We kept ascending the mountains to the south of Toniba till three o’clock, at which time having gained the summit of the ridge which separates the Niger from the remote branches of the Senegal, I went on a little before; and coming to the brow of a hill, I once more saw the Niger rolling its immense stream along the plain!

Yet I could not keep my mind’s eye on the African scenery. I could not shake a sensation for which my present predicament supplied a metaphor: my life was off the tracks. My high-rise ambitions and hopes had evaporated somewhere around New London. I would have to get a job, something repetitive and demeaning, to support my painting. Which would wither away. And my marriage: it, too, through no one’s fault, was one of those things that were not happening. My wife’s excited attraction to Malcolm was indication of that. And my little girl: Annie’s very wonderfulness frightened me. So proud now of being able to brush her own hair, she would stroke it clumsily until it fanned out from her head in long floating wands, and then come to me, imagining it was beautifully smooth, her face fat with conceit, saying, “Lookit, Daddy. Lookit.”

I was not totally alone in the station. Mine must have been the last train for hours. One of the men who had been in the lavatory had not left the waiting room, and he stood by the door staring out into the dingy small-city darkness. A car wheeled its lights through the station lot and bit the curb with a screech; I glimpsed several heads, including the tufted shadow of a woman’s, and imagined that my wife and daughter had relented and driven here with Malcolm. They had been quicker than predicted—miraculously quick.

But it was a young man in an old athletic jacket who slammed through the double doors and raced into the lavatory. Too much beer, I supposed. He had left his motor running and his lights burning. Light poured into the face of the man waiting by the door, washing a halo into the rim of his flimsy fair hair. Lookit. Lookit.

The athlete dashed back to his car, the motor roared, and the lights backed off and sped away. The man by the door said to me, “Not bad, huh? Two guys and one cunt.” He shuffled forward a few steps, a slender man with a stooped neck. He was not young, and yet not old either—merely hard-used, and poor.

“Yeah,” I said, and fixed my eyes pointedly on the book.

It was in the afternoon, and we fastened it to the tree close to the tent, where all the asses were tied. As soon as it was dark the wolves tore its bowels out, though within ten yards of the tent door where we were all sitting.