At first, while scarlet clouds littered the sky, all the force of the chanting continued. Then, in slow groups of two or three, the natives began to disperse back over the promontory, and the sounds broke up and faded away. Momentarily, from the point where the sun had vanished, there radiated upwards an enigmatic flush, as if a furnace had been lit just beneath the horizon. Then this too retreated, and left only a pallor over the desert.
For a day and a night the convoy made its way back over the bush. Even a distant fall of rain might have stranded them beyond some swollen river, and the officers ceaselessly scanned the sky while the dark-bottomed clouds put on weight and multiplied.
A mechanical failure delayed their progress for four hours, and one of the water drums sprang a leak and emptied away unnoticed. But mainly the going was easy. The soldiers bellowed jokes from one vehicle to another, and at night the lurch and jolt of the jeeps seemed barely to disturb their exhausted bodies. One man became feverish, and Rayner could only treat him with cold compresses on a truck floor, and drug him. But by dawn of the second day they were crossing the familiar savannah—now piebald with cloud shadows—and were less than two hours from the town.
As they passed between derelict farmhouses, where a few cattle still stood, the first drop of water hit the windscreen, and Rayner, looking up at a sky which had been void for half a year, saw the massed rain clouds unfurl over the earth.
About the Author
COLIN THUBRON is the author of four highly acclaimed novels and several distinguished travel books, including The Lost Heart of Asia and Behind the Wall. He lives in London.
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Praise
“Turning Back the Sun is proof that Thubron is one of the current masters of the short novel.”
—Times Literary Supplement
Nominated for the prestigious Booker Prize in England, Colin Thubron’s mesmerizing tale of an isolated frontier community of whites and native blacks slowly terrorized by a mysterious disease offers new insight into the modem plague of racial hatred. In a harsh, vividly imagined landscape reminiscent of the Australian outback, a young doctor is obsessed by memories of his youth in the coastal capital. Tom by his yearning for a lost Eden and by the equally powerful force of his love for a fiercely independent dancer, Rayner stumbles upon a revelation In the outback In a haunting ritual of the aborigines, who are themselves exiles from paradise.
“An allegory of the perniciousness of colonialism…. Turning Back the Sun is beautifully thought out … and lyrically delivered.”
—Jennifer Howard, Washington Post Book World
“A powerful novel of suspense and mystery. [Turning Back the Sun] chronicles in chilling detail how groups become ‘the other’ to be feared and contained, and the effects of persecution on the oppressors and the victims.”
—Margaret Ezell, Houston Chronicle
“Superb…. Riveting…. Thubron writes with flawless control and economy of language.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist
Also by Colin Thubron
Fiction
The God in the Mountain
Emperor
A Cruel Madness
Falling
General
Mirror to Damascus
The Hills of Adonis
Jerusalem
Journey into Cyprus
Among the Russians
Behind the Wall
The Lost Heart of Asia
Copyright
This book was originally published in 1991 by William Heinemann Limited, London. It is here reprinted by arrangement with William Heinemann Limited. A hardcover edition was published in 1992 by HarperCollins Publishers.
TURNING BACK THE SUN. Copyright © 1991 by Colin Thubron.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
EPub Edition © AUGUST 2011 ISBN: 978-0-062-10473-1
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.
First HarperPerennial edition published 1994.
Designed by Claudyne Bianco
* * *
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Thubron, Colin, 1939–
Turning back the sun / Colin Thubron.—1st U.S. ed. p. cm.
“Originally published in 1991 by William Heinemann Limited, London”—ISBN 0-06-018227-X T.p. verso.
I. Title. PR6070.H77T87 1992
823”.914—dc20 91-58342
ISBN 0-06-092508-6 (pbk.)
94 95 96 97 98 /RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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