Richard Critchfield
- 1970
Fellowship Title:
- Food Population Crisis in India, Indonesia and Iran
Fellowship Year:
- 1970
Riders Together
A Morning’s Journey on December 31, 1969, into the Lagoon at Grand Gaube, a Fishing Village at Cap Malheureux on the Southern Indian Ocean Island of Mauritius Cast of Characters Octavius Antonius Marie (Octave), age 27 An unemployed Creole stone mason who has taken to the sea Karl Latchoo, age 26 A Creole fisherman George Francois, age 17 A neighbor youth, who serves as their boatman Dhanilall Thug (Prem), age 22 A destitute Hindu student “Riders on the earth together, brothers in that bright loveliness in the eternal cold….” Archibald MacLeish, inspired by man’s first televised view of earth from the moon, Christmas, 1968 The Cove at Grand Gaube (Introductory note: The tiny, twenty-nine-mile wide island of Mauritius is one of a scattered group known as the Mascareignes, situated on the Tropic of Capricorn in 20 degrees of southern latitude, some 1,200 miles oat into the Indian Ocean from the east coast of the African continent. An isolated remnant of a vast geological upheaval of uncertain antiquity, the island itself is the exposed tip of
Mauritius: A Sense of Apocalypse
Gap Malheureux January 2, 1970 To the island of Mauritius and the fishing settlements along its rocky northernmost extreme of Cap Malheureux dawn comes gently. The sky grays over the stars of the southern hemisphere and the pale, late moon grows insubstantial and thin as the fishermen leave their hats in the whispering filao trees and set sail into the lagoon. The moon still governs the tides and the ebb and flow of their lives; they have watched American astronauts exploring its surface on the village TV and there is an Apollo tracking station on the island. But moon-landings and space probes remain a perplexing fantasy, as mysterious an expression of God’s will as the doubling of the island’s population in the last fifteen years. The fishermen’s pirogues skim across the green water, past meadows of pale sea grass and outcroppings of coral “n…..”heads. The tropical son from a perfect blue sky first reaches the island’s craggy volcanic peaks, fax, far distant, then moves down to blue hazy hills and the green slopes of sugar