An entire trunk of a tree, interred in the sand, straddled the beach. Stripped of its bark, the bole looked as if it had been worked upon by a master craftsman. It had been endowed with a sensuousness and rhythm which the living object could hardly have rivalled. Death had given it power and grandeur. Possessed of all the tensions of an arrested fluidity, it was tempting to imagine that, these tensions resolving themselves, it would melt, flow away and be reabsorbed into the earth. The trunk and branches had been bleached bone-white by the sun and salt; and the wood itself worn down – metamorphosed – to the texture of living flesh. It suggested totemic splendour; a sacrificial offering to the gods of fertility and plentiful harvests, divorced from its true time and place and function and condemned to rot slowly on this wind-swept, shimmering beach of swooping vultures, starving dogs, chip-chip gatherers and himself.
Notes
1 Feroza Jussawalla (ed.), Conversations with V. S. Naipaul (Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), p. 142.
2 Ibid.
3 Shiva Naipaul, Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984), p. 11.
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PENGUIN CLASSICS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in Great Britain by André Deutsch Limited 1973
Published by Penguin Books 1976
This edition published in Penguin Classics 2012
Copyright © Shiva Naipaul, 1973
Foreword © Amit Chaudhuri, 2012
Cover photograph © Claudine Doury / Agence VU
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author and the author of the introduction has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-14-196931-2
The Chip-Chip Gatherers Page 36
