he’d demonstrate his strength to the weaker part of the troop. That would be my sister. He eventually nipped her, drew blood, and I got out the revolver and shot him.” OK, then.

Once through the forest, we dive into a thicket of grass and find that the rain has made a lake of our trail. Knowing that an LR3 can push through water high enough to break over the hood, I press confidently along, completely forgetting I am on highway tires. No problem. We come out in the fynbos, a riotous blast of purple, pink, yellow, and blue spikes, flowers your florist would die for.

Back to Stellenbosch for an open-air Indonesian and Cape Malay buffet with delicacies such as springbok saut and gnu stew. (I made that last one up.) In the city center, there’s a great crafts market, but I’ve decided to not tell you about buying the Congolese mask from the Zairian merchant, whom I somehow bargained up from 280 to 300 rand, about fifty dollars. Rob is suffused with mirth as I climb in with my precious cargo. The guy was sweating. He pleaded. I felt sorry for him. Forget it.

Luggage stowed, we head for an overnight in the coastal town of Knysna. We of course go the longest, most difficult way. There is a dirt trail all the way from Cape Town to Knysna, but we don’t patch into it until we turn off just west of Mossel Bay on Route 327, pass ostrich farms that line the road on both sides, and head into the Centre Valley of the Western Cape, the arid red earth and rocklands of the Little Karoo.

In the distance, two wild ostriches haul tailfeathers across the bleak plain. “Damn quick little buggers,” says Rob. “Sixty kph [37 mph] at full speed.” The road turns to lane, the lane to trail, and soon we are climbing past a sign that reads, ‘Men remove dentures, ladies fasten your bras.’ It’s the oxwagon autobahn, the path of Dutch settlers between 1689 and 1869. If they could do it, so can we.

We see wild Boerperds—native horses—and the most colorful birds imaginable. When we can look. Because now we are creeping downhill. The rocks are loose and have sharp edges, it is scary steep, and in some places the holes are so deep that both rear wheels lift off the ground in a pirouette straight from hell, which gives me shallow breathing. As I crawl from that horror, I loosen my sweaty stranglehold on the wheel, letting it spin free in my hands.

“You mustn’t do that or the ruts in the road will dictate where your tires will be,” Rob corrects me. I forgot he was even there, focusing as I am on the sharp rocks that line the downward slope of this path. I feel six inches too close to everything—the steering wheel, the pedals, the brakes, God. “Take the brake off,” says Rob. Huh?   I have to unhook all ten toes from their death grip on the pedal. I don’t want to. But the LR3 slowly finishes the gradual descent without my feet. We are at Bonniedale, a 1650-hectare guest farm that was named one of the top 4×4 destinations in South Africa for two years.   It’s open to the public for anything from a day’s driving fun to camping and horse trekking. Nico Hesterman, a former conservation officer, and his wife, Danette, have lived in this wilderness for eighteen years and have a traditional outdoor barbecue, or braai, waiting in camp for us. A cold, Namibia-brewed Windhoek lager would have to wait ’til that evening.  

We were sorely ready for the rain forest town of Knysna and its ultraluxurious, ultrachic Pezula Resort. Again we arrive with the camouflage pants, lug-soled hiking boots, and zebra-trimmed bush hats, tromping through someone’s hushed art gallery of a hotel lobby.   But this time, we throw ourselves on the nearest beer bottle, nearly weeping with relief for having made it thus far unscathed. Okay, maybe that really nice lady with the Bottega Veneto bag and Gucci loafers, who rode serenely down that same awful hill, confident in her young son’s ability at the wheel, sipped white wine.  

IFTTT