Character from the Amadia Alphabet.
116.
We ride all day leaving the forest behind--now we're passing through open plains.
I don’t know what language the old man speaks, but after sharing our meager breakfast and joking gestures of friendship, he shows me a letter he is carrying written in what is for me an unknown alphabet. Another passenger who speaks a little French translates for me the alphabet’s name. It is called the “Amadia” alphabet.
It starts to rain hard. The people sitting near the windows close them and the heat in the coach increases until it is truly unbearable. The young man who translated for the old man is coughing and I think: “By golly, a person could die in this crush and heat.” Sure enough, at the next village a fat woman is lugged out of the far end of our coach, stone dead.
The train stops at every village though there aren’t so many of them out here and each of these plains villages seems to have some specialty they offer to sell to the passengers.
One village has plastic bags of cola-nuts for sale and everybody who has any money buys one. The next village has lovely tie-dyed cloth, which is pretty and popular but too expensive for my fellow travelers. Other vendors have the oilcans full of water I mentioned before, but I can’t think of drinking such stuff though I am very thirsty.
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