The Sky And The Forest Read Online Free PDF Page B

discussion, and the invention of writing which would perpetuate their thoughts and enable them to influence the thinking of future generations. It may be strange, but it is true that Plato and Aristotle as well as Mohammed had something to do with the raiding of Delli's village by swarthy half-castes bent merely on acquiring slaves and ivory.
    Loa and his people were the product of an entirely different set of circumstances. They never knew what famine was, for the plantain and the manioc provided an unfailing source of food in return for very little effort. Sleeping sickness and malaria and cannibalism combined to keep the population small. The forest made migration -- even minor movements -- almost impossible, restricting the spread of ideas and the diffusion of inventions. The absence of writing made progress difficult, for each generation was dependent on the scanty information conveyed by word of mouth, and even if the forest people had learned to write, their language -- the clumsy, complicated, unimproved language of the barbarian -- was enough to hamper thought and impede its diffusion. Thought is based on words, and Loa's words were few and simple yet linked together -- tangled together would be a better term -- by a grammar of unbelievable clumsiness. And Loa lived in a climate where there were no seasons, where the nights were hardly less warm than the days, where it was easy to do nothing -- as Loa was doing now; where there was no need to take thought for the morrow -- and Loa was taking none.
     

CHAPTER 3
     
    Delli lived in her little pen a full week. She was not actively unhappy in it, not even actively uncomfortable, for they made it six feet long and three feet wide, so that she could lie at full length, and three feet high so that she could sit up in it. They thatched it roughly with big leaves so that the rain hardly came through at all, and Musini herself gave her another couple of armfuls of leaves on which to lie, which was a sensible precaution, as someone as thin as Delli was at the start, and as scratched, might have broken out into sores had she been compelled to lie on the undisguised earth. They interwove the palisades, and the beams of the roof, with tough creeper stems, so that there was hardly a place wide enough to pass through the bowls of food which Musini saw to it were continually being provided for her.
    So for some days Delli was content to lie in her pen recovering from the hardships of her wanderings in the forest. To lie still, to sleep, to fill her belly all through the day with good food; that was all Delli wanted at first, and a few days of it made a great difference to her condition. The bones of her skinny limbs were soon less apparent; her ribs disappeared under a layer of fat, and her previously lifeless-looking skin took on a healthy gloss. It was gratifying to Loa, when he walked past her pen, to see how she was responding to treatment. It boded well for the future; his meat hunger was a perfect obsession now, and all his dreams were positive torment, full of tantalizing visions of meat. In his dreams he could even smell the delicious stuff, and he would wake up with the saliva running from his mouth.
    It was only natural, then, that he should be moved to wild rage when Vira pointed out to him one morning that Delli had been trying to escape. She had gnawed through a full dozen of the tough dried vines, and in a purposeful manner, too.
    “See,” said Vira. “These she has bitten through.”
    He pointed to the chewed ends, all between one pair of palisades. Then he went on:
    “Soon she would chew these, where the wall meets the roof. She would bite through this knot, and this one. And then ...”
    Vira made a gesture to show how, then, Delli would have been able to force the two palisades apart a little way, just wide enough, presumably, for her to slip through. And then in the darkness she would make her way out of the village into the forest, where she would be as