A Short Walk Through a Wide World

Aubry meets the Holcombe family from New Zealand, including mother Emily, father Vaughan, and children Sophie and Somerset, while traveling in Siam. They are the only people who show Aubry kindness and help her when her sickness strikes in a marketplace. Aubry’s meeting with the Holcombes provides the reader’s entry point into the novel, with the narrative beginning in media res before shifting back to the beginning as Aubry tells her story to the Holcombes. Vaughan is initially wary of Aubry and her sickness, fearing that she might have malaria. Aubry tells him that he is right to be cautious but assures him that she is not contagious. Emily recognizes Aubry from the newspapers and expresses her excitement. The Holcombes, particularly the children, portray the awe and envy that Aubry often sees in those who romanticize her travel without understanding the losses she suffers in consequence, thus contributing to The Tension Between Exploration and Rootedness.

Lionel is a Black man whom Aubry meets on a train going through the Russian wilderness. He is an accountant who attended Oxford and is now on his way to a job in Vladivostok. Aubry is around 34 years old when she meets Lionel, and they spend a week together on the train, sharing stories about their lives and making love in the sleeper compartment. Though Aubry falls in love several times in her life, Lionel holds a special place in her memories because of his kindness and understanding.

Like the Holcombes, he romanticizes her affliction, suggesting that she stop viewing her sickness as an exile or punishment. He contributes to the theme of travel by arguing that confinement is the universal punishment for crime and that her extraordinary mobility is the opposite: a reward. He offers to go with Aubry when she leaves the stalled train, but she refuses, fearing that he will not survive the journey. Lionel is one of the few people Aubry meets twice: She encounters him again 15 years later on a ship leaving Constantinople. By this time, he has a wife and children, but he still regrets not going with her when he had the chance. Aubry and Lionel’s brief relationship highlights the surprising effects that people can have on each other, thus contributing to the theme of human connection.

Uzair is a wealthy man in Tripoli, in what is now the North African nation of Libya. He is an amateur scientist and collects scientific specimens, archeological artifacts, and other oddities. Aubry meets him when she is about 16 years old, after leaving the Greek fishermen and being lost in the library for the first time. Uzair is a distinguished older man who is charmed by Aubry’s provocative nature. However, he becomes convinced that Aubry’s sickness is mental and that he can cure her. He tries dozens of remedies on her to no avail while their relationship deepens. Uzair typifies the prevailing attitude of the time, believing that science can explain and quantify everything. He is the first man Aubry has sex with, and he becomes possessive and controlling, finally locking her in a room to prove that she will not die from her sickness as she claims. His failure to cure Aubry, or even understand her sickness, coupled with his unwillingness to believe her own account of her experience, underscores The Limits of Scientific Rationalism. Aubry’s relationship with him also highlights the effects that people have on each other, which can be negative and traumatic as well as positive.

The Prince is the benevolent ruler of an unnamed region in India. Aubry meets him some time after passing through the Himalayas. India is under British colonial rule, and the Prince is required to tax his people to pay for British protection. However, the Prince pays the British with his own money, including revenue gained through illegal horse breeding, rather than tax his impoverished people. Aubry is impressed by his kindness, generosity, and quiet resistance against British rule. The Prince protects Aubry from prosecution after she kills three men, and he helps her travel when her sickness strikes again. It is through the Prince that Aubry meets Qalima and tells the story of Pathik. Aubry cares for the Prince despite their brief time together, and she tries to resist her sickness in an effort to stay with him. The Prince suggests that Aubry’s purpose is to see the world because the world wants to be seen, thus deeply altering Aubry’s views on her sickness and the purpose of her enforced travel.

Pathik is a nomadic hunter whom Aubry meets on the Tibetan Plateau beneath the Himalayas. Though they do not understand each other’s languages, they communicate through gestures and connect on a non-verbal, spiritual level. Aubry helps Pathik hunt a giant bird with red-gold wings that should not be real. It is implied that this bird is a mythic being. Aubry and Pathik bond over this experience and trade necklaces: Aubry gives Pathik an amber necklace that she received from Uzair, and in exchange, Pathik gives her a large tooth on a cord. Aubry then stays with Pathik’s family for several days, during which time she sees the same well she saw as a child in Paris. She throws her puzzle ball into the well, believing that this will at least relieve her of her guilt and the sickness. She and Pathik have a brief but happy affair, and Aubry feels hope for the future for the first time in years before her sickness returns and she is forced to leave again.

Qalima is a beautiful woman whom Aubry meets among the Prince’s retinue in India. She claims to be an old friend of the Prince who arrives whenever her intuition tells her that the Prince needs help. She experiences visions and then uses her skill as a painter to share these visions with others, who often make them real. For example, her painting of horses gave the Prince the idea to breed horses to make money for the British taxes. She tells Aubry to make a wish for her birthday. Aubry does not understand the meaning of this until the final chapter, when she finds a third well in the Amazon jungle. There, she finds her long-abandoned puzzle ball and a painting by Qalima. The painting depicts the river and jungle where she has found a home with Vincente, with a note reading “Happy Birthday” on the back. This implies that Aubry has finally found what she wished for: a home that she will not have to leave behind. Though Qalima appears in a single scene, she has a lingering impact on Aubry that again highlights the power of human connections.

Marta is a journalist from Mexico who fell in love with Aubry after seeing a photograph of her in a newspaper. She makes it her mission to record Aubry’s life story, going so far as to track her down in the Alaskan wilderness in the 1920s and travel with her for two years. Marta is strong, determined, and stubborn. She believes that Aubry should brag about her exploits and that she has a conscious choice in how she views her life. Marta is the first, and presumably only person, to whom Aubry tells her entire life’s story, including the existence of the mysterious infinite library. Aubry cares for Marta deeply, though not romantically. However, Aubry is forced to leave her when Marta falls ill with malaria in the Congo and Aubry is pulled into a whirlpool that drops her into the library without warning. Years later, Aubry learns that Marta survived the experience and wrote a book about her.