The Eye Of The Leopard Read Online Free PDF

from the table, and he fears he won't make
it to his room in time.
    Outside the lift he sees to his surprise that the woman who
had previously offered him her company is leaving the hotel with
the bloated man in the khaki suit who claimed that the prostitutes
weren't any good at this hotel.
    In the lift he shits his pants. A terrible stench begins to spread
and the shit runs down his legs. With infinite slowness the lift
takes him to his floor. As he stumbles down the corridor he hears
a man laughing behind a closed door.
    In the bathroom he studies his wretchedness. Then he lies
down in his bed and thinks that the assignment he has given
himself is either impossible or meaningless. What was he
thinking?
    In his wallet he has the smudged address of a mission station
on the upper reaches of the Kafue. How he's going to get there
he has no idea. He checked that there was a train to Copperbelt
before he left. But from there, another 270 kilometres straight
out into a pathless, desiccated landscape?
    At the library back in his home town he had read about the
country where he now found himself. Large parts of it are inaccessible
during the rainy season. But when is the rainy season?
    As usual, I'm ill-equipped, he thinks. My preparation was
cursory, just throwing a few things into a suitcase. Only when
it's too late do I try to make a plan.
    I wanted to see the mission station that Janine didn't have a
chance to visit before she died. I took over her dream instead of
creating my own ...
    Hans Olofson falls asleep, sleeps restlessly, and rises at dawn.
Out of the hotel window he sees the sun rise like a huge ball of
fire over the horizon. Black shadows appear on the street below
him. The fragrance of the jacaranda trees blends with the stifling
smoke of the charcoal fires. Women with bulging bundles on
their heads and children tied on to their backs walk towards goals
he cannot fathom.
    Without consciously making a decision, he vows to continue,
towards Mutshatsha, towards the goal that Janine never
reached ...

Chapter Five
    When Hans Olofson awakes in the cold winter
morning, and his father lies collapsed over the
kitchen table, asleep after a long night's struggle with
his invisible demons, he knows that he is not completely alone
in the world. He has a confidant, a warrior with whose help he
torments the life out of the Noseless One who lives in Ulvkälla,
a cluster of shacks on the south bank of the river. The two of
them go searching for the adventure that must exist even in this
frozen community.
    The wooden house where Hans's accomplice lives has a mighty
fir tree. Fenced in by stone posts and well-polished steel wire
stands the district court and courthouse, a white building with
a columned portico and wide double doors. The ground floor is
the courtroom, and the judge lives upstairs. For over a year the
building stood empty, after old Judge Turesson died. Then one
day a fully packed Chevrolet drove into the courtyard of the
courthouse, and the town peeked expectantly through its curtains.
From the gleaming car poured the family of the new district
judge. One of the children running around in the yard was named
Sture. He became Hans Olofson's friend.
    One afternoon, when Hans is wandering aimlessly down by
the river, he sees a boy he doesn't know sitting on one of his
special boulders, a look-out over the steel bridge and the south
bank of the river. He hides behind a bush and watches the interloper,
who seems to be busy fishing.
    The boy is the son of the new judge. Pleased, he summons
up all the contempt he can muster. Only an idiot or a stranger
from another parish would think it possible to catch fish in the
river at this time of year.
    Von Croona. That's the family's name. A noble name, he has
heard. A family, a name. Not ordinary, like Olofson. The new
judge has ancestors reaching back into the mists of historical
battlefields.
    Hans decides that because of this the judge's son must be a
really unpleasant devil. He