Among Flowers by Jamaica Kincaid Read Free Book Online

little complaints. That next morning Dan suggested that we pack a change of clothes in our day pack and so not be dependent on the porters for dry clothes when we got into camp. He had remembered from his last trip here that they had a rhythm of their own: it all started out well, but eventually there would be some problem and porters had to be let go and new ones hired in the next village. Now as we walked on toward Num, the town where we would spend the night, a small worry cropped up: our porters seemed not to be as well-disciplined as the other porters with the other groups. They lagged behind and sometimes would disappear completely. We were in open land. The sky could not be more blue. The sun was a hot I had never experienced; it seemed to penetrate into my skin, going in one way and coming out the other. We marched on, sometimes passing the porters, but then they would rush past us carrying our bags, our tents, our chairs and tables, our food, our everything at an incredible speed. When we passed the porters, our hearts sank; when they passed us and rushed on ahead, we thought of the day’s end and our nice tents with sleeping bags waiting for us. We came to a little village that appeared to be the Himalayan equivalent of a truck stop. There was a shop, dark inside, and men were coming in and out. There was a lot of shouting and even drunkenness. It interested me greatly to know what was going on. Sunam would not let us linger to see anything or buy anything, but he had not so much control over the porters. We then descended into a forest the floor of which was littered with a chestnutlike fruit, but Dan and Bleddyn couldn’t quite agree on what this was, and I could see it was because it had no interest for them. I saw a climbing fern and then I saw my first maple, Acer campbellii. It wasn’t like the maples I am used to seeing, big-trunked, tall, and with leaves like a geometric illustration. It was slender and modest, and the leaves were only notched near the top, almost imperceptibly so. In the forest, the temperature fell to seventy-eight degrees Fahrenheit, and the cool was welcome. All around us we could hear the gurgle of water coming from somewhere and the ground on which we walked was soft with moisture. Dan was looking for another maple, not the campbellii, and he could not find it. He remembered from before that he had found it around where we were but now there was neither the tree nor seeds of it. However, he and Bleddyn found Paris and Roscoea, Tricyrtis, Thalictrum, and Lithocarpus, and something they said was fagaceous, but I had no idea what that could mean. Just outside Chichila they had found some Rosa brunonii in fruit, though they were not so very excited about that. We emerged from the forest back into the open sun, and I have to say that I began to flag then. At one o’clock we stopped for lunch in the village Muri. What made Muri a village, other than it said so on the map, I will never know. We ate lunch outside the one-room schoolhouse, a lunch that Cook had made inside the school. We had been walking for five and a half hours. It was eighty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. Many times during our walk we thought we would stop for lunch but we could never find a place that had enough flat space for Cook to make our meals, and water with which to cook our food, and then space for us all to spread out and eat. We ate our lunch, fresh vegetables and tinned fish, and some people—inhabitants from Muri or not, we could not know—watched us do so. Some of the children had hair that had lost its natural pigmentation; it had been black but had become blond, a sign that some essential nutrient was missing from their daily diet.
    From our lunch spot, we could see Num in the distance. It was not far away at all. A couple of hours’ walk and that was mostly downhill. We started out, in the usually gingerly fashion, and then soon were confidently marching along. We walked on paths,