Ben Okri - The Famished Road

‘Where is everyone?’ I asked the albinos.

The beautiful woman smiled at me. The albinos twisted, shrugged, stood up, and spread out the sack. The woman distracted me with her smile. And then the albinos sprang at me and covered me with the sack. I struggled and fought, but they expertly bundled me in and tied up the sack as if I were an animal. And as I resisted; kicking, I heard the noises of the world, the voices of all the different people who had been in the bar. They talked in their inhuman languages in leisurely animation, as if they were merely setting out on a pilgrimage to a distant land. Overcome with fear, unable to move, surrounded by darkness and the death-smells of the sack, I cried:

‘Politicians! Politicians aretakingmeaway!’

My voice was very faint, as if I were shouting in a dream. Even if I had cried out with the voice of thunder, no one would have heard me.

They took me down many roads, rough-handling me in the sack. They swung me round, they changed me from one shoulder to another, and the sack kept tightening about me. I heard the noises of lorries and cars, the tumultuous sounds of a marketplace. All the time I fought and struggled like a trapped animal. The more I strained for freedom, the more they tightened the sack, till I had no room to struggle.

My feet were around my head and my neck was twisted to breakingpoint. I couldn’t breathe and I fought the panic that washed over me in waves. The blankness of death cameuponme.Ishutmy eyes.ItwasnodifferentwhenIopenedthem.AtonepointI fell into a strange sleep in which the figure of a king resplendent in gold appeared to me and vanished. My spirit companions began singing in my ears, rejoicing in my captivity and in the fact that I would soon be joiningthem. I could not shut out their singing and I’m not sure which was worse: being bundled away by unknown people to an unknown destination or hearing my spirit companions orchestrate my passage through torment with their sweet and excruciating voices.

When I had fought and my energy was exhausted and I couldn’t do anything, I called to our great king, and I said:

‘I do not want to die.’

I had hardly finished when the figure of the king appeared to me again and dissolved into the face of the midget. By now I had ceased to hear any sounds outside, except for the rushing of waves, the hissing of water, and the keening of birds. Suddenly, I remembered the pen-knife the midget had given me and began another struggle to find it. I searched my pockets. I searched the sack, and couldn’t find it. My fear became unbearable. Then a quietness came over me. I gave up. I accepted my destiny.

Water poured into the sack. I became convinced that I was being taken to an underwater kingdom, where they say certain spirits reside. As I tried to keep the water out of my mouth, I felt something metallic like a frozen fish banging against my head. It was the pen-knife. I wasted no time in cutting my way out. The sack material was very tough but the water had softened it a little and it took some time to cut my way out and when I did the outside world was black like the bottom of a well. I fell out into the water with a splash.

‘The boy has escaped!’ a voice cried.

It was very dark, the river could have been the night, and the water was bitingly cold. I stayed under without moving. And then very gently I swam back to the shore, serene in my element.

I struggled through the bulrushes and the tiger-lilies of the marsh, over twisted mangrove roots and flickering eels, and when I gained the soft silt-sand I went on running till I got to a main road. It was very dark; I was hungry, wet, lost; and I heard voices all around me, the twittering, vicious voices of my spirit companions wailing in disappointment. I ran till the road became a river of voices, every tree, car, and face talking at me, cats crossing my path, people with odd night faces staring at me knowingly. At crossroads people glared and seemed to float towards me menacingly. I fled all through the night.

The road was endless. One road led to a thousand others, which in turn fed into paths, which fed into dirt tracks, which became streets, which ended in avenues and cul-de-sacs. All around, a new world was being erected amidst the old. Skyscrapers stood high and inscrutable beside huts and zinc abodes. Bridges were being built; flyovers, half-finished, were like passageways into the air, or like future visions of a time when cars would be able to fly. Roads, half-constructed, were crowded with heavy machinery. Here and there nightwatchmen slept under the stars with dull lamps as their only earthly illumination. The moon was round and big and it seemed bright with the face of an awesome king. I was comforted by its presence. I walked on with a terrible hunger for a destination, for Mum’s face, and Dad’s smells. I walked past the kerosine lamps of the somnolent street-traders.

‘Smallboy,whereareyougoingatthistime?’they oftenaskedme.

But I replied to no one. I wandered till my bare feet broke into blisters. And then, as I walked about in the darkness of being lost, I saw a disembodied light ahead of me, a tiny moon the shape of a man’s head. I followed the light. And it led me on longer journeys. And when I got to an area I vaguely recognised, my feet gave up on me and I collapsed at the roadside. I crawled to the nearest tree and curled myself up between its great roots which were above the ground and I fell asleep under the safety of the waning moon. The mosquitoes tormented me. The ants bit into my flesh and their stings persisted. But I slept through it all, and dreamt about a panther.

When I awoke the moon was still in the sky, like a ghost unwilling to disappear under the force of daylight. It was dawn. A few people were standing over me, with puzzlement on their faces.

‘He’s not dead!’ one of them cried.

I got up quickly; they came towards me with arms outstretched; I fled from them. I ran through thequickeningdawn,withthesunridingthesky.Theairheated,thesand warmed underfoot; and women of the new African churches, who wore white smocks andrangbells,criedout tothesleepingworldtoawakeandrepent.Ipassedprophets emerging from the forest with dew and leaves in their hair, cobwebs meshing their beards, their eyes demented with visions. I passed sorcerers with machetes that crackled with flames in the morning light, making sacrifices at dawn of red cocks, who poured gnomic chants on the untrodden roads. I also passed workers who had woken early and with sleepy faces made their ways through the mist, pierced by the sun, to the garages and bus-stops.

My feet were fresh on the paths. Dew wet my ankles. Hunger dried my lips. News-vendors roused the dawn with their horns, announcing to the awakening world the scandals of the latest political violence. The industrious women of the city, who carried basins of peppered aromatic foods on their heads, tempted the appetite of the world with their sweet voices. The worms of the road ate into the soles of my feet.

I came to another familiar place; the passionate chants of the muezzin roused the Muslim world to prayer. I had turned a corner, and had gone up a path that became a track, when three men in blue smocks rushed at me. I tore into the bushes, ran amongst the trees, and cried out into the echoing forest. Birds scattered from branches and pods fell from the treetops. I shook off the men, but I went on running, for the world seemed populated with people intent on me for one obscure reason or another.

While running through the forest paths I stepped on an enamel plate of sacrifices to the road. The plate was rich with the offerings of fried yams, fish, stewed snails, palm oil, rice and kola-nuts. Shell fragments and little pins stuck in the soles of my feet. I started to bleed. I was so hungry that I ate what I could of the offerings to the road and afterwards my stomach swelled and visions of road-spirits, hungry and annoyed, weavedinmy brain.Iwent onbleedingandablackcatwithgoldeneyesfollowedthe trail of my blood. My head boiled with hallucinations. I walked on broken glass, on the hot sand of bushpaths, on hot new tarmac.