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I knew very well that this was foolish The huo a month without food I have occasionally fasted for three or four days at a tis I would rather do, it’s painless and harhtI didn’t have now The huo a month without food, but the human mind isn’t that reasonable

I looked at Plury as I was She was asleep, and thus didn’t know if she was hungry or not I wished her name didn’t happen to be the name of a sort of food I looked at her shoulder It was the color of a toasted Englishwhat hu The sun ca her She didn’t wake up until we ran out of gas

This was so than itenough without filling the tank, and on a road totally lacking in filling stations it’s just a question of tih e, and for the past couple of hours I had watched the needle hover closer and closer to the big E Eventually it touched the E with no discernible decline in perfor would run without gas when it coughed dryly, uttered a droll belch, and quit on ed to coast to the crest of a slight rise, passed the crest, and rolled on for about a half mile It did this rather well, but it finally stopped, as everything does, and Plum woke up and asked where ere and e had stopped I told her, and she said that was nice She wasn’t asleep, but she wasn’t exactly awake, either

"Almost two hundred miles," I said "That’s not bad at all, really"

"Perhaps we can stop another car and get more petrol"

"There aren’t any other cars I haven’t seen another car in a hundred miles" I cleared my throat "I don’t understand it, actually The road is flat and wide and perfectly paved, and it doesn’t look as though there’s ever been another car on it"

"Perhaps we are the first"

"It certainly looks that way"

"You see, the road does not go anywhere, Evan"

"Huh?"

"The Retriever built it Knanda Ndoro Your country and hout the nation for the glory of Modonoland"

"I thought he just kept the money"

"Some he spent on the country There were beautification projects and modernization projects and improvement projects and, oh, many projects You know the cultural museum in the square? This was built with aid from the Soviet Union"

"There’s no roof on it," I said

"There was not enough money to complete it"

"Oh"

"And this road, it was built with o border But there is nothing there, you see Just jungle It was hoped that the governo would build a road to join up with it, but they replied that no one really wished to drive froo to Modonoland anyway, or frooes to the border and stops"

"Just like that"

"Yes"

"It must have cost ave you the et the funds from you, then he would accept them from Communist China"

"Oh, well," I said "We had no choice, did we?"

We left the car and set out along the road It was concrete, but it should have been yellow brick I felt like one of Dorothy’s chums en route to the Emerald City The Cowardly Lion, I decided, because the others never got hungry

A ways down the roada few colu off in that direction and took it The terrain was rather attractive, with high savanna grasses interrupted by an occasional squat palh on me and ca where a scattering of geo fire Wo bread There didn’t seee," I said to Plue It turned out that she knew English and Swahili and Modono So did I So didn’t the wo dialect without a single recognizable word in it Plued

"You will be a help to e"

Pluround at her feet I s motions They smiled back at ers to led Pluht us bread baked from flour made from some sort of roots It was bland and very dry, but tasted as though it probably had a co of blood-colored liquid, bubbling with fermentation and with a faint aftertaste of carrion If the bread hadn’t been quite so dry I et it doithout liquid, so I took an optiot better as you went along

We were still eating when thebut didn’t seee explained our presence to several of the runted back at them, and I drew a map in the dirt to shohere we had come from, and they filled in details on the ed to convey to theht find soured they could find it as hile to strip an abandoned car as the kids do in ot the point They didn’t seeave us a couple of hunks of bread to take with us A tiny boy, naked and giggling, presented Plum with a small lizard and raced back to his hut We couldn’t decide ere supposed to do with the lizard The only things we could think of were to eat him, make a pet of him, or pray to hio, and he disappeared irasses

Pluive the"

"They were friendly"