In a Free State by V. S. Naipaul

Author:V. S. Naipaul [Naipaul, V. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Classics, Adventure, War, Politics, Man Booker Prize
ISBN: 9780307789327
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 10906550
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-30T04:00:00+00:00

3

THE SCRUB, when it ruled, had appeared to stretch all the way to the escarpment across a flat valley. But for some time the land had been getting broken and greener. The escarpment still bounded the view, but less and less abruptly. There were now low, spreading, isolated hills; dark trees in the distance hinted at water and streams; here and there hummocked fields spoke of recent forests. Dirt roads began to meet the highway; simple road-signs gave the names of places, twenty, thirty, sixty miles away. There were a few small hoardings. Traffic was still light.

Linda said, in her even mystical voice, ‘That’s my favourite hill on this drive. It looks as though some giant hand had clawed down the side.’

The description was accurate. It was what Bobby himself felt about the hill.

He said, ‘Yes.’

Ahead of them, a tall covered van entered the highway from a side road. Beagles pushed their heads above the tailboard of the van. Hanging on at the back, badly jolted, were two Africans in jodhpurs and riding boots, red caps and jackets.

‘Such a strange part of Africa,’ Linda said.

She sat up, took her bag from the floor and brought out her vanity case. She began to make her face up. Her mystical manner had disappeared. Bobby was now the gloomy one.

‘When we were in West Africa for those few months,’ she said, patting powder, squinting at the hand mirror, ‘you would never have said that the Africans there were remotely English. But as soon as you crossed the border into the French place there you saw black men just like ours sitting on the roadside and eating French bread and drinking red wine and wearing little French berets. Now you come here and see these black English grooms.’

The road had begun to curve; the way ahead was no longer clear. They stayed behind the van with the yelping, interested beagles. The grooms eyed the car without friendliness. A sign announced the Hunting Lodge, one mile on.

‘We’ll have to be quick,’ Bobby said. ‘I don’t like the way those clouds are piling up there.’

‘I told you I was the expert.’

The road they turned off into dipped sharply from the embank ment of the highway. It ran dark-red and narrow, with deep wheeltracks about a central ridge, between humped fields. Rain had fallen the previous day or early that morning. The car slithered in the wheeltracks; the steering-wheel jumped in Bobby’s hands.

‘Still hasn’t dried out,’ Bobby said. ‘It must have rained pretty hard.’

‘It will rain again soon,’ Linda said. But she didn’t sound anxious.

The red road curved, following a shallow depression between gentle slopes. Bobby and Linda were enclosed by green; the highway was hidden. Not far ahead of them a line of trees, some white and leafless, marked the course of a stream. Beyond that the land sloped up again, parkland.

‘Like England,’ Linda said.

‘Or Africa.’

Past a turning the land on the left was shaved of humps and was as flat as a swamp, with scattered tussocks of grass and reeds breaking the surface, as in a swamp.

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