Free A Way in the World by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

everything exists in balance, and there is nothing from outside to compare, what idea can men have of the passing of time? It is thethings we pass that give us an idea of speed. When there is nothing to compare, men must exist only in their own light and the light of the people they know—the narrator thinks of the dim lights in the blackness of the mission clearing, thinks of the play of his flashlight and the others’ as they pick their way back to their cabins. Beyond that, backwards and forwards, there must be nothing.
    The narrator wrestles with this difficult idea, very strange in the bright light. While the sun is still high the march ends. It is the rule. Two hours before sunset. They camp beside a stream. The sun strikes through the shallow reddish water; inches below the surface webs of light dance over the crushed grey and red rock at the bottom. Beauty; but it is only Lucas and Mateo who have made it safe. Lucas and Mateo are like people to whom the forest is home. Very quickly now, using their machetes, they trim slender tree branches, sharpen one end, bury it in the earth, and put up a low shelter, roofed with the fronds of the wild banana.
    They light a little fire. Lucas and Mateo prepare their own food; the narrator prepares his own, using the river water. The sun begins to go; very quickly it falls out of the sky. The evening melancholy, the long hours before daylight, cast a gloom on the narrator.
    Mateo is whittling away at a toy dugout-paddle.
    The narrator asks Mateo, “What does your father do?”
    A foolish question to ask in the forest: the narrator feels it as soon as he talks.
    “My father dead.”
    “How did he die?”
    Mateo puts down his paddle and throws a twig on the small fire and says, “Kanaima kill him.” Mateo speaks like a philosopher, like a man resigned to grief.
    The kanaima is the spirit of death of the forests. It inhabits the body of a living man. Somewhere in the forest is the killer who looks like a man, looks like Mateo and Lucas and all theothers, and kills all men. In a world without time, where men live only in the present, by their own light, as it were, all a man’s life is spent in this fear. Without the kanaima, a man could truly be happy; might live forever.
    Impossible to enter this way of perceiving. The narrator asks, the little twig fire dying down, the night stretching out ahead, “Are you married, Mateo?”
    The other boy answers, “How can he be married?”
    And Mateo says, “Indian girls foolish. They know nothing.”
    The narrator is filled with shame and grief for the people of the forest. They are very far away, these people who can see everything in the forest, who have so many talents, and have perfected so much in their isolation. They are beyond reach. They are further away than any group the narrator has known; perhaps even the revolution will not reach them. Everywhere else, in Asia, Europe north and south, Africa, tribes and peoples have been in collision since the beginning of time. These people, after the migration of their ancestors from Asia, have become people entirely of themselves, without resilience or the talent to adapt. Once their world was broken into, they lost their wholeness.
    The little fire dies down. Lucas and Mateo stretch out away from the hut. The forest sings; from time to time, for some reason, the singing subsides for a split second and the river sound is heard. The narrator tries to imagine himself living in that setting for some years; for the rest of his life; for five hundred years. He feels an artificial touch of stress. He takes a sip of whisky from his bottle.
    One of the boys sits up straightaway and says, “You drink rum, sir?”
    “Not rum.”
    “You give us rum, sir.”
    “No rum.”
    The boy lies down again, sighing like a man.
    The narrator is awakened by the sound of rain, falling loudly on the wild-banana fronds of his hut roof. He awakens to his earlier stress, his own feeling of dislocation.
    One of