The Quarry, by Damon Galgut
The following excerpt was taken from the first chapter of Damon Galgut's novel 'The Quarry'.
Then he came out of the grass at the side of the road and stood without moving. He rocked very gently on his heels. There were blisters on his feet that had come from walking and blisters in his mouth that had come from nothing, except his silence perhaps, and bristles like glass on his chin. He crossed to a stone that was next to the road and sat. He was there for a while until, apparently without emotion, he bowed his head and wept into his hands. Then he stopped. He looked around. The road was a curve of dust. On either side of it the grasslands stretched flatly away and there wasn't a solitary tree. 'Jesus Christ', said the man. He took from his right hip pocket a glass cooldrink bottle which he had filled with brackish water at a stream. He unscrewed the top, spat into the dirt and took a long swallow. He checked the level of the water and screwed the top back on. He put the bottle back into his pocket. He sat for a while and looked. He stared at the lines on his palm. He started to say something. But it was too hot to speak. He said nothing. He shook his head once briefly, perhaps to shake a fly from his face. Then he stood and began to move again, tottering down that empty white trail. He looked like a figure fired in a kiln, still smoking slightly and charred. A gull followed him for a while, hovering above his head, white and mewling. He stopped and threw a stone at it and it veered away to one side, tilting on its wings. It vanished over the grass, going towards the sea. The road curved left. It went up a rise and then he himself could see the water, flat and endless as it moved in on the shore. He wanted to go to it. There was a bed of brittle reeds between the road and the beach and he moved between the dry, crackling stalks. He came to the sand, which was white and fine, marked as though with music by the lines of ancient tides. Shells and weed, skeletons of crabs. He hung his clothes as he undressed on a piece of salt-whitened driftwood that stuck up out of the sand. His clothing was a peculiar mixture of articles. The boots looked military and so did the socks. His shirt was red cotton with irregular white buttons and had been pilfered in passing from some nameless settlement somewhere. The blue pants were likewise stolen from a washing-line near the city. He took them off and then he was naked in the cold wash of sun. His body was bizarrely quilted in areas of sunburn and whiteness, cleanness and dirt. He was a harlequin. He went down to the water. There were gulls eddying above him again. He ignored them. He waded out a little way till the water reached his knees. It was cold. He washed himself. There was a quality to his movements that was perfunctory and detached so that all activity was one. Crying or washing, it was the same to him. He scooped handfuls of the freezing water over his back, his face. He scoured his skin with sand. Then he waited for a time with his hands at his sides and gazed at the thin shell of the horizon which seemed inscribed in ink and which curved across all he could see of the world. [...]
This is an excerpt from the novel 'The Quarry', by Damon Galgut.
Title: The Quarry
Author: Damon Galgut
Genre: Novel
Publisher: The Penguin Group (SA)
Cape Town, South Africa 2004
ISBN 9780143024620 / ISBN 978-0-14-302462-0
Softcover, 13 x 20 cm, 176 pages
Galgut, Damon im Namibiana-Buchangebot
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