The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński Page B

it becomes history’s true determinant and master.
    Less than an hour’s flying time, and we are approaching the airport. Zanzibar: the old Arab town, like a brooch skillfully sculpted out of white stone, and further on forests of coconut palms, enormous, branching clove trees, and fields of corn and cassava, all of it framed by the brilliant sandy beach punctuated by aquamarine inlets in which bob flotillas of fishermen’s boats.
    When we are already close to the ground, we see armed men positioned on both sides of the runway. A feeling of relief, because they are not taking aim at us, are not shooting. There are several dozen of them, and one notices immediately that they are poorly, carelessly dressed—half-naked, in fact. The pilot taxis the plane to the main building. Karume is not there, but there are some people who introduce themselves as his aides. They will take us to the hotel, they say, and request that the plane take off again at once.
    We drive to town in two police vans. The road is empty, there are hardly any people visible. We pass some ruined houses, a destroyed, disemboweled shop. One enters the city through a magnificent, massive gate, beyond which immediately begin narrow streets, so narrow that a car can barely fit through. If someone were walking toward us, he would have to duck into a doorway and wait until we passed.
    But at this time the city is silent; doors are either shut or torn out of their frames, windows tightly shuttered. A torn-off signboard on which is written “Maganlal Yejchand Shah”; a broken window in the shop Noorbhai Aladin and Sons; a similarly gaping and empty store next door, M. M. Bhagat and Sons, Agents for Favre Leuba, Geneva.
    Several barefoot boys are walking by, one of them holding a gun.
    “This is our problem,” says one of our guides. His name is Ali. He worked on a clove plantation. “We had only several dozen old guns, confiscated from the police. Very few automatic weapons. The principal arms are machetes, knives, clubs, sticks, axes, hammers. But you’ll see for yourselves.”
    We got rooms in the deserted Arab neighborhood, in the Zanzibar Hotel. The building was constructed in such a way that it always provided coolness and shade. We sat down at the bar, to catch our breath. Every now and then some people we didn’t know would come up to see and greet us. At one point, a slight, energetic old woman came in. She began questioning us: What are we doing here? what for? where from? When she got to me and I told her where I was from, she seized me by the hand, paused, and began reciting in flawless Polish:
    Pogodą rana lśni polana,
    Cisza opieszcza smukłość drzew,
    Dygotem liści rozszeptana,
    Źdźbla trawy kłoni lekki wiew.
    Naggar, Arnold, our escort, all those barefoot warriors now congregating in the hotel’s reception area, were frozen in astonishment.
    Tak cicho jest i slodko wszędy,
    I tak przedziwny wkoło świat,
    Jakbyś przed chwilą przeszła tędy,
    Musnąwszy trawy skrajem szat.
    “Staff?” I asked, hesitatingly.
    “Of course it’s Staff. Leopold Staff!” she said triumphantly. “My name is Helena Tręmbecka. From Podole. I have a hotel right next door. It’s called Pigalle. Please come. You will find Karume there and all his people, because I am serving them free beer!”
    What happened on Zanzibar? Why are we here, in a hotel guarded by a troop of barefoot zealots with machetes? (If truth be told, their leader has a rifle, but there’s no telling whether it’s loaded.)
    If someone looks carefully at a detailed map of Africa, he will notice that the continent is surrounded by numerous islands. Some are so small they are registered only on highly specialized navigational maps, but others are large enough to appear on ordinary atlases. On the northern side of the continent lie Dzalita and Kerkenna, Lampione and Lampedusa; on the western side of the Canary and Cape Verde Islands, Gorée and Fernando Po, Príncipe and São Tomé,