The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,41

appearance of so many acres—seemed to happen quietly.

It was some time before I knew that there had been failure. The machines were there; the cows were there; the men were up and down in their cars; the big trucks came to take away the grain from the metal-walled barn. But then gradually the failure, the withdrawal at the center, began to show.

The prefabricated cow shed next to the barn was opened, front and back, and cleared of its dung and straw; and it remained open and clean (though stained) and empty: the stalls, the concrete floor with its canals, the slatted timber of the walls striping the sunlight, radiating it at many angles, and giving the shed an internal glow. The new milking building or parlor was taken down. So newly put up, its concrete platform—all that remained—still so new and raw-looking on the hillside. It was like Jack’s greenhouse; that, too, had left only a concrete floor.

Again, here, building had been on too big a scale, a scale too big for men. Needs had been exaggerated, had ramified, and had left a ruin. An empty cow shed that might eventually be taken down and sold elsewhere; a milking machine that no doubt had already been sold, leaving only a concrete floor. So small in the openness now, that floor, where the milking machines had hummed and hissed and dials had kept check of this and that; while the dung-stained cows, corralled into their iron-railed passages at particular times, had waited with a curious stillness to give milk to the machines, after being walked up the hill to the cowman’s shouts (the only human remnant of the milking ritual).

The cows themselves eventually disappeared. Some would have been sold; but whether sold or not, what would have happened to them would have been what always happened to cows when their time was judged to have come: batches of them were regularly taken off in covered vans to the slaughterhouse.

I had seen the cows on the hillsides against the sky, heads down, grazing, or looking with timorous interest at the passing man. And they had seemed like the cows in the drawing on the label of the condensed-milk tins I knew in Trinidad as a child: something to me as a result at the very heart of romance, a child’s fantasy of the beautiful other place, something which, when I saw it on the downs, was like something I had always known. I had seen the big eyes, the occasional mild stampede of the herd as, within their pasture, they had followed the walking man, thinking he had brought them something tasty or was to lead them to something they had been trained to like. I had seen the big, wet, black noses, the fly-repellent in the metal sachets clipped to the ears, which they flapped like heavy fans. One sees what one sees. Harder to imagine, unreal, what one doesn’t see.

It had taken me some time to see that though milk came from cows that had dropped calves, no calf was to be seen, except very sick ones: little, seemingly fluid sacks of black and white or brown and white on straw, creatures still seeming fresh from the womb. And no cow with its calf. No lowing herd winding o’er the lea here, as in Gray’s “Elegy”; no “sober” herd lowing to meet their young at evening’s close, as in “The Deserted Village.”

Pictures of especial beauty at one time, those lines of poetry, matching the idea of the cows on the condensed-milk label. Especial beauty, because (though I knew that “sober” well—lovely, apt word—and knew the ritual of bedding down cattle for the night) we had no herds like that on my island. We didn’t have the climate, the pasture; the island had been developed for the cultivation of sugarcane. But there were cattle. Some members of my family, like other country people, kept cows, one or two, for milk, for love, for religion.

We were at the very end of the old Aryan cow worship, the worship of the cow that gave milk, without which men’s life would have been harder and in some climates and lands impossible. This worship was something our grandfathers had brought with them from peasant India; when I was a child, we still honored the idea for its own sake, as well as for its link with the immemorial past. Among us, the new milk from a cow that had just calved was almost holy. A