The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,167

in a higher, wilder place, strewn with dirty lumps of old snow. Beyond that, on the droveway, the land sloped up to the lark hills, the barrows and tumuli with their tufts of coarse grass and their stunted, windswept trees.

I knew the walk by heart, like a piece of music. I didn’t go all the way to the top of the down. It wasn’t necessary. I knew what I would see from there, in that light. I turned back; all the views of the walk unrolled again.

Later that evening, in my cottage, the choking fit returned. I felt my bronchial tubes contract and tighten. I waited for the fit to pass. But it didn’t; everything tightened, seized up. Within a few hours I was seriously ill, but oddly light-headed. And it was in this light-headed mood—but seeing everything with great clarity, noticing with surprise and pleasure the unusualness of the view of the valley through the dark windows of the ambulance—that I was taken to the Infirmary in the town.

I had seen the building for years and had known it was the Infirmary, the hospital, but had never thought about it, in spite of the comings and goings on the asphalt forecourt. I had seen it only as a building. I had seen remnants of the eighteenth-century brick (having learned to see age in red or reddish brick, which in 1950 I had found very ordinary, the material of little houses). I had seen the elegant Georgian letters of the legend—stating the voluntary nature of the Infirmary and giving the date, 1767—carved right along a band of stone near the top of the flat facade.

The Infirmary was on the road to the railway station. It was past the bridge: here the rivers of the chalk valleys all around met and ran together, the water always clear, giving an extraordinary brilliance to scattered pieces of litter, the water seeming (like glass paperweights or like photographs) to have the power to isolate ordinary or well-known objects and force their details on the eye.

Ten years before, illness had heightened, had given a special quality to, my discovery of spring in the manor garden. The illness of that time—brought on by mental fatigue and travel—had been, to me, though it had lasted for many weeks, like the passing tropical fevers of my childhood, fevers associated with the rainy season, fevers which I thought ran their course too soon and which I longed for again. These fevers of childhood had been welcome because, with their great relaxing internal warmth, they pleasingly distorted the sense of touch and the sense of hearing, made the world remote, then very close, played tricks with time, seeming to awaken me at many different times to the same event; and with this drama and novelty (and the special foods and “broths”) fevers always gave a feeling of home and protection.

With something like that kind of fever (and all that it implied, for the first time in England, of protection and ease) I had seen the peony below my window (in my half-waking delirium the tight red bud had grown tall on its stalk and tapped on my window in the wind); and the single blue iris among the nettles; and the thorny, scented moss roses; and the rotting bridges over the black creeks to the glory of the river, “freshing out.”

It was with real illness now, a more than passing incapacity, a fatigue that seemed to have gone beyond the body to the core and motor of my being, a fatigue that made it necessary for me to judge very carefully first how many minutes I could be up and about for, and then how many hundred yards I could walk without burning up my strength and falling ill again, it was with true illness that when I came back from the Infirmary I began, after some time, to take short turns in the sodden, ruined manor garden. Indifferent to winter for many years after I had come to England, never feeling the need for an overcoat or gloves or even a pullover, I now had a sensation of internal coldness such as I had never had before; I felt chilled in my lungs.

Grass and weeds were tall and wet, black at the roots with different kinds of vegetable rot. Autumn had once had an enchantment of its own, with the trees and bushes “burning down” in their different ways, with different tints, with the wild mushrooms imitating the color