Among Flowers by Jamaica Kincaid Page A

dressed rapidly (I did not brush my teeth), packed up, ate, checked ourselves for leeches, and left. We never wanted to see that place again.
    We got going without regret, without looking back, without even wishing for another moon like the one we had seen the night before. It was the most beautiful moon I had ever seen without a doubt, but I would not spend a night in a field full of leeches just to see another one like it. We marched upward the steep climb to the top. Many times the thick growth of maple, oak, Sorbus, and yew would thin out and clear up and I felt the top was near, but this clearing was only a pause leading up to more thick forests and darkness and moistness and slippery paths, almost falling down in a way that could be dangerous—and this was not a place to have an accident of any kind. To twist your ankle here wouldn’t be good at all; it would cause much misery and inconvenience. Then again, if your heart cracked out here, how much longed-for would a twisted ankle be? We climbed up to nine thousand feet, finally reaching a clearing that was somewhat level. We were at the very top of the ridge of the mountain we had just walked up. Almost as a reward, Dan immediately found a Cardiocrinum giganteum that was almost twice as big as the tallest of us, and that was Dan himself. It had lots and lots of seed. How happy he was and Bleddyn too. And after that we seemed to find nothing but Cardiocrinum giganteum, they were everywhere. I remained deeply in the experience of the night before: The Moon, The Leeches, The Landslides, The Escape from the Maoists, all of it capitalized. We walked down the forested hillside, plunging into a gulley, going more steeply down it seemed than we had gone up the day before; the sun hot overhead, the sky clear of clouds and blue as if it had never known otherwise. Down we went, toward the Arun again, passing through a thick forest of oak, Aralia, and Berberis. I kept my eyes peeled to the ground, carefully picking out each step I took, for we were on moist ground. In fact the earth seemed to be only a leaky surface; I could hear water trickling, I could feel my feet slipping on the sticky wet ground. From time to time I fell and cursed myself for doing so. But then we were out in the open sun and the ground was dry and we were walking in nothing but red-fruited Berberis. But I couldn’t collect any seeds because they are on the list of banned seeds, seeds not to be brought into my country. As usual, our destination seemed farther away the closer we got to it. We could see a village high above the other side of the Arun, and it was the village beyond that was our destination. We stopped for lunch just before crossing a river, that fed into the Arun, at a place called Sampung, and then one hour after lunch crossed the Arun and started climbing up again. That day after the night spent in the field with the leeches, we walked for nine hours and stopped in Chepuwa just a mile or two from our destination, the village of Chyamtang, because it was getting dark. We were so very tired and cross, though not with each other and not with the people who were taking care of us.
    When we made camp in the schoolyard in Chepuwa, we were immediately surrounded by children, one of them wearing a T-shirt that had the word Paris written on it. His T-shirt referred to the city, not the plant. In fact, though the plant Paris was native to the very place he is from, he most likely had never paid attention to it and so had never seen it. In any case, for dinner we had reconstituted food, Chinese food at that. I was not hungry. I went to bed at eight that night and noted that we were at an altitude of seven thousand feet. We had begun the day at six thousand feet altitude, walked up to nine when reaching the top of the hillside on which we had spent the night, walked down to three thousand feet when we crossed the Arun, and now were spending the night at seven thousand feet altitude. If I was