Among Flowers by Jamaica Kincaid Read Free Book Online Page B

retrieved from the depths of our brains. At about ten o’clock, the rain stopped falling, the clouds began to lift, dissolving into tiny wisps, and then the sun came out and shone with a brightness that seemed as if it had been just newly made. The whole transformation was in five minutes, from frightening and wet gloom, to hot sun and bright dry. Camp was immediately closed up and we were on our way again. We said goodbye to the campers we had met at the beginning in Tumlingtar, the ones from Spain and Germany and France. They were going off to Base Camp Makalu and would get there in seven days. They went right, we went left, and I had no thought of ever seeing them again.

THE MAOISTS
    W e left the village of Num at half past ten, the day showing almost no sign of the storm or whatever it was that had gone on during the night. We exited the village by going through someone’s backyard. They waved at us, calling out the usual Nepalese greeting, “ Nemaste, ” the equivalent of “Good day,” Sunam had told me. It was a simple enough greeting, but I couldn’t pronounce it properly. I never succeeded in getting myself to say it just the way I had heard it. We started going down, and this as usual meant that sometime before the day was over we would be going up. After three days, I knew with fixed certainty that to go up would lead to going down and vice versa. Up was always so hard and I never greeted it with any pleasure. Down became so hard that at the end of our journey, it took me four weeks for my knees to recover. Still, if we were to find anything worth growing in our gardens (this especially applied to me, since I lived in the coldest garden zone) we would have to go up.
    I believe I was so glad to be on the path again, walking and not sitting or lying while a terrific storm, a storm, the fierceness of which I was not familiar, raged around me. In any case the going down seemed like not much to me. We had been mostly going up the day before and had gotten up to six thousand feet. Going up had been very hard, so hard that I began to think it a definition of real mountain climbing. It is not. The thing that I had not yet gotten used to was this: behind every rising was another one, higher and then higher it went. The ease with which I was used to going anywhere and everywhere had sunk deep into me. If I wanted to be someplace, I only had to find a way of transporting myself there. The idea that I had to actually get myself from one point to the other, through my own effort, was hard to take in then and hard to take in even now, months later, as I write this. But what had I imagined when I set out to do this? I had thought I would walk of course, I just did not understand the kind of walking that was required of me. And so it was that day, our fourth day out, I felt that my legs were adjusting to this walk, this path, that cut through huge slippery rocks and fallen tree trunks. I walked carefully, I had to, a couple of times; and I fell flat on my bottom because I had made a misjudgment in my steps.
    And then suddenly again, there was that dramatic, magical change that I was fast getting used to. We had started out, just after the rain, and it was still chilly, so much so, that we bundled up in sweaters. Suddenly it was hot. We had gone from a moist, cold, dark forest into open woodland. Suddenly it was so hot that Dan wished for a secluded spot, where there was a stream that flowed into a pool so that he could take a bath. He did not find the two together. As we walked along in that whole forest, far away from everything in the world, secluded spot and stream that flowed into a pool never did meet up. Perhaps to make up for not finding such a thing, we walked into a world of butterflies. At first, there were only bright yellow ones, dancing in the blue clear air just above our heads and in front of our faces, and there were many of them, as if someone or something nearby did nothing but produce