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the animal.’
    â€˜And another thing, Mr Andrews, I advise you not to drink unboiled milk. The French veterinarians have reported outbreaks of brucellosis all along the northern zone.’
    Jeb could hear again the flat voice of the Peace Corps doctor and see the disapproving lips and untanned face above a spotless overall. The doctor had given him sterilising tablets and packets of dehydrated food. He had not used them. Jeb drank the milk in spite of and because of the doctor.
    Set apart from the others was a small shrunken woman, her legs reduced to spindles, her lips cracked, her hair scabbed and matted and her breasts shrivelled to leathery purses. She crouched with her sex uncovered, not caring, or shuffled round the women, picking up pieces of old calabash. Jeb watched her arrange them in piles as if, by fitting them together, she could repair her broken womb.
    He had been three weeks on the road. The strangeness of Africa had worn off and somehow, in the heat and light, Africa was less unbelieveable than home. It was winter in Vermont. He tried to picture it, but the picture kept slipping from focus, leaving only the heat and light.
    Still, he worried about Old Herb. In the fall they’d stood on the bridge below the store. They’d been lumbering all day and the leaves fell, red over yellow, into the river.
    â€˜Sad you’re goin’,’ Herb had said. ‘Shan’t last the winter through. That’s how I’m feelin’ anyways.’
    â€˜I’ll be back, Herb.’
    â€˜Don’t mind me, Jeb. You got to go. And don’t mind your mother none. You can’t sit back home with her fussin’ you. You’re grown enough to know your mind.’ There was a lump in his throat. The snow would be piled up round Herb’s cabin and it troubled him to think of it.
    Jeb Andrews found his body thinning and hardening all the time, and the old prejudices stripping away. The Africans fascinated him—the mammas, the big cheerful grain-filled mammas; and the Hausa men, their faces scarred like cat whiskers and their shiny skins reflecting the blue of their clothes and the blue of the sky so it was the colour of night without a trace of brown; and the Peul boys strutting about with swords and black leather kilts and ostrich feathers in their hats. Jeb was beginning to feel how they looked. He even learned to spit like an African ‘Yiakchh ... ptoo ...’ and the ball of saliva would roll in the dust and disappear.
    He loved the smell of fresh-flailed millet in the villages and the bulging mud granaries and rhythmic thumping of pestles; the termitaries splashed white by vultures and the red laterite road streaking through the thorn savannah. The bark of the bushes was orange or pale green and their spines were long and white as icicles. In the heat of the day the Peuls’ cattle roamed among them. They had rippling brown coats and white lyre-shaped horns. Jeb thought them the loveliest animals in the world. He did not believe their milk could be diseased.
    The driver called the passengers back to the bus. The road forked north away from the river. The earth became less red and the baobab trees fatter and more stunted. They reached the town late in the afternoon and stopped outside a bar called Le Lotus Bleu. A mad boy was whirling in the street. In the bar-room some Africans were drinking. Jeb ordered a beer from the owner, a squat Vietnamese woman with her head in a flowered scarf. A man came in selling meat on a metal tray. She prodded it with her pudgy fingers.
    â€˜The meat’s too tough,’ she said.
    The Africans laughed.
    â€˜You be the one that’s tough, Mamma, not this meat.’
    The old woman liked being teased and squealed with pleasure. Jeb compared her happy face with Vietnamese women in magazines.
    â€˜Have you a room?’ he asked.
    â€˜This is a bar,’ she said, ‘not a bordel.’ And the men laughed again. ‘For a