Anatomy of Restlessness by Bruce Chatwin

UP
    The men waited for the truck in a tight rectangle of shade under the blue wall. The sun was glaring bright and sucked the colour from the dusty red street. The men were squatting. They had pulled their blue cottons above their knees. Their legs were lean and brown and the soles of their feet were rough as sandpaper.
    A boy was walking up the shadow of the wall scuffing the dust with his feet. His hair was red but it was the caked dust that coloured it. He put down a kitbag and sat by me.
    â€˜You are going to Atar?’
    â€˜You too?’
    â€˜I am going to France.’
    He was short and stocky, perhaps twenty. His hard thighs bulged through white jeans that were now ruddy pink from the dust. He had not washed for some time. He smelled strong and acrid though the smell was not objectionable. He had been chewing cola nuts and they had dyed his gums orange. His thin curling mouth showed off his Moorish blood. The Moors ignored him. He was very black.
    â€˜What will you do in France?’
    â€˜Continue my profession.’
    â€˜What’s that?’
    â€˜Installation sanitaire.’
    â€˜You have a passport?
    â€˜No I need one not. I am a sailor. I have a sailor’s paper.’
    He squeezed his hand in his back pocket and with two fingers fished for a scrap of damp and crumpled paper.
    The writing was in Spanish: ‘I, Don Hernando Ordoñez, certify that Patrice Diolé has worked as Seaman Third Class ...’
    â€˜From Atar,’ he said, ‘I will go to Villa Cissneros. I will take a ship to Gran Canaria. I will go to France, to Yugoslavia, to China, and continue my profession.’
    â€˜As sanitary engineer?’
    â€˜No, Monsieur. As adventurer. I will see all the peoples and all the countries of the world.’
    The truck came, almost filled up with sacks of sorghum and rice. The Senegalese and Moors climbed aboard. We followed. The trip to Atar was a bad trip, dust storm all the way. The Moors pulled down the folds of their blue turbans, covering their faces and leaving the narrowest horizontal strip through which their eyes glittered. The Senegalese wore a variety of head gear. One man wore his underpants. His nose, not his eyes, showed through the vertical slit.
    The truck stopped at a police post. A gendarme climbed up and counted fifty-nine bodies lying in among the sacks. The law prohibited more than thirty. The gendarme was a Sarakolle from the river. He was not making his people move. The Moors were in their country now and they weren’t moving either. All fifty-nine went on into the dust and the night.
    I had been squeezed against the sanitary engineer for twelve hours. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Have you seen the Indians?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜It’s a village or what?’
    â€˜It’s a big country with too many people. You should go see it.’
    â€˜ Tiens . I always thought it was a village.’

AT THE MINE
    From the hill we looked down over the flat country, golden white and spotted black with flat-topped thorn trees; you could see why they once called it ‘leopard country’. Below us was the mine. There were grey spoil tips and the new American crushing plant, green with purple scaffolding, and the old French mine that went bust, because the copper was low-grade ore and they couldn’t ship it out economically. There were silver fuel tanks and shiny aluminium cabins and yellow cranes and bulldozers. Beyond we could see the town of mudbrick boxes, and shanties made of packing cases, and the tents of the nomads.
    The Major pointed to a grey hill where he had shot gazelles.
    â€˜Nice view,’ he said. ‘Thought you’d like it up here.’ He looked at his watch.
    â€˜Sorry, I’m afraid we have to go. I’m on parade at lunch. You’ll see.’
    The Major was a neat, sandy-haired man, greying at the temples. He wore khaki shorts, had a red face and red knees, and smiled with a