The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,1

nothing to fit it into. I was still in a kind of limbo. There were certain things I knew, though. I knew the name of the town I had come to by the train. It was Salisbury. It was almost the first English town I had got to know, the first I had been given some idea of, from the reproduction of the Constable painting of Salisbury Cathedral in my third-standard reader. Far away in my tropical island, before I was ten. A four-color reproduction which I had thought the most beautiful picture I had ever seen. I knew that the house I had come to was in one of the river valleys near Salisbury.

Apart from the romance of the Constable reproduction, the knowledge I brought to my setting was linguistic. I knew that “avon” originally meant only river, just as “hound” originally just meant a dog, any kind of dog. And I knew that both elements of Waldenshaw—the name of the village and the manor in whose grounds I was—I knew that both “walden” and “shaw” meant wood. One further reason why, apart from the fairy-tale feel of the snow and the rabbits, I thought I saw a forest.

I also knew that the house was near Stonehenge. I knew there was a walk which took one near the stone circle; I knew that somewhere high up on this walk there was a viewing point. And when the rain stopped and the mist lifted, after those first four days, I went out one afternoon, looking for the walk and the view.

There was no village to speak of. I was glad of that. I would have been nervous to meet people. After all my time in England I still had that nervousness in a new place, that rawness of response, still felt myself to be in the other man’s country, felt my strangeness, my solitude. And every excursion into a new part of the country—what for others might have been an adventure—was for me like a tearing at an old scab.

The narrow public road ran beside the dark, yew-screened grounds of the manor. Just beyond the road and the wire fence and the roadside scrub the down sloped sharply upwards. Stonehenge and the walk lay in that direction. There would have been a lane or path leading off the public road. To find that lane or path, was I to turn left or right? There was no problem, really. You came to a lane if you turned left; you came to another lane if you turned right. Those two lanes met at Jack’s cottage, or the old farmyard where Jack’s cottage was, in the valley over the hill.

Two ways to the cottage. Different ways: one was very old, and one was new. The old way was longer, flatter; it followed an old, wide, winding riverbed; it would have been used by carts in the old days. The new way—meant for machines—was steeper, up the hill and then directly down again.

You came to the old way if you turned left on the public road. This stretch of road was overhung by beeches. It ran on a ledge in the down just above the river; and then it dropped almost to the level of the river. A little settlement here, just a few houses. I noticed: a small old house of brick and flint with a fine portico; and, on the riverbank, very close to the water, a low, white-walled thatched cottage that was being “done up.” (Years later that cottage was still being done up; half-used sacks of cement were still to be seen through the dusty windows.) Here, in this settlement, you turned off into the old way to Jack’s cottage.

An asphalt lane led past half a dozen ordinary little houses, two or three of which carried—their only fanciful touch—the elaborate monogram of the owner or builder or designer, with the date, which was, surprisingly, a date from the war: 1944. The asphalt gave out, the narrow lane became rocky; then, entering a valley, became wide, with many flinty wheeled ruts separated by uneven strips of coarse, tufted grass. This valley felt old. To the left the steep slope shut out a further view. This slope was bare, without trees or scrub; below its smooth, thin covering of grass could be seen lines and stripes, like weals, suggesting many consecutive years of tilling a long time ago; suggesting also fortifications. The wide way twisted; the wide valley (possibly an ancient river