Turning Back the Sun by Colin Thubron

Author:Colin Thubron [Thubron, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: nepalifiction, TPB
ISBN: 9780060182274
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1991-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

That night Rayner was woken by confused shouts and cries. They sounded far away but violent, as if left over from nightmare, yet when he fully woke they were still there. He pulled back the curtain from a three-quarter moon. Beyond and a little below him, like a ghost over the blanched river, moved an unlit police launch. All along the near bank, where the last natives had camped, the darkness spurted lights and the screams and bawling reached him with unearthly distinctness. A cooking fire showered the night with sparks before dying underfoot. A child was shrieking. But in that distance everything passed with a chill unnaturalness. Gradually the lights shifted downriver toward the road. Occasionally, in the flash of torches, Rayner discerned a jostle of heads as someone still resisted arrest. Then, one by one, the jeeps” headlights flooded the distant highway as they drove away, and the police launch drifted back into dimness. For a moment the loudest sound was his own breathing, short and harsh in the room”s silence.

Then, with an eerie shock of familiarity, as if it resonated somewhere in his memory (but he could not recall where), there arose from near the river a long, disembodied howling, which wavered like a dog”s under the moon, and died away.

By the time Rayner had tugged on his trousers and gone outside, everything was silent again. He blundered along the crest of the slope, afraid of treading on a snake with his bare feet. He had forgotten to bring a torch, but by the time he reached the copse his eyes had adjusted to the moonlight. For the first time since their arrival he was praying that the natives would still be there. He thrust aside the branches until he reached the bloodwood trees.

They lay asleep on their quilt. The girl bunched on her side, her head covered by her arms. The old man”s face was turned up to the sky. Yet he appeared not really to sleep. The converging lines which knit together his eyes and nose twitched and flinched at the air. And the big, dry mouth was never still. It uttered tiny cries. And he breathed so lightly. Rayner stared down at him with relief and something like affection. But in its enormous nest of hair the old man”s face looked emptied, Rayner thought, as if he were the detritus of some older, sturdier race, which had lost its evolutionary way. And the cries he uttered were like the fragments of a language he had once known, and was trying in vain to recover.

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