A Way in the World by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul Page A

year later): curiously informal and fresh, these old Spanish cries from the other end of the world, the complaints and deceptions of hungry, quarrelsome, self-righteous, stoical people.
    I looked also at the accounts of foreign adventurers. Foreigners—other Europeans—were barred by Spanish law from the Spanish empire. They risked death or the Inquisitionif they were picked up. But this was a neglected corner of the Spanish empire, and the interlopers, as they were called, kept on coming, from France and Holland and England. Most came to trade (bringing in African slaves, taking out salt or tobacco); but a few had the idea of setting up colonies or kingdoms of their own, and came to find allies and subjects among the Indians.
    I wondered at the fortitude of all these people. I remembered what I had first seen of the continent, a very small corner of it, from the low-flying aeroplane in the last week of 1960: miles of muddy wild beach with collapsed big trees where perhaps no traveller had set foot and no tourist ever would; tight forest; the vast half-drowned confusion of meandering rivers. It would have been achievement enough to get there and survive. The people whose words I was reading went there to intrigue, to look for gold, to fight.
    A story shaped in my mind, over some years. But it never clothed itself in detail, in the “business” necessary to a narrative, even though this business fades as the narrative moves on—much as the oil or alcohol that carries a longer-lasting perfume fades.
    My idea remained an idea, and (partly working it out for the first time) I write it down here.
    THE NARRATOR is going up a highland river in an unnamed South American country. Who is this narrator? What can he be made to be? This is often where fiction can simply become false.
    To make the narrator a writer or traveller would be true to the actual experience; but then the fictional additions would be quite transparent. Can the narrator be a man in disguise, a man on the run? That would be true about the region. In 1971 Michael X, the Trinidad Black Power man, after he had killed two people in Trinidad, went to Guyana (physicallylike the country of the narrative) and made for the interior, to hide. And many years before, one of the last men of the Frank James gang, looking for a sanctuary outside the United States, fetched up in the Guiana savannah country, lower down from the forest. (So I had heard when I went there on my own journey. Local people were proud of the connection; and I, too, thought it glamorous, having seen as a child the Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda films about Frank and Jesse James.)
    A man on the run would have been true to the place. But narrative has its own strictness. It requires pertinence at all times, and to have given that character to the narrator would have introduced something not needed, a distraction, something that wouldn’t have tied up with what was to come at the end of his journey.
    Better, instead of a man on the run, have a narrator who is a carrier of mischief. A revolutionary of the 1970s, say. A man seeking the help of up-country Amerindians to overthrow the African government on the coast. Such a situation wouldn’t only echo the truth of more than one country in the region. It would also hold certain historical ironies.
    In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, at the time of the Dutch and British slave plantations on the coast—the Dutch and British no longer interlopers on the Spanish Main, but sovereign powers—when slaves ran away to the interior, Amerindians hunted them down for a bounty. Now, at the time of the story, the Africans on the coast, descendants of the slaves, have inherited the authority of the old colonial government. They have a substantial educated and professional class. They are the rulers now; and the Amerindians are culturally what they were two hundred years before.
    So for this narrator—who is more than a traveller looking for new