A Way in the World by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

cardboard boxes strapped up in their back-packs. But the boys reassure the narrator. It’s all right; he is not to worry; they are looking after him.
    So for two or more days they walk and camp: make-believe in the evening (the leaf shelter in the forest, the little fire, safety in the night), turbulence and doubt in the day, day and night now like two sides of the narrator’s spirit, one growing out of the other: the narrator at night wishing that make-believe could be all, the complete reality, and then in daylight wondering how he could disengage from the trust the boys have placed in him. More: almost without his being aware of it, the daylight doubt is widening. He begins to wonder—at first in a lightheaded way, and as though the idea is quite absurd—what would happen if he were to withdraw from what he has undertaken to do.
    At last, at about noon one day, after four or five hours of marching, they arrive. They turn off the path and go through the forest and up to a little plateau where there is a village of old grey-brown grass huts, some of them open with tree-branch poles, some conical and closed.
    Lucas and Mateo are home. People call out to them: they call back: animation such as, many days before, at the startof his travel in the deep interior, the narrator had seen at the village landing-stages on the river.
    The narrator is taken to the hut where he is to live. There is an overpowering smell of earth and stale tobacco. People who have lived in the hut before have left pieces of cloth and whittled wood wedged between the trimmed rods of the frame and the old grass of the roof. The narrator becomes very tired. He sleeps almost as soon as he lies down, relieved to be at last alone.
    When he gets up he finds that the light is the light of mid-afternoon, the sun about to decline: the time when on previous days they would have stopped marching, and Lucas and Mateo would have been building their shelter: a toy version, as the narrator now sees, of the huts here.
    After days of forest and gloom, the smoke from the cooking fires in front of the open kitchen hut seems to the narrator to be remarkably blue, a colour on its own, not a tone of grey or brown. The narrator is also aware that the ground below his feet feels hollow: footfalls even some distance away make a dull drumming sound. The ground has been disturbed or built up in some way. The narrator, considering the plateau or platform of the village open space, feels that the site is old, that for some way down the earth would contain debris or relics of scenes, repeated through the centuries, like the one around him now.
    Some of the women are making cassava bread. Finished rounds are on the grass roof. At the side of the kitchen hut hangs the long plaited tube which can be twisted or wrung by means of a horizontally fitted stick, to squeeze the poison out of grated cassava: a poison caught in a wooden dish on the ground. Because this poison is valuable: it can preserve meat for up to a year.
    On the ground is a cassava-grater. It is a beautiful object: sharp chippings of granite fixed in hardened pitch, the pitch set in a shallow rectangular trough in a flat piece of wood.The pitch would have come from far away; a precious lump would have been imported; so, too, the granite chippings. The pitch would have been boiled into a liquid, then poured into the hollow in the wood; as it cooled, the granite chippings would have been set in it one by one.
    The narrator looks up. The women and girls are delighted by his contemplation of this kitchen object. The narrator thinks, “I love these people.” Then he questions himself, “What do I mean by that?” Looking at the women in the blue smoke, he thinks, “I want no harm to come to them.”
    Lucas and Mateo appear. Without their loads and travelling hats, and in fresh clothes, they look like young men of some standing in the village. They take the narrator down to the river. There is a deep part where he can dive,