Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe [97]
17
The Great North Road
THE KIND OF PEOPLE—local bourgeoisie and foreign diplomats —who sidle up to you at cocktail parties to inform you that Bassa was not Kangan are the very ones who go on behaving as though it was. Why? Because, like the rest of the best people, they have never travelled by bus out of Bassa on the Great North Road. If they had, even once, they would have believed and stopped prating! But they always proffer the excuse that it is too dangerous, too sweaty and, above all, too long a journey for busy people.
Now, as the overwhelming force of this simple, always-taken-in-vain reality impinged on each of Chris’s five, or was it six, senses even as hordes of flying insects after the first rain bombard street lamps, the ensuing knowledge seeped through every pore in his skin into the core of his being continuing the transformation, already in process, of the man he was.
What would happen now, he wondered, if the wheels of fortune should turn again and return him to the very haunts of his previous life, to the same cocktail circuits, those hollow rituals which in fairness to him, he always loathed for their sheer vapidity and perhaps even more for the physical pain they caused him? For being somewhat weak of hearing he was forced by the cumulative drone of a hundred or more conversations into an aural blockade in which he could do no better than wander aimlessly from one set of moving lips to another, hearing absolutely nothing, smiling idiotically. What would he do if—but make God no ’gree—he should find himself again in that torture chamber? He would pray for courage to tell each pair of lips and set of teeth before moving on to the next: “Yes, but do you know that although you say so, it is actually true?” And for his courage he may perhaps be rewarded with the rare pleasure of seeing, since he could not hear, one vacuous idiot after another shut his trap for a few peaceful seconds in total mystification, because his piston lips may only have asked: “How the go de go?” Beatrice was of course absolutely right about never going to cocktail parties, but then Beatrice never had the misfortune to be Commissioner for Information. No, Bassa was certainly not Kangan. From this authoritative windowseat in Luxurious Chris could now vouch for that!
The impenetrable rain forests of the South through which even a great highway snaked like a mere game track began to yield ground most grudgingly at first but in time a little more willingly to less prodigious growths; and a couple of hundred kilometres further north, unbelievably, to open parklands of grass and stunted trees. The traveller’s spirits rose in step with this diminution of forests which gave the eye a heady facility to roam freely and take in wide panoramas of space stretching to a horizon where tiny trees on distant hills and against clear skies formed miniature Japanese gardens.
Even the asphalt on which Luxurious sped towards the North told its own story of two countries. Thickly-laid and cushiony at first it steadily deteriorated into thin black paint applied with niggardly strokes of a brush over the laterite beginning to break up and reveal, as the journey progressed, more and more of the brown underlay, forcing the elegant and beautiful Luxurious to lurch from side to side in order to avoid the deepest ruts and potholes. But Chris welcomed this disappointment of comfort for the blessing it had in tow, for it curtailed the recklessness of Luxurious which had been conducting herself like a termagant of the highway treating her passengers’ safety cavalierly and bullying every smaller