Among Flowers by Jamaica Kincaid Page B

suffering from the dreaded altitude sickness, I did not know it. I only felt tired and lonely and my head did ache, but it ached in the way my head always aches. The next morning, on the thirteenth day of October, nine days after we left Kathmandu, each of them spent walking at least ten miles, we walked the two miles to Chyamtang and decided to spend a few days there.
    In that long hike the day before from the field full of leeches to our campsite in Chepuwa, I had felt I was negotiating my very existence with each step. But while I spent nine hours all wrapped up in myself, wondering if this plant ( Paris, for instance) which looked awfully familiar and so much so that it had to be something else, was really itself, wondering if I was seeing something new, and always wondering if I could grow it—and when I realized I could not, I had no interest in the thing before me whatsoever. While I had spent nine hours being a gardener, in other words, Dan and Bleddyn and Sue were gathering seeds. They had collected and recorded the seeds of thirty-nine different plants, among them: Anemone vitifolia, Rubus lineatus, Cautleya spicata, Paris polyphylla, Schefflera sp., Disporum cantoniense, Arisaema tortuosum, Tricyrtis maculata, Philadelphus tomentosus, Hydrangea anomala, Crawfordia speciosum, Viburnum grandiflorum, Aralia, and many ferns.
    When we reached Chyamtang, we unpacked everything and aired out our clothes and sleeping things. It was a brilliant day of heat and bright light. Dan told me how lucky we were. Apparently, it could have been raining, it could have been cold. I was grateful for all that and grateful too for being able to spend the day lying down and reading and certainly not hiking. It was around then that Sue and I said to each other how hard the whole thing was. Sue came down with a cold. I came down with a case of loss of sense of self, but not only was this not new, I actually enjoy this state and were it not for that, I really would be in a state of loss of sense of self, only I would have no way of knowing so.
    All the same, how welcome this day was. A Pause. Sue and I could hardly believe it. Of course, Dan and Bleddyn went off seed hunting or collecting and they expected Sue and me to clean the seed collection from the day before. Sue did her best, I did nothing at all. The day went by.
    Chyamtang is way up north in Nepal, not far from the Tibetan border. It seemed to be a big village because many people kept coming and going by us. By many people, I mean perhaps twelve, but we had seen so few people in the last few days that five began to seem like a crowd. They passed through, they stared at Sue and me, and then they went on. At some point we had to take refuge in our tents, she in the one she shared with Bleddyn, I in the one I shared with Dan. A group of children had come by at lunchtime and stared at us as we ate. We grew uncomfortable and went into our tents. While we were in our tents, a large group of people gathered outside and one person would open the tent flap to show us to the other people. We had to call on Sunam, who spoke gruffly to them and made them move away. But nothing made my rest day not blissful. I was reading my book by Frank Smythe about his failed attempt to climb Kanchenjunga in 1930. Three weeks ago I would have had no interest or understanding of his account of climbing a mountain. I knew of him through his writing as a plant hunter. I had no idea that the mountaineer and the plant collector were the same person. Much later, I came to see that he became a plant collector because it was a way for him to climb mountains. His most famous book of plant collecting, The Valley of Flowers, is full of the many little side trips he took to climb some summit, insignificant by Himalayan standards but major when compared to the rest of the world’s geography. It became clear to me that while trying to climb Everest in the twenties, and then Kanchenjunga in the thirties, the