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fatherless boy, at this stage of his life, he finds the idea of fatherhood deeply appealing, he who once had dreamed of being a child of the sun, running down a foaming, exploding beach. A world so new it was forever being born, like eternity.
    And the world he will return to after fifteen years away? Unrecognizable. The Eiffel Tower, the buildings of the Exposition Universelle de Paris of two years before, all this is new, just as Paris now has a model sewer system in which, for a modest fare, well-to-do, big-hatted ladies with a taste for the stygian—indeed, ladies holding parasols—can glide through the gloom in lantern-hung boats.
    Yes indeed, in an explosion of steel and steam, electric lights and dynamos, the modern industrial world was booming, and all built by the very men he had once spat upon: businessmen and bankers, men of science, engineers, and riveters—men of steam, like Georges-Eugène Haussmann, architect of modern Paris, or Charles de Freycinet, creator of the first state-owned rail network. These “types,” once dismissed by him as the slaves of bygone orders, twenty years later, he now holds these men in abstract awe—men hot to pan the Yukon, conquer the North Pole, or, like Ferdinand de Lesseps, dig the Panama Canal. And so, even in an Africa backwater like Abyssinia, Rimbaud maintains a keen interest in amateur engineering manuals on such odd and diverse topics as metallurgy, the stringing of suspension bridges, and the manufacture of tiny precision toys—tumbling clowns and monkeys clappingcymbals and such. But will his bullheaded and unimaginative mother procure for his edification said self-bettering books? Could the old witch not see?
    MOTHER JUDGMENT . Books to buy
where
, to do
what
? Has the heat driven you crazy? What do they even
make
in that place?
    PETITIONER SON . Why am I still waiting for the aforementioned volumes? And two months without a word from you.
    MOTHER JUDGMENT . (
Silence.
)
    SON
blinks
. Three months have passed without a word from you. I am still here, with the idea that I will remain here for another three months. It’s very unpleasant, but this will nonetheless end by ending. I do hope, however, that I soon shall see these books, especially the one on suspension bridges.
    MOTHER ON HIGH . Bridges in the desert—built by whom? By you who never so much as lifted a hammer?
    But here’s a question: Where would one even
start
in a thousand-year-old civilization in which antiquity slumbers like the Sphinx? With what conceivable workforce or industrial capacity? Here, in a hut as hot as an oven, you will find half-naked zombie men drenched in sweat and soot—low-caste men of a scavenger tribe, expert makers of knives, axes, and scythes. Dazed by the narcotic
khats
they chew, tiny green leaves mashed and wadded in one cheek, one man works the wheezing ox-hide bellows, two more wield the great spark-splattering mallets, and a fourth, the tong man, then plucks from the fire a pulsing, livid heart of iron ready to be shaped. But honestly, tintinnabulating toys? Does Rimbaud fancy these men are thrifty Swiss in disguise?
    What can he be thinking, then, this missionary of modernity? Or writing, for that matter. For here we come to another issue that cannot be ignored in his strange late letters. Namely, the even more perplexing matter of writing
style
, or rather the utter absence of style, indeed a regression to his earliest schoolboy days in which, like other childrenunder the rod, he numbingly memorized, then recited in schoolboy sing-song, all the rivers and streams of France. Consider a representative passage to his mother and sister:
    Dear friends,
    I arrived at this country after twenty days on horseback through the Somali desert. Harar is a city colonized by the Egyptians and dependent on their government. The garrison is made up of many thousands of men. Our agency and our storehouses are here. The saleable products of the country are coffee, ivory, skins, etc. The