Read Napoleon's Roads for Free Online Page A

weight of sunlight, the slow, ordinary movements of the ordinary, familiar people on the streets within, the dogs, camels, donkeys, sheep, and the coloured awnings of the stalls, the goods being taken to and from market.
    They say that we carry deep within us a memory of all the places we have ever lived, of all the spaces that have made us their familiar, and that this memory in its turn shapes and colours the places we afterwards might dwell, but when was it that we all – that I – first entered A.?
    There are many ways of getting there. One of them is simply to set out and to keep moving until you find it. Another is to gather together all of those moments from your life so far when you have come across a site or smell or taste or thing which you have seemed to know intimately, but for which intimacy you could find no explanation, and to accept them as glimpses, as the beginnings of A. Another, of course, is to record your dreams. Still another is simply to look within – at your mind, your heart, your small daily habits, the way you shape your sentences – and to find out what kind of place it is you have hidden there. Even if that is only the faintest sketch of a place, the merest trace. Even if all that remains is the initial, the letter only in the alphabet of the mind, the lofty arch of it, that pointed attic space, the broad, hearthed room beneath it would return us to the time that gave it origin, no mere trick of rhetoric, no sleight of text, but the first letter, the beginning of all. One sees pictures of an ancient city of the Sahara, perhaps, or Kazakhstan, and says Yes, that is it. One sees a painting of Innsbruck – the cobbled streets, the outdoor market, the spires, the turreted roofs – and knows it is there too, a confluence of our deepest images and desire, a place every heart, every mind, every unconscious turn of the body somehow unknowingly knows, shaped no more by experience than by the first touch of the lip on the mother’s breast, the first glimpse of light, the first searing breath of air in the infant’s lungs, and all the cognates of these things: the first colour, the first word, the first knowledge of that other – that father – who also made one.
    Yet A. is also distinctive, also entirely one’s own. There is something arbitrary even in the selection of the initial, although also not. The letter itself occurs in word after word, as if to remind us that the beginning is always with us. But that is not why I have chosen it, if in fact I have had choice at all. I call it A., I sometimes think, because it is a city like Alexandria, or rather, since I have never been to Alexandria, what I have imagined that city to be like, from all the images I have seen of it, all the things I have read. If this makes it sound as if A. is also something in the mind, a kind of process of thought, then well and good, since any city must also be such a thing. I don’t only mean the way we carry deep in our minds the maps and shapes and atmospheres of the earliest cities of our experience, so that any subsequent city is also in some part these cities, too, since it is perceived by the mind itself that these cities first taught to see, although I do also mean this.
    There is, let us say, a harbour in A., but you need not live on the harbour. There are also hills behind the city, but you need not live amongst them. Within the perpetual alternation of the dry heat and the heavy winter rains (winter? is it ever winter there?) – in the palm-shaded courtyards, the narrow alleys behind the great central market, the airconditioned rooms of the luxury hotels – there is a considerable variety of climates and weathers, but you need not experience them. Doubtless those who live and work about the harbour think of A. as a harbour city, just as those who work high up in the hill mines think of the harbour as serving them, or those who live in the dry, flat reaches on the