Education Of a Wandering Man (1990) by Louis L'amour Page B

bought a suit of clothes and other necessaries, there was not too much money left.
    No doubt I should have begun hunting a job at once, but I was hungry for books, anxious to be learning, so I rented a room in a small hotel close to the library and divided my time between it and the shelves of second-hand bookstores close by.
    In those days one could buy a meal ticket, which was punched out as you ate, and I bought two.
    First, I attempted to get a job on a newspaper, but I had no experience and had not graduated from any school, so I got nowhere.
    A few attempts in other directions were equally unsuccessful. Many commented that they were laying off help rather than hiring.
    Browsing through the shelves in bookstores or libraries, I was completely happy, dipping into a book here, another there, tasting, savoring, learning. Many books I would not read for years I first examined at this time.
    On the Death Valley claim I had read Byrne's Messer Marco Polo, a very pleasant little book but not at all what I wanted. It was years later that I found it, and years more before I owned it, but what I really wanted was the two-volume work on Polo with notes by Cordier and Yule, which far surpassed anything else in the field. That book was to lead me to Yule's Cathay and the Way Thither, which was a real joy.
    It would be impossible for me to explain my early fascination with Asia, although it could well have sprung from reading a child's version of The Arabian Nights. Years later, when I acquired the full set in the Sir Richard Burton translation, I was content that I had the best. Burton's knowledge of the Arabic language, of the customs and mores of Near Eastern and African peoples, made his comments and notes a rich entertainment and an introduction to many aspects of the life not touched upon elsewhere. The only comparable collection, of similar but different stories, is The Ocean of Story in the Penzer and Tawney edition.
    Although known as the "Arabian Nights," the stories largely originated in India or farther east, as did those in The Ocean of Story. Many of the places can readily be identified by anyone with a sailing knowledge of Asiatic waters. No matter what the content of the stories, the locales were invariably actual places, just as in my own stories.
    We in the Western world have been so involved with seafaring in the Mediterranean and Atlantic that we have almost ignored what was happening on the other side of the world, when much longer voyages were being made and another part of the world explored.
    When Vasco da Gama arrived in the harbors of India after his long voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, he found those harbors crowded with shipping.
    Almost two thousand years earliler, when Nearchus, Alexander the Great's admiral, was looking for a pilot for the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf, he had no trouble at all in finding one. Ships from China had come to Babylon in the time of Nabonidus, and before Columbus discovered America, Cheng Ho had sailed back from Africa with a giraffe for the Emperor's zoo.
    Ships were sailing from the south of India for Madagascar and Africa over an open ocean of more than two thousand miles. The area now known as Indonesia had been explored and colonies established, at least one in Borneo, by the ninth century.
    It was about this time that I read Quentin Durward by Sir Walter Scott and Ivory Apes and Peacocks by James Huneker, and followed it with Iconoclasts by the same author.
    I was in the habit of listing books read, even then, but often lost the lists, so the only ones intact are from periods after 1930.
    At the end of a week in Los Angeles, I gathered my gear and headed for San Pedro and the sea again.
    Arriving at San Pedro, I registered at the Marine Service Bureau for a ship, discovering it might be as much as three months before my number came up. At that time the West Coast ships were unionized but East Coast ships were not, and conditions aboard ship were drastically