“I’ve never heard anything like it. You can’t mean what you say. I won’t listen to you. Here is man struggling upward through the ages, and he reaches something so wonderful as Borobudor, and you talk as though it were a symptom of a disease. Monstrous! Why ever do you travel, sir?”
“I don’t know, but I prefer to enjoy it, if I can.”
“But how can you enjoy it if you miss the most important things in travel? What do you learn?”
“The confirmation of my prejudices, I suppose. What else could I learn?”
“Ah, the war has destroyed respect and worship in you younger men. You want to begin everything again, but you cannot, you cannot. Borobudor is there, and it is too strong for you. You think you can forget it, but it won’t let you.”
“Why was that temple ever dug out of the jungle to which it belonged? A fixed tangle of dark and incurable thoughts!”
“I cannot discuss this with you, sir. There is nothing else like Borobudor in the world.”
“This poor world is overloaded with Borobudors. We struggle beneath them, yet nothing will satisfy you but you must dig out another from the forest which had fortunately hidden it. There it is, to distress any wretched traveler who passes it with the idea that man will never escape from himself. Borobudor is a nightmare.”
Shortly after this interview I was on my way to the ruins. It was not by intention. My affairs drifted that way, somehow, perhaps because the roads of the world are clandestine with their memory of the past, and so we move in the old direction of humanity without ever knowing why. The archæologist was right. The Borobudors are too strong for us. There is no escape.