Remembering Babylon Read Online Free PDF

stillness was broken by a peal of laughter, then exploded in general hilarity.
    They tossed him scraps, and fell still again as he sat with his head down and tore with his teeth at singed fur. Then he curled up just where he was and slept, and when he woke, all round him, under drifts of mist past the trunks of trees, they were preparing to leave.
    He followed. At first at a distance, though one or two of them glanced back from time to time to see if he was still with them; then closer, till he made one of the loose mob of old folk, women mostly, who straggled in the rear.
    They left a good space round him, but in a place where the forest thickened and it was almost dark, tried to elbow himoff the track, then, when they saw that he was not to be got rid of, gave up. One old woman, with no sign of personal interest, as if he were a little white hairless thing that could not fend for itself, gave him a mouthful of seeds. Once again, half-fearful, they watched while he swallowed it. When they came to a halt at last and made camp, he claimed a place for himself in the second or third ring from the fire, and his neighbours, though wary, made no dispute.
     
    So he began his life among them, doing what he had always done. It was all he knew. Since he had somehow found his way into the world, his object, like any other creature’s, was to stay in it and by any means he could. He had a belly to be fed. In the days that followed he winkled out a place among them, made himself small, scouted about for this or that one he might attach himself to, looked droll, looked pathetic, and when he could not get what he wanted that way, would dart in under the half-playful, half-timorous cuffs, grab what he could and gobble it down before he was stopped. He was not put off by the occasional bruise.
    He was a child, with a child’s quick capacity to take things in and the street child’s gift of mimicry. They were astonished at the swiftness with which he learned their speech, and once a thing had been pointed out to him, how keen his eyes were. Relying on a wit that was instinctive in him and had been sharpened under harder circumstances than these, he let himself be gathered into a world which, though he was alarmed at first by its wildness, proved no different in essence from his previous one, for all that it was, day after day, hot tracks over stone, and insect bites, and nights when you had to creep in under logs while the rain slushed, and long spells between one bellyful and the next.
    Watching out for it, and for himself, he got into his mouth as much of its fat and flesh as he could manage, its names too, its breath. What kept you alive here was the one and the other, and they were inseparable: the creature with its pale ears raised and stiffened, sitting up alert in its life as you were in yours, and its name on your tongue. When it kicked its feet and gushed blood it did not go out of the world but had itslife now in you, and could go in and out of your mouth for ever, breath on breath, and was not lost, any more than the water you stooped to drink would cease to run because you gulped it down in greedy mouthfuls, then pissed it out.
    Young enough to learn and to be shaped as if for the first time, he was young enough also to forget. He lost his old language in the new one that came to his lips. He had never in fact possessed more than the few hundred words that were immediately needful to him, to fill his belly or save his skin, having heard little in his short life but commands, curses, coarse endearments, the street talk he had learned to spit out like the rest, and such bits and pieces of something lighter – jokes, riddles, the words of a penny-gaff tune – that he had picked up from Willett, or at the beer shop while he was waiting on one foot for their ale to be drawn, and in his years at sea from the talk of sailors bent over a bit of darning in the swing of the fo’c’sle lamp or sprawling on deck. It was not enough to