Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee

Author:J. M. Coetzee [Coetzee, J. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Tags: Fiction, Unread
ISBN: 9780099465935
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2004-06-14T23:00:00+00:00

Though the guards have orders not to discuss anything with me, it is not difficult to stitch together into a coherent story the snatches of talk I hear on my outings into the yard. All the latest talk is about the fire along the river. Five days ago it was just a darker smudge against the haze in the north-west. Since then it has eaten its way slowly down the river-course, sometimes dying down but always reviving, and clearly visible now from the town as a brown shroud over the delta where the river enters the lake.

I can guess what has happened. Someone has decided that the river-banks provide too much cover for the barbarians, that the river would form a more defensible line if the banks were cleared. So they have fired the brush. With the wind blowing from the north, the fire has spread across the whole shallow valley. I have seen wildfires before. The fire races through the reeds, the poplars flare up like torches. Animals that are quick enough--antelope, hare, cat-escape; swarms of birds fly out in terror; everything else is consumed. But there are so many barren stretches along the river that fires rarely spread. So it is clear that in this case a party must be following the fire downriver to see to its progress. They do not care that once the ground is cleared the wind begins to eat at the soil and the desert advances. Thus the expeditionary force against the barbarians prepares for its campaign, ravaging the earth, wasting our patrimony.

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