The Tower of Silence in every bustling city

We said goodbye at the gate.

His first step took him over the horizon.

We stood around his parting footprint.

“He must be taller than we thought,” we said.

We met him near the West Hampstead tube station: a young man we knew little of beyond the fact that he, like us, lived in a nearby house that was awaiting demolition. He had a small bag slung over one shoulder. “Where are you off to?” we asked. “Kathmandu,” he replied, and strode onwards.

That evening I mentioned him to Anna, founder of the local self-help organisation that had argued the local council into letting some of its stock of unoccupied housing be used temporarily by such indefinables as ourselves and the Kathmandu pilgrim. She had not known of his departure, but we were all as elusive as eels, and she was unsurprised. The next day she went to the house to see if it was suitable for others of her houseless clients. “He’s left a few old books you might be interested in,” she said to me later, “and the house itself is worth seeing.”

Lured by the whiff of old books, I hurried round there myself. The house, Victorian, detached, three stories and attic over a semibasement, stood in a tangle of scrawny buddleia bushes. The back door to the basement flat gave at my push. I stepped in, and stood amazed. The ceiling of the flat’s main room, together with the floors and ceilings of the room above it, and of the one above that, and the one above that, had been removed. The departed resident must have started in the attic by prising up the floorboards and sawing through the joists beneath them, and so on down from floor to floor.

I saw no sign of the piles of timber this operation must have produced; perhaps they had been sold to fund his travels. One wall of the great empty tower had a door in it at each level, all hanging open; another wall had four tiled fireplaces one high above another. Craning my neck, I could make out some flowers, still fresh-looking, in a jam jar on the topmost mantelpiece.

After some rooting around in cupboards and cardboard boxes I found the books. They were mouldy and battered, but a 19th-century guide to Wales with engravings of famous views was worth salvaging. Then a ragged volume with the title Sahara, or perhaps Saraha, caught my eye. It seemed to be the work of a Buddhist sage of some such name.

I dipped into the long and scholarly introduction, and flipped through the many detailed notes at the end of the book. Intrigued, I eagerly turned to the text itself, only to find that it had been ripped out. What I had in my hand was the husk, academic analysis and pedantic commentary; the precious kernel, the divine message, was gone – to Kathmandu, no doubt.

New horizon

The Tower of Silence always stands in a city somewhere. No street noise reaches its summit. With every dawn it gives itself a new horizon. The doorman is polite but remote.

One day when the Tower was in Istanbul, I stepped out of it into what had been the courtyard of a Venetian caravanserai. The domes of the arcade had long fallen in. Squatting below the ragged circles of sky were women, their hands busy picking rags to bits, sorting short lengths of thread by colour.

In Terre Haute, Indiana, right opposite the doorway of the Tower, were the boarded-up windows of an apartment once used by the prostitute Al Capone blamed for his gonorrhoea and sent one of his gang to murder.

In Paris when I went to cross the road from the Tower’s splendid porte-cochere I had to step around two weeping women locked in each other’s arms. They had just come out of the Institut Curie’s radiotherapy centre, having, I surmised, just received the results of tests; the younger woman had burst into tears as soon as they were free of the institute’s constraining orderliness, and the elder, her mother perhaps, was comforting her.

In Dubrovnik, the Tower’s lobby formed part of the promenade around the city walls and faced the back of the jail. Something small was hanging on a string from the bars of a little window: a Turkish cigarette package, 10 Bafras, blue, empty. A vortex of traffic separated the Tower’s front steps from the blood-cemented stones of the Colosseum in Rome.

There were so many people crossing the street on which the Tower stood in the city of London that some of them had to step over the little drunken Scotsman lying on his back agitating his limbs like a capsized beetle. The Lion Dance went round and round the Tower in Bangkok; the six capering monkeys, their masks lumpy coagulations of spite, harried the exhausted lion, which feebly snapped its huge jaws at them. The child who slept among the Tower’s dustbins in Calcutta had dragons of pleated paper for sale; he could make one of them run up on to the back of another as if in copulation. His mother in Dublin sat against one of the Tower’s plant containers all day and apparently owned nothing but a plastic cup.

When the Tower returned to Istanbul there was a man living in the concrete-pillared parking space under it. The bottom half of his body had been replaced by a curved piece of rubber cut from a tyre, and he swung himself along by means of two weights in his hands. As I watched, he levered himself off a step on to a lower one, bounced and fell over with a curse. Two other men lurking in the darkness further back laughed at him. And so on, world without end.

Connemara and Elsewhere is published by the Royal Irish Academy and NUI Galway (€30). Irish Times readers are invited to two events with Tim Robinson. On Thursday, at 6.30pm, Vincent Woods will chair an evening with Robinson, John Elder and Nicolas Fève, at the RIA, in Dublin. Email robinson@ria.ie to book. On September 30th the book's launch, with a reading by Robinson, will follow a seminar and exhibition, Interpreting Landscape, at the Moore Institute, NUI Galway (nuigalway.ie/mooreinstitute)