13 JULY 1944, Page 7

RIMBAUD IN HARRAR

By B. IFOR EVANS

TOMORROW," said the leader of our party in Addis Ababa, "we go to Harrar." And then I remembered. Rimbaud ad been in Harrar. The greatest genius in French poetry in the ineteenth century, the clearesr example of genius anywhere, genius without talent, the explosive, new, unaccountable manifestation, ad spent his later years in Abyssinia, as a merchant's agent, a dealer n skins and 'guns, in every trade legitimate or illegitimate that ight be available. Then crazily came to me the faith that in that estern Ethiopian city someone would still have some record of this man driven by destiny. I had once discovered an unknown izabethan play in the attic of an English country house. In Harrar would find some trace of the house where he acted for the French merchant Bardey, some manuscript, or at the least some verbal memory.

The journey from Addis Ababa to Harrar is long, and it was ade longer by the fact that the patches on our worn-out inner tubes ceemed continually to grow hot in the sun and burst. The Ethiopian driver regarded it as a routine occurrence, and he mended every atch with skill. I tried to remember as I sat in the back of our army all that I had read of Rimbaud, especially in Miss Enid Starkie's dmirable volume, but I found my memory maddeningly capricious. he only book I had available was Francois Ruchon's study which, 31lowing the tradition of French literary works, had a triple division I Sa Vie, Son Oeuvre, Son Influence," but the " Sa Vie" section Was SO tantalisingly brief.

This quest for Rimbaud made me an unrewarding member of • th: party. We passed down from Addis through some of the most mlressive country I have ever seen, great plains, fruitful for the o,t part, villages with mud and straw huts, and, in the distance, ange after mighty range of mountains, blue, and purple, and endless.

only I had not thought of Rimbaud, nature could have had her ue, but while my friends indicated this or that beauty, I looked urreptitiously at Fantin Latour's picture, Coin de Table, which uchon reproduces. The rude, defiant face of the boy Rimbaud ares wickedly at the side of Verlaine, who seems like some orrupt and mendicant uncle. The two had been together in London, d had trouble with the police, if I remember Miss Starkie aright, fl their lodgings in Camden Town. I looked for a reference to mden Town in Ruchon, and failed to find it, and grew almost grv that this boy poet could make me think of Camden Town n this drive through a country that opened with each hour a more pressive grandeur. Of this I felt certain: Harrar itself would ove a disappointment, it would be hot, arid, ugly, rather like n inland Aden.

We reached Harrar at night and found to our surprise a well- Raided hotel a mile or so from the old city. At breakfast we asked waiter, an allied emigre with defective English, if he knew Rimbaud's house in Harrar. All he would reply was, "Is that the man with the girls?" Perhaps we had put our question very unintelligently, but his oft repetition of this single phrase suggested that enquiry in that direction would not prove very profitable. Yet the morning was young, and, despite all our premonitions, the climate was gentle ; the eye, so accustomed in the middle-east to the hard colours of deserts, could rest on the green of trees and the varied colours of flowers.

It was afternoon before we entered the gates of the old city, with its narrow pathways, and its crowded mud-built houses with their flat dun-coloured roofs. In the middle the town opened into a market, where costumes of all colours mingled in the crowd. How was one to pursue an enquiry here for a poet dead over fifty years, among these primitive people busy with their grain and spices and vegetables? Then I remembered that Miss Starkie had said some- where that when Rimbaud traded in Harrar he had the large house which later became the Governor's: in the lower storeys the goods were kept and on the top storey he lived. Someone perhaps would know the house we searched for by the name of the Governor's house, And so it proved. Five minutes' enquiry in a coffee-stall had not only produced an answer, but a boy to lead us. On a hill in the centre of the town stood the house, unmistakably the house, where Rimbaud had worked so grudgingly and lived in such un- happiness. It was empty. The doors were open and we could walk from room to room and climb from floor to floor. All we could discover in our meagre Amharic exchanges with the boy was that "They had gone." They had most certainly gone, and not one trace of human living remained, nothing but room after room of bareness.

I went out on to the roof and looked down on the town. The quest was over, and the mood had exorcised itself. I realised how foolish I had been to expect anything. I became aware of my sur- roundings again and buried the past. As I began to take in the scene below me I realised that the town had disappeared, only a low mass of brown flatness was visible. It was not a miracle: the houses were so close together that, from the height at which I stood, one could not see the paths between or the people who walked in them. I turned the other way to look, and there breaking in on the monotony was the market, a coloured bubble on a brown back- ground.

So it may have been in Rimbaud's day, and I realised that if I had found no memorial of the poet I had at least found the symbol of his Ethiopian life. Empty, like this house beneath me. No line, no poem, once he had left France. In sterile loneliness he had burned out his spirit in a world which could give him no response.