Read Online In the Belly of the Elephant by Susan Corbett - Free Book Online Page B

table next to the hammock. The sky was porcelain blue and, for these few minutes, the temperature was tolerable.
    “I’ll just have to find something better.”
    Spooning freeze-dried crystals into my cup, I thought of Foequellie, and how James and Gnalima, the midwife, used to come to my house to drink coffee before clinic. I missed them, too. Francis and James, Gnalima and Francis’s wife, Martha. With a sigh, I wondered how they were doing under their new government, hoping they were still alive.
    “I miss everybody.” I poured the hot water and stirred, then upended the can of condensed milk and watched the thick liquid drizzle into my mug. I’d even been homesick. With the return of the heat, I yearned for Idaho in the fall—the gentle warmth of Indian Summer, cool nights, crisp mornings, and leaves turning the color of rust. Then my sister, Tricia, had written, saying she hoped to come for a visit in the spring. Trish in Africa? She’d bring a suitcase full of my father’s fears with her.
    There were once two great powers in the world: Elephant and Spirit Rain. Now Elephant, who as you know was proud and stubborn, was always arguing with Rain, trying to make him agree that, she, Elephant was the greater.
    My father was just like Rain, always lording it over me, raining on my parade.
    One day they were arguing as usual, when Spirit Rain said in his wet, gurgling voice, “How can you, Elephant, be greater than I, when it is I who nourishes you?”
    When I’d told my father I was returning to Africa for the second time, he’d threatened to disown me. Now, he was most certainly sending my sister to bring me home; Tricia—my father’s own little black cloud.
    The person I really wanted to see was Lily. Lily wasn’t afraid of anything. I picked up a week-old letter from her and read it again. It brimmed with health and happiness. She wrote of riding horses, working hard, and living in the present.
    The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment. Her angled script leaned across the page like a row of falling dominoes. It is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.
    I sighed. Ordinary life. The morning cool was already succumbing to the sun. It was going to be another day of driving through one of the most exotic and isolated places on earth, sweltering in the truck and breathing dust. Another day of walking around the villages, a scene out of National Geographic , my skin burning, my head baking beneath my hat. And when I returned, another sunset over the Sahara, another evening to relax in the refuge of my hammock and my books.
    A bird flew from the branches above me and landed on the mud wall. My books, my courtyard, the office, the villages, the desert—all had become my new ordinary world.
    A breeze fluttered the blue paper of Lily’s letter . To pay attention even at unextraordinary times…To be anywhere else is to paint eyeballs on chaos.
    “Eyeballs on chaos.” I couldn’t quite wrap my brain all the way around that one, but it was so Lily. Her quote was from The Snow Leopard , a must read, she wrote, and was I coming to visit in October?
    I’d been saving my meager intern’s salary, hoping to have enough by October to go to Tunisia. Lily and I would throw the I Ching again to see if I was still butting my head against a hedge.
    I turned on the radio to the familiar refrain of the BBC six o’clock news. It rang slightly flat—a sure sign the batteries were running low. The British voice began with the news headlines:
    “It is the three hundred twentieth day of captivity for the hostages in Teheran. The Ayatollah has spurned a peace proposal offered by Saddam Hussein. Iraqi jets have bombed Abadan, Iran’s oil refining center. In retaliation, Iran continues to bomb Iraq.”
    I shuddered at the thought of being imprisoned in a room for three hundred twenty days and took in deep breaths of free