Continental Drift by Russell Banks Page A

who come down from the hills, the Somali-speaking nomads who have raised cattle in that wilderness for a thousand years and who now must flee famine, drought and the war, the endless war between the Ethiopians with their Russian guns and Cuban allies and the soldiers of the Western Somalia Liberation Front. The man, his black skin cut through almost to the bone of his face with worry and fatigue, nods and repeats the name of the man with the truck. He will take you to Kismayu, we say, just as we told the others, for nearly every day they come. The camps are there, on the coast. There is food and shelter there, and people who will know how to cure your children of their sores. The man asks if there will be a price for this transportation. We shrug, as if we don’t know. He nods. He understands. Perhaps he will be able to sell his wretched camel. If not, he knows that one night soon, on the cold ground outside the tiny crossroads village of Samaso, they will die. First the children will die, then probably the man, and then the woman. And tomorrow or the day after that, another family will come down from the hills and will cross the dry, hot plain along the rutted road, will stop for the night beside our hut and in the morning will move on to the same fate.
    In these years, the early 1980s, most events and processes that have been occurring for millennia continue to occur, some of them silently, slowly, taking place an inch at a time miles below the surface of the earth, others noisily, with smoke and fire, revolution, war and invasion, taking place on the surface. We measure the geological change in millimeters per annum, feel nothing move beneath our feet and conclude, therefore, that nothing has happened. By the same token,when we read in newspapers and hear from the evening news broadcasts that there is revolution in Iran, war in Iraq, foreign soldiers and tanks in Afghanistan, because each new day brings a surfeit of such news, blotting out the news of the day before, news of Israelis in Lebanon replacing accounts of Russians in Afghanistan, Americans in Grenada replacing Israelis in Lebanon, we conclude here, too, that nothing has happened.
    The metabolic rate of history is too fast for us to observe it. It’s as if, attending to the day-long cycle of a single mayfly, we lose sight of the species and its fate. At the same time, the metabolic rate of geology is too slow for us to perceive it, so that, from birth to death, it seems to us who are caught in the beat of our own individual human hearts that everything happening on this planet is what happens to us, personally, privately, secretly. We can stand at night on a high, cold plain and look out toward the scrabbled, snow-covered mountains in the west, the same in the suburb of Denver as oustide a village in Baluchistan in Pakistan, and even though beneath our feet continent-sized chunks of earth grind inexorably against one another, go on driving one or the other continent down so as to rise up and over it, as if desiring to replace it on the map, we poke with our tongue for a piece of meat caught between two back teeth and think of sarcastic remarks we should have made to our brother-in-law at dinner.
    While we stand and think of trivialities on the plain in Baluchistan, the crust of the earth, in plates, diverges, carves long, bottomless trenches beneath the sea between India and Antarctica and shoves the last, lost child of Gondwanaland north into Eurasia, attaches India and Pakistan to China, Afghanistan and Iran with such irresistible force that the subcontinent bends and dips down at the line of convergence, buckles and crumbles at the edges and heaps up, as if with the blade of a colossal shovel, the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush, a thousand miles of mountain peaks twenty and twenty-five thousand feet high, the very mountain peaks and passes we can see in the distance and have watched night after night all our brief, distracted lives.
    And while we wait with one