A Way in the World by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul Page B

sights—everything seen on the river has many meanings.
    At the stern of the boat there is a man with a shotgun. From time to time he fires at the birds following the boat; and after every shot he laughs. It was perhaps with this sense of sport that his ancestors hunted down African runaways. Not with guns then, but with arrows—delicate little wands with the merest metal tip, not at all dangerous-looking, looking more like toys. They are still made: the arrows and quivers in the craft shops on the coast are exactly like the real things, fifty or sixty years old, that can be seen, coated with dust, in the ramshackle little museum—hardly touched since colonial days—in the capital.
    And—perhaps, perhaps, the narrator thinks—this old instinct, this old attitude to the African, can be revived now, to serve a higher cause. Though when the boat stops at the villages, and the narrator considers the blank faces, the stillness of the staring people (after the first agitation), he has his doubts, comparing these withdrawn, passive river people with the Africans on the coast, and with the liveliness of revolutionary tribal people in other continents.
    The once-a-week boat on this river is a cause for excitement at all the villages. At one shady village a woman comes down the zigzagging yellow ramp with a basket of food for the man with the shotgun: various things in tins and wooden bowls, separately tied up in cloth. The man doesn’t look at the woman when he speaks a few words to her; and later she comes down again with some cassava bread, two halves of a big stiff whitish disc about half an inch thick, with something of the appearance of granulated polystyrene.
    The man breaks these halves into smaller pieces and wedges them between the bowls and tins and the side of the basket—roughly, as though the wrapping up of food in cloth is something that only women do. Later, when they are on the smooth river again, and the time has come to eat, the man unties all the dishes and—with sudden seriousness—breaks off small pieces of bread to dip into them. Cassavabread is part of every mouthful that he chews. It is the staple; it bulks out the meal.
    The narrator asks for a piece, to try. The man laughs, pleased to be of interest. Below the unexpected sourness of the bread there is almost no taste.
    The light alters; the mood of the day alters. The sun, more directly overhead, strikes down between the forest walls, and the river becomes full of glare. The river changes. The man with the gun, his meal finished, the dishes rinsed in the river and put back in the basket, is now sitting in the bow looking out for snags. He sits and watches and never stirs.
    The narrator, with the sourness of the cassava bread lingering in his mouth, and a memory of its grittiness, thinks of the world’s staples. Rice and wheat and other kinds of grain are grasses. Cassava—a cousin of the red-leaved poinsettia—is more miraculous. It is a root, and it has a poison. It would have taken centuries for the remote ancestors of these forest people, after the crossing over of their ancestors from Asia, to have made their way down the continent to these forests and rivers. How many centuries more before the discovery of cassava? And how many centuries after that for the folk invention of the simple tools for getting rid of the poison?
    Thinking like this, thinking of all the inventions of these isolated people, the narrator begins to think of the antiquity of the forest. Not new, not virgin. Those villages on the river would have been like the towns of the classical world, rising for millennia on the middens of their predecessors.
    All at once, then, the light altering again, acquiring colour after glare, the river journey is over. It is about four o’clock, two hours to sunset. There is a new clearing in the forest, with a damaged stretch of low dirt-yellow bank—not the high bank of the Indian villages. There is no well-made ramp, just a number of