Like most addictions, it is full of pleasure — and like most neurotics, I feel I have it in hand. I consider it a branch of art appreciation, but of a particularly subtle, interactive kind, for in my view a hotel and its guests are engaged in a kind of minuet of mutual inference, each responding to the other’s vibes and gestures — a little like the mating dances of exotic birds, as they strut and preen about one another, lasciviously grunting.

Before he takes a sip, the alcoholic sniffs the bouquet of his claret or eyes the color of his malt whiskey. I get my preliminary frisson simply by walking through the revolving door of a hotel. It may be the sort of hotel where a young woman in a tailored blouse offers a sickly training-school smile and says in a phony accent, “Good evening, how may I assist you?” Or it may be the sort where a fawning assistant manager in a dinner jacket comes intensely bustling across the lobby — he has been so looking forward to seeing you ever since he noticed your name in the reservation book, and he slips his visiting card into your hand just in case there is anything you need during your stay in Suite 111 (same old suite, you see!). Either way, it is performance art, and the practiced hotel addict responds in kind, instantly demanding non-smoking accommodation with discount as per special offers, or exclaiming “Giovanni, my dear, what a delight to see you again!”

This is the touch of theater that is essential to the nature of expensive hotels. These people are play-acting, and are tacitly inviting people like me to join the cast. It is conceivable that I really have met Giovanni before (though more probably I have just snatched his name from a sly look at his card). Most people I meet in hotels, however, are total strangers to me, companions in illusion, and just as the hotel itself is living in perpetual pretense, so just for a day or two I may inhabit whatever character I fancy — pompous or slinky, shady or respectable, dowdy or modest or flamboyant. For us addicts, staying in a hotel is joining a communal charade — far more fun than accepting a bed in Clarissa’s guest room and having a nice long chat after dinner.

Oddly enough, too, the hotel can often seem more sympathetic, more collusive, than Clarissa and Simon’s place, where I would also be obliged to admire the holiday photographs, drool over the baby, put up with bath water that is less than scalding and even, at worst, help with the washing-up. The hotel requires nothing of me (except hard cash or credit card), yet I have only to check in to feel that I have become a member. If it is one of the mammoth modern kind, perhaps on the top 20 floors of a skyscraper, I feel I have become a citizen of a private city. If it is smallish but trim, I feel I have joined the crew of a ship. And when I am taken upstairs in a creaky gilded elevator to my poky room high on the attic floor of some superannuated European chateau, I feel I am being welcomed into a family of aristocrats, if only as the upstairs maid.

The other day in Chicago I walked out of a hotel without paying my bill.
“Of course we never dreamed it was anything but a mistake,” said the
manager when I called to apologize, but he was lying. The seductively
familial feeling of expensive hotels is all a sham. Hoteliers and guests
love, hate and distrust each other in about equal proportions. This gives
an irresistible tang to my addiction — a delectable craving for sweet,
sour and deceptive.

For example, I detest the sort of hotel that carefully calls itself an
Inn, often An Historic Inn, where Mine Host (formerly a chartered
accountant) envelops me in bonhomie and asks half a dozen times in the
course of dinner whether Everything Is All Right. I detest it, but I love
it. I relish the exquisite pretension of it all, and actually look
forward to meeting the Innkeeper on the stairs to endure another dose
of his traditional hospitality. I even — almost — like the potpourri
smells, like the smells of touristy Gifte Shoppes, with which Historic
Inns like to perfume their low-beamed, quilt-eiderdowned, four-posted and
traditionally uncomfortable bedrooms.

In a way, you see, I make up my own hotels as I go along — it is part of my
disorder — but then they are seldom quite what they seem anyway. Hotels are
arcane and secret places. Next time you walk down a hotel corridor,
look through the open door of the next room, and then through the bedroom
window beyond, and what will you see? Not the view that you have from your
own window, oh dear me no. You will see a landscape totally unfamiliar
to you, a magic landscape specific to other peoples’ hotel rooms. Only
hoteliers know how this is done, and if you ask them they will disclaim all
knowledge. It is part of their grand craft and mystery.

Myriad hidden passages lie beyond the guest quarters of a great hotel,
leading who knows where and patrolled by security men with beepers. All
night long there is rustling movement through them, and the elevators –
you must have heard them? — rise and fall with muffled whirrs. If by chance
you run into the concierge in the street one day, dressed in
T-shirt, jeans and trainers, it is like seeing through a disguise — and his
response to your greeting will be strangely sidelong and reluctant, as
though he is disconcerted to be recognized. I love these esoteric
suggestions, for the hotel addiction is not unlike an obsession with
conspiracy theories, or mystic convictions about UFOs.

There are aversion treatments for my condition, and for a time they work.
Prolonged and repeated residence in airport hotels is one temporary cure. A
long weekend in an Historic Inn can help. A drastic device called a Hotel
Chain Reactor consists of a cassette that you put under your pillow at
night that plays over and over again, in a false and artificial
voice, “Good evening, how may I assist you? Good evening, how may I assist
you? Good evening, how may I …” But the effect even of this appalling
mechanism does not last. Before long I find myself pining once again for
that inexplicable view through the next room’s window, for the whiff of
dried rosemary and lavender across the patchwork quilt, for dear Giovanni
bounding over the lobby floor with his card in his hand.

It is then that I go to my secret cache in the bookcase, hidden behind
Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall,” and pull out my hoard of brochures. Ah, as I thumb through their shiny pages, all the romance of the old
addiction bewitches me once more, the Spacious and Comfortable Guest
Rooms, the Ideal Facilities for Executive Conferences, the Cafe Polo for
Less Formal Buffet Meals, the Elegant and Historic Inn Offering the
Perfect Escape from the Pressures of Modern Life. I am ensnared again by
the temptations of Health Spa With State-of-the-Art Equipment! The
wicked promise of Remote Control CD in Every Room once again has me in its
spell!

Hang about, Giovanni, I’m on my way.

It was the year of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, fondly proposed by contemporary English pundits as the start of the new Elizabethan Age. The British Empire, though clearly on the way out, was a proud living entity for most Britons. The United Kingdom was a unity still, almost every citizen was an enthusiastic monarchist and a kingdom that had recently emerged battle-scarred, bloody but unbowed from a fearful war was all too ready to be confirmed in its belief that British was best. What could be better, and more British, than being the first to climb Mount Everest?

For to the British, Everest had a symbolic importance not just as the highest peak of them all, but as a traditionally “British” mountain. It was named for a British surveyor-general of India, it stood like a watchpost above the northern marches of British India and for half a century successive British expeditions had tried to get to the top of it. It had been, so to speak, a fief of the Raj, and although now that India was independent, climbers from other countries were beginning to eye Everest, still among mountaineers it was generally thought of as a British specialty.

So that spring an almost allegorically British team set off for Nepal, the 12th full-scale expedition to make an attempt on Everest from one side or the other. Its leader had been one of Field Marshal Montgomery’s staff officers, and it included two New Zealanders (in those days thought of just as overseas Britons), a clutch of former public schoolboys and army officers and one correspondent of the London Times, the venerable organ of the Establishment that had helped to finance nearly all Everest expeditions since the first in 1921.

The reporter was, as it happens, me.

What a difference an age makes! When the expedition, with its
long, long train of Sherpas and Nepali porters, trekked away from
Kathmandu through the foothills toward Everest, it was
recognizably a formation of Empire — Empire at its most amiable,
in its last enlightened days, but still decidedly in the style of the Raj.
This was a party of British sahibs with their native attendants, and it
looked like it. The porters, men and women, were much as they had
been a century before, when the old explorers had first penetrated
these mountain parts; the sahibs sported all the traditional
eccentricities of Britons in the imperial field, the wide variety of
hats, shirts and walking sticks, the well-known peculiarities of
temperament, the eclectic tastes in reading matter from thrillers to
“The Oxford Book of Greek Verse.”

Col. John Hunt, the leader of the expedition, had soldiered in India
for years; his family had served the Raj for generations. A Gurkha
officer was in charge of the logistics, and the most experienced of
the Sherpas had been promoted, like a native officer in the army of
British India, out of porterdom to be one of the climbing party. A
wide variety of professions was represented, too — scientists of one
sort and another, two surgeons, a cameraman, a bee-keeper, the
manager of a travel agency and a couple of schoolmasters, one of
them also being the requisite poet. Nearly all had lately served in
Her Majesty’s armed forces, and all were bound into comradeship
by two common factors: their passion for the craft and mystery of
mountain-climbing and their unquestioning Britishness.

I say the mystery, because in those days Himalayan climbing was
still infused with a dedication that edged toward the spiritual.
Legacies tragic and poetical had been bequeathed by previous
expeditions — some high-flown prose, tales of gentlemanly heroism
and faithful native sacrifice, above all the romantic disappearance,
high on the mountain 29 years before, of George Leigh Mallory
and Andrew Irvine. The knowledge that Everest was sacred to the
Sherpas touched the imaginations of these men; Hunt himself
declined to talk about the possible “conquest” of the mountain, only
its ascent. Chomolungma — Goddess Mother of the Earth — was the
Sherpa name for the mountain, and nobody in that expedition
scoffed at it. This was a late expression of imperial tradition, but
there was nothing jingo or philistine about it.

Besides, the trek through Nepal offered the arcane excitement of
the almost unknown. All the prewar expeditions had approached
Everest from the north, through Tibet. Only a handful of outsiders
had ever followed this southern route, and the journey lay through
countrysides and societies that were still marvelously strange.
Nowadays so many trekkers go this way that the track is often thick
with their litter; in 1953 plastic was still unknown in Sherpa
country, radios and binoculars were marvels, there were no
wheeled vehicles and to the people along the way the sahibs of the
passing expedition were as curiously fascinating as they themselves
were to the sahibs.

And I can remember the moment when I first saw the summit of
Everest itself, with its high plume of driven snow streaming away
like a talisman. Nowhere on earth, I thought then, was more
compellingly strange. There was nothing at all up there, nothing but
snow, ice and rock, but that high patch of desolation was one of the
most celebrated places on the earth’s surface. Many human lives had
been lost, over the decades, trying to reach it, yet no single soul had
ever stood there. By now hundreds of people have been to the top
of Everest; then it seemed to me as remote and wonderful as the
moon itself — and how many of us, in 1953, seriously supposed that
anyone would ever stand on the moon?

Today those cosmopolitan multitudes of climbers make it to the top
of Everest largely in order to say they have done it. In 1953 the
impulse was subtly different: Mountaineers wanted to ascend the
Goddess Mother of the Earth “because,” in George Mallory’s
mystic words, “it was there.” They wanted to prove that it was
physically possible, they wanted to measure themselves against this
mighty challenge, they wanted to bring honor to their nation and
perhaps fame to themselves.

Still, Hunt’s was an expedition that took no chances. It was huge. It
was conducted with military thoroughness. It took months. Once the
lowland Nepali bearers had dumped their burdens and gone home,
16 sahibs and 34 high-altitude Sherpa porters were left on the flank
of Everest, meticulously organized to project two of their number
to the top. The world watched them, and especially the British
world. Week by week, scrambling up and down the mountainside
myself, I sent back to the Times reports of their progress — by
runner.

By Sherpa runner, hastening over the 200 miles of intervening
mountain country to get my dispatches to the cable-head! The very
words sound archaic now, when a correspondent can send a report
from Mount Everest direct from his laptop via satellite, and another
generation of reporters hardly knows what a cable is, let alone a
runner! But seen over the gulf of 45 years, almost everything about
the expedition seems wonderfully old-fashioned. We had no
long-distance radio, but we did have the contemporary equivalent
of a mobile phone, to communicate up on the mountain — a heavy
gray metal box, slung around the neck to dangle upon one’s chest,
with a large rubber mouthpiece sticking up like a ventilator. The
climber’s boots, I suppose now, were frightfully clumsy. The tents
were, I imagine, awkward and heavy. The sleeping bags were
cumbersome. The oxygen masks and cylinders were like something
out of the First World War.

And old-fashioned too, I suppose, was the nature of the camaraderie
that bound those sahibs together. By the nature of things there was
bound to be competition among them — who would not wish to be
the first man to stand on the top of the world? It was competition,
though, of a muted, stiff-upper-lip kind. Nobody voiced it. There
was no football frenzy to this adventure; few even mentioned the
awful possibility that, if the expedition failed, some damned
foreigners might be the first to climb Everest. There was no
speculation, so far as I know, about the possibility of honors or
rewards. Everyone was ambitious, I do not doubt, but the most
blatantly ambitious of all was me — and I was less concerned about
the possibility of climbing Everest than I was about the possibility
of getting a scoop.

We did it, as you know. I got my scoop — and it changed my life
forever. Far more importantly, Edmund Hillary the New Zealander
and Tenzing Norgay the Sherpa stood together on Everest’s
summit, and John Hunt their benign commander became the
Montgomery of the snows. I shall remember until the day I die the
sensations when, at 21,000 feet on the mountain’s flank, the rest of
us welcomed the pair of them back from the summit — the sun (or
so it seems in memory) so preternaturally bright, the snow so
particularly pristine, the great mountains smiling all around, the
exuberance of us all so vivid as to be almost tangible, and Col. Hunt
even going so far as to hug his two champions, like a football
manager today.

Partly by chance, partly by cunning and hard labor, the news of the
ascent broke in London on the very day of Queen Elizabeth’s
coronation, and fusing with all the lavish ceremonial of the
occasion, aroused unforgettable emotions of pride and patriotism.
Even now, all over the world people often greet me with nostalgic
wonder — “my goodness, the person who sent the news from
Everest on Coronation Day!” For Hunt, Hillary and Tenzing, of
course, it meant fame of another dimension. Hunt and Hillary were
both knighted within the week, Tenzing as a non-Briton was
awarded the George Medal, and all three became household names
around the world.

No adventurers, before or since, were more honored and feted in
the months after their great achievement, not even astronauts
coming home from the moon. In the British historical consciousness
they instantly joined the long roster of national heroes: Livingstone
and Captain Scott, General Gordon, even perhaps Drake and Sir
Walter Raleigh. The symbolic coincidence of Everest and
coronation seemed like a providential benediction upon the British
people as a whole.

The people felt they deserved it, too. They alone had fought the
grim fight, start to finish, against the ghastly Nazis. They had won a
famous victory at terrible cost to themselves. Their country was
still impoverished by their sacrifice, still threadbare and uncertain
of itself. The national celebration called Festival of Britain, two
years before, had been a deliberate attempt to restore the nation’s
morale and self-confidence after so many dingy years: Coronation
Everest seemed to seal the process, and made people feel that the
grand old kingdom was making yet another fresh start at last. “All
This and Everest Too” was a much admired headline of the day,
and it seemed to express something fundamental about the twin
events: ancient grandeur given new life by a bold adventure — and
an adventure, too, on those distant frontiers of the east that the
British had so long ago made their own.

The euphoria did not last. It was not the start of a New Elizabethan
Age after all. The dissolution of the British Empire continued, and
before long New Zealanders were almost as foreign to the British
as — well, as Sherpas, say. But the achievement itself, after all these
years, has not lost its delight. Reaching the top of Everest has
become a commonplace, but the meaning of that moment in 1953
can never be repeated. It was an alpha and an omega. It was the
first ascent of the greatest of mountains; it was a last harmless
triumph of an empire.

All those climbers, long ago, made successes of life after Everest.
Some of them went on to make other notable ascents, at least half
dozen published books and most of them achieved distinction in one
professional field or another. Sir John Hunt became, in the fullness
of time, Lord Hunt of Llanfair Waterdine, one of the universally
respected Great and Good. Sir Edmund Hillary became New
Zealand’s High Commissioner in India and a beloved worker in the
cause of Sherpa progress and well-being. Tenzing Norgay became
the most famous Sherpa who ever lived. Most of the team met,
from time to time, at reunions in the mountains of north Wales, and
those who can will be meeting there again on the 45th anniversary
later this month.

Some, though, have climbed on. Two died in accidents on lesser
mountains — poet Wilfred Noyce among them. One died after long
years of multiple sclerosis. Three others were simply taken away,
like the great Tenzing, by old age after long exertion. They are not
forgotten, though, because the expedition itself has never been
forgotten. Around the world the memory of Everest ’53 brings
pleasure to this day, because nothing about that adventure is bad. It
cannot be debunked. Nobody was hurt in it, nobody behaved
poorly, nobody made much money out of the experience, and its
memory possesses that rarest of modern enchantments, the allure of
innocence.

When he came to write the official history of the first ascent, John
Hunt paid particular tribute to “my wife, Mrs. Goodfellow and
Mrs. Mowbray-Green” for sewing name-tapes on all the climbers’
clothing — “thus avoiding a possible cause of contention among us
on the mountain.”

On the train? Of course. Who would not wish to take the train on such an expedition? It was the train that enabled these prairies to grow rich, and made it possible for Springfield itself, situated more or less in the middle of nowhere, to become the capital of Illinois — still, with its 106,000 inhabitants, the political superior of Chicago up the line.

It was winter when I made my journey, and Amtrak itself would not claim that there was much to see through our windows. The prairies may look wonderful in summer, when the tall grass waves and the wildflowers blossom, but at my time of the year it all looked pretty dismal out there. The towns we passed through reminded me of Albania, so run-down seemed to be their railside factories and warehouses, and the wide prairie itself, speckled with farmhouses and windbreaks, was like some stretch of wartime ocean, in which the masts and superstructures of sunken ships protruded here and there from the swell.

The man across the aisle from me, who took his jacket off the better to cope with the mass of papers and correspondence he took from his briefcase, was also bound for Springfield, and the very look of him cheered me up. Surely he was a state senator, or at least an influential political lawyer, and was a portent of the vivid political goings-on that I was going to find in the capital, the sotto voce conferences in smoke-filled corners of the Sangamo Club, the politicos intriguing arm-in-arm as they strolled up to the State Capitol. I watched him with professional satisfaction as he resumed his jacket and his expensive overcoat, gathered up his papers and looked out of the window expectantly, I thought, for his waiting limousine.

But no, he stumbled out of the train like everyone else, and I last saw him wandering rather helplessly around the station yard looking for a taxi. I had forgotten it was a holiday season. The Illinois Legislature was not in session, the Sangamo Club proved to be anything but smoke-filled, the governor was out of town and there were remarkably few people about.

“Which hotel would you suggest,” I asked a chattily homespun bystander as I waited for my own cab to appear, “the Hilton or the Renaissance?”

“Six of one, half a dozen of the other,” he said, metaphorically spitting out his tobacco chaw, “and there’ll be plenty of room in either.”

He was right. I chose the Hilton, the only skyscraper in town, towering even over the dome of the State Capitol, which is itself, so the man told me, higher than the Capitol in Washington. It seemed to be entirely empty of guests. I found a clutch of tourist publicity material in my room on the 22nd floor, and tried to identify, in the vast melancholy expanse outside my window, some of the tourist sites it recommended. Could I see, for example, the site of the Old Tyme Tractor Show at Hillsboro, or the Two-Story Train Depot Museum at Greenup, or Taylorville where Kay the Circus Elephant is buried — only the second elephant, as my brochure winningly told me, to die in Illinois?

But a veil of cloud and mist lay low over the prairie, and if these varied marvels were ever visible from the Hilton, I could not see them that day. On the other hand, I could make out, close beneath the lee of the skyscraper, a little cluster of clapboard houses that was identified on my map as “Mr. Lincoln’s Neighborhood.” I hastened there at once — down my 22 floors on the elevator, past the municipal parking garage on Seventh Street and the First Presbyterian Church on the corner, turn left and lo! all my supercilious feelings about Springfield and its prairies evaporated.

The streets might be empty, the mist lay low, the restaurants were deserted, the doors of the First Presbyterian Church were locked, but there before me stood one of the best-known and best-loved houses in all America at Eighth and Jackson streets, Springfield, Ill., the only house Abraham Lincoln, Esq., ever owned in his life. O Captain, my Captain! O sweetest wisest soul! From that moment on I saw Springfield through new eyes, and every symptom of its prairie origins, every dismal wisecrack I pretended to laugh at, the very silhouette of the Springfield Hilton Hotel, looming apparently lifeless above me, I saw as emblems or products or origins of the Gettysburg Address.

Of course Springfield never lets you forget that Lincoln was the most famous of all its citizens. There are Abe Lincoln markers all over the place, an Abe Lincoln Garage, an Abe Lincoln hairdresser, Lincoln’s tomb of course, Lincoln’s law office, the railway station where Lincoln set off for the presidency in Washington, D.C. For me, though, skeptic that I was about the attractions of prairie culture, what made the place so marvelous was the fact that out of an environment so fustian, so fascinating a hero should have emerged. Like it or not, when we consider Springfield and all it represents, we must remember that for 25 years Abraham Lincoln was part of it.

I bumped once again, for instance, into that man from the train, who did indeed turn out to be a lawyer, and I realized now that he was just the kind of man Lincoln might have had as a partner long ago. I thought again about that philosopher of the station yard, and easily imagined the two of them outdoing each other in prairie anecdote. At the Caffe Capitol one day I introduced myself to the assembled Poetry Society of Springfield, a very hospitable crew, and could easily imagine old Abe, holding an awful ode of his own, unfolding his lanky limbs to greet me. In Downtown News & Books I swear I saw him dropping in for the day’s State Journal Register (which has his portrait on its masthead).

A day or two later, several hundred adolescents, attendants at some kind of church convention, unleashed themselves upon the Springfield Hilton, monopolizing the elevators, sitting in corridors eating pizza, laughing and shouting and ringing random telephones in the small hours; but even as I swore at them and resolved to claim my money back from the management in the morning, it occurred to me that young Abe, visiting the big city from his log cabin home down the Sangamo River, might perhaps have let off his American high spirits in rather the same way.

I will be frank with you. I was not altogether at a loose end when I went to Springfield. Actually I went there because I was having trouble with Lincoln. Somehow I could not reconcile his historical presence with the United States that he, more than anyone, bequeathed to us. His gentle character seemed incompatible with the style of modern America, or for that matter with the style of the prairie society he sprang from. The more I read about him, the more I saw of the United States today, the more it seemed to me that he must have been some kind of historical freak, one of those prodigies who appear to have no connection with their own origins, but are flung into the world at God’s whim.

My few days in Springfield taught me otherwise. Late one night I went wandering around Mr. Lincoln’s Neighborhood all by myself. So inescapable is his presence still, even in the imagination, that over the years countless people have reported seeing his ghost down on Eighth Street. I cannot claim a similar experience — the whole neighborhood has been prettified, sanitized and made suitable for tour group experiences by the National Park Service — but I did most powerfully sense his influence lingering there. And when I pottered somewhat aimlessly toward Capitol Avenue, just around the corner I looked up and saw, magnificently floodlit, the not very beautiful dome of the Illinois State Capitol, which is said to be considerably higher than — oh, but I told you that before.

I was greatly stirred, despite myself. Lincoln never even set eyes upon that structure (it went up after his time), but for all the shenanigans that, I do not doubt, go on inside it — for all the rogues and scoundrels who have been, at one time or another, elected to its membership; for all the corruptions that it has witnessed and the conspiracies that it has fostered — still as I looked at it, that night in Springfield, I remembered that out of that very milieu, his genius recognized if not cherished by those very people, Honest Abe went off to Washington and the possession of the ages.

I returned to Chicago again myself on the Ann Rutledge, which is named, by the way, for Lincoln’s original girlfriend, probably one of those screaming harpies who kept me so furiously awake all night in Room 2212.

The city is called Gdansk now, but I grew up with Danzig, and can’t get out of the habit. Long ago in my school atlases it was always called Danzig, and sometimes had a little plan all its own, in a corner of the map of Central Europe, to show that it was a place peculiar to itself — a Free City, in fact, under the sovereignty of the League of Nations, within the strip of Polish territory that separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Danzig was a fateful place, and when it mutated into Gdansk, that proved fateful too: It was here that the Soviet Empire first began to crumble before the superior convictions of democracy, and the hero Lech Walesa of Solidarity lives here to this day, like the knight of an old fairy tale, behind the high hedges of a suburban villa.

There are not many places in the world where the history of our time seems more immediate. And it is history clarified by hallucination, where things are a little more exact than they ought to be, legendary champions live on bus routes and insubstantial battle cruisers kill soldiers long since dead.

The prime Gdansk illusion is central Gdansk itself — Old Danzig, that is, which was for centuries one of the great seaports of the Hanseatic League and a lordly center of Baltic commerce, culture and diplomacy. Teutonic knights in chain mail — Polish kings in ermined robes — cloaked merchants from Gotland or Riga — traders in amber or Arctic sealskins — eminent astronomers and illustrious sculptors — these were the sort of people who haunted the memories of the place, and the streets of the city were tall-gabled and sprinkled with spires.

For years Danzig was the biggest city in eastern Europe. Sometimes Polish, sometimes German, briefly French, it remained a revered old seaport of the Baltic until — crash! — in 1945 the Red Army, driving the Wermacht out of Poland, demolished the whole place by bomb and gunfire. Old Danzig was almost entirely destroyed, probably more completely than any other European city. Within the circuit of its medieval walls, with its quays and warehouses beside the Motlawa River, nothing was left but rubble. It is one of the miracles of our century that 50 years later we can walk those very same streets, among the same tall-gabled houses, beneath the towers and steeples of Danzig’s ancient churches, as though nothing at all has happened.

I suppose the reconstruction of Old Danzig — as it was — is the single most spectacular rebuilding job ever, one honorable memorial of communist rule in Poland. I defy any ill-informed stranger to guess that this marvelous city is not in its original incarnation. Proud and mellow stand the houses of those ancient merchants in their stately ranks, apparently worn a bit by age and weather but instinct with centuries of consequence, and above them stands the mighty red hulk of the Church of Our Lady, one of the largest brick churches in the world, like a very declaration of sacred permanence. Seven town gates of Gdansk still look down, as they always did, upon the water traffic of the river, and a constant bustle of shoppers, tourists and buskers enlivens the elegant square called the Long Market, for so long the prime mercantile exchange of the Baltic Sea.

I could hardly believe it all. I could hardly credit that the Restauracja Tawerna, where they served me boiled eel and potatoes as though they had been serving them without a break since the 15th century, 50 years ago was no more than a pile of rubble. It was almost inconceivable to me that the venerable roofed crane on the riverfront, a famous municipal symbol since the Middle Ages, was only a synthetic substitute, or that the beautiful Baroque mansions of Mariacka Street, with their elegant stone terraces and flourishes of sculpted stone, were really no older than I was myself. Very few people in Gdansk today can remember Old Danzig as it originally was, before tragedy destroyed it and bold hearts built it up again.

Occasionally reality does impinge. The thoroughly authentic traffic of the modern city whirls around the ring roads, beyond the Torture House and the Great Armory’s florid turrets. From the tower of the Town Hall you can see the massed derricks of the modern docks, away at the mouth of the Vistula. The Old Polish Post Office really is the actual post office that G|nter Grass immortalized in “The Tin Drum” and the royal gate that was always the city’s ceremonial entrance is one of the very few old structures that did not need rebuilding.

Besides, a city is an animate object, and Gdansk has never been exterminated. An old man stands in the Long Market, selling starfishes and amber from a tray just as his forebears doubtless did five or six centuries ago. A young man rides by on a bicycle, inexplicably loaded down with bits of old cardboard as he might ride a pony heavy with firewood from the forest. There is an immemorial smell of ropes and tar along the quays, and a generic shrieking of gulls. Coveys of feral cats scurry about in holes under the river footbridge, spat upon by naughty boys and fed by a cadaverous man in spectacles and leather jacket. Two young soldiers in the traditional capes and triangular hats of the Polish army sit on a bench by the water licking ice creams.

In short, from time to time I am reminded that although the fabric of the city may be deceptively new, the life it lives is the same robustly organic life it has lived for a thousand years. This is very good for me, because sometimes during my stay in Gdansk I began to feel that the sham and the genuine were disturbingly confused here, past and present all mixed up, the very conception of old and new made meaningless. I was beginning to feel that I really had seen that German battle-cruiser belching shells upon the peninsula of Westerplatte, and that perhaps Gdansk really was Danzig all the time.

But that old man selling starfish, and those two fine young sergeants licking ice creams, looking just as Polish soldiers have always looked, brought me back to the real thing.

In a shop on the Motlawa embankment I saw an old model of a paddle-steamer, circa 1890 I would guess. The ship was called Luirpold, was brightly painted in the red and white Danzigian colors and bravely flew the crown and double white cross of the Gdansk ensign. I bought it at once. They packed it up for me in a comical contraption made of several shoeboxes taped together, and with hilarious care and hazard I carried it away with me to Copenhagen, to London and home to Wales.

Now it sits on a windowsill in my library, looking complacently exotic against a background of damp Welsh pastures. It is more than just a model to me, more than just an old Polish pleasure steamer, and it has voyaged much farther than the mere voyage from Gdansk to Llanystumdwy. Think what storms of history that old ship has paddled through! The bombardments and the invasions, the bombings and the street fighting — fire and cold and terror and oppression! I don’t know whose windowsill it stood upon when the wars came to Danzig, or the commissars took over Gdansk, but I like to see its grand old ensign flying here now, to remind me always — as its home port did — that truth rides above hallucination, and always wins in the end.

The truth is that to me Florence is more than just a city: It is the idea of a city. No place on earth offers me an image more concentrated and more exact — the look of it, its history, its style and reputation all bundled into one intoxicating fancy. I think of Florence not as a municipality, with the usual problems of sewage, traffic and petty crime, infighting among city councilors and shady practices concerning planning permissions. Those citizens I see swarming over my mirage-bridge are artists and poets every one — or if not, master craftsmen, philosophers or cultivated merchants of ancient lineage. Princes live in those insubstantial palaces, and masterpieces adorn all their drawing rooms. Magnificent prelates preach beneath that dome. Immemorial bells sound from the campanile. If there is crime, it is gorgeous crime, all daggers and secret poisons. If there are squabbles about civic development, they concern the best place to erect a figure by some genius sculptor, or a dispute over who is to carve the baptistery doors.

In short, I am dreaming as I drive, and all my notions of Florence are misty and golden, like that transient vision on the road to Rhayader.

Misty, yet decidedly precise. I have always particularly admired buildings that look as though you could pick them up, so functionally compact do they seem, so absolute. The Palace of Westminster strikes me as one such structure, also the Doge’s Palace in Venice and the Chrysler skyscraper in Manhattan. So it is with my conceptual Florence. It is like a model for me, everything complete and compact and crystal clear.

It is of course true that when we think of most cities in the world we think only of their centers, disregarding the sprawling suburbs all around. New York is just Manhattan to most of us, give or take a bit of Brooklyn; how many people include Crouch End in their mental image of London, or see Parramatta behind the Sydney Harbour Bridge? My feelings about Florence, though, are different. It is not that I wilfully ignore its suburbs; it is that in my mind’s eye, it has no suburbs, has no ring roads or railway sidings or supermarkets, but is simply a shapely medieval cluster of buildings glorious with art and history beside its river.

This is not all mere romanticism. Florence really is snugly couched, like my holographic version of it, between low and gentle hills upon the River Arno in Tuscany. Generations of artists have painted it from the high ground around and given the impression that it is a small, idyllic settlement clustered around the covered Ponte Vecchio, surveyed by the grand dome and campanile of the Cathedral, and by the castellated tower of the Palazzo Vecchio. Generally, the painters bind their views with blue hills, so that the city seems to lie there serenely in a contoured embrace, waiting for you to touch it, or stroke it — or pick it up. Even the oldest depictions of Florence indulge this fancy. The earliest realistic picture of them all, engraved in the late 15th century, is actually enclosed within an engraved chain, complete with engraved padlock, as if to demonstrate the levitable nature of the place.

So my vision of Florence owes much to the artists, who have always made it seem a privileged enclave, separate from everywhere else. But it derives too from my first genuine, wide-awake experience of the city, at the end of the Second World War. My introduction to Florence was a helter-skelter, free-wheeling ride into town, more or less out of control down the hill of Fiesole, in an armored scout-car whose engine had given up; and no impression could have been more lasting than the blissful sensation, as we skidded at last into the venerable downtown streets, that we had arrived at some blessed haven of consolation.

Then again, in my consciousness — or sub-consciousness — Florence occupies its own cultural capsule: detached, separate and unmistakable. Its name triggers a Pavlovian response in me, as in nearly everyone else. Say Florence, and I will cry, “Civilization!” My mind’s eye, which has already seen the city stylized physically into that glorious little clump of towers and rooftops beside its single bridge, imagines it populated too by all the geniuses of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Dante hobnobs there with Petrarch and Boccaccio. Raphael chats with Botticelli. There stands Michelangelo, supervising the dragging of his great statue of David into the piazza, inch by inch on greased beams. Brunelleschi is round the corner, watching the construction of his cathedral dome, and Ghiberti inspects his marvelous baptistery doors. Donatello walks over the bridge to supper, Fra Angelico returns to his monastic cell after painting another lovely angel. Leonardo, Uccello, Giotto, Fra Filippo Lippi — all are there in my Florence, all apparently at the same time, all in harmony. No matter that many of them lived and worked in other cities, too. It is to Florence that reputation has assigned them, and with them throng all their followers down the centuries — the scholars, the connoisseurs, the dilettantes of the Grand Tour, the international art dealers and the auctioneers and the groups of T-shirted students shepherded awestruck from gallery to gallery.

And what about political history? Florence is always and only a city-state, in my imagination, and its consequence is all embodied in one glittering family of rulers: the Medicis. I can see them clear as life in my imagination, with their bright wide eyes and patrician noses, leaning elegantly against pillars or smiling benevolently from thrones. Did they not make Florence the humanist capital of Europe? Did not Galileo name the moons of Jupiter after them? In my fantasy of Florence I dismiss all its lesser rulers, ignore the old feuds between the political factions of Guelphs and Ghibellines, turn a blind eye to Savonarola, the fanatic who held the Florentines in thrall, pretend that the Florentine Machiavelli never lived. It is the Medicis for me, as it probably is for most of us; and most vividly of all, when I think of Florence, I see Lorenzo de Medici, the lordliest of them all, duke of dukes, scholar, musician, poet, architect and lover. Everything that is civilized and worldly and elegant and splendid boils down in my fantasy to Lorenzo the Magnificent of Florence.

This blend of images, together with many more subliminal ones, gives my idea of Florence a mellow aura. It summons in me sensations deliciously autumnal. Others, I know, have seen the place as emblematic of spring, or harvest time — “flowers and grapes and olive leaves” was Mendelssohn’s metaphor, and Byron wrote of the city’s corn, wine, oil and plenty “leaping to laughing life.” But mellow is my word for it. Its buildings seem to me matured by time, molded into each others’ presences, accustomed to one another; the colors of its great pictures, recalled collectively in my memory, are never lurid or dazzling, but reverently noble; and I always seem to see dim blue wood smoke rising from its elaborate chimneys, casting fragrances of pine or oak all across the city. Surely no vulgar rivalries or sleaze ever disturbed the serenity of this glorious place (say I to myself, as I meander dreamily on to Rhayader) …

Is it only a dream? Well, Florence has suburbs, and a railway station and cinemas and supermarkets and armies of tourists and rubbish and quarrelsome civic councilors like everywhere else. Eight bridges, not one, cross its river. It was always as much a center of money-making as of art. Its history began long before the Renaissance, in Roman times, and Mussolini called it Firenze facistissima. Its great artists often quarreled. Its rulers, far from being just enlightened art lovers, went in for every kind of political skullduggery. It has not been an independent state since 1737. Lorenzo the Magnificent was extremely ugly. What’s more, Florence was never, as I have loved to imagine it, a single bright prodigy burning there beside the Arno, but was only one of several such city-states, frequently rivals. It was not always mellow, by any means, but often very brash.

Only a dream? Yes and no. As a matter of fact, in that Welsh valley where I see my mirage-Florence so vividly, the 13th century English conquerors of Wales did try to create a city. It never came to anything, though, and all that remains of it now is a line of cottages, a church, a country mansion and some grandly named village lanes. No Ponte Vecchio crosses the river Cynon. No Dantes or Verrochios stroll those lanes. No curled magnifico looks down upon his people from the windows of the big house. The real Florence could exist nowhere else than where it is, below the sweet hills of Fiesole, beside the river where the poets sang; but there, to this day, its reality remains dream enough.