Beyond the Door of No Return by David Diop EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: David Diop
- Language: English
- Genre: Historical Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Michel Adanson watched himself die under his daughter’s gaze. He was
wasting away, racked by thirst. His joints were like fossilized shells of
bone, calcified and immobile. Twisted like the shoots of vines, they
tormented him in silence. He thought he could hear his organs failing one
after another. The crackling noise in his head, heralding his end, reminded
him of the first faint noises made by the bushfire he’d lit one evening more
than fifty years before on a bank of the Senegal River. He’d had to quickly
take refuge in a dugout canoe, from where—accompanied by the laptots,
his guides to the river—he’d watched an entire forest go up in flames.
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The sump trees—desert date palms—were split by flames surrounded
by yellow, red, and iridescent blue sparks that whirled around them like
infernal flies. The African fan palms, crowned by smoldering fire, collapsed
in on themselves, shackled to the earth by their massive roots.
Beside the
river, water-filled mangrove trees boiled before exploding in shreds of
whistling flesh. Farther off toward the horizon, the fire hissed as it
consumed the sap from acacias, cashew trees, ebony and eucalyptus trees
while the creatures of the forest fled, wailing in terror. Muskrats, hares,
gazelles, lizards, big cats, snakes of all sizes slid into the river’s dark flow,
preferring the risk of drowning to the certainty of being burned alive. Their
splashes distorted the reflection of the flames in the water. Ripples, little
waves, then stillness.
Michel Adanson did not believe he’d heard the forest moan that night.
But as he was consumed by an internal conflagration just as violent as the
one that had illuminated his dugout on the river, he started to suspect that
the burning trees must have screamed curses in a secret plant language,
inaudible to men. He would have cried out, but no sound could escape his
locked jaw.
The old man brooded. He wasn’t afraid of dying, but he regretted that
his death would be of no use to science. In a final show of loyalty to his
mind, his body, retreating before the great enemy, counted off its successive
surrenders almost imperceptibly. Methodical even unto death, Michel
Adanson lamented his powerlessness to describe in his notebooks the
defeats of this final battle. Had he been able to speak, Aglaé could have
acted as his secretary during his final agony. But it was too late to dictate
the story of his own death.
He hoped desperately that Aglaé would discover his notebooks. Why
hadn’t he simply left them to her in his will? He had no reason to fear his
daughter’s judgment as though she were God. When you pass through the
door to the next world, you cannot take your modesty with you.
On one of his last lucid days, he had understood that his research in
botany, his herbaria, his collections of shells, his drawings would all
disappear in his wake from the surface of the earth. Amid the eternal churn
of generations of human beings crashing over one another like waves would
come a man, or—why not?—a woman, another botanist who would
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