Inspired Sentence 6

I had slept beautifully, rolled up in the rugs on the floor of my bare room, stars shining in on me through the black window, and I looked forward eagerly to whatever might happen next.

That’s from Philip Glazebrook’s great Journey to Kars (1984) – one of my all-time favorite books. I’m currently rereading it. It’s an account of Glazebrook’s 1980 trip through the old Serbian and Greek provinces and islands, through the ruined cities of Asia Minor as far as Turkey’s eastern frontier with Russia at the fortress of Kars, then back by Trebizond, Istanbul and the Balkan capitals. In the sentence quoted above, he’s looking back on his stay in an ancient Anatolian village. The room he rented there, actually just a hut, “had a collection of worn-out rugs and old clothes heaped against its bare walls, an earthen floor, and a door with so large a gap under it that cats and even chickens merely ducked their heads to follow us in.” 

I love the positivity of this sentence. Glazebrook doesn’t complain about his rough accommodations. Quite the opposite. He says he “slept beautifully, rolled up in the rugs on the floor of my bare room, stars shining in on me through the black window.” That “rolled up in the rugs” makes me smile. That, for me, is the inspired bit. I also love the “and I looked forward eagerly to whatever might happen next.” That’s the spirit of a true traveller.