Squeezed between a sluggish trickle of dusty water and the main road, a sycamore sapling replaces the tree from which two miscreants were hung in Globe, a hundred years or so ago. If they hadn't have committed robbery and murder, the men would have lived to share the rapid growth of the town into a copper mining centre.

Globe is now but a shadow of its former self, a spread of auto part shops and fast food outlets, but the railroad track still runs down the centre of one of its main streets, so it can't be that bad!

This hot afternoon small girls in leotards, just like small dancing girls the world over, writhe in the window of the dance school and stare as I pass; the town's second-hand bookshop is dim and cool and scented with that unique smell of old bookbindings, a dog patrols the shade of the side street where I park.

The bars are dark and beckoning. Two tanned and tightly-contoured girls squeezed into short-shorts skylark to attract attention on a street corner and flash salaciously-innocent glances at every man who passes.

Globe Museum

In the museum an elderly boorish visitor is holding forth to the long-suffering lady attentant amongst the dusty assaying equipment and sepia-toned photographs. Someone in Globe at the beginning of the century was keen on panoramic photographs, and there are a score of panoramas of the town, and of large groups of mine workers.

I peer at the rows of men, their features picked out sharply by a sun much harsher than the English light that would have illuminated their contemporaries back in the pits of Britain. Many look fit and handsome, glaring come-uppishly at the camera as it gave them a tiny piece of immortality. They are all dead now, including the man in the centre of one long photograph who, in glaring contrast to those around him, wears a white shirt. Ourtside, only the grey spoil heaps they sweated to create, remain.

The museum, with its collection of old typewriters, the usual manual telephone exchange, some dull grey kitchen equipment (kitchen implements always look sad and grey if you don't use them -- rather like the dull, miserable coating that musical instruments acquire if they aren't constantly burnished by human fingers) and two dozen small sherds of native pottery, is like ten thousand other small town museums, and I love it because of that.

Each museum may differ in detail, a penny-farthing bicycle here, an Ashanti spear there, but the smell is the same, and the overall grey colour of disuse, and the nameless faces staring out of a an immense patchwork of photographs; thin, fragile, ghostly layers of silver all that remains of all these dead, unknown people and their unknown stories.

| ARIZONA | MIAMI | SUPERIOR | OAK FLATS |

LENORE'S TRAVEL DIARY

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