In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,13

the most basic, the most necessary, that on certain days can be luminous with almost religious significance, and on others can feel like the most tedious of chores. The tent, for example, must be put up and taken down. Two or three times a day a meal must be prepared, then the pots and pans must afterwards be cleaned. In the beginning, for the first few days, these jobs are shared equally between them. They help each other lay out the poles and insert them through the limp canvas, cast around together for stones to knock the pegs into the ground. Or they trade, why don’t you put up the tent, I’ll make the supper. Okay, I’ll help you wash up later. And although they are wary of each other, and the little moments of conflict do recur, there is a symmetry and balance to the running of things, they could continue like this for some time.

In these early days there is a lot of talking between them still, they find their way into interesting conversations, they exchange ideas and disagree with respect. And if they avoid personal topics, if there is no discussion of their most intimate lives, it is because they have left those intimate lives behind. In their place is this new intimacy, the practical one between them, in which they lie next to each other and bump against each other in the dark, and look into each other’s faces first thing in the morning, and in a certain sense it’s this intimacy that is the engine of their journey.

The day becomes organized around little rituals of collapse and renewal. Every morning they get up very early before it’s light.

One of them makes a fire to boil water for coffee while the other takes down the tent. Then they set out, trying to cover a certain distance before it gets too hot. After an hour or two they stop to have breakfast. Then they wash up, if there is water, or store the dirty pots and plates till later, and set out again.

By the middle of the morning, when it becomes too hot, they find a place to rest for a few hours. In this country of peaks and valleys, threaded with rivers, there is often a shady spot near water, with a view out into blue distances, they become used to sleeping in these soft and lush surroundings, bees drone, the shadows of clouds move silently, grass waves.

Now the heat is building towards a storm. The edges of mountains take on a sharp electric sheen, in the high air thunderheads mount up, eventually a hot dry wind begins to blow. Either they will wait where they are, sometimes even putting up the tent again until the storm has come and gone, or they will take shelter in a hut or cave. Their greatest fear at these times is lightning. In this dislocated state, in which death is a constant presence beneath the skin, it is a grotesquely plausible idea that they will be struck down from the sky. He has never seen such brilliant fire, or heard such terrifying thunder.

Then there is the last walk of the day, the final push of energy and effort, trying to cover a particular distance before the night comes down. Around sunset they find a place to sleep. Most of the time they pitch the tent. If they are near a village they go to ask permission from the chief, this is invariably granted, once or twice they are offered a room to sleep in. Then there are the evening rituals, the fire and food, perhaps a little reading, the walk out into the dark with a toilet-roll in hand. Before it is very late they sleep, stretching out side by side, exhaustion erases the mind in seconds, even the hardest ground is soft.

So the days go on. The road takes them past houses, or little clusters of huts, and everywhere people stop what they’re doing to watch them go past. Sometimes greetings are shouted, stock English phrases they must have learned at school, hello how are you yes no I am also fine goodbye. In many places crowds of children swarm around them, following with singing and laughter this pair of pied pipers who draw them in their wake. In one village the mayor puts them up in his house, he is a huge gap-toothed man who smokes marijuana incessantly in rolls of newspaper, he insists on giving them