A HALL OF WHISPERS

In the enveloping pressure of Hanoi, someone mentioned that Sapa was like Tibet, and that was all it took, he was off. Hanoi, he just couldn't get his head around the language and it sounded to him like he was surrounded by a million scratching crickets, all concerned with their own insect lives, their own concerns. It would be weeks before the language around him softened and he would ever begin to make much sense of the city.  He was a terrible tourist, and wasted what should have been an opportunity. Instead, he hopped the bus to Sapa.

He had never heard of it; had no idea what it was, and expected to emerge in some remote location with a few trailing old facilities reminiscent of some ancient hippy trail, and that was it. Instead Sapa is a well built up, established town and the tourist industry itself runs like clockwork, with numerous hotels, hostels, touts, stocky determined women from the local villages dogging your every turn; and it was not the obscure, out of the way place that he imagined, even if it was in some of the most glorious mountain landscape imaginable.

He fell off a rented bike, $US4 a day, on his second or third day there, and that promptly put a stop to exploring the magnificent beauties of the surrounding valleys. Instead he hobbled around the hotel like a crippled ancient, barely able to climb the stairs, stared at the cloud wreathed valley walls opposite, and wondered what the heck he was doing there.

Everybody had their own life but him. He had finished the last book and was bereft and unformed, wandering, or in his case hobbling, in an even more aimless manner than usual. He smoked the tobacco bongs of the locals, a Vietnamese custom from one end of the country to the other, anything to kill the pain, his head spinning as nicotine flooded his system. The locals think it's a great joke to see a foreigner gagging on the local tobacco. They all know it makes your head spin. They like it. He just didn't want to think anymore.

He stayed there long enough to watch the tourist machinery at work, the hikers and backpackers and bikers who came for a day or two or three and were gone. 

The locals who went about their lives as if tourism hadn't made them part of a world wide zoo. 

And he didn't know, anymore, what would happen next. There was no precognition.

And so when he returned to Australia, and the watchers had graciously, wonderfully disappeared, and he tried to relax back into himself, he pushed the envelope; and then could hear them.

"He's humiliated himself, again. That's the trouble with the internet. It's just as well he doesn't know the full scale of it."

He could run fluid through a thousand times. These forms were brief. He could stare them down or turn them off. Sometimes he even listened to their advice; "common sense would tell you", but there was so much advice, and it all came from a different place, a more rigorous rectitude; and so he just went back to the only thing he really knew how to do, work. And work he did. 

THE BIGGER STORY:

When Hillary Clinton took the stage before 3,500 energized supporters in a historic district of northern Virginia on Friday, the scene glowed with the sense of a presidential campaign on an upward trajectory.

Benghazi hearing: Hillary Clinton shows yoga poise through 11-hour stretch

The sun shone brightly on an uncharacteristically warm afternoon in late October as Terry McAuliffe, the state’s Democratic governor and a longtime friend of Clinton, fired up the crowd with an impassioned introduction.
McAuliffe was only midway through his remarks when the audience broke into chants of “Hillary, Hillary, Hillary”. Their excitement was compounded when he invoked a marathon hearing a day before, in which the former secretary of state maintained her composure as Republicans grilled her in the most dramatic fashion regarding the September 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
“You want to talk about a fighter – how about those 11 hours of testimony yesterday?” McAuliffe said. “I almost want to thank [the Republicans], because you saw in that 11 hours of testimony, this is why she needs to be our commander-in-chief.”
The crowd roared in agreement.
While Clinton has appeared before countless crowds of supporters since launching her second presidential campaign, there was a palpable buoyancy to this audience –the kind of grassroots enthusiasm political observers have wondered if Clinton is capable of generating.
But a lot has changed since the soft launch of her campaign in April, and many believe the month of October has solidified her standing as the presumptive Democratic nominee.
     
http://www.timesofisrael.com/watch-islamic-state-threatens-israel-in-new-hebrew-video/

In its first-ever Hebrew-language video, which was posted online this week, the Islamic State terror group addressed an Israeli audience, warning that “no Jew will be left [alive]” once its fighters conquer Jordan and arrive at Israel’s borders.

“This is a message to all the Jews, who are the Muslims’ No. 1 enemy,” says a masked man in green fatigues in fluent, if slightly Arabic- and French-accented Hebrew.

“The real war has not even begun and everything you have experienced so far has been child’s play — [it is] nothing compared to what will happen to you soon enough, inshallah [God willing],” he warns.

“We promise you that soon, not one Jew will be left [alive] in Jerusalem or across Israel and we will continue until we eradicate this disease [Judaism?] from the world,” he goes on.

“Look at what has happened to you in a few vehicular and stabbing attacks from our brothers in Palestine,” he mocked, in reference to the spate of recent attacks against Israeli civilians and security forces in Israel and the West Bank, in which at least 10 Israelis have been killed.

“You lost your minds and started fearing every driver that sped up. You were even scared of every person carrying something in their hand. What will happen to you when tens of thousands [of Muslim fighters] arrive from across the world to slaughter you?” he asks.