Free In High Places by Arthur Hailey

fancy because the memory of how she looked had faded in his mind and now, when he thought of her, her face was in shadow, with features vague. But she had given him love; that much he was sure of, and he remembered because it was the only love he had ever known.
    The early years were disjointed fragments in his mind. He knew that his mother had worked, when she could, to keep them in food, though at times there had been none. He had no recollection of the kind of work his mother had done, though he believed at one time she had been a dancer. The two of them had moved around a good deal - from French Somali-land into Ethiopia, first to Addis Ababa, then Massawa. Two or three times they had made the Djibouti-Addis Ababa trek.
    At the beginning they had lived, though meagrely, among other French nationals. Later, as they had become poorer still, the native quarter was all the home they knew. Then, when Henri Duval was six, his mother had died.
    After his mother's death his memories were mixed again. For a time - it was hard to be sure how long - he had lived in the streets, begging for food and sleeping at night in whatever hole or corner he could find. He had never gone to the authorities; it had not occurred to him to do so, for among the circle he moved in the police were looked on as enemies, not friends.
    Then an elderly Somali, living alone in a hovel in the native quarter, had taken him in and provided shelter of a sort. The arrangement had lasted five years and then, for some reason, the old man left and Henri Duval was alone once more.
    This time he drifted from Ethiopia across into British Somaliland, getting work where he could, and for another four years he was variously a shepherd's helper, a goatherd, and a boat boy, eking out a precarious day-to-day existence with wages seldom more than food and shelter.
    Then and later, crossing international borders had been simple. There were so many families with children on the move that officials at border points seldom bothered with the children individually. At such moments he would merely attach himself to a family and pass unnoticed through the guards. In time he became adept at it. Even in his late teens his small stature continued to make this possible. Until, at twenty, after travelling with some Arab nomads, he was stopped for the first time and turned back at the borders of French Somaliland. ,
    Two truths were now revealed to Henri Duval. One: his days of slipping across borders with groups of children were over. Second: French Somaliland, which until this moment he had regarded as his own country, was closed to him. The first thing he had already suspected; the second came as a profound shock.
    Fatefully, inevitably, he had encountered one of the fundamentals of modern society: that without documentation - the all-important fragments of paper, the very least of which is a certificate of birth - man is nothing, officially non-existent, and belonging nowhere on the territorially divided earth.
    If men and women of learning have, at times, found the proposition hard to accept, to Henri Duval - without schooling of any kind and forced through his years of childhood to live like an unloved scavenger - it had come with shattering impact. The Arab nomads moved on, leaving Duval in Ethiopia, where he now knew he had no right to be either, and for a day and a night he sat huddled near the border crossing point at Hadele Gubo...

... There was a fold of bleached and weathered rock. In its shelter the twenty-year-old youth - still a child in many ways - stayed unmoving and alone.. Directly ahead were the arid, boulder-studded plains of the Somalilands, bleak in moonlight and barren in the bright noon sun. And across the plains, sinuously winding like a dun-coloured serpent, was the dust-blown roadway to Djibouti - the final tenuous thread between Henri Duval and his past, between his childhood and his manhood, between his body, undocumented except by its living presence, and