From Mindat to Matupi, Chin State, January 15, 2019

In the little mountain town the walls are of planks, the street is of dust, the first rays of day filter through the cracks and the windows cut out with a saw. Along the street walk the last women with tattooed faces. For the cold season they wear motley clothes: flowered dress, bazaar sweater with panda patterns, fluffy scarf girding the head like a crown of gold. The bottom of the air is cool, the line of the sun sweeps the surfaces, brushes the skins and barely warms.

I tear myself away from Mindat by the road of flanks and mounts, on my phosphor-red Indian motorbike, in the dry cold air that comes down from the summits. On the mountains up there the earth is sepia; the vegetation, sparse. The trees are stunted; their branches, stumps covered with moss – and yet, here and there, scarlet flowers spring from the leafy tufts.

I ride all day under the claw of the sun that harrows my nose and lips, scratches the sanded atmosphere: struck match, sulphurous flash – it soon goes out, burns down behind the high mounts. All at once the air cools on the shaded flanks. I must arrive. I shiver; I arrive: Matupi.

Impression of a trading post, of a frontier town. At the crossroads a kid turns on the streetlamp as if it were a lamp, with a flick of the finger on the switch. In the market square are a thousand plants, seeds, roots and meats brought back from the forests. There are two scooters loaded with fleecy blankets: fur traders of present times.

Under such blankets in the evening I huddle, in the icy inn with partitions of planks.