Stone Kingdoms by David Park Page B

ever widening arcs for firewood, the wood that fuelled their lives. The constant collection and rationing of resources. The doling out of life’s dregs.
    All the dwellings I passed were different, a patchwork of ramshackle structures that bore witness to ingenuity, to the creative exploitation of what the world had discarded. Little shacks fashioned from packing cases and polythene, cardboard walls fastened to battens of spindly sticks, oil drums driven into the sand for corner stones and roofed with sacking and plastic. Old tyres bound together with rope supporting woven matting or strips of corrugated tin. None of them more than three or four metres high, their frameworks caulked and cemented with dried dung or clay. Even the front half of a jeep, its gutted innards replaced by a parcel of possessions and bedding. As I walked I passed small children returning from the scrub carrying mean little bundles of bleached sticks that looked like bones. One of them trailed two stringy slithers of goats whose skins were blistered with sores. A boy holding the hand of a younger brother crossed my path but only one set of eyes turned to look at me; the other’s were locked in a torpid white blindness. Women carried the first water of the day, the heads of babies swaddled in the folds of their clothes, and as I stepped aside to let them pass along the ridged and rutted path, I felt the weight of their gaze, assumed the guilt. And I knew for the first time that no matter how much or little you might do to help, our very physical presence subsumed us into the essence of their suffering and intensified the knowledge that they had no future happiness until we were no longer there.
    Sometimes as I walked I caught glimpses of inner worlds – a mother feeding her baby, her breast flapping loose and thin like an empty envelope, around her the sleeping forms of her older children snuggled into each other’s hollows; an old man naked from the waist up with a white stipple of beard, his skin hanging from his shoulder bones like an old shirt on a wire hanger; a young girl in a doorway combing her hair with a painted comb, one hand rubbing the sleep from her eyes. And as I walked and listened to the slow unfolding of life around me, the smell of cooking seeped into the other smells which I had tried to block out. Somewhere a baby cried in hunger and in response a voice set up a slow chanting, a rhythmic cadence that pleaded for patience.
    â€˜You’re up early.’
    The voice was American. It belonged to a big man in green fatigues which looked tired from the strain of stretching over his body. In his late fifties maybe, his bald head glazed with sun spots and a thin smear of hair that looked like daubs of charcoal. He was carrying a medical kit emblazoned with the Agency logo, and he wore gold-rimmed glasses with lenses which looked too small to cover his eyes. As he stretched out his hand towards me he snuffled the glasses into a tighter focus. ‘Dr Rollins, James Rollins – we didn’t get a chance to meet. Welcome to Bakalla.’ We shook hands, observed social refinements, my concentration momentarily distracted by a small child defecating in a little hollow then surreptitiously kicking up a concealing layer of dirt. ‘You’re Irish, aren’t you? I hear Ireland’s a very beautiful country, I’m going to take a vacation there some day, going to visit the Burren. I’m a plant man. Orchids mostly. There’s wild orchids on the Burren.’
    For a few moments we made small talk, and then as the words dried up he asked me if I wanted to come with him, and so I followed down alleyways where it felt as if the clumsy collision of his case or the brush of his elbow against the fragile frameworks might topple them into the dirt. Sometimes as he walked he raised his hand in a silent warning, and we stretched our legs over a coagulated trail of dysentery or side-stepped some indecipherable