An unknown place

The railway line snakes along slowly, sneaking through the wild undergrowth typical of the area, dry, dull and dying. In a pleasanter clime, the rails would seem cold and lifeless, but here, they glimmer an almost hellish brown under the fierce everyday sun. The sleepers, sturdy, creosoted, rest complacent, waking every few days to a thunder that rumbles along impatient, subsiding into a distant silence, deep, dreary and deathly. Every year teams of engineers arrive to look at the bolts and the nuts that hold together this fragile, this sturdy mass of metal and wood. Then they too leave as they arrived, silent, brooding, happy, passing along the tracks, testing it mile by mile.

Of life, there is not much around: this was never a cradle that lulled an ancient child in its bosom to look up to the stars. Not enough water, the experts would say. And yet there is a village a little distance from the railway line. A village of little men, toiling at a tenuous life, trying to make something out of all the wild brush and sleepy nothingness that abounds. A little village unknown to the modern cartographers, that turns up a blot on Google Earth and Yahoo Maps: nothing here signifies. And yet there is life here.

Twenty little shacks, or maybe twenty-three, these are the scattered homesteads of the people here. Men, women and children, I mean, of all ages, the young have started leaving though, for the town some miles distant, where there is more life and more shacks on a grander scale. Each day, the people who remain find food in the scorching sun. Each day they save the water that they carry from the town each week. Each day they live as their fathers did, and before them their fathers: barely. But of course there were more people then and there will be fewer soon. Is it easier with fewer people or more, the thin, reedy man struggling to get his wild rabbit skinned, wonders when he has the time to. Is it better to bother cooking the rabbit to just eating it raw, he wonders when he is still skinning the rabbit.

There is life here still and there will still be life. There are the kids who will learn to live. There are the elders who will teach them. There is the town just beyond where things may be got and things given. There is a whole world conspiring to keep them alive. There is above all, a special Providence at work in all this, defying augury and protecting the meek. Let us visit a happier place in the meantime.