The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,103

something like forest debris. But here, in the days of the old life of the manor, there had been a series of railed timber bridges over the channels—channels which, overgrown with willows that had then been blown down by equinoctial gales, had become like forest creeks: water appearing to be black over old leaves and mud, until you noticed the clear clean colors of the leaves and the sky that the water reflected. In these hidden black creeks (so unlike the open meadows with yellow irises at the other end) there were often mallards. They took fright at one’s approach, so used were they to their untroubled possession of these waters, or a particular willow-blocked arm of a creek.

The bridges over the creeks of the water meadows had been built to high specifications; but over the years they had rotted in the water and had been further broken up by the growth of vegetable matter, even sturdy, tall-stalked nettles, and especially by the growth of the roots and trunks of willows. There still remained, that first spring of my walks and discoveries, a heavy gate at the end of the first bridge. This gate dragged; but its posts, though black and green with damp and disagreeable to the touch, still stood, and the gate could still be pulled shut and latched with a rusting catch. As a gate, a barrier, it was meaningless. The levels of ground and water had changed; the gate no longer guarded a dry walk across the water meadow. One could simply walk around the gate. There was a merest dip in the ground now, and the only inconvenience came from the nettles. But the nettles were everywhere.

At one stage of this cross-meadow walk the weeds and reeds and willows and other wild growths were so tall it was hard to see the river. Then, quite suddenly, from the very last bridge—with many broken planks, big rusted nails alone remaining whole, the planks they had fixed having rotted away altogether—suddenly from the last bridge the end of the bush was clear, and the trimmed path along the river-bank, beside the collapsed boathouse.

This boathouse was a spectacular ruin. The mooring for the boat or boats was in a creek, one of the old channels of the water meadow. The thick timber posts or pillars of the corrugated iron-roofed shelter stood on either side of the creek. But tame though the river looked—a few feet deep, a few feet wide—the water it channeled was a force of nature, not wholly predictable; and the banks of that river and its inlets were constantly changing. The boathouse creek, widening or simply shifting, had caused the boathouse to collapse on one side. The angle of collapse, the rotting timber, the black-looking water, the rusting corrugated iron suggested a tropical river ruin, somewhere on the Orinoco or Amazon or the Congo. And yet, passing this ruin, and as though belonging to another order of nature, another order of society almost, was the trimmed path along the riverbank.

It was to that easy path, a path for fishermen, that the water-meadow bridges were meant to lead. And the river itself flowed tidily and gently; and neat planks bridged the channels from the wet meadows to the main river. It was the hand of man, the hand of the water bailiffs and people like them, that suggested an orderly nature. Left to itself, the river, like the water meadow at the back of the manor, would have become a forest ruin. It took only one collapsed willow—blown down during a gale, say—to create a mess in the river: the banks wrecked, easy passage gone, tangled islands of river weeds and river dross with rippled skins of milky-brown scum building up in a few days between the branches.

The color of the river depended on what grew on the banks. And small though the scale was, the bank was varied. Where there were tall reeds or grasses on the water’s edge, and the bank was overhung with trees, and if there were little indentations—miniature coves—in the bank, then the water was dark green, deep-seeming, and mysterious. Where the bank was clear the water was clear, showing the white sand or chalk of the bed or the rippling green river weeds.

There came a stage on my walk along the riverbank when I stood directly in front of the water meadow where the yellow irises grew. Beyond that was the old orchard, with the box enclosure that lay to