A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [48]
From copper he turned to the other metals, and we talked for a while, quite ignorantly, about the prospects for tin and lead. Then he said, “Uranium—what about that? What are they quoting that at now?”
I said, “I don’t think they quote that.”
He gave me his innocent look. “But it must be pretty high? A chap here wants to sell a piece.”
“Do they sell uranium in pieces? What does it look like?”
“I haven’t seen it. But the chap wants to sell it for a million dollars.”
That was what we were like. One day grubbing for food, opening rusty tins, cooking on charcoal braziers and over holes in the ground; and now talking of a million dollars as though we had talked of millions all our lives.
Mahesh said, “I told the general it could be sold only to a foreign power, and he told me to go ahead. You know old Mancini. He is consul for quite a few countries here—that’s a nice line of business, I always think. I went to see him. I told him straight out, but he wasn’t interested. In fact, Mancini went crazy. He ran to the door and closed it and stood with his back against it and told me to get out. His face was red, red. Everybody’s frightened of the Big Man in the capital. What do you think I should tell the general, Salim? He’s frightened too. He told me he stole it from some top-security place. I wouldn’t like to make an enemy of the general. I wouldn’t like him to think I hadn’t tried. What do you think I should tell him? Seriously, seriously.”
“You say he’s frightened?”
“Very frightened.”
“Then tell him he’s being watched and he mustn’t come to see you again.”
I looked in my science magazines and children’s encyclopaedia parts (I had grown to love those) and read up on uranium. Uranium is one of those things we all hear about but not many of us know about. Like oil. I used to think, from hearing and reading about oil reservoirs, that oil ran in trapped underground streams. It was my encyclopaedia parts which told me that oil reservoirs were of stone and could even be of marble, with the oil in tiny pockets. It was in just such a way, I suppose, that the general, hearing of the immense value of uranium, had thought of it as a kind of super-precious metal, a kind of gold nugget. Mancini the consul, must have thought so too. My reading told me of tons and tons of ore that had to be processed and reduced—but reduced to hefty blocks.
The general, offering a “piece,” might have been duped himself. But for some reason—Mahesh might have told him he was being watched—he never troubled Mahesh again. And not long afterwards he was posted away from our town. It was the method of the new President: he gave his men power and authority, but he never allowed them to settle in anywhere and become local kings. He saved us a lot of trouble.
Mahesh went on as coolly as before. The only man who had had a fright was Mancini, the consul.
That was what we were like in those days. We felt that there was treasure around us, waiting to be picked up. It was the bush that gave us this feeling. During the empty, idle time, we had been indifferent to the bush; during the days of the rebellion it had depressed us. Now it excited us—the unused earth, with the promise of the unused. We forgot that others had been here before us, and had felt like us.
I shared in the boom. I was energetic in my own modest way. But I was also restless. You so quickly get used to peace. It is like being well—you take it for granted, and forget that when you were ill, to be well again had seemed everything. And with peace and the boom I began to see the town as ordinary, for the first time.
The flat, the shop, the market outside the shop, the Hellenic Club, the bars, the life of the river, the dugouts, the water hyacinths—I knew it so well. And especially