Guerrillas Read Online Free PDF

sounds like a grub of some sort. Something you have to carry. A kind of leech.”
    They turned off at last into the city proper. This was the area of the merchants’ warehouses, and there were many rum shops. From each rum shop came a din. This was once part of the city center. But the city no longer had a center. With the coming of the motorcar, in numbers, the hills had been opened up and developed as self-contained suburbs, with their own shopping and entertainment plazas; and the peasants who had cultivated and impoverished the hillsides had sold out and moved down to the flat land. To go up to the Ridge was to go up to a more temperate air; it was to lose the feel of the city and see it as part of a larger view of sea and mangrove and great plain. It was to see it, as it could be seen now, as part of the colors of the late afternoon, smoke haze and pink cloud rising from the edge of the sea to blend with the glory of gray and red and orange clouds.
    An amber light fell on the brown vegetation of the hills. But in that vegetation, which to Jane when she had first arrived had only seemed part of the view, there was strangeness and danger: the wild disordered men, tramping along old paths, across gardens, between houses, and through what remained of woodland, like aborigines recognizing only an ancestral landscape and insistingon some ancient right of way. Wild men in rags, with long, matted hair; wild men with unseeing red eyes. And bandits. Police cars patrolled these hillside suburbs. Sometimes at night and in the early morning there was the sound of gunfire. The newspapers, the radio, and the television spoke of guerrillas.
    The house was set on a large bare lawn, cut out flat from a piece of irregular hillside, with a natural wall of earth on one side. Tawny where it remained grassed, and almost bald near the earth wall, the lawn was now gold where the low sun touched it; every bit of grass and every little clod of clay cast a shadow, so that the whole surface was dramatized. The house was nearly as wide as the lawn; it was low, on one floor, and the wood-tile roof projected far over the rough-rendered concrete wall, on which a kind of ivy grew. From the open porch at the back the land sloped down to a dry gully and woodland. The city lay far below, a small part of the flatness. The rim of the sea still glimmered, but elsewhere sea and swamp were darkening to the color of the great plain.
    “So bogus,” Jane said. “So hidden away. The High Command. All the publicity. All that food. Of course, it’s a perfect cover for the guerrillas, isn’t it?”

THE SKY went smoky and the evening chill fell on the hills. The hidden city roared and hummed, with ten thousand radios playing the reggae, as they so often seemed to do. As though somewhere the same party had been going on, with the same music, month after month. The same party, the same music, at the foot of the hills, in the thoroughfares across the city, the redevelopment project, the suburbs beyond the rubbish dump. The same concentration of sound, the same steady beat of people and traffic and radio music which, dulled during the day, at night became audible. As the fire on the roadsides, invisible in daylight, could now be seen, little smoking flares beside the highways.
    At Thrushcross Grange it was dark and quiet. The sky had darkened to the deepest blue and then had gone as black as the forest walls. Every footstep and every shuffle resounded in the hollow hut; every sound, bouncing off concrete and corrugated iron, was sharp, reminding the boys of the emptiness and the night outside; and they, who in the towns never spoke without raising their voices, here spoke quietly, almost in whispers. The two oil lamps threw shadows everywhere.
    Once, even when the hut was less finished, when the walls were unplastered and the glass louvers hadn’t been fitted, the hut had been noisier and gayer. That was when Stephens was there. But Stephens had gone, and other boys