The Shadow of the Sun Read Online Free Page A

has already vanished. A field still cultivated three months ago is today lying fallow.
    The continuity that lives and breathes here, and that creates the threads of the social fabric, is the continuity of family tradition and ritual, and the pervasive and far-reaching cult of the ancestor. Rather than a material or territorial community, it is a spiritual community that binds the African to those closest to him.
    The bus is going deeper and deeper into the thick, tall, tropical forest. Biology in the temperate zones exhibits discipline and order: there is a little stand of pines here, some oaks over there, and birch trees somewhere else. Even in mixed forests a certain clarity and propriety prevail. In the tropics, however, the flora exists in a state of frenzy, in an ecstasy of the most untrammeled procreation. One is struck immediately by a cocky, pushy abundance, an endless eruption of an exuberant, panting mass of vegetation, all the elements of which—tree, bush, liana, vine, growing, pressing, stimulating, inciting one another—have already become so interlocked, knotted, and clenched that only sharpened steel, wielded with a horrendous amount of physical force, can cut through it a passage, path, or tunnel.
    Because in the past there was no wheeled transport on this enormous continent; there were also no roads. When the first cars were brought here, early in the twentieth century, they didn’t really have anywhere to go. A paved road is something new in Africa, at most several decades old. And in certain areas it still remains a rarity. Instead of roads, there were trails, usually shared by people and cattle alike. This age-old system of paths explains why people here are still in the habit of walking single file, even if they’re traveling along one of today’s wide roads. It explains, too, why a walking group is silent—it is difficult to conduct a conversation single file.
    One can’t afford to be less than a great expert on the geography of these paths. Whoever knows them less than well will lose his way, and if forced to wander too long without water and food will of course perish. Various clans, tribes, and villages have their own paths, which cross one another, and someone unfamiliar with their points of intersection can walk along one assuming it is taking him in the right direction, while in fact it may be leading him astray, even toward death. The most perplexing and dangerous are jungle paths. You are constantly caught on thorns and branches, reaching a destination all scratched and swollen. It is a good idea to carry a stick, for if a snake is lying across the path (as happens often), you must scare it off, and this is best accomplished with a stick. Talismans present further dilemmas. Inhabitants of the tropical forest, living in an impenetrable wilderness, are by nature wary and superstitious. To scare off evil spirits, they hang all kinds of talismans along the pathways. What should you do when you come upon a lizard’s skin left hanging, a bird’s head, a bunch of grass, or a crocodile’s tooth? Should you risk continuing, or, rather, turn back, knowing that beyond this warning sign something truly evil might be lurking?
    Every now and then our bus stops along the side of the road. Someone wants to get off. If it’s a young woman with a child or two (a young woman without a child is a rare sight), there unfolds a scene of extraordinary agility and grace. First, the woman will secure the child to her body with a calico scarf (her small charge sleeping the entire time, not reacting). Next, she will squat down and place the bowl from which she is never separated, full of food and goods of all kinds, on her head. Then, straightening up, she will execute that maneuver of a tightrope walker taking his first step above the abyss: carefully, she finds her equilibrium. With her left hand she now clutches a woven sleeping mat, and with her right the hand of a second child. And this way—stepping at