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Back The Black Earth Save as PDF
Chapters (56)
  1. Cover
  2. THE BLACK EARTH
  3. Dedication
  4. Contents
  5. BOOK I
  6. CHAPTER ONE
  7. CHAPTER TWO
  8. CHAPTER THREE
  9. CHAPTER FOUR
  10. CHAPTER FIVE
  11. CHAPTER SIX
  12. CHAPTER SEVEN
  13. BOOK II
  14. CHAPTER EIGHT
  15. CHAPTER NINE
  16. CHAPTER TEN
  17. CHAPTER ELEVEN
  18. CHAPTER TWELVE
  19. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  20. CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  21. CHAPTER FIFTEEN
  22. CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  23. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  24. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
  25. CHAPTER NINETEEN
  26. CHAPTER TWENTY
  27. BOOK III
  28. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
  29. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
  30. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
  31. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
  32. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
  33. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
  34. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
  35. CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
  36. CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
  37. CHAPTER THIRTY
  38. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
  39. CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
  40. CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
  41. CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
  42. BOOK IV
  43. CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
  44. CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
  45. CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
  46. CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
  47. CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
  48. CHAPTER FORTY
  49. CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
  50. CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
  51. CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
  52. CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
  53. CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
  54. About the Author
  55. By Philip Kazan
  56. Copyright

By sunset the Narkunda is steaming around Cape Matapan towards Italy, and Tom is at supper, ignored among the grown-ups, sitting silently, chewing a lamb chop and listening to the reverend, who is telling them, for the tenth or twentieth time, about a duchess who had come to visit his mission for unmarried ladies. Tom has already forgotten Piraeus, or at least has put it away where he keeps his bad dreams, though the Acropolis is a bright white arrangement of angles in his memory: white stone, blue sky and, far below, a disordered lake of tawny rooftops, church domes, spiky cypress trees. The next day that too is fading. He doesn’t feel well, and Mummy has to find the bottle of castor oil.

CHAPTER THREE

Piraeus, Greece, October 1922

The little girl is walking along a street. Shuffling, really; she is a small, grubby bead in a necklace of shuffling people that stretches for miles in either direction. Since they left the dockside camp in Piraeus that afternoon, she has been staring at the backs of the woman and her two children who are walking in front of her. The woman is heavyset, with thick lead-coloured hair. She is wearing a dress of block-printed cotton, the pattern of which – golden roses on a background of burnt-bread brown – has been mesmerising the girl for hours. The woman’s calves are swathed in drooping, laddered stockings that might once have been a fetching pink but now resemble pork rind that has been in the sun for too long. She is clutching a child’s hand in each of her own. One of them, a boy of around ten, wearing what might be a school uniform, is marching along like a wind-up toy, complaining in a loud, sharp-edged voice about everything. The other child is a younger girl, who is dragging her feet, keeping up a low, relentless whine. The back of her linen dress is stained brown down to the hem, she smells horrible and she has already fallen over twice, crying for water. The mother – if she is their mother – has just scolded her in a raspy, exhausted voice. From her accent, she is from one of the towns up the coast from Smyrna.