Disaster Was My God Read Online Free PDF

godlike birds, rulers of all the sky, the kings!
    Beware, butcher. Turn even for one second and the swooping, spade-tailed kite with his hand-sized claws, he will snatch your meat, then perch nearby mocking you, tearing it with claw and beak. And way up there, high on the bluff, there is where the kites live, on the walls ofwhat looks like a great mud ship; there it is beached on the great massif from which one can see for a hundred miles. This is the ancient mud-walled city of Harar, a place of some 12,000 souls, thousands of goats, and innumerable dogs. And now, as the women see, it is a city suddenly blocked. No reason. What reason? The gate is blocked, as always, by the sheer arbitrariness of life in this part of the world.
    As the sentries push people back, it’s chaos, what with the market-day crowds bumping and buzzing and shouting. Men with goats slung over their shoulders. Bawling camels piled impossibly high with firewood and bananas and hempen bags. Donkey carts with wobbling wooden wheels tall as doors. And people bringing strange birds and boys holding dik-diks, tasty antelopes the size of rabbits, their long legs bound like sticks with leather thongs. And blocking them, at the head of the great gate, in their old white uniforms stand the impassive Egyptians—now mercenaries, their cohorts driven out some years before by the vengeance of the great Menelik, Menelik the Merciless, the capturing king. Holdover former occupiers from the north, the Egyptians stand with their rusted rifles and purple fezzes tightly wound in white cloths to combat the sun. Going
You
and
You
. Or
Not you
, if they do not like your looks—out.
    “Look at this mess!” The date woman spits. “
Late
. I told you.”
    The other shades her eyes. “And today it is the day? Are you sure?”
    “Silly girl. Was sure ever sure?”
    But five minutes later, pushing through this river of people and animals, mud and husks and rinds, they arrive at the Feres Magala, one of the town’s two squares, and there at the well must be fifty women, all waiting to catch a glimpse of the Bastard, otherwise known as our luckless hero, Arthur Rimbaud. Alas, Rimbaud is hastily concluding his self-exile in this African Elba. Hiding behind those arched green shutters. Treed!
    “Yes, it is true!” shouts the date woman, holding her wares over the crowd. “Today he goes, the Bastard! Look, dates, fresh dates!”
    “But no, you are wrong,” dismisses her rival, another date seller. “They say tomorrow he goes—
pthu
. Away, the thief.”
    “But how?” asks the youngest, pressing her shawl against her face, poor girl, as if to ward off some dreaded contagion. “But how can he go when his leg is so fat and sick? He cannot ride.”
    “Ride!” sneers another. “With his money he will buy a golden leg! Two! The devil, he will find a way.”
    Out is the way, and hastily, too. For even now, upturned on sweaty backs or balanced atop heads, the last dregs of A. Rimbaud Ltd. are being rapidly disgorged into the street: desks, crates, hempen bags, tusks—yours, at a fraction of their wholesale cost.
    Two stories above this scene, the besieged proprietor peers out—well back from the peeling, rickety louvers, his face striped with bars of sun and shade. Ah, but not back far enough. For just then the rising sun illuminates his silhouette—exposed! With that an ululating cry can be heard. It is the chorusing, cicadalike cry of fifty female tongues clucking.
    “Ayyyy​eeeee​eeeee​eeeee​eeeee​eeeee​eeeee​eeee!”
    U nfortunately, our hero has lost the element of surprise. For although it is not the actual day of his departure, it is the last full day of his tenure at this torrid, misruled school. And a downcast day it is, too.
    How sad to be misunderstood, when for years, in his missionary way, he has tried to be good. Not
great
, he would hasten to add, but merely good—good enough, living a modest, human-scale existence that might be